The Last Wilder Page 9

  “You still working on my biography?”

  “Just answer the question, copper.”

  “What was the question?”

  “You could just tell me you don’t want to talk.”

  “I don’t mind talking.”

  “Just not about yourself, right?”

  He didn’t know why he was giving her the runaround. It was no secret what he did before he came to Wyatt County. He guessed he just liked giving her a hard time. He shrugged. “I’m shy.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah, right. Okay, if you won’t tell me, I’ll make something up. You ran away from home at the age of fifteen and joined the circus, but they made you clean up after the elephants, so you quit and became a beach bum.”

  “Where were you when I needed career guidance? I like your story better than the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “No big deal. I was a cop, in L.A.”

  “Aha. So you aren’t just a politician.”

  “I’m not any kind of a politician,” he protested.

  “You had to be to get elected sheriff.”

  “Not when you run unopposed,” he stated.

  “So that’s how you did it.” She snickered.

  “Does that lower your opinion of me?” he asked playfully. Playfully? When the hell had he become playful, Dane wondered, appalled. He had no business getting playful, flirting, teasing, whatever it was he was doing, with a woman under his protection.

  “Do you care about my opinion of you?”

  A woman under his protection who happened to be ten years younger than he. “I thought you were going to get some sleep.”

  Stacey laughed. “All right, all right, I give up. You just drive your dark, deserted roads and I’ll keep quiet. I won’t make you tell me you like me.”

  Dane didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. The next time he looked over at his passenger, her head was tilted at an odd angle in sleep.

  She’d had a rough twenty-four-plus hours. Frankly he was surprised she’d managed to stay awake this long.

  When he stopped for the stop sign where the county road met the state highway, she woke, but remained silent as Dane waited for a southbound car to go by. He would pull out behind it and head south himself for a few miles, then circle back north again and head for town. By the time they got back his shift would almost be up.

  “Look at that,” Stacey said, blinking. “Am I dreaming, or is that really another vehicle?”

  “Hey, come on,” Dane said. “We’ve passed other cars tonight.”

  “How many, two?”

  “So this is the least populated area of the United States. We like it that way.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Stacey said. “I’m just not used to driving for hours without seeing at least a few other vehicles.”

  “Well,” Dane said as the car in question whizzed past the side road where he sat at the stop sign, “you’re seeing one now.” As the car sped on down the highway, Dane realized that it had no taillights and the light over the rear license plate was out. “And you’re going to see this one up close in a few minutes,” he added to Stacey.

  “You mean we get some action? Are you going to haul him off to jail for no taillights?”

  “You do have a real high opinion of cops, don’t you.” He might have taken real offense at her comments, but he could hear the laughter in her voice. She was trying to get a rise out of him.

  “Are you going to drive fast enough to catch this guy, or are you just going to follow him all night? Where are your lights? Your siren?”

  Dane flipped on the lights. “There, satisfied?” He hoped the guy would see the red-and-blue flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pull over without Dane having to chase him halfway to the state line.

  “What about the siren? What kind of cop are you, anyway?”

  “I think we can do without the siren for now.”

  But when the guy ahead did not slow down, Dane sped up until he was less than a quarter mile behind him. The guy had to have seen the lights by now, even if he never looked directly into his rearview mirror.

  Of course, with the taillights and tag light out, there was the real possibility that the idiot didn’t even have a rearview mirror. The car looked like it was about on its last mile, with rust spots all over the trunk and back bumper, and part of the vinyl top torn and flapping in the wind.

  But Dane could see an outside mirror on the driver’s side, so the guy had to have seen Dane’s flashing lights by now. While the fellow didn’t speed up to get away, neither did he slow down.

  “Okay,” Dane said to Stacey. “Just for you.” He hit the siren for a short blast.

  The guy kept driving.

  “Well, hell.” Dane hit the siren again and let it go for several seconds, until the car in front of him began to slow.

  “He’s slowing down,” Stacey said.

  “You sound disappointed.” Dane eased on the brake. “What did you want, a high-speed chase?”

  “Nah,” she answered. “I guess not. It would have been too boring. There’s not so much as a curve in this road for miles and miles.”

  “I’m sorry your evening’s entertainment isn’t more exciting.”

  “Well,” she said with a heavy sigh, “at least you tried, and for that I thank you.”

  As he slowed and followed the car off onto the shoulder, he shook his head at his companion and laughed. Then he picked up his mic and radioed in the tag number, which was now visible in Dane’s headlights. It was a Colorado plate. Dane waited for his dispatcher to check the tag number and let him know if the vehicle was stolen, or if there were any outstanding warrants on the owner.

  It didn’t take long for the report to come back negative. The car was registered to a man in Boulder. Dane made note of the name while wishing for enough money in the budget to put laptop computers in all his vehicles.

  “Sit tight,” he told Stacey as he reached for the door handle. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Do you have your gun?” she demanded. “Your handcuffs? Your billy club?”

  “I have something even more powerful.” He picked up his citation book and pulled the pen from its holder. “I have my pen.”

  “You’re just going to write him a ticket?”

  “If he’s a good boy, I’ll probably just give him a warning. From the looks of that car, I’d say he’s got enough trouble already.”

  Laughing at her look of disappointment, Dane got out and cautiously approached the vehicle. He aimed his flashlight at the windows and found no one but the driver. At least, no one sitting up. These days a cop couldn’t be too careful.

  But something about the driver’s head looked familiar, and when Dane stepped up to the window and the driver rolled it down and gave him a smirk, Dane bit back one curse, but let slip another. “Hell, Farley, what are you doing out here this time of night driving this bucket of bolts?”

  Former Wyatt County Deputy Sheriff Farley James—“former” because Dane fired him shortly after getting elected—deepened his smirk. “Hell, Dane, what’s the great sheriff of Wyatt County doing out here at this time of night, period? You oughta be curled up in your bed, all snug and sure that the world is safe because you’re in it.”

  Dane let the gibe slide. He and Farley had never gotten along. Dane’s firing him only made their meetings more antagonistic.

  “Whose car is this?” Dane asked, forgoing any more small talk. “And why are you driving it with no taillights or taglight?”

  Farley swore. “It belongs to a friend of mine from Boulder. He got hurt on the job up near the Yellowstone. They had to medivac him out and he asked me to drive his car home for him. I didn’t know about the taillights until it was too late tonight to do anything about them.”

  The story was plausible enough to Dane. Giving him a ticket might put a few dollars in the county coffers, but not enough to buy the next round of coffee.

  Dane wrote him out a warning. When he to
re off the driver’s copy and handed it over, Farley snatched it with a sneer. “Gee, thanks, Sheriff. The roads will sure be safer now that you’ve given me this.”

  Dane closed his citation book and tucked the pen into its loop. “Just be glad you weren’t speeding.”

  “I am, yes, sir, Sheriff, I surely am. Hey, by the way, who’s that doll baby you got riding around with you tonight?”

  “Good night, Farley.”

  “Why, Sheriff Powell,” Farley called as Dane walked back toward the Blazer. “You wouldn’t have an unauthorized female back there, would you? Gettin’ a little nighttime benefits, if you know what I mean, on county time?”

  The farther away Dane got, the farther Farley leaned out his window and the louder he yelled. “Wait’ll word gets around about this. The high-and-mighty Dane Powell, gettin’ it on in the county cruiser, while he’s out cruising. Ha!” He laughed hard at his own joke.

  Dane ground his teeth and got back into the Blazer.

  “Well,” Stacey said. “It doesn’t look like that went well. What was he yelling about?”

  “You were right,” Dane bit out. “I should have used the gun. At the very least, the handcuffs. But what I really want to know is when somebody’s going to start making police-issue gags for guys like him.”

  Dane didn’t trust Farley James as far as he could pick him up and throw him. Since Farley outweighed him by a good forty pounds, that wasn’t saying much for Dane’s trust.

  It was petty of him, he knew—juvenile, even—but Dane followed the son of a bitch all the way to the county line, just to make sure he didn’t turn off somewhere and make mischief.

  At the county line Dane turned around and headed north again, toward town.

  “Is it safe to talk now?” Stacey asked.

  Surprised by her question, Dane glanced over at her. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said lazily. “Maybe because you’ve been chewing nails—and I don’t mean fingernails—ever since you stopped that guy.”

  “I have not,” he protested.

  “Sheriff, if you gripped that steering wheel any tighter, I don’t know which would snap first, the steering wheel, or that jaw you’ve got clenched so hard your muscle is bulging.”

  Dane grinned and relaxed. “Been noticing my muscles?”

  “In your dreams, copper.”

  Dane chuckled darkly, but he feared the joke would be on him before too many more hours passed. He would be taking Stacey home with him. She would sleep in his spare room. No woman had ever spent the night in his house. The fact that they would sleep in separate beds, separate rooms, wasn’t going to make much difference to his dreams. He very much feared the woman next to him, with the golden hair of an angel and the sweet smell of heaven was going to have the starring role in them.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time they made it back to Dane’s office and he took care of some of the never-ending paperwork that went with his job, it was midmorning.

  Stacey was groggy with fatigue. Staying up all night and sleeping only a few hours, she didn’t know whether she was coming or going.

  Which was probably the reason that Dane was showing her to the spare bedroom in his house before second thoughts about the arrangement threatened to strangle her.

  “I can’t stay here,” she managed.

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me.” She turned away from the neat but plain room before her, with its double bed, dresser and chest of drawers, and faced him.

  “I know it’s not fancy, but—”

  “Don’t be an ass,” she said. “I mean I can’t stay in your house.”

  He cocked his head and stared at her with those deep blue eyes that made her want to stare right back and forget to breathe. “And just why is that?” he asked.

  Well, first there are those deep blue eyes… “You’re the sheriff, for heaven’s sake. What are your neighbors going to think? Or are you in the habit of bringing strange women home with you in broad daylight and not coming out again for hours?”

  He smiled. “Are you worried about my reputation, or yours?”

  “You’re supposed to be setting an example for the rest of the community, aren’t you?”

  “And if everyone else gave shelter to someone in need? Gee, I see your point. It could be the downfall of civilization as we know it.”

  “Besides that,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm, or attempt at humor, whichever it was, “I don’t have any clothes.”

  He blinked. Once, very slowly. “Oh. Yeah. Right.” He seemed to give himself a mental shake, then looked her up and down in a way that made her wonder if the clothes she was wearing had been torn to shreds along with the rest of her belongings, leaving her all but naked to his gaze.

  It was not, to her everlasting amazement, an unpleasant feeling.

  “I’ll get you one of my T-shirts to sleep in. It ought to cover most of you.”

  “Something to sleep in is the least of my worries. I don’t have a toothbrush, or deodorant, or clean underwear.”

  “If you’d said something earlier we could have stopped at the store and picked up a few things.”

  “I didn’t think about it,” she admitted.

  “Well, come on, let’s go shopping.”

  Stacey frowned. “Just like that?” Where was the argument, the note of derision in his voice, the whine that he was being inconvenienced? Maybe even the threat.

  “Why not?” He seemed surprised that she’d asked. “You need stuff, don’t you?”

  She looked at him more closely.

  Yep, he was still a man. No one had sneaked in and swapped him for a robot. Or a woman. Or a saint. But he sure wasn’t acting like most of the men she’d known. And thank God for it. She didn’t know how long this generous, cooperative attitude would last, but she meant to enjoy it while she could.

  “Yes.” She gave him a big smile. “I need stuff. And thank you for offering to take me to get it.”

  Within minutes they were back outside in Dane’s Blazer and headed for town.

  Now that she was awake and paying attention, Stacey could appreciate the quiet, tree-lined street where Dane lived. The houses were small and so were the yards, and there were sidewalks on both sides of the street. The occasional bicycle spoke of young families, but there were older people, too, as evidenced by the gray-haired man waxing his 1970s-era Mustang in his driveway. He waved as they drove past, and Dane returned the wave.

  At the end of the street Dane sat at the stop sign and looked at her. “Where to first? Drugstore or clothes?”

  She shrugged. “Drugstore, I guess.”

  “Drugstore, it is.” He turned right and drove two blocks to Sumner’s Drugstore. “I don’t know how much you’ll find that you’re wanting at either store.”

  “I’ll manage,” she told him. She wasn’t about to complain about lack of variety. She would be grateful to get the essentials. Like deodorant and some basic makeup.

  Dane helped her out of the Blazer, then held the door of the drugstore open for her to enter. A bell overhead dinged.

  “Come on in,” a woman’s voice called out from somewhere. “I’ll be right with you.”

  “Take your time, Ida,” Dane called back.

  “That you, Sheriff?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Heard you had some excitement last night.” The woman emerged from a doorway behind a genuine old-fashioned soda fountain. Her steel-gray hair and the lines on her face had Stacey guessing she was in her mid-seventies.

  “Oh,” the woman said when she spotted Stacey. “Hello, there.”

  “Stacey Landers,” Dane said, “this is Ida Sumner, the owner of the store.”

  “How do you do?” Stacey said.

  “I do pretty good for an old lady.” Mrs. Sumner laughed at herself. Then she sobered. “You must be the poor thing all the excitement happened to over at the motel.”

  Stacey blinked. “I must?”


  The woman smiled. “Small town. Word travels. Not too many new women in town on crutches, you poor thing, you. Heavens to Betsy, we’re all just thankful you weren’t there when those hoodlums broke into your room that way. You’re going to catch them, aren’t you?” she demanded of Dane.

  “I’ve got John Taylor working on it.”

  “Fair enough, then,” she said with a sharp nod. “John’s a good man. A good detective. If anyone can figure out who did that terrible thing, John will. Now, what can I do for the two of you?”

  “I just need to pick up a few things,” Stacey said.

  The woman slapped a hand to her cheek. “Heavens to Betsy, if those hoodlums destroyed everything you owned, like folks are saying, I’d say you do need a few things. Let’s see what we can do for you, hon.”

  In a matter of minutes Stacey had toothpaste, a toothbrush, dental floss—“Oh, hon, you’ve got to floss every day if you want to keep your teeth when you’re my age. Believe me, false teeth are just awful. Every time I have to deal with them I wish somebody had made me floss.”—comb, brush, deodorant, the bare necessities of makeup, and a tube of lip balm. Other than the dental floss, the woman didn’t try to talk Stacey into buying anything she didn’t want. But Stacey was grateful for her suggestions or she wouldn’t have remembered to get moisturizer.

  Dane carried Stacey’s purchases out to the Blazer and drove her down the street to Kandie’s Kasuals, the only store in town that sold women’s clothes, according to Dane.

  “Unless you want overalls, in which case we can go to the feed store.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass. Kandie’s Kasuals looks fine.” They had a nice window display sporting a pretty wool dress and three different pants sets. Surely she’d be able to find something inside to wear.

  And she did, right down to underwear. Kandie herself waited on her and helped her find everything she wanted. She made nearly as big a fuss over Stacey as Mrs. Sumner had at the drugstore.

  “Is everyone in town so friendly and helpful?” Stacey asked once they were on their way back to Dane’s. She stuck her right foot out and admired her new fuzzy pink house slipper that was keeping her otherwise shoeless foot toasty warm.