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“The brunette who was in here earlier, who is she?” He handed her a ten-dollar bill and waited for his change.
“The brunette?” Her frown disappeared with the dawn of understanding. “Oh, you mean Cat Calder.”
“Cat,” he repeated, thinking that it hadn’t been that far from the truth when she called herself Maggie the Cat.
“Cathleen, actually, but everyone calls her Cat. Her father owns the Triple C,” she said, then laughed at herself. “Look at me explaining that to you, like you haven’t been here long enough to have heard all about the Calders and their ranch.”
“Hard not to,” Logan agreed. The ranch was the largest in the state, practically a country all by itself. In a community as small as this, the ranch and its owners were popular topics of conversation. Truthfully, he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it beyond garnering the simple facts that Calder was a widower with a son and a daughter. It had never crossed his mind that the daughter might be the woman who had haunted him all these years. He tried to remember some of the things that had been said about her, then pushed such thoughts away.
“Thanks.” He pocketed the change the clerk handed him, and gathered up the tobacco can to head for the door.
“Take care of yourself, Logan,” the woman called after him.
He answered with a wave. Outside the store, he paused, lifted his hat and settled it back lower on his forehead, brim tilted down. Shaking his head, he laughed at himself with a kind of twisted humor. “You do know how to pick ’em, Logan.”
As simply as that, he put aside any hopes he might have had in Cat Calder’s direction, and walked back to his patrol car. Experience had left him with few illusions about his place in today’s world. Lawmen of every kind were treated as a breed apart, hated by a lawless few, needed by the respectable many, and welcomed in the home of almost none.
Cat had looked at his uniform and walked away. If he had any doubts, she had removed them. Sending no more glances to locate her whereabouts, Logan slid behind the wheel, turned the key and reversed away from the store, then swung north onto the highway, needing the release speed could give him.
THIRTEEN
A mile north of Blue Moon, Lath dug a cold can of beer from the plastic sack and popped the top on it, the sound sharp and distinctive in the truck cab. Rollie threw him a startled look, then darted an anxious glance at the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind them.
“Jeezus, Lath, are you crazy?” he blurted. “What if Echohawk comes along and pulls us over?”
Undeterred, Lath chuckled and chugged down another long swallow. “I thought prison might have changed you, but you’re still the cautious one, always careful not to get into trouble.” His sidelong glance glittered with amusement.
Rollie’s mouth tightened at the jibe. “Lord knows, you got into enough trouble for both of us.”
“Yeah, the old man was always on me for settin’ such a bad example.” He nodded at the memory. “Like workin’ himself from dawn to dusk on that farm with nothing more to show for it than a bunch of calluses and aching bones was a better one.” He took another swig of beer, then drained the can, crumpled it, and tossed it out the window, then reached in the sack for another one. “Do you want one?”
“No.” Rollie shot another look at the rearview mirror.
Lath noted it and laughed derisively. “Quit worrying about Echohawk. He won’t be following us. His kind counts on intimidating you.” He snapped the tab on a second can.
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” Another check of the rearview mirror showed an empty road behind them.
After taking a short sip, Lath held the can in his lap and stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. “I swear you coulda knocked me over with a toothpick when you told me Echohawk was here. I wonder what made him pick a godforsaken part of the country like this?” he mused. “Nothin’ ever happens here. Maybe that’s what he was counting on—handling nothin’ more serious than an occasional drunk, a rustled cow, or some domestic dispute.”
This prompted Rollie to recall, with a curious frown, “Back at Fedderson’s you said something about Echohawk getting shot up?”
“It was about a year or a year and a half ago. Echohawk and some of his ATF buddies got into an old-time shoot-out with a paramilitary group down in southwest Texas. He got hit in the leg and took another bullet in the chest. It punctured a lung. It was touch-and-go for a while, I heard. I know of a few boys who were pulling against him.” Lath paused, turning thoughtful again. “He must have decided to call it quits after that. Probably figured he had used up all his luck.” He grinned suddenly. “It just could be that he has. Yes, sir, it just could be.”
Rollie didn’t like the sound of that. He started to ask what Lath meant by it, then decided it was better if he didn’t know. Ahead the highway began its climb into the broken country, leaving the flatness of the prairie behind it. A scattering of pine trees marched along the stony footslopes of this Rocky Mountain outlier, joined here and there by clumps of aspen.
Uneasy with the silence that had fallen, Rollie sought to break it and direct his brother’s thoughts away from any scheming he might be doing. “I told you, didn’t I, about meeting up with Buck Haskell while I was in prison.”
Lath responded with a disinterested nod. “You mentioned he took you under his wing, so to speak.”
“Yeah, he said he was paying back a debt he owed the family.”
“A debt? How’s that?”
“You’re gonna like this one, Lath,” Rollie said with a stretching smile. “It seems the old man got drunk one night, and Buck knocked him over the head and rolled him, took every dime he had.”
“He rolled the old man?” Lath barked out a laugh. “When the hell was this?”
“Before he married Ma, I guess.”
