Chapter 9
Ransom hadn't said a word in twenty miles, and that was how I knew I was in trouble.
He sat in the passenger seat with his head tilted forward and his bandana pinched around his nose, blood drying in his stubble.
I'd holstered my service weapon two miles back.
My hand kept drifting toward it. I kept making it stop.
The crazy thing was that some small, ugly part of me wanted to find out which way he came down.
I wanted to know what it looked like when he made up his mind.
One way or the other, I wanted him to decide and stop pretending it could go either direction and put his hands on me.
"Pull off there," he said.
Up ahead, a turnout opened on the right with a gravel shoulder wide enough for the truck. It was dark enough you'd miss it unless you were looking.
I pulled off.
The engine ticked loudly in the sudden quiet.
"Out," he said.
"Ransom—"
"Out."
I got out slowly.
The night air hit cold and clean, a relief after twenty miles of breathing copper and his silence.
The headlights threw a cone into the scrub.
There was nothing for a hundred miles in any direction except wind moving through brush and the truck engine ticking.
I walked around to the front of the truck and stopped.
My hand wanted the gun, and I forced myself to let it go again.
Ransom climbed out the passenger side and pulled the bandana down off his face.
Blood smeared across his upper lip and chin, dried into the stubble along his jaw, dark in the headlights.
He looked like he'd come up from a fight he hadn't quite won, and he looked at me like he'd already won the next one.
He walked around the front of the truck and stopped a foot from me. "Hands on the hood, Ranger."
I turned and put my hands on the hood. The metal was still warm from the drive.
He stepped in behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him along my back, and his hand came up and pressed flat between my shoulder blades, holding me there.
The other hand started at my waist and worked up under my jacket, slow, slower than a man searching for a weapon needed to be.
He found my service weapon and pulled it out of the holster, and set it on the hood by my left hand.
His knuckles dragged across my hipbone on the way back.
"Pretty," he said. "Try anything with it and I take it out of your hand and shoot you with it."
"Noted."
He took the backup off my ankle and my pocketknife. He took his time about all of it, working his hand up the inside of my thigh. I stiffened as he cupped me through the denim. I was already half hard. He huffed a laugh against the back of my neck.
"You just can't help yourself, can you?"
"Ransom."
"Shh." He squeezed, just once, hard enough to make my hips jerk forward against the hood.
Then his hand left me, and the absence of it was its own kind of violence.
"We're going to have a conversation, you and me.
You're going to keep your hands on the hood.
You move them, I break a finger. We clear? "
"Clear," I said, but my cock didn't get the message. It twitched eagerly like he was offering his lips instead of violence.
"Good." His weight shifted off my back. He moved around to my left side, where I could see him, and leaned a hip against the truck. The blood on his face had gone almost black in the headlights. The bruising under his eyes had come in. He looked beautiful and mean, and I wanted him to hurt me.
"You're a Ranger," he said. "Are you a Ranger?"
"Yes."
"Are you on assignment?"
I didn't answer.
"Winston."
"No."
"No, what?"
"No, I'm not on assignment."
He nodded, slowly, like he'd known.
"Your captain know you're up here?"
"No."
"Anybody know you're up here?"
"My mama. And the man I owe rent to."
His lips twitched like he wanted to smile, but he looked away instead. When he looked back, he was the man who'd led me into the desert.
"What are you doing on my land, Winston?"
I had a story I'd practiced for this. I'd practiced it in the truck on the drive up from El Paso.
I'd practiced it in the shower the morning I left.
I'd practiced it the way you practice a deposition until I could deliver it without my eyes going anywhere they weren't supposed to go.
The story was that I'd caught a rumor about Castillo at a bar in Las Cruces and decided to follow it on my own time because the case felt right.
Standing in the headlights of a truck on a highway with a man who'd just patted me down and palmed my cock and told me he'd break my fingers, I could not for the life of me remember the words.
"It's a long story," I said.
"I figured."
"Let's just say we've got history." I held his eyes. "He hurt people I care about."
My daddy was one of them. Took a fall that wasn't his. I'd said it that way in the shower in El Paso a hundred times. None of those times had Ransom Lanza six inches off my left shoulder with his blood drying on his face.
He waited.
"And you came up here to do what?"
"I haven't decided."
"Bullshit. You decided before you crossed the state line. You're just not telling me what you decided."
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe."
"Maybe." He pushed off the truck and stepped in close again.
His hand came up and caught my jaw, two fingers under my chin, and turned my face toward him.
His thumb pressed against my bottom lip, and a smear of his blood came off it.
My whole body went hot at the same time my brain said Christ, Winston, no.
"You came up here to kill him," he said quietly. "Didn't you, Ranger?"
"Maybe."
"Yes or no."
"... Yes."
He held my jaw for a beat longer. Then his thumb slid across my lower lip once, slow, painting the blood across it, and he pulled his hand back and looked at his thumb like he'd finished a sentence with it.
"Open."
I opened.
He pressed his thumb into my mouth. Salt and copper flooded my tongue, and I closed my mouth around his thumb and sucked it clean.
I am a Texas Ranger, I thought, and I would do anything he asked me to do right now.
His pupils blew wide.
"Yeah," he said, soft. "There you are."
The pad of his thumb traced down my throat and across my collarbone, and his other hand came up and settled at my belt, fingers loose, an inch from the buckle.
The headlights threw the whole turnout white.
I could feel him deciding. My cock throbbed, and I held still on the hood and waited to find out who he was going to be tonight.
He didn't move for a long second.
"I should be thinking about killing you," he said, almost to himself. His thumb traced my collarbone again. "I'm thinking about owning you instead."
Then his hand left my belt, and he stepped back.
"Pick your weapons up off the hood, Ranger."
My tongue flicked out over the blood smear on my bottom lip. "Ransom."
"Pick them up."
I pushed off the hood. Slow. My legs took a second to remember what they were for. I picked up the knife and holstered the gun.
When I turned around, he stood three feet from me with his face in shadow, the headlights behind him, his bandana balled in his fist and his shoulders set like they'd been when he'd led me into the desert.
"Why?" I asked.
"You came onto my land lying," he said. "And I almost just bent you over my boss's truck on a public highway."
"Ransom—"
"You told me a story. I listened to the story. The story doesn't track, and you know it doesn't track, and I'm tired, and my nose is broken, and I'm not doing this with a liar." He worked his jaw. "When you want to tell me what you came up here to do, you come find me."
"I don't have anything else to tell you."
"Then you don't have me." He looked away, out toward the mesa, and the moon caught the line of his throat. "You can keep what almost happened. I'm sure it'll be useful to you in the shower."
"Christ, Ransom—"
"Get in the truck."
I stood there a second longer because some last part of me thought if I just held my ground he'd come back across the gravel and put his lips on mine, but he didn't. He walked around to the passenger side and opened the door, and got in.
I stood in the headlights for one more breath before I followed him.
I pulled back onto the highway and didn't look at him.
The dark closed in on either side and the headlights ate a hole through it.
Somewhere behind us the turnout disappeared into the scrub.
Somewhere in front of us was Pae Saco. Between the two was a silence I didn't know how to break, and Ransom Lanza, who didn't seem to be in any hurry to break it for me.
After a while he reached up and wiped his bandana across his lips. "You should've told me," he said, not looking at me.
"I told you what I came up here to do."
"You told me a piece of it."
"That's all there is."
"Yeah. That's a fucking lie."
I gripped the wheel. The moon had moved over the mesa. We were maybe twenty minutes from the ranch turn.
"Ransom."
"You keep saying my name like it means something to you, Ranger." He turned to glare at me. "Does it?"
I opened my mouth to say something. Anything, any version of the actual truth, a piece of it, an opening, the name of a town in Texas that would tell him enough. Nothing came out.
"Yeah," he said, turning forward again. "That's what I thought."
We didn't speak again before the ranch turn.
The compound came up in the headlights. The main house had a light burning in the kitchen window. Sierra was still up, or someone was. The rest of the place sat dark under the moon.
I killed the engine.
He opened his door. Then stopped, his hand on the frame.
"Winston."
"Yeah?" I tried not to sound hopeful, but it didn't work.
"When you're ready to tell me the truth, you know where to find me."
He got out and closed the door.
Across the yard, the feral cat appeared and wound around his ankles. He stopped, crouched, scratched behind her ears, and she leaned into it. He stood and kept walking. The cat followed him into his casita. He didn't turn the porch light on.
I sat in the truck with my hands on the wheel for a long time. Then I got out, went inside, and went to bed alone in a room I was a guest in on a ranch that didn't belong to me, with the smell of Ransom Lanza on my shirt and his blood on my lips.