Joe was speechless.
“Just be ready,” Rulon said, already distracted with something else on his desk by the way his attention had flagged. “If I call, you need to respond. It could be anything and at any time. LGD will understand — sort of. So cowboy up and be my range rider and make me proud!”
With that, the governor slammed down his phone.
Joe had been waiting ever since.
They released the old truck on the side of Joe’s garage and Farkus roared away toward town on Bighorn Road. When he was gone, Joe opened the driver’s door again and dug out the frozen urn of his father’s ashes that he’d left behind the seat years before. He’d never known where to spread them — no place seemed right—and he’d stashed them behind the seat until he could figure it out.
It was his father’s last dirty trick, sticking his son with his ashes and not enough good memories to determine a proper place to leave them. Even so, Joe didn’t want the urn to be discarded or sold by a used-parts dealer somewhere.
He put the urn on his workbench in the garage to deal with later.
A gleaming black late-model pickup with Texas plates was in front of Joe’s house. He’d never seen the truck before, and his guard was up as he pushed through the front gate toward the door. All the lights were on in the house and Marybeth’s van and April’s new acquisition — a fifteen-year-old Jeep Cherokee — were parked on either side of the Texas pickup.
He never knew who might be waiting for him at his house because it also served as the local game warden station. Hunters, fishermen, and locals often simply dropped by, wanting him to personally explain regulations, mediate disputes, or lobby for some kind of action. It was a burden on Marybeth because she had to serve as a kind of unpaid receptionist and assistant, and something his girls had grown up with: having strangers — sometimes covered with blood — simply show up at their door.
There was an animated conversation going on in the living room when he entered the mudroom and hung up his parka and unlaced his Sorel winter pac boots. April was chattering away, and a male voice was laughing and urging her on.
Joe didn’t like that.
April had recently turned eighteen and was a senior at Saddlestring High. Despite a very troubled past and an antagonistic relationship with both Joe and especially Marybeth, she had turned a corner the year before and become… a cowgirl. She worked after school at Welton’s Western Wear, one of the oldest retail stores in operation in Saddlestring, selling hats, boots, belts, yoked cowboy shirts, jeans, and outerwear to locals and tourists alike. She’d gone from troubled Goth to bubbly cowgirl so quickly it’d left both Joe and Marybeth almost breathless. Joe had expected the phase to end, but it hadn’t. In fact, April had embraced the new April to the point that she now socialized almost exclusively with the cowboy clique at school and seemed to have withdrawn from the Goth and slacker cliques entirely. It was as if she’d stepped out of an old uniform and pulled on a new one, and her persona had changed as well. She had blossomed from a morose and bitter girl with black fingernails to one who wore Cruel Girl jeans, square-toed turquoise Fatbaby boots, bejeweled belts, and tight western tops that showcased her buxom figure in a way Joe found alarming. The young cowboys felt otherwise. They flocked around her at school and work and sometimes drove by the house at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through her bedroom window.
Warily, Joe entered the living room.
April sat sidewise on one end of the couch with her legs tucked under her, leaning forward attentively toward a compact young man in a black cowboy hat on the other end of the couch as if at any moment she might spring at him.
She looked at Joe and her eyes brightened and she said, “Daddy!”
April had never called Joe Daddy before in his life. He was taken aback.
“Daddy, this is my”—she giggled at her hesitation—“friend Dallas. Dallas Cates.”
She said the name with a triumphant whoop.
The young man jumped to his feet and turned with a practiced grin on his face. He was shorter than Joe but had wider shoulders and biceps that strained at the fabric of his snap-button western shirt. He was lean and hard, and his face looked to be constructed of a series of smooth, flat white rocks — sharp cheekbones, wide jaw, heavy brow. There was a two-inch scar on his left cheek that tugged at the edge of his mouth in an inadvertent sneer. His neck was as wide as his jaw and projected raw physical power.
Cates’s belt buckle was the size of a silver saucer, Joe thought.
The young man removed his hat with a graceful swoop of his left hand and pressed the brim to his breast while he reached out with his right to Joe.
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pickett,” he said as he gripped Joe’s hand a little too hard.
Dallas Cates was a local legend, and Joe had run into him before. Cates had graduated from high school a few years before after winning the National High School Finals Rodeo three times in a row in bull riding. He was also a former state wrestling champion. An amazing athlete, Cates had had his pick of rodeo scholarships and had chosen the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he won the College National Finals Rodeo his first two years before quitting and going pro and moving to Stephenville, Texas, where so many other national rodeo cowboys lived. People in Saddlestring and throughout the state followed and tracked his weekly winnings the way southern NASCAR fans followed the Sprint Cup Series.
But that wasn’t all there was to Dallas Cates.
“What are you doing in my house?” Joe asked without a smile.
Cates’s grin didn’t lose its wattage, but something hardened in his eyes and he didn’t let go of his grip on Joe’s hand.
“Daddy!” April cried, jumping up to intervene as if she planned to wedge herself between them. “Don’t embarrass me like that. Dallas came into Welton’s this afternoon to say hello to everybody. Wrangler has him touring stores in the country for its boot-cut jeans. He stood right next to that life-size promotional display we have of him and took pictures with everybody. I told him about Mom’s horses and he said he’d like to see them someday, so I invited him out tonight. That’s all.” Somehow, she remained cheerful during the explanation, Joe thought. Where had the old April gone?
Joe said, “So if you’ve seen them, I guess you’ll be going.”
Cates looked to April and arched his eyebrows in a questioning way.
“Of course he won’t be going right away,” April said, playfully prying Joe’s and Cates’s hands apart. “He might even stay for dinner.”
“That sounds like a nonstarter,” Joe said flatly.
Lucy, their sixteen-year-old high school sophomore and a blond, lithe dead ringer for a younger Marybeth, appeared in the hallway with a textbook and her homework, likely on her way to ask Marybeth a question. When she saw April and Dallas Cates, she haughtily rolled her eyes, spun on her heel in a perfect one-eighty, and marched straight back to her room.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that, Lucy,” April called after her.
Lucy’s bedroom door slammed so hard, pictures on the walls jumped.
“She’s the annoying one I told you about,” April said to Cates, who shrugged. Joe noticed Cates’s eyes had lingered on Lucy for a beat too long.
April turned back to Joe, her face expectant: “And there’s something I need to ask you and Mom.”
“Now probably isn’t the best time,” Cates cautioned, turning his attention from the hallway to April.