The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(14)
As Josie was cresting a hill sloping into a patchy field of prairie grass and mesquite, her eyes were drawn to her home ahead. Its pink stucco walls glowed each night at sunset. The house was a simple rectangle with a deep front porch held aloft by hand-hewn pecan timbers. Two low-slung chairs, one for her neighbor, Dell Seapus, and one for her, faced the panoramic view of the endless Chihuahuan Desert that stretched out beyond the Rio and deep into Mexico. Behind her house, the Chimiso Peak, a rocky crag in the midst of the Chinati Mountain range, was visible.
Chester, a brown and tan bloodhound, lay on the porch in front of her door, head on his front paws, his ears draped across the floor like a head scarf. Josie knew he would not raise his head until she stood in front of him, hand outstretched to scratch behind his velvet ears. She smiled, rolled her windows up, and shut the jeep off. She’d asked Dell to stop in and feed the dog last night while she was away from home. Dell would never admit it, but he loved the dog as much as Josie did.
She unlocked the front door and followed the hound inside to a living room painted a buttery yellow and filled with rustic Southwestern furniture, Navajo Indian blankets, and more benches and chairs that Dell had carved from fallen cedar and pecan trees off his ten-thousand-acre ranch. The seventy-year-old bachelor’s ranch was tucked into the foothills behind her house. Josie had come to know Dell shortly after joining the police department nine years ago. He had been robbed at gunpoint in his barn, where two horse thieves had loaded five of Dell’s prized Appaloosas onto a trailer and taken off. After a four-week investigation, Josie tracked the men to New Mexico and returned the horses unharmed. Her detective work had established her as a first-rate cop in town and won her a loyal friend in Dell.
Josie had spent quite a bit of time at Dell’s ranch over the course of the investigation and fell in love with the desert. Dell deeded her ten acres of land on the front end of his property, and she built her home with the trust money she had received as a child when her father was killed in a line-of-duty accident. She moved from Indiana at the age of twenty-four to escape her mother and begin a new life. A year after moving to Artemis, she moved into the first place that had ever felt like home to her. Dell claimed to always have her back, and she did not doubt him.
Josie unstrapped her uniform belt and hung it on a hook just inside her pantry door, stuck a bag of popcorn in the microwave for dinner, and walked back to the house’s only bedroom, barely large enough to hold her queen-sized bed, dresser, and nightstand. She hung her uniform and bulletproof vest in the closet, then dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She exhaled deeply, rubbing the small of her back, and looked at her empty bed, the white sheets and cotton blanket in a jumble. Her thoughts strayed to Dillon Reese, but she turned and left the room, unwilling to wander down that lonely road.
Josie laid her watch on the bathroom counter and noticed her tired eyes in the mirror. Her skin had the permanent tan of a desert dweller, and fine wrinkles radiated from the corners of her eyes from too many hours squinting into the bright afternoon light. She didn’t consider herself vain, although the lines around her eyes bothered her occasionally. She wondered if she had enough to show in her life for the age that had started to accumulate on her face. When Josie was growing up, her mom had often told her she might be pretty if she would smile once in a while. She envied others who smiled often and laughed easily. She wished she could loosen up, laugh at simple things, and see the humor in life. She had tried to develop that trait in herself through the years, but she had found there were few things more uncomfortable than forced laughter.
In the kitchen, she poured a double shot of warm bourbon, dumped salt into a microwaved popcorn bag, and slumped into the couch. After two hours of CNN had done little to still her racing thoughts, she washed down two sleeping pills with another shot of bourbon and hoped her brain would grow numb by ten o’clock. She desperately needed a good night’s sleep. When the phone rang and she didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, she picked it up.
“Great god a’mighty, you’re a hard one to track down.”
Josie knew the voice immediately, and in a split second considered begging off as a wrong number.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I’m fine, not that it means anything to you.”
Josie listened to her mother inhale deeply on a cigarette, and sadness settled over her like a bad dream she couldn’t shake.
“You ever planning on calling me again?”
“Our phone calls don’t work out so well,” Josie said.
After Josie left Indiana nine years ago, she had called her mom twice a year—once at Christmas and once for her mom’s birthday—until two years ago. Their last conversation had ended in a terrible fight, and Josie quit calling. This was the first time her mother had made the call. Josie figured she needed something.
“The operator. She said this area code was Texas. You still living out there?”
“That’s right.”
“What city you living in?”
Josie closed her eyes and drank, thankful for the heat in her throat. She pictured her mother as she’d seen her last, the night Josie bailed her out of jail on a public intoxication charge. She had gotten drunk and physical with the bartender at the Holiday Inn lounge. Josie had paid the bond, then watched her mother stagger out from lockup, her head down, not from shame, but because she was too drunk and tired to hold it level. Her long red hair had been a wild tangled mess, and she wore a miniskirt and halter top that revealed too much sunbaked skin.