Home > Filthy Cowboy(6)

Filthy Cowboy(6)
Author: Liza Street

The cheerful voice on her phone directed her off of Main Street and onto Pedrick. The app pronounced Pedrick as “pee-drick,” which made Dew smirk, because she hadn’t outgrown potty humor, apparently.

And then Dew drove. And kept driving. And kept driving.

“Jeez, how far away is this place?” Dew asked.

After a long while, the voice said simply, “Continue on Pee-drick Road.”

“Yes, thanks so much for that useful tip,” Dew said, shooting a side-eye at her phone.

“Your destination is in approximately ten miles.”

“Good grief,” Dew said. Did she have enough gas to get back to downtown Sierraville? This was some errand. No wonder Garrett, on the rare occasions he spared a moment to chat, always had something to say about gas prices. By now, she should’ve just about reached that old dump. She and Jillian’s new crush could’ve carpooled, maybe made a date out of finding the old place. She imagined telling him about her quest to bring The Ten Thousand Doors of January to her secretive pen pal. She wondered if the stranger would be amused. Something told her he wouldn’t be. He hadn’t seemed to have much of a sense of humor.

There was a clearing up above, hard to view in the darkness, but illuminated briefly by her headlights. And jarring in the quiet hum of her car came the app’s voice, “You have arrived at 5844 Pedrick Road. Your destination is on the left.”

Dew turned down the drive. When her headlights illuminated the world in front of her, she nearly burst out laughing. “Seriously?”

The app was silent, of course. She snatched it up and looked at the map on the screen. Sure enough, 5844 was the address of the junkyard—the very one she’d been telling that man about.

S did not live in a junkyard. So something was wrong. Maybe this was a misprint of the address.

Two men waved at her from the top of some kind of old truck, their legs kicked out over the windshield. One of them said something, but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of her car’s motor running.

She could turn right around, go home. But she’d come so far already, it would be good to just get this figured out, stuff S’s book in his mailbox—which had to be close—and then reward herself with some takeout and a book of her own.

Dew stepped out of the car, pulling the white slip of paper with S’s address from the book. The winter evening seemed colder now than it had when she left the library, and she tugged her coat closer around herself before stepping forward.

Giving a tentative wave to the guys, she said, “I think I must be lost.”

 

 

4

 

 

Stetson was so absorbed in the pages of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, he barely registered the sound of an approaching car. Stetson had seen some messed-up shit in his life—mob-level drug operations, human trafficking, murder and betrayal amongst criminals—so the Corleone family’s drama was perhaps a way to make meaning from it. Or maybe he just wanted to reassure himself he wasn’t a total freak for living that kind of twisted, criminal life.

A car door slammed outside the Junkyard. Yet in the book in Stetson’s lap, Michael Corleone was going after a drug dealer. This was far more interesting than whoever might’ve shown up to disrupt the sleepy evening. But Stetson’s stomach was rumbling—it was past the time he usually scrounged for something to eat. He wouldn’t have noticed his hunger if not for the interruption. Irritating. Stetson set a piece of paper in the book, marking his place. Slowly, he eased up from his reading spot—a well-worn stump propped against his van. He’d go inside, find something in his ice chest. Blythe and Jase had sprung for pizza for the entire Junkyard pride a couple of days ago, and Stetson still had a couple of leftover slices.

Cold pizza. And he was looking forward to it.

Far cry from the delicious casseroles Annabelle used to make him, but thinking about that was only a trail to pain, so he’d eat his pizza and swallow past the constant ball of emotion blocking his throat.

Someone shouted in excitement, and Stetson cocked his head. Sounded like one of the Cruthers. The two of them were like cubs, not full-grown grizzly shifters. Punks. Everything excited them.

As Stetson got closer to the boundary, he heard the voices more clearly. The Cruthers brothers, yes, and a feminine voice. It wasn’t Blythe’s. Was it Gabrielle? That would certainly be noteworthy. She hadn’t come out of her trailer in several weeks—at least, not in anyone’s presence that Stetson knew of. If she were to break her self-imposed exile, Stetson figured those two assholes were the last people she’d want to talk to.

“I think I must be lost,” the woman said.

Not Gabrielle. A stranger. The car. A strange woman had shown up in a car. Well, this wasn’t going to be good.

“I think you’re in exactly the right place,” Weston said, and Stetson could hear that the fucker was smiling.

“No,” the woman said slowly. “I’m looking for a house. 5844 Pedrick Road. Is that close to here?”

That was the address of the Junkyard, Stetson knew, because he used it to get his books delivered. But he had instructed the guy who brought them to drive around to Grant and Caitlyn’s cabin behind the Junkyard. Was this a new delivery person?

“Let me see that paper of yours,” Dallas said.

“Um…”

“But if you could bring it over here, I’d appreciate it. We both would,” Weston said. “We sprained our ankles. Hard to walk.”

Oh, fuck. They couldn’t be serious. They were asking the woman to come over the line.

No fucking way.

Stetson began to run, still out of sight of the boundary line.

“Really.” The woman sounded skeptical. Good.

“Really,” Dallas said. “It’s a painful topic, though. We don’t like to discuss it.”

“Now you’re messing with me,” the woman said.

Stetson sped around a pile of old refrigerators and freezers, then came to a sudden halt. The woman was gorgeous, with black hair, sepia-toned brown skin, and high cheekbones that begged for kisses. She had a lush, curvy figure that couldn’t be hidden by her heavy coat.

And she held a book in her hands. The Ten Thousand Doors of January. That was the book Stetson had requested from the library. But this, this was not the delivery person. A tiny bit of blue stuck out from the book’s pages. Dew’s note.

The woman standing before him, just twenty yards away, was Dew. She had to be. Even as Stetson’s mind told him not to jump to conclusions, his heart told him it was the truth, and his eyes told him she was even more beautiful than he had imagined her.

That ball of emotion threatened to choke him again, and he swallowed. It hadn’t even been a full year since Annabelle’s death. It should be too soon.

“Maybe we’re messing with you a little,” Dallas admitted. “If you could just show us the address, we’ll take a peek and tell you if you’re in the right place or not.”

“No,” Stetson whispered, starting forward. Then he said it again, a little louder. Damn his raspy voice. Usually being quiet wasn’t a problem.

The woman—Dew—shrugged in a “what the hell” gesture. “I don’t have time to play games, so fine, if your ankles are injured, whatever.”

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