Chapter 4
The sun bled out behind the mesa, and I led the Ranger deeper into the land where Pae Saco kept its teeth.
Galahad walked beside me with Roy Castillo's body lashed across his back, and behind us Winston rode Faye with his hat tipped back and his mouth shut for once.
A quiet Winston was a dangerous Winston, and the fact that I already knew that about a man I'd met four hours ago was its own kind of problem.
The bigger problem was in my jeans.
I tried not to think about Winston on his knees in a dead man's boots, his lips parted, his eyes on mine, the sound he'd made when he came.
I tried not to think about how his throat had worked when I'd told him to lick me clean, or how he'd pressed his lips to the head of my cock before he put me away, like it meant something.
I failed.
My cock thickened against the seam of my jeans and I gritted my teeth. He was going to stay with me longer than anyone I'd let in.
And underneath the thinking about his lips, quieter and worse, was the thinking about what it would be to keep him. To put him in my bed. To find out what he looked like in the morning. The thought arrived without my permission and would not leave when I told it to.
And none of it mattered because I was taking him to Coyote.
The trail ran east through a stand of juniper and dropped into the arroyo where the runoff from the storm still cut new channels in the red dirt.
I picked a path along the high side, and Galahad followed without complaint, steady under the dead weight.
Roy Castillo's hand swung loose with each step.
I reached back and tucked it under the rope.
Then I turned my head to check on the Ranger.
That was a mistake.
He rode Faye loose-hipped, one hand light on the reins and the other resting on his thigh. The dead judge's boots were dark against Faye's flank.
"Nice country," Winston said.
Same voice as in the shack: easy, embodied, a little wry.
"It'll do."
"That rifle on your saddle is older than I am."
"Older than my daddy, too."
"Family piece?"
"Something like that."
He was quiet for a beat. Then he said, "Bolt was sweet on it. Whoever sanded that stock did a good job."
He'd handled my rifle in the shack and read it the same way he'd read me. Getting on his knees for me had been strategic. I'd known. I'd let him do it anyway. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
The thought went straight to my dick, and I wanted to put my hand around the back of his neck and pull him off Faye and find out what else he'd do as part of his little act.
Instead, I faced the trail and kept walking.
Chance's room ran nine hundred a day before the specialists. Rafe and the ranch matched whatever I paid in. I couldn't afford to lose the ranch, not over a pretty face and a good mouth.
The junipers thinned and gave way to pinon pine.
Wet resin and creosote in the air, the last heat of the day bleeding out of the rocks.
Winston dropped his hat back over his eyes and shifted in the saddle, working a kink out of his lower back.
His shirt pulled tight across his shoulders when he stretched.
I'd walked other men down this trail before.
Not many, but enough. Coyote came out of a different tree each time.
The sound when they hit the dirt was always the same surprised grunt.
They never saw it coming. I'd slept fine on those nights and I would sleep fine on this one, except that my tongue still tasted like a man who was still breathing behind me, and that man, with nowhere to be and nothing to fear, stretched out his back like a cat in the sun.
He caught me looking.
"Something on your mind?" he said.
His voice had a small smile in it. He knew exactly what was on my mind, or half of it. He didn't know the half that mattered.
"Nope."
"Liar."
I didn't answer. He laughed a little, low in his chest, and the sound went straight through me.
We climbed out of the arroyo and the land opened up into a flat stretch of scrub that ran south toward the foothills, away from the ranch, away from the road, away from anything a Texas Ranger would want to ride toward.
His weight shifted on Faye. The reins came up an inch. The easy lean went out of his shoulders. "Ransom."
I kept walking.
"The highway is west. You're taking me southeast into nothing." His voice was easy, conversational, a man remarking on the weather. "Now, I'm not the suspicious type. But I am the observant type, and those two things tend to arrive at the same place."
"Almost there," I said.
"Almost where?"
I let the silence answer for me. The pines thickened ahead. This was Coyote's territory. I could smell his fire and the animal musk that clung to everything he touched.
Winston pulled Faye to a stop.
I turned. He sat straight in the saddle now, both hands on the reins, hat pushed back, those pale green eyes on mine and reading me the way he had read the rifle.
"I'm going to need you to turn around," he said.
The easy tone had gone, and what replaced it was the voice of a man who carried a badge and knew what it was worth.
"Because right now you're a person of interest escorting an officer of the law into the middle of nowhere with a dead body, and I'd hate for this to become a different kind of conversation. "
I stopped walking and closed my eyes.
I'm sorry about this, I thought. For what that's worth.
Something hit Winston out of the saddle like a bolt from God.
I took a step toward him with my hand going for the rifle on Galahad's saddle, and I had the stock in my palm before I registered the move. I let go of the rifle and stepped back. My boot scuffed in the dirt, and that was the only sound I made.
Faye screamed and bolted. Winston and Coyote rolled in the dirt, and Coyote came up on top with his knees pinned on either side of Winston's chest, hair hanging wild past his jaw, teeth bared, a sound coming out of him that was not a word in any language.
The last of the light caught him from behind and turned him into edges and angles and bare bronze skin.
Winston got a hand up, and Coyote caught it and slammed it into the dirt and hit him once in the temple with the heel of his palm.
Winston went limp.
His hat had come off in the fall. The lips that had been on me three hours ago hung a little parted in the dirt.
Coyote crouched over him, breathing hard, and cocked his head to the side like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear.
A long, reddish snake slithered down from around his shoulders and wound down his arm toward Winston's face, tongue flicking.
Coyote followed her with his eyes and didn't blink.
His stillness made the back of my neck go cold.
"Coyote."
He didn't answer for a beat. Then his head came up and his eyes found mine, and the feral thing in his face folded back into the face I knew.
"Took you long enough," I said.
Coyote looked up. His eyes were black and bright and half-crazy. That was his resting state. "The wind was selfish."
"The wind."
"She wanted to tell the horse I was coming. I had to wait until she got bored." He said it like a news report. "Horses are gossips. Wind is worse."
"You literally just jumped out of a tree."
"And it was beautiful. Did you see it? Tell me you saw it." He sat back on his heels and looked down at Winston's face. "Oh. Pretty."
"Don't start."
Coyote lifted the snake off Winston's face and draped her around his neck. He stood, stepped over the unconscious Ranger like he was a log on the trail, and walked straight to me. He leaned in, put his nose to my throat, and inhaled.
I stood still and let him do it because stopping Coyote from doing anything was like stopping the weather.
He pulled back and grinned at me wide enough to show every tooth he had.
"You fucked him."
The accusation landed like a boot on my chest. Part of me wanted to hit him. Part of me wanted to sit down in the dirt and rest.
"Shut up."
"You did. I can smell it." He leaned in again, sniffed my collar, my jaw, circled behind me and sniffed my shoulder.
"You fucked him and you liked it. You smell like guilt and cum and that thing you do when you're pretending you don't feel things.
" He came back around to my front and stopped.
The grin dropped off his face the way weather changes on the high desert, all at once.
"You fucked him and now he's yours and you don't know what to do about it. "
"That thing I do has a name. It's called being a professional."
"That's not what it's called." He circled back to face me. Nimue tasted the air between us. Behind Coyote, Winston was a long shape in the dirt, his hands above his head where he had fallen. "Does Rafe know?"
The relief came in under the shame, quiet and ugly.
Coyote was here. Coyote was always, in the end, the answer.
Whatever I had done in that shack would stop belonging to me the moment we tied him up, because the next set of decisions wouldn't be mine to make alone.
I wanted that. I hated that I wanted that.
"Nobody knows. And nobody's going to know."
"I know."
"You don't count."
"I never count. That's why people tell me things." He crouched beside Winston and tilted his head. He studied Winston like the world was a puzzle and he'd lost the picture on the box a long time ago. "Help me tie him up. Nimue likes him, but Nimue likes everybody right before she bites them."
"Nimue doesn't bite. She's not venomous."
"Everything with a mouth bites, Ransom." Coyote snapped his teeth an inch from my nose and cackled when I didn't flinch.
I got the rope from Galahad's saddle while Coyote rolled Winston onto his stomach and pulled his wrists together behind his back. He went over too easily. He looked smaller than he had four hours ago.
Coyote hummed as he worked, bright and tuneless, the kind of sound a man made while cooking breakfast or washing a truck.
"Hands first," I said. "Then ankles."
"I know how to tie a man up." Coyote sounded offended.
"You know how to tie a man up for fun. This is different. This is also fun." He looped the rope around Winston's wrists and cinched it with a knot that would've made a rodeo hand weep. "More fun, actually. He can't safe word."
"Jesus Christ."
"What? I'm being thorough." He ran the rope down to Winston's ankles, pulled them together, tied them off just as cheerfully, then sat back and admired his work like he'd just finished wrapping a gift. He patted Winston on the back. "There. Comfortable?"
Winston did not respond on account of being unconscious.
"He's not going to answer you," I said.
"Rude." Coyote leaned down and pressed his ear to Winston's back. "Still breathing. Good heartbeat. Very strong. Like a horse." He sat up. "When he wakes up, can I be the one holding the knife?"
"There's no knife."
Coyote stared at me. "How are you going to kill him without a knife?"
"We're finding out what he knows first."
"And then the knife."
"And then we figure out what to do with him."
"Ransom." Coyote put a hand on my arm with the kind of seriousness reserved for bad news. "You cannot kill a man without a plan. What are we doing? Throat? Belly? Do we take pieces first? I need to know these things. I need to prepare emotionally."
"You need to prepare emotionally to kill someone."
"Yes. It's intimate. You should respect that." He pulled a blade from somewhere I didn't see and flipped it between his fingers.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Put that away."
He put it between his teeth instead.
We dragged Winston into Coyote's camp, less a camp than a den: a canvas lean-to strung between two pines, a fire pit ringed with stones, a bedroll that stank of wood smoke and snake, and a collection of bones hung from the branches on lengths of wire that clicked against each other in the wind.
Coyote had told the new arrivals at the ranch that they were human.
They were javelina, but nobody had ever called his bluff.
We propped Winston against the trunk of the larger pine and Coyote checked the knots again, tugging each one with a focus that bordered on tender.
"You really did fuck him," Coyote said, quieter now, the manic edge gone. He sat cross-legged in front of Winston, tilted his head, and studied his face. Coyote studied things either not at all or completely. "He smells like you. Not just sex. You."
"Drop it."
"You're going to kill a man who smells like you." He looked up at me, grin gone, eyes steady and old in a young face. "That's a new one. Even for us."
I crouched beside the fire pit and started building a fire because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't looking at Winston's lips.
"We find out what he knows," I said. "Who sent him. What he's told them. Then we call Rafe."
"And then?"
The kindling caught. I fed it piece by piece until it took.
"And then we do what we always do." I stared at the fire. "We protect our own."
Coyote was looking at me like he'd looked at Winston in the dirt. Head cocked. One eye shut.
"When you can't do it," he said, "come find me. I'll do it for you."