The Cowboy Lawman

She just had to decide who she would be now that she was back in Dawson, at her mom’s insistence. Okay, she admitted she had been easy to convince. She’d been ready to come home. Her apartment in Tulsa had been too quiet, too private, even for her.

She adjusted the sling that kept her right arm close to her chest, swallowed another gulp of water and jogged down the steps. She could run. She could take to the streets of Dawson, smile and wave to neighbors who might be out. She could pretend that everything would be okay.

But Butch Walker was dead.

That would never change. Butch’s wife, Tina, would raise two children alone. Mia would forever remember his face as he went down. She would always live with shooting too late, with not being able to save him.

Her arm might ache. The possibility of not being able to go back to work hurt. But Butch gone—that hurt worse. She could take the pain of running.

She hit the pavement, taking it slow, breathing deep and easy as she lengthened her strides. She swallowed past the tightness in her throat and ignored the pain in her arm and shoulder.

Don’t ignore the pain, her doctor had warned her after surgery a month ago. How could she ignore it? It was a constant reminder.

A car came up behind her, and she stepped to the side of the road. Her heart jumped a few paces ahead as she glanced back to make sure it was someone she knew. In Dawson it was rare to see a stranger. Even people you didn’t know well weren’t considered strangers—they were just people you should get to know better.

Her brother, Jackson, pulled alongside her, the truck window sliding down. She kept running. The truck idled along next to her.

“Jogging, really?” He leaned a little, glanced at the empty country road ahead of them and then looked her way again.

“Yeah, I needed to get out. Alone.” She smiled, but it took effort.

“Right. You’ve never liked too many people in your business. But you have family. Mom has been trying to call you.”

She slowed to a fast walk. “I’ll call her.”

“Today. You can’t outrun this.”

The big brother in his voice shook her. She remembered a time when she’d been the older sister taking care of her biological siblings, making sure they ate, got dressed each day, survived. Her name then had been Mia Jimenez. And then her mother had died and she’d become the little sister, with people taking care of her. Mia Cooper. Reinvented at age seven.

She and her siblings had been separated.

“Mia, stop running.”

“I’ll call her.” She stopped and closed her eyes, his words sinking in. She’d always been running. Always running from life, from the past, from pain.

The truck stopped next to her. “Mia, you’re strong. You’re going to survive this.”

“I know.” She blinked quickly, surprised by the sting of tears. She should have stayed in Tulsa. But as much as her family suffocated her at times, she needed them. Her mom had brought her home on Monday.

“Want a ride home?”

She shook her head and somehow looked at him, smiling as if everything was fine. “No, I can make it.”

“Okay, but be safe.”

“I’m safe.”

He smiled, nodded and shifted to drive away. Mia stood on the side of the road in a world with nothing but fields, trees and the occasional cluster of grazing cattle. A light wind blew, the way wind blew in Oklahoma, and the air smelled of drying grass and blacktop.

Jackson’s truck turned a short distance ahead, but his words had opened the wound. Tears blurred her vision and her throat burned. She kept jogging. She kept pushing.

She brushed at the tears that continued to flow. It ached. It ached every minute of every day. Even in her dreams it hurt. She stopped running and looked up at the clear blue sky, at birds flying overhead.

“It hurts!” she yelled as loudly as she could. And then more quietly: “Make it stop. Make it all go away.”

There was no answer. Of course there wasn’t. God had stopped listening. For some reason He had ignored her when she pleaded for help, holding her hand on Butch’s chest, trying to stop the flow of blood, crying as she told him to hold on.

She closed her eyes and slowly sank to her knees in the grass on the shoulder of the road, not caring who came by, what people said about her. It didn’t matter. Why should it matter when she hadn’t been able to save her partner, her friend’s life?

A car pulled up behind her. She didn’t turn. She didn’t want to know who had found her like this.

A door shut. Footsteps crunched on the gravel shoulder of the road. She wiped a hand across her face and looked up at the person now standing in front of her, blocking the sun, leaving his face in shadows. He smiled a little but his dark gray eyes mirrored her sorrow. He held out a hand.

“It gets easier.” His voice was gruff but soft.

“Does it?” She didn’t think it would. Today it felt as if it would always hurt like this.

She took his hand.

“Yeah, it does. Is this your first cry?”

She nodded and the tears started again. His hand clasped her left hand. She stood and he pulled her close in an awkward embrace. His hand patted her back and then he stepped away, cleared his throat and looked past her.

“Let me give you a ride home.”

She noticed then that he was in his uniform. He’d been a county deputy for ten years. He’d been the second officer on the scene the night his wife died in a car accident.

“Thanks.” She walked back to his car. He opened the passenger-side door for her. Before getting in, she stared up at him, at a face she knew so well. She knew his gray eyes, the way his mouth was strong but turned often in an easy smile. She also knew his pain. “It feels like it might hurt forever.”

“I know.”

* * *

They made the trip back to Mia’s in silence. Slade McKennon glanced Mia’s way from time to time, but he didn’t push her to talk. Their situations were different, but he knew how hard it was to talk when the grief hit, when your throat felt so tight it hurt to take a breath. He knew how hard it was to make sense of it all.

He knew how angry you could get and how every time you opened your mouth, you wanted to yell at God or cry until you couldn’t cry any more.

He pulled into her driveway and they sat there a long time, just sitting, staring at her garage in front of them. Finally, she turned to face him, her eyes still watery, rimmed with red from crying. Her dark brown hair framed her face, her normally dark skin looked a shade or two paler.

Tall and slim, athletic, she’d always been an overachiever, the girl who thought she could do it all. And did. She’d been a star basketball player. She’d ridden barrels all the way to nationals, three times. She’d won the whole thing once.

Now she looked as broken as a person could get, but she still had fighter written all over her.

“Remember when Vicki used to tell you to just go ahead and cry?” He smiled as he remembered his wife, her best friend. That was what time did for a person—it made the memories easier, made smiling easier.

“Yeah, she used to do that. When I broke my ankle, sprained my wrist, had a concussion. Cry, she’d say.” She rubbed her hand over her face. “But it didn’t make sense to cry over it. Pain is an emotion.”

Instead of crying, Mia would just get mad. A defense mechanism he guessed from her tough childhood, pre-Coopers. She reached for the door of his patrol car. He knew he wouldn’t get much further with her, but he had to try.