Page 5 of Reckoning with the Cowboy
He closed his eyes for a moment as the memory shook him to his boots. He’d killed Roger Grimes. That’s why he knew Cordell had to be mistaken. He remembered crawling across the blood-slick floor to check the fallen Grimes for a pulse. Not finding one, he and Cordell had loaded his body into the back of Grimes’s old pickup and driven miles through the night to Big Horn Canyon. If their stepfather had been somehow alive, the fall from the cliffs would have killed him even before he hit the lake water far below.
That night was why Max had gone into law enforcement. He wasn’t going to be like the law who listened to Max’s and Cordell’s claims about the abuse by their alleged stepfather and then promised to help by calling Grimes and having him pick up his stepsons. The beatings that followed had laid both him and Cordell up for a week. Max still had the scars, both inside and out. He hated to think that his brother still did, too, along with the nightmares.
Now, standing next to Cordell’s pickup and trailer, he tried to shake himself from the past that had haunted him for eighteen years. No one in Dry Gulch knew about their past and that was the way Max wanted to keep it. He’d been determined not to let the shame of what had happened define him, yet he knew it had. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have already married Goldie? They might even have a couple of kids by now.
He pushed away that painful thought as he walked around to the trailer and searched the ring of keys his deputy had taken from Cordell until he found one for the padlock. Turning the key in the lock, he removed the padlock, half-afraid of what he was about to find.
The doors swung open in the wind, startling him, but not half as much as what he saw standing inside the trailer. He swore under his breath, before quickly slamming the doors and relocking the trailer.
CHAPTER THREE
“Your brother’s asking to speak to his lawyer,” Deputy Rance Fletcher said as Max returned to the sheriff’s office.
“Of course he is,” the sheriff said.
“Who’s his lawyer?”
“I’ll take care of it.” Max tossed his brother’s keys onto his desk and headed for the cellblock, snatching up the keys to the cells on the way.
Cordell was where he’d been earlier, snoozing on the bench, his Stetson cocked over his eyes, his legs crossed at his boots. “Comfortable enough?” he asked sarcastically. Cordell had always been able to sleep anywhere under any circumstances since they were kids—unlike Max. It was something Max had resented for years, but especially right now. After what his brother had told him, he wondered if he’d ever sleep again.
“Rance tell you I wanted to talk to my lawyer?”
“You sure your…lawyer wants to talk to you?”
“Doubtful, but I need a lawyer and there’s only one in town.” Cordell swung his boots off the bench and sat up, casting his hat aside as he raked a hand through his hair. There’d been a time when people had thought the two of them were twins even though Max was older by five years.
“You do know it’s Saturday. The law office is closed today.”
“I still have the home number on speed dial,” his brother said with a wry smile.
Max could only shake his head.
“I wouldn’t mind making the call in private, all things considered,” Cordell said.
Max just bet he would. He thought about the fight he’d had earlier with Goldie. Why was he being so hard on his brother when he’d missed Cordell like one of his own limbs and had worried about him the whole time he was gone?
Relenting, he pulled out his brother’s cell phone and held it through the bars. “You have three minutes.”
“I doubt it will take that long.”
* * *
Cordell dialed thefamiliar landline number and listened to it ring. Once, twice, three times before it was picked up with an aggravated, “If this is about Cordell Lander, we already know.”
It had been so long since he’d heard a familiar voice, it made him smile. “Hey, Amy Sue.” Silence. “Sounds like good news travels fast.” More silence. “I find myself in need of a lawyer. Is Josie close at hand?” He knew she was. She spent every chance she got out at her grandmother’s old farm even though she had a combo apartment–law office in town.
When she came on the line and he heard her voice after all this time, his heart swelled as if filled with helium.
“I figured you’d be calling.”
“Josie.” He uttered her name like a prayer. She sounded so good that his eyes filled, and his chest ached. “Sure would like to see you.”
“Amy Sue said you need a lawyer. These old charges against you? Or are they new ones?” she asked, sounding like the attorney she was.
“Old.”
She made a dismissive sound. “I can probably get them thrown out, if I can tell the judge that you’ll be leaving town right after you’re released.”
