CHAPTER 14

After I left Tatum and Burke’s, I drove to the hospital in Kermit, hoping Mom was on duty. Each breath was becoming more painful; I was hoping she wouldn’t mind wrapping my ribs without all the paperwork. The less paper with my name on it, the more trouble Frank Gilleni would have trailing me from Vegas.

The hospital was a six-story building that had been added to so much over the years, part of the building was white brick and part was glass and chrome. The emergency department where my mother had worked for thirty years straddled the past and the present, connecting the old with the new.

I parked and went in, stopping at the check-in desk. “Is Angie Moran working today?” I asked the nurse behind the desk.

“Angie? Sure. She’s here. Can I tell her who’s here to see her?”

“Her son.”

She smiled, showing ultra-bleached teeth. “So you’re Gypsy.”

I slowly nodded, wondering what stories my mother had divulged.

She paged my mother to the front desk and a minute or two later, Mom came bounding down the hall leading from the trauma rooms. She was wearing blue scrubs and white sneakers—the only thing I could ever remember seeing her wear.

“Hey,” she said as she approached. “What’s up? Other than you’ve been in a fight.” She poked at my lip. She wasn’t quite as rough as Rhonda, which, given her profession, I supposed was a good thing.

I jerked my head away and grinned. “Can we talk a moment?”

Her eyes immediately filled with questions. “Sure.” She told the nurse at the desk she’d be on break for a few minutes then led me down the hallway. “Want to grab a cup of coffee in the cafeteria?”

“Are one of these trauma rooms empty?”

She stopped, then turned around and glared at me. “Yeah, but they don’t serve coffee in a trauma room. What have you done, Gypsy?”

I pulled my shirt tail from my pants and gently lifted the right side.

Mom stared at the bruise, then twisted her lips and rolled her eyes. “Nice.” She pushed the door open to one of the rooms, then closed and locked it behind us. “Take your shirt off and get up on the table.”

She pushed her fingers around the bruise, causing me to gasp. “You’ve got some broken ribs. You’ll live unless of course it punctures a lung.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

I remembered when I was a kid other mothers kissed boo-boos and spoke in soothing voices when their kids were hurt. Our mom ripped off Band-Aids, taking the first layer of skin with it.

“Take a deep breath,” she said, standing back to watch the movement of my chest. She then grabbed a paper towel and handed it to me. “Cough.”

“I haven’t coughed up anything.”

“I need to see if there’s blood in it. Cough.”

“But I haven’t coughed—”

“Cough,” she snapped, so I forced myself to cough. She stared at the nonexistent mucus in the paper towel, then tossed it in the trash. She then cut several pieces of adhesive and wrapped them from my sternum around to my back, pulling them like she was yanking out a tooth.

I gasped in pain. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“Oh, if I was trying to kill you, you’d have been dead long before now. You goin’ to tell me how you did this?”

“A basketball game,” I said between grimaces.

She glared at me with one eyebrow raised. “I hope you won.”

I didn’t feel up to recounting the story again so I forced a grin. Mom finished wrapping my ribs, then tapped at my lip. “You need a stitch or two in that. It’s probably going to scar worse than it was. Want me to open it back up and—”

“No!”

She cocked a brow, then leaned against the counter, arms folded across her chest. There was no doubt Rhonda was her daughter.

“How’s your grandmother?” she asked.

“She needs to be in a home.”

“For what? Grouchiness? She’s in perfect health, Gypsy.”

I sighed. I wasn’t used to living with anyone and Gram’s irritable disposition was enough to make me appreciate my solo lifestyle.

“Be nice to her. She’s old.”

“I don’t see her living with you.”

“I ain’t stupid. Do you need something for pain?”

My mother—my angel of mercy.

“I can’t give you the strong stuff because you’re already having trouble breathing, but I can get you some prescription-strength ibuprofen.”

As teenagers, Rhonda and I were too terrified to ever experiment with drugs. Mom had us convinced anything stronger than aspirin would kill us.

Just as mom ducked out to get the meds, my cell beeped. I dug it out of my pocket, saw that it was Claire, and quickly answered the call, cussing myself for doing so.

“Hey, gorgeous,” she said.

“Hey back at you.”

Mom came back in with two red pills and a small paper cup of water. She pretended she wasn’t listening.

“Same time, same place?” Claire asked and my gut tightened.

“I’m … a little tied up tonight. But how ’bout I drop by the ranch tomorrow?” I did need to find out more about her hiring practices. My body parts had their own agenda.

“Oh.” Claire didn’t take well to being turned down for anything. “Okay … what time tomorrow?”

“Lunchtime?”

She laughed. “I’ll plan a picnic.”

I closed my eyes and was taken back twenty years to other picnics, blankets under trees, sun-kissed skin.… “That sounds good,” I whispered. “I’ll see you then.”

I slipped my phone back into my pocket. I glanced up at my mother and swore I saw Rhonda standing there. She slammed the pills in my hand then shoved the cup in the other. “The ranch? As in the K-Bar Ranch?”

I quickly downed the pills, then took a long drink of the water.

Mom shook her head. “Rhonda told me you saw her the first night you were back.”

Rhonda needed to get her facts straight. I saw Claire the second night I was back in Wink. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve actually got a reason for seeing her, Mother. Since her dad had a stroke, she’s been managing the ranch and—”

“Carroll had a stroke? When?” There was far too much concern in her voice.

My mother had despised everything about the Kinleys since as far back as I could remember. Why all the concern now?

“When did Carroll have a stroke?”

“I don’t know. Claire just said she was managing the ranch because her dad had a stroke. Why is Carroll Kinley’s health so important?”

She waved me off. “Don’t get an attitude. I went to school with the man. We’re the same age. It’s a little unsettling when you start seeing people you went to school with in the obituaries.”

“He’s not dead. He had a stroke.”

She rolled her eyes, then pulled a handful of red pill packets from her pocket and handed them to me. “Take two every four hours. I’ve got to get back to work.”

It was a little troubling seeing my mom’s world stop, too, at the mention of a Kinley.

*   *   *

“We’ve got a weird family,” I told Rodney. We were on the back deck waiting for a much anticipated thunderstorm, finishing off the two six-packs Rhonda had bought the night before. Two bottles were unaccounted for and I suspected Gram, who had conveniently passed out after dinner.

Rodney didn’t say anything but grunted his agreement to the weird family comment.

“My mother freaked out when I told her Carroll Kinley had a stroke. I thought for a minute there she was going to have one. What’s up with that?” I was feeling buzzed and chatty. “Since Rhonda and I were kids, Mom has all but called an exorcist to rid the Morans of anything Kinley.”

“Maybe she used to date him.”

I shook my head. “Mom and the old man got married their senior year. I was a backseat baby.” I couldn’t stop the chuckle that bubbled up into my throat along with the beer. After a moment, I finally said it. “Claire’s married.” I was certain he already knew; I just wanted to see if I could say it.

“Yep. Senator Steven Sellars.”

Sellars. So that was it. Claire Sellars. It didn’t roll off the tongue with ease; it was cumbersome. Heavy. She deserved better. I sighed and pressed the cold bottle to my forehead. The temperature had dropped to an almost bearable 85 degrees as a cold front moved in from the northwest. So far it had brought with it a lot of thunder, some impressive lightning, but little rain.

“I think the K-Bar Ranch might be involved with the missing girls.” I finally said that, too.

Rodney turned quickly and stared at me. If I had been completely sober, I could have probably seen the wheels turning in his bald little head.

“Oh my God … it makes perfect sense.” He pulled his chair closer and hunkered down for a meeting of the minds.

“What makes perfect sense?”

“Claire’s husband, Steven Sellars—his sister’s married to Mark Peterson. Peterson’s Claire’s brother-in-law.”

A crack of lighting exploded north of the tree line followed by a churning rumble of thunder. Normally, that would have been my cue to head inside, but I couldn’t move. I felt like my heart was tied to an anchor. A sinking anchor. She couldn’t be involved. Claire toyed with people’s hearts, she took them to dizzying heights of ecstasy, she was the strongest-willed person I had ever known—but she wouldn’t be involved in something like this. She was a protector. She protected the unpopular girls at school. She protected the fillies and geldings that didn’t make the rodeo cut from slaughter. She protected the land, and the ranch. It was her nature.

Could they be using the ranch as a pipeline? I laid my head back against the chair and waited for the coming storm.

Rodney went inside and returned with two fresh bottles. He handed me one, then sat back down and leaned in close. “How do you think Claire’s involved?”

“Two of the missing girls’ fathers work at the K-Bar. Sophia Ortez is looking into how many others there might be.”

“They were working at the K-Bar when their daughters went missing?”

I slowly nodded. “But I don’t know who hired them. I don’t know how long Claire’s been managing the ranch. Years ago, Sam Amos was the ranch foreman—he did all the hiring back then.”

Rodney settled his weight in the chair. “Okay … so the K-Bar hires these illegals and then their daughters go missing. There’s got to be someone sending them the workers … someone who would know these men were, one, illegal, and two, had teenage daughters.”

I popped the top on the new bottle and downed half of it in one long swig. “Peterson and McCoy worked for the Border Patrol. Maybe there’s someone there feeding them these poor bastards.”

“More likely a coyote they’ve hooked up with.”

I drank my beer. My heart ached for the missing girls. Maybe after I proved Ryce was murdered, I could dig a little deeper into the pipeline. And after that, I was going to have to find a paying job.