Page 2 of Switch

Salvation had one of those. The Unholy Few called him their Road Captain.

I’d sooner have called the cartel everyone had been talking about around here.

Three years ago, Switch had come home with me the night of his father’s funeral. It was the best sex of my life, which is a hell of a thing to admit about a man who didn’t stick around for breakfast. He kept me up until the sky went gray, and I fell asleep with his arm heavy across my ribs, thinking, finally.

I woke up alone. His side of the bed was cold and his bike was gone from the yard. No note. No call. Not one word, then or since.

I told myself I was fine with it for about a week. Then I heard his bike go past the feed store and had to sit in my truck in the lot until I trusted my face again. After that I got angry, because angry was easier, and I stayed there. Three years on, he still walked out of the diner when I walked in, and I let him go, and every time it was that morning all over again, only with an audience.

I put the new chain on myself and snapped the padlock shut hard enough to hurt my hand.

The mares told me first.

It was late, the house dark except for the stove light, and I was at the kitchen sink with a glass of water when I saw them through the window. Four horses in the near paddock, every head up, every set of ears pointed at the back of the property. Nothing moved out there that I could see. Then I heard it, faint enough to be the fridge. An engine working hard somewhere beyond the wash.

I had my boots on before I’d decided anything.

The rifle stayed locked in the hall cabinet. A horse and a gun in the dark is how ranchers end up in the paper, and I had no plan to shoot anybody. I wanted a look. My phone went in my back pocket. I caught Whiskey at the paddock gate, slipped the bridle on and swung up bareback, and she took me out past the arena at a walk so quiet I could hear the blood in my ears.

There was half a moon. Enough to throw shadows, not enough to trust them. The desert had cooled off the way it does after midnight, and the creosote smelled sharp and wet even though it hadn’t rained in a month. Whiskey’s ears led the way. I let them.

Near the rise above the back section she snorted and propped, all four feet planted, staring at a clump of mesquite.

Chrome caught the moonlight in there.

I slid off and led her closer. A motorcycle stood on its kickstand in the dry cut behind the brush, pushed in by hand with the engine off, where nobody on the mine road would ever see it.

I knew that bike.

The last time I’d seen it this close, it had been parked by my porch steps.

My stomach turned over. I was still crouched there, fingers stinging, when somebody took hold of Whiskey’s bridle out of the dark.

“Don’t,” he said.

I came up fast. Whiskey threw her head, and he rode it out without letting go, his other arm already over her neck.

“Get your hand off my horse.”

“Two trucks are coming down that road,” Switch said, low and even. “You’re standing on the only high ground for a mile, in the moonlight, holding a mare who’s about to holler at them. Walk with me.”

“Go to hell.”

“Later. Seriously, walk.”

He was already moving. He led Whiskey off the rise and down the slope, and I went because my horse went and because down on the mine road an engine had started climbing.

He took us straight to the old windmill, no light, no hesitation. He stepped over the busted pipe that ran off the stock tank without looking down, and he ducked the low mesquite branch at the corner of it before he reached it. That was when it landed on me. When we were kids, his father’s trailer sat a quarter mile from here, down where the wash widened. Switch had grown up on this ground. He knew the back of my place better than I did.

The stock tank’s rim dug into my spine. Whiskey pressed against my left side, and Switch took the space in front of me, his back to the road and his body between me and it. Up close he was bigger than I remembered, or I’d let myself forget. Leather and road dust and heat coming off him in the cool air. His chest rose against my shoulder when he breathed.

My body remembered him. That made me angrier than anything else he’d done that night.

Headlights came around the shoulder of the hill below us. A utility truck, no plates I could make out, bouncing slow down the mine road. A second one waited at the bottom with its lights off. The first pulled alongside. Three men got out. One opened the back and lifted out two hard plastic cases, and two more cases came out after them. Nobody talked. They’d done this before.

Whiskey filled her lungs to call.

Switch’s hand came up and settled on her nose, the heel of it firm across her nostrils, his thumb working a slow circle on the flat of her face. She huffed the air out against his palm and dropped her head. It was a horseman’s hand. I hated that it was.