Her heart lurched. She was awake now. Tearing off the bedcovers, she angered Rogue further as they piled on top of her cozy form. Scrambling to her feet, Sassy snatched up the flannel sweater she’d left on the side chair and a pair of fur-lined, slip-on boots.
As she dressed, she thought wildly of the fine art she’d carefully curated from a pool of local artists, mostly Indigenous and female crafts folk. She thought of the priceless artworks sprinkled throughout the gallery and felt a hot flush crawl up her neck. She grabbed a flashlight from the nightstand drawer and her purse from the dresser.
As she wove out of the bedroom to the front door, Rogue trailed behind, yowling her displeasure.
At the threshold, Sassy turned. “I’ll feed you when I get back,” she promised.
Rogue let her disappointment be known with the flick of her tail.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Sassy said. She was jittery with nerves. Holding up the flashlight, she added, “Mama’s got to go fight crime.”
The cat gave her a deadpan look.
Sassy glanced down at her mismatched pajamas—the oversize bright pink T-shirt that warned she was Cute but Feral and the pj bottoms with faded koala bears.
As an afterthought, she grabbed a trapper-style hat off the coat stand and jammed it over her bedhead. “Don’t wait up,” she told the feline before rushing out into the chilly night.
* * *
A wise person would have called the police. They’d have phoned a friend—or any one of her brawny male cousins, all of whom would have laughed at the idea of Sassy fighting crime. They’d more than likely chew her out for confronting it on her own.
The only person Sassy could think of as she drove into downtown Dark Canyon, Utah, was her best friend, Nick Malone. Normally, Nick was her go-to partner in shenanigans.
She began to punch his number into her phone and then remembered that he wasn’t home. He’d taken the week off from his job as a Dark Canyon first responder to go on a solo camping trip, the one he took every year around his birthday—and the anniversary of his father’s death.
“Okay,” she reasoned, gripping the cracked leather wheel of the 1976 Ford Bronco Wagon. The tires hummed loudly and the springs of the old driver’s seat squeaked as she sped through the turn signal onto Elm Street. “I have no backup, but I’m armed and dangerous.” She eyed the flashlight alongside the hornet spray she’d snatched off her front porch. As improvised weapons, they’d do.
Still, she lifted the phone again and dialed her cousin Ryan—firefighter by day…and most nights.
Praying he wasn’t on a callout, she waited through the drone of ringing before his voicemail picked up. “Hi, Ry,” she greeted. “It’s Sassy. I know it’s…” She glanced at the dash clock and made a face. “…forty winks past midnight. Ew. But I got this weird notification from security at the gallery saying someone was at the back door. If you get this message within the next few minutes, would you mind heading over to Zephyr so you can check it out with me?”
She realized that she’d futilely waited for an answer. She swerved into the little alleyway that ran between the gallery and the bakery next door. The windows of the boxlike 4x4 barely fit between the walls that hugged either side. “Never mind,” she decided. “Just…call me back, ’kay?” Ending the call, she tossed the phone on the passenger seat.
Should she switch off her headlights?
What would be the point? Unless the intruder was stone deaf, they’d heard the deep-throated Bronco coming from a mile away. They’d probably hightailed it by now.
She stepped on the brake as she reached the alley’s end and eased the Bronco into the small parking lot behind the gallery. Two blue dumpsters shared the space, one for the gallery, one for the bakery.
As soon as the driver’s mirror cleared the alley wall, she opened her door. Leaving the truck on, she kept the headlights blazing so that every square inch of the area was lit up. Holding the flashlight out in front of her, she uncapped the hornet spray. “Hello?” she called.
The words cascaded back to her on an echo. The security light over the back door of the gallery flickered drunkenly, another problem that needed fixing.
She inched toward the door. It wasn’t open. It wasn’t even ajar. She caught herself breathing a little easier.
The flashlight beamed off something on the pavement. Sassy looked around, checking her surroundings. Then she crouched to pick it up.
The item was silver. It lay heavy across her palm.
It was a bar rod, the kind found at the end of a chain lariat.
She turned the rod, looking for an artist’s mark. The light overhead flickered again, buzzing in and out. Angling the flashlight, she examined it more closely.
It wasn’t a signature or initials. It was a brand. She frowned at the grim face of the longhorn bull skull. The empty eye sockets were prominent slashes of black.
She knew most every jewelry maker in the Four Corners region of southeastern Utah. A good many of them resided between Dark Canyon and Moab, and Sassy had learned to distinguish one artist’s style or mark from another’s.
She’d never seen this one.
