Page 9 of Reckoning with the Cowboy
CHAPTER FIVE
Max didn’t know why he’d been putting it off. A lie. He knew exactly why. He was terrified that his brother might be right. The repercussions if true didn’t just threaten his job and the life he’d built as well as Cordell’s. If Roger Grimes was alive, then it threatened everything and everyone Max loved, including Goldie and the people of this town. If Grimes came to Dry Gulch, there would be collateral damage.
As he sat down at his computer, his fingers fumbled at the keys as he typed in the man’s name. He’d hoped he’d never have to hear that name ever again—let alone go looking for him in the system. Roger Grimes was dead. Period.
He’d dreamed about that night for years. Each time, he relived the horror of what he’d felt forced to do. The problem was, in his nightmare when he went to check the man’s pulse, he felt a heartbeat.
Max knew it was only his guilt. It was just a bad dream. It meant nothing. He kept telling himself that Grimes was dead and gone. He and Cordell had lived with what had happened that night as they’d tried to start a new life and heal from the past. Not that Max had ever forgotten. Nor had he healed. But he did everything he could to hide the fact.
He would regret what he’d had to do to his dying day. That he could act in such a cold-blooded way still terrified him and made him question what kind of man he was. It didn’t matter that he was protecting his brother or that he hadn’t meant to kill Grimes. It was what he and Cordell had done after the man was dead that still shocked him.
Instead of calling the law and making public the horror he and his brother had endured for years because of Grimes, Max had taken care of the situation in a way that went against everything he believed about himself. But the law hadn’t helped them when they’d tried to stop the abuse. The law hadn’t helped them when they’d been fighting for their lives, often not even bothering to drive out to where Max and his brother and mother lived with Grimes. The one time the cops did come out, Grimes assured them what he also told their mother. The boys needed discipline. He was just trying to step in and help their mother.
Now as Max typed in Roger Lloyd Grimes, he found himself praying that his brother was wrong. He’d spent all these years believing Grimes could no longer hurt them. That wouldn’t be true if the man really was still alive.
The first thing that came up were old reports of Grimes and a series of small-time arrests for disturbing the peace, brawling outside a bar, threatening his former boss. There was his history of working at the state prison, then nothing, until he was arrested, did some jail time, then finally a seventeen-year prison sentence after he was convicted of bank robbery in Florida along with several accomplices.
Bank robbery? Max stared at the screen. This couldn’t be right. Grimes was a small-time criminal at best. Some other criminal must have stolen his identity, robbed a bank and done the time. He knew there was only one way to verify it. Reluctantly, he called up the latest mug shot from Florida hoping to see the face of a man pretending to be Roger Grimes. Instead, he felt ice water race up his spine.
There was no identity theft. Cordell was right. Max would know that face, those eyes, anywhere. Roger Grimes was alive. The bastard had somehow survived. Max couldn’t imagine how it was possible. Only out of pure hatred and meanness, he thought. It was the only thing that made sense.
But why hadn’t Grimes come after him and Cordell before now? He’d been behind bars for almost all of the past eighteen years except for one.
With a start, Max realized he probably had looked for the two of them during that time. But they had disappeared and there was a good chance that Roger hadn’t involved law enforcement because he much preferred to operate under the radar. He’d always been involved in criminal behavior of some kind.
Which meant he’d gone on with his life, surviving the only way he knew how. Only now he was out of prison, a free man and, according to what Cordell had heard, he was coming for them after all these years.
Max had thought they were safe. They had gotten rid of Grimes’s old pickup and taken off after that night with just the clothes on their backs. They’d borrowed some clothing off a clothesline at a farmhouse and then hitchhiked their way north. They had no idea where they were going. They were just running. Their last ride landed them in the out-of-the-way town of Dry Gulch, Montana. The small town in the eastern part of the state had seemed like the perfect place to start over, and it had been.
Max still found himself holding his breath as he scrolled down looking for the man’s discharge date from prison. A part of him refused to believe Grimes was loose. When the date came up, he felt his stomach drop. Grimes had been released only days ago—just as Cordell had said—and without parole. The man was free and could be on his way to Montana.
The old familiar fear and loathing rushed at him, making him physically ill. Roger Grimes was alive and, even if he hadn’t admitted to the world what his plans were for the future, Max knew he was coming for them. The only thing that had saved him and Cordell it seemed was that Grimes had gotten into trouble with the law before he could find them before now.
How he’d gotten to Florida from where they’d dumped his body, Max had no idea. Just as he had no idea how close Grimes might have gotten to finding them that year before he was arrested in Florida. Had a judge not thrown the book at Grimes and sentenced him to seventeen years, their stepfather might have found them sooner.
But had he found them? Max told himself that even though Cordell swore the man said he was going to look up his stepsons, that didn’t mean he knew about Dry Gulch. Max quickly searched online for the interview of the released prisoners, needing to hear exactly what Grimes had said. His heart in his throat, he found the link and opened it.
He was instantly taken aback as his stepfather’s face appeared. Max quickly froze the shot and turned down the volume. His heart raced at just the sight of this Roger Grimes, so different from his mug shot. The man had aged, looking rougher and meaner, but not that much. Then again, he hadn’t been but twenty-five when he’d hooked up with their mother, who was twenty-nine. Max had been eleven, Cordell six at the time. They’d been told that their biological father had died in a mining accident. Max never knew if that was true.
Grimes had immediately convinced their mother that her boys needed discipline. She’d looked the other way as her husband taught her boys how things were going to be from that moment on. At some point, Max knew she must have known that if she crossed Roger, she’d get the same treatment her boys were getting. She’d only tried to leave him once—the night she disappeared.
Max closed his eyes, remembering his mother’s fall down the stairs. He’d thought for sure Grimes had pushed her and there would be an investigation into her death. But Grimes had chased them back up to their room and locked them in, saying she was fine. The next morning, he told them that their mother had just been knocked out and when she’d come to, she’d decided to take a break from her always-misbehaving sons. He said that he’d helped her pack up her things and had given her a ride to town.
Max had known it was a lie, but there had been no sign of their mother. He figured Grimes had buried her and what few belongings she had somewhere on the property since there wasn’t another house for miles out where they lived. He’d told the principal at school, who had called the authorities.
They came out, listened to Max’s and Cordell’s story and then Grimes’s account. As they left, Grimes walked them to their car. Grimes had always been a large man who prided himself on being able to talk himself out of anything. Max never knew what else the man had told the law, but that was the last night the cops ever came out to the house.
He clenched his fist at the memory, so filled with hatred for the man that he felt sick to his stomach. On screen, Grimes looked as if he’d been lifting weights his entire sentence. His arms were massive. He stared into the camera as he spoke—just as Cordell had said.
It felt as if he were looking right at Max. His brother was right. Grimes was coming for them. A gauntlet thrown down, all of it directed at Max.
He closed the clip of the interview and put his head in his hands. He’d thought this was all behind them. He’d thought they were safe. But now Grimes wasn’t just alive, he was out of prison and he and his violent temper and hatred were most likely making a beeline for Dry Gulch—just as Cordell had said. Retribution had shown in the man’s dark eyes, a promise to destroy them and the lives they’d made for themselves.
Swearing under his breath, he tried to think. When they’d arrived in Dry Gulch, they’d told everyone that their mother had abandoned them. When she’d brought Grimes into his and Cordell’s life, she had abandoned them to the violent man. It had cost her life. He hated to think what it had done to him and his brother.
On their own in Dry Gulch, a nice lady who ran a boardinghouse had taken them in and given them jobs around the property for their rent. She’d enrolled them in the local school and suggested that Max become his brother’s guardian once he was eighteen, which he’d done. They’d been lucky to find a safe, soft place to land. They hadn’t changed their names because they’d believed Grimes was dead.
Now Max realized how easily they could be found. He’d gone to the police academy and become the local sheriff. All through school, Cordell had excelled at sports, with newspaper and television stories highlighting his success across the state. A stranger in town asking about either of them would probably direct the man straight to the sheriff’s office and Max.
