Christmas Rescue at Mustang Ridge

He was counting heavily on that.

“Well?” Chet, again. Another snarl. “Did you find her?”

Jake waited until Nell had closed the door to Sunny’s room before he answered Chet’s questions. “I found her. More or less.”

Royce knew where this was going, and that was no doubt why he cursed and probably wished he had another smoke or two. “She’s in the Witness Security Program.”

“She’s where?” Chet snapped.

“WITSEC, witness security,” Jake supplied, though Chet had no doubt heard him the first time. The man was sixty-four, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Or his mind. “She was placed in the program after, well, just after,” Jake settled for saying.

Chet cursed. “The marshals won’t tell you where she is.” It wasn’t a question, and it was followed by more cursing.

Royce took up the explanation since he’d been at the sheriff’s office when Jake had gotten the news. “We sent a request all the way up to the head of WITSEC, but our request was denied.”

Chet got to his feet and started to pace. “If I could get my hands around her neck—”

“She probably doesn’t know Sunny’s sick,” Jake interrupted. “And we don’t know if it’ll be worth it to even find her.”

That was the hardest part of all.

This could all be for nothing.

“I don’t know how much the Justice Department is telling her because—” Jake had to pause and breathe “—it could be dangerous if anyone found out her new identity and her location.”

“Damn right it’s dangerous,” Chet snapped. “It’s dangerous for Sunny, too. And if she can help, then I don’t care about compromising her identity. Hell, I don’t care if somebody guns her down like—”

Thankfully, Chet had the good sense to stop. Jake already had enough bad things to deal with tonight without the memories of his late wife’s murder. Of course, the memories of Anna were there.

Always.

Even though she’d been dead and buried for over two and a half years now, since Sunny was just a baby.

“Are we just going to keep calling her she and her?” Royce asked. He huffed, but Jake didn’t know if he was just riled about the situation or the pronoun use. “Because she’s got a name, you know?”

“Yeah, and it’s a name not welcome here,” Chet insisted.

His father wasn’t the forgive-and-forget sort.

Neither was Jake in this situation.

But Sunny needed her. And that meant Jake needed her, too.

“Maggie Gallagher,” Jake said aloud. It was the first time that name had crossed his lips in two years, eight months and five days.

Maggie, his former sister-in-law. Or would that be his late wife’s sister? Or how about the woman who’d gotten Anna killed? Yeah, that was the label that fit her best.

Maybe Chet had the right idea about not saying her name.

Chet stopped pacing and snapped toward Jake. “How you gonna convince those marshals to give us her location?”

The million-dollar question. Jake had a fifty-cent answer.

Jake shook his head. “I can’t convince them. Royce and I have already tried.”

“We have,” Royce agreed. He glanced at Chet. “The Justice Department can’t tell us where she is because during her relocation processing, Maggie specifically said she didn’t want contact with any of us.”

Chet cursed again.

If Jake had been feeling charitable—he wasn’t—he would have pointed out that Chet had warned Maggie that if she ever came back to Mustang Ridge, he’d kill her and the horse she rode in on. Hardly a welcome-mat greeting. And it was that threat that had no doubt caused Maggie to include the no-contact order.

Chet lifted his hands, palms up. “So, that’s it? You’re just gonna give up?”

It took Jake a moment to rein in his voice. “I’ll never give up.”

Chet shook his head, riffled his hand through his hair. “Then never giving up better come with some kind of plan attached.”

“I have a plan,” Jake managed to say. It wasn’t a good one, though, and it would hurt.

Oh, yeah. It’d hurt bad.

“Best if I don’t give you any details of what I have to do.” Jake unpinned his badge and dropped it on the table.

It hardly made it sound when it hit the soft pinewood.

Funny, he figured it would. Because the sound sure went through him. That badge was fourteen years of his life and had been pinned to his pockets since he was twenty-one.

“For safekeeping,” Jake explained, knowing as explanations went, that it wasn’t a very good one.

Or an honest one.

Chet glared at the badge, then at Jake. “We’re family. We got a right to know what you’re doing.”

Jake pulled in a weary breath, shook his head and started for the door.

Chet called out for him to stop, but Jake just kept going. There was no way he could tell his family that come tomorrow, all hell was going to break loose.

And that he, Sheriff Jake McCall, was about to become an outlaw.

Chapter Two

There had been a time in her life when Maggie Gallagher would have knocked a man senseless for pinching her butt.

Now wasn’t that time.

Maggie ignored the gesture that Herman Settler probably thought was good ol’ boy friendly fun, and she deposited the plate in front of him.

Flop two, over hard. Smeared raft on the side.