Black Heat (6 page)

Roan grabbed a pink lead from a hook on the wall. After a moment's hesitation she dug into an old porcelain cookie jar shaped like an owl and held out a fistful of treats. "You can reward her if she waits for you before she crosses the street," she said. "The only thing is...she can't sit down. I mean, she can, but I don't make her. It hurts her too much."

Angel, her ears perked up at the jingle of the leash, went to stand next to Roan with an air of gleeful anticipation. Cal saw the problem: she walked with such a profound limp it took her twice as long to cross the small room as it would another dog.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked, pocketing the treats and bending to clasp the leash to her collar.

"Hip dysplasia. Advanced—both back legs. She needs surgery." Roan took a breath and expelled it. "Which is why I need to find Grandpop's treasure. If I don't—"

She didn't finish the sentence, but before she turned away Cal saw her brush tears angrily from her eyes.

"Would you like tea?" she asked, busying herself at her stove, picking up the teakettle and turning on the heat.

"Sure," Cal said, and let himself out the door of the small apartment, going slowly so as not to rush Angel, who didn't seem to mind having a new companion for her walk.

But that wasn't what he meant to say at all. Cal had been planning to turn around and leave, and instead he had committed to a walk in the rain and a cup of tea, which he didn't even like.

When he pulled the door closed, he turned and saw Angel looking up at him, as if waiting for him to catch up before they set out on their walk. And he could almost swear the animal was wearing the canine equivalent of a knowing smile.

#

Roan watched from the window, tracing the rivulets of rainwater on the outside of the glass with her fingertip. The apartment was scented with lemon, steaming from the herbal tea, and she'd put out a plate of gingersnaps that Mrs. Castleberry had brought over.
Roan didn't have much of a sweet tooth, but Mrs. Castleberry loved having someone to bake for, so Roan pretended to consume the cookies and muffins and banana bread her landlady baked even while most of it got taken down to the bike shop and devoured by Roan's co-workers.

At least it was appreciated, Roan thought. A little kindness could go a long way. She glanced at the photograph hung over her fireplace: her mom and dad, shortly before her mom got sick, laughing with their arms around each other's waists. Roan knew now that they couldn't possibly have been as perfect—or as happy—as she had once believed. Life was complicated; even the best times were colored by everyday disappointments and failures and losses.

People did the best they could, she was starting to understand. But that didn't make up for everything that had happened in her twenty-four years. Everything she'd lost and endured and missed out on.

People who thought they had all the answers—like Cal, who seemed to be on a quest to check off good deeds—could be dangerous. He didn't realize that sometimes the best thing to do was just stay out of the way. If Roan could just find the treasure she needed, Angel would get her surgery and everyone could go back to living their lives and Roan would never set foot on the old ranch again.

She was so deep in thought that she didn't see Cal and Angel return. He knocked on the door and then opened it himself. "Okay if we come back in? Seems to have gotten worse out there."

He stood dripping on the braided rug while Angel shook, carefully, even that motion hurting her. Roan recognized the faint whimper she made deep in her throat and went to get one of the pain pills Dr. Raj had given her for the hardest days.

"Weather makes it worse sometimes," she said.

"You have a towel or something I can use to dry her off?"

"Of course. Here. Oh, I'm so sorry you got soaked," she added, unable to suppress a faint grin. There wasn't an inch of him that was dry. His jet black hair, however, stood straight up; rather than plastering against his scalp as her own would.

He ran a hand through it self-consciously—and ineffectively. "My hair looks ridiculous, doesn't it," he said ruefully, as he bent down next to Angel. He unhooked her leash and handed it back to Roan.

"It's just so..." Roan struggled for the right words. "Tall?"

"Yeah, I know. It's been that way my whole life. I'm part Cherokee, part Mexican, and I guess the combination...well, anyway."

"How do you get it to stay down when you're not walking in the rain?" Roan set down the bottle of medication and grabbed a second towel.

Cal looked away self-consciously. "You don't want to know," he groaned. "There's...
product
involved."

Roan laughed. "You say that like it's a dirty secret!"

"Hey, I live with a bunch of guys who work on oil rigs. You have to man up in an environment like that—it gets kind of high testosterone."

Roan handed him the towel. She was enjoying this—more than she'd enjoyed a conversation in a while. It wasn't that she didn't like talking to the guys at work, but the shop was busy, the workload satisfyingly full, and there wasn't a lot of time for banter.

Of course, that wasn't all of it. Roan felt herself redden as Cal peeled off his jacket and she saw that even the shirt underneath was soaked; her gaze traveled over the damp fabric sticking to his chest and arms. Cal was
built
—he had the biceps and pecs of a weightlifter, and even through the shirts she could see the definition in his abs.

Roan swallowed hard. "Let me throw your jacket in the dryer," she said.

"Well..." he hesitated, and she took the garment from his hand.

"And your other things. Your clothes. I can have them dry in..."

Her voice broke off as she saw how he was looking at her. Hungrily. Letting his gaze travel over her face, down the soft sweater she'd slipped on while he'd been walking Angel to replace her rain-dampened shirt.

"I mean I have something you can put on," she said, babbling. "Sweats from work. They're Hank's. Oh! I mean, I only borrowed them one day when I got grease on my pants...never mind, forget that I—I mean, unless you want—"

"It would be good to get out of these wet things," Cal said, looking at least as embarrassed as her. "Tell the truth, I've got water running down my back."

Roan dashed to her bedroom and dug the sweats out of the dresser. At least they were clean; she kept forgetting to give them back to Hank. She handed them to Cal without looking and pointed to the bathroom.

"Just throw your stuff in the dryer," she said. "Let me know if you need me to turn it on..."

She nearly groaned at her unwittingly suggestive word choice, but Cal was already down the hall.

"Don't worry," he said as he closed the door. "I've been doing my own laundry all my life. I can probably figure it out."

CHAPTER SEVEN

When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Roan had gotten Angel toweled off, and the dog was resting on her bed in the corner of the kitchen, licking her chops.

"I put peanut butter on her pills," Roan admitted sheepishly. "That way she takes them without any trouble."

"I probably would, too," Cal said.

"We can sit in here," she said, putting the teapot and two cups on a tray and setting it on her coffee table.

"Don't you have to get back to work?" He hesitated before taking a seat at the other end of her couch. He felt a little ridiculous in the borrowed sweatshirt, which stretched tight across his chest, and the sweatpants that bagged around his waist. He sat down gingerly at the other end of the fussy old pink couch.

"In a bit," Roan said. "Walt won't care if I take some extra time. I always stay until the work's done. I mean, I'll go just as soon as your laundry is dry," she added, blushing.

"I really appreciate it."

"How did you and your friends end up renting the bunkhouse?" she asked abruptly, changing the subject.

"It was...I ran into someone I went to high school with. Jimmy Mason. He told me they were all headed up here together to find work. He asked me if I might want to come along. Then he talked the rest of them into inviting me."

He shook his head. It was still hard to talk about, even after everything had been worked out between them.

"You look like he had to twist your arm."

"No, it's not that...it's just that we ran in different crowds back when we were in school."

She waited expectantly, her cup lifted halfway to her lips. As she blew on the steam, Cal couldn't help fixating on the way her lips pursed in an 'o', her eyes widened in curiosity. In the filtered light coming from the rainy sky, her eyes looked stormy; their navy depths were sparked with silver. And she had a scar that he hadn't noticed before, a tiny crescent high up on her cheek. He wondered how she'd gotten it—maybe a bicycle accident?

He wanted to touch it. Wanted to touch her face so badly that his fingers twitched.

Instead, he cleared his throat. "Jimmy is the smartest guy I've ever met. He and his friends...well, they were the good kids, you know? Teachers liked them, coaches loved them. Parents loved them. They dated nice girls."

"And you?" her mouth twitched at the corner, as though she were trying not to smile.

"Let's just say I was focused on other things." On detention hall, if he was honest with her. Though detention hall had been the least of his infractions. "Anyway, our paths didn't cross much. But then we met up again and the timing couldn't have been better. I'd graduated from the academy down there but I couldn't get on the force. There was a lot of competition for jobs."

He shifted uncomfortably, because he wasn't telling the whole truth. Yes, there were more applicants than jobs, but he'd graduated at the top of his class. What was holding him back was that everyone in Red Fork remembered how troubled Calvin Dixon had been. More than a few of the Red Fork citizens had been inconvenienced—or worse—by his adolescent hijinks.

And the police chief, who'd been a patrol officer back then, unfortunately remembered a very different version of Cal. Their first encounter was when Cal had been caught, at age fifteen, breaking windows in the high school's science lab.

"Jimmy told me unemployment in Conway was down around three percent," he said, wanting to get off the subject of the past.

Roan nodded. "It's pretty amazing."

"I couldn't get that figure out of my head. I mean, you've got to be trying not to find work in a place with unemployment that low, right? So I started wondering whether there was a job for me on the police force. It took me a few days to get up the courage to call. Looked the number up online and when the duty sergeant answered, my voice cracked like I was thirteen years old. But when I asked if they were hiring, they said yes so fast I nearly dropped the phone."

"So you've got the job?"

"Not officially. But they're looking to add several officers so I've got a good chance. I don't know what the applicant pool looks like, but the chief has been very encouraging. They're announcing hires right after the last of the exams, the week after next."

All he had to do was pass the exam and wait for his references to check out. And not run into any trouble over the next few days.

"Are your folks happy to have a police officer in the family?"

Cal felt a familiar ache in his heart. He didn't look at Roan as he answered. "It was just me and my grandmother. She took me in after my mom died." He left out the part where he lived in foster homes for a few terrible years before Nana took him in. "I think she would have been happy for me to get on the force. I just wish she had lived long enough to see it."

"How long ago did you lose her?" Roan's voice was soft and husky, and Cal remembered that she'd lost all of her family as well, other than Mimi. Great. They were a pair of orphans, commiserating over their lot in life. Not exactly the conversation he'd meant to have with her.

Somehow, it seemed very important that she not find out how low he'd once sunk. Roan only knew him now, as a man with a future. A man with a fresh start.

"Seven years. By then I had a steady paycheck, and I was able to help her out a little with her bills." It had been a tremendous relief to be able to help her for a change, after she'd scrimped and saved to provide for him for so long.

"What did you do? For work?"

Cal felt his face color. He didn't have a lot to brag about, other than hard work and learning, eventually, from doing things the hard way. "Different things. I delivered pizzas for a while. Did some construction. After a while I got a job in a warehouse, and I made pretty good money on the overnight shift. Gram kept on me to go back to school. She could be pretty hard to argue with."

"I know all about relentless old ladies," Roan laughed. "Mrs. Castleberry keeps telling me I should be married with a baby by now."

Cal smiled. "Gram didn't want me to end up with a baby, she wanted me to get an education. It took me six years to get my associates degree at the community college, going part time, but she was as proud of me as if I went to Harvard."

"I sometimes think of going back to school," Roan said. For a moment she looked like she was going to say more, but then she shook her head. "But I've got the shop and all. And I never was much of a student."