Ransom (Dust Devils #1)

Prologue

The wind had been restless since before sunup, working the dust around the yard in low spirals that came apart and put themselves back together somewhere else.

Galahad stood at the far end of the paddock with his ears pinned and his teeth bared at nothing, daring the air itself to come closer.

Mal día para un mal caballo. Sierra had asked twice already if I wanted him moved to the back pen before the new arrival showed, and twice I'd told him no.

If the boy Aguilar was bringing couldn't stand near a mean horse on his first day, he wasn't the boy Aguilar said he was.

The land had been Lujan land before there was a New Mexico to put it in.

Before there was a Mexico, even. My mother's people had been here longer than that, in the pueblo on the other side of the ridge, and they would be here after the rest of us were dust. The land let them stay.

The land had let my father's people stay too, eventually, after enough of them died learning what it would not tolerate.

I had grown up knowing where my line stopped and the pueblo's began and which fences could be crossed and which couldn't, and I had grown up knowing the land kept its own counsel about all of it.

Pae Saco sat in the middle, a working ranch on paper and something else underneath, and the ground I stood on had taken men I knew and would take more before it was done with me.

I'd learned young to give it what it asked for and not look too long at what it didn't.

The cruiser turned off the highway just after noon.

I leaned against the porch rail and watched it bounce up the long dirt road, trailing a cloud the wind grabbed and scattered east toward the mesa.

Aguilar had brought his personal vehicle, not a squad car.

A small kindness. The boys in the bunkhouse had history enough with law enforcement without a black-and-white rolling up the drive.

He'd called the night before from his kitchen, after his wife had gone to bed, the way he called when the file in his hand wasn't going to find its way to a desk.

Eighteen, he'd said. Brother in the ICU.

Lightning. He'd gone after the man who'd told them to stay in the field with a tire iron.

Caved his face in. If this went through the system, he'd be looking at assault with a deadly weapon if the guy survived, murder if he didn't. He was young enough that the prison system would chew him up and spit him out meaner for it if he went.

But he wasn't going to prison, and there wasn't going to be any paperwork on any desk at the precinct about Ransom Lanza. Not if I had anything to say about it.

The cruiser stopped near the porch and sat there a moment, engine ticking. Aguilar killed it and didn't get out. Long pause. Long ride.

The passenger door opened first. The boy came out fast, already moving, head down, shoulders pulled tight against his spine like he was carrying something heavy under his shirt.

He ignored me, and the mountains and all the things people usually looked at when they came up the drive for the first time.

He cut straight across the yard toward the barn, like something in there had called him by name.

Aguilar got out. "Hey. Hey, hold on."

I lifted a hand. "Leave him."

"Rafe, that horse of yours is in the paddock and this kid's already got an assault charge I'm trying to make disappear."

"I said leave him."

I came down the steps. Aguilar pulled his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck.

He had the look of a man who'd been arguing with his conscience the whole drive up and still wasn't sure who'd won.

I'd seen that look on Luis Aguilar before.

He always brought the conscience with him, and he always took it home with him afterward, and I'd never once made him put it down.

"Tell me again," I said. "In daylight."

"Eighteen. Name's Ransom. Brother's at UNM. Heart stopped for six minutes. They got him back, but he's not coming back, you understand me?"

"I understand."

"They put him in the back of a pickup in the rain.

Boy did CPR on his own brother the whole drive.

When the verdict on the brother came out, he drove forty minutes to the man who'd told them to stay out and worked him over with a tire iron.

Started with his hands. Used the iron when his hands wore out. "

There it was. Started with his hands. Aguilar had given me that detail twice now, on the phone and in person, because he wanted me to hear it.

A boy who came in swinging the iron from the start was a different animal from a boy who used what his body had first and only reached for the metal when his body wore out.

Across the yard, the boy had reached the paddock fence. He stood with both hands on the top rail, his back to us, his whole body aimed at Galahad.

"He talk on the way here?"

"Not a word. Three hours and not a word." Aguilar put his hat back on. "I've brought you angry kids before, Rafe. This one isn't angry. This one is something else. I don't have the word for it."

I had the word. I'd had it for a while. Anger was loud. Anger threw punches and broke windows, and burned itself out. What this boy had carried into my yard was quieter than anger, with a longer fuse. You didn't put a fuse like that out by sending it to Los Lunas to learn worse from worse men.

"Vete a casa, Luis," I said. "Te llamo en la manana."

He glanced back and forth between me and the boy before putting his hat on and getting back into the car. He pulled away in a trail of dust.

I walked to the paddock quietly so as not to disturb whatever was about to happen.

The boy had climbed the fence. He sat on the top rail with his boots hooked on the second rung and his forearms on his knees, watching Galahad intently. Up close, he was smaller than I'd expected. Wiry, almost, like most boys about to become men.

Galahad stared back at Ransom, ears pinned, nostrils wide. Every line of him saying what he said to everyone: come closer and find out.

I stopped a few paces from the fence. "He bites."

The boy glanced at me. Up close, he had pale, hard eyes that seemed older than the rest of him. A bruise was yellowing along his jaw. His knuckles were split and scabbed over, the left hand worse than the right.

"Good," he said, and dropped into the paddock.

Galahad charged.

I reached for the gate latch and stopped.

A thousand pounds of mustang at full speed against a boy who weighed maybe a buck fifty soaking wet.

There was a version of this where I went over the fence and pulled him out, and there was a version where I let what was happening happen, and the second version was what Luis had driven him here for.

I left my hand on the latch and watched.

The boy squared up and met the horse.

Galahad braked at the last second, close enough to send dust over the boy's boots, and snaked his head forward and bit.

Got a piece of the shoulder. The boy staggered, caught himself, looked down at the torn shirt and the blood already coming through.

Then he grabbed Galahad by the jaw with both hands and bit him back, hard, on the muzzle.

Galahad yanked his head away, snorted, and stood there with his ears pricked forward for the first time since I'd brought him home.

I'd bought that horse two years back from a man in Cuba, New Mexico, who'd given up trying to make him into anything. The guy said Galahad had nearly killed three men, and I believed it. Galahad was the meanest horse I'd ever known.

I had been ranching for forty years. I had broken horses and been broken by horses and seen things on this land my mother had warned me I would see. I'd never seen anything like this.

The boy spat dirt and blood and wiped his mouth. "We done?"

Galahad stamped, tossed his head, and swung his hindquarters before coming back for another pass, teeth bared.

The boy stood his ground and grabbed and bit, but it didn't stop what was coming.

Galahad bit into his arm. Ransom bit him back and repeated the question. "Done yet? Or you got one more in you?"

Galahad backed up and came in slow, neck extended, and the boy stood still and let him. The horse breathed against his torn shoulder and didn't bite. Neither did the boy.

Then Galahad folded his front legs and lowered himself to the ground. He rolled onto his side in the dust and lay there with his ribs rising and falling and his eye on the boy who had come into his territory and answered him in his own language.

The boy dropped to his knees. He put a hand on Galahad's neck, and Galahad turned his head and rested his muzzle against the boy's leg and closed his eyes.

He started shaking in waves and folded over Galahad's neck, forehead pressed into the mane.

The horse's blood was still smeared on his face, but when he reached to wipe the blood away, he smeared dirt over his lip.

The sound that came out of him belonged to the mothers of lost children, to orphans, to anyone who'd ever buried the last of their kin and survived it.

I stayed where I was and watched over him. The land would keep his grief, and I would keep the boy.

Sierra came up beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

His palm was warm from the kitchen. He smelled like coffee and the cilantro he'd been chopping for dinner and a little like the wood smoke from the morning fire that never quite came out of his shirts.

I leaned into him the way I always did, automatic as breathing.

"Well," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "That one's staying."

Sierra was quiet for a moment. Watching the boy and the horse in the dust. Then he said, soft, "You going to tell him what he's staying for?"

"Not today."

"When?"

"When he asks."

Sierra nodded. He'd been here for every one of them.

He knew how it worked. The boys came in broken, and we let them be broken for as long as they needed.

Then one day they came to the porch and asked the question, and we answered it, and they either stayed or they didn't. None of them had ever not stayed.

Ransom was going to stay. Galahad had already told me so.