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I laughed. My first actual,reallaugh in the past twenty-four hours. “I hope you brought some backup if that’s your plan. You’re gonna need it.”
“I don’t know about that…” He gave me an appraising glance that I knew was meant to get under my skin. “I’m still in my early thirties. Still in my prime. But you…” He shook his head. “They say a man starts slipping a little once he hits forty.”
The little bastard. If he wasn’t actually one of my few close friends—and a damn good deputy, regardless—I would have seriously considered marching over there and showing him exactly what I could still do at forty.
But then he started to laugh, and I couldn’t stop myself from joining in.
“Got you that time,” he snickered. “You don’t have to be sensitive about your age, you know.”
“And you don’t have to be sensitive about not getting laid,” I shot back. “Maybe she just realized she needs a man who knows what he’s doing.”
He gave me another long look but then shrugged it off. “Yeah, maybe that’s it. I’ll have to ask her on our next date.”
Okay, so that was a good one. I had to laugh again.
The crackling dispatch radio interrupted our back and forth before I could come up with a good comeback. Probably for the best, since it seemed like we were both mostly over our little competition for the redhead’s attention.
Mostly.
For now, anyway.
I frowned as the call came through, then picked up my radio to let them know we were on it.
“Do you think it’s another poisoning?” Cole snarled, already standing up and gathering his jacket.
“They wouldn’t call us in to look at sick animals if they didn’t think it was something serious,” I said. “But at the Josephsons’ ranch this time? Whoever is doing this has the biggest balls I’ve ever seen. They’re fucking with the biggest families in the county.”
“Could be someone who doesn’t know any better.” Cole shrugged. “Some teenagers just out thinking they’re being edgy or some shit.”
I didn’t say anything as we walked toward the door. It didn’t do much good to speculate, anyway. But this didn’t feel like the work of some rowdy teenagers. Maybe at first, but not now. Not after so many times.
These ranchers were being targeted. And it was up to us to figure out who was behind it.
* * *
Ari Josephson was waiting outside her barn with the town’s veterinarian, Logan Hensley, when we pulled up.
“She sure doesn’t look like she’s old enough to run a place like this,” Cole murmured as we got out of the police cruiser. “Is she even eighteen yet?”
I pretended to cough to cover my answer. “Twenty, if I recall correctly.”
And yeah, she definitely looked young—except in her eyes. They were the eyes of someone who had lived a little. Someone who knew how the world worked. They were the eyes of a grown woman.
I wondered if Cole might make a play for young Ari Josephson now that he actually knew how old she was. Maybe he’d leave pretty little Daisy Lynn to me. That would work out best all the way around, as far as I was concerned.
But as we walked up and started talking, I could already see that Cole wasn’t interested in Ari like he was in Daisy Lynn. There was no spark between them. They weren’t exchanging any secretive, flirty glances. Not as far as I could see, anyway.
Which was fine. It would be a little unseemly if we went after every twenty-year-old girl in town, after all. It just meant the competition for Daisy Lynn was still very much alive and well.
And I was definitely up to the challenge.
“The poison was in the water again?” Cole was asking as I pushed away those other thoughts. “Just like at the other ranches?”
Ari and Logan both nodded. “The only difference here is that we’re downstream from those other places,” Logan said. “There is a possibility that the cattle here are getting poisoned from the runoff.”
“How can we be sure?” I asked, getting my head into the game. This was an active investigation and the most serious thing to hit Bliss in years, so I really did need to concentrate. There would be plenty of time to think about Daisy Lynn after we’d gathered a few more facts and taken a few more statements. “If there’s that much poison in the streams around here, that could be a public health concern. We could be looking at more serious things than sick cattle if we’re not careful.”
Jesus, I didn’t even want to think about that possibility. If word got out that the water around town might be poisoned, this story would blow wide open. We’d have TV crews and half a dozen state and federal agencies breathing down our necks.
