When It's Right(3)

Be safe, Justin. Be happy.

Her body slammed into the roof of a car with a sickening thud. Everything went black.





Chapter 2



Three Peaks Ranch, Montana

Blake Bowden tossed a flake of mixed grass into Bingo’s feed holder. He pet the Thoroughbred on the neck and walked out of the stall.

Dee rushed down the aisle, ignoring the horses sticking their heads out to greet her. Her brow creased into worry lines. She kept her steady gaze locked on him. “You have to do something. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s on his third shot of whiskey.”

Blake caught the urgent tone, and his insides knotted with tension. Something terrible must have happened to get his old friend drinking the hard stuff. The man barely had more than a beer or two in a given week.

“He’s in his office. He won’t speak to me.” Dee’s eyes filled with fear and worry. She twisted the dish towel in her hands. Blake had never seen her this out of sorts.

He touched his hand to hers to reassure her. “Okay now, I’ll go up and see what I can do.”

Blake rushed up to the house, Dee hot on his trail. She stopped in the living room and held her hand out to indicate her husband, sitting in his study, his head bowed. Blake walked in and stood in front of Bud’s desk. Bud didn’t look up but continued to stare at the newspaper. A bottle of whiskey sat on the desk by his elbow, next to a half-­filled tumbler. The desolate vibes coming off him filled the room and nearly stole Blake’s breath. He’d known Bud since he was a kid, long before Bud made him a partner in Three Peaks Ranch. He’d never seen the man this miserable in his life.

“Bud, what happened?”

Several long moments passed, but finally Bud’s gruff voice broke the eerie silence. “He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Ron.”

Dee gasped behind Blake. He turned and met her watery gaze. Her hand pressed to her open mouth.

Blake knew all about Ron, the man who convinced Bud’s only daughter to run off with him when she was just eighteen. Wild and unruly, they spent years moving from town to town, from one dead-­end job to the next, drinking and doing drugs. Bud lost track of them years ago, until one day he received a letter from the coroner’s office asking him to claim his daughter’s body. Bud hadn’t caught up to her, but the drugs had. By the time Bud picked up Erin’s ashes, Ron had split town with their daughter. No forwarding address as usual.

“What happened?” Blake figured he’d finally up and died from an overdose.

“She shot him.”

“What? Who?”

“My granddaughter. Gillian. Twice. In the chest.”

“Back up. How did you find out? Did she contact you?”

Bud shook his head, but he never took his eyes off the paper. “I had some time to kill at the airport in Denver, so I went into the bar and ordered a beer and a burger, thinking I’d pass the time before my flight watching a ball game on TV. Guy sitting next to me swore and said, ‘Some ­people deserve to get shot.’ ” Bud smoothed his hand over the paper and the photo Blake couldn’t really see. “He got up and left, but didn’t take the paper. I slid it over to see what he’d been talking about.” Bud sucked in a deep breath and traced his finger over the photo.

Blake stepped closer to the desk. Bud spun the San Francisco Chronicle and scooted it toward Blake. The photo showed firefighters and police kneeling on top of a car, helping someone who’d obviously fallen onto the roof. Blake read the caption under the photo. “ ‘After an altercation with her father, Gillian Tucker was thrown through a second-­story window. She survived. Her father, Ron, died at the scene from gunshot wounds to the chest.’ ”

Fate’s a tricky beast.

It could bring you something you most desired or dump you on your ass. Bud had been handed his ass on a platter.

The picture was black and white, an up close view of the gruesome scene. The only part of Gillian Blake she could see was her feet. She’d been wearing a pair of well-­worn canvas shoes with a hole near the toe. Two firemen, paramedics, and a police officer blocked the rest of her, swallowed by the now-­concave roof. Blake couldn’t take his eyes off her tiny feet hanging from the top of the car.

The image transposed with the nightmare in his mind of another woman’s feet tangled in the limbs of a felled tree. But that was the past. Maybe the confusion in his mind between the past and the present explained his surging need to help that poor girl. Not that it would make up for what he’d done.

Bud’s voice rang out like a gunshot exploding into the silent room. He spoke in his normal tone, but the room, the house, seemed so empty, as empty as the man sitting behind the desk. “I called the San Francisco Police Department. I wanted to be sure it was him. I had to be sure it was her. She shot him after he beat her. She fired twice into his chest. Completely out of his mind on drugs, he still had the strength to grab her and shove her through the window before he died.”