The Long Ride Home Read online

  He rolled down his window and braced a beefy forearm on the frame. “This facility ain’t for public use.”

  But Kylan’s girlfriend had said—

  And she most likely didn’t have his best interests at heart. Might’ve even set him up just to get even. David swallowed a curse. If he couldn’t stay here, he’d have to go on to the next town, another twenty-five miles. More gas money down the drain, and that much farther from wherever they’d taken Muddy. “I just need a place to camp for the night. I have business in town—”

  “I know what your business is,” the cop said, and his tone made it clear he wasn’t the welcoming committee.

  So. That’s how it was gonna be. Did they think they could scare him off? Not hardly. Before David could figure out the best way to tell the cop so without ending up in the local slammer, a faded black pickup rumbled in and parked next to the police car, stirring up a cloud of dust and drawing a curse from the cop when it rolled in his open window.

  David cast an envious eye at the pickup’s flatbed. It was loaded with half a dozen bales of hay. Nice-looking stuff, worth ten bucks a square in Colorado these days. The man who climbed out looked as road-tested as his pickup with his battered black hat, wire-rim glasses, a sprinkling of silver in his brushy black mustache and a rolling hitch in his gait as he ambled over to join them.

  “Hey, Galen,” the cop said. “I was just tellin’ this guy we ain’t runnin’ a campground here.”

  The newcomer frowned, but at the cop, not David. “Don’t be a dick, JoJo. Ain’t gonna hurt nothin’ by lettin’ him stay here.” Galen turned to David, gave an apologetic shrug. “Kylan’s his nephew.”

  David nodded, thinking this would be a good time to shut up and see what happened next.

  The cop’s face set into mulish lines, but Galen waved him off. “I got this. Go be a real cop and get a donut or something.”

  JoJo grumbled, shot David another glare, but wheeled his car around and left.

  “Sorry. JoJo’s got a soft spot for Kylan, but that ain’t the way to go about helping.” Galen stuck out his hand. “Galen Dutray.”

  “David Parsons.” Which Galen obviously already knew. They exchanged a quick, hard handshake.

  “Are you in charge of the fairgrounds?” David asked.

  “Nah. I work for the Blackfeet livestock department.”

  Livestock department? Would Galen demand to see Frosty’s brand inspection, health certificate, Coggins test? Not that it would be a problem. With the number of state lines David crossed in any given week, all of his papers were in pristine order.

  “Nice-looking horse,” Galen said, eyeing Frosty. “I like grays.”

  “Thanks.” Frosty turned a lot of heads with his near-white coat, flowing mane and tail and classic Quarter horse head. Definitely easy on the eyes…and hard to lose in the dark. Always a plus.

  “Mary asked me to come down and see if there’s anything you need.” Galen dangled a set of keys. “I’ll turn on the water on the way out, and I brought hay in case you’re short.”

  David blinked, stunned. “Mary sent you?”

  Galen shrugged. “We got a mess on our hands, for sure. No sense being assholes while we’re sorting it out. You got your papers and stuff for the brown horse with you?”

  “Yes. You wanna check ’em?”

  “Nah. Tomorrow mornin’s soon enough. I’ll swing by, bring you to her lawyer’s office at nine.”

  Crap. She was serious about the attorney. David had hoped it was a bluff. He couldn’t afford even a few hours of a lawyer’s time. But why should he have to? Muddy belonged to him. He could prove it. Case closed.

  Galen gave him a sympathetic look. “He’s a hell of a horse. Must have been tough to lose him.”

  “Yeah. It was.” Then David realized what Galen was saying. “You already know he’s mine. How?”

  “Even out here on the rez, we got Google. We found pictures.”

  “Then why—”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll be here a little before nine.” Galen strolled back to his pickup, dragged two hay bales off the side and stacked them on the ground, then he left David alone with his jangled thoughts.

  David hunched his shoulders against the wind, watching it whip Galen’s dust trail up and away. Mary knew she’d have to turn the horse over. So why force David to chase her back to Browning? Then again, David still had no idea how Kylan had ended up with Muddy. And it had been a woman who’d hocked his saddle in Billings.

  Maybe the visit with the attorney wasn’t about trying to keep Muddy. Maybe Mary was trying to keep herself out of jail.

  Chapter Six

  He definitely should’ve filled the propane bottles. David had used the last of the fuel to heat water for his shower, so there wasn’t enough left to even kick on the furnace when the wind picked up during the night, whistling around the nose of the trailer with an occasional gust that made the whole rig shudder.

  David layered on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, tossed an extra sleeping bag over the top of his bed, but he still couldn’t stay warm. When he did sleep, he dreamed the old dreams. Muddy appearing, then disappearing again into the darkness, always out of reach. Or worse, maimed, bleeding, a broken leg dangling, his eyes wild with pain.

  Awake, David fought the urge to toss and turn. Every movement disturbed the blankets, allowed cold air to leak into his cocoon. His body ached from curling into a ball to conserve body heat, his brain from trying to fathom how Muddy had ended up in Browning, and what Mary thought she could accomplish by running home. All she’d done was delay the inevitable.

  It was inevitable. He would not leave without Muddy.

  His mind bounced to the possibilities. A future that had suddenly opened up wide. Even if Muddy was no more than eighty percent of his old self, David’s chances of scoring that big win were much, much better.

  This had to be a sign, right? His luck had finally turned. If he had an exceptional Fourth of July run, he could crack the top fifteen in the world standings. Even a halfway decent streak would put him within spitting distance.

  By six a.m. the ache and the cold had penetrated clear to his bone marrow. The sun was well above the horizon, so he crawled out of bed, laced up his running shoes, forced his body through a few painful stretches and then jogged west out of town. The mountains gleamed pink and gold in the morning sunlight and he drank in long gulps of air, sweet as cold spring water. His muscles warmed, the kinks unwinding step by step.

  After twenty minutes, he dropped to a walk. As his pulse slowed, he opened up his senses, let the sheer lushness of the countryside permeate his ragged soul. At its best, eastern Colorado was never this vibrantly green. So many shades, from the yellow tinge of the baby poplar leaves to the near-black of pine needles in the distance.

  He’d followed a narrow local highway that hugged the curve at the base of a ridge to the beginning of what passed for foothills, nothing more than a couple of bumps at the base of the mountains. To his right, the ground flattened into grassland scattered with clumps of brush, cut by a winding creek, knee deep with grass.

  Horse heaven. No wonder Muddy looked so full of spit and vinegar.

  David drew in a deep lungful of air, held it, sorting out the myriad aromas. Damp, rich earth, hints of sweetness from the star-shaped purple wildflowers blooming in the road ditch, a tantalizing whiff of peppermint, all sharpened by the cool edge of mountain air.

  A house sat off to his right at the end of a narrow dirt driveway. David paused to admire the tipi in the front yard, banded top and bottom with black, with a herd of crudely painted buffalo racing around the broad white stripe in the middle. As lawn ornaments went, it beat the hell out of his mother’s concrete garden gnomes.

  There was a neat pole barn and a securely fenced pasture, but no animals in sight. Hobby farmers, no doubt. Worked in town, had a dog
, a couple of cats, maybe a horse that functioned mostly as yard art. There were a million just like this in Colorado.

  Behind it all, the mountains reared up, a fortress of solid rock, jagged and impenetrable. A threat to frail human endeavors even in the golden morning light.

  When David turned and started back toward town, he could see nothing but prairie rolling over hills and bluffs clear to the eastern horizon. If he didn’t glance over his shoulder, he could almost imagine the Rockies weren’t looming over him. Mountains or plains. No middle ground here on the Blackfeet Reservation.

  Back at the fairgrounds, he dug a set of barbells out of his trailer and pushed his sluggish body through lunges, squats, presses and curls, then finished off with the stretches and abdominal exercises that kept his back in working order despite the time he spent hunched underneath the horses he shod.

  Panting from the last set of crunches, he toweled sweat from his face, enjoying the ache of fatigued muscle. Of all the things he regretted during his two lost years, the way he’d let his body go was near the top of the list. Beer and self-pity…not exactly the diet of champions. Only in the past few months did he feel like he’d regained his previous level of strength and trimmed off the last of the belly that had crept out over his belt.

  He stripped to the waist and scrubbed off sweat, his nipples contracting to pinpoints at the cold insult of the washcloth. He definitely needed to fill those propane bottles and fire up the hot-water heater. That extra layer of fat he’d been packing would’ve come in handy right about now, but he was much happier to look in the mirror and see muscle.

  He splashed water over his hair and mashed it into submission. A haircut was high on his agenda the next time he got home, but it didn’t seem right to wear a dusty cowboy hat to a lawyer’s office. He was dressed and pacing his cramped living quarters when Galen’s pickup rattled into the fairgrounds at ten minutes to nine.

  As David stepped out of the trailer, Galen rolled down his window to extend a large foam cup of coffee. “I got sugar and stuff, case you need it.”

  “Black’s fine, thanks.” Darn fine, in fact, David realized at the first sip. From the espresso stand at the concrete tipi, maybe?

  “Climb in,” Galen said.

  David shoved a binder overflowing with papers and a bag of cattle ear tags out of the way to make space in the dusty cab. A generous coating of dog hair on the seat suggested the usual passenger was of the four-legged variety. Galen had dressed up for the meeting in a blue plaid shirt and a denim jacket with a multi-colored medicine wheel embroidered on the front, although he wore the same battered black hat.

  David had dug out one of his winter shirts, a heavy brushed cotton in dark navy that his sister had bought him because she said it made his eyes look blue. Whatever. He usually didn’t wear it after the first of May, which accounted for why it wasn’t in the laundry hamper with all the rest of his decent clothes. His jeans were clean, at least, but nearly worn through at the knees.

  Maybe they’d think it was a fashion statement.

  Galen didn’t comment on David’s clothes or anything else as he drove into town, weaving through the same bustle of cars, pickups and RVs. The street guy and his dog were huddled alone on the cracked concrete in front of the boarded-up gas station, soaking up the intermittent sunshine.

  The attorney’s office was in a long, nondescript building a few blocks off Main Street. Galen parked on the street out front and they walked inside to an office that was equally tired and dull. No plush carpets or gleaming wood here, just steel government-issue desks and scratched filing cabinets.

  A woman popped out of her chair as they entered. David had to look twice and still might not have recognized Mary if it weren’t for the freckles. Yesterday, his vision had been too blurred by anger to register much of anything in the few moments they’d squared off. His memory had painted her as wiry, hard-faced, not petite and…well, pretty damn cute, though he had a feeling she wouldn’t like that word much.

  She stared at him, blinked once, then again, as if she didn’t quite recognize him either.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Uh, no. You’re just a lot…um…cleaner.”

  “I tend to be that way when I’ve had time to take a shower,” he said, scowling.

  Her face flushed. Her gaze slid down to his chest and away, her blush deepening. Nervous? Or scared? She should be both after taking off with his horse like that, but she was so petite he felt like a goon looming over her. She’d tried to look all serious and grown up in a tailored black jacket over a white shirt, black jeans and dressy boots that added a couple of inches to her height, but she was still a little bitty thing.

  Without the baseball cap, he could see her hair was cut boyishly short, sort of feathery on the sides and spiky on the top. Light brown, with gold tints on the ends that matched the lighter flecks in her eyes, which were the kind of brown that could veer toward green in the right light. The freckles scattered across her face nearly blended with her tawny skin, as if her color came from a tan, not her heritage.

  She didn’t look Native, he realized. Not like Galen, Kylan and the girlfriend, with their dusky skin and inky black hair. Mary looked more like a golden-eyed pixie. She lifted her pointed chin and their eyes locked. Held.

  A part of David’s brain that had been dormant for a very long time perked up and drawled, Well, hello. What’s this?

  Oh, hell no. He hadn’t looked twice at a girl in months, and now his man parts decided to pay attention? No. Nope. Uh-uh. Not this woman. That was plain stupid. So why couldn’t he look away?

  She blinked again and then gave a slight shake of her head as if she’d felt the same jolt. Turning on her heel, she marched to the interior office door. “Yolanda is waiting for us.”

  Nice butt, that rogue voice muttered in his head.

  Not much wider than the span of his fingers. And dammit, there he went again, but he couldn’t help sneaking another look before Mary plopped into a chair and he was forced to redirect his attention.

  The woman behind the desk was not small, in height or girth. She offered a brisk smile that matched her handshake. “Yolanda Pipestone, attorney at law. And you’re David, of course.”

  Three chairs were lined up in front of her desk. Mary had taken the far one. Galen settled into the middle, a protective buffer between Mary and David, who wedged his big frame into the third.

  “Well, this is a fine mess,” Yolanda said, folding her hands on the desk in front of her ample bosom. Everything about Yolanda was ample, including the intelligent gleam in her eyes. “I suppose we should start by explaining how we believe your horse came to be in Kylan’s possession.”

  “That would be nice,” David said, impatience layering sarcasm into his voice. Yeah, he wanted to know the whole story, but he was more concerned about where Muddy was right now.

  Yolanda gave him a long, measuring look and then transferred it to Galen. “Go ahead. You know it better than me.”

  “Ah-right.” Galen pulled a piece of yellow notebook paper from his shirt pocket and squinted down at it, as if to be sure he got the facts just right. “Mary bought the horse two years ago from a friend of mine named Otis Yellowhawk. Lives down in Lodge Grass just north of the Wyoming border. Otis got ’im when his granddad passed away. Old man had a whole herd running on a tribal lease down by the Pryor Mountains. Otis remembers his granddad saying his cousin Jinks left one of the horses there right before he got killed.”

  “Killed?” David echoed, remembering the pawnshop in Billings, the story the woman had told about her boyfriend leaving her the saddle.

  “Car wreck. Drunk. ’Bout a week after you lost your horse.” Galen fished in his pocket again, pulled out a copy of a newspaper clipping printed on white paper and handed it to David. “He went to a team roping in Meeteetse the day Muddy disappeared, woulda been driving home thro
ugh Cody about the right time with a half-empty trailer.”

  “And he just happened to be the one who found Muddy?” David asked, squinting at the blurred face attached to the obituary in his hand.

  “Guess so.” Galen hitched a shoulder. “He wasn’t a real upstanding citizen. The neighbors’ cattle had a bad habit of going missing when Jinks was short on meat, that sort of thing. Guy like him finds a horse running loose with an expensive saddle and bridle, he counts it as easy money. Far as we can guess, he hightailed it home, stashed the saddle at his girlfriend’s house and dumped the horse out with his granddad’s herd.”

  “And just left him there?” David asked.

  Galen’s mustache twitched in disgust. “Knowing Jinks, he had a plan. Find a horse running loose right down the road from a big rodeo and packing a fancy trophy saddle, sure bet he’s worth a lot and somebody’s gonna be willing to pay to get him back. Too bad for everybody he ran his pickup into a bridge before he could figure out how to collect.”

  David stared down at the clipping. All this time, he’d been raging at a dead man. It felt…weird. An uncomfortable stew of guilt and disappointment. “I put up posters in Lodge Grass and Crow Agency.”

  Galen nodded. “Otis remembers seein’ ’em, but Jinks traded horses all the time, and you gotta admit, Muddy don’t look like much. Sure as hell if their granddad had known, he’da hit you up for the reward. No reason not to, with Jinks dead.”

  And now the old man was dead too. Nobody left to blame or to answer questions. Convenient.

  David looked over and caught Mary watching him. Her gaze jerked back down to her hands. His gaze got hung up on the delicate curve of her cheekbone, the pattern of freckles sprinkled across her tipped-up nose, and he scowled at his reaction. “A woman sold my saddle at a pawn shop in Billings that fall,” he said curtly. “The owner described her as young and skinny.”

  Mary stiffened, snapping her head up, anger sparking in her eyes. “You’re accusing me?”