Chapter 25
I pulled into Pae Saco around ten and put the truck in park.
It felt wrong to come back in a truck when I'd left on Galahad, but Mateo and the others would bring him back.
Galahad would forgive me. Eventually. The burnt remains of the barns smoked in the distance.
Wasn't much left of the horse barn, just two mismatched timbers jutting out of the earth like teeth.
I shut the truck off, and we sat in the silence.
The killing was the easy part. I'd been doing the killing for Rafe for ten years and I knew the shape of it, the after of it, how it sat in a man between dawn and dusk and went where you put it.
Tonight I'd killed past Rafe's permission and I'd killed in front of Winston, and I would do both again before breakfast if anybody so much as said his name wrong.
Winston shifted in the seat. He was wearing somebody else's blood.
"You need a minute?" he said.
"I need about ten."
"Take twelve."
I let out a breath. "Meet me at the casita, will you?"
"All right then." He slid out and limped toward my casita without looking back. He'd left his hat on the dash. I picked it up and brought it with me.
Sierra was on the porch beside Rafe with Pearl at his hip and a coffee mug in his hand. Pearl thumped her tail twice when she saw me. Sierra didn't move, just lifted the mug an inch in my direction and set it back on the rail.
Rafe came down off the porch slowly, hat in his hands. He stopped at the bottom step, looking out across the yard. Then he tugged his jeans up, waved for me to follow, and started walking. We stopped at the paddock rail where he turned his hat over once in his hands.
"I called Aguilar tonight. Told him there'd been a fire at Bonney and he might be getting calls. He said he'd handle the calls."
"Good."
I waited. The wind had started shifting while we'd been standing there, a cooler breath of it coming flat off the southwest, the kind that meant the rain was an hour out, maybe less.
"Ransom."
"Yeah."
"I'd have gone."
"What?"
"You heard me." He looked past my shoulder at the mesa, not at me.
"If somebody had taken Sierra out of this yard like they took your man out of yours, I'd have gone past you.
I'd have gone past the gate. I would have burned the road behind me on the way, and I'd have burned anything else that needed burning to get him back, and I'd have come back through that gate one way or the other.
" He brought his eyes back to mine. "I knew that earlier when I was telling you not to go. I told you anyway."
He put his hat on the paddock rail between us.
"I was wrong about the ask, son. The price came due and we're paying it. None of that's on you to make right with me."
"Rafe."
"I'm not finished."
I shut up.
"You been part of this place ten years. I'm not undoing that today. I'm not undoing it tomorrow. Not next year. You ride out that gate again, you ride back through it. You hear me?"
I couldn't get the word out, so I nodded.
"Say it."
"I hear you."
He came around the rail and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in. "Pae Saco is your home. You're family. And if that Ranger of yours sees fit to walk away from his badge, might be there's a place for him too."
I swallowed. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank Sierra. I'm just a stubborn old bastard without him."
The first drop of rain hit my hat brim.
"There it goes," Rafe said looking up. "About damn time."
He let me go, stepped back, and picked his hat up off the rail. "Go on. Get in out of this. I'll see you at breakfast."
The screen door banged on the porch behind him. "Rafe Fernando Lujan, you come up here right now or I swear on my mother."
Rafe gave a short laugh. "Coming, mi vida."
He clapped me on the shoulder on his way to the porch steps. Sierra held the screen door for him and waved at me across the yard before he pulled it shut.
I stood at the rail and let the rain come. It came the way New Mexico rain does in monsoon, no easing into it, just a wall of water hitting the dirt all at once. The dust came up brown. The smell of wet creosote rose off the flat in a way you could taste. I was wet through inside thirty seconds.
I pushed off the rail.
The cat was on the casita step where she always was, hunched up, soaked, glaring at me like the weather was a thing I'd done to her on purpose.
"Sorry, mama."
I pushed the door and stepped over her. Winston was sitting in my chair. The cat shoved past my boots, made for the bed in three jumps, flattened herself on the pillow, and chirped at me. Then she shut her eyes and made a point of ignoring me.
Winston laughed under his breath and stopped because his ribs caught him.
"That your alarm clock?"
"Landlord. You forgot this." I held out his hat.
"Thank you kindly, cowboy."
"You're welcome, Ranger."
I shut the door. The casita looked like I'd left it.
Dust on the windowsill. Flowers on the nightstand finished dying.
Chance's photo right side up where Winston had set it that first night.
I hung the wet hat I'd carried in beside Winston's, and the two of them sat there next to each other dripping.
"Looks good up there next to mine," I said. "Don't you think?"
"I think they're a matched pair. Always were. Now, are you gonna come over here," Winston said behind me, "or you gonna stand at the door admiring our hats?"
I went to the stove and got the towel off the hook.
"Arm."
"Ransom, it's fine."
"Arm, Winston."
"Yes sir."
He held the bad arm out from where he sat in the chair.
I crouched in front of him and rolled the wet sleeve up past the wrap.
My hands were colder than I'd realized. Coyote's wrap had soaked through, dark from rain on the outside and darker than that on the inside from whatever had been seeping under it since the cab.
I started unwinding it, one hand under his forearm, the other working the cloth.
His skin was warm under my palm. The warmth went up my wrist and into my chest and stayed there. He watched me and didn't say anything.
The wrap came off. The stitches were tight. The wound was closed. The skin around it was hot and the slow seep was the kind that meant healing and not the kind that meant trouble. Coyote did ugly work but Coyote did work that held.
"Stitches held," I said.
"Yeah."
"Doc Oliver looks at it tomorrow."
"All right."
I pressed the towel gently against his arm until it was dry, then set it down and tried to fold the torn sleeve back off the cut. The wet cloth wouldn't lie flat, and I gave up and started on the buttons of his shirt instead.
Winston could have helped. He didn't. He sat there in my chair and let me do it.
Halfway down I had to stop and breathe out through my nose.
Two hours ago I had stood at fifteen feet from this man with a rope around his neck and his feet on a trap, and now he was sitting in front of me letting me undress him a button at a time in a lamp-lit room with rain on the roof.
I opened his shirt the rest of the way and eased it off his shoulders, mindful of the wrap.
The right sleeve came away from the cuff in two pieces where Coyote had opened it up the seam.
The wet cotton weighed about as much as a small dog by then.
I draped it on the chair back to drip. He was in his undershirt under it.
The cotton was thin and damp and stuck to his ribs where the wrap pushed it crooked, and I left it on him.
Taking it off was going to hurt and I had hurt him enough for one lifetime.
I put the towel on his shoulders and dried him through the cotton, slowly. He had spent the last two weeks getting hit and shot at and stitched up. I figured Winston had earned a little slow care.
The warmth of him going through the cloth into my palms was the closest thing to home I'd had in a long time. I hadn't had this kind of quiet with another man before. Not in ten years on this ranch. Not ever, that I could remember.
I let my fingers rest at the base of his throat. His pulse beat under them. He swallowed and the pulse jumped. The skin on his throat was a little raw from where the rope had been, and the print of it was still there in two faint lines. I let my thumb sit on one of those lines.
"When are you going back?" I asked.
"I reckon I'm not goin' back, Ransom."
My hand stopped on his face. His pulse beat against my thumb where it pressed against the soft skin under his jaw.
"What?"
"I'm not going back to El Paso, Ransom."
I swallowed hard. "Then…"
"I was kind of hoping that offer about staying here was still good. Is it?"
I cupped his cheek and nodded because I didn't know if I could speak.
"Don't tell me that if you don't mean it now, cowboy."
"I mean it." I blinked and shook my head. "I mean, what about being a Ranger?"
"Cap's gonna fire me if I don't quit," he said.
"He just didn't say so. I haven't put it in writing yet.
I'm telling you first because you're the reason.
" He waited until I looked up. "Heard the sheriff was retiring in November.
I figure I can sit a horse and read a file, and I've worn a star for a good many years already.
" His good hand came up to my wrist where I'd let it fall.
"And I figure I'd like a place to come home to while I do it. "
"How long you been thinking about this?"
"About a day."
"A day."
"Round about the cave," he said, quieter. "When you had your hand on my head."
I leaned in and put my forehead against his. His hand came up off his thigh and rested on the back of my neck, his thumb on the place behind my ear where my hair curled when I sweat.
The words were sitting just behind my teeth.
They had been sitting there since he'd come up my porch with stolen flowers, and they had been sitting there in the cab when he'd said it first and I hadn't been able to get my mouth around the answer, and they were sitting there now under the rain on the roof.
I'd kept things in my chest for ten years and I did not know how to do this, but the man was waiting on me.
"I love you, Ranger," I said quietly and then paused. "Can I still call you Ranger? Even if you turn in your badge?"
His breath caught. Then he laughed. "Darlin', you can call me anything you want."