The Sheriff of Heartbreak County

“Don’t I always?”

“Yeah, but promise me anyway.”

Roan gave an exaggerated sigh. “I promise.”

“Okay, then. G’night, Daddy. I love you bunches and bunches.”

“Love you the same back atcha. G’night, now. Be good.”

With the cell phone dead in his hand and the silence of night settling in, Roan realized his face was aching-most likely because he was still wearing that grin. He scrubbed a hand over his face to ease the muscles and was reaching for the ignition key when his radio crackled to life.

He thumbed it on and ID’d himself. “Yeah, Donna-what’s up?”

“Sheriff, uh…what’s your ETA back here at the shop?” The night dispatcher sounded uncharacteristically restrained.

“Let me guess,” said Roan with a new and decidedly sardonic grin stretching his face muscles. “There’s a United States Senator sitting in my office right now, spittin’ bullets.”

“Uh…that sums it up pretty well, only he’s not sittin’. More like…pacing. Think…a big old mountain lion in a cage.”

He chuckled and reached for the ignition. “I’m on my way.”

As the SUV’s lights came on he looked up at the house once more, in time to see the window curtain twitch back into place.

At least, the sheriff thought as he drove away from the dark, quiet house and its puzzling, enigmatic and oddly disturbing occupant, I can tell the victim’s father we have a possible suspect.

He wondered why that thought didn’t make him happier.

Mary let the draperies fall back into place, laughing silently at her own foolishness. He’d only been checking in, or calling in, or whatever it was policemen did when they’d been absent from their radios for a time. She was being paranoid, worrying for nothing. Sheriff Harley had her gun, and if he was as competent and as good and decent a man as Miss Ada said he was, it shouldn’t take him long to conclude that she’d had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Jason Holbrook.

But I could have. Maybe I would have…

Revulsion rippled across her skin, and she fought down a wave of nausea as for a terrible moment it all came rushing back-the smell of his breath, hot and thick with beer and tobacco and lust…the pressure of his arm across her throat, and the rising curtain of blackness and terror that threatened to suffocate her…the sharpness of his belt buckle cutting into the small of her back…the sound of his breathing, intent and determined…the sense of stark disbelief that curtained her mind from the thought that shrieked from some distant place: Oh God, I’m being raped.

And perhaps most shockingly, she recalled the violence and brutality of her release, and the strange mixture of rage and relief that had shaken her then, to the very depths of her soul. Not raped… violated nonetheless. She had not been a well-loved child, nor had she lived a protected life up to then, but she had never been spat upon before. She had never been struck in the face. Even Diego had never struck her in the face.

She could still taste the sickness that had risen into her throat after Jason had left her, in spite of all her efforts to prevent it.

Oh, I wish I could have killed him.

Would she have, she wondered now, if she had been able to reach the gun in her purse, the one she’d bought and practiced with so faithfully, then left sitting on the table beside the front door when she’d stepped onto the porch to check on the burned-out light bulb…only to realize a moment later, with a horrifying clutch of fear in her belly, that the bulb had been deliberately removed…and to know, with a cold sick sense of irony, that all her vigilance and preparation had been for nothing?

For nothing. Because in the end, the boogieman had found her anyway. Not the boogieman she’d been expecting, true, but bad enough. Definitely bad enough.

But the sheriff had taken her gun, and the forensics would prove she hadn’t shot Jason, no matter how much she might have wanted to. She had nothing to worry about.

Well, maybe not nothing. The sheriff had struck her as a man to be reckoned with, a man who wouldn’t be easily fooled.

Once again a little frisson stirred through her body as she recalled the cool blue glitter of those farseeing eyes, and it was followed by the surprised realization that, like the first time it had happened, when she’d first seen Roan Harley standing on her front porch, this wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” Mary said to Cat, who was still crouched on the back of the sofa, staring at her with what she could have sworn was a sneer of contempt. “Just because you took a fancy to him. You’re a cat-what do you know? The man’s dangerous, I’m telling you.”

The cat gave her one of his slow-motion blinks and turned his face away.

Mary shrugged. What had she expected? She was, as she had been for ten long years, utterly and completely alone.

Taking a purposeful breath, she crossed the living room to the door that opened onto a short hallway and thus to the house’s two bedrooms and only bathroom. She went into the bathroom, turned on the light and closed the door.

With only the briefest glance at her image in the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink, she pulled the clip from her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders, not in the vibrant tumble of curls that was its true nature but in limp straight strands. She scrubbed her scalp vigorously with her fingers for a few moments, then opened the cabinet below the sink and took out several plastic bottles with applicator tips, a small glass bowl and a number of odds and ends she’d become all too familiar with during the past ten years.

Slipping disposable gloves onto her hands, she squeezed dollops from the plastic bottles into the glass bowl and mixed them thoroughly. Then, using a small soft brush, she began to dab the resulting jelly-like gunk onto the strip of flaming red at the roots of her dirt-brown hair.

Roan entered the sheriff’s station through the front door, removing his Stetson as he nodded at the dispatcher ensconced in her cubbyhole behind a pane of bulletproof glass. At that hour, the business day and visiting hours at the detention center being long over, the lobby was empty. There were no washed-out women balancing babies on their hips waiting to visit their no-account husbands in the lock-up, no parolees keeping appointments with their parole officers, no unhappy teenagers and grim-faced parents waiting to pay traffic fines. The silence had a suspenseful, waiting quality, like a held breath.

The blast of the buzzer announcing the unlocking of the door to the inner sanctum sounded raucously, making him wince as it always did. The combination sheriff’s station and county detention center was a relatively new facility, having been one of the first major promises Roan had made good on after getting himself elected sheriff. Considering that the one it replaced could have been taken straight off the set of a Hollywood Western movie, the effect had been to boost the county’s law-enforcement capabilities from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in one giant leap, vaulting over the twentieth in the process. The facility had been all state-of-the-art at the time, with the latest security safeguards considered necessary in this age of terrorism. Roan had no objections to the protection, even if any terrorists to be found in the environs of Hart County, Montana, were likely to be of the homegrown drunk-and-disorderly-cowboy or disgruntled-hunter variety. He did wish that buzzer could have been toned down a bit, though.

As the outer door closed behind him he paused to stick his head through the open top half of the dispatcher’s doorway and said in an undertone, “He still here?”

Donna gave him a grim look and tilted her head toward the back of the building. “Down there in your office.”

Roan nodded, slapped his hat against his thigh and continued on down the hallway. He didn’t hesitate at the door to his office; the way he saw it, postponing the moment wasn’t going to make it any easier. He took a firm grip on the doorknob and turned it.