A high stakes reunion, p.24
A High-Stakes Reunion,
p.24
“Just one?” Javier asked.
“Yep. Kid thought he’d livestream his ascent,” Everett said.
“He didn’t make it?” Lucas asked. “Seems easy enough.”
“The climb’s intermediate,” Javier noted.
“The broadcast cut off before he reached the top,” Everett said. “No one’s seen or heard from him in three days. Parents in San Gabriel are worried.”
“How old?” Javier asked.
“Sixteen,” Everett noted.
Javier made a pitying noise. “Same age as my Armand.”
“Shouldn’t he be in school?” Lucas asked.
Everett raised a brow. “Shouldn’t you?”
“I got kicked out,” Lucas informed him. “Didn’t my mom tell you?”
Everett pursed his lips. “Your mama told me you were too much to handle and thought I could do something about it.”
“How’s that coming, amigo?” Javier asked, with a sly grin under the shade of his hat.
Everett shook his head. “I have a habit of inheriting problems of monumental proportions.”
“Sure wish you had your dogs with you,” Lucas told Everett as they crossed a stream. “They’d be able to smell a lion. They’d warn us, wouldn’t they?”
Everett scowled, thinking of the three cattle dogs he’d raised from pups. “I’m not keen on putting any of them on Tombs’ menu.”
“He wouldn’t attack them. Any animal would run from their baying. Even a predator.”
Everett couldn’t predict what Tombs would do, but he had trained the dogs for protection as much as herding. If they scented danger, they’d go looking for it. Everett couldn’t think of any circumstance where Bones, Boomer and Boaz meeting Tombs wouldn’t end in at least one of them maimed or killed.
“You’ve got a hot date tonight,” Lucas recalled.
“What do you know about it?” Everett barked.
Lucas scrambled. “I heard it.”
“From?”
“Mateo. Spencer told him. Spencer heard it from the house. Nobody knows who you’re going out with.”
Lucas was baiting him, and Everett wasn’t willing to share any of his plans for the evening. He gnawed at the wad of gum in his mouth. “What’ve my plans got to do with anything?”
“We won’t make it back to headquarters by sundown,” Lucas considered. “I figure you’d have sent Ellis in your place to find the guy.”
“Kid went missing,” Everett reminded him. “If he’s camped out somewhere on the Edge, I aim to find him.”
The horses climbed to the mouth of a natural arch where the river sluiced and gurgled busily from the mouth of a cave. Water flowed freely now that the snow had melted in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
This was the lifeblood of Eaton Edge. The river fed the grass that made cattle ranching in the high desert of New Mexico possible.
As they neared the falls, Everett tugged on Crazy Alice’s reins. A smile transformed the grim set of his mouth. The loss of 23’s calf had unsettled him. But the sight ahead made the trouble slink back to the corners of his mind. “Howdy, Sheriff,” he called. He took off his hat.
The Jicarilla-Apache Native American woman was five feet three inches at the crest of her uniformed hat. Under the two-toned, neutral threads that suited her position, she was built solid. Everett couldn’t help but let his gaze travel over the hips under her weapons belt or the swell of her breast underneath her gold badge and name plate.
Sheriff Kaya Altaha’s black-lensed aviators hid eyes as dark as unexplored canyons. If she’d take them off, he’d see the usual assemblage of amusement and exasperation that greeted him under most circumstances. She addressed him. “You’re late, cattle baron.”
“We set out at dawn, like I promised,” he assured her, dismounting. He flicked the reins over Alice’s ears and led the horse the rest of the way. “Ran into a snag a quarter of a mile south of here.”
Her frown quickened. “Trouble?”
“Heifer dropped a calf before dawn,” he said, fitting the hat back to his crown. “Something carried it off.”
Kaya’s frown deepened. “Did you find any remains?”
“Other than a blood trail...” He shook his head. “Cat took off in this direction.”
“You think it was lion.”
“I know it was. Normally, we don’t keep the heifers this far north when the mountain’s waking up for spring, especially not during calving season. 23’s a wily one—makes a habit of slipping through fences. The big cats are more likely to carry off pronghorn, small deer, rabbit...” He wished she’d take her hair down for once. She kept it knotted in a thick braid at the nape of her neck.
Everett would love to see it free. He’d bet money it was as dense as plateau nights and as soft as the Wapusa between his fingers when it ran down from the mountain.
Something tugged just beneath his navel—a long, low pull that snagged his breath for a second or two.
That wasn’t new, either.
Everett had had to come to terms with the fact that he had the hots for the new sheriff of Fuego County. He’d been wallowing in that understanding for some time—since the shoot-out at Eaton Edge over Christmas that had led to her being shot in the leg and, after some recovery, promoted to the high office she held now.
Everett knew what he wanted, always, and he chased it relentlessly. But the last eight months of his life had changed him. He’d been shot, too, in a standoff between a cutthroat backwoodsman and his family. He’d nearly died. Recovery had been a long mental process with PTSD playing cat and mouse with him. He’d found himself in therapy at the behest of Ellis and their housekeeper turned adoptive mother, Paloma Coldero. He’d set aside his chief of operations duties until doctors had given him the go-ahead to continue.
He had hated the hiatus. He’d worked since he was a boy—to the bone. He’d quit high school his senior year to help his father manage the Edge. Everett had never not worked.
After Hammond had died in July, work had felt vital. If he wasn’t working, he was thinking about the state of his family and the grief he still hardly knew how to handle, even after all his months sitting across from a head doctor in San Gabriel.
Kaya Altaha had been a bright spot. The then-deputy had saved his life in the box canyon last July. Not only that—she’d checked in on him regularly. She’d worked to clear the name of Ellis’s soon-to-be wife, Luella Decker.
The first time he’d smiled during his recovery, it’d been with her.
He hadn’t known there were feelings attached...until Christmastime, when he’d seen her blood in the hay of his barn. He’d smelled it over the stench of cattle and gunpowder. To say he’d been worried was a damned lie—he’d gone over the flippin’ edge.
She tucked her full lower lip underneath the white edge of her teeth, nibbling as she looked beyond him into the hills that tumbled off south. “Anyone get a look at the predator?” she asked.
He had to school himself to keep from rubbing his lips together. “Happened before dawn, as I said. Blood was dry.”
“I’m sorry to hear about the calf,” she said sincerely.
He could feel her eyes through the shades. He felt them from tip to tail. “I’m not looking forward to telling my nieces. They love the little ones come spring.”
She studied him a moment before the professional line of her mouth fell away and a slow smile took over.
He darted a look at the two deputies roving around the space between the falls and the arch walls before he brought himself a touch closer, the toes of his thick-skinned boots nearly overlapping hers. He lowered his voice. “You can’t be doing that.”
“What am I doing?” Her jaw flared wide from its stubborn point when she smiled.
He’d thought about kissing that point...and a good many things south of it. “Flashing secret smiles at me and pretending I’m not going to do anything about it.”
“I don’t play games.”
“You know what that mess does to me,” he said, “and you’re betting on me not doing anything about it.”
“You wouldn’t,” she said.
“Why d’you figure that, Sheriff Sweetheart?” he asked with a laugh.
The smile turned smug. “Because I know the only things Everett Eaton fears in this life are bullets and bars. Not the honky-tonk kind—the ones that hem him in and keep him away from...all this.” She gestured widely. “Despite how much we both know you like a challenge.” She tossed him back a step with the brunt of her hand and raised her voice to be heard by the others. “Hiker’s name is Miller Higgins. He’s sixteen years of age. Five-eight. Roughly one hundred and fifty pounds. His last known contact was three days ago at approximately 10:23 a.m. The family reported him missing yesterday when they couldn’t get in touch with him via cell.”
“Cell service is low here,” Javier noted. “How good was the quality of the livestream video?”
“Not great, but good enough to establish where he was and what he was doing,” Kaya replied. “If he fell during the hike and injured himself, he might have lost his cell phone or damaged it. That’s the working theory. He left his car on the access road to the northeast. Deputy Root will fly the surveillance drone once we get to the top. I plan on combing every inch of this mountain and the surrounding area until we find Higgins. If we need to bring in more search and rescue people, we’ll do so.”
“Nobody knows Ol’ Whalebones as well as me and Ellis,” Everett explained. “He’ll join us tomorrow, if need be. We’ll find Higgins. I’d like Lucas to wait here with the horses since there’ve been signs of predators about.”
She inclined her head. “Fine. Let’s split into groups and hit the trail.”
Copyright © 2024 by Amber Leigh Williams
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ISBN-13: 9780369743213
A High-Stakes Reunion
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Tara Taylor Quinn, A High-Stakes Reunion
