Page 2 of All These Years
“The bum? Yeah, he’s in the lock-up now. If someone stole from Chuck, most likely it was him.”
Anger flooded me. “No one stole from Chuck!” I didn’t realize how forcefully I’d said that till Tomlinson flinched, then scowled darkly.Back off, back off.“Sorry, Sheriff, but you know he’s lying.” The last thing Micah needed— if “the bum” was him— would be any kind of criminal charges.
“So you say. You’re not making the call here.” Tomlinson glared at me. I’d made him afraid for an instant. I hadn’t meant to, but at the thought of a threat to Micah, my wolf had climbed up behind my eyes and growled. The sheriff wouldn’t knowwhyhe was afraid of a man two inches shorter and fifty poundslighter who’d never been known to be violent, but he’d hate feeling intimidated.
Time to soothe his pride.Pretend he’s your Alpha.I bowed my head, making myself smaller, hating that I needed to, but staying on Tomlinson’s right side was essential in this town. “Of course not. You have all the law enforcement experience. If you really think his complaint has any basis in fact, you’ll get that warrant, and I’ll fully cooperate with it. Just let me know.”
Tomlinson nodded, his body language reassured. “I’ll do that. Get out of here and stay away from Peggy Fletcher.”
“Gladly.” I’d love to warn Chuck off hurting her, but angering him would do more harm than good unless she left him. And I understood why she didn’t. Divorce meant standing up in court and giving them a good enough reason to grant her release— and courts didn’t put enough weight on smacking your wife around. They might say no, and then she’d be trapped with an enraged man.
Or they might say yes. Then she’d be a single divorcée, trying to survive, likely with no job skills at all, in a community that would look down on her lack of loyalty to her man.
She could leave town and head somewhere bigger, if she could afford the bus ticket, but Rock Springs, half an hour away, didn’t offer many more options, and Salt Lake City in Utah was a tough place for someone without support. I’d only been there twice in the decade I’d lived here, and the anonymity was cold and lonely.
Hopefully, Peggy would find some other way out, but I needed to step back for both our sakes.
Tomlinson waved at his door. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to Chuck again, but if he insists, I might have to go to a judge.”
“Try the pawnshop first. If anything’s actually missing, I bet he took it there himself and plans to blame me.” He owned our one local pawnshop and could fake up the books any way heliked. Of course, claiming I tried to sell him his own possession back would look suspect as hell, but Chuck wasn’t smart.
That was a mess for another time, though. I couldn’t focus on Chuck. “Hey, I have a big job coming up, moving a load of gravel for Mayor King. It’d go better with an extra pair of hands. You think that bum you have in the tank might be willing to do an actual day’s work?”
“The bum?” Tomlinson cocked his head. “There must be men in town who could use the work.”
“Yeah, but if this guy’s hungry, I can get a day’s work out of him for a lot less than a day’s pay. I’m not making much on this job. You know what a tightwad Mayor King is. Heck, look at your department budget. He never parts with an extra dime.”
That was a surefire way to get Tomlinson on my side, since his battles with King over access to our tax dollars were legendary. He nodded. “Right. Makes sense.”
“You picked the man up for vagrancy, right? Not any real crime?”
“Broke and dirty, longhaired tramp. Not our kind here.”
I could read between those lines. Micah also had darker skin than “our kind here” in this little whitebread Wyoming town, partly courtesy of some American Indian ancestry whose threads ran through our old pack. On me, that heritage looked like a working man’s tan. But for Micah, whose mother was from Calcutta, the combined result had gotten him sneers and insults throughout our teens.
Not from other wolves. For all our faults, racism was rare. We were, after all, a different race ourselves, and the women wolves married were chosen for intelligence and submissiveness, a valuable combination unaffected by skin color. But we lived among humans, and even back in our hometown of Columbus, Micah had been “that dirty Injun” way too often, from adults aswell as our classmates. The human boys had been lucky I was restrained by pack rules, and good at keeping my temper.
I kept that temper now and shrugged. “Well, I can solve dirty and broke. I’ll throw him in the creek to clean up and feed him for a day’s work, give him a couple of bucks.”
Tomlinson laughed. “All right. You can have the guy. But you’re responsible for him. Any trouble, and I’ll come down on you both. And he has to have a place to stay or be out of town by sundown.”
“I’ll see what kind of worker he is. I’ve got a cot in my back room, if he’s worth his keep.”
“Huh. Wouldn’t have him in my place. You keep an eye on him, then.” Tomlinson rose and gestured me to go ahead. As we left the office, he turned to Nora at the front desk by the station doors. “Any trouble?”
“Everything seems quiet, sir.”
“I’m going to clear out the prisoner in the holding cell. Pierce will put him to work.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tomlinson led me deeper into the small station. Here in Highcrest, the sheriff’s department had one holding cell, mainly used for the drunks Tomlinson and his two deputies hauled in from the Rusty Saddle Bar on a Friday night. Now and then, there was a more serious arrest, and the lawbreaker would be held for a day or two before being transported to Rock Springs where they had an actual jail and a courthouse.
An antique cell door barred the end of the short corridor. Tomlinson called, “Hey, Crue, it’s your lucky day. Got someone here to bail you out.” He pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, turned the lock, and swung the door open. The prisoner looked up from where he was sitting on the bunk, then stood and stepped toward us, and I got my first look at Micah Crue since 1935.
He was still lean and tall, still dark-haired and tan-skinned, with a hawk nose and high cheekbones. He still had those steady gray eyes that met mine across the shadowed cell. Micah didn’t react when he saw me. Perhaps he’d smelled me coming. Perhaps he’d come to Highcrest knowing I was here. Or perhaps he just didn’t care. Micah was as hard to read as always.
I wanted to know everything he’d done in the last twenty-five years, but that wasn’t for Tomlinson to hear. There was one question I could ask that would help Micah’s standing in town, though. “You move like a man who served,” I said, although it was a lie. He moved like a werewolf. But when the US was attacked in 1941, almost every wolf of the right age within her borders rose up, ready for a fight. More of us served than not, and I bet Micah would’ve.
