Montana Creeds: Logan (11 page)

She was near the front entrance, half listening to an old man insisting that the slot machines were rigged and half worrying that her sons were on their way to God knew where in Vance’s old van, when she spotted Logan coming into the nearby restaurant, through the “family entrance.”

Alec and Josh were with him, both of them grinning cheerfully.

The first thing Briana felt was relief. Her boys were safe, close enough to see and touch.

The second thing was a slamming fury that shook her bones and then rushed through her bloodstream like venom.

Who the
hell
did Logan Creed think he was, taking
her children
anywhere without her knowledge or permission?

“I
NCOMING
,” J
OSH
intoned, peering over the top of his menu.

Logan had already spotted Briana out of the corner of his eye, steaming toward them like a freight train on a downhill grade. He grinned a little, anticipating the inevitable collision, complete with sparks. “Think I’ll have the beef enchilada-tamale combo,” he said.

Alec shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Mom looks
pissed,”
he whispered.

“You’re not supposed to say ‘pissed,’” Josh told him.

“Pissed,” Alec repeated, jutting out his chin. “Pissed, pissed, pissed.”

Briana strode through the wide doorway in the long glass wall separating the Mexican restaurant from the rest of the casino.

Logan calmly closed his menu.

Stood.

Briana glared at him, then, hands on her hips, turned to the boys, both of whom were cowering behind the giant menus, their eyes wide with both alarm and defiance.

“What,” she began, “did I tell you about riding in cars with strangers?”

“Logan isn’t a stranger,” Josh said. “He’s our neighbor.”

A waitress approached, cautiously, hovering at a safe distance.

“Join us for lunch?” Logan asked Briana.

Color surged into her cheeks. She always looked good, but being mad gave her a fiery quality that made Logan want to take her to bed, ASAP.

That would probably happen later, rather than sooner.

If at all.

“I’m
working
,” she said.

“And that means you can’t eat?”

Clearly flustered, she turned to her sons again. “You’re supposed to be at home,” she said. “You know the rules.”

“We got lonesome,” Josh said.

“It’s hard being a latchkey kid,” Alec added. He’d have a big future in any business involving manipulation by-bullshit, that one. Probably make a good lawyer—or a politician.

“So we went over to Logan’s place to see what he was doing,” Josh went on, as though Alec hadn’t spoken.

“We stayed
completely
away from Cimarron and the orchard,” Alec added, his tone and expression earnest. “We took the county road.”

Briana consulted her watch, the motion of her arm slight but jerky. She started to say something, then stopped herself. Sighed.

“Guilt won’t work with me,” she told Alec, a little late.

On the contrary, Logan thought, Alec’s latchkey remark had struck the bull’s-eye.

She looked up into Logan’s face, and he saw pain in her eyes. Pain and fear and a kind of weariness that even a long vacation couldn’t cure. “I have to work,” she said.

And Logan wanted to draw her into his arms, hold her. Tell her everything would be all right.

He had no business doing any of those things, so he just stood there. “No harm done,” he said quietly. “When the boys showed up at my place, I figured the best thing I could do was bring them here. To you.”

She let out her breath, and her stiff shoulders slackened a little. “Thanks,” she said, without much conviction. And then she looked at her watch again. “I’d better get back on the floor,” she said. Pride had replaced the pain in her eyes. “I don’t get off work until five.Alec and Josh can wait in the coffee shop until my shift is over.”

Logan nodded, registering that she didn’t trust him to hang out with her children for the rest of the day, and reconciling himself to that. He was a stranger to her; caution was more than reasonable.

“Can’t we go back to the ranch with Logan?” Josh asked. “It’s no fun sitting in a casino all day.”

“I guess you should have thought of that,” Briana told her son, “before you broke rule number one—when I’m not home, you don’t go any farther than the yard.” A pause. “And where, pray tell, is Wanda?”

Alec grinned broadly. “She’s home. We dropped her off before we came to town, but Sidekick is out in the truck. He’s even got a water dish.”

“Can’t you just have lunch with us?” Josh’s voice held a pleading note.

“I owe you a meal,” Logan said, referring to last night’s supper.

But Briana just shook her head. Then, after fixing each of them with a warning glance—first Josh, then Alec, then Logan—she turned and went back to work.

The boys were a little subdued after that, but they ordered the beef enchilada-tamale combo, as Logan did, and ate as if they’d been locked away someplace and starved for a week.

They’d almost finished their lunch, and Logan was gearing up to leave the boys behind at the casino—a thing he would find hard to do—when he spotted Brett Turlow watching him from a table on the far side of the restaurant.

Turlow immediately looked away.

He was sitting alone, a smaller man than Logan remembered. In his midforties, old Brett wasn’t aging well. He’d evidently done some hard living since taking over the family logging business, running it into the ground and declaring bankruptcy.

Logan knew all that because he’d kept up a subscription to the
Stillwater Springs Courier
after he left home the first time, and because he had several good reasons to dislike Brett Turlow.

They went way back, he and Brett, though there was a decade’s difference in their ages.

Way, way back.

Logan paid the lunch check, left a tip for the waitress and walked Alec and Josh to the coffee shop to wait out the rest of Briana’s shift. Mindful of Sidekick out in the truck with a partially rolled- down window and a limited supply of water, Logan took the time to backtrack for a word with Brett.

Somewhat to Logan’s surprise, Turlow was still
sitting at his table, the remains of an order of nachos in front of him, along with a glass of beer.

Turlow looked up at him, and the old mean streak coiled in his eyes. Back in the day, he’d been a hardass and a bully, the boss’s son. Now, his skin didn’t fit his face, but hung loose on his bones.

He’d beaten the hell out of Logan once. And then Jake had beaten the hell—and then some—out of
him.

Turlow had wanted his dad to fire Jake, on the spot.

But whatever else he might have been, Jake Creed was the best logger in the woods. He felled three trees to everybody else’s one, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. Not the giant pines they called widow-makers, because they had a way of splitting from tip to trunk and crushing any man setting chain somewhere along their length, and certainly not Deke Turlow’s son. Ever mindful of his profits, Deke had ordered Brett out of the woods instead of Jake.

He hadn’t come back until after Deke turned a bulldozer over on himself and died, and even then, the old man’s will prevented him from getting rid of Jake. That must have been hard to swallow, working day after day with a man who’d kicked his ass in front of half of Stillwater Springs.

“You come over here to gloat?” Brett asked wearily.

“Now why would I want to do that?” Logan countered.

“You know I lost the logging outfit. All that competition from overseas, and the environmentalists always making a fuss over some owl—”

“Bad things happen,” Logan said. Like that chain snapping at the wrong time, he thought, and spilling a few tons of logs off the truck bed to crush Jake to a pulp.

“You and your brothers got the insurance money,” Brett said, as though that made it all right, the way Jake had died. He’d been alive under all that timber when the other loggers got to him, according to the sheriff. The pain must have consumed him like a fire, but he’d laughed. He’d looked up at old Floyd Book, bloody as a chunk of raw hamburger, and
laughed.

“This is how it ends, old buddy,” he’d told Floyd. “This is how it ends.”

They’d settled Jake’s personal debts with the insurance check, he and Dylan and Tyler, and divided what was left. Logan had used his to pay off the loans he’d taken out to go to college.

“You were there that day, weren’t you, Brett?” Logan asked. “The day that logging chain broke?”

Turlow squirmed a little, then pushed back his chair and stood.

Logan stood a head taller, and he didn’t move to let the other man pass.

“I was there,” Turlow said. “So what? So were the other eight men on the crew.”

“They were still in the woods.”

Turlow flushed a dull, sickly red. His breath smelled rancid, and he seemed to exude the sour stink of yesterday’s beer from every pore. “There was an investigation,” he spat. “I was cleared.”

“He was sleeping with your girlfriend,” Logan said. “Jake, I mean.”

Turlow’s flush deepened to dark crimson. “She was a tramp.”

Logan shrugged one shoulder and stood solid as a totem pole. “Maybe so,” he allowed. “But it must have made you mad, just the same. Your girl, pounding a mattress with a man twice your age—”

“Logan?”

Distracted, he turned. Saw Sheriff Floyd Book standing behind him. Speak of the devil.

Turlow skittered past him and beat feet for the outside door.

“If I thought it would do a damn bit of good,” Book said, hooking his thumbs in his service belt, “I’d tell you to stay away from Brett Turlow for the sake of the peace.” Floyd had always had a belly—now it hung lower and strained the buttons on his brown uniform shirt. His badge was as shiny as ever, though, and when he took off his round-brimmed hat, Logan saw that he still had a thick head of iron-gray hair.

“No worries, Sheriff,” Logan said. “I’ve said what I wanted to say.”

“I don’t want any trouble around here,” Book went on, sounding tired to the marrow. “Things have been relatively calm in Stillwater Springs since your daddy was killed—God rest his obnoxious soul—and you and your brothers lit out for parts unknown. At the risk of sounding like a character in a corny black-and-white western, I’d like to keep it that way.”

Logan smiled. He’d always liked Floyd Book, thought he was a fair man. Now, though, he was mindful of Sidekick, alone in the truck. Brett Turlow probably wouldn’t bother his dog, but Logan didn’t want to take the chance. “I’ll mind my manners,” he said, starting to walk away.

Book sat down at a nearby table, nodded a goodbye.
“Stop by my office when you get the chance,” he said. “We’ll jaw awhile.”

Logan nodded back and left.

Out in the parking lot, Sidekick greeted him eagerly, sticking his nose through the opening in the window and barking in ecstatic welcome.

Logan felt a rush of relief as he unlocked the truck, shouldered the dog back off the driver’s seat and climbed behind the wheel. He supposed running into Brett Turlow had been inevitable, given the size of Stillwater Springs, but the experience had nettled him, just the same. Brought back a lot of gut-grinding memories.

He’d rushed back to Montana when word of his dad’s accident had reached him, and found Jake in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Missoula, veritably holding on to life by the tips of his fingers.

There had been no part of Jake that wasn’t bruised a pinkish-purple. His legs and ribs had been smashed by the weight of those rolling logs, and the distortion was visible even under the blankets. Tubes and wires snaked from him in every direction—he’d seemed tangled in them, like a fly caught in a spider’s web.

Only Jake’s eyes, fiercely blue and snapping with obstinate pride, had been the same.

Jake hadn’t been able to talk—his voice box and virtually every bone and organ in his body had been broken or ruptured—but those eyes had said plenty.

You’re too late.

I’m disappointed in you. Always was.

Yes, I’m going to die.

Shake it off.

“Shake it off,” Logan repeated aloud.

Jake had kept his unspoken promise. He’d died before Dylan and Tyler could get there, and that was when the blaming had started. They’d both been furious with Logan for being in that hospital room when Jake breathed his last—maybe because it wouldn’t have seemed right to turn that fury on a dead man.

Especially when that dead man was their father.

Sidekick whimpered.

Logan reached out to tousle his ears.

And then they headed back to Stillwater Springs Ranch, where they belonged. Or did they?

Just then, Logan wasn’t sure
where
he belonged.

T
HE REST OF
Briana’s day crawled by.

She made brief but regular visits to the coffee shop, to make sure the boys were still there, and Jim even offered to let her leave early. Since she was about to make a purchase she hadn’t budgeted for, getting docked on her pay didn’t seem like the best idea in the world. Besides, with every other child-support check bouncing to the ceiling, she was barely making it as it was.

At ten minutes after five, Briana collected her boys, now sheepish and cranky from cooling their jets in the coffee shop for several hours, got into the dented, primersplotched extended-cab pickup truck Dylan had left behind at the ranch, and started the engine while she waited for Alec and Josh to buckle themselves in. She could drive the old rig if she could get it running, Dylan had said, and she had, with most of her first paycheck from the casino and a lot of help from a mechanic in town, but after two years,
keeping
it running was the challenge.

Briana had been saving up to buy a decent used car, but it was three steps forward, two steps back. Every time she got a little ahead, some unexpected expense came up—medicine and veterinary bills when Wanda tore a ligament in one hind leg; the window Josh had broken out, playing baseball with Alec in the side yard; a donation at work when one of the other employees lost everything in a house fire.

It never stopped.

And now she
had
to get a cell phone. Josh and Alec would be able to call her directly, instead of going through the casino switchboard. They were good boys, and they probably would have contacted her before striking out for Logan’s place via the county road, where they could have been run over, kidnapped or attacked by a wild animal.

They
probably
would have contacted her.

“What you did today was not cool,” she said, speaking for the first time since they’d left the casino as she pulled into the parking lot at Wal-Mart. She shopped there a lot, but every visit brought back stinging memories of the night Vance had bailed on her and the kids and Wanda.