Lone Star on a Cowboy Heart Read online

They step out into the chilly night air and stand on the sidewalk with the saloon door at their backs. The street’s quiet, stars white and thick above the trees in the town square and the Yavapai County Courthouse.

  Montgomery lights up a cigarette just as Sam turns to shake his hand.

  “Thank you,” Sam says. “I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

  A hint of bashfulness crosses Montgomery’s mouth, and he nods, taking Sam’s hand and shaking it.

  “Please consider stopping by the station here in town to give your statement.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Montgomery says. “Good night, Deputy.”

  “Night.”

  Sam watches as Montgomery walks down Whiskey Row to his truck, the other man’s silhouette like the shape of something in a dream.

  ~~*

  A week passes, and if Montgomery talks to anyone at the Sheriff’s station in Prescott, Sam doesn’t hear about it. He gets into his car early on a Saturday morning and drives west out of town, taking Iron Springs Road through the forest hills before it bends southbound back into desert. It takes him twenty minutes to reach the intersection where Skull Valley’s only businesses stand: a garage and gas station, a general store, a post office, a diner, an elementary school, a fire station, and a church. The streets are deserted, but there are several vehicles parked at the diner and a couple more in front of the general store.

  Sam pulls up to the old garage, painted mustard yellow with vintage red gas pumps from the ’50s. He parks the car and goes inside the service room. A woman is sitting behind the counter reading a magazine, and music plays through an old portable radio set on the counter. The woman looks up at Sam and smiles.

  “Hello, how can I help you?” she says.

  “Hi,” he says. “I was wondering if you could help me find someone. He lives around here somewhere. I don’t have an address.”

  “Sure, who you looking for?”

  “Montgomery Clarke? He works on the Barbee ranch?”

  She nods. “He’s tall and quiet, always wears a cowboy hat. I remember him. I don’t think we’ve seen him in here for a little while. A few weeks, maybe. You know, folks like to take gas to go, especially if they live out a ways. Why don’t I go ask my husband if he knows where to find him.”

  She gets up and disappears into the back, going through the door connected to the garage. She comes back a couple minutes later and says, “I’m sorry, but he doesn’t know where Mr. Clarke lives, either. You might have better luck at the cafe. Ask Aaron, the manager. He knows the community pretty well.”

  Sam walks to the Skull Valley Diner. The small dining room is packed, every table and counter seat taken by families, couples, ranchers, and old bikers whose Harleys are parked right outside. Sunlight streams through the wide windows, their threadbare lace curtains drawn open. Forest green pleather chairs line the long, low counter made of polished blonde wood, and the wall behind the counter plated with the same wood is covered in black and white photographs of Skull Valley ranchers and cowboys from decades back. The only decoration on the diner’s white walls are a few framed prints of cowboy paintings. The doors and windows are lined with green trim that match the counter seats. One young waitress with long red hair in a ponytail moves easily across the tiled floor, dropping off coffees, checking on every party, and making small talk. She sees Sam and beelines for him. Her nametag, pinned to her uniform front, says Joy.

  “Welcome to the Skull Valley Diner, sir. It’s going to be about a fifteen to twenty minute wait for inside seating, or you can place an order to go.”

  “Actually, I want to talk to your manager. Aaron?”

  She looks a little alarmed. “Oh. Okay. Let me go get him.”

  She heads into the kitchen, then comes out again and goes to the first door on the right in the short corridor leading to the back of the diner. She knocks, speaks to the person inside, and a man emerges behind her as she returns to the main floor. He’s tall and burly, with a short, thick beard, and he’s wearing a red flannel shirt tucked into his belted jeans. His arms and shoulders bulge in the sleeves. He looks like a lumberjack, not a guy who spends his days managing a diner. He approaches Sam and holds out a big hand to shake when he’s close enough.

  “Morning,” he says. “I’m Aaron; how can I help you?”

  Sam shakes with him. “I’m Sam Roswell. The garage told me you might know where Montgomery Clarke lives. I’m looking for him.”

  “Clarke.”

  “Yeah, he’s a ranch hand—wears a black cowboy hat, quiet, probably comes in alone.”

  “Right.” Aaron, hands on his hips now, looks at the floor for a moment. “Sir, I have to be honest with you, people respect each other’s privacy around here, and I’m not too comfortable with the idea of giving a stranger my customer’s address, not knowing what your intentions are.”

  “I understand,” Sam says. He moves the right side of his jacket open to show off his deputy star clipped to his belt. “I’m with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s. I just need to talk to him about something.”

  The suspicion dissolves out of Aaron’s face, replaced with slight surprise. “Let me write you directions.”

  The house, like most others in Skull Valley, is at the end of a dirt drive off the nearest paved road. Sam has to turn around and go back north from the town center, then east past a handful of other homesteads that don’t look much like ranches or anything else. He has to count the lot entrances he passes to make sure he finds the right one, because there is nothing to mark addresses on the street, not even individual mailboxes.

  When he hits the right number, he turns into the dirt path, this one much shorter than those leading to ranch estates on bigger lots. He’s relieved when he sees the house exactly as the cafe manager described in the notes: an unpainted wood cabin with a raised porch and a stone chimney built into the back like a spine. The door and the roofline are painted pine green, and there’s an old pickup truck parked at a diagonal in front, nose pointing at the corner of the porch on the right. It’s a 1985 black Chevy Silverado with silver trim, covered in dust and sandy colored dirt caking the tires.

  Sam climbs up the porch steps, pauses, and knocks on the door light-handed.

  After a moment of silence, Montgomery opens up. He looks less intimidating without his hat on, but he’s still about six foot four in his cowboy boots. He looks at Sam with a hint of surprise. “Deputy,” he says, “what are you doing here?”

  Sam now realizes this is not usually how a man makes a friend. “You still haven’t submitted your statement about the diner robbery to the sheriff’s.”

  Montgomery pauses, raising his arm to rest against the inside of the doorjamb and leaning his weight on that leg. “Don’t ya’ll have a secretary makes phone calls? If you can track down where I live, you could’ve got my number.”

  “I had a hunch you’d ignore it if we did call.”

  Montgomery stands there for a beat, holding the door open, the same somber but unreadable expression on his face that he wore the first two times Sam saw him. “You can come in,” he says, stepping backward into the house.

  Sam follows him inside.

  The living room is almost Spartan in its decor, which tells Sam that what little decoration there is must have personal meaning to Montgomery. A long, green leather couch is pushed against the front wall of the house, below the window to the left of the door. There’s a knit Navajo blanket spread across half of the couch, accented with one dented pillow. In front of the couch, there’s a low-standing coffee table with nothing but a dirty ashtray on it, one thick, smooth slab of dark wood on short legs. A rifle, clean and polished, is mounted on the wall to the left of the kitchen entrance, and a steer skull hangs on the wall to the right. A portable heater is plugged into an outlet behind the far end of the couch.

  Opposite the couch, there are two easy chairs, one chocolate brown leather and the other olive green cloth. Behind the chairs on the floor is a colorful area rug with
faded edges that looks Mexican made. A bookcase full of books stands in the corner opposite the couch. There are coat hooks installed in the wall next to the door, two of them taken by Montgomery’s black cowboy hat and a denim jacket. Below them are boots standing neat on the floor, one cowboy pair and one pair of lace-up work shoes, both of them dirty and well-worn.

  No television. No photographs.

  “You want coffee?” Montgomery says, heading into the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” says Sam, “Coffee would be good.”

  “How do you take it?”

  “Just cream.”

  Montgomery disappears, and Sam sits on the couch, uneasy—like he isn’t supposed to be there.

  Montgomery comes back with two mugs and offers one to Sam. Before letting him have it, he looks at him and says, “I ain’t giving you a statement.” He turns around and sits in the brown chair, smelling the coffee without drinking it yet.

  “Why not?” Sam says.

  “You were there. You saw what happened. I don’t have to tell it to you.”

  Before he can mention it as a justification for giving testimony, Sam remembers that Montgomery already explained his actions at the diner when they spoke in the saloon. “Guess I can write the statement myself and hand it to the sheriff.” He tests his coffee with a ginger sip.

  Montgomery’s looking out the window behind Sam, and the sunlight sharpens the color of his eyes. Hazel green. Slate. Earth colors.

  “How’d you know I’d be home?” he says.

  “I didn’t,” says Sam. “How many days off you get?”

  “Two. Sometimes three. Guess you could say I’m part-time, in ranching terms. Bill’s got plenty of hands younger’n me happy to be there six or seven days a week, and I don’t need the money that bad. But I like to stay busy.”

  Montgomery drinks some of his coffee.

  “What do you do, exactly?” Sam asks.

  “A lot of things,” says Montgomery. “Most of it amounts to looking after horses and cattle. There’s the occasional maintenance job. I’ve done plenty of teaching to the younger hands. First timers. Bill appreciates not having to do it himself.”

  They’re quiet for a couple minutes, sipping from their mugs.

  “You ain’t been here long, have you?” Montgomery says, looking at Sam.

  “I moved from California a few months ago,” says Sam. “I was with Lassen County Sheriff’s Department up north.”

  “Why the hell’d you come to Prescott, Arizona?”

  Sam just looks at him, eyes sliding down into his coffee as he chooses not to answer.

  Montgomery doesn’t push.

  “How did you end up here?” Sam asks him.

  “I was in Tucson for a while. Decided I wanted a change of scenery.” Montgomery stretches out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles, and slouches into his chair. “You any closer to finding your fugitive?”

  “Joel Troutman. No.”

  “He’s probably long gone with that money,” says Montgomery. “If he’s smart.”

  “His wife’s still in Dewey-Humboldt.”

  “Giving up a wife’s one thing. Giving up your freedom’s something else.”

  Sam looks at him and doesn’t reply. The sun coming through the window behind him is warm across his shoulders and his bare neck. “You live alone, I take it,” he says.

  “Last I checked,” says Montgomery. “You?”

  Sam nods. “Yeah. I came by myself.”

  They fall silent again for a long few minutes, drinking their coffee, never looking at each other at the same time. The house is quiet, not even the sound of wind against the wood or the windowpanes.

  “How long have you been in Skull Valley?” Sam says.

  “Four years,” says Montgomery.

  “Why did you decide to live here instead of Prescott?”

  “Fewer people, the better.”

  Sam doesn’t understand the appeal of isolation, so he finishes his coffee instead of responding. He wants to know if Montgomery has any friends at all, but he can’t think of a good way to ask that question.

  “You should put up wanted posters,” Montgomery says.

  “What?” says Sam.

  “For Troutman.”

  “Right. Maybe.”

  Montgomery sits up, leans forward, and sets his mug on the table. He stands, digging into his back pocket for a lighter. “I need a smoke,” he says.

  Sam gets up and follows him outside. They stand at the top of the porch steps, even though there’s one rocking chair behind them. Montgomery lights a cigarette, draws on it, and exhales with a long sigh of satisfaction. Sam’s got his empty mug in between both hands like an excuse for being here.

  “You know people in Prescott?” he says.

  “Not really,” says Montgomery, looking out at the landscape. “The dead man’s wife—she ask who killed him?”

  Sam looks at him. “No. I don’t think she cares.”

  Montgomery’s quiet for a beat, bowing his head and scraping his boot on the step, then looking up again. His face doesn’t give anything away. “What’d you say his name was?”

  “Decker. Ed Decker.”

  Montgomery smokes for a minute without speaking. “Tell me something, Deputy. Why’d you pick law enforcement?”

  Sam blinks at Montgomery. Nobody’s asked him that question in years. He hasn’t thought about it in as long either. “I wanted to do something with my life that mattered, I guess. And I probably thought, when I was younger, that it’d be exciting. Why did you go into ranching?”

  “Whatever keeps a man close to nature beats just about anything else, I reckon. There’s a satisfaction in going home and feeling worked. If I’m going to sit on my ass all day, I might as well be dead.”

  Sam smiles, not without feeling a twinge of shame in his gut about all the hours he spends sitting at a desk or in his car when in uniform.

  Montgomery takes one last draw on his cigarette, now smoked to the filter. “Good luck forging my statement,” he says.

  Sam takes it as his cue to leave. “Thanks,” he says, offering his empty mug to the other man.

  Montgomery takes it and drops his cigarette butt inside.

  Sam nods and starts down the steps with his fingers shoved into his pockets and a sense of disappointment. He must be lonelier than he realized.

  “Hey,” Montgomery calls, when Sam’s halfway to his car.

  Sam looks back.

  “You know how to ride?”

  “A horse, you mean?”

  “What else?”

  Sam pauses. “I’m rusty. “

  Montgomery looks at him. “Snoop your way to the Barbee ranch next Saturday, nine in the AM. We’ll see how rusty you are.”

  He turns around and goes back into the house, the screen door slapping against the jamb behind him.

  Sam smiles.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Montgomery drives out to Dewey-Humboldt on his next day off, not thinking too hard about why. He stops at the only place in town worth being in: Billy Jack’s Saloon, a standalone dive on the side of Highway 69. There are a few vehicles parked in front and alongside of the small building, even at eleven o’clock in the morning. A tall metal pole stands outside the saloon with a red COORS sign hanging to the side at the top and another sign reading BILLY JACK’S SALOON with images of a beer mug and a redhead shooting pool. Wire fence encloses a narrow area of outside seating right next to the front door, and multi-colored big bulb string lights line the roof edges. Part of the saloon’s south side is nothing but exposed wooden boards.

  Inside, the bar is on the right, and the pool tables and extra seating are on the left. The ceiling above the bar is covered in dollar bills glued on with signatures and messages scrawled in black marker. Neon light signs for Budweiser, Tecate, Coors Light, and Jack Daniel’s Original Hard Cola glow red and green on the walls. There’s a small TV mounted in the left corner behind the bar and another one on the back wall of the saloon opposi
te the entrance, the older box models instead of flat screens.

  Montgomery sits near the middle of the bar, wearing his black cowboy hat.

  The bartender, a stocky man in his forties with a fringe of pepper hair lining his jaw and upper lip, comes over. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he says.

  “Here I am,” says Montgomery. “How are you?”

  “Fine. What’ll you have?”

  “Cold beer would be good. Bottled.”

  The bartender pulls a beer out of the cooler and pops off the cap before setting it in front of Montgomery.

  “Thanks,” Montgomery says and starts sipping.

  They don’t speak for a few minutes. The bar is quiet enough that they can hear the football game on TV, and the bartender turns his back on Montgomery to watch it.

  “Hey,” he says, voice low and smoker’s raspy.

  The bartender faces him again.

  “You ever serve a man in here by the name of Joel Troutman?”

  “Maybe. Tell me what he looks like and I might remember.”

  Montgomery saw a photograph of Troutman on the local news just last night, on Bill Barbee’s TV. Either the bartender didn’t watch the broadcast or he’s playing dumb. Troutman was presented as a missing person from Dewey, not as the runaway suspect who survived the diner hold-up in Prescott. He figures the sheriff’s department wants Troutman to think that they haven’t identified him as their fugitive. He gives the bartender the description he heard on the news.

  “He’s under six foot, dark hair, little bit more on the face than you. Between thirty-five and forty years old. Average build, kinda broad in the shoulders. He’s married. Drives a blue Ford pick-up.”

  The bartender creases his face in concentration.

  “I think he works construction,” Montgomery adds.

  “I might know who you’re talking about,” says the bartender.

  “You mighta seen him come in with Ed Decker, if that helps.”

  “Shit. I do know who you’re talking about. Joel, yeah, he did come with Ed a few times.” The bartender leans down toward Montgomery and lowers his voice. “Ed Decker’s dead. Something happened to him a few weeks ago. Bunch of rumors are going around.”