Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich Read Free Book Online Page A

of
worse.
That being said, you do what you have to do. But hear me, Clayton Burroughs, I will not let some cop, no matter how
genuine
he is, drag you down a hole you can’t climb out of to help a man who doesn’t want or deserve your help.”
    “He’s my brother, Kate.”
    “He’s goddamn crazy, is what he is.”
    “That doesn’tmake him any less my brother. No less my family.”
    “
I’m
your family now.
I
come first. That’s what you promised me when you put that ring on my finger, and you aren’t getting out of it. Ever. Do you hear me, Sheriff?”
    “I hear you, woman.”
    Clayton grabbed a handful of T-shirt and pulled her down on top of him. He loved it when she called him Sheriff. He pushed her down on her back andslid himself on top of her. That way, he wouldn’t have to look at the rafters.

CHAPTER
4
    K ATE B URROUGHS
    2015
    The digital clock from Clayton’s side of the bed showed 2:15. The glow of the numbers washed the room in a soft orange hue and seeped into Kate’s restless eyelids. Clayton normally coveredthe clock with a T-shirt or something to block the light, but tonight he hadn’t, and the damn thing always kept Kate awake. She was a light sleeper anyway, not that she would be getting any sleep tonight. Not after the bomb Clayton had just dropped on her. She loved him, of that there was no doubt, but she’d never once claimed to understand him. At what point in your life do you just accept aspade for being a spade and move on? Every time her husband raised a hand to help the people on this mountain he’d had it slapped away, but he always jumped at the chance to try again. It reminded her of the
Peanuts
cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Everyone knows she’s going to snatch it away at the last minute and poor Charlie is going to land flat on his back;even he knows it, but he does it anyway out of sheer faith in the goodness of the world. She’d heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If that was true, then her husband was insane. Hell, maybe she was, too. After all, this whole lawman thing was her idea.
    It was one of those moments in time that sneak up on you fromnowhere, without warning or provocation, and change your life forever. She and Clayton had been dating for a little more than a year and he was bound and determined to prove to her, to everyone, that he wasn’t anything like his father. Even so, he still seemed lost. That might have been what initially attracted her to him in the first place. It was clear to her, by the way he cut short conversationsabout his childhood or took hard left turns whenever the subject came up, that he’d seen, and maybe done, things he wasn’t proud of, and it had changed him, robbed him of the things that make falling in love with a girl across a diner table enjoyable. He always acted like he didn’t deserve the good things in life that other people take for granted. He was broken, and she liked fixing broken things.She didn’t know that about herself then but she knew it now, and this close to forty, she might as well start admitting it. She also knew Clayton would have done anything for her back then. Anything. And that kind of power over a man, in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old woman, could be dangerous. She liked that, too.
    They’d been sitting in Lucky’s after church—that was saying something rightthere. Clayton Burroughs had never stepped foot in a church before her, but there he was, hair combed and shirt tucked in, pretending to be comfortable—the two of them sharing a massive plate of cathead biscuits, peach preserves, and fresh butter. Kate had the figure for that kind of thing back then. That memory made her reach under the covers and pinch at her love handles, then cup the pudgeof her belly with both hands.
    The gossip in the air that morning at the diner was about Sheriff Flowers’s stepping down. Sam Flowers had