Gray Wolf Security: Wyoming Page 6

  “That sucks.”

  Sutherland tried to imagine one of her people taking such a menial job. She couldn’t even picture it. But it frightened her that it was a real possibility.

  “So, I have a little gossip you might be interested in,” Becky suddenly announced, getting up and joining Sutherland by the counter.

  “What kind of gossip?”

  “The romantic kind, I think.” Becky nudged Sutherland’s shoulder with her own. “A woman came to see Hank in the middle of the night last night. Knocked on the wrong door, woke me and Cassidy up.”

  “Is that right?”

  Sutherland was suddenly interested. She knew Hank fairly well, at least she liked to think she did. But she hadn’t seen him with a woman since he came to work at the ranch, not even on the rare occasions when she ran into him at the Smoky Joint, the bar downtown. She assumed he was as celibate as she was—quite by circumstance, not by design. But maybe she’d been wrong.

  “She was pretty, too. Red hair and green eyes.” Becky seemed to think that over for a moment. “Not really the type I pictured Hank being attracted to.”

  “What did you imagine?”

  “I don’t know. A blonde, maybe.”

  Sutherland smiled. “Yeah, a blonde seems to go better with his poster-boy good looks.”

  “But the way he was looking at her… I think there’s something pretty hot and heavy going on there.” Becky sighed. “I’m jealous. A man hasn’t looked at me that way in a very long time.”

  “Me neither, sweetheart. Me neither.”

  They looked at each other and burst into laughter. That was how Kirkland found them when he came into the kitchen a few minutes later, laughing with their shoulders pressed together and their fingers intertwined. He cleared his throat, and Sutherland immediately pulled herself together, the laughter dying the second she realized the boss had come to spy.

  “Mr. Parish,” Becky said, glancing at Sutherland with curiosity bright in her eyes before she backed away, heading toward the door. “I’ll leave the two of you to it.”

  “We have a problem with this case,” Kirkland said the moment Becky was out of earshot.

  “Oh?”

  “The vandals hit the school again last night, only this time they broke into the elementary side and trashed one of the kindergarten rooms.”

  “Why am I just now hearing about this?” Sutherland demanded, pushing away from the counter.

  “I just heard about it.”

  “Where’s Hank?”

  Kirkland shrugged. “Not hanging around here. I assume he’s out doing whatever it is cowboys do around here.”

  A few choice words jumped to the tip of Sutherland’s tongue, but she couldn’t really criticize Kirkland. She was a city girl before she had left the army and came to live on MidKnight Ranch, too. A lifetime ago. If not for Shelby, she’d probably still be as clueless as he was.

  She moved around him and marched down the hall to the study. There was a wireless radio there that was set to a channel that corresponded with radios the cowhands carried. Sutherland picked up the mic.

  “Come back, Shelby.”

  “This is Shelby.”

  “Is Hank with you?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s headed up to the stable.”

  She glanced at Kirkland. “Must be getting ready to go in for his shift at the high school.”

  “I’ll go talk to him.”

  She grabbed his arm before he could move. “I’ll do it. I have ranch business to talk to him about anyway.” It was a bit of a lie. Sutherland was sure she could think of some ranch business to talk to him about, but what she really wanted was to deliver the news with less accusation than Kirkland would deliver it with.

  “There’s something else you should know,” Kirkland said before she could leave the room. “Mabel was out taking a walk last night and ran into one of the teachers from the high school. She was here looking for Hank.”

  “One of the teachers?”

  Kirkland gestured to a bank of computer screens he’d set up in the study a few weeks ago. “I set up a test camera near the front gate. I got a good picture of her face and was able to identify her from the school website.” He held up a print of a picture. “Miss Jonnie Frakes.”

  The name wasn’t familiar. It made sense, though, that Hank’s visitor had been from the school. Maybe it hadn’t been quite as romantic a visit as Becky had assumed it was.

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said without pausing to give Kirkland anything else.

  Hank was in his room, dressing after a shower when Sutherland knocked. He opened the door, a towel in his hands, his chest bare.

  “Sutherland,” he said, clearly surprised to see her.

  “I need to talk to you before you head over to the school.”

  He moved out of the way and invited her in. His rooms traditionally belonged to the stable boss, but the current stable boss lived in town with his wife and three kids, so it had been vacant when Hank came looking for work. Sutherland didn’t see any harm in letting him have the room, especially if it meant he stayed long term. Shelby was… well, Shelby was a little hard on the cowhands. They’d had a lot of turnover since he took over as foreman five years ago. Hank was the first to stick it out longer than a few months. And Hank’s presence seemed to have softened Shelby’s rough edges because the newer cowhands were sticking it out longer with him here.

  Sutherland owed a lot to Hank.

  She glanced around the room, not really sure what she was looking for. She half expected to find evidence of the teacher’s visit last night, but there wasn’t anything visible. In fact, the room was probably the cleanest she’d ever seen it. He’d even made the bed, even though he’d been up before dawn to help Shelby round up the calves for the vet’s visit tomorrow morning.

  “The calves have been brought up?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They’re in the pen on the back pasture.”

  “Good.”

  She turned to watch him pull a plain white tee over his head, the shirt tight enough to fit snug against his impressive pecs. It reminded her a little of the white tee Mitchell wore under his uniform.

  Funny, the things that reminded her of her husband.

  “There was another break-in at the school last night.”

  Hank frowned, the wheels clearly turning in his head.

  “In the elementary school. They apparently trashed one of the kindergarten rooms.”

  “And they think it’s the same kids?”

  “They do.”

  He shook his head, turning to the closet to get a button-down work shirt. “I don’t think so. The last break-in resulted in thousands of dollars of stolen equipment. This was just a couple of kids destroying things because they could.”

  “So, you don’t think—”

  “I think it was probably a copycat.”

  Sutherland nodded. It made sense.

  “You need to check into it, see what you can make of it. If we could come up with something to present to the school board quickly, it would really help our credibility.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” He hesitated a moment. “But you know I’m not an investigator. I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

  “None of us do, Hank. We’re learning as we go.”

  He nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  Sutherland turned to go, but she couldn’t help but ask.

  “Did you have a visitor from the school last night?”

  Hank shifted, shuffling his feet like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I did.”

  “Was it about the case?”

  He looked truly uncomfortable with that question. He shuffled again, answering the question without saying a word. Sutherland touched his arm, smiling what she hoped was a warm smile.

  “You don’t have to say. I was just checking.”

  “It’s a small town.”

  “It is.”

  She patted his arm again, then turned to go. But
once again, she hesitated at the door.

  “You know, you are allowed a personal life. Just because you live where you work doesn’t mean that you can’t have a life outside of the ranch.”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  Sutherland bit back a chuckle. “This ranch is my life. Has been since I married Mitchell.”

  “But you know he’d want you to be happy.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  Chapter 7

  Hank

  The classroom was cut off from the rest of the building with crime scene tape crisscrossing the open doorway. I stood just outside of it, the sound of laughing, screaming children coming to me through the open doors at the far end of the hallway that led out to the playground. I’d never particularly disliked that sound. I’d just never grown to like it, either.

  “The police were here for hours this morning,” Veronica Patton, the vice principal, told me. “They said we shouldn’t disturb anything.”

  “I won’t. I just want to look around.”

  I pulled the tape free on the right side and stepped into the room. It was obvious from a quick look around that whomever had done this had been out to create the most destruction possible. Paints were poured on the tile floor, bookshelves turned over, and cubbies emptied of their contents. The live plants that had been growing near the windows had been dumped out, the hamster cage stomped on and the hamster missing. The teacher’s desk had been ransacked and the children’s chairs all piled into one tall tower in the center of the room.

  The more I looked around, the more I was convinced this was the act of a couple of bored teenagers who thought they could get away with it because of the previous break-ins at the high school.

  I even had an idea who’d done it.

  “Have you talked to Bobby Jensen?”

  “No. Why?”

  I continued to look around, picking up torn finger painting pictures that were scattered around the floor. The Jensens had been forced to sell their property six months ago, leaving most of their employees with less than thirty days’ notice to go find new work. Most of them moved out of the area, but a few were still around. The Jensens had stayed, too, living in a rent house here in town while the father worked early mornings at the local donut shop.

  Bobby Jensen was a troublemaker that a lot of his peers had accused of the other break-ins. But I suspected this was more his style.

  I waited for him outside his history class, watching through the window as he doodled on a piece of paper while the teacher lectured on World War II. I knew the body language, the anger that rolled off him in waves. I knew the daggers his eyes shot at anyone brave enough to make eye contact with him. And I knew the bitterness in the way he studied his peers, taking in the expensive tennis shoes and the designer clothes some of them wore while he was wearing a stained t-shirt and a pair of jeans that probably came from the thrift store in Casper.

  I was him once upon a time.

  “Bobby, I’m Hank Stratton,” I said as he came out of the classroom at the bell, falling into step beside him. “I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.”

  “I didn’t steal those computers.”

  “I know.”

  He glanced at me. “Yeah? Aren’t you here to find out who did?”

  “I am.”

  “Then why else would you want to talk to me?”

  “I was wondering what you knew about the destruction of the kindergarten class last night.”

  He shook his head, but his body language changed drastically. His shoulders came up, his head came down, and he shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, hunkering down like a soldier trying to avoid injury from an air strike.

  “I grew up on a ranch,” I said, walking quickly to keep up with him. “My dad inherited the place from my grandfather who bought the land with the last fifty bucks he had in his pocket when he arrived in Texas as a twenty-five-year-old bachelor.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” the kid said without even looking at me, “but those stories are a dime a dozen around here.”

  “Don’t I know it. I work on MidKnight Ranch, and that story is told over and over again there like a badge of honor. Who cares if the family’s been on that land for nearly two hundred years? What does history count when you can’t hardly keep the cattle fed in today’s economy?”

  Some of the tension left Bobby’s shoulders. He glanced at me, interest suddenly coming into his eyes. “Everyone always compares every ranch here to MidKnight.”

  “Isn’t that an awful burden to live under?”

  “It ruined my father.”

  “I know. A ranch like that ruined my father, too. They raised the price of feed so high that he could hardly pay it. And then they lowered the price of cattle per head until we were barely making ends meet. In the end, the bigger ranch bought out my dad, paying him barely enough to pay off the bank loans and have enough to live off of for a few months.”

  “We had to sell ours. And now my dad works in a donut shop. A fucking donut shop!”

  “Must be humiliating.”

  Bobby shook his head. “I want to get a job, want to help out, but my parents insist that I concentrate on school. They want me to go to college, to make something of myself that’s better than a failed rancher. That’s what my dad calls himself now. A failed rancher. Like there’s nothing else he could ever be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Bobby glanced at me. “There’s nothing worse than watching your dad drink himself to sleep every night, you know?”

  I did know. I’d done the same, watching my father drink and yell at the television every night. And when my mother would ask him to stop, he would tell her to shut the fuck up, tell her that he earned the right to blow off some steam after working at a dead end, minimum wage job all fucking day just to put a little food on the table.

  That was part of what drove me to get my GED and join the military. I couldn’t just sit there and watch that. And I couldn’t allow myself to become that.

  I pulled Bobby aside as we approached his next classroom.

  “You must be horribly frustrated with everything that’s going on at home.”

  Bobby glared at me. “Don’t pretend you care.”

  “I do care. I told you, I was there once upon a time. But I took myself out of that situation. I went to the military and made a life for myself.”

  “What? You want to recruit me?”

  “No. I just want you to know there’s a better road to walk down, Bobby. The one you’re on right now… it only leads in one direction.”

  He looked away, his jaw tight with anger. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “But I do. I know the frustration and the anger and the fear that comes with your situation. I dropped out of high school to help my father save the ranch, and we failed. Together we failed, but my father took it as his own failure. And he drank himself into an early grave.” I tilted my head slightly, remembering my father in his final days. “He was only forty-six when he died of liver failure.”

  Bobby looked startled when he focused on me again. “Yeah?”

  “And my mom? She got a job as a maid in this local motel. She died when a blood clot moved from her leg to her brain. Had a massive stroke while changing some stranger’s soiled sheets.”

  Bobby shook his head, tears filling his dark eyes. “I can’t just sit around and watch that happen to my folks.”

  “I know. But you won’t be able to help them if you’re arrested for vandalizing school property.”

  His jaw clenched again.

  “The best way to help your parents? Get an education. Go to college and become something better, something professional, something that will help you earn the kind of money your father never imagined he could earn. Or go to the military, burn out that anger and hurt. You could have a great career with the military.”

  “How will that help my parents?”

  “You have no idea how
great a burden it would be for your parents if you went to jail. But if you’re out in the world, taking care of yourself, what an enormous relief that would be for them.” I rested my hands on his shoulders. “Your parents only want what’s best for you. If you can prove to them that they did a good job raising you, that you can survive on your own, it will be the best gift you could ever give them.”

  I watched as my words slowly sank in, as he absorbed them in a way he probably never would have if anyone else had said them to him. Not that I was a great orator. I just wasn’t his teacher or his father.

  And then Bobby’s face fell. “But I already—”

  “You let me take care of that. You just get yourself back on the right track and don’t do anything like it again.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that I’d done the other break-in, and I just thought, well, if they were going to assume I’d already done it…”

  “I know. But you’re better than that. You’re a smart kid, Bobby, and I know you would have come to this conclusion on your own.”

  He shrugged.

  “Promise me that you’ll get yourself on the right track. And if you ever need any help, you’ll come to me.”

  “I will.” The kid actually smiled then. “Thank you, Mr. Stratton.”

  “Hank.”

  He just nodded, moving around me to go to class. I watched him go, suddenly aware that we hadn’t been as alone as I’d thought. Jonnie was standing just outside her classroom, her eyes warm and full of respect as they fell hesitantly on my face. Just looking at her flooded my system with memories of last night, of seeing her in that mussed t-shirt that spoke of a restless night in bed, her hair wild around her face. And the memory of her kiss…

  I turned away. I couldn’t allow myself to become distracted.

  ***

  “You know who trashed the kindergarten room, but you’re refusing to tell us?” Walter Michaels, the president of the school board and member of the city council, stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “Isn’t that what we’re paying you for?”

  “You’re paying me to find out who stole thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment out of the high school tech classroom. This has nothing to do with that.”