Hot on the Trail. Vicki Tharp
scarred hand.
Kurt’s hand.
* * * *
The sheriff showed up with the light bar on top of his pickup flashing, the siren blaring, the ambulance a hundred yards and a dust cloud behind. Jenna glanced over from her seat in the cab of the John Deere and saw Lottie run out to greet him, then refocused on the levers.
Her heart thrummed, and her fingers shook on the tractor’s bucket controls. Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead. The round bales were stacked high and deep. If by some miracle Kurt was still alive, she couldn’t risk a thousand-pound bale rolling and crushing him.
Their best option was to remove the metal sheeting on the sides of the barn, and without a ladder tall enough, they’d improvised. Which meant she operated the tractor and Boomer removed the screws, balancing with his blade prosthetic on top of the six-foot ladder, on top of a sheet of plywood spanning the width of the tractor bucket. A tractor bucket currently extended to its maximum height.
OSHA would shit a brick if they saw that.
OSHA would have to revamp their manual to cover this level of stupidity if they saw that.
OSHA would levy such a massive penalty that her grandchildren would still be paying the debt a hundred years from now if they saw that.
But she didn’t care about OSHA. All she cared about, all anyone on the Lazy S cared about, was getting to Kurt.
After Boomer had removed the last of the screws, he climbed off the ladder and made a motion with one hand, telling Jenna to bring him down. She backed the Deere, lowering him as she went.
The sheriff and the paramedics didn’t waste any time moving in. The metal sheeting was grooved, and the men fought the overlap to pull the panel free. Jenna killed the engine and jumped down as the men yanked the metal clear.
For a split second, Kurt’s body hung in the air, defying gravity. Head down, eyes open—face, blue-gray and livid with blood. Then his rigid body crashed to the ground. He didn’t flip or flop or grunt or groan.
You didn’t do that when you were dead.
Her heart stopped beating. One second it raced in her chest, and the next…nothing. This void, this vacuum in the center of her chest where her heart used to be, was sucking the blood from her cheeks, the strength from her muscles, the hope from her soul.
She sank to the dirt. The hard-packed earth jarred her spine. She stared out at the scene in front of her. The sheriff speaking into the radio on the shoulder of his uniform. Boomer with his arm around Sidney, holding her close to his chest. The paramedics backing away. Lottie, with her arm wrapped around her waist, a hand to her mouth, her cheeks stained with tears.
A deputy with a camera snap, snap, snapped. Photos of Kurt. Of the side of the barn. Of the gap in the siding. She sat in the dirt, too stunned to move. Sometime later, Sheriff Elmore St. John approached her with a couple of clear bags in his hand. “I need to show you something.”
He was a tall man. Somewhere between her dad and Boomer, his features hard beneath the brim of his tan cowboy hat. A muscle twitched at the corner of his right eye. He held out his hand and helped her to her feet. Her legs were numb, unsteady, as she took one tentative step, testing.
They hadn’t covered the body yet. The sleeve of Kurt’s red flannel shirt was buttoned around his right wrist; the one on the left, shoved up above the elbow. The sheriff turned her and helped her over to his truck with a hand on her elbow.
He sat her in the front passenger seat. Her boot slipped on the step rail, and she grabbed on to the handle to haul herself inside. After she had settled, he gave her two sealed clear bags. Inside the first was a spoon with the handle bent back, the bowl black with soot. In the other, a syringe, the skinny kind, the kind diabetics used—or junkies.
“No.” The word wheezed out of Jenna’s mouth. “He…he’s clean. He was clean. His test came back a couple days ago. He wasn’t using. I don’t understand.”
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“O-okay.” Her chest loosened, and air filled her lungs again. Her heart tripped a weak, shaky beat in her chest, and her fingers tingled as blood flow returned.
“When was the last time anyone saw Kurt?”
“Last night. After dinner. He went to catch the late AA meeting in Murdock.”
“No one saw him return?”
She shook her head. “As I said, it was a late meeting. I vaguely remember the shine of his headlights in my window as he pulled past the house last night, but I didn’t see him.”
“What time was that?”
Jenna thought back to the night before. She’d been reading in bed. “Ten thirty or so…the first time.”
“What do you mean the ‘first time’?”
It was coming back to her now. “I saw lights flash about ten thirty. When I got up to use the restroom around midnight, I saw lights then, too. I was half-asleep. I didn’t think anything about it.”
“Was it Kurt both times?”
“Honestly, I can’t say for sure it was him either time. I never went to the window. I just assumed it was him.”
“Could a friend have followed him home?”
“Kurt’s only been here a month. He didn’t have any friends outside of the ranch. Not that he’d mentioned.”
“Someone from his meetings, maybe?”
Jenna shrugged. “I have no idea. You would have to ask them.”
“And as far as you know, he hasn’t been using since he’d been here.” St. John had his little spiral notepad out, scribbling away as he noted her replies.
“He’d been lucid, coherent, with clean drug tests. And clean tests for the six months prior to coming here, according to his doctor. This isn’t a drug treatment facility. The veterans have to be alcohol- and drug-free before they’re approved to come.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time an addict has relapsed.”
“No.” Jenna focused on the clods of dirt on the floor mats. “I don’t suppose it would. He’d seemed to be doing so well. The horses were starting to trust him…he was a little rough around the edges. Everyone liked him, though…” Jenna raised her hands and let them flop back into her lap. Then she glanced back up at the sheriff. “What the hell am I doing? Who am I to think I could do this? That I could help these men and women?”
“Whoa, now,” Boomer cut in as he stepped up to the truck.
She hadn’t seen him approach. Or heard the coroner’s car pull up. Through the windshield, she watched as a sheriff’s deputy finished with the photographs and the coroner moved in. A wide man with a short body. Because of his girth, he squatted unsteadily beside Kurt.
“Jenna.” Boomer drew her attention to him. The compassion in his eyes, that of a man who had lived through worse, who knew what she was going through, made it difficult to keep eye contact. “This isn’t your fault. Not even close.”
“But—”
Boomer made a sound in the back of his throat, the kind she often used when Dink was getting into something he shouldn’t. It shut her up. To the sheriff, he said, “Are you done here?”
“For now.”
St. John stepped back, and Boomer helped Jenna out of the truck. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. “Come on. We have a lot of things to figure out.”
* * * *
Jenna and Sidney sat at the long wooden table in her grandmother’s kitchen, their cups of coffee growing cold in front of them. Kurt’s body had been taken