“THAT’S MY PROBLEM,” Blue said.
Andie Lee blocked the words from her ears while she tried to control her rising panic. This was on a whole new level of trouble—Shane planning to kill someone. She couldn’t even think about Jason. Her son, the son she’d loved so much and gone through so much to birth and nurture was serious about murder?
Was this why he was being so good lately? He was staying clearheaded to plot a murder?
Talk about helplessness! She’d thought she lived with it but she never even knew the meaning of the word until now.
“I know you said you didn’t take him to raise…”
Her voice left her. It didn’t break, it just left her standing there with a whole new dread beating its drum in her mind and deep in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t have a clue what to do and she had no right to badger Blue to take this responsibility. She turned away from him and walked down to the edge of the creek, trying to see the grass and the rocks and the water through eyes so dry she couldn’t bear to close her lids over them.
Beyond tears. She’d never known exactly what that meant until now.
She saw a large, flat rock that jutted out over the fast-running stream and headed for it. She sat down and stared at the glittering water rushing by, totally oblivious to any pain.
After a long time, Blue said, “Andie Lee?”
She didn’t turn to him. For one thing, she couldn’t move and for another, she didn’t want to beg for help.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
She felt him, though. He didn’t go away. After a minute or two, she thought he might’ve sat down on the other end of the rock.
“Go away.”
“I’m not walking to the house,” he said. “And you’re in no shape to, either.”
That made her look at him. It made her try to smile a little.
“A remark from a whole different world,” she said.
He looked a question at her.
“Like when you have a broken heart and your mother tells you you have to eat,” she said.
She lifted her open hands and let them fall empty into her lap.
“I’ve screwed up so bad I don’t want to ever eat again,” she said. “I’ve loved him so much. How did I raise a child who wants to kill somebody?”
Blue’s gaze held hers gently.
“I thought he was getting a whole new attitude,” she said. “Every day he was in that hospital, and every day since he got out of it, his outlook has been getting better and he’s been acting and talking as if he’s more and more normal. I was getting my hopes up like crazy.”
He still didn’t say a word.
“But it was only his addict’s cunning at work,” she said, the cold fear in her gut starting to flow into words. “He’s only fooling so he can get enough freedom to move on up into bigger crimes. All he’s doing is scheming his way into the big leagues.”
Blue waited.
“What’s wrong with him?” she said, hearing her voice getting more desperate. “What wrong with me? What did I do wrong? All I ever did to Shane was try to be a good mother to him and I’ve raised a heartless monster-child.”
She tried to read the answer in his eyes. Tried to read the true response Blue was thinking. After all, she told him with the look, he ought to know.
“My mother never did anything to cause me to kill a man,” he said at last.
The tone of his voice told her that he wasn’t accustomed to talking about this. She waited, never letting him break the look that held them locked together.
Tell me.
“And I’m not a monster,” he said. “It’s like you said. Probably just about everybody could kill, given the right circumstances.”
Andie Lee nodded.
He began to speak a little faster, as if it felt good to him to talk about it.
“Especially somebody young. I’m not saying it’s all right. You and I talked about it back there and we excused me from killing that creep. I’d like to leave it at that. It would be so easy. But it wouldn’t be honest.”
“So you are sorry now? Besides for the prison time?”
“It changes a man to kill another man,” he said. “Whatever the reason. No way around it—it’s final, it can’t be changed, that human will never be again. A man isn’t God and has no right to act like he is. And yet we have to do what we think’s right at the time.”
“Do you think now you were less right?”
He turned and stared off into the trees.
“Hindsight’s always different. A man’s a different person at fifteen or twenty-five, as I was, and then at thirty-five. Life looks different.”
He looked at her again.
“Sometimes I think about that kid I was then and he seems like a stranger to me.”
She watched the fire come into his eyes.
“Yet when I remember the fury I felt that had nowhere to go—the rage at how wrong it all was that he stood there breathing in front of me, evil in the flesh—and poor, innocent Dannie, who never had a chance against him, lying there between us, I’m glad to this day that I did it.”
She knew he wasn’t finished.
“Justice,” he said. “Bringing justice, when there’s so little of it in this world. That’s sweet.”
They looked at each other for a long heartbeat.
“Shane’s ten years younger than you were then,” she said. “He’s not strong in himself. Not yet. He never will be if he goes to prison.”
Blue looked off again, this time down. Into the sparkling water of the creek.
“I’ll talk to him,” he said.
THE ROAN COLT WAS a little funny about water. He hadn’t shied much at the tree limbs scraping him or even at the elk horns lurking on the trail ahead where they’d been scraped off in the spring. But they’d crossed three creeks so far this afternoon, and he’d resisted at each one. For a shorter time with each try, yes, but it was still a deep resistance. He would get better and he would finally get over it, but he’d taken that first step into a running stream only because of his trust in Blue.
Like Shane’s.
Which would disappear if Shane ever found out Blue had betrayed him. Would Andie Lee accidentally let it slip? Or would she grow so desperate that she’d try to talk to him herself?
He didn’t think so.
You don’t know her, Bowman. You don’t know her anywhere near well enough to predict what she’ll do.
That was true. He knew her some, though. And he wanted to know her better. Because knowing her better made him want her more, every time. That peace he’d felt with her in his bed had been rare and precious.
He still couldn’t believe he’d talked to her about his feelings the way he’d just done. That had given him such relief. Relief he’d never admitted he needed.
Which, like the lovemaking, made him want more. Made him need it.
He would have to choose between that wanting, that need for Andie Lee and his bone-deep vow of revenge against Gordon. The purpose of his life, held for ten long years. The intent to bring sweet justice one more time.
It had been stupid to tell her what Shane was up to, although a parent needed to know something like that. All he’d accomplished was heaping more worry on her and destroying the small bit of happiness she was clawing from her life, which just went to prove he never should’ve started this babysitting business in the first place.
That’s what had been stupid. If he hadn’t been drawn into trying to help Shane, he’d never have gotten to know her enough to be in this trap.
Yes, she’d had a right to know, but he must’ve also hoped, in some small corner of his mind, that she could do something to stop Shane. Which had been stupid, considering that she hadn’t been able to stop him from doing the drugs.
Every time Blue had a flash of her walking away from him to the rock along the creekbank, he wished he’d never told her. She’d moved with that long, strong stride of hers and the square shoulders that said she could handle anything, keeping her head up so she’d give no hint of the pain she carried inside.
She was a gallant woman. Like his mother.
That was much the same way Rose had walked out of the visitors’ room the two times she’d come to visit him in prison. The strength at her core had comforted him then.
But he’d finally broken that, too, just as he had Shane’s trust.
That was the problem with a code against betrayal. It didn’t make allowances for foolish teenagers.
Roanie walked away from the creek along the foot of a hill. All the hand-walking had done him good, had helped him heal with less of a limp—one that might eventually completely go away. The scar would be wide and deep and permanent, but maybe he’d still be able to use the leg normally.
Roanie seemed to read Blue’s thoughts. He began trying to break into a trot, so Blue let him do it for a short distance. A slow trot. He’d worried about riding him for the first time today, but Micah had come home and he’d had to get horseback and get away from the talking. He’d needed the company of only this horse and Roanie had been restless in his stall. He’d been right. It was time.
And it was right that he had told on Shane. The boy had no clue about the misery he’d be bringing on himself if he did succeed in getting to Jason and killing him, so it was worth taking any chance and breaking any code to try to stop him. It was Andie Lee’s job to figure out how. He would just do what he could, as another human being, and then not worry about it anymore.
Now that he thought about it, one thing making Shane’s eyes bright and alive again was his passion for killing Jason. Andie Lee might be right that his recovery was only an act so he could get free to do murder. Talk about irony—kick the habit so you can kill your dealer.
Move yourself out of one hell only to end up in another.
The roan spooked sideways and Blue’s legs tightened on him. A hawk, screaming somewhere. Horse and man together threw up their heads to look for it.
Against the enormous bright blue sky, it swooped down toward them, dipping low, then away. Roanie danced all the way over under the trees and into some loose rocks while he was making sure it was gone. The pine duff made the footing a little tricky, but he didn’t get any more excited and it only took a minute to get him calmed down again.
“Good job, good job,” he said, patting Roanie’s neck as they walked out into the sunshine.
The hawk’s cry still rang in his ears. Squinting, he picked it out in the southern sky and watched it as long as he could see it. With such a wingspan he’d soon be halfway to Oklahoma.
This, too, could be a sign. Hawks always caught his interest because of his name and Auntie Cheyosie.
The Blue Hawk brings trouble with it.
That’s what she used to say every time when, as a little boy, he got into trouble. It was the first line of an incantation to separate people she’d told him, but she had never recited the rest. That was all she knew, she’d insisted, but he had not believed it.
That had been a red-tailed hawk screaming at him. Blue was the blue hawk. And he did bring trouble.
He must stop thinking about the look on Andie Lee’s face when he’d told her about Shane. They were not connected to him. They were already separate from him and from each other.
What he must think about was the man who’d separated Blue from his mother and his sister. He had to think about bringing trouble to his door. That was why he was here.
But the mountains caught his eye and he couldn’t hold that thought, either. The hawk had pulled him out of himself as surely as if he’d been a mouse to pluck out of the grass.
This was a magnificent country and he had eyes and ears. A nose to smell the wind and skin to feel it.
He was riding into a big clearing full of yellow daisies backed up by a wall of old-growth lodgepole pines. The sky arched endless and blue.
A good horse between his legs and a covey of partridges whirring up from the long grass murmuring in the breeze.
Peace held the whole world in its arms.
He’d been to hell. This was heaven.
HE RODE UP to Micah’s barn on the west end and dismounted. He led Roanie in and stopped to unsaddle, hating for the afternoon to end. If it hadn’t been for Roanie’s recovering condition, he would’ve ridden even farther.
Faintly, he heard voices outside the barn somewhere and hoped that whoever it was wouldn’t come in. He hadn’t felt this calm and balanced for a long, long time, if ever. It was as if he could feel the blood moving smoothly in his veins and hear his own sure, unhurried heartbeat.
It was enough just to be. No thinking, no planning, no past, no future. Just for this little while.
He took a deep, long breath of the good smells. Old barns, probably because they were made of lots of wood and not so much metal, had a mellow resonance all their own.
“And so do you,” he murmured to the roan, who was nosing at him as he unbuckled the halter. Blue brushed the back of his hand across the soft muzzle after he slipped the bit out. The horse stamped one foot and rolled an eye at him.
Mellow? Don’t take it for granted, man.
The look brought Blue a smile and then a chuckle while he put away the saddle and bridle, slipped the halter on, and picked up a currycomb and a brush. He led Roanie down the aisle to his stall.
As they walked into it, the sounds of hoofbeats and voices floated through its open window. Damn. He wished they’d go away. He tried not to hear them.
But one of the voices was Gordon’s.
“Open your ears,” he yelled. “I said for you to throw back those scrawny shoulders and straighten that spine, Shane.”
That was new. Usually it was “boy” or “you little idiot.”
Blue glanced outside to see Shane riding around between the barn and the round pen on a good-looking, young black horse that Blue hadn’t seen before.
Oh. So Gordon wasn’t giving up. Shane had rejected his offer of a free horse and free advice, and he was going to make him change his mind.
Gordon ruled. Didn’t Shane know that?
“Damn it! Why don’t you listen?”
“I am listening.”
“You’re not hearing. You’ve fried your brains taking all that shit and ruined your hearing into the bargain.”
He was glaring at Shane.
“Or else you’ve always been that stupid.”
“At least I never paid anybody to cheat me,” he yelled back. “So who’s stupid now?”
That wound Gordon up a notch louder and into his nasty, most sarcastic tone of voice.
“Don’t be a smart-ass with me, boy.”
Aha. Back to normal.
“What’re you talking about? Who do you think cheated me?”
Shane stopped the horse.
“You don’t have a clue, do you?” he said in a tone that gave weight to the words. “You’re always yelling insults and bossing people around but you don’t know jack shit.”
Blue walked closer to the window and began to watch in earnest. He remembered when Gordon had yelled those same words at Shane the day he tried to run away. Did Gordon remember that, too?
Gordon took a step toward Shane and the horse.
“Know what? What are you talking about? Come right out and say it. I’ve got no time for riddles, you little pill-head.”
Shane slouched in the saddle as if to defy Gordon’s early orders as well as this last one. He laid his arm across the horn and smiled.
“Spit it out or shut up,” Gordon said.
Shane took his time. He got down from the horse, picked up the reins and led the black toward Gordon.
The kid had more guts when he was sober than he did stoned.
“Remember Jason?” he asked, smiling again. “Remember how you cut him a paycheck every month to get us off drugs?”
Gordon nodded. One abrupt jerk of his head.
“Jase was making five or ten times as much as you were paying him by selling crack and pills and everything else, too.”
Shane let that soak in.
Then he said, “To us. He sold them to us. At your rehab center. We all thought that was pretty funny.”
Speechless. For once, Gordon was speechless, staring at Shane as if he’d drill the truth out of him with his eyes. But he already knew it was true. Shane’s tone and his manner left no doubt.
Shane held out the reins. Gordon ignored them.
“I’m gonna kill him,” he said. “’Cause Jase’s the one who shot me and messed up Roanie’s shoulder.”
That froze Gordon in place.
“What?”
“I was stealing his stash that he kept up at your Lininger cabin. He’d been living there ever since you fired him off your place.”
He waited a beat after that, too, to let that thought sink in.
“But don’t worry about it, Gordon,” he said, his voice full of disrespect, “I’ll kill him for you.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll pull your head off.”
The cold menace in Gordon’s tone would’ve made most kids lose their nerve.
“I’d rather not own a horse than take your insults,” Shane said, offering the reins again.
Absently, Gordon took them.
Shane turned and walked away.
“Hey,” Gordon called. “Wait a minute. I need some details. What kind of proof can you give me?”
Shane just kept walking.
The kid had way more sand than Blue would ever have thought.
Gordon stared after him, then turned and looked all around, as if looking for somebody else. He headed toward the east end of the barn, leading the black horse.
He came in the door scanning the place for Blue. Or maybe Micah. His face was flushed and he was hunting for somebody to question, somebody to help him start getting to the bottom of this unbelievable tale that a lazy kid like Jason had scammed him so thoroughly. The set of his shoulders and his walk, even more arrogant than usual, announced his determination.
“Micah!” he bellowed, just the way he had done that first time Blue ever saw him.
Then, “Blue!”
He spotted Blue then.
“What the hell’s going on up here?” he roared. “Shane says Jason pulled the wool over my eyes, big-time. Says he’s gonna kill Jason. Have you heard anything about all this?”
Blue continued rubbing the roan’s back with the currycomb.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
It always made a man look bad to be out of control when the other man was not. Gordon recognized that and lowered his voice.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“About Jason?”
“Yeah.” The one word was filled with the wonder and shock that must be flowing through Gordon like a river. “Was Jason really bringing drugs in all the time I was paying him to get those kids off them?”
Blue shrugged again. “Shane oughtta know.”
Gordon walked to the door of the stall and Blue started toward it with the rubber currycomb still in his hand. It made him feel trapped to be in that small space with Gordon blocking the door.
He couldn’t stand it. Too many years on the wrong side of the bars.
Gordon moved away to give Blue room, then walked on down the aisle to give his horse room to turn around. When he came back, Blue stood in the aisle, leaning back against the stall door.
“Do you think the boy’s all talk about trying to kill Jason?” Gordon asked.
“Not after what I’ve just seen out that window.”
“I don’t, either.”
It was the strangest feeling in the world to be talking something over with Gordon this way, much less agreeing with him.
“Andie Lee thinks you’re a good influence on him,” Gordon said. “If so, you’d better lean on him about this. Stop the foolishness.”
He searched Blue’s eyes with such a sharp focus that it stabbed Blue with a thought. Had Gordon guessed from where Micah picked him up that he’d been in prison? Had he bothered to go check and find out why Blue had been there?
“Shane makes his own decisions,” he said. “I don’t control him.”
Their eyes held for a long minute in the dusky gloom of the barn.
“What’s Shane planning?” Gordon asked. “He gonna ride up to the Lininger and get himself shot again?”
“We haven’t got down to details.”
Blue wasn’t going to betray any of Shane’s confidences to Gordon. If Gordon wanted to find Jason, he could put pressure on his local lawmen to do it. But he couldn’t resist twisting the knife a little.
“Jason sure could still be living up there, though. He’d probably like to, since you threatened him with his life if he didn’t get off your place.”
Gordon hated that.
“My men searched that whole area up there when Shane got shot,” he snapped. “They didn’t find any sign of somebody living there.”
Blue shrugged.
“Well, maybe Shane was pulling your leg on that. The cabin may be nothing but a cache for Jason’s merchandise.”
Well. Whichever, it was a direct insult to Gordon. He set his jaw, drew up the reins on each side of the black’s neck and stepped around to the side. He turned the stirrup with his toe, ready to mount.
Ready to get back to headquarters and get started finding and squashing this sneaking coyote that had once invaded his ranch.
“Nothing but more hell for Andie Lee,” he said. “Stupid kid. It’d be long odds if he got the job done, but he could get himself locked up for a long time just for trying and that’s all it would take to kill that girl.”
There was an unintentional note of sympathy in his flat, impatient tone that struck at Blue. At least Andie Lee was one person he cared about.
But naturally, Gordon’s biggest concern was avenging this damage to his ego and his reputation. If Shane talked or if one of his men saw Jason up there and found out he’d either been living there or stashing drugs there, the jokes and the gossip would be wilder even than the talk about Shane breaking into his house and stealing his gun right from under Gordon’s nose.
Gordon settled into the saddle, his eyes drilling into Blue’s. The very same color. Their eyes were the exact same shade of cobalt.
“Talk to him, Blue.”
“Not my job,” Blue said.
Gordon’s face reddened a shade more. He locked his gaze on Blue’s but Blue didn’t waver.
“By God, you’re as big a pain in the ass as he is.”
Gordon turned the horse around again, as if to prove he was the one in control—of the horse, at least—and rode out the west door.
Blue stood looking after him.
That last remark had made him sound like a kid. Gordon’s kid.
It stopped Blue for a moment. Why had he even thought that? He’d had thirty-five years to realize that Gordon would never be a father to him.
On a rare occasion or two, he’d heard Gordon call Shane “Son,” and Micah often called Blue “Son” but there would never be an occasion rare enough for Gordon to call Blue “Son.”
Just like Newt in Lonesome Dove. In prison, he’d read that book many times. Like Newt, he would never hear his father acknowledge that he was his son. Not even if he held a gun to his head.
BLUE HAD FINISHED brushing out the roan and was nearly done with the feeding when Shane came in the east door with a can of Coke in one hand and a large bag of chips in the other.
“Micah will have your hide,” Blue said. “You know that’s his favorite kind.”
“I won’t eat ’em all.”
Blue dumped the scoop full of sweet feed into Roanie’s feeder, came out of the stall, and closed the door behind him.
“Grab a bale, Shane.”
He nodded at an unopened bale of hay lying along the wall at the side of the aisle. Shane threw him a puzzled look, but he sat down on it.
“Gordon made me mad and I told him I’m going to kill Jason,” he said, raising his voice a little so Blue would be sure to hear as he walked back to the feed room. “I didn’t mean to. But it’s okay. He thought I was just blowing smoke.”
“You sounded pretty serious to me,” Blue said.
He threw the old wooden scoop in the barrel, set the lid back in place and used both hands to click it closed all the way around.
“You heard?”
“Through the window. I was in Roanie’s stall.”
“Well, anyhow, he can’t stop me. I won’t tell any of the plans we’re gonna make.”
When Blue walked back out into the aisle, Shane popped another chip into his mouth and smiled at him.
“He can’t prove anything, either,” he said around the crunching in his mouth. “It’s my word against his and even if he does have a lot of influence and the police listen to him, it’s what happens in court that counts.”
Blue’s skin went cold all over. Fury flashed through his blood like a runaway fire.
“Listen to yourself,” he snapped, covering the distance between them in three or four long strides. “This is real life for God’s sake, not some fantasy of a TV show.”
Shane stared at him, eyes wide with surprise.
Blue set one boot up on the end of the bale, propped his arm on his knee, and leaned over to get in Shane’s face.
“First of all,” he said, “there is no ‘we.’ I never said I’d help you make plans to kill Jason and I sure as hell won’t. Second of all, you don’t know shit about doing it yourself, so you are going to prison, whether you succeed or fail. All you have to do is try it.”
“You don’t know. I’m a good shot.”
“You used to be, maybe, before you fried your brain and burned hell out of your nerves. How many rounds have you shot lately?”
“Uh. Not any, yet, but…”
“You ever been inside a prison?”
Shane shook his head.
“You ever washed the soap out of your eyes in the shower and opened them to see four big pumped-up gorillas surrounding you and you gotta fight ’em, one at a time or lose your manhood? Be their girlfriend? You know what I’m talkin’ about?”
Shane nodded.
“Or maybe lose your life instead.”
He had his attention now.
“Think about it. Look at the muscle on me and on you. Could you handle me, Shane? If we really got into it?”
Wide-eyed, the boy shook his head. “No,” he said.
“So you couldn’t handle four bubbas bigger than me. Is that fair to say?”
Shane agreed.
“You wanta eat whatever slop somebody slaps onto your plastic plate, every day, year in and year out, and nothing else?”
He gestured at the can frozen in Shane’s hand halfway to his mouth.
“No soda pop, no potato chips, no candy? How about never seeing a beautiful thing? Like the moon or the stars or a thunderstorm or green trees and grass? How about being locked in, day after day, until an hour is as long as a year used to be on the outside of that wall?
“Never seeing a woman, never touching one. Never feeling a tender hand on your skin like your mom’s on your forehead checking for a fever. Never a touch or a hug or a kiss.
“Never talking, for days on end, until you don’t even know if your voice still works or not. Silence except for the racket of the dining hall when you go there. Always silence when it comes to somebody saying something to you, except when somebody gives you an order.
“You want to be a person? You don’t want to be an animal in a cage?”
He stopped for a moment to take a deep breath and slow the racing of his pulse. He felt he might explode.
“You’re not allowed to talk to the other prisoners?”
“I didn’t want to talk to them.” The question made him despair. He wasn’t getting through to the kid at all.
“Look at these horses and think about how they’d feel and how they’d act if we never let them out of these stalls.”
“They’d come out over the top,” Shane said.
“Maybe. Some would. But there’d be no top to your bars. Your cell’d have another one right on top of it. And horses would be nothing but a memory. You’d never see a horse, much less smell one or run your palm over a muzzle or stroke a smooth, silky neck or slap your hand on a sleek-muscled rump.”
Shane’s eyes went to the roan, looking out over the top of his stall.
“If you do go after Jason, Shane, you’re gonna find out all this stuff up close and personal. Think about it. If you can’t figure out how to get off this ranch to look for him, you can’t figure out how and when and where to shoot at him, much less how to get away afterward.”
“I can so,” Shane said with a stubborn set to his chin. But his tone said he knew he couldn’t. “Just because you’ve been watching too many prison movies—”
“I was there,” Blue growled. “I lived it for ten years.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed a man.”
Blue straightened up, dropped his foot to the floor and spun on his heel. He walked out of the barn and into the night, dark now with stars sparkling by the millions overhead.
Every word he’d just said was ringing in his ears as if he’d never heard it before.