Page 4 of Reckoning with the Cowboy
He met his brother’s gaze, his mouth suddenly dry. “I recognized our stepdaddy.”
Max snorted. “He wasn’t our stepfather. Now you’re telling me you drove all this way because you thought you saw a dead man on the local TV news?”
“He’d not dead. That’s only part of what I came here to tell you,” Cordell said.
Max shook his head and looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone before he lowered his voice. “Roger Grimes is dead. Don’t you think I should know that?”
Cordell continued as if his brother hadn’t spoken. “This TV news story was about some men who were being released early from prison for whatever reason. Couldn’t have been good behavior knowing Roger. The newsman was asking each of them questions as they came out. Asking them what they were going to do now.” He took a breath, even now questioning if he’d really seen and heard what he thought he had. “Roger looked right at the camera and said, ‘I’m going home to look up my stepsons. It’s been too long.’”
His brother shook his head and started to step away. “You’re mistaken. It was just some man who looked like Grimes.”
“Max, you don’t think I remember him? There was that familiar glint in his eyes that I still see in my nightmares.”
“You still have nightmares?” Max asked, looking concerned.
He brushed the question aside, wishing he hadn’t mentioned it. Max liked to think that once they’d escaped, his little brother had been able to put the past behind him. “That look gave me chills even before Roger…” Cordell cleared his throat again and said, “added, ‘Can’t wait to see the oldest. I owe Max my life.’ He’d looked right into the camera and smiled. You remember that smile, don’t you? No one smiled like that but the devil himself.”
He could see that his words had shaken his brother—just as they had rattled him—but Max being Max, he didn’t want to believe it. It’s why Cordell had come with the news in person, rather than calling to let him know that he was on his way.
“I’m not sure what you saw or think you heard, but you’re obviously mistaken,” his brother said. “There is no way he’s still alive, let alone on his way here.”
Cordell watched his brother grab the cell’s bars and squeeze until his knuckles turned white. “It was him, Max. It was thirty-six hours ago. I drove straight through except for gas and one quick stop to pick up a rented trailer to haul a couple of things I’d left with a friend.”
“A couple of things?” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”
“I couldn’t come back to town empty-handed,” Cordell said.
Max let go of the bars, waving his hands as he tried to dismiss what his brother was saying. “I don’t have time for this foolishness.”
“Wait, you can’t leave me here. I didn’t just come to warn you. You’re going to need my help. Anyway, Roger isn’t coming after just you. I suspect the man knows I helped you that night. He’s coming for us. This time, he’s going to kill us. You know it as well as I do.”
His brother turned and walked to the door before stopping to look back. “Where’d you leave your truck?”
“Down in front of the old car dealership. Max—”
But his brother didn’t answer as he stepped out, the door closing behind him.
* * *
All the waydown to the former car dealership, Cordell’s keys jangling in his hand, Max refused to even think about what his brother had told him. Instead, he kept replaying the argument he and Goldie had at the café earlier.
“I can’t believe you jailed your own brother,” she’d said, angrier than he’d ever seen her, though she’d kept her voice down. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Max Lander.”
“Cordell has three outstanding warrants on him, all misdemeanors, but I’m the sheriff. It’s called doing my job.” She had turned her back on him to go wait on another customer. She hadn’t come back by the time he’d eaten what he could choke down of the daily special and left a generous tip. He was almost to the door when she came after him, following him outside.
For a moment, he had thought they were about to make up. Instead, she shoved the wrapped sandwich into his hands. “I would imagine your brother might be hungry,” she said and turned on her heel, leaving him to return to work in an even worse mood than Cordell’s sudden appearance had caused.
Now, as he reached his brother’s truck, he saw the rented trailer and felt his irritation with his brother growing. He hated to think what might be inside. This was so like Cordell. A peace offering?
Max knew his mood wasn’t really about his brother or the damned trailer and its contents. Cordell couldn’t have seen Roger Grimes. Maybe the released prisoner had looked like Grimes, but whatever the man had said that this brother had taken as retribution hadn’t been about him and Cordell. Max was a common name. His brother was wrong, and Max hated being reminded of that time and how it had ended. Grimes was dead. No way could he have survived after what Max had done to him that night.
For years, he’d tried to put it all out of his mind. Now, though, like in his nightmares, he saw himself pulling their so-called stepfather off Cordell. Grimes and his mother hadn’t been legally married, not that it mattered since by then his mother was gone, leaving them with this monster.
Like most nights, Grimes had come home from work drunk and out of his mind with meanness. He had grabbed up the baseball bat by the door. Cordell lay on the floor in pain from the beating the man had already given him with rubber tubing. Max, seventeen, had watched Grimes lift the bat to swing at his already injured and bleeding twelve-year-old brother on the floor. In a few years, his younger brother would grow into his height and weight and would be able to make it a fair fight, but not that night.
Max had known he was going to have to cross a line that would change everything. It had been a long time coming. He and his brother had feared for their lives from the moment their mother had married the man. But the beatings had gotten much worse after their mother disappeared. Grimes had gotten much worse. He hated his job at the state penitentiary down the road from their isolated shack of a house in the middle of nowhere out in southeastern Wyoming. The man had a streak of meanness that ran deep through him, and he took out his disappointments on Max and Cordell.
Max had rushed Grimes, taking the bat away from him and doing what he’d wished he’d done long before it had gotten so bad. Grimes fought like the animal he was. But by seventeen, Max was strong. Not as strong as his stepfather and probably not as determined, but strong enough since he’d known that he wasn’t just fighting for his own life, but for his brother’s.
