Confessions. JoAnn Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ through to her sister, so she could advise Laura not to wait up.

      Mariah frowned at the busy tone. “Who could she be talking to at nearly three in the morning?” She tried once more. Again, the line rang busy.

      “Maybe she took the phone off the hook.” Mariah wondered if Laura was avoiding her. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering their rocky past. But during the past two years when they’d begun speaking again, she’d hoped that she and her sister had put those days behind them.

      Perhaps the storm had knocked down the lines.

      “Shit.”

      Patience had never been Mariah Swann’s long suit. It wasn’t now. She dug through her purse, searching out the cigarettes she’d bought in Kingman, swearing, as always, they’d be her last. She located the already crumpled pack, shook a cigarette loose and picked up the matches from the tin ashtray on the bedside table. The matchbook cover suggested she was only a free test away from a career as a commercial artist.

      As she lit the cigarette, drawing the acrid smoke into her lungs, she could almost hear Laura lecturing her, the same way she had the first time Mariah had gotten caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom at school.

      Their mother, unable to stand the remoteness of ranch life, had fled Whiskey River—and her domineering husband. The same day Margaret McKenna Swann packed her Louis Vuitton suitcases and returned to Hollywood, Matthew Swann had filed for divorce.

      Angry, unable to understand their mother’s defection, and chafing under her father’s iron hand, Mariah became the rebellious Swann daughter. Which left Laura, by default, the role of the solid, responsible daughter.

      Only lately had Mariah begun to understand how having so much responsibility dumped on Laura’s shoulders at such a young age must have cost her older sister. Not that Laura had ever complained.

      Except the time she’d shocked everyone by eloping with Clint Garvey. The ill-fated marriage had lasted less than a day.

      After their father brought her home Laura never mentioned Clint again. A few years later, she married the man her father had chosen for her, and if the glowing articles Mariah read in all the magazines were any indication, her sister was happy.

      But sometimes, when the camera lens was focused on the senator while Laura stood loyally in the background, a photographer would capture a candid, unpracticed expression on her face. An expression so filled with sadness that Mariah wanted to cry.

      “I’ll make it up to you, Laurie.” Guilt and regret snaked through her. “I promise.”

      Unable to sit still, Mariah began to pace and smoke. Waiting for morning.

      * * *

      Trace Callahan was dog tired. Throughout the night he’d driven the back roads, setting up barricades in the pouring rain, trying to keep idiot vacationers and drunk residents of Mogollon County from driving their four-wheelers into the raging Whiskey River.

      When he’d first applied for the job of sheriff, he couldn’t help thinking of the old days when cowboys got drunk and smashed up Whiskey River’s saloons. These days, kids got drunk and smashed up their daddies’ pickups.

      He hung his dripping poncho on the rack by the front door and tossed his hat onto a nearby table. Rotating his aching shoulder, which went stiff when it rained, he went into the kitchen, ignoring the trail of muddy footprints he left in his wake.

      He opened the refrigerator and had just pulled out the beer he’d been thinking about for the last hour, when the phone rang. The caller I.D. screen announced the call was from his office.

      “I told you I was going off duty, Cora Mae,” he barked into the mouthpiece. “This had better be important.”

      “It is if you consider a possible one-eighty-seven in progress important, Sheriff,” Cora Mae Jackson shot back.

      A wave of adrenaline rushed through his body. Fatigue was immediately forgotten. “A one-eighty-seven?”

      A murder? In Whiskey River? Impossible. There hadn’t been a murder in the Arizona mountain town since 1957, when Jared Lawson got drunk at a family Thanksgiving dinner and shot his mother-in-law to death over a white meat–dark meat argument.

      “A one-eighty-seven,” the night dispatcher repeated. “At Senator Fletcher’s ranch.”

      Trace could feel his body relaxing again. He hunched his stiff shoulder, holding the receiver against his neck as he unscrewed the beer cap.

      “You mean a possible burglary.” There’d been at least a half dozen false alarms at the ranch. Trace wished Fletcher would either get the damn system fixed, or tear it out.

      “After thirty-five years I should know my codes, Sheriff,” Cora Mae sniffed. “I meant a murder. The senator just called in on 911. He’s been shot. He thinks his wife was shot, too.”

      Trace’s pulse rate soared. “Is the gunman still in the house?”

      “The senator said he heard them run out. He thinks there were two of them.”

      Trace slammed the bottle down onto the counter. Foam ran over his hand. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

      “I believe I did, Sheriff.”

      “Dispatch the county medical unit,” Trace instructed. “And get hold of J.D.”

      “J.D. was here when the call came in. He’s on his way to the ranch now.”

      “Radio him and let him know I’m on the way. Oh, and tell him not to touch anything.”

      “Ten-four,” she said. Trace would have had to have been deaf to miss the smug satisfaction in the dispatcher’s voice.

      As he marched back out into the stormy night, Trace remembered a time when he’d genuinely loved being a cop. When he’d been filled with an overwhelming need to help.

      He’d especially enjoyed being a homicide detective—the murder police. The top of the rung, the cream of the crop. The goddamn best. He’d gotten off on the crime scenes, the countless cups of coffee, the chain smoking, the pursuit, the face-to-face confrontation with a killer. And that inimitable sound of handcuffs clicking around the wrists of the bad guys had never failed to give him an adolescent rush.

      He woke up each morning juiced, ready to hit the streets and save the world. But that had been in what now seemed like another lifetime.

      Unfortunately, justice had proven to be not only blindfolded, but deaf and dumb as well and Detective Sergeant Trace Callahan had learned the hard way that one man couldn’t save the world from itself.

      Now all he wanted was a chance to build himself a quiet, uneventful life where he didn’t have to worry about some coked-up drug dealer pumping bullets into him. As he climbed into the black-and-white Suburban, Trace considered that he thought he’d found exactly that when he signed his contract six months ago.

      Cursing whatever lowlifes had so rudely intruded on his peaceful existence, he gunned the engine and headed, emergency lights flashing, toward the Fletcher ranch.

      Whiskey СКАЧАТЬ