Chapter Six

They were all dead.

Outside of their home, bullet holes in each. Mona and little Nate. And Hector.

It was Jess that found the ability to move first. Walking to the man wearing black, he kneeled there beside the crumpled frame. It was obvious by the location of the blow to the head that it had been self-inflicted. Jess gently removed the weapon responsible from the limp fist, putting it out of the man's reach as if he could suddenly waken and do the horrible deed all over again.

Seeing boots beside him, Jess looked up to Mort's weary gaze. "He killed himself."

"Yeah." Mort swallowed. "So I see."

"But he couldn't have done this to his wife and son," Jess said, hating to see the other two bodies again, but also needing to, and he put his gaze on Mona. "He loved her, Mort. Loved his boy. He didn't kill them."

"I'll take your word on that for now, Jess. But with this view in front of me, it's hard to not put the entire blame on the man below us. We did hear the shots. All three of them."

"But they didn't come all together. Remember? Two were, and the third came later."

Mort nodded. He hadn't forgotten, but he would need to have more proof than distant sound to not believe the man had reached full loco and pulled the trigger, even on loved ones. Having Billy follow him so far, Oates could have thought he was caught, or maybe had been in an argument with his wife. Anything could have put him over the edge. Or he could have been pushed.

Mort's eyes caught hold of Slim, leaning down and when he rose back up, he held something in his hands. "What is it, Slim?"

"A Bible." Slim answered, his thumb softly touching the edge. "The wind fluttered the pages into Genesis, but I think it had been open even further in the beginning. Look at this."

Standing beside Slim, Mort's eyes followed Slim's fingers, sliding down a list of names. The first was a date of marriage to a couple that likely was already gone, the second and third were of births, a pair of sons that would be in their thirties now. The last were of deaths. His head turned. Theirs.

He tried, but Mort couldn't clear away the tightness in his throat. "Why would he write down the names of Mona and Nate and today's date, but not his own?"

"I don't know," Slim answered, shaking his head, stilling it long enough to seek Jess' thoughts and received the same negative reply. "But it's obvious that they were dead before he was."

"So this proves that he took his life," Mort said, hand resting at the back of his neck. "Thief and murderer that he was, I still can't help but feel sorry for him."

Shutting the Bible, Slim took it to a porch chair and left it. Maybe there would be somebody in the family left to take such a possession. And everything else the Oates family owned. Or shouldn't he have called them Davies? His hand resting on the doorknob as he pushed it ajar, Slim frowned as he looked at the interior. Simple, but clean, and kind of like how every other poor, homesteading family in the territory lived. There shouldn't have been any reason for Davies to turn outlaw. But because the hearts that mattered here could no longer reach out to tell him the truth, Slim could only dwell on what his brain uttered.

Leaving the house behind him, Slim's boots began to turn toward Jess, already digging into the ground next to the existing cross, but then his eyes found where the ground had been marred some distance further. Someone else had been here. "Mort, come look."

"What'd you find, Slim?"

"Riders." Slim pulled his hand away from the tracks that had pounded off to the north and knew instinctively that these belonged to the killers of a woman and boy. "Who would do this, Mort?"

"Someone that would go to any length for money." Mort waited to see if Slim would fill in the blank, when there was no response other than eyebrows rising, Mort completed the answer. "Bounty hunter."

"Make that plural," Slim said, angrily brushing away a pair of marks with his palm. "There were two of them here."

"They do sometimes travel in pairs, Slim."

"But why kill Mrs. Oates?" It was bad enough looking at the lifeless face of the woman, but Slim couldn't bear to put his eyes back on the boy, lying face down in his own puddle. "And the boy? Was he even seven?"

"I reckon she was just defending her man," Jess said, getting understanding as he prepared Mona for her permanent rest. "There looks to've been a struggle here. She's got blood and skin underneath her fingernails. Can't say about the boy, though. Maybe he just got in the line of fire."

Slim's hands clenched tightly at his sides. "But if it was bounty men, Mort, why didn't they just wait for Davies to arrive home and to collect? That was who was worth the cash, not his wife and son."

"Looking at how fast they must've sped off, I can only assume that they knew they were in for hell after they killed these two and didn't wait for Davies to find out what they'd done. He probably heard the shots like we did and hurried in. Only to find the kind of carnage that would put a man over the kind of edge that takes his own life. Come on, Slim, let's help Jess with the burying and then we'll follow where these tracks lead. Someone's going to pay for these deaths here today."

But when the tracks turned invisible at a stream, there was nothing for the trio of badges to do except turn their horses around. There might have been some killers on the run, but since the culprit responsible for the ranch partners taking the stars from Mort in the first place was underground, Slim and Jess wouldn't be following Mort back to Laramie. They split at the trail that wound around the hillside that would take them home.

Not quite dusk when they arrived, Jess slid out of his saddle, weary, and wearing the familiar stab of trauma that he had known since his youth. It took a lot out of him to bury a child. The reminder was so stark he didn't notice another dose of discomfort until it was right in front of him.

His gun found his hand the moment his eyes found his partner, coming up behind him. "Slim, the front door's open a crack."

It would take a heap of chores in front of her to keep Daisy from noticing that Mike didn't get the door shut when he went through it. Since the barn was vacant when they arrived, there was no thought that the boy was merely taking a quick run from one place to the other and she let the disobedience slide. All they could think, and feel, was that there was trouble on the other side of that crack.

Slim now wearing his iron in his clasp, the two men shared a nod and then Jess' left reached out to push open the door. The silence on the other side was so frightening, even the floorboards were trembling. Slim was so tense that he flinched at their whine under his feet.

"Daisy?" Jess tested, but the beat increasing inside of his chest was his only response.

Slim's stride longer, he took the route to the kitchen and finding it empty, he connected to Jess' blue and saw the same fear that he possessed. "The stove's cold."

Significant. As Daisy would have been making dinner, even if Mike would be the only one sitting at the table. Morning, noon and eve, there was always a warm meal set in the Sherman household.

"Maybe…" Slim started, but what he was about to suggest, that Daisy was just unwell, felt so foreign to his tongue that the rest of the words couldn't fall off of it.

Jess' head angling toward her bedroom door, solidly shut, Jess waited until Slim was across from him and then with a jolt that could have kicked an entire wall over, Jess' boot punched the door completely off its hinges. The blow to get inside Daisy's bedroom made him stumble, but the sight would have done the same.

Jess' lashes fell. "My God."

Slim's silent breath was quick to follow Jess' short prayer, only his was followed by an exclamation point. "No!"

Jess quickly spun on his heels. Only a few hours before he had buried a boy. Someone in the heavens tell him that he wasn't going to have to bury another, especially one that was more like a son. Please! "Mike!"

Slim wasn't far behind his partner, but even the few steps felt like the space was a day's hard ride away. It was an even harder stop when Slim entered Mike's bedroom. He came upon Jess' slightly slumped frame, gun hanging low in his hand, eyes a blend of terror and fury. If Slim would have been looking in the mirror, he would have seen the same.

"Jess."

He barely moved his head. "He's gone."

Slim's hand dropped his iron into his holster, no longer needed. For now. "I know, Pard. Daisy too."

"Why?" It came out with the kind of croak that might have meant that the voice that produced it was near his own death. By the way Jess felt inside, maybe he was.

"I don't know. But we're going to find out."

"Slim, when I get my hands on whoever's responsible for this, I'm gonna…"

"We both will." Slim's hand gripped Jess' shoulder, usually like steel, but underneath he felt a strange kind of weakness. Giving a squeeze in case his own palm felt just as small, he added fire to his throat for the repeat. "We both will."

Jess nodded, forcing the moisture away from his lashes. It was too soon for them to fall. In fact, he willed them to not drain at all. But if there was something worse to see than Mike's disheveled bedding, a clear indication of a struggle, or when he put his eyes on the source of the blood splattered over Daisy's bed, then the burning drops would come no matter what he told them to do.

"Come on, Jess. Let's get going."

He wouldn't need Slim to say this part twice. Hurrying out of Mike's empty bedroom, Jess rushed to the drawer of ammunition and took out every box. Not even exploding every one of them would be able to stifle what flamed inside of him. But these would do for a start.

Handing half of the boxes to Slim, Jess aimed for the kitchen to grab whatever food would fit in his saddlebags, but when he saw a droplet of red at the floor directly in front of the door, he went still. All that was allowed to rove was his eyes, and as they drifted upward, there was a knife, tip coated in blood, holding a note to the door's center.

"Slim!"

His partner was behind him the moment Jess ripped the page off of the door. Slim's breath was held and then released so hard at the shade of red that stained the paper that the hairs on the back of Jess' neck moved.

He felt so numb, Jess thought his heart had no existence as he read aloud. "Harper. You did this to Mona and Nate. And now I'm doing it to you. I'm taking your family just like mine was taken from me. You brought those bounty hunters turned killers to my doorstep, but now you'll wish that it was them that'd come calling for you instead of me."

"It's signed Hector Davies," Slim said, reading over Jess' shoulder when Jess' lips couldn't spit out the name at the end.

The note turned into a ball in Jess' hand. "Davies is dead, I saw him!"

"What's more, I buried him."

"He can't come back." Jess turned sharply to look into Slim's ashen cheeks. "He just can't."

"Then who wrote this? Who took Daisy and Mike?"

Suddenly Jess' eyes were staring at his feet. "Unless…"

"Unless what?"

Now they came back up, resting against the sparks of blue across from him. "Maybe he wasn't dead."

"But I buried him."

"No. You buried somebody. Somebody whose face was marred so badly by a fatal bullet that it coulda been somebody else. It had to be somebody else! Hector Davies is still alive, and he's got Daisy and Mike." Narrowing his eyes was just the first part of his face that turned into incense. The rest of his features rapidly followed, complete with the locked jaw that would grind with the hardest grit as he forced out the vow. "But I guarantee you, he's still gonna get his place in hell. I'll personally see to that."