Chapter 11

Delon braced himself for an interrogation on the drive back to Earnest, but his dad only said, “So that’s Tori.”

“Yep.”

Merle nodded. “Well, if she’s like the rest of her family, she’s good at her job.”

“Seems to be.”

And that was the sum total of the conversation.

Back at the shop, Delon walked straight to his bedroom closet and pulled out the gear bag he hadn’t touched since the night of the wreck. When he dragged the zipper open, the smell hit him—dust, rosin, leather, and the sweet antiseptic scent of the benzoin used to stiffen his glove. Aromas meant to be accompanied by banging chutes, the snorts of bucking horses, the strains of the national anthem. What Beni called the “bareback riders get ready” song because they were nearly always the first event of the rodeo.

His riding glove could stand up on its own, like medieval armor formed to fit his hand. Traces of mud were still visible in the seams of the chaps folded at the bottom of the bag, but someone had taken the time to clean up his gear and stow it properly while he was flat on his back in the hospital. He slid his hand into the glove and flexed his fingers, feeling the bite of hardened leather. For the first time since he was thirteen, there were no calluses to protect his palm.

He really had gone soft.

He pulled the glove on and worked his hand into the stiff rawhide handle of the rigging. His blood rose instantly at the creak of rosin. For a moment he fought the urge. He should wait until he was sure he was alone. Then he hissed a curse. He was in the mood to kick the shit out of something and no one would pay any attention to him in the old, walled-off section of the shop.

He shoved his feet into a pair of boots, caught up the cinch with the hand that wasn’t still stuck in the rigging, and headed out the back door. The flick of a switch lit a single row of fluorescent lights below. His mind reeled back over hundreds of hours, thousands upon thousands of spur strokes, and two half-grown boys with big dreams. His rodeo career had started here. Not in an arena, but this grimy, ill-lit corner of their father’s shop.

The contraption that sat in the middle of the cramped space looked like a poor attempt to build a wooden doghouse—six feet long, wide at the bottom, with short straight sides and a top that slanted to a platform slightly wider than his butt. The front narrowed and sloped away from the body, forming the approximate shape of a horse’s neck and shoulders if it had its head down, bucking. They’d padded the seat and shoulders with foam and carpet remnants, then worn it to shreds with the pound and scrape of boot heels.

Later they’d designed a fancier model with a pretty decent bucking motion using an electric motor and a flywheel off a junker truck, but once they’d mastered real live horses, it had been relegated to one of the sheds out back. This old board was all they needed to stay sharp and hone their personal styles: Gil flung back, his head slamming off the horse’s rump, his spur strokes free and wild. And Delon, shoulders cocked forward, his body tight and controlled, each stroke precise.

Bareback riding was the X-games event of rodeo, the best rides straddling the razor-thin line between going big and crashing. The harder the horse bucked, the bigger the score. The cowboy was rewarded for opening up and taking chances, unless he teetered over that line and lost control. The judges wanted to see long, flashy spur strokes, but you’d better stay centered and your boot heels had better be planted in the horse’s neck before its front feet hit the ground on the next jump or they’d dock points.

Delon damn near always beat the horse to the ground, his spur strokes dead even and snappy. Consistency was Delon’s hole card, but Gil was the one people had lined the fences to watch. Electric, unpredictable, but always worth the price of admission.

Shaking off the memories, Delon checked the CD in the battered boom box on its shelf above the workbench. Guns N’ Roses. Perfect. His heart pounded to the beat as Axel howled the opening bars of “Welcome to the Jungle” through the forty-amp speakers Delon had wired into every corner of the room. He pulled his hand free and strapped his rigging onto the board, then propped one heel on the seat and reached for his ankle, his muscles only offering a mild protest as he touched his cheek to his knee. His body responded to the familiar routine, his brain kicking off a slide show of all the times and all the places he’d warmed up this way—from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to the coliseum on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, from Calgary to Houston, and hundreds of other rodeos in between.

On this last Friday night in January, he should be in Fort Worth, or Rapid City, South Dakota, standing on the back of chutes inhaling the perfume of dirt and horse shit and rosin, the chute boss yelling that he’d be coming out of number six so get his rigging strapped on. Cowboys and contractors would be jostling past, thumping him on the back and yelling, “Go get ’im.” Then he’d be climbing over the back of a chute to ease down on a horse’s warm, hard back while it snorted and showed him the whites of its eyes.

He was nowhere close to ready to be done with that life. The admission tore something loose inside his chest and set his heart thudding like a hammer-strike against his sternum. He clenched one end of a leather lace between his teeth and wrapped the other around his wrist to tie his glove on. Then he slung a leg over the spur board, worked his hand back into the rigging, and scooted his hips up into position. Free arm cocked up and back, he nodded his head.

His feet lashed out, thudding solid against the wood. He jerked his knees up, heels dragging against the worn carpet. The right one clicked the edge of the rigging. The left came up a foot short. He cursed and spurred again. And again. And again. With each stroke the rhythm got more ragged as his right leg outpaced his left. Sweat slicked his forehead and his knee burned as he focused every ounce of his will on making it work.

It wouldn’t.

He dropped his feet and bowed over the rigging, his breath a harsh rasp, his eyes and throat burning as all the fear and pain and frustration of the past months flooded through him.

“Looks like shit,” Gil said.

Delon jerked upright, searching the shadows until he found his brother’s lean form lounging against the open door to the office hallway, a Coke bottle in hand. Humiliation balled up into fury. “Did I ask your opinion?”

“It’s your lucky day. You get a freebie.” Gil tipped the neck of his bottle toward the spur board. “Is that the best you can do?”

“Yes.” He yanked his hand out of the rigging and swung off the spur board, gritting his teeth against the bright arc of pain when his left foot hit the ground.

“Is it gonna get any better?”

“I don’t know.” Delon tossed his glove into his bag, then turned to fumble with the buckle of the cinch, work the leather latigo free, and fold it in precise loops through the D-ring.

“When will you?”

Delon secured the latigo, then rolled up the cinch on the opposite side of the rigging. “Pepper wants to do another MRI to see if there’s scar tissue or something he can scrape out. He might be able to get more of the motion back.”

“But probably not all.”

“No.” Delon shoved the rigging in his bag and zipped it shut.

“Be easier if you rode right-handed. Frees up your left leg.”

Delon gave a derisive snort. “We both know how well that went.”

“You might be a little more coordinated than when you were fourteen.”

Delon shook his head. If swapping hands was the only way to compensate for his knee, he was screwed.

“What are you gonna do if doesn’t get better?” Gil asked.

“Hell if I know.” Delon grabbed the rigging bag and thumped it down on top of the spur board, turning to sneer at his brother. “Got any suggestions, boss man?”

Gil gave him a steady, dark stare. “You could pry that stick out of your ass. Life fucks with people. Deal with it, Delon.”

They weren’t just talking about bucking horses anymore. Delon wanted to lash out, ask Gil who made him the expert, but he already knew. Fate. Bad luck. Bad decisions. They’d all ganged up to teach Gil a whole shitload of lessons. And Delon was still following his lead, despite every vow to the contrary.

Delon turned away to shut off the boom box. “I can’t force my knee to bend.”

“No, but you could let your hips do more of the work. Rear back and open up a little.”

Of course. Gil’s mantra. For fuck’s sake, D, have a little fun. You ride like someone’s holding a gun to your head.

“That’s not my style.”

“No. It was mine.” Gil’s mouth twisted into a mockery of what used to be his smile. He straightened and tossed his bottle into a metal trash can with a resounding crash. “God knows, turning out like me is a fate worse than death.”

Delon couldn’t lie. Couldn’t force out the truth. For years, he’d wanted nothing more desperately than to be just like his big brother. Sometimes, in the dead of the night when he couldn’t hide from himself, he still did. He stood in the light and watched Gil disappear into the darkness, his footsteps an uneven tap and scrape on the concrete. The sound tore at a scar deep inside Delon’s soul. One that had never healed over completely, and probably never would.

* * *

Delon would’ve preferred to avoid Gil indefinitely, but he had to go into the office to get the keys to the service pickup. Gil popped his head out of the dispatcher’s office as Delon slipped them off a hook.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta run over to Dumas, take a look at a tractor.”

“Doing house calls now, are we?” Gil drawled with a lift of his eyebrow that made it an insult.

“Fuck you, Gil.”

“Save it for the customer.” Gil folded his arms and smirked. “Especially if it’s who I assume it is. Dad told me about your new therapist. Funny, you didn’t see fit to mention her name.”

“It’s no big deal.” But guilty heat seeped under his skin. On the surface Tori was—well, had been—so much like Gil’s ex that being with her had felt like something else he’d stolen from his brother. Look what else I’ve got that you can’t have anymore.

But he couldn’t see anything in Gil’s expression beyond the usual sharp glint of sarcasm. “Uh-huh. That’d be why you’re hustling over to console the grieving widow on a Friday night.”

Delon stiffened. “What do you know about Tori?”

“As much as the Internet had to tell me. That husband of hers was big news.”

Delon swore under his breath. “You ever heard of respecting a person’s privacy?”

Gil shrugged. “Fine. If you don’t want to know what happened to Willy Hancock, no skin off my ass.”

Willy Hancock. Cheyenne. Delon frowned, talking more to himself than Gil. “I remember something…”

“Step into my office and I’ll show you.”

Delon hesitated. Gil was probably screwing with him. Then again…

The computer made a sound like a ringing phone and Gil disappeared into his office. The mouse clicked, then springs creaked on Gil’s chair before he spoke in a teasing voice Delon hadn’t heard in a very long time. “Hey, sugar. Now there’s a sight for sore eyes on a lonely Friday night.”

A woman giggled, sounding almost as if she was in the room. One more thing the Sanchez boys had in common—a love of high-quality sound systems. “You’re wastin’ that charm on me, Gil Sanchez,” she said. “I can’t be bribed.”

“You sure? I got good stuff.”

“Yeah? Like what? You gonna send your hottie of a brother to pick up the next load I give you?”

Delon clenched his hand around the pickup keys, but couldn’t make himself leave.

Gil’s laugh had an evil ring to it. “You bet. He’s still on the disabled list, but he can drive.”

“When’s he gonna be able to ride again?”

The hesitation was barely noticeable. “Not sure. Do we have a deal? I got a driver sittin’ dead in the water an hour down the road from you, lookin’ for a back haul. And I’ll send you Delon just to keep him from pacing around here, makin’ us all nuts. With three hundred loads a day out of that warehouse, you must have something you can give my driver in the next day or two.”

“Hmmm.”

Delon eased over to peek around the doorframe. Gil’s oversized double monitors spanned the far wall of the cramped space. The one on the left shuffled between sections of highway maps, with red arrows to indicate the progress of Sanchez trucks, courtesy of the new GPS system. On the right screen, Delon saw a woman poking at computer keys, her face and hair done to perfection—if the Farrah Fawcett look was still the ultimate in style.

When had Gil turned into a borderline computer geek? He’d come to work full-time after his accident by force, not choice, and he hadn’t been happy about it. Or anything else, for that matter. Days had passed when he hadn’t bothered to show up at all. Everyone understood he was skating on treacherously thin ice, but no one knew how to pull him to safety.

Somewhere along the line, he’d found his way back. Now this little office was the heart of Sanchez Trucking and it seemed as if the whole company moved to the accelerated beat of Gil’s pulse. Or the thrum of his guitar, which he’d settled onto his lap. He picked at it while he waited for a reply. In a bigger company, someone other than the dispatcher would schedule the loads, but they hadn’t reached that threshold, or found anyone Gil would trust for more than the long weekends he spent in Oklahoma with his son. As far as Delon could tell, work and Quint were the sum total of Gil’s existence.

The woman onscreen tapped some more, mumbling to herself. “Reefer. Reefer. Flatbed. Hmm…I have a load of personal hygiene products—baby wipes and stuff—that’s due to load at ten tomorrow morning, headed to Albuquerque. The trucking company already called to say their driver will be late. They’ve been makin’ a habit of that. Wouldn’t hurt to give ’em a wake-up call.”

Gil struck a triumphant chord on his guitar. “I’ll have our guy there no later than nine. And as soon as you find another load for me, I’ll send Delon out for a visit.”

She giggled again, then promised to email Gil the paperwork before signing off. Gil leaned back and strummed—bah-bah-bah-bum-bah—the triumphant opening chords of “Dueling Banjos.”

Delon glared at him. “You just whored me out for a load of asswipes.”

“Seemed appropriate, considering your attitude lately.” When Delon didn’t bother with a comeback, Gil tipped his head, continuing to idly strum the guitar while studying his brother. “Since you’re here, I assume you want to know how Willy Hancock died.”

Delon shrugged. Gil leaned forward and clicked a tab in his browser. The web page for a Cheyenne newspaper popped up. Delon stepped closer.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, staring at the photo of a mangled pickup below the headline.

Cheyenne Cowboy Sacrifices Life to Save Children

Local roper and rancher Willy Hancock died on Thursday after intentionally driving his pickup into the path of a car that was speeding toward a group of kindergarten students in a school crosswalk. The car struck the driver’s door at forty miles an hour, killing Hancock instantly. Police confirmed that the driver of the car was reading a text message…

“It made national news,” Gil said, dead serious now.

“I remember.” Willy Hancock. Cheyenne. Of course. “They did a big tribute during Frontier Days, introduced his family, had the kids and their parents there. I had no idea…” That Tori was one of the solemn crowd on the stage in front of the grandstand. He shook his head. “I had no idea he was married to a Patterson. Why didn’t we hear anything?”

Gil clicked again and a photo popped up. Tori, graveside, in a black dress and a wide-brimmed black hat, her eyes dull with pain in a face so pale she was almost transparent. Delon felt as if a truck engine settled on his chest, crushing his lungs.

Gil skimmed a finger under the people clustered around Tori. “See anyone you recognize?”

Delon leaned in, squinting. Tori was flanked by an older couple who were clearly not the Pattersons. The man was big and barrel-chested, the woman a nondescript blur. None of the other faces around them were familiar either. “Her parents weren’t there?”

“Nope. Not a single mention of her daddy.”

Easy enough to guess why. “The press would’ve gone nuts if they’d known where she came from.”

“They went nuts anyway—at least in Wyoming. It made a minor splash at the national level, but the reporters were so caught up in the Hero Saves Children angle, they didn’t bother to look at his wife other than the usual quotes from the devastated widow—along with all fifty or so of his closest relatives.” Gil rolled his eyes. “The Hancocks breed like damn rabbits. She just disappeared into the mob. Besides, Patterson is a common name. Why would anyone connect a cowboy’s wife in Wyoming to the man who’d just been named the chair of Senate Appropriations?”

Delon stepped back and braced his hand against the doorframe to catch his balance. He looked at Tori’s stricken face, and his throat closed up. He cleared it twice before he could speak. “Who was he?”

Gil raised his eyebrows, questioning.

“Her husband. His family. Who was he?”

“What it said in the newspaper. Rancher. Roper. Horse trainer. Big family, but not big bucks.” Gil shrugged. “Just a guy.”

An ordinary guy. No better than any other mother trucker. And Tori had married him anyway. The realization hit Delon hard, shattering a certainty so deep inside, he felt like every other part of him would come undone. It wasn’t fair, dammit. Willy Hancock was from Wyoming. He didn’t know any better, so he’d just gone for it, the way Delon had done that first night. Before reality, that coldhearted bitch, had slapped some sense into him. Except it turned out reality wasn’t exactly what he thought, and some other guy who didn’t know a Patterson from a regular girl got the prize.

Gil clicked to close the browser and swiveled his chair to bend his head over the guitar, plucking out an unfamiliar but catchy melody. Probably something he’d written himself. Another unexpected side of Gil that had emerged in the last few years. “Turn in an invoice for any parts you take tonight so I can adjust the inventory. I assume your services are on the house.”

He gave the word services an insulting twist that snapped Delon’s spine straight. “I’ll leave the bill on your desk, boss man.”

“Whatever, bro.”

Delon stomped upstairs, wincing as his knee complained about the unaccustomed workout. He grabbed an ice pack and a Coke on the way past the refrigerator. Twenty minutes later he pulled on work boots and a jacket, stuffed a pair of grease-stained gloves into his pocket, and headed out his back door. Halfway open it stuck, blocked by a paper bag. Delon glanced around, saw no one in the shop, and bent to pick it up.

A weird pang ricocheted around inside his chest as he pulled out a battered bareback rigging with the initials G.A.S. branded into the leather. Delon choked on a raw-edged laugh. Gil used to like to brag that even his initials were flammable. Delon skimmed his fingers over the rawhide handhold, reversed from his own because Gil rode right-handed. Even in that, they were polar opposites. He hesitated, then slid his bare hand into the rigging and tightened his fingers.

The backward grip felt off-balance and wrong, and holding it felt like violating a rodeo commandment. Thou shalt not mess with another man’s equipment. Ten years ago, Gil would’ve punched him for even touching the thing.

Delon put the rigging in the bag, folded the top tightly closed and stowed it in the back corner of his closet, next to his own. These days, it wasn’t any use to either of them.