Free Cowboy Justice by Melissa Cutler Page A

Stepping through the sliding glass doors of John Justin’s into the quiet, sunlit street was a feeling that would stay with her forever.
    It was her moment of liberation.
    Their farm was too far away for her to walk home, so she’d gone to the feed store. The Parrish family who owned it had always been kind to Rachel when she’d shopped there with her dad. They passed her sweets and told her jokes. That day, she walked into the feed store, and Mr. Parrish believed her lie that her mom had driven off and forgotten her, probably because everybody in Catcher Creek knew what Bethany Sorentino was like. Mr. Parrish gave her a peppermint and a horseshoe that had been laying on the counter, explaining that it would bring her luck. Then he drove her home, where, horseshoe in hand, she set off on foot over the fields and pastures until she was hopelessly lost.
    Hours later, her father, on his horse, found her sitting against a boulder. He sat with her for a long time, and when she asked if she could start working the farm with him in the mornings and after school, he hugged her and told her, Of course you can, Jelly Bean.
    She missed her dad so much. Not the part of him who gambled and schemed their bank accounts dry, but the man who’d taught her to be a farmer. The man who found her when she was lost. This was her second spring without him, and though the loss wasn’t nearly as acute as it had been a year earlier, her grief remained, tempered only by the anger and embarrassment she felt at how blind she’d been to his faults.
    A mile into the ride, when she sensed Growly had warmed up enough to handle some speed, she nudged his flanks. They took off over the landscape, both woman and horse needing the exertion of a long, hard run to ease the burden of their grief.
* * *
    From his vantage point at the top of the mesa, Vaughn looked at the gash in the dirt running along the twenty-foot drop of the mesa’s face. The path Wallace Meyer Jr. took on his way to the valley. Stratis was on the scene with him, and the two had worked all morning to reconstruct a timeline of events from the previous day.
    They’d begun in the canyon and followed the path of footprints around the south side of the mesa, where the slope was gentle enough to drive a truck up or walk. The footprints turned to scuffs once they reached the top of the slope, the marks of someone scooting on their knees. The scuff marks ended next to the imprint of a truck tire where, it seemed, Rachel stood and fired at the men. On the ground, scattered near the footprints, were six .38 bullet casings.
    Not a good find. Not at all.
    Which was why Vaughn was standing on the edge of the mesa, watching a hawk circle in the distance while he overcame his urge to kick something.
    His interview with Wallace Jr. yesterday had lasted hours and yielded nothing except a grudging admittance—a demonstration of cooperation, his lawyer proclaimed—of the identity of the fourth man at the scene, the suspect currently at large with Elias Baltierra. Shawn Henigin. Henigin had a history of petty thievery and drug charges from Tucumcari to Santa Fe, the most recent arrest being a year earlier for possession of a stolen car. The charge hadn’t stuck, as the car owner had a sudden change of heart and decided he’d allowed Henigin to borrow it.
    Kirby and Molina were equally unsuccessful tracking down Henigin and Baltierra. At the county line to the south, they found a truck matching the one in Rachel’s photographs as far as they could tell. Hard to determine exactly, given that it’d been torched to a crumbling shell. Four AR-15 rifles, also torched, were discovered in the backseat. That accounted for all the rifles in Rachel’s crime scene photographs, but it certainly didn’t mean Vaughn was going to amend the statewide APB out on the two suspects identifying them as armed and dangerous.
    The state’s forensic lab towed the truck to their facility in Albuquerque to process it, but