Page 39 of Ransom
"You told me a piece of it."
"That's all there is."
"Yeah. That's a fucking lie."
I gripped the wheel. The moon had moved over the mesa. We were maybe twenty minutes from the ranch turn.
"Ransom."
"You keep saying my name like it means something to you, Ranger." He turned to glare at me. "Does it?"
I opened my mouth to say something. Anything, any version of the actual truth, a piece of it, an opening, the name of a town in Texas that would tell him enough. Nothing came out.
"Yeah," he said, turning forward again. "That's what I thought."
We didn't speak again before the ranch turn.
The compound came up in the headlights. The main house had a light burning in the kitchen window. Sierra was still up, or someone was. The rest of the place sat dark under the moon.
I killed the engine.
He opened his door. Then stopped, his hand on the frame.
"Winston."
"Yeah?" I tried not to sound hopeful, but it didn't work.
"When you're ready to tell me the truth, you know where to find me."
He got out and closed the door.
Across the yard, the feral cat appeared and wound around his ankles. He stopped, crouched, scratched behind her ears, and she leaned into it. He stood and kept walking. The cat followed him into his casita. He didn't turn the porch light on.
I sat in the truck with my hands on the wheel for a long time. Then I got out, went inside, and went to bed alone in a room I was a guest in on a ranch that didn't belong to me, with the smell of Ransom Lanza on my shirt and his blood on my lips.
The cat had claimedthe bed.
She lay curled in the center of the mattress like she'd paid rent, one ear swiveled toward me while I stood at the sink running cold water over my knuckles. The blood had dried in the creases, and it took work to get it out, scrubbing with my thumbnail until the water ran clear. My face looked like shit. Both eyes bruised, nose swollen, a cut along the bridge where the guy's ring had caught me. I looked like I'd picked a fight with the ground, and the ground had won.
I turned off the water and dried my hands on the towel hanging from the nail by the stove. The casita was one room and a bathroom, which was generous language for a shower stall and a toilet behind a door that stuck. Everything I owned fit in here and didn't crowd it. The bed sat against the west wall, the stove in the corner, one chair between them.
I pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it onto the chair. My ribs ached where I'd hit the ground in the parking lot. The bruise would show by morning. I unbuckled my belt and got my jeansoff and stood in my boxers in the middle of my own house and tried to figure out what came next.
Rex's guy had threatened the ranch. I needed to tell Rafe, but Rafe was asleep, and the information would keep until morning. What wouldn't keep was the look on Winston's face when I'd pulled away from him on the side of the highway. I couldn't stop thinking about how he'd stood there with his hands raised after I'd stepped back, like he was the one who'd done something wrong.
He hadn't done anything wrong. He'd just refused to answer a question I needed answered before I could let him any closer.
The cat stretched and yawned and showed me her teeth.
"Nobody asked you," I said.
She closed her eyes.
I was reaching for the lamp when someone knocked.
I pulled on my jeans but left them unbuttoned and crossed to the door. I unlatched it and pulled it open.
Winston stood on my step with his hat held against his chest and a fistful of flowers in his other hand. Yellow ones, the kind Sierra kept in a clay pot on the kitchen table. In fact, they looked exactly like the flowers Sierra kept on the table.
