She turned away from the house. The memories. The trauma. The sense that someone might be watching her?—
Rex suddenly went rigid, his ears pricked forward. A low growl rumbled in his chest.
“What’s he alerting on?” Jackson asked.
Paige studied her dog’s body language. “Something’s wrong. Rex, show me.”
The German shepherd trotted toward a rocky outcrop behind them, about thirty yards from the old house, on the Blackwood side of the road, where another abandoned mine shaft cut into the hillside. This one was smaller than where they’d found the hikers, barely wide enough for a man to crawl through. Rex stopped at the edge of a shallow gully that ran alongside the mine entrance, his hackles raised.
“There.” Paige pointed. “In the wash.”
Sierra’s heart hammered as she approached the depression. At first, she saw only rocks and scattered debris washed down from the hillside. Then her eyes focused on what didn’t belong—a boot. Attached to a leg that wasn’t moving.
“Oh no.” Jackson scrambled down into the gully.
A man lay crumpled in the rocky bottom, his body twisted at an unnatural angle. He wore work clothes—jeans, flannel shirt, worn leather boots. His gray hair was matted with blood, and his face?—
Sierra’s knees nearly buckled. “Tom. Tom Hendrick. He owns the ranch two sections over from ours. His family’s been ranching these hills as long as we have.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Jackson said. He was already pulling out his phone.
Sierra stared at Tom’s body, her mind racing. The position told a story—he’d been running when he went down, maybe trying to reach the cover of the mine shaft? Dark stains spread across his flannel shirt, and she could see the ragged hole where a bullet had torn through his chest.
Jackson hung up. “Police are sending a team. We need to secure the area and wait for them.” He looked at Sierra. “We got this from here. Go get Huck.”
“Thanks.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, unable to shake the image of Tom’s body crumpled in that rocky wash.
There was a killer in the hills. And it was dangerously close to her backyard.
Not for the first time, she wanted to stand, hands to the heavens, and scream.
And hope that somehow, she might be heard.
This was a bad idea. Rowan “Hammer” Wallace knew it in his gut. And his gut was never wrong.
He gripped the steering wheel of his Ford F-150 as the highway curved down from the mountain pass, revealing the Renegade valley spread out below him like a postcard from his past. The town had grown since he’d left—a lot. Sure, he’d kept to his side of town—the original core of Renegade, now called South Eagle, once a sleepy ranch community of thirty thousand, a forgotten corner just outside and to the southeast of larger Renegade. But now the city sprawled across the valley floor and beyond, even to the far ranchlands to the south.
The modest high-rise downtown rose from the center, but along the foothills to the north, new developments climbed the slopes in terraced subdivisions. Million-dollar homes dotted the mountainsides to the west, their glass facades catching the afternoon sun. To the south, the sprawling campus of what looked like a tech company, all modern glass and steel, gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. And what looked like a college area to the southwest.
“Look at that,” Mack said from the passenger seat, pressing his face to the window. “It’s nearly as big as Colorado Springs.”
Luca Saxon leaned forward from the back seat. “Mountain towns always blow up like this. Rich folks from Denver discover them, property values skyrocket, and suddenly you’ve got Starbucks where the feed store used to be.”
Some things were exactly as Hammer remembered though. The mountains still dominated the skyline, their granite peaks catching clouds that promised snow. The Redbank River still wound through the valley, though now it was lined with bike paths and pocket parks instead of cattle fencing.
Saxon wasn’t wrong.
“We grew up on the outskirts—near the original settlement of Renegade.” Hammer got off the highway and headed toward old Main Street. “It was all pickup trucks and ranch hands, a Western Mayberry. Sort of its own pocket community.”
Thankfully, the bones of the old town were still here. The original Renegade community bank, the central brick schoolhouse, the street lanterns that lined a storybook street. The courthouse sat on its corner lot, red brick and white columns exactly as he remembered. The hardware store still bore the same hand-painted sign, though it now shared a block with a yoga studio and an organic coffee roaster.
“There.” Mack pointed ahead. “At least some things haven’t changed.”
The Renegade Café occupied what had once upon a time been a soda fountain, complete with a long counter, round stools, and a jukebox in the corner. Red neon in the windows, hand-painted menu boards, and a sign that read World Famous Chicken Fried Steak in the same font Hammer remembered from twenty years ago.
Hammer pulled into a parking space directly in front, his truck looking out of place among the Subarus and BMWs that lined Main Street.
“You look like you’re about to face a firing squad,” Saxon said, cutting through Hammer’s thoughts. “It’s just lunch.”
