LITMIR.BIZ

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no houses.

      He couldn’t see any oncoming traffic so he pulled into the other lane as if to pass and drew up alongside his baby, intent on getting a look at the thief.

      He was a punk, nothing more. The kid behind the wheel was skinny, dark-haired, maybe fifteen, sixteen. He looked over at the big rumbling pickup beside him and he looked scared to death, eyes huge and wild in a narrow face.

      Good. He should be, the little dickhead. Seth rolled the window down, wishing he could reach across, pluck the kid out of the car and wring his scrawny little neck.

      “Pull over,” he shouted through the window, even though he knew the kid wouldn’t be able to hear him.

      He must have looked like the Grim Reaper, Freddy Kruger and the guy from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre all rolled up into one, he realized later, and he should have predicted what happened next. If he’d been thinking straight, he would have handled the whole thing differently and saved himself a hell of a lot of trouble.

      Even if the car thief couldn’t hear Seth’s words, obviously the message got through loud and clear. The kid sent him another wild, scared look and yanked the wheel to the right.

      Seth growled out a raw epithet at the hideous sound of metal grinding against metal as the GTO scraped a mile marker post on the right. In reaction, the kid panicked and swerved too hard to the left and Seth groaned as his baby nosedived across the road and landed in an irrigation ditch.

      At least it was blessedly empty this time of year.

      The sun was just a sliver above the horizon and the November air was cold as Seth hurriedly parked the pickup and rushed to his car to make sure the kid was okay.

      He jerked open the door and was petty enough for just a moment to enjoy the way the kid cringed against the seat like he thought Seth was ready to break his neck with his bare hands.

      He felt like it, he had to admit. He had no doubt the GTO’s paint was scraped all to hell from the run-in with the mile marker post and the left fender looked to be crumpled where she’d hit a concrete gate structure in the ditch.

      He held on to his anger while he checked the thief for any sign of injury.

      “You okay?” he asked.

      “Yeah. I…think so.” The boy’s voice shook a little but he warily took Seth’s hand and climbed out of the car.

      Seth revised downward his estimate of the boy’s age, figuring him to be no older than thirteen or fourteen. Just old enough to start shaving more than once a month, by the look of it.

      He had choppy dark hair worn longer than Hank Dalton would ever have let his sons get away with and he was dressed in jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt about four sizes too big with some logo of a wild-looking music group Seth didn’t recognize.

      The kid seemed familiar but Seth couldn’t immediately place him—odd, since he knew just about every kid in the small community. Maybe he was the son of one of the dozen or so Hollywood types buying up good grazing land for their faux ranches. They tended to stay away from the general population, maybe afraid the down-home friendliness and family-centered values would rub off.

      “My mom is gonna kill me,” the kid moaned, burying his head in his hands.

      “She can stand in line,” Seth growled. “You have any idea how much work I’ve put into this car?”

      The kid dropped his hands. Though he still looked terrified, he managed to cover it with a thin veneer of bravado. “You’ll be sorry if you mess with me. My grandpa’s a lawyer and he’ll fry your ass if you try to lay a single hand on me.”

      Seth couldn’t help a short, appreciative laugh even as the pieces clicked into place and he registered who the kid must be and why he had looked familiar.

      With a grandfather who was a lawyer, he had to be the son of the new elementary school principal. Boylan. Boyer. Something like that.

      He didn’t exactly hang around with the elementary-school crowd but Natalie had pointed out her new principal and the woman’s two kids one night shortly after school started when he’d taken his niece and nephews out to Stoney’s, the pizza place in town.

      His grandfather would be Jason Chambers, an attorney who had retired to Pine Gulch for the fishing five or six years back. His daughter had moved out to join him with her kids—no husband that Seth had heard about—when the principal position opened up at the elementary school.

      “That lawyer in the family will probably come in handy, kid,” he said now.

      The punk groaned and his head sagged into his hands once more. “I am so dead.”

      He wasn’t quite sure why but Seth was surprised to feel a few little pangs of sympathy for the kid. He remembered all too well the purgatory of this age. Hormones firing, emotions jerking around wildly. Too much juice and nothing to do with it.

      “Am I going to jail?”

      “You boosted a car. That’s a pretty serious crime. And you’re a lousy driver, which is worse, in my book.”

      “I wasn’t going to take her far. You’ve got to believe me. Just to the reservoir and back, I swear. That’s all. When I saw the keys inside, I couldn’t resist.”

      Damn. Had he really left the keys in the ignition? He looked inside and, sure enough, there they were, dangling from the steering column.

      How had that happened? He remembered pulling up to his mother’s house for her birthday dinner, then rushing out to take care of business when Lucy started to squat on the floor mats. Maybe in all the confusion, he had been in such a hurry to find a patch of grass before his puppy busted her bladder that he’d forgotten his keys.

      What kind of idiot left his keys in a ride like this, just begging for the first testosterone-crazed teenager to lift her?

      Him. He mentally groaned, grateful at least that the boy hadn’t been hurt by their combined stupidity.

      “What’s your name, kid?”

      The boy clamped his teeth together and Seth sighed. “You might as well tell me. I know your last name is Boyer and Jason Chambers is your grandpa. I’ll figure out the rest.”

      “Cole,” he muttered after a long pause.

      “Come on, Cole. I’ll give you a lift to your grandpa’s house, then I’ll come back and pull her out with one of my brothers.”

      “I can walk.” He hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

      “You think I’m going to leave you and your sticky fingers running free out here? What if you happen to find another idiot who’s left his keys in his ride? Get in.”

      Though Cole still looked belligerent, he climbed into the passenger side of the pickup.

      Seth had just started to walk around the truck to get in the driver’s side when he saw flashing lights behind him.

      Instead of driving past, the sheriff’s deputy slowed and pulled up behind the GTO. Seth glanced at the boy and saw he’d turned deathly white and his breathing was coming fast enough Seth worried about him hyperventilating.

      “Relax, kid,” he muttered.

      “I am relaxed.” He lifted his chin and tried for a cool look that came out looking more like a constipated rabbit.

      Seth sighed and closed his door again as he watched the deputy climb out of the vehicle. Before he even saw her face, he knew by the curvy shape that the officer had to be Polly Jardine, the only female deputy in the small sheriff’s department.

      She dimpled at him, looking not much different than she had in high school—cute and perky and worlds away from his idea of an officer of the law. Though she still looked like she should be shaking her pom-poms at a Friday night football game, he knew she was a tough and dedicated cop.

      He

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