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What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, And plunge us in the flames; or from above Should intermitted vengeance arm again His red right hand to plague us? John Milton, Paradise Lost
Rope bit into his neck, cutting skin. Blood wept like slow honey, pooling in the hollow of his throat and sliding past his collarbones.
He knew this man. He’d known him for years in that small-town way everything was known about everyone else. He knew this man, though, better than he knew others. Never, in all that time, had he thought this would be how they’d meet their end: one of them at the end of a rope, staring down a rifle the other man held.
Ice slicked down his spine, spread through his arms and legs as his chest went tight. This wasn’t just for show. This wasn’t just to scare him. He was going to die today.
He kept his eyes open as long as he could, drinking in the country and the setting sun bathing the meadows in spilled paint, in all the pastel colors man had ever named. A thousand regrets flashed through his mind, days and nights he’d never live, dreams he’d spun out under the big sky that would never unfurl from his mind. His life had seemed open once, unburdened, a wild emptiness ready to be filled with every daring thought he’d ever had. As the darkness closed in, one thought rang through his mind, one thought sharper, harder edged, more filled with regret than all the others. It was the
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All rootless things are grabbed by the wind, and so was Everett Dawson.
Everett Dawson arrived in the Crazy Mountains.
“You,” Lawrence growled. “You graduated high school up in Lone Pine last year, yeah? Go’n get me a real deputy!”
His heart squeezed, and he ran his fingers down the side of the cold face. He couldn’t look at the neck, at what had been done.
“Other than the fact he was missin’,” Lawrence said slowly,“was the buzzards led me to him. Got there before they could get to his eyes.”
Lawrence held Braddock’s glare. “Sorry, Sheriff,” he said, his voice taut. “You know, when I found him, all I could think ‘bout was gettin’ him down—” His voice went rough, words tangled and torn as his voice failed him. He looked down.
“Welcome to the Crazies, son.” Braddock smiled across his desk and folded his hands together. Everett sat ramrod straight in the chair before Sheriff Braddock’s desk. He wore his jeans, as instructed, brand-new roper boots, and his Montana Department of Agriculture bomber jacket. He’d taken off his Stock Detective ball cap and set it on his thigh, perfectly centered and parallel to the floor.
“Somethin’s going on in the Crazies. Stock—cattle—been disappearin’ off everyone’s ranches. Stock disappearin’ usually means rustlin’, and rustlin’ always means trouble. Modern rustlers, they like to grab stock and shove them in trailers, get them as far as fast as they can. They rework the brand and slide on up to a backwater auction where they can offload the stolen beef. One stolen head can bring as much as five grand at one of them black-market auctions.”
He didn’t have to wait long. A man appeared around the back of the barn astride a large chestnut stallion. He wore a black cowboy hat pulled low and dark sunglasses, a flannel shirt, and dark jeans. Black leather chaps covered his legs. He trotted his horse toward the gate, one hand on the reins. His right hand stayed loose.
Lawrence never took his eyes off Everett as he peeled an apple and fed his stallion in the center of the corral.
The way he stood, Everett could finally take him in, get the measure of the man. He was tall, six feet or so. His shoulders were broad, axe-handle wide, tapering slightly to a barrel chest. He had a rugged strength built up from years of manual labor, and the body to show for it. His flannel shirt clung to his chest and his arms and was tucked into jeans covered in shotgun leather chaps. Everything was well worn and practical. No fringe, no finery.
Everett surveyed the ranch, as much as he could from the corral. The ranch home overlooked the road, white paint and a wide porch wrapping all the way around the squat log cabin frame. The corral Lawrence was in led to a horse barn and stables, and behind the stables, there was a bunkhouse for the hands that lived and worked on the ranch, and another smaller log cabin set back in the pines.
I know exactly what I am.”
He looked at the barn, unable to hold Lawrence’s hard stare. There was something about the man, an intensity. It was like trying to stare at the sun.
“You’ll need chaps. We’re riding through rough country.”
Everett chewed his dust for the next three hours.
in the scramble and mess. Lawrence hung back, standing outside the grove with both horses and watching as Everett slowly circled the tree and made his way toward the sliced noose. He crouched, peering at the fallen leaves, the tracks.
No one thinks twice about their fingerprints when they’re screwing in a lightbulb.”
And four feet ahead of the ant pile, pressed into a decomposing leaf stamped into the dewy forest floor, lay a single outline of a shoed horse’s foot.
He could read the thirst for vengeance in every line of Lawrence’s body, from his curled fists to his taut shoulders, the way his muscles trembled when he thought Everett wasn’t looking.
Lawrence watched every move he made as he poured the casting material slowly over the print, covering the edges, extending the cast into the dirt and leaves surrounding the horse’s print.
Bureau of Land Management owns it,”
beside him, ride side by side. “Forest Service likes to tromp around up there,
It’s beautiful country.” He nodded around them, to the wild trees and untamed country, the towering pines mixed with poplar and ash, and the pastel sky unfurled over the mountains like a blanket shaken out on the wind. “This is raw land. Untouched since time began.”
The Crazies were like lost jewels from a crown, emerald forests and sapphire lakes and rivers, gold-gilded pastures specked with riots of wildflowers, fire-red ruby poppies and amethyst lilacs and diamond-white daisies. It was hard to imagine this much beauty in the world still existed, if Everett wasn’t riding through it.
the sun sank below the horizon. A thousand stars winked on, glittering so low in the sky Everett thought he could reach out and bat them down, scramble up Crazy Peak and cup one in his hands.
Everett got the fire going while Lawrence finished preparing the rabbits.
His thumbs kneaded into Everett’s lower back, fingers splayed across his hipbones. Digging in, pushing against the tight muscles, rotating around through the knots that had formed.
Everett’s mind abruptly swapped the comfort of the campfire and the gentle massage with another possibility, another night of hands splayed on his back, a man behind him, fingers gripping the skin over his taut hipbones. Everything shifted, changed in an instant, at least in Everett’s mind.
“My hat?” Everett pulled his ball cap off, the black one emblazoned with Stock Detective across the front. “What’s wrong with my hat?”
He shifted, trying to ignore the heat in his blood. It had been a long time since he’d let his eyes trace the lines of a man or had felt the prick of desire crawl under his skin.
We could share. It came into his mind like a bomb, a thought unbidden, unwanted. Everett shoved it away. There’d be none of that. Not anymore.
“Story gets told different every time. But the way Carson tells—well, told—it, Dell and Aaron were senseless drunk and shovin’ bills in a couple strippers’ thongs when some local truckers got pissed they was hoggin’ all the action. Words got thrown, then fists. Then they all got thrown out.”
“Backed right up over those two truckers in that big ole ranch truck. Carson said he could hear their bones break, every single one in their bodies. Like timber snapping. Or watermelon exploding.”
Endless Sky trucks got torched. Some of the Endless Sky boys torched a big rig parked at the gas station while the owner was eatin’ inside. Truckers across the state were refusing deliveries here. Long haul truckers were comin’ in and startin’ fights with any cowboy they saw.
Certainly not enough to make assumptions about Lawrence’s relationship to a dead man. For all he knew, they were hunting buddies. Or they smoked pot together. It didn’t mean what he thought it meant.
Everett watched him fall asleep, watched his jaw go slack and his chest rise and fall. The coals turned deep red, the color of boiling blood, as he unfurled the sleeping bag and crawled inside. The down smelled like woodsmoke and leather, sweat and a musk that, even after one day, Everett could say was Lawrence’s. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, burying his face in the folds of the bag as his cock hardened.
Laughter hit him. Lawrence, brushing the horses. Trigger preened under his touch, shaking his head. “Cowboy coffee,” Lawrence called. “It’ll peel paint off a barn. But it will also wake you up, get you goin’.”
Lawrence knelt beside a dead man, lying facedown and flattening the field. A single shot had entered the center of the dead man’s back, gone through his heart, and exploded out his chest. His hat lay in front of him, tipped off, his arms and legs splayed wide. He’d fallen where he’d been shot. And he hadn’t been expecting it.
He blinked, and the cowboy’s corpse in front of him shimmered, changed. Now it was a man in uniform, an officer, lying dead in the dust—
A single horse print, like before. Slender, a small horse’s footprint. A lighter horse, like before.
“There’s a murderer here in the Crazies,” Everett said.
He didn’t know which man to trust. Not yet.
Terry shook his head. “Hoss, me ‘n the boys were talkin’. While all this is goin’ on, while all this killin’ is happenin’… we’re gonna take our pay and clear out for a while.” “You’re quittin’?” “Takin’ a break,” Terry tried to protest.
“The house has a phone line.,” Lawrence finally said,
