“Get it fixed. It’s freezing in here.”
“When I get some extra money.” Shifting down, he turned the nose of his truck up the hill and bounced over the railroad tracks. Man, did he need new shocks, but he couldn’t afford them yet. Just like he couldn’t fix the heater. Not while he was a volunteer; he needed a paying job and was almost to the point of begging for his old job back at Corky’s Gas and Go, but he’d left there on bad terms, to the point he wasn’t sure he even could use the service station/mini-mart as a reference for another job. Nor could he ask the mechanic on duty to give him a deal any longer. So he’d had to let the maintenance on his pickup lag.
He gave the truck some gas as the road was steep as it cut into the sheer cliffs of Boxer Bluff. As a kid he’d imagined the cliff face splitting and falling down on their car, burying his mom’s old Explorer and them in it, but he’d gotten over that somewhere along the line.
“You’re just being overprotective,” Bianca theorized as her cell phone buzzed for like the zillionth time since he’d picked her up. “It’s because she’s the only mother you have.”
>
“The only parent I have,” he clarified. “You’ve got Lucky.”
She wrinkled her nose and thought about it as she scanned the text. “Yeah, I guess, and Michelle.”
“They don’t count. Not for me.”
If Bianca was surprised at his feelings for the couple she embraced so wholeheartedly, she didn’t show it as she texted back with lightning speed.
“What’s so important?”
Again she looked at him as if he were from outer space. “Like everything. My life.”
They crested the top of the hill and drove past the sheriff’s department. He glanced at the parking lot, saw his mom’s Jeep was missing, and wondered where she was. It worried him, how gung ho she’d been to go after the judge’s killer. She was a little reckless at times, and as he’d heard Heidi’s father remark so often, she could be kind of a “loose cannon.” Not that he really put much stock in Sheriff Brewster’s opinion. That guy was a bastard with a capital B and it irked Jeremy that he had to suck up to him.
But someday it would all be different.
When he was a cop and Heidi was his wife.
They’d already talked marriage, though he knew it was in the far-off distance. Heidi was pushing him, but he wasn’t ready, and as stupid and immature as his mother seemed to think he was, he knew better than to tie the knot before he’d figured out his life and she’d figured out hers.
So he put up with her dad. For now. And even Heidi was coming around about him, saying he’d “changed” ever since becoming sheriff, that he wasn’t around as much or as into his family.
Just like his mom had warned. But that’s what happened when you were an officer of the law. So Heidi better get used to it, because someday, she was going to marry one.
“How about Dixie’s?” he asked Bianca, as he spied the neon sign of the local burger hut at the next stoplight.
She was still texting like mad, not paying much attention. “Do they still have garden burgers?”
“I think.”
“Okay.”
Bianca flirted with becoming a vegetarian, just as she flirted with bulimia. Their mother was wising up to the fact, and Jeremy had given Bianca a lecture because it was just plain stupid, in his mind. Yeah, he’d heard it was a serious eating disorder, but he just wanted her to stop being so dumb. Bianca seemed to be coming around, or so he thought as he pulled into the parking lot of the burger joint and, smiling, caught a glimpse of Heidi Brewster seated in one of the booths.
The night was suddenly looking better.
Chapter 28
Cade’s patience had run thin.
He ordered a beer at the bar of the Black Horse Saloon and nursed it slowly. Country music twanged from the speakers, pool balls clicked at a table in the corner, and several televisions were turned onto a variety of sporting events, none of which held his attention.
J.D. and Zed were handling the evening chores, so a few hours earlier Cade had driven to Missoula to check on Dan.
It hadn’t gone well.
With each passing day, the usually cheery nurses and aides at the hospital seemed less hopeful for his brother’s recovery, or at least that was the impression that Cade had gotten. The security guard posted outside the ICU wing was ever changing and appeared to become either more grim at each of his visits or more bored. Neither boded well.
Finally, just two hours earlier, he’d cornered an ICU doc entering the unit as he was leaving and, sick and tired of what he perceived as the runaround, he’d demanded answers.