Free Impulse by Joann Ross Page A

the “misunder standing,” Josh had been on his way.
    He’d also been picked up a few times in roundups of kids at an after-hours club in Westwood, but none of those times had been anything like this.
    This was serious shit. If he didn’t manage to convince that stone-faced Indian deputy that he didn’t know anything about what had happened to Erin, he could end up in a cell.
    Not just a cell. He could go to prison, where motherfucker, baby-raper gang members were just waiting for a shiny new ass to ream.
    Fuck. Sweat began to roll down Josh’s back.
    At the same time he began to shiver, and although he fought against it, trying to clench his jaw, his teeth began to chatter like castanets.
    His head was spinning, and although there couldn’t be anything left in his stomach, he was hit with a greasy nausea that made him feel on the verge of hurling again.
    The last time he’d felt this rotten was after he’d gotten some bad ecstasy at a rave. When he’d started imagining that the other dancers were sharks trying to eat him, the girl he’d been with had gotten scared enough to take him to the hospital, where the ER doctor had stuck a saline drip in his arm. By the next morning the hallucinations were gone and he was feeling okay again.
    Josh had the scary feeling that it would take a lot more than fluids and a night’s sleep to rid his mind of the images of Erin, covered in her own dark red blood, her pretty white throat cut all the way to the bone.
     

 
     
    14
     
     
    T he streets we re dark, the store- fronts shuttered, as Will drove to the jail after delivering that tourist who’d been injured in the accident to the ER.
    Hazard had garnered a bit of fame back during the early seventies, after the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had come out. According to legend, Butch and Sundance had enjoyed the pleasures of the working girls at The Shady Lady, one of several Hazard brothels in the booming red-light district.
    The outlaws had long gone, as had the gold prospectors and mountain men, but the cowboys and the Indians—the majority of whom lived on the joint-use Shoshone/Arapaho Wind River Reservation—had stayed.
    Hazard was surrounded by mountains: the stunningly beautiful Tetons, soaring a mile high of the town; the Wind River Range, which presented some of the most rugged territory in the state; Heartbreak Ridge, curving around the southeast edge of the valley; and towering over everything, its lofty peak often sheathed in clouds, White Owl Mountain, named for the mythical Arapaho bird of winter.
    Growing up here, Will had taken the mountains for granted. In fact, there’d been a time he’d thought of them as a prison. Coming home, after years in the Low- country, he could appreciate their wonder.
    Back when he’d been as young and stupid as Josh, he couldn’t wait to escape what he saw as a world of grinding boredom broken up by periods of backbreaking- hard ranch work. Which was why, when that judge had worked out the deal with his father to allow him to avoid going off to juvie, he’d joined the marines.
    The irony was that the Corps, in their wisdom, had, for some reason he’d never be able to figure out, decided to make him an MP.
    Surprisingly, he’d been good at his job. Good enough to get promoted into criminal investigations as soon as he reached the required age of twenty-one. Although he enjoyed the work, he’d chafed under the rigid military rules and regulations and hadn’t reenlisted.
    But his talent for chasing down bad guys had gotten him hired by the Savannah police department, where he quickly discovered civilian law enforcement agencies had their own set-in-stone rules and bureaucratic bullshit. After things went south, and Josh landed in his lap, Will had believed that after all these years, and having achieved a small measure of respectability, it wouldn’t be that difficult returning to his hometown.
    He’d been wrong.
    From the moment he’d accepted the job as