twenty-four

Dropping the shotgun, Merry wrapped her arms around Barbie’s. “It’s okay,” she murmured.

Jamie.

She released Barbie and loped to the house.

Jamie still lay slumped on his side. Merry touched his neck and felt a weak, thready pulse. She ran into the kitchen. The phone was gone.

Back in the living room, she eased him back a few inches so she could see the damage, afraid to move him, afraid not to.

Barbie pushed her aside. “Here, let me look at him.”

They’d have to get him in the truck—no, Olivia said she’d taken the keys, too. They’d be in her pocket. Have to go get them. Or, wait—

“Barbie, where’s your car?”

“Down the road a little. I didn’t want Olivia to see it.”

“Give me your keys. We’ve got to get Jamie to the hospital.”

Barbie fished in her jeans pocket. “Moving him right now could kill him.”

“He’ll die for sure if we don’t.” Merry stood and started for the open door, only to see her cousin, now with dark hair, walking up the steps. She had a cell phone clamped to her ear.

Lauri? What are you doing here?”

“Hello? Yes, someone’s been shot. The McCoy ranch. You know where that is?”

“Tell them a police officer’s been wounded.”

Her cousin’s head jerked up. “Um, and a police officer has been wounded … I don’t think so.” She moved the phone away. “Is it bad?”

Merry, giddy with helpless fear, shot a look at Barbie.

She nodded. “They’d better hurry.”

Lauri said, “Tell them to hurry.”

Merry knelt next to Jamie. The bullet had entered on the right side of his chest. Barbie slid her hand along his back, careful not to move him. Her hand came back slick with red.

A bubble of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth and popped. His shirt was saturated dark maroon where Barbie pressed her palm against his chest.

“What can I do?” Merry asked.

Barbie frowned. “I’m pretty sure his right lung collapsed, but he’s still breathing so the left one’s okay.” She looked up and saw something in Merry’s face that made her say, “Here. Apply pressure here, where my hand is.”

Merry quickly complied. A ghost of a wince crossed Jamie’s unconscious face as she pressed down.

I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.

“What happened to your arm?” Barbie reached as if to pull her hand away from Jamie’s chest.

“It’s fine,” Merry barked and shrugged away from her.

“I remembered to call 911 this time.” Lauri stared at Jamie, dazed.
“I forgot at Clay’s, but I remembered this time.”

Merry felt the hysterical burble of laughter in her throat, and swallowed it back down. If she started now, she might never stop.

“What are you doing here?” Barbie asked Lauri.

“I followed you. I thought you killed Clay. I never thought …” She indicated the body in the yard with a slight movement of her chin.

“You’ve been here this whole time?” Barbie sounded shrill.

“Yeah.”

“You should have called for help right away!”

“I was way out by the road! I didn’t think anyone was hurt until I heard the shot in the yard. Even then it took three times for the call to go through. Your cell reception sucks out here.”

Merry glanced at her watch. Only a few minutes had passed since Lauri had called. She had a sudden, terrifying thought.

Jamie, what if you were right? What if Olivia and Barbie were partners in carnage?

“Barbie, why are you here?”

“When you called and asked about that gun of your mom’s? You said Olivia had told you Bo taught me how to shoot with it. Well, I’ve never seen it, and she knows that. So I got to thinking about why she’d say that, and I realized what she’d done. I was going out to her ranch to confront her when I saw her turn in on your road. I thought she might be coming after you.”

Merry shifted her position to provide more leverage on Jamie’s chest. “So you figured out that she killed Clay.”

“And gave herself an alibi when she gave me one.”

Lauri squinted. “Where were you that night?”

Barbie looked unhappy. Sighed. “I guess it’ll all have to come out anyway. I was at the clinic. Packaging up drugs for our dealer in Billings.”

See, Jamie? I was right. I told you I was right. Wake up so I can say I told you so.

“You were in on the drug skimming, too.”

“You know about that?”

“Not all of it. But why else would Olivia kill Clay? He was going to turn her in, wasn’t he?”

Barbie took a deep breath. “Big-mouth Anna found the Billings dealer for us, but then she blabbed to Denny and Clay. Clay lost it when he found out Olivia was involved. Probably wasn’t too pleased with me, either, but I never got a chance to talk to him about it. He called Bo, and he went over there, and they had a big fight about it. Olivia told me about that.”

“Did Bo know about the drugs?”

Barbie hesitated, then said, “Yeah. So I don’t know why she’d kill him.”

Because he found out about Clay. Right, baby?

Jamie sighed beneath her hand. His face swam in her vision, and she bit down hard on her lip.

“She killed her stepson.” She nodded toward Jamie. “She shot a police officer, and she was sure as hell going to kill both of us. But before she shot Jamie she said she killed Bo by accident.”

“By …? But she wouldn’t burn down her barn. The whole reason she got involved in selling narcotics was because she needed the money to make it big in the training business. She really wanted to deal with the high-end horse people.”

The mink-and-manure crowd. But Olivia couldn’t blame Lauri for Bo’s murder, could she, Jamie? She’d needed to cover it up. And I bet she was well-insured.

Lauri cocked her head at Barbie. “So how come you stole drugs?”

“I couldn’t buy back my family’s land on a nurse’s salary. I needed the money, too.”

A siren sounded far away. Merry looked in the direction of the county road, willing them to hurry.

“Would you have killed Clay, too?” Lauri asked her rival.

Barbie’s chin rose. “Of course not.” Tears welled in her eyes as the ranch yard filled with flashing lights.

———

A dank, rotting smell nudged into every crevice of the aquamarine cinderblock walls, every splinter of the smooth-worn bench, and reflected off the dull iron bars. It wafted up from the drain in the aisle between the cells as if the jail had a direct subterranean connection to a massive locker filled with gangrenous meat.

Merry hadn’t been surprised when the sheriff had led her to his car and made her wait in the backseat after she’d answered his initial questions. Barbie and Lauri had gone into two other cars. Renegade women. Protect the horses, men.

Suspected of two murders in two days. One she hadn’t committed. One she had.

No. Olivia had been self-defense. There was no question. Except the authorities had questions anyway.

In the cruiser she’d been swamped again by déjà vu. They would decide it hadn’t been necessary to kill Olivia Lamente. Forget her big-ass gun. Forget the string of murders she’d committed. Forget that she’d shot a police officer. They’d decide Merry had used “unnecessary force.” Again.

They’d look at the evidence and somehow know, as she did, that retribution played as large a part in Olivia’s demise as did self-defense.

And until they did, she’d sit here in jail. Rory Hawkins had already visited her once to gloat.

No one would tell her anything about Jamie. She didn’t even know if he was still alive. But he’d been breathing, his skin clammy beneath her hand, when they’d taken him from her, rushing through the mud to the gaping doors of the red and white van that screamed down the road toward the waiting helicopter.

She’d shown the bloody groove in her arm to the sheriff as evidence that Olivia had shot her, then she wrapped it with gauze from the medicine chest without mentioning it to the paramedics. She wanted every bit of their attention on Jamie. Now the wound throbbed as if her heart lay directly under the damage. Her jaw clenched with each painful beat as she stared, unseeing, at the crosshatching of her cage.

Beside her, Lauri sighed. “When are they going to let us out of here?”

The sheriff was talking to Barbie upstairs.

The palm of her left hand had swelled an angry red around the piece of wood still embedded there from the ladder in the barn. It ached, a dull mirroring of her arm.

She unwound the gauze, wincing as it pulled away dirt and dried blood. Her throbbing hand moved to her arm, and she squeezed. Gritting her teeth, she did it again.

“Merry,” Lauri said.

The gash began to bleed freely. She bent her head as tears filled her eyes. A sob broke free and then another. Blood ran between her fingers and dripped onto the gray slab floor, streaking her boots.

Lauri looked on with wide eyes. Merry sensed one hand reaching out to touch her, but it drew back. She wanted to run her bloody hand over her face, through her hair, in imitation of some tribal grieving ritual.

Jamie. I should have stopped her.

“Oh, Merry. This will never do.”

Her head jerked up, the tears surprised out of her. Yvette Trager stood outside the cell. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and her gray curls were flattened on one side of her head as if she’d just crawled out of bed.

Merry hiccupped. Swallowed.

“I heard one of my parolees got themselves in trouble.” Yvette began with a light tone, as if ready to chivvy her charge toward right thinking. But the half-smile slid off her face as she stared at Merry. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck no. I just blew a huge hole in Olivia Lamente with my Bampa’s shotgun.” She wiped her nose against the still-damp shoulder of her T-shirt. “Just having it is a parole violation, right?”

The other woman gave a reluctant nod.

“Using it like I did, well, that’s going to land me in prison for more years than I ever had coming before. Not a lot you can do about that.” Merry’s angry gaze pushed at her to leave, but Yvette fielded her animosity with kind eyes, cracking her ire like an egg. Yvette grasped a bar in each hand and yelled over her shoulder.

“Nick!”

A short, overweight man hustled down the stairs. “Yes, Ms. Trager?”

“Why hasn’t this woman seen a doctor? Look at her arm.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. She came in with the deputy like that.” He looked closer. “Well, it didn’t look that bad.”

“It’s okay,” Merry said. “I kind of hid it from them so they could concentrate on Jamie.”

Her voice quavered as she spoke, and Yvette’s gaze sharpened. “Jamie Gutierrez? What happened to him?”

Merry gaped. “You don’t know?”

Yvette motioned to Nick, apparently the graveyard shift’s Nadine. “I want to talk to her upstairs. Let her out, and get me a first-aid kit.”

With alacrity, he bent to the keys dangling from his belt and unlocked the door. Apparently, being a parole officer held some clout around here. Or maybe just being Yvette Trager did. Merry stood.

Lauri followed. “Hey, what about me?”

“In a little while, honey,” Yvette said.

“No! Not in a little while. If Merry gets to go, so do I. I didn’t even shoot anyone!”

Merry turned pleading eyes on her cousin, who either didn’t understand or didn’t care, and whose rising voice continued to complain as they climbed the stairs to the main level of the police station. Yvette ignored her, and Merry tried to.

Nick shut them in the conference room Merry knew so well by now. Moments later he opened the door again to hand in the first-aid kit.

“Where’s Barbie?” she asked.

“Went back out to your ranch with the sheriff.”

Yvette began with the groove in her arm, gently wiping the dirt from the deep slash with a sanitized towelette. Merry winced as the disinfectant worked its way into the wound but didn’t pull back.

“What happened?” her parole officer asked.

Grime and blood had worked into her cuticles, into the tiny crevices of her knuckles, and into a fine webbed pattern in the skin on the backs of her hand. Brown-gray smudges of mud daubed her arms and stained her clothing.

Tangible.

Evidence.

It had all really happened. Her mind, playing the defensive tricks minds do when faced with untenable situations, had been distracting her with her own pain and guilt.

Now, as she prepared to relate the earlier nightmare at the ranch, she faced it all over again. Oh God. Jamie could really die. She was really going back to prison. She’d lose the ranch. The grim dominos lying down in all directions from this night filled her interior vision. Fear unfurled in her chest, and her hand began to tremble in Yvette’s. The older woman unscrewed the cap on a tube of Neosporine, watching her face.

“Merry?”

Somehow, she held it together enough to tell what had happened. When she’d finished her story, Yvette had finished cleaning and bandaging her hand and arm. Neither hurt as much as before, numbed by antibiotic ointment and the ibuprofen washed down with a bottle of water Yvette extracted from her giant handbag.

Merry gestured toward the bandages. “Thanks.”

Yvette nodded.

They sat back and considered each other.

“You saved a man’s life,” Yvette said.

“I don’t even know that! He might have died.”

Yvette got up and left the room without a word. Merry waited, unsure.

After about five minutes she returned. “He’s not dead.”

Relief gusted through her. Short lived. “So he could still die.”

“He’s stable. Critical, but stable. From what Nick said when he called the hospital, the bullet chewed him up pretty good inside, but it could have done a lot more damage.”

“Is that a clinical diagnosis?”

“Layman’s terms are all I have. Point is, you can go ahead and hope for him.”

Merry looked out at the night through the window.

“Are you afraid wanting so badly for him to be okay will somehow jinx his recovery?”

Merry hesitated, then inclined her head a fraction. As much affection as she’d developed for her, this woman was a little spooky. “I’m sorry.”

Yvette cocked her head to one side, inviting her to continue.

“I didn’t do what you said.”

“What I said?”

“In Chewie’s. About staying strong. I could have stopped her, but I didn’t.”

“I don’t understand. You did stop her.”

“But not in time. I could have knocked her down, hurt her before she hurt him.”

“Really? Could you have?”

“I hesitated. Said to myself we could talk it out. But really, I was just afraid that it was wrong to want to hurt someone the way I wanted to hurt Olivia.”

Yvette sighed. “First of all, avoiding violence is not cowardice; it’s rationality balancing out something more primitive. Second, you couldn’t have stopped her.”

“I could have—”

“She had a gun, Merry. A forty-four from what Nick told me before I came down to see you.” Merry’s head jerked up, and Yvette nodded. “I knew part of what happened, just not about Jamie. I wanted your version. Anyway, I come down and find you sitting in jail beating yourself up because you, unarmed and untrained, didn’t take on a crazy bitch with a Dirty Harry gun. How egotistical is that?”

“I—”

“Don’t be an ass. She would have shot you. Killed you dead. Killed Jamie. And killed Barbie. But she didn’t, because you were smart and because you did what you needed to do when you needed to do it.”

Merry was silent, resisting.

Yvette rose. “I’m going to go talk to your cousin, now. You stay here for a little while longer.”

Merry waited for half an hour. The door opened, and Sheriff Ellers walked into the room.

“Looks like you all were telling the truth.”

She stood. “Jamie regained consciousness?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. But the bullets and guns and the locations of things work out. You can go home. I wouldn’t wander too much farther than that, though.”

“Can I go to the hospital in Missoula?”

Ellers considered, then gave an easy nod. “Want a ride?”

She heard Rory Hawkins’s snort of disgust from outside the room.

“If you can spare the time.”

Ellers gestured toward the door. “Let’s go then.”