A Horse with No Name
IT WAS a near miss, but in the end Bailey did not have that brush with a cactus that Dean had him worrying about.
He did everything Dean told him—ran his legs in place like a cartoon animal, pulled left to go left, right to go right, and in the end he landed cleanly in about an acre’s worth of cleared space, only coming near the giant cacti toward the end of his run.
He released the chute from his back so he could make a hard turn and skidded to a halt about ten feet in front of a surprised rattlesnake, who after curling up, shaking its little rattle, and watching Bailey back away, went off on its original mission.
Bailey managed to gather his chute after that, but he left his flight suit on when he realized that the cold packs in the suit were doing him a real favor.
God, Dean had thought of everything .
Bailey tripled down on that thought when he bundled his parachute and shoved it in the space in the wagon, using a fold to cover Mr. Bumble’s crate.
Mr. Bumble was still very out of it, but there was a hamster feeder with water ready to be positioned on the side, and Bailey did that while stroking his cat’s fur.
There were also, he realized, a few cold packs along the walls and top of the carrier.
The outside temperature in the long-shadowed, westering sun was at least 105, but Mr. Bumble sat in relative 80 degree comfort.
Bailey’s eyes burned as he finished rubbing the sleeping feline’s ears, and then even more as he discovered his old khaki baseball cap wedged between the carrier and the soft side of the wagon, sunglasses tucked inside.
With a determined shove of the hat on his head—and of the sunglasses up the bridge of his nose—he stood and unlatched the plain wooden box so he could grab the wagon handle. He’d seen the road as he’d gotten near the ground and had even spotted what looked like a big rig—all in purple—nearby.
Dean had told him a half hour at the most.
Bailey was very much starting to trust Dean’s estimates in things like that. It seemed like a stellar bet.
IT TOOK less than fifteen minutes for him to reach the road. Sand had coated it, but the basic pattern of a throughway still held true amid the encroaching cacti, and the rig didn’t seem to have much problem powering through the desert.
Bailey stood to the side and watched as the driver found a place to turn around that wouldn’t force the local fauna to scratch his paint job, and he was stripping out of his flight suit when the air brakes hissed to a stop about fifteen feet away.
He recognized the rangy cowboy in the passenger seat as Rory McCauley, the man who had offered to keep an eye on Val Royal that day in the hospital, and he gave a tentative smile.
“Fancy meeting you here?” he asked, as McCauley swung the door open.
“Yup. Total fuckin’ coincidence,” McCauley said dryly. Then he stepped out of the cab and adjusted the seat so somebody sitting in the back of a small sleeper cabin could emerge.
Bailey could not have been more surprised to see McCauley hold out his arms to help his father’s dog to the ground.
“Catherine?” he said, remembering suddenly that Dean promised his family would be safe.
The big golden retriever gave an even bigger woof , galloped toward him, and stood on her back legs to lick his face, because she had no manners, and his father never tried to teach her manners, and right now that big doggy hug was one of the most wonderful things Bailey had ever received.
Then his father clambered out with McCauley’s help as well, and with a slightly bemused smile and a squeeze of Bailey’s shoulder, he gathered the stuff in the wagon—the water, the food, and then the cat, and one item at a time, he and McCauley made spare, exact work of packing the things away into a sleeper cabin that was feeling more and more like the Tardis and less and less like a real semi.
After only a little fussing, Bailey had his flight suit stripped off and that had been stowed too, and then his father and McCauley hefted the dog back in before they both—to Bailey’s surprise—clambered into the back of the cabin and let Bailey pull himself into the passenger seat.
The driver—who had relieved himself on a cactus on the other side of the rig as they’d been stowing gear—was wiping his hands off on a pocket wipe that he pitched in a neat little trash bag hanging from the console between them.
Bailey recognized Val Royal with no trouble at all, but instead of looking pained and fragile and as though the next move might shatter his overtaxed musculature and nervous system, he looked scowly and irritated and ready for bear.
Bailey grinned at him in absolute happiness. God, it was so good to see a relative of Dean’s.
“Wow,” he said as he belted himself in and Val released the air brakes. Val hit a button and their windows purred up, leaving him in a nicely air-conditioned cab with relatively little engine noise.
“Wow, what?” Val asked. He held his hand between the seats and said, “Mack, could you hand me a—Thanks.”
He pulled up two bottles of water and handed one to Bailey, who opened it and guzzled happily. Yeah, he’d had water, but he’d had no idea how long it would last him, and he hadn’t really gone far enough for a good break.
Didn’t mean he wasn’t thirsty.
“Wow, Dean does not fuck around when he’s arranging a rescue,” Bailey told him when the water was gone. He crumpled the bottle, put it in a bag of recyclables hanging from the console, and enjoyed the sound of Val’s gruff chuckle.
“No, I guess not. What surprised you more—to be pushed out of an airplane or to see your dad?”
“To see my dad,” Bailey replied, glancing to the rear of the cab to give his father a smile.
People told them they were the spitting image of each other a lot, and Bailey always took it as a compliment.
Older, with longish gray-blond hair, Connor Dodge was a treatise on how to age gracefully.
He had one of those weathered smiles that made Bailey feel like nothing he did was too awful to forgive, even when he’d been a kid and been nothing but mistakes.
Hearing his father’s voice on the phone every day after Emmett had died had kept Bailey putting one foot in front of the other, even when he’d felt as though every bit of his will had been sucked out of him with a vacuum and a straw, body and soul.
Connor gave him a sweet smile back and hugged Cathy to his chest.
“You even brought his dog,” Bailey said, knowing that talking from the back seat to the front was probably an exercise in frustration and futility.
“And my cat.” Bumble had still been groggy when he’d been hefted into the back of the truck, but the water supply and a tiny bit of cat treat had placated him.
Bailey figured he’d probably snooze a while more before needing to be let out to wander a bit on the lead and halter Dean had included with his crate.
“I understood they come as a matched set,” Val said with surprise. “Son, I’m old enough to know you don’t separate a man from his dog.” He smirked. “Or my brother’s boyfriend from his cat.”
Bailey laughed a little. “Well, thank you,” he said, feeling the gratitude in his heart.
“You want to thank me?” Val asked. “Then, uhm, could you tell me why we all did that? I mean, I trust my little brother and all, and I’ll take an awful lot on faith, but I gotta tell you, I was toodling along perfectly happy, heading toward Fort Stockton, when Dean suddenly calls me up and rearranges my life. I would love to know why.”
Bailey gaped at him, absolutely stunned. “He… he didn’t even tell you? Oh my God.”
Val hit a switch on his dashboard. “Okay, y’all,” he said seriously into what must have been an intercom. “Listen up. Bailey’s gonna tell us a story.”
Wow. Uhm… wow . Well, given what Val Royal had just done for Bailey and his family on faith, Bailey figured he owed the man one.
If all he wanted was Bailey’s story, well Bailey would make it a ripsnorter.
He told the story with all its elements and finished with “And then Dean threw me out of an airplane, and you know the rest. Sorry! Sorry for the inconvenience—”
Bailey’s father’s voice was crystal clear over the intercom. “You literally knelt in a puddle of blood while mobsters came in and pawed a corpse? Jesus, son—you’ve got balls!”
Bailey snorted. “I didn’t think about it that way, Dad,” he said. “I mostly didn’t want to get gutted like poor Vlade.”
“Vlade?” Val asked, his voice suddenly sharp with curiosity. “Vlade… Karcek?”
“Uhm, yeah?” Bailey supplied.
“Wow. Well, that explains what Dean was doing in Austin all this time—besides you, Bailey.”
As Bailey stared at him, McCauley guffawed. “Fuckin’ nice , Val. To your little brother’s boyfriend you said that. Don’t forget I know your family.”
Val grunted. “I mean I know what he was doing there for work , asshole.”
“What?” Bailey said. “And I don’t know if we’re boyfriends yet—” About the time he was wondering if he could sound any more like he was in the ninth grade, the other three men in the semi burst into a cacophony of laughter.
“Son, after what these men just did for you, I’m pretty sure you’re married in the eyes of their clan.”
Bailey could feel his cheeks heat in spite of the semi’s stellar air-conditioning.
“I only meant we’re new,” he said with what dignity he had. “But what was Dean doing there for work?”
“Well,” Val said, “from what I understand—and Dean is a closemouthed bastard, which is why I’m the only sibling who knows about you , my friend, so don’t get your panties in a wad when everybody else gets all in your face.
But from what I understand, mind you, Dean and Marcus are sort of…
well, the cartel busters of their division. ”