The Eagle and the Fox (A Snowy Range Mystery, #1) Read online

  THE EAGLE AND THE FOX

  (A Snowy Range Mystery)

  By

  NYA RAWLYNS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Eagle and the Fox | (A Snowy Range Mystery)

  THE EAGLE AND THE FOX | (A Snowy Range Mystery)

  DEDICATION | To all who serve and protect. | Thank you.

  I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. | ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

  Chapter One | Twice Shy

  Chapter Two | Favors

  Chapter Three | Preacher Man

  Chapter Four | Courting

  Chapter Five | Interrogations

  Chapter Six | Boyfriend

  Chapter Seven | Pulling Teeth

  Chapter Eight | On the Hunt

  Chapter Nine | The Visitor

  Chapter Ten | Flare Up

  Chapter Eleven | Firing Line

  Chapter Twelve | Mixed Messages

  Chapter Thirteen | Skirmishes

  Chapter Fourteen | Week’s End

  Chapter Fifteen | Dance Moves

  Chapter Sixteen | Fallout

  Chapter Seventeen | Ride the Cowboy

  Chapter Eighteen | The Long Kiss Hello

  Chapter Nineteen | Morning After

  Chapter Twenty | Mix-up

  Chapter Twenty-One | Abduction

  Chapter Twenty-Two | Hiding Places

  Chapter Twenty-Three | Tracks

  Chapter Twenty-Four | Bartering

  Chapter Twenty-Five | Engulfed

  Chapter Twenty-Six | Ghosts

  Chapter Twenty-Seven | Calm after the Storm

  Chapter Twenty-Eight | The Price of Silence

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Eagle and the Fox

  (A Snowy Range Mystery)

  Kit Golden Eagle is running. From poverty, from abuse. Forced to live by his wits, the Ojibwe teen slowly succumbs to living a life of hate and lies.

  Josiah Foxglove is given a second chance when he takes over his family's spread in the shadow of the Snowy Range. A veteran of the Gulf War, he came back broken in body and spirit.

  Marcus Colton buried his long-time lover and best friend three years ago. Lonely and still grieving, Marcus finds solace in keeping his business afloat but that doesn't help him get through the long, dark nights.

  Three damaged souls converge as violence wracks the small community of Centurion, WY. The town protects its own so when Kit Golden Eagle shows up, it’s easy to place blame on the stranger. It looks open and shut, but for Josiah and Marcus the facts simply don’t add up.

  Something’s rotten in Centurion, something that smacks of a hate crime...

  THE EAGLE AND THE FOX

  (A Snowy Range Mystery)

  Copyright ©2015 Nya Rawlyns

  First electronic edition published by PubRight

  ISBN (eBook): 978-0-9906048-7-7

  Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

  Cover Design by Dreams2Media

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  To all who serve and protect.

  Thank you.

  I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

  Chapter One

  Twice Shy

  “Marcus.” The man ducked his head, almost bird-like quick, tucking his chin in tight. It didn’t help. The scars still showed whitish and raw. He was growing a beard. It only made it worse.

  Marcus extended the kindness. He kept his eyes on the cash register and muttered, “Josiah,” in response. It was the little dance they did once or twice a month when the burly near-stranger came into the feed store to stock up on ranch necessities.

  Josiah looked around. “Slow for Saturday.”

  Marcus near bit his tongue. Josiah kept to a few words... mostly howdy, how much, see ya next time. It would have been awkward, but after a bit you got to accepting what the man gave you because he had reasons, a shit ton of them, what with the scarring from the IED and the metal rods holding him upright.

  It seemed odd to know the intimacies of a man’s inner workings when the man himself was an enigma, a stranger to the town he was born in, the town where his parents had their farewell service in the cleared out space in Polly’s restaurant amid the savory smells of steak on the grill arguing with stale beer and staler pretzels ground into the wide plank flooring.

  Shifting from the cash register to the cluster of sacks just at the edge of the counter, Marcus said, “Hard times,” and proceeded to bag up the pitiful few items. Ten penny nails. Duct tape. Some industrial grade staples. A roll of twelve-gauge electric wire.

  The wire was heavy. Josiah reached across the counter and grabbed at the edges of the sack, holding it open. The touch was incidental. Marcus hadn’t meant anything by it. It was just a casual scrape across the man’s knuckles. They both flinched. Marcus would have laughed and said oops or ’scuse me, except he’d clamped his jaw, mimicking the taller man, holding back. A tremor rattled his gut like it always seemed to when Josiah Foxglove was near. What’s with that, anyways?

  Marcus asked, “Doing fence this weekend?” He wanted to kick himself. Of course the man was doing fence. That’s what you did when you made do on ninety acres of not nearly enough to support you and yours.

  Josiah had shrugged. He was also standing there, at the end of the counter, holding onto the sack. Planted. Like his worn boots had somehow glued themselves to the dusty, cracked linoleum. Grown roots.

  It was unseemly. And unprecedented. Marcus decided to go for broke. “You know, Josh, it’d be a hella lot cheaper to go with the single strand barbwire.”

  He swallowed, remembering in a gush of oh shit that Fox Ranch ran a small herd of cutting stock and hacks for tourists to take for an hour’s spin around Sheep Mountain. The glint in Josiah’s eyes wavered between are you shitting me and yore a dumbass cracker. While his ears heated to boiling, he tried for a quick recovery. “You know, to keep Paulie’s herd out?” Or not.

  Shut up, Colton, just shut the hell up already. “...you know, with things being tight as they...” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Bring up another sore spot, idjit.

  Josiah blinked, almost in slow motion, his eyes following Marcus’ lips as the gibberish spewed out, unfiltered and uncontrolled. The front door opened and closed, the overhead bell tinkled, feet shuffled, the sound approached and receded.

  Marcus choked back a thank God and meant it. Customer, serial killer, bank robber... didn’t much matter. The distraction was well-timed. He said, “Well, if there’s anything else you need,” and turned away, barely aware his hand still shared possession of the sack. At the last minute
, he relinquished control and muttered, “I have to pee,” as he bolted for the safety of his office.

  The state of his bladder was only partially true. His belly had cramped up enough that bile flooded the back of his throat, coating his innards with red hot acid. It hurt like hell. He fished a handful of antacids out of his shirt pocket and cursed softly as he tried to peel the covers off the nesting boxes. His hands were too big, too rough, and too arthritic from a lifetime working as hired help to handle the delicacies of the task at hand.

  Frustrated, Marcus sank into the creaky swivel chair, letting his ass find the sweet spot that damn near two generations of ranchers and shop keepers had worn into the ancient wood. Of all the things that said family, it was a rickety chair that most grounded him across time and space. But time hadn’t been kind. Now it was just him left. There wasn’t family, hadn’t been for longer than he wanted to think on.

  “Oh, Tommy. Why aren’t you here?”

  Marcus glared at the blank wall of rough cut lumber. He followed the lines of the distressed surface like he always did late at night, his hand wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey, his heart wrapped around the gravestone in the small plot of land where all the Coltons and the Hendersons were laid to rest.

  Following habit, he reached into the bottom drawer and withdrew the bottle of liquor, swiveling it in the natural light. It seemed different, the colors reflecting through the cheap glass, paled out and anemic. Not nearly so rich or so tempting as when, in the hunger of pre-dawn, he poured the amber fluid into the tumbler, swished it around and tossed it back to suffer the burn running full throttle into his screaming gut.

  Instinct warned against, but what-the-hell won out. He poured two fingers, measuring the amount precisely with an expert splash. Three years. Three fucking long years. It’d taken him most of that to perfect his technique, night after night of pouring his soul and his loneliness down his maw of despair. Week after week of mourning. Months, then years of grieving bleeding into that single moment when today a stray touch reminded Marcus of what he’d lost.

  He almost hated Josiah, really, truly hated him. Hated the broke man the damn military had returned, leaving him to struggle in the assback of nowhere Wyoming. Washing their hands of men who’d not just served, but sacrificed in ways that weren’t obvious. It wasn’t just the steel locking a man’s bones into some semblance of working order, nor was it the flesh wound of pride and self-respect that ripped open skin and muscle and made talking harder than hard. Marcus totally got that it made taking the first step, then the next, seem like too much effort.

  But getting it was one thing, doing something about it? Well, there was the trick. He was hardly the poster child for saint of the year, caregiver to the wounded holding on to an existence that, on a good day, didn’t care squat if or how a man got by. Fate played a man false, especially a man like Josiah, prideful hard and duty bound. A man who’d give his shirt off his back. A man who’d donated pieces of his body. A man most had forgot.

  Lifting the tumbler, Marcus hissed, “Here’s to you, Josiah Foxglove. You earned it.”

  Marcus pushed away from the desk and struggled to his feet, feeling all of his forty-seven years. He still had to pee, so he ducked into the adjoining employee bathroom. After splashing water on his face and doing the sniff test—breath into cupped palm to nose—he deemed himself safe to face any customers who might wander in as closing time fast approached.

  As he re-entered the store, Marcus watched his part time helper trot down the main aisle, intent on carrying out some task.

  “Mr. Colton?” The voice was barely a pipsqueak, a chirrup of sweetness that brought a smile every time the sixteen-year-old girl spoke up.

  “Yes, Pet? What can I do you for?”

  The girl smirked and tittered. “Um, well... Mr. Barnes wanted to know when we’d be getting in the tag thingees.”

  “Agritags?”

  “Um, yeah? I think that’s them.” She bobbed her head. It made the blonde braids bounce and jiggle. Not for the first time, Marcus wanted to release the rubber bands holding the fine hair in a rigid twist. It made her look twelve, and it made him feel like an ogre or a dodgy uncle with less than gentlemanly intentions.

  Of course, nothing was further from the truth.

  The kid’s mom had come round one snowy afternoon. Janice had married a no good shithead from the rez up north who planted his seed a few times, then took off when jobs dried up and times got hard. The boys were half-bloods, dark, brooding bundles of useless just like their dad. Petilune was different. Blonde, blue-eyed, petite and painfully shy, she stuck out like a sore thumb. Tongues had wagged something fierce when the kid was younger, but the busybodies had finally shrugged off the incongruity. Janice hadn’t been a pillar of virtue growing up. She was lucky the town had a forgiving nature when it suited, so when it came time to do right by an innocent kid, Marcus had thanked God for short memories.

  What they couldn’t shrug off was the gnawing poverty keeping the family down. Marcus had let himself be talked into having the girl help out around the store. There’d been more on offer than that...

  “She can do you for whatever needs doing, Mr. Colton. Sweeping. Stuff like that.” The woman had sidled up close, too close, leaving Marcus in a sweat. “Pet’s shit with numbers, but she’s clever and willing.” She’d pursed her lips, her eyes gone crafty and assessing, looking him over. “Very willing, if you get my drift.”

  He had. The lie he’d buried in the family plot had come back to haunt him. Marcus Colton, proprietor, was single and an upstanding citizen, a man who went to church and did more than his fair share for the town. A man with needs. She’d hit him in his vulnerability without knowing the particulars.

  He could have said no, he couldn’t afford to hire, things being what they were... But he’d said yes because things being what they were meant that this sweet ray of sunshine with the blonde braids and shy, innocent smile would be bartered out to someone else who got the drift, who would say the words that put a child in harm’s way.

  Hard times sometimes had a way of estranging folks from the straight and narrow. He’d taken on the onus of caregiver, because if he didn’t someone else would. If nothing else, with him the woman-child was safe and the family had food on the table. If it meant tightening his own belt and dealing with the occasional murmurs and innuendo, he was good with that.

  Tommy would have understood. He always had.

  “Mr. Colton?” She was twirling a loose curl, oblivious to his march down memory lane.

  “Uh, yeah, Pet. They’re over in aisle four, in that bin next to the metal tag applicator. You know which...”

  Petilune chirped brightly, “Oh, sure. I can find it,” and skipped off in the wrong direction.

  Marcus was about to yell after the girl, but a hand on his arm stopped him short. “Don’t trouble yourself, Colton. I know where they are.” It was John Barnes, one of Josiah’s neighbors. The man chuckled and shook his head. “She’s a good kid. Tries hard. She means well.” He said it like the girl was a little simple, not quite all there. Like they all had to make allowances. He was probably right.

  Marcus wandered back to the cash register and began the tedious process of closing it down for the night. When Barnes reappeared with a handful of tags and an applicator, they made small talk while Marcus rang him up.

  Out of nowhere, the man asked, “Petilune still keeping house for you?”

  The question carried an odd tone, something like are you still beating your dog, harboring a trick question vibe. Marcus was used to fielding those incursions into his private life. He and Tommy had kept their relationship secret for so long that after a while the lies and misdirections came so easy he didn’t need to think twice on it.

  If the town only knew they’d been harboring closeted old queers all those years. Him and Tommy, distantly related via Tommy’s mother’s side of the family, had gotten away with it only because the ones who kept track of bloodlines had either d
ied off or left. They’d played at cousins without the kissing, then business partners, and finally roommates without anyone blinking an eye.

  The problem was, Marcus had been so very good at playacting that the current role of upstanding, single citizen was about ready to backfire on him. Nothing abhorred a vacuum more than the deep-seated ache of knowing you’d never, ever again experience the passion of touching a man who blew your body, mind and heart.

  The girl interrupted before Marcus could fashion a reply. “Didja want me to do anything else, Mr. Colton? I done the dusting upstairs, but if you...”

  Barnes looked down at the sprite, a small smile forming on his lips. To Marcus’ relief it seemed more paternal than lascivious, protective and not jealous.

  Marcus replied, “No, everything’s fine, kiddo. You go on home, spend some time with your Ma. You’re here too much as it is.”

  She giggled. “Oh, I ain’t going on home, Mr. Colton.” Both he and Barnes raised their eyebrows. “I’ve got a...” She blushed, furiously, and rubbed her tiny hands along her thighs.

  Marcus and Barnes exchanged an amused glance. It was Barnes who teased, “Don’t tell me you have a date, young lady. Are you old enough to be going out?”

  Stretching to her full five-foot-two, Petilune preened and spun in place, the worn peasant skirt billowing around her narrow frame. She grinned and curtseyed. “Yes sir, that I do.”

  Marcus asked, “Who’s the lucky boy? Is it that Parks kid, the junior bull rider?” He looked at Barnes. “Jake, Jake Parks. You know him, John. He’s from over near the access road to the trailhead in the Snowys.”

  They went back and forth, teasing the girl until she was blushing crimson to her roots. Finally she blurted, “He ain’t no one y’all know.”

  Leaning over the counter, Marcus stared at the girl while Barnes crouched on his heels, bringing his lanky frame even with the wide-eyed kid. The man asked, “Is he from around here? Where’d you meet him?”