John calmly pushed the button on the smart key to unlock the doors. Minutes later, he drove Josie back to the pasture where they’d met, what seemed like days ago.
“Is one of your cronies meeting you here with a semi truck later, or do you have other plans for the evening?”
“Since you’ve already told me that your people shoot first after dark, I’m not keen to hang around or come back,” she said icily.
“Just as well. They’re all great shots.”
“Well, thanks for the meal. Your mother is very kind.”
“She is.” His face hardened. “I’m not. Something you might remember.”
“I will.”
He looked around. “I’d rather not leave you here. Just in case. Do you have a place to stay in town?” he added.
“Yes, but I’ve caused you enough...” she began.
“Not quite. I don’t have anything to do for an hour or so, until my prospective buyer gets here. I don’t mind driving you where you need to go.”
This was going to cause some more suspicion, but she couldn’t realistically walk to town. It was hot in spite of the recent rain,and the humidity, added to the soaring heat, was likely to leave her in a puddle on the side of the road.
“Thank you,” she said in a small voice. “I have a room at the motel in Percell.”
He pulled back into the road and drove to Percell, the nearest big town, which was about a twenty-minute drive.
“Your ranch isn’t anywhere near the border,” she said after a few moments of freezing silence when they were underway. “But it’s on the main drag from El Paso to Dallas. Do you have problems with drug traffickers around the area?”
He gave her a quick, suspicious glance. “In fact, we do. Our sheriff just had a deputy stop what looked like an innocent pickup with a family inside and a huge mattress and sheets in the bed. It turned out to be a fortune in fentanyl.”
Just what her boss had suspected. But she couldn’t afford to give away how much she knew about such things. “Fentanyl. Isn’t that the drug that’s killed so many users...?”
“Any drug can do that, given the right amount,” he interrupted. “But, yes, it is. We lost a wrangler to it last year.” His voice lowered in sad memory. “He’d just lost his wife to cancer. He’d never even used drugs. An acquaintance at a bar offered him some. Just to get him past the grief, he said. So Henry took it home. But he wasn’t told how much was a safe dose. We found him a day later.” He winced.
“Did he have children?” she wondered aloud.
“No. That was part of the problem, I think,” he said, vulnerable for just that space of time. “I think it might have saved him. Men with kids aren’t like other men. They don’t take as many chances.” He was thinking of his brother, Tanner, whose wife, Stasia, was pregnant. He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d changed. Odd, how nobody talked about it around him. Probably because they all knew how infatuated John had been. His jaw tautened. He’d been in love with her for years, but she onlyhad eyes for Tanner. Theirs had been a long and tormented relationship, but in the end, Tanner chose her over the dangerous life he’d been living as a government agent.
“Something you know?” she probed.
“My older brother is married. They’re expecting in the spring. He was a government agent. He gave it up for ranching, because of the baby.”
“My goodness!”
He glanced at her. “So I guess love has its points.”
“Oh, that sounded sour,” she murmured, her eyes out the window. “My gosh, there are oil pumping wells right out there with the cattle!”
That amused him and he chuckled. “Well, there are only so many places you can find oil, and a lot of them are on cattle ranches.”
“I know, but it just looks very odd,” she replied.
“I went back East to visit an old army buddy,” he said as they paused at a stop signal. “He lived in a small town. Right next to a shopping center, there was a little plot of grass with a pumping station right in the middle. I told him he should come to Texas and see where they were supposed to be located.”
“What did he say?”
He laughed. “He said no, thanks. He lived in a small mountain community in north Georgia. In fact, his hometown was located on top of a mountain. He said he’d take deep rivers and tall trees in the place of scrub land and mesquite trees any day.”
“It’s not so bad here,” she mused. “In fact, it looks rather like Wyoming, in places.” She could have bitten her tongue. “Arizona, too,” she added with what she hoped was nonchalance.
