Chapter 5 Stormy Detour
M allory was amazed at how quickly the sky darkened.
Only minutes earlier, it had been sunny and bright outside the truck windows.
She recalled nothing ominous in the forecast, not that she ever paid much attention to the Weather Channel.
The weather gurus were wrong so much of the time that she usually just went by her gut.
“What’s the plan, chief?” She directed her question to Tucker.
“Working on it.” He crawled up the exit ramp at a snail’s pace, alternating between squinting through the windshield and fiddling with his cell phone.
She’d never seen him text and drive, and was surprised he wasn’t pulling to the shoulder to do so. Then again, there were no other vehicles on the road, and he couldn’t be driving over five miles per hour.
“Have you heard of the Goodnight-Loving Trail?” he asked suddenly.
“Of course.” She’d been born and raised by cattle ranchers, who’d enjoyed telling stories about the Goodnight-Loving Trail. It had served as a major cattle route across Texas in the late 1800s, and she could think of only one reason Tucker would mention it now. “We’re on it, huh?”
“Yup.” He laid his phone on the dashboard, face up so he could continue watching for incoming messages. “It’s not a town many people have heard of, because it was purchased years ago by a?—.”
“Man claiming to be the son of Doc Holliday and his first cousin, Mattie Holliday,” Cruz interrupted impatiently. “Nobody asked for a history lesson, dude. Just keep driving.”
Mallory spun toward the backseat. “Are you telling me we’re heading to a town owned by descendants of the West’s most famous gambling dentist? Aka besties with Wyatt Earp?” She was a western movie junkie, and Tombstone was her all-time favorite. She’d watched it dozens of times.
“According to folklore, yes.” Tucker braked at a stop sign.
“No one has ever proven it. Not sure they’ve even tried.
” In front of them loomed the entrance to re-enter the highway, except it was blocked off.
Orange-and-white striped sawhorses, eerily reminiscent of the faux blockade from earlier, stretched across the entrance to it.
Mallory glanced around nervously, half expecting another set of gunmen to ride up to the truck masked and armed. However, the road running parallel to the highway remained empty both ways as far as she could see.
“There’s gotta be another way back to the highway,” Cruz grumbled. “Let’s find it so we can stay on schedule.”
“In this weather?” She gaped at him. “Are you crazy? The cattle are already squalling to wake the dead back there.” They needed to find shelter under an overpass or something.
“Who cares?” he shot back, sounding reckless. “They’re all about to become hamburger, anyway.”
“You don’t know that!” She caught herself in the nick of time before blurting out that the opposite was true.
Though many of her steers ended up in freezers, the ones in the trailer had been purchased for something else entirely—to pull plows and buggies for the cast of an Old West reenactment show.
They would be housed in a barn next to the indoor amphitheater, where they would be performing.
Chip snorted out a laugh. “You sound just like the boss lady back home. She treats all the cows on her little ranchette like house pets.”
Ranchette? Despite how close Mallory was to having her cover blown, she felt her face grow red with rage.
The only reason she’d agreed to sell a hundred acres of prime ranch land was to stay afloat financially.
Sadly, she’d been forced to sell them to some anonymous nut job, whose attorney was badgering her to sell the rest of it.
Hard pass. Though the sale of the hundred-acre parcel had reduced her ranch to a lowly hundred-and-twenty-five acres, she had every intention of maintaining her family’s legacy of quality livestock through good old-fashioned elbow grease and top-level customer service.
“I like her already, even though we’ll probably never meet.
” Mallory was tempted to throw something across the seat at Chip.
Instead, she forced a matter-of-fact note into her voice.
“Most folks don’t realize what affectionate animals they are.
And smart!” She considered herself to be a subject-matter expert on how intelligent cattle were.
“They’re easier to potty-train than toddlers. ”
“What kind of weirdo would potty-train a cow?” Chip spluttered. “That sounds even dumber than the stuff Miss Evans does.”
Whew! It was good to hear him declare a distinction between the real her and the fake her. Crisis averted. She was still hiding in plain sight. For now.
A red pickup truck burst through the swirling rain mixed with snow to her right, making her jolt. “We have company, Tuck!” She didn’t intend to use a shortened version of his name. It simply slipped out.
He sent her a bemused sideways glance. “I’ve got eyes, Brat.”
She grimaced, knowing he had ears, too. From the smirk on his face, he hadn’t missed her little slip of the lip.
The truck lumbered closer to them, revealing an ancient Ford emblem on a hood that was half-covered with slush.
The driver steered around them, pulled abreast of Tucker’s door, and rolled down his window despite the icy downpour.
A heavily bearded face appeared. It belonged to a man in his late fifties or early sixties, who motioned to Tucker that he wanted to talk.
Tucker rolled his window down halfway. “Hey, sir!”
“Hey, yourself.” The bearded man had heavy creases at the edges of his eyes, either from age or working long hours in the sun.
Maybe both. “The policeman on the highway called to say he was sending a cattle trailer my way. Conrad Cavender’s the name.
We’ll jaw more later. But from one rancher to another, you need to get these animals somewhere safe first.”
To Mallory’s surprise, Tucker didn’t correct the man’s assumption that the cattle he was transporting belonged to him.
Instead, he snatched his cell phone off the dashboard and started fiddling with it again.
“I take it you’ve got a place in mind, sir?
” He held up his cell phone and squinted between Mr. Cavender and an image on his phone screen that looked just like Mr. Cavender.
“Yep.” The rugged rancher tipped his Stetson at them. “Follow me.” He didn’t wait for an answer. Rolling up his window, he backed up his truck and curled around in the direction he’d come from.
“Whelp.” Tucker sent Mallory a crooked half-smile. “As the old saying goes, we’d best not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“You’ve gotta be joking,” Cruz exploded, leaning forward between the two captain’s chairs. “After everything that’s happened to us, you think it’s safe to follow a perfect stranger anywhere?”
He had a point, so Mallory kept silent.
Tucker shrugged and pressed down on the accelerator, keeping Mr. Cavender in sight. “According to the website I just pulled up, he looks identical to the owner of the town we’re heading to.”
“Whatever.” Cruz still didn’t sound happy about the turn of events.
A well-lit entrance sign blazed on the right side of the road, welcoming them to the town of Earp Springs, population 273 .
“What a crowd,” Mallory murmured sarcastically.
“Mostly employees,” Tucker informed her. “Everyone else who passes through here are tourists. Or so it says on their website.”
The outlines of buildings on both sides of the road soon replaced the empty landscape. They weren’t ordinary buildings, either. Their clapboard facades were reminiscent of the gold rush era in the Old West. Several had windows that were lit with flickering LED candles.
It was like stepping back in time. Or driving back in time, in their case.
“What is this place?” Mallory mused under her breath.
“A glorified RV park, more or less,” Tucker supplied. “With a souvenir shop, small service station, mom and pop restaurant, and farmer’s market. It’s a full-blown tourist trap.”
His description of the town puzzled her. “I thought you said Mr. Cavender was a rancher.”
“He’s that, too.” He gestured vaguely at the road with his cell phone. “Like I said earlier, he owns the whole town. It’s a pretty big spread.”
Chip gave a low whistle. “Must be nice to own a town.”
They drove past the touristy stuff and continued on toward a towering ranch entrance made of logs. As they passed beneath it, Mallory read the words on the sign. “The Double C Ranch. For Conrad Cavender, I presume.”
From the corner of her eye, she watched Cruz snap a picture of the sign. At least, she was pretty sure that was what he did before lowering his phone to his knee.
She eyed the fenced-in pastures that stretched on both sides of them, and the pair of barns rising in the distance. “What a nice spread!”
“A lot bigger than Evans Ranch, that’s for sure.” Chip wagged a finger at the window. “Working at a place like this is my parents’ dream job.”
Really? “I bet,” Mallory murmured, trying not to let his words hurt her feelings, but it was difficult.
She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him and his parents to a bigger ranch.
The way he was shooting off at the mouth almost made her miss the painfully introverted version of him.
During today’s drive was the most she’d ever heard him speak .
Her angst about his parents’ ambitions faded as she caught sight of a chopper parked on a helipad behind the farmhouse. No way! She pointed excitedly. “Do you see that?” Its lights were still flashing, and its blades were still spinning, telling her it had recently landed.
“Sweet!” Chip’s gaze followed where she was pointing.
Tucker didn’t say anything, but Cruz snapped a picture of it. This time, she was sure she saw him do it.