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Opening chapter of first mystery in the series: Rainbow Horses

Synopsis for Rainbow Horses

Open scene of second mystery in the series: Spotted Spirit Dog

RAINBOW HORSES

A Mystery Novel

By Jerrie Hurd

Seven horses guard the seven directions . . .

         The YELLOW horse guards the West

         Where sunsets color the sky, and dust devils dance.

Riding the yellow horse requires skill.

It is quick as lightning, fickle as luck.

PART 1

Mid-morning, Sheriff Samantha (Sam) Nielsen was driving along the bottom of a deep canyon on a narrow dirt road, listening to her dead husband’s music, playing through an earbud. Suddenly seven wild horses crashed through the brush onto the road in front of her. Her first thought was to wonder if her husband had been distracted like that—off on a wave of song—when he drove into one of the concrete barriers dividing Los Angeles’ many freeways. Her second thought was that she might also crash.

She swerved, barely missing a big gray. With him were four or five duns and a black foal or, maybe, two foals. She couldn’t be sure. The swerve had sent her patrol car into a skid. Steering furiously, she fought to keep herself from going into the storm-swollen stream on her right. It didn’t help that there were huge boulders on her left. Even worse, the morning light skimming the canyon’s uneven ridge created alternating patches of bright sunlight and deep shadow, both equally blinding. Most of the time, she had no idea how close she was to the edge of the water or anything else. Finally, her vehicle fishtailed and banged to a halt against one of the big rocks.

The horses, unhurt, ran along the road ahead of her to where the stream widened. Then they splashed into the water, churning up enough spray to sprinkle the sunshine with rainbow. That unexpected beauty took what breath she had left.

Local indigenous believed that White Bead Woman, a goddess, made the horse. It was to be the medicine animal that completed the world. Knowing that, White Bead Woman took great care with her work. She used red stone for the heart, small cloud for the mane, and black cloud for the tail. She caught distant thunder for the hooves . . .

Sam shook her head. She couldn’t recall when she’d first heard that myth. What was it about horses? Every Native American she knew believed that horses were magical. And they weren’t alone. The Greeks claimed their god Poseidon created the horse, and, to this day, the white-capped breakers that roll in from the sea are known as “the white horses.” In Ireland, O’Donohue’s legendary white horses supposedly reappeared every seventh year to carry the hero over the lakes of Killarney—an event accompanied by hordes of fairies and unearthly music. Not to mention mythical unicorns, winged Pegasus, and the Biblical Horsemen of the Apocalypse who supposedly rode steeds of white, red, black, and pale.

Personally, she preferred her patrol car—a mostly white SUV. When it wasn’t running right, she could get it fixed at the local garage. At least that’s what she liked to tell herself in her down-to-earth role as the Sheriff of Drinkwater County, Idaho. She lied. Even in her practical-sheriff moments, she understood the fascination. Riding a horse across an open expanse was like sliding along the seam between heaven and earth. Nothing quite like it.

She paused and drew a deep breath. Spin a story. Say a prayer. Sing a chant. Take what comfort you can. One moment you are on the rough road to somewhere. Next moment, wild horses jump in front of you. Or people die—her husband—suddenly without rhyme or reason, leaving nothing but his music and too few remembered moments.

She sat a little longer, watching the horses, reminding herself that she’d already survived one end-of-the-world-as-she-knew-it crisis. She could do it again if she had to. On the other side of the stream, the horses fanned out. Then they disappeared, one by one, round a turn in the canyon. At that same moment, her husband’s music, still playing in her earbuds, crested before slipping into an achingly beautiful melody.

Perfect, she breathed.

Her husband had composed soundtracks for movies—lots of movies. He believed that it was his job to hold the audience’s attention while building and supporting the emotional backdrop of the story. Never overly modest, he bragged that his soundtracks had saved more than one mediocre actor and/or poorly developed script. And he wasn’t wrong. She’d watched every one of the movies he had worked on. She’d felt the supporting lift of his music, which was why she still listened to his music whenever she was driving alone over Drinkwater’s long, lonesome stretches of road, doing her job.

Her dead husband had worked hard at his job. That said, she doubted that he would have appreciated hers as the Sheriff of Drinkwater. He never liked this place that she called “home.” The few times he visited, he never got beyond the dusty roads and the seemingly empty spaces. He thought “cowboy culture” was a joke—all cowboy, no culture.

“I get why you left,” he told her repeatedly. And again, he wasn’t wrong. When she was seventeen, she couldn’t leave Drinkwater fast enough. But now that she’d returned here and made a life for herself and her daughter, she’d come to appreciate many of the things she’d never given much notice when she was younger. Was anything better than wild horses running through a rainbow spray of water?

To be fair, being sheriff was not something she’d ever imagined she would do—but she liked what she was doing and thought she had become good at it. No doubt her dead husband would be surprised at this turn of events. He was one who lived light, always laughing, never caring for tomorrow. She was the one who moved in to make sure he remembered to eat regularly and pay his bills. When she gave birth to their daughter, he asked her to marry him, an act so responsible, so completely out of character, she’d laughed, thinking he couldn’t be serious. He was always the dreamer. She was always waiting for the crash.

This one wasn’t too bad. She rubbed a sore spot where her shoulder had knocked against her side door. His crash had left her in far worse shape. If not for their daughter . . . she paused to reshape that thought. For their daughter’s sake, she’d figured out a new life. She was the Sheriff of Drinkwater County. In fact, she’d been the sheriff long enough to be up for re-election in a few weeks. Hard to believe.

It was her job that had brought her out here, all by herself, driving this rough, rock-strewn canyon. She had come to check on a complaint about some van-lifers illegally camped on private property—one of the less than glamorous parts of her job—but, when she got there, they’d already packed up and moved on. That done, she decided to drive the canyon road, on her way back to her office, because it was shorter and more scenic.

That meant, rain, not horses, had been her main concern. If she got caught in a flash flood, she’d have no place to run. In other words, she hadn’t been entirely inattentive. Even as she listened to her husband’s music, she’d kept an eye on the weather and the rising spring-swelled stream as well as the road. In the catalog of possible catastrophes, she hadn’t given wild horses a thought.

She rotated her arm. It was sore but not injured. Airbags might have helped, but, out here, in the middle of America’s nowhere, everybody disabled their airbags. In a place where the nearest tow truck was half-a-day away, deployed airbags only complicated getting back on the road, which was what she needed to do.

She opened her car door and stepped out to assess the damage. She noted a new dent in the bumper and a crease along the back rear panel. Neither were the first scars her official ride had acquired in the line of duty. Then she climbed onto the dented bumper to check her antennae. She had three. None picked up anything down in this canyon. Likewise, her cell phone had been out of service for at least an hour. She was “down a dirt highway,” the local expression for being out of contact and miles from anywhere.

Drinkwater happened to be one of the most desolate places in America—desolate and dying. It was one of the ironies of the Twenty-First Century that the wide-open spaces of the American West were not disappearing. They were growing. Huge areas outside cities like Denver, Santa Fe, Boise, and Phoenix were losing population at the rate of two per cent a year. At that rate, in a few decades, there would be nothing left in a county like Drinkwater but ghost towns and state highways. Even in Idaho, most people had never heard of Drinkwater County. That was remarkable considering that her county—the jurisdiction she sheriffed—was larger than the state of Massachusetts.

To make a long story short, there weren’t many jobs in a place like Drinkwater. The old sheriff was retiring; so, she ran for the office and won. The night she won, she celebrated at the Stagecoach Saloon, a local hang-out. She was happy and confused and not sure she was up to the job. Worse, her husband’s epic themes kept playing repeatedly in the back of her head, seemingly taunting her. Yes, she knew the idea of her becoming the Sheriff of Drinkwater County would have startled and amused him, but she didn’t need his epic, over-sized music haunting her, like a jingle you can’t quite forget.

To him, music was everything.

The afternoon when she first met her husband, he talked about opera. He never asked if she liked opera; he assumed everyone did. Later, when her interest in him had deepened, she realized that loving opera wasn’t about “being sophisticated” it was about understanding human emotions in a way she only wished she could master. She fell hopelessly in love the moment she realized he was listening to her as carefully as he listened to opera.

When Sam was sure everything was ok on top of her car, she jumped down and looked underneath, checking for leaks. She didn’t see any. So far, so good, she told herself. She really-really didn’t want to get stranded down in this canyon. If that happened, she’d have to walk for miles or figure out how to climb one of the steep canyon walls before she could get a cell phone signal and call for help. And then it would be hours before help came.

Suddenly she turned her head, catching the sound of an approaching vehicle, normally a good sign. However, in this case, she recognized the low, diesel rumble echoing off the canyon walls. Only one rancher on this end of Drinkwater made that much noise, and she wasn’t necessarily referring to his loud, oversized pickup truck.

On a good day, Sam managed to make-nice to Bill Willoughby. She wasn’t sure this was a good enough day. On the other hand, she didn’t really have a choice. She was the sheriff. He was one of Drinkwater’s three county commissioners. That meant he voted on her budget. More like, he seemed to think counting pennies was a good use of her time. More like, Willoughby’s money issues had nothing to do with her budget. He wasn’t sure she was up to the job.

 Like everybody else in Drinkwater, he knew she’d been elected mostly because she was a third generation “Nielsen woman.” The real question was whether she was enough of a “Nielsen woman” to match her mother and grandmother’s reputations. Willoughby doubted it. And he wasn’t alone. Sam was up for re-election in a few weeks. Rumor had it that she wouldn’t be re-elected. Rumor in Drinkwater was rarely wrong.

Sam started her engine and pulled forward, away from the rock. Her trusty, official ride seemed to be running fine. Having established that fact, she was tempted to put it in gear and keep going, but good sense got the better of her. She cut the engine and waited.

 When he arrived, Willoughby immediately rolled down his side window and shouted, “Good thing I came along.”

Sam was leaning against her car. She slapped the hood, saying, “No problem. Everything’s fine.”

“What happened?”

“I spooked some wild horses. Or they spooked me. I fishtailed, trying not to hit one of them, but there’s no real damage.”

He climbed out of his pickup truck and circled her patrol car. An older lanky rancher, Willoughby had worked around trucks and cattle all his life, for that reason, he clearly thought it was up to him to decide the depth of the damage. He noted the scratches and the new dent. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and looked under for leaks. Checking for leaks wasn’t a bad thing. She’d done it herself, but, Willoughby, she realized, was mostly showing off for his passenger, a younger man who had also stepped out of Willoughby’s pickup truck to look over the situation. He was taller and thinner than Willoughby. He was also wearing brand-new, high-end outdoor clothing. In other words, he was too “done-up” to be local.

“This is a bit out of your way. What brings you out here?” she asked Willoughby, a routine question.

“Him,” he answered, gesturing over his shoulder at his passenger while he hopped up top to check her antennae. “Meet Miles Gurwitz. I’m showing him around. It’s been a while since a production company took an interest in our part of the world, but I talked with his uncle last week, and he expressed some interest in making a new movie here, or maybe a tv series featuring a modern ranch family.”

Sam had recognized Miles the moment she saw him. She knew the Gurwitz family, mostly by reputation. They were old Hollywood, dating way-back to when Hollywood was “Hollywood”—a term not much in current use. Her dead husband had introduced her to Miles and his uncle, Morrie Gurwitz, a big producer, at a party, maybe, a year before he died. “The whole family are cheats and crooks,” her husband had added as an aside. “The uncle still owes me for something I did for him two years ago.”

Sam shrugged that off. No reason, Miles would remember her. Her California life had been so different and so seemingly long ago, she wasn’t sure that she would recognize herself from back then. She was, however, quite certain that his uncle wasn’t serious about doing something in Drinkwater, never mind that its vast, wide-open spaces were sometimes referred to as “The American Serengeti.”

That meant she couldn’t help wondering what was really going on. The last movie Morrie Gurwitz made here was twenty years ago—maybe more than twenty years ago. After that many years, she couldn’t imagine why Morrie Gurwitz would even take a call from Willoughby? In industry terms, twenty days was a long time. Twenty years? To put it bluntly: this wasn’t making sense and when something didn’t make sense, her sheriff instincts tended to light up.

Miles Gurwitz cleared his throat. “Sorry about the crash.”

Sam was momentarily confused, which “crash” did he mean? Her husband’s or . . .?

Then, gesturing towards Willoughby, Miles added, “He scared the horses and made them run because I’d never seen wild horses before. And they were amazing.” He paused. “Sorry, if we made you crash into that rock.”

Sam thought that’s exactly what Willoughby would do, while trying to impress someone from the industry.

“Do you see wild horses often?” Miles continued.

 “Not spooked like that,” she said, tossing the words in Willoughby’s direction.

Willoughby offered no response. After checking her antennae, he’d lifted the hood of her car and was looking around under there. She wasn’t sure what he expected to find.

When she turned back, she caught Miles giving her a quick once-over.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was expecting someone . . ..”

“Different,” she said, finishing his sentence. His reaction wasn’t atypical. Sam was short, slight (she preferred “wiry”), blond, and blue-eyed—not the usual sheriff-stereotype.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean . . ..” He stopped and shook his head.

Sam sifted her full attention from Willougby to him: What was he doing here?

She dredged her memory. There had been an accident. She was a little foggy on the details. It had happened, years ago, long before she became sheriff. It had involved Miles’ uncle and the last film crew who used Drinkwater as a location. After the “accident” they had left in a hurry and never returned, not even to finish the movie they were shooting at the time. The old sheriff, the one before her, had opened an investigation, but . . ..

“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do,” Miles continued. “Forgive me, I keep stumbling over myself. I think it’s because I’m a little overwhelmed by this place.” He made a wide gesture. “Everything out here is so . . . so . . . extraordinary.”

This place was extraordinary? She wanted to laugh. He was from Los Angeles where the air was solid, and the earth moved.

Miles drew a deep breath. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but she’d thrown him off his usual steady demeanor. Willoughby wasn’t hard to figure. The old guy’s view of the world was decades out-of-date and clearly didn’t include lady sheriffs. Miles sensed instantly that she bothered him. Willoughby wasn’t sure how to act around her, which was the real reason he was spending so much time checking out her car. That’s not to say Miles couldn’t appreciate the old guy’s dilemma. His own stereotype of a gun-toting lawwoman was a lot more butch. Not that he was inclined to underestimate her. She was clearly all business: short hair, almost no makeup, and a straight-to-the-point directness in her questions. Everything about her was no-nonsense, and yet . . ..

Miles looked away, trying not to stare. Willoughby was boring. Sheriff Sam Nielsen, on the other hand, was someone he thought he’d like to know, not because she’d caught his attention but because she was interesting, which was a different thing.

While Willoughby continued checking out her car, Miles tried again. “Who else do you think I should talk to about doing a movie here? Besides Bill Willoughby, of course.”

She took a moment. “What are you really doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“A western ranch-family movie doesn’t fit the current vibe. Right now, even wearing cowboy boots isn’t really a thing. So, what’s up?”

Again, the directness caught him off guard. And then, because he didn’t have an answer, he tried to laugh it off. “Wow, that’s a sheriff question if I ever heard one.”

“When something doesn’t make sense, it’s my job to ask.”

She was right about westerns, not being a thing, but every time he thought his being here didn’t make sense, he reminded himself that his uncle was famous for having a sixth sense for spotting shifting trends. Maybe moviegoers were ready to revisit American’s wide-open spaces and only his uncle knew it. That, however, wasn’t something he was ready to share. So, he shrugged. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what this is all about. My uncle asked me to come here and talk to him (he nodded in Willoughby’s direction) about maybe making a modern western—so here I am. Whether or not that develops into something is another question.”

“So, you got on a plane and flew to this remote corner of Idaho, to check on something, and you’re not sure why?” she continued.

He was trying to make it sound like he knew what he was doing here. But harder he tried, the worse it sounded. So, he decided to take a lighter tone.

He smiled. “There was also a helicopter flight from Boise. I don’t enjoy helicopter flights.” He gestured again towards Willoughby. “But my uncle seems to think he might be onto something, so what can I say?”

She clearly didn’t believe him. So, he hurriedly added, “And I’m hoping my uncle will finance my next film. My last two movies got good reviews but lost money, and so . . ..” He stopped. He was saying too much. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“You don’t need to explain anything,” Willoughby grumbled. “Our sheriff has more important things to worry about, like finding the cattle rustlers who are stealing my cows.”

“Cattle Rustlers? You have cattle rustlers here?” Miles now asked.

Sam gave Willoughby a quick glance, and then turned to Miles. “Not like in the old movies, but, yes, cattle rustling is on-going problem.”

Willoughby slammed the hood of her car shut. “Our current cattle rustlers are all up to date with the latest greatest gadgets. They fly a done overhead to spot the cows. Then they swoop in, load a trailer with five or six head, worth several hundred each, and they’re gone in under fifteen minutes.” Willoughby wiped his hands on a handkerchief he’d pulled from his back pocket. “And that’s what’s wrong with the whole damned country. We got the same-old problems, but we don’t have the same sense of determination. We’ve become too timid and too scared to do anything about cattle rustlers and most everything else that’s wrong. We need to start making real movies again, westerns movies with real heroes who aren’t afraid to make a real difference.”

Sam glanced at Miles trying to judge his reaction to Willoughby’s rant. She couldn’t get a read on him.

Meanwhile, Willoughby continued in a voice loud enough to be a shout. “I’m talking about the kind of drama that once defined America. Heroic stories with good guys and bad guys. You know, the kind of movie where when things go wrong somebody does something about it. That’s the kind of movie I challenged your uncle to make—to have the courage to make—bucking the current trends and everything. You never know when something old will become new again, I say. And it’s about time, too.”

Sam glanced again at Miles. He seemed puzzled. Her dead husband had warned her that the whole Gurwitz family were “cheats and crooks,” but Miles wasn’t acting like one. A con artist would have zeroed in on his mark’s hopes and dreams—something Willoughby had just spilled in vivid detail. She circled back to her original question: what was he doing here?

Meanwhile, Willoughby pushed his hat back, cowboy style, as if daring anyone to disagree with him.

And Sam was willing to give Willoughby credit for trying. Everyone in Drinkwater was grasping at straws—hoping for an act of Congress, if not an act of God, to save this place from becoming just another forgotten patch of dust. Trying to enlist the moviemaking industry was, at least, original.

“So, what about my missing cows?” Willoughby asked her directly.

“I am looking into it. I have two deputies making the rounds, checking stockyards, packing plants and truck rental places. My dispatcher is calling your neighbors, asking if they’ve seen anything unusual or have checked their security cameras lately.”

“I already checked with my neighbors,” he grumbled. “First thing I did.”

“Doesn’t hurt to ask again,” Sam answered.

He harumphed.

Modern-day cattle rustling, Miles thought. That could be interesting. Maybe his uncle WAS onto something. But then he quickly reconsidered. Truth was, Willoughby didn’t have any real ideas. He’d driven past a lot of scenery but never mentioned anything as interesting as cattle rustling. Willoughby was a waste of time. Miles told himself. And his uncle usually spotted a time waster before they’d finished their first sentence. So, what was going on here?

While Miles was worrying those questions, Willoughby and the sheriff bantered about the things, both large and small, that Willoughby’s neighbors had or hadn’t noticed concerning his missing cows. When it was obvious that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, Willoughby signaled that it was time to go.

Miles smiled and expressed the usual “glad to meet you” niceties and got back into Willoughby’s truck. Willoughby started the engine and, almost immediately, announced that they’d seen enough of Drinkwater’s canyons. It was still early in the day, and he had other things to show Miles. With that, he turned his truck around and started back the way they came.

Miles shrugged. He was along for the ride, never mind that he was newly interested in why. And something else troubled him—the sheriff.

Something about her was familiar. Miles had taught himself to remember everyone he’d met. He made it a point to file that information in the back of his head along with when and where he’d met them and who else that person might know. In his industry, networking was key to getting projects green-lighted, and he liked to believe he was good at it—the networking part. Which was why he couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that he knew Sam. He’d met her somewhere, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t remember when or where. The feeling was naggingly annoying.

“Has she been the sheriff long?” he asked Willoughby.

Willoughby chuckled. “I’d say not much longer.”

“Oh-h-h,” Miles said and then not knowing exactly how to respond, he let that information settle a moment.

“I’m backing someone else in the upcoming election,” Willoughby continued. “Someone who knows more about being a sheriff. She’s not fit for the job, never was.”

“Then how did she get elected?”

“Family.”

Miles knew about family. Family was the reason he was here. “Her family has some clout, I take it?”

“Among other things, she’s the daughter of Congressman Jay Evers.”

“Evers . . . isn’t that’s the long-time Idaho Republican?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Solid guy.”

“So, what? He encouraged her, endorsed her, campaigned for her?”

“No, not exactly,” Willoughby said. “It’s more like she thought she could run for sheriff because politics runs in her blood or something.” Willoughby paused. “Also, her grandmother owns the biggest ranch in the county. Biggest, not the best. The movies that your uncle and your father filmed here, were all shot on my ranch. It’s more scenic. Her grandmother supplied some of the horses for the project. She’s also one of the Drinkwater County Commissioners. You’ll need her to approve permits and stuff. But that’s not a problem. Everybody’s going to be behind this new project. Trust me about that. Things around here could use a boost.”

No doubt, Miles thought. The place had a worn feeling—almost a worn-out feeling. That included Willoughby. He was a big man, tall, broad-shouldered but not fleshy. Comfortable, Miles thought. Willoughby’s clothes were worn to a comfortable stage. He moved the same way, cowboy-slow. He seemed to know where he was going, he just wasn’t in any hurry to get there. Miles figured Willoughby could handle himself in most situations as long as he wasn’t too far from the ranch, so to speak. That said, calling Morrie Gurwitz, Miles’ uncle, was a long-long way from the ranch. So, what, Miles wondered, had Willoughby said to his uncle.

“What made you think my uncle might be interested in doing another project here—I mean after all these years?” Miles asked.

“He didn’t tell you?”

Miles shook his head.

Willoughby took his time. When he answered, what he said didn’t quite make sense. He rambled on about how great Drinkwater was for making movies that needed lots of outdoor shots. and then added, “I told your uncle that the old sheriff is gone. Sheriff Leo used to make life miserable for your uncle, constantly causing trouble about him paying his bills on time and other niggly things. It got worse after the accident—a young woman died. That was a real tragedy, but accidents happen.”

Miles knew about the accident. There had been a falling out between the brothers—Miles’ uncle and his father—over the accident. From the time he was is primary school, Miles had been forbidden to have anything to do with his uncle because “he let that young woman die.” As far as he knew, his father and his uncle hadn’t spoken much since that happened. Now Miles began to wonder if he’d ever heard the whole story.

“What happened?” he asked Willoughby.

“Some explosives went off too soon. Likely she was confused and tripped them because she wasn’t in the right place—who knows why. Like everything else, movie making can be dangerous, but the old sheriff started an investigation.”

“Aren’t most accidents investigated?”

“Yeah, but a lot of the crew left immediately, so he couldn’t finish his investigation. He didn’t like that.”

“What was he looking for—negligence?” Miles asked. That, he thought, fit with his father’s repeated complaint that his brother “let that young woman die.”

Willoughby shrugged. “He was stickler for details. The fact that everyone left so quickly meant he didn’t get all the details, if you know what I mean.”

Miles considered that for a moment. “Special effects are mostly done with animation now,” Miles added. “It’s safer.”

“Yeah, lots of things have changed since then. I told your uncle that he doesn’t need to worry about what happened back then. Our current sheriff has other worries.” Then Willoughby shifted to a lower gear and started up a steep incline, climbing out of the canyon. “But I’ll admit she catches the eye,” he added.

“Who? The sheriff?” Miles asked.

“Yeah, I saw you looking her over.”

Miles couldn’t deny it, but he shook his head anyway.

Willoughby didn’t seem to notice. He was busy negotiating another stretch of steep road.

While he was busy doing that, Miles studied his side mirror, watching the dust roil out from under Willoughby’s truck, forming a cloud that seemed to grow as it followed them. “What did she do before she became the sheriff,” he asked when the ride had settled into a straight stretch.

“Don’t know. She was living in California, married someone down there—he died in some kind of traffic accident.”

California! Miles repeated under his breath. His instincts were true. He had met her someplace. Now, he just needed to figure out when and where.

         After Willoughby drove away, Sam sat in her car thinking about Miles Gurwitz and the checkered history of made-in-Drinkwater movies. The longer she thought, the worse it got, meaning she couldn’t come up with a single good reason why Morrie Gurwitz might want to return to Drinkwater. Too much unfinished business.

Morrie Gurwitz, was the old sheriff’s Big Fish, she knew.

         Every law officer, who had been on the job for a while, had a Big Fish—the one that always got away. The old sheriff, known locally as “Sheriff Leo,” died six days after Sam was elected. He’d retired for health reasons but hadn’t shared the seriousness of his failing health with anyone but his wife. As a result, Sam didn’t have a chance to talk to him about Morrie Gurwitz or anything else, but she’d read the old file. Sheriff Leo had suspected the older Gurwitz of a multitude of minor crimes that his money and privilege made difficult to prosecute. It was those small crimes that Sheriff Leo particularly hated—mostly unpaid bills, both large and small, that his production company always left behind. In a place like Drinkwater, that calculated carelessness, could bankrupt local businesses and ruin lives.

Sheriff Leo had also investigated the accident that had resulted in the death of a young woman, a lead actor, in the film they were making. But, because everyone left so quickly, he was never able to gather enough evidence to prove anything one way or the other. And as a small-time sheriff he didn’t have the power to force any disclosure if he couldn’t find any evidence. That was a long time ago, and to the best of her knowledge, in all that time, no one from Morrie Gurwitz’s family or his production company had ever returned to Drinkwater. So why now?

Sam sat awhile, chasing those thoughts. When she finally realized she wasn’t getting anywhere, she started her car’s engine and began the long climb out of the canyon. But, of course, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Sheriff Leo’s file was coffee-stained and dog-eared. It was the one file that was still in the top drawer of his desk when she took over. Out of respect, Sam had left it there. She hadn’t read that file in a long time. She never expected to re-open the investigation. She wasn’t sure that was even possible. For one thing, it was more than likely that she wouldn’t even be the Sheriff of Drinkwater in a few weeks.

Besides she had her own Big Fish—Keith Monson—that she needed to keep dogging, every chance she got. He was the billionaire who had recently purchased thousands of acres of Drinkwater land and then built a huge hunting lodge where his business cronies came to fish and hunt while enjoying the comforts of pressed cotton sheets, gourmet meals (prepared by a trained chef) and wine from a world-class cellar.

Nothing wrong with that, except that many of Monson’s guests came to Drinkwater hoping to bag one of Drinkwater’s big horn sheep which happened to be endangered. Monson didn’t care. If some bigwig from Saudia Arabia or Japan or Singapore wanted a hunting trophy, Monson made it happen. And if she or one of her deputies tried to stop them, the guests produced diplomatic papers and/or forged hunting permits. And, like her predecessor who didn’t have the resources to take on Morrie Gurwitz’ and his production company, she didn’t have the resources to prove their paperwork was false—not before Monson’s guests conveniently made their exit over an international border.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. She suspected her Big Fish was involved in something so big, it dwarfed anything Morrie Gurwitz may or may not have done. Her Big Fish was building a power plant in Drinkwater—a huge one from the looks of it. Her job description didn’t include regulating the building of a power plant, but that didn’t stop her from wondering why? Why build a power plant in a place where there was no obvious need for one? Idaho was already sending excess power to Nevada. In short, building that power plant didn’t make sense. And when things didn’t make sense . . .

Sam shook those thoughts off and started her car. The road leading out of the canyon could be tricky. She needed to pay attention to her driving. However, as soon as she was “up top,” the local jargon for having reached the upper plateau where her communication devices worked again, Sam radioed her dispatcher, Debra Ruth.

“What’s up?” Debra Ruth answered in a voice that was pitched too high. She sounded like a teenager. Debra Ruth also dressed with youthful abandon. She’d never met a color she didn’t like. Her skirts and shirts were a cacophony of plaids, stripes, and bright hues. So was her hair. In other words, she wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a professional dispatcher. That said, everyone, who knew her, liked Debra Ruth. They shared gossip with her, confided in her, asked her for advice, some even shared medical concerns and family secrets. Since becoming her boss, Sam had come to understand that in a short-handed, under-funded, backcountry sheriff’s office, Debra Ruth and her gossip network were worth at least two regular deputies—something her dispatcher also understood, although she pretended to be humble about it. Oh, and she knew her way around computers, which added to her indispensability.

Sam cleared her throat. “What are you hearing about the Californian Bill Willoughby is showing around Drinkwater?”

“I hear he’s a hunk,” her dispatcher returned.

That was sooo Debra Ruth, Sam allowed herself an inward smile. “He’s ok,” she offered.

“You’ve seen him?” Debra Ruth replied with a sudden edge of interest.

Her dispatcher was forever looking for the “gorgeous guy” who would sweep her off her feet. Sam took a moment before saying, “Yes, Willoughby is showing him wild horses and the other usual Drinkwater attractions. What are you hearing? Does anyone know what he’s doing here?”

“Nah, most people think Willoughby is just being Willoughby. I mean, when doesn’t Bill Willoughby have some overly grand idea that he’s chasing?”

“Right,” Sam offered, but the whole thing still seemed wrong.

“Oh,” Debra Ruth came back, “You’ve been out of radio range so long I almost forgot to ask where you’re going today?”

“Accra, Ghana.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s big city in Africa.”

“If you say so . . .”

Sam shook her head. By now almost all of Drinkwater knew that she randomly picked a place to go every morning from a scrapbook of travel brochures she’d collected when she was a teenager and thought any place would be better than Drinkwater. She’d never been to any of the places in her scrapbook, but when things were not going well, she liked to remind herself that she could be Accra or Paris or somewhere similarly exotic. Helped her keep her sanity.

It had started as a school assignment, “write a foreign embassy and ask for information.” The embassy that she chose sent a whole packet of colorful brochures. So, she wrote another embassy and another and another. At that time of her life, getting any mail was a thrill. Getting mail that was colorful and seemingly exotic had allowed her to imagine worlds beyond her grandmother’s ranch and the small school she attended. Even back then, it had helped her keep her sanity. The fact that she hadn’t outgrown her interest in faraway places, might seem odd, but one day, she was going to honor her teenage self and go see the world.

Today, however, that silly ritual, gave her pause. If she wasn’t reelected, would she go to Accra?”

That’s when one of her deputies, came on the radio saying that he’d asked around and hadn’t found anyone who had seen any signs of cattle rustling. Then another deputy, the one everybody called “Tractor,” because he liked to tinker with old farm machinery, came on the radio, saying the same thing.

“Willoughby’s neighbors all agree that he is missing some cows—more than a few—but they haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary. They honestly don’t know what’s going on. Most don’t even have an opinion,” Tractor added.

“Yeah,” the first deputy, Paul, agreed. “Right now, everybody’s more interested in why Willoughby is hanging out with that guy from California.”

“Everybody?” Sam asked. “How long has Miles Gurwitz been in Drinkwater?”

Debra Ruth answered, “I hear he arrived late yesterday and Willoughby showed him around the north end. Then this morning Willoughby has been driving him around the canyons.”

“And everybody already knows about him?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, that’s the big buzz,” Tractor agreed. “People are wondering what’s going on.”

“What do you think is going on?” Sam asked.

The radio went silent for a couple of beats.

“Nobody thinks that his uncle is going to start filming here,” Debra Ruth offered.

“Yeah, there was some bad karma after that last movie,” Tractor added

“Who remembers?” Paul asked. “That was a long time ago.”

“So, what do you think is going on?” Sam asked.

“Another one of Willoughby’s schemes,” Tractor answered. “Or a con job.”

“Yeah, a con job,” the other deputy agreed.  “Has to be, what else?”

Sam’s first thoughts were along that line, but it didn’t make sense. By Drinkwater standards, Willoughby was a big man, but when it came to making a movie, he wasn’t worth conning. Like most ranchers, his accounts ran in the red every month except the one month each year when he took his cows to market. So, why would Miles Gurwitz, of the famous or infamous Gurwitz family, think hanging out with Willoughby was worthwhile? He could run the slickest con in the world and not come up with enough cash to make his next movie. The money just wasn’t there.

Bigger question: if Willoughby was being conned, was it her job to save him from his own stupidity? She mulled that for a long moment, then ended those thoughts with a mental shrug because she didn’t think Willoughby was being conned. Her instincts told her this (whatever it was) was bigger than a con. And since she was the sheriff of Drinkwater, at least until the next election, and she wasn’t going to Accra, Ghana, today, she needed to figure out what was really going on. Problem was, she knew how to buy a plane ticket to Accra, even though it was half-a-world away. She even knew that the flight would likely connect through Washington Dulles airport. On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine what made Morrie Gurwitz send his nephew here to talk to Bill Willoughby.

         “Check on the nephew,” Sam told Debra Ruth. “See what you can find on him.”

         “Like what?”

         “Everything.”

         “Everything?”

“Right down to where he buys his socks.”

         “You’re serious?”

         “I am.”

While Sam was worrying about Miles Gurwitz, cattle rustlers, and getting re-elected, Eric Mitchell, the local junk dealer, was sitting on the bleachers behind the Drinkwater County School watching Sam’s daughter, Amy, play softball while he ate his lunch. Amy was supposed to be covering center field, but he saw her take out her phone and send a message—the modern equivalent of passing notes in school. There was no texting when he was going to that same school years ago. He never passed notes either. Mostly a loner, he’d never really hung out with anyone. Only person he ever cared about was Sam. Back then, some of the other kids noticed and began teasing him about being her “groupie,” always hanging around hoping to get her attention, but never quite succeeding. . ..

Eric’s father was foreman of the Nielsen ranch, so sometimes when they were away from school, hanging out at the ranch with nothing else to do, Sam talked to him. He’d lived for those moments.

“You like the word ‘groupie?’” he asked his lunch companion.

“A baby frog,” she said.

“Groupie, not guppy,” he repeated with a shake of his head. It was hard to get Mrs. Roser to understand much of anything, but, in her day, she had been all proper English and multiplication tables.

“Baby frogs don’t look like frogs. They are a surprise when they grow up,” she continued.

He shook his head. There had been a time when he was completely intimidated by Mrs. Roser. That was in the fourth grade, when she was his teacher. Now, long retired, she mostly wandered around town, often walking in circles, forgetting where she was. He understood the confusion. Smelling Sam’s daughter had done the same thing to the order of his memories. He was leaving the Bone-Dry Café—the only decent eating place in town—when Amy and a couple of her friends came in. The entrance was narrow. She brushed against him, and that’s when he realized she smelled just like Sam when Sam was her age. The scent had left him feeling dizzy. After that, it had become a regular thing for him to watch her play softball during her noon recess.

He set his lunch box on the bleacher next to him, opened it, and took out a sandwich. Peanut Butter. He liked peanut butter. As a kid he’d traded for peanut butter whenever his father made tuna fish. He never had a mother, at least not one he remembered, and his father only knew how to make two kinds of sandwiches—peanut butter and tuna fish. Eric would have been happy if his father hadn’t been even that versatile. Peanut butter was all he needed.

Amy’s hair was long, the way Sam’s used to be. Sam was the sheriff now. When she spoke to him, it was in her sheriff voice. Always keeping her distance. Like she’d never really come back from California. He didn’t like that.

“Same lunch?” Mrs. Roser asked.

He nodded and spread a napkin over the lap of his former teacher. Then he handed her half of his sandwich. He didn’t like Sam’s sheriff voice.

“Roast beef?” Mrs. Roser muttered.

He paid her no attention because this was how their lunches always went.

“Bacon and lettuce and tomato?” she continued.

He opened a carton of milk for her.

“Liverwurst and chopped onion?”

Eric wasn’t crazy. He knew he couldn’t show up day after day at the schoolyard to watch Amy without an excuse. He knew what that would look like. That’s why he’d invited Mrs. Roser to sit with him and share his lunch. She never had other plans.

Drinkwater was not the place to be if you had plans. He’d found that out the hard way. Nothing changed here, at least nothing changed for the better. The old school needed paint. Otherwise, it was the same as when he and Sam went there—twelve grades and a library under one roof. Students from outlying areas boarded during the week with town families. The others rode school buses. He couldn’t count the hours he’d spent on a school bus. Sam sat in the back talking with her friends or doing her homework. He sat in the front by himself. They talked when it was time to walk the long lane leading to the ranch—half a mile each way, each day.

High school football games were still the biggest social event in Drinkwater County. Home games filled the bleachers, where he was sitting now. More than filled the bleachers. Some folks brought extra lawn chairs. Girls’ softball, on the other hand, was a recess activity. Nobody watched that. Nobody cared. Eric hoped anyone seeing him with Mrs. Roser would think he was doing a good thing—a gesture of kindness towards his old teacher. Otherwise of no note.

“Corn beef on rye?” Mrs. Roser asked.

He shook his head.

“Ham and cheese?” she went on.

He didn’t care what he ate. The important thing was that for forty minutes every day, he was a groupie again. He had a focus. He knew every move Sam’s daughter made. His reward for that careful attention was getting to smell her when she ran past on her way back to her classroom. Sometimes, as an extra bonus, she flipped her hair over her shoulder, a gesture so reminiscent of her mother at that age, it almost made time stop.

“You always wanted that one, didn’t you?” Mrs. Roser said, her voice taking a different tone.

“Which one?”

“She had one of those longish names—three syllables. It’ll come to me. I just need a minute.”

Samantha, he knew. He also knew that it would take more than a minute for his old teacher to remember. He nudged her hand—the one holding the sandwich—to remind her to eat.

She took a bite. “This isn’t egg salad.”

He shook his head again.

“I like egg salad. I never liked any of those Nielsen women,” she rambled on.

“Why’s that?” he asked. Mrs. Roser could have moments of clarity, but they quickly passed.

“They don’t need anybody, do they? Didn’t need you, did she? Too bad. I always thought those Nielsen women could use a spring tonic every season of the year. Then maybe they’d shit like the rest of us.”

Eric shot her a glance. He’d never heard her say “shit.” He’d also never heard her express an opinion on the Nielsen women of Drinkwater, Idaho, although he would have been more surprised if she didn’t have one. The Nielsen Women consisted of Maddy, Sam’s grandmother, who was a county commissioner and owned the biggest ranch around, Xan, (short for Alexandra) Sam’s mother, the famous western artist who painted huge, colorful canvases and signed them with an “X.” And Sam, who was the sheriff. And Amy, her daughter, had just made an out, putting her team in position to win the game.

“Mrs. Roser, you surprise me,” he said. “A spring tonic every season?”

She paused and stared at him for a moment. Then blankness overtook her gaze. “Left-over lamb and mint jelly,” she answered. “That makes a good sandwich.”

On those long walks from the school bus stop to the ranch, Eric had shared his childhood secrets with Sam, including his elaborate strategies for finding his missing mother. Then one night, his father showed him her death certificate. She’d been dead all the time that he was making those elaborate plans, all the time that he’d spent thinking and dreaming about her. That was the same night . . ..

“Pastrami on rye,” Mrs. Roser continued.

“Too salty,” he answered.

“Cucumber with the crusts cut off,” Mrs. Roser said.

“Too fancy.”

“Chicken salad,” she suggested.

“Not for me.”

The night he learned the truth about his mother was the night Sam finally helped him, not with his mother, but with his father. Because she helped him, he suddenly believed that Sam cared about him. She cared about what might happen to him. That was when he decided that she loved him. Why else would she have done what she did? From that moment on, he was sure that when they grew up, they were going to get married and . . ..

“Sweet pickle on brown bread,” Mrs. Roser continued.

Instead, Sam went away. And when she came back, she wasn’t the same. Her sheriff voice made him cringe like when his father told him that he was no good and was about to hit him—again.

He looked up and saw Amy running, her hair blowing behind her. He swallowed hard. No question, Amy was more like Sam than Sam. He wasn’t sure what that meant. He wasn’t sure of anything. That’s why he came here almost every noon to watch and think and wait while he figured it out.

“Many, many kinds of sandwiches,” Mrs. Roser said.

“I know,” he said, while again nudging her arm, “but you need to eat this one. It’s almost time to go. Noon recess is over.”

Later in the afternoon, when Sam got back in town—Drinkwater City, population 550, known locally as “the other D.C.”—she drove straight to Gus Beesley’s Texaco. Gus-Gus, the owner’s son, was minding the front. He was selling a can of oil to the captain of the high school football team. She’d spotted the football captain’s motorcycle parked outside. And in a glance, Sam recognized an-all-too-familiar mini drama. Being captain of the team and riding a motorcycle, meant the kid leaning against the counter was acting like he owned the place. Gus-Gus, who was the same age and whose father DID own the service station, was nervously counting change. Football, in a town like Drinkwater, defined young lives. But once high school was over . . .. She drew a deep breath. She wanted to tell both of them to chill, but she didn’t.

“Is your dad in?” she asked Gus-Gus. He wordlessly pointed towards the back.

Gus, the father, was a large man who always wore the same style green coveralls, stretched over his widening paunch. When she found him, he was putting new tires on an old pickup truck. He paused long enough to chew a couple of Tums before asking, “What can I do for you?”

“I slammed into a big rock. I’m hoping you can fix the dent because I don’t really have the budget for a whole new back panel.”

He wiped his hands and followed her outside. Like Willoughby, he walked around her vehicle and looked underneath for leaks. He straightened up, chewed more Tums, and said, “I can smooth out the dent and match the paint, but . . ..”

She stopped him before he could continue. “I know, I know, the old sheriff, the one who was repeatedly re-elected for thirty-six years, wouldn’t have bothered,” she said. “I’m a little tired of hearing how far he could stretch a dollar, mostly by ignoring anything that wasn’t falling apart.”

Gus paused before adding, “I was going to say that it might take me a week to get the paint.”

“Sorry, but I know that’s what people are saying.”

Gus shrugged.

“I happened to see Bill Willoughby this morning,” she added. “Put me in a mood.”

Gus let a smile slide across his face. “I hear he’s giving some Californian the grand tour of our hidden paradise.”

“And I thought we weren’t sharing that secret with outsiders,” she replied.

He tossed an empty Tums bottle into a trash barrel at the side of his garage. “What secret?”

“That this is a paradise,” she said.

“It ain’t,” he told her. “That’s why Willoughby is running all over the place, working way too hard, trying to make Drinkwater seem like something it ain’t.”

“Yeah, but what do you think is really going on?” she asked.

“No idea, but I’m rooting for him. If he can get some Californians to take an interest in Drinkwater, I’m all for it. Since the ultra-rich settled in Wyoming, my cousin’s garage in Jackson Hole has made a fortune for him. What does Wyoming have that we don’t have?”

“Mountains and an airport,” she answered.

“They have a helipad out at that fancy hunting lodge,” he offered.

She rolled her eyes. “Careful what you wish for.”

“I know. I know. You don’t like Keith Monson’s fancy hunting lodge or his helipad, but he’s hiring people to build more cabins and guide more fishing trips. And my nephew got a job doing concrete work at that power plant Monson’s building. Good job. Good pay.”

Sam shook her head.

“You could be wrong about that power plant, you know,” he added.

“I hope I’m wrong for your nephew’s sake,” she said and was about to ask if he remembered anything about an accident on the set of the last movie, when she heard Gus-Gus, the son, yell, “Hey, hey, where do you think you’re going?”

Sam turned and saw Mrs. Roser, her old fourth-grade teacher. She was shuffling past the gas pumps, breathing hard, her hands waving in a fit of frustration.

Gus-Gus was following behind, trying to get her to stop. “You need to go back that other way,” he said, but she wasn’t listening.

“Every lunchtime, it’s little girl sandwiches,” Mrs. Roser said, grabbing Sam’s arm. “Never ham and cheese. No bacon and tomato. He won’t try egg salad.”

Sam looked from Gus to Gus-Gus wondering what they were making of this. Gus-Gus rolled his eyes. Gus shrugged. Then, because he could never let anything go without a comment, Gus added, “If you ask me, that’s the one person around here with no worries. Must be nice when you can’t remember enough to be concerned about anything.”

That was no help. Sam turned to Mrs. Roser. “Who won’t try egg salad?”

“Yes, yes,” she said with renewed enthusiasm. “You got to guess his name, or he gets your first born. That’s how the story goes. Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin,” she began to chant, the tone of her voice rising with each repeat. “Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin . . ..

Then Mrs. Roser suddenly stopped talking and plopped herself down on a pile of old tires that Gus had stacked near the front. She fussed with some strings on the frayed edge of her shirt and swung her feet back and forth like a child.

Sam squatted next to her. “Tell me again who won’t try egg salad?” But Mrs. Roser had stopped paying attention. She swung her feet and began singing while she twisted and tied the loose ends of her shirt. “Fairytales can come true. It can happen to you,” she sang softly as though Gus was right and she hadn’t a care in the world, which wasn’t true. She no had family and fewer and fewer lucid moments.

         Gus broke the silence. “The time’s coming,” he added, “when she’s going to have to go into a home where someone can really take care of her.”

         “A place where nobody knows her, you mean.”

         “Yeah, but . . .” Gus started to say.

         Sam stopped him with a gesture. He was right, but that was not the problem of the moment. Sam sat on the pile of tires next to the woman who had taught the multiplication table to almost every adult in Drinkwater. “What’s eight times eight?” she asked.

         Mrs. Rose brightened. “Sixty-four.”

         “Nine times nine?”

         “Eight-one.”

         “What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

         “Peanut butter every day,” she said. “I don’t like eating peanut butter sandwiches every day.”

Synopsis:

RAINBOW HORSES—a novel by Jerrie Hurd

7 chapters, 240 pages, approx. 70,000 words

Sheriff Samantha (Sam) Nielsen is up for reelection and rumor says she won’t win. Rumor is notably reliable in Drinkwater County, Idaho, located in a remote semi-arid area known as the American Serengeti. When her husband died in a freak accident, Sam left California and came home to Drinkwater and then ran for sheriff on a dare, but she’s come to like her job and would like to continue. Her jurisdiction covers an area larger than the state of Massachusetts with a dwindling population of 60,000, not counting the ultra-rich who jet in to fly fish and illegally hunt curly horned mountain sheep.

Rainbow Horses (the first of a series of novels) opens when Sam meets the nephew of a big movie producer who claims to be scouting locations for his uncle’s next film. The lead actress on the last movie made in Drinkwater, thirty years ago, died mysteriously. For that reason and the fact that westerns, as a genre, don’t make current box office, Sam can’t believe anyone wants to start making movies in Drinkwater again.

Meanwhile, she’s trying to catch some modern-day cattle rustlers who are stealing both cows and some of the wild horses that Sam’s mother, a famous western artist, is trying to protect.

Even more worrying, she suspects that the local junk dealer, a disturbed young man who Sam knows well because they grew up together, might be stalking her ten-year-old daughter.

Then there’s her Big Fish (every law officer has a big fish—the one that always gets away). Her Big Fish is a billionaire who owns a fancy hunting lodge in Drinkwater and is building a new power plant nearby. The question is: why? Idaho is already selling excess power to Nevada. And the air pollution from that power plant will destroy Drinkwater’s air quality and its famous mirage. “Why is he building that power plant?” she keeps asking herself and anyone else who will listen to her. “What is he up to?”

In the end, saves her daughter in a life-threatening climax that also reveals an underground water reservoir—water that her Big Fish intends to pump to California, using the power from the plant he’s building. His project is temporarily halted once the scheme is exposed. That, however, means that Sam is suddenly on his radar—a fact that becomes an on-going danger. Sam’s Big Fish, and his schemes flow through all the novels.

She also exposes the cattle rustlers and saves the wild horses, but only by crossing into Nevada, where her authority means nothing. She relies on her wits instead.

And she solves the twenty-year-old murder mystery. She gets the case re-opened, but she isn’t sure her new evidence is enough to convict the murderer—Miles Gurwitz’s uncle. That is until she uncovers the fact that a couple of long-missing teens were also murdered by him because they witnessed the first murder. This, of course, complicates her growing interest in Miles Gurwitz—the nephew, who supposedly buys a ranch in Drinkwater because he needs a quiet place to work on scripts. Sam’s on again/off again relationship with Miles runs through all the novels.

And she wins reelection.

Opening Scene: Spotted Spirit Dog

Part One

She sees the bullet coming straight at her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she also notes a flurry of blackbirds flying up from the thicket of trees where the bullet seems to be coming from. Ravens? Then something hits her knees. Hard. She falls sideways. Thankfully, her training kicks in. She rolls into the fall, hitting the ground with the back of her shoulder, minimizing the damage to her body. Simultaneously she draws her sidearm. Then quickly pulling herself into a sitting position, knees tucked into her chest, she scoots sideways, putting her patrol car between her and the shooter. Without thinking, she also grabs the collar of the dog that knocked her down.

Sheriff Samantha “Sam” Nielsen gives herself a chance to catch her breath while she listens for a second shot or any other sound that might tell her where the shooter is or what’s going on. She hears nothing but the buzzing of a couple of mosquitos and the whisper of a slight breeze rustling the willow trees behind her. A long moment later, a ping from her car’s engine makes her jump. The dog whimpers. She tightens her grip on its collar. More mosquitos, maybe a bee. The breeze again. Nothing else.

Dragging the dog with her, she slides sideways over uneven, slightly damp ground, stopping only when she was sure she’s sitting squarely behind her car’s engine block. She’s alone, no backup. Or to be more precise, her backup was at least forty minutes away. She is the Sheriff of Drinkwater County Idaho. She and her five deputies were responsible for area larger than the state of Massachusetts. They patrolled deep canyons, wide salt flats, and seemingly endless stretches of sage and scrub brush, sometimes romantically dubbed the “American Serengeti.” More like it was America’s forgotten place—Drinkwater County, Idaho, population under 160,000 and dropping. This was not a place where the young saw a future. Most left. She had returned. The first time she ran for sheriff, five years ago now,winning was a surprise.

Not like this. Not as surprising as seeing a bullet coming straight at you.

She looks around, making a quick assessment. The engine block is the only part of her vehicle that can stop a bullet. Everything else might deflect it or slow it down, but not . . .

         Stay focused, she tells herself.  Listen!

If someone is working their way around hoping to take another shot, she’ll hear something. Given the dense scrub brush next to the refuge lakes, she can’t imagine the shooter making a move without also making a noise. The undergrowth next to the (name these) lakes was thick. Not even the best tracker could . . .

Just listen, keep listening, she tells herself.

         She hears nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. The buzzing of those pesky mosquitos continues. She also notes the screech of a distant hawk and the steady breathing of the dog that has momentarily stopped struggling. She loosens her grip slightly. The dog turns its head and tries to lick her hand. Not her dog. Never saw it before it hit her knees and took her down.

         Sam leans her back against her patrol car, feeling a growing soreness in the shoulder that hit the ground first. Still listening, she draws several slow, deep breaths while she reminds herself that you never see the bullet that kills you. Seeing a bullet is a good thing. Means it missed you already. Your brain can’t process what your eyes are seeing. Not that fast. By the time you know you’re seeing a bullet, it’s past being a danger. Her current danger is the next bullet, the one she doesn’t see.

Stay focused, she tells herself again while she tries to figure out what’s going on here. She was on her way to The Royal Hotel, a refurbished birder hangout on the edge of a local ghost town. The proprietors had called her because of a fist fight between a couple of seventy-year-old birders, both of whom wanted to press charges. So, intending to respond to that call, she was on her way to the hotel, driving along the edge of the refuge’s larger lake, when she spotted some car tracks leading into a part of the bird refuge that was supposedly off limits to everyone. She stopped, got out of her car, started following the tracks a few steps and then all of a sudden seemingly from out of nowhere . . ..

She shakes her head.

Her patrol car has “sheriff” written on all four sides. Whoever fired that shot had to know they were firing at the Sheriff of Drinkwater County, Idaho, unless they were so inept with a gun that they’d let a shot go wild. She dismisses that possibility. The people in her county know how to handle a gun almost from the time they are old enough to hold one.       

         She takes out her phone. No service. No surprise. The bird refuge situated near the eastern side of her jurisdiction was notorious for having little or no cell phone service. She thinks about reaching round for the radio inside her patrol car, but quickly dismisses that idea. Sticking her head up long enough to grab the radio might be the move the shooter is waiting for—a scenario she considers more likely given the fact that the shooter obviously isn’t tramping through the brush hoping to line-up a shot from another, better angle.

Letting her dispatcher know that she was pinned down, wasn’t going to help. Sam returns to her only best option, which was to wait this out, let the shooter grow impatient and make the first wrong move. Meanwhile, she had become so alert, listening so intently, that the hair on the back of her neck was beginning to feel like pinpricks.

If she hears something suggesting that the shooter is coming round, looking for a clean shot, she planned to roll under her vehicle, forcing her stalker to come within range of her side arm. Her rifles, of course, were also in her car along with her radio.

Five minutes tick by and she still hasn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. Come to think of it, she hasn’t seen anything out of the ordinary either—except that bullet and the dog. No longer struggling against her grip, the dog lays quietly beside Sam giving her a wide-eyed look, every time she glances in its direction.

She will deal with the dog when the danger is past, she tells herself. Sooner or later, the shooter will need to move. Wait, listen, she reminds herself yet again.

         Sam Nielsen grew up in this dusty corner of America. At nineteen, she left to go to school in California, and like most young people who fled this long-forgotten, futureless place, she never thought she’d come back. Then, years later, when her husband died suddenly in a car crash, she couldn’t imagine raising her daughter alone in California, not when she had family living here. When she got elected sheriff, six months later, no one was more surprised than she was. She’d been sheriff for five years now, re-elected once, but, in moments like this one, sitting behind her car, waiting for someone to take another shot at her, she still couldn’t quite believe the direction her life had taken. She wasn’t naïve; she knew her election had a lot to do with the fact that her family had deep roots in this place, generations deep, and a family reputation for “not sitting still” a phase that meant something quite different than Sam’s current circumstances. 

Actually, Sam thought the phrase “not sitting still” mostly applied to her grandmother, Maddy, who still ran the family ranch and was one of Drinkwater’s three county commissioners—had been for years and years. “Not sitting still” meant Grams now in her seventies was still considered a go-getter. Sam’s mother was the famous artist Xan (Alexandra Nielsen), who signed her paintings with an “X.” She upheld the family reputation by never-never doing the expected or the ordinary. Being sheriff, didn’t mean that Sam was trying to uphold the family reputation. Quite the contrary. Her idea was to keep Drinkwater County running as smoothly as possible. No drama. No drama that could be avoided.  She preferred to think of herself as a “peace officer.” Keeping the peace was how she measured her job. If things were running smoothly, she was doing a good job.

With that in mind, she made it a point to personally know most of the people in her county. She attended local football games, graduations, weddings, funerals. In other words, without making it a stated goal, she’d also learned to do the politician part of her job. In short, she was hard-pressed to think why anyone would want to shoot her.

Of course, the shooter didn’t have to be local. It is fall—bird season, meaning her job was currently complicated by the 10,000 or more birders who descended on her county, twice a year, every fall and spring. Strangers who didn’t know her, came from as far away as Australia, Brussels, and Patagonia, not to mention that the map, hanging on the wall, at The Royal Hotel showed pins from people from every state in the US. Drinkwater County was considered a world-class birding site—one of the places every serious birder wants to brag about having been, at least once. And yes, some of those birders could be annoying and city-stupid, meaning they got lost or got into fist fights or trespassed onto private property. Nevertheless, they were birders. They carried scopes, not guns. No reason to think one of them wanted to kill her.

         A couple more minutes tick by.

Having not heard another shot or any other unusual sound, Sam releases her grip on the dog. It stands up and shakes itself. To her surprise, the dog is huge—a Great Dane. A spotted black and white Great Dane with a missing one back leg. The leg had been amputated some time ago; it was cleanly healed.

How? she asks herself.

         Then she catches that thought as she realizes she might have remembered everything backwards. The black birds flying skyward had caught her attention. Then the dog knocked against her and, as she was falling, she saw the bullet. Did that mean . . .

         Had the dog saved her life?

She shakes her head slowly. The bigger question was the dog itself. How had this enormous, three-legged, black, and white dog come to be here at the right moment or any moment? It made no sense. Drinkwater County, Idaho, is rural. The only dogs people owned here were working dogs, ranch dogs, herding dogs. A three-legged Great Dane fit none of those categories. Most likely it had been dumped because it was too big or too crippled or just too much trouble to someone. Maybe that explained the tracks she saw. Someone had pulled off the road to dump the dog, leaving it to slowly starve or be killed and eaten by coyotes.

People like that . . . she grits her teeth. Then she reminds herself that she still needs to keep focused, keep listening.

She watches the dog. Like her, it seems alert, listening. In the distance, there is the gurgling cries of sandhill cranes. The dog turns in that direction and tests the air with its nose, no doubt smelling the water. Not too far in that direction are two lakes with a combined size slightly larger than Lake Tahoe, but unlike Lake Tahoe, they are only inches deep. Twice a year, every year, some 320 migratory species of birds used those lakes as a stopover. Scientists had found evidence that some species, like the sandhill cranes, had been stopping at these lakes for over a million years. A million years made the long minutes she’d been sitting behind her patrol car seem silly short, but she isn’t under the impression that any of this is silly.

The dog relaxes, it stretches its nose in her direction and nuzzles her arm—the one holding her sidearm. She brushes it away, not wanting to be distracted. The dog steps back, eyes her a moment, and then lies down, rolling onto one side as if it doesn’t have a care in the world. She thinks that’s a good sign, but waits, still listening.

A couple of minutes later, she hears it—the thing she’s been waiting for. Someone is tramping through the underbrush. However, they aren’t trying to be quiet and they’re coming from the lake side—her unprotected side, the opposite direction from the expected danger. The bullet had come from behind her. There are thick willows and a bank of cattails in front of her. She glances at the dog. It has rolled up, head cocked, listening with interest. Sam is taking no chances. Side arm still drawn, she gets onto her feet in a crouching position, braces her arm and waits.

Half a minute later, a middle-aged, slightly rotund woman, dressed in what looks like a white lab coat, pushes aside some of the willow branches and emerges into the clearing where Sam stopped to check the strange tracks. She exclaims, “Oh, here’s the road.” Then seeing Sam, she suddenly throws her arms into the air and shouts, “Don’t shoot.”

For a moment, Sam thinks this is so surreal she wonders if she has fallen into a Murakami short story or a Magritte painting. Then her training kicks in. She quickly shakes off her surprise, and, because it’s her job to protect people, she pops up, grabs the woman, and pulls her down behind the patrol car. The woman lands with a decided thump and an audible groan.

“There’s an active shooter in the area,” Sam says. “Didn’t you hear the gunshot?”

The woman shakes her head. “What gunshot?”

Then Sam asks if she saw the flurry of blackbirds—probably ravens.

 “Ravens,” the woman repeats and then adds, “No, no, I’m not interested in ravens.”

The woman rubs her arm where Sam grabbed her. The dog whimpers. Then, all of a sudden, the woman stops rubbing her arm and starts complaining about the dog. “It’s against the law to have a dog on the bird refuge, leashed or unleashed.”

“Not my dog,” Sam starts to tell her. Then it occurs to Sam that the real mystery is the woman.

“Who are you?” she asks.

The woman straightens slightly and answers, “I could ask the same. I mean, I’m not used to having a gun pulled on me. I’m even less used to being roughly pulled to the ground.”

Sam thumbs over her shoulder to the identifying insignia painted on the side of her vehicle.

The woman twists around. Then she leans away from the patrol car, as though she’s having trouble reading the sign. She is a little close, but the lettering is big. When she turns around again, she looks Sam over and says, “You’re the sheriff of Drinkwater?”

Sam is short, slight (she prefers “wiry”) and blond, meaning this lab-coated woman isn’t the first person to have asked that question.

Sam leans forward, looking pass the woman, to check the dog. It is resting sphinx style, interested in what was going on, but not exhibiting any anxiety. Can she trust the dog’s instincts? Her own told her to stay cautious.