Cowboy Sing Me Home (30 page)

            “Naked in my bed?”  He felt the curve of
her cheek shift as she smiled.

            “Naked in your bed.”

            “And what if I get up?”

            “That will definitely take some of the fun
out of it.”

            She slid to the side, so that her head
rested on his shoulder.  She looked up at him, and she didn’t look like the
cool, self-composed Dusty.  The eyes that met his were unsure, and vulnerable,
and he took it as his reverent duty to make sure he did nothing to take
advantage of that vulnerability.

            So he kept his mouth shut.  He traced the
line of her cheek with one finger slowly, over and over, until she yawned.

            “I’m sorry.  I haven’t had much sleep the
past few days.”

            “Then you need your rest.”  He sat and
pulled a light blanket from the foot of the bed, and they shifted until they
were spooned together, her back curved to nestle against his front.  He looped
an arm around her waist and tucked her head under his chin. 

            He, on the other hand, had slept a lot in
the past few days.  So he was still awake when she took his hand in hers and
held it against her chest.  Still awake when her breathing changed and he knew
she’d drifted off to sleep.

            He stayed awake long enough to marvel at
two things.  One, she was the most uninhibited woman he’d ever known, when it
came to her body.  She made no apologies for having desires, nor for
celebrating those desires.  And two, she was the most inhibited woman he’d ever
met, when it came to trusting people.  Because he knew beyond doubt she’d just
paid him the highest compliment he would ever receive, by trusting him enough
to sleep in his presence.

            He held her and thought about what he’d
almost said, while they made love.  He’d never said that to a woman before. 
Then again, he’d never come close to feeling what he felt for Dusty.

            She stirred, and he smoothed her hair
back.  “When are you leaving Aloma?” he whispered.

            “Mmmm.”  She rolled and placed her hand on
his chest, her breath warm and soft against his neck.  “This weekend.”

            He told himself that was good.  Her
leaving was a good thing, no matter how it felt right now.  Because if she
stuck around much longer, who knew what kind of mess he would make of things.

Luke tapped his pencil against his desk
and cleared his throat.

            Toby sighed and looked up from his
paperwork.  “Something eating you?”

            “Just beating myself up for not catching
the coincidence with Wayne and Kenny.  I mean, I should have suspected
something was up, when two people from Seattle show up in a place like Aloma.”

            “Why?  You had no reason to suspect Wayne
of anything.  He grew up here.  And you were the one who arrested Kenny in the
first place.  You did everything you could with the information you had.”

              “I should have questioned it when Wayne
showed up for the first time in fifteen years.”  He curled his lip and shook
his head.  “I shouldn’t have written it off as coincidence.”

            Toby rubbed the back of his neck.  “Yeah,
you’re right.  It just never dawned on me that Wayne would be a danger to anything
more than a tube of Brylcreem.  Of course, if IND had been a little more up
front with the information in the first place, we might have been on the
lookout for something more.” 

            Luke stood and reached for his hat.

            “Where you headed?”

            “Back out to take a look.”

            “You look pale.  You’re not going to have
any energy to play tonight if you don’t go home and get some rest.”

            “Maybe I’ll do that.”  Later.  When Wayne
and Derek Broeker where safely tucked away in jail and he quit seeing the
barrel of a gun pointed at him everywhere he turned.

            The heat hit him as soon as he opened the
door, and he squinted against the white-hot sun as he slid his shades on.  He
walked around to the back of the building, but he’d already been over it a
dozen times in the day since he’d been out of the hospital, and no new ideas
came to him.

            He drove over to the Rain Fest first.  Not
much of a crowd around, but later on when the temperature dropped to a
comfortable 95 degrees, they’d be out for their corn dogs and dart games.  He
stood by the gate, favoring his left leg, and let Dorothy Parks talk his ear
off while sweat ran down the back of his neck, disgusted with himself at the
way his heart pounded whenever someone new entered his line of sight.

            The men weren’t at Rain Fest, of course. 
They were probably out of the country by now.  His stomach knotted at the
overwhelming powerlessness he felt at that, knowing they were free, going to
get away with it.

            Kenny’s car was still in the locked lot
behind Johnny’s service station.  Luke swung his legs out of the pickup and
dropped to the ground.

            “Hey friend,” Johnny said when he walked
up.  “Good to see you up and limping around.”

            “Good to be up, friend,” Luke said.  “I
need to take a look at the car I took into custody last week.”

            “Sure thing.”  Johnny unhooked a heavy
ring of keys from his belt.  “Look while you can, that FBI guy said they’d be
picking it up either this afternoon or tomorrow.”

            Luke took the key ring from him.  “You
have any other keys to that gate besides this one?”

            “Sure, in the register.”

            Luke chewed his lip.  They’d always used
the lot behind Johnny’s station for impounded vehicles, but he’d never before
worried about Johnny taking a wrench to the side of the head because of it. 
But if Buddy was wrong, and Wayne and Broeker hadn’t recovered the disk yet,
they might still be hanging around…

            Toby had told him that Wayne had been by
to visit with Johnny, before they’d broken Kenny out.  He’d fed Johnny some
line about Kenny’s car being a special model and wanting to look under the
hood, but Johnny had refused. 

The FBI had already been by, too, and gone
over the car with their fine-toothed combs.  He wasn’t going to find anything
they didn’t.  But still, he had to look.

Dry weeds and grass crunched under his
boots as he walked across the lot.  The heat inside the car was a living thing,
reaching out to slap him as soon as he opened the door.  He opened both doors
wide to let in some air.  All the trash he’d seen when he’d arrested Kenny was
gone, stuffed into clear plastic bags, labeled and on their way to an FBI lab
by now, he supposed.  There was nothing in the glove box.  Nothing in the CD
player.   Nothing under the seats.

He sighed and locked the car back up
again.  He was missing something.  The rack of tires he passed on the way back
reminded him of Kenny’s flat.

Kenny hadn’t had a spare at all, not even
one of those little donut tires.  If he did, he probably would have been on his
way with no on ever the wiser.  But he’d been so nervous when Luke pulled over
to help – even refusing his help at first, although it was clear he wasn’t
going anywhere without some help from
somebody
– that Luke had decided
he needed to find some cause to run his plate and license.  It hadn’t been
hard; the inspection sticker was out by three months, something Luke usually
just gave a warning for.  But after running the license and learning of the
warrant for Kenny’s arrest, he’d had no choice but to bring the kid in.

He’d had Johnny go out and tow the car
into town.  And now all four tires were up.

“Did you already fix the flat on it, or is
that a spare you put on to tow it in?”

“I fixed it, but I don’t know how long
it’s going to hold.  Had a wood screw in it.”  He took the keys back from
Luke.  “I told my brother and his wife, fixing flats is all that’s keeping me
in business right now.  With gas prices the way they are and people worried
about the crops, nobody’s going anywhere.  But I’ve had a rash of nails in
tires lately.”

“Did Dusty come pick up the tire I brought
in for her last week?”

Johnny shook his head.  “Nah, I intended
to take it by the other night ‘cause I was going by there to have dinner with
Nate and his family.  But I got to thinking about all Nate’s kids running
around and got distracted.”

“Yeah, Dusty can see their place from the
trailer park.  She said it looks like an ant hill crawling with ants.” 
Something niggled at the back of his mind, and he chewed on it a second. 
“There was a nail in the tire on the prisoner’s car?”

“A wood screw.  One in hers, too.  Like I
said, these little nickel and dime things are keeping me afloat.”

After the deal with Wayne, Luke was
jumping at shadows, but at this point any coincidence was suspect.  “Is that
normal, to have two of the same kind of screw right there together?”

“I imagine somebody just dropped some off
a truck by accident, driving through there one day.”  He pulled a greasy red
rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands on it, then his brow.  “It is
kinda strange, though, ‘cause they’re not all the same size nails and the same
size screws.”

Luke thumbed his hat back and rubbed his
forehead.  “Hmmm.”

“Yep, that’s what I said.  Hmmm.”

“Well, I’ll go ahead and pay for Dusty’s
tire and take it out to her.”

Luke turned the situation over in his mind
on the drive out to Trailertopia, but could make no sense of it.  He told
himself he had bigger things on his mind at the moment than a bunch of flat
tires.  But the uneasy feeling that he was missing something remained in his
gut until he pulled up into Trailertopia and saw Dusty.

She stood on the hitch, and had a
screwdriver at one of the windows.  She smiled when she saw him, and that had
him grinning in return.

“I think you’re limping less today.”  She
hopped down from the hitch.

“It’s this special physical therapy I’m
doing.” 

He reached for her and gave her a quick
kiss.  She wasn’t prepared for it, he could tell, and cast a quick glance
around before her eyes met his again.

He stepped back to give her some space,
and nodded in the direction of the window.  “Something wrong?”

“No, just giving the place a once over, to
make sure nothing blows off while I’m driving down the road.”

Driving down the road meant she was
leaving.  The thought ruined what was starting to be a pretty good mood.

Of course she was leaving, he told
himself.  What was he going to do, beg her to stay?  To give up her life and
live here with him?  For what?

Because the urge was strong to do exactly
that, he said instead, “You need some help?”

“It’s my trailer, Cowboy.  I’ve been
taking care of it for a long time.  I can handle it.”  She turned away to drop
the screwdriver into a toolbox on the table beside her front door.

“You can handle just about anything, can’t
you?” he asked, annoyed for some reason he didn’t care to examine.

She gave him a raised-brow look over her
shoulder.  “I try.”

He told himself to stop being an ass
before he ruined a perfectly good morning.  “I brought your tire from
Johnny’s.”

She closed and snapped the lid to the
toolbox.  “Why?”

“Why?  Because I was there.”

Her chin jutted out. “I was going by there
this afternoon to get it.” 

“Now you don’t have to.”

She bit the inside of her lip and cocked
her head at him, then turned to stow the toolbox in the compartment under the
trailer.  The box was obviously heavy, but Luke knew better than to offer
help. 

“I can handle my own affairs, Ace.”

“I know you can,” he said, crossing his
arms over his chest and leaning back against his pickup.  They were a pair, he
decided.  She bristled at the slightest offer of assistance, and he bristled
every time she proved she didn’t need it.

Being perfectly honest, he admitted to
himself, she was maybe slightly more justified than he was.  So instead of
pushing the issue, he said again, “I know you can.  You’re perfectly capable of
taking care of yourself.  But I was there, and I was headed out here anyway, so
I thought it would be the neighborly thing to do.  In case you need a couple of
pointers on graciousness, I would say the thing for you to do now is say ‘thank
you very much, kind sir’.”

She rolled her eyes and stepped close. 
She looked at him with big green eyes under dark lashes, and her tone mocked
him as she said, “Thank you very much.  Kind sir.”

He cocked his head.  “You must be a
graduate of Miss Emily’s Charm School.”

“I’ll pay you for your trouble.”

“If it will make you feel better.”  He
took advantage of her nearness and wrapped his arms around her waist.  “Have
you seen any strange people around here the past couple of days?”