Firebreak: A Mystery by Tricia Fields Read Free Book Online

one of them.” He pointed to a field that lay beyond the barn. “The horses, I stayed with last night. We got the cattle to a clearing. Kept the fire back with water from the stock pond.”
    “We’re glad to hear it. You need any help checking outbuildings this morning?”
    “No, we’re fine. I heard the house up the road got hit hard. You might check there.”
    “Will do. Take care,” she said.
    Josie turned her jeep around in the barn lot and drove out along the ranch lane. “The next house up the road is the Nixes’.”
    “That’s the country music people?”
    “Billy Nix. He’s a singer, plays guitar. You ever heard him play?”
    Otto made a dismissive noise. “Everybody drinking beer and crying and leaving. I have to put up with that nonsense with the yahoos we drag to jail. I don’t need it in my music.”
    Josie smiled. “He’s pretty good. I’ve heard him at the Hell-Bent a few times. He’s hardcore country. Tries to come off like Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe.” She glanced at Otto and saw by his blank expression that he had no idea who she was talking about. “Anyway, his wife, Brenda, is also his manager.”
    “How’s a boss lady for a wife work for a hard-core country guy?”
    “I don’t know. I hear she’s all business, all the time. Rumor is she’s negotiating a recording contract.”
    About two miles past the New Moon Ranch they saw that the road had not stopped the fire from spreading west as Doug had thought. Scorched earth slowly spread out from the edge of the road into the pasture.
    “Doug said the wind was gusting from the northeast. And everything we saw driving over here supports that. How would embers jump the road against the wind here?” Josie pointed off to the other side of the road. “It’s mostly sand and clumps of scrub brush.”
    “One ember blowing in a crosscurrent could catch a clump of that grass,” Otto said.
    As they drove another two miles down the road, the remnants of the fire spread farther into the field and down into a ravine. The steep valley made it impossible to see how far west the fire had traveled. This area of the county was sparsely populated, with no houses beyond the Nixes’. Another mile and the road ended at the base of Helio Mountain, which was part of the several-thousand-acre Oler ranch. The Nixes’ home wasn’t part of the ranching operation, and Josie was worried that it had been burned with no firefighters or ranchers to offer protection.
    About five miles beyond the New Moon Ranch, around a bend in the road, the Nixes’ one-story white home came into view. Josie slowed the jeep to a crawl. Over half of the ranch-style house had been severely burned. The front door was situated at the center of the house. Everything to the left of it appeared to have been spared. To the right was a large hole that opened up into what had probably been the living room. The house disappeared around jagged black edges like an abstract painting. To the right of the living room the building was completely gone. The gravel driveway led to the front of this burned-out area and Josie wondered if it had been an enclosed garage, but they were still too far away to tell. A pickup truck parked in front of the house was nothing more than a blackened frame.
    Josie stopped the jeep before pulling into the driveway and considered the layout of the property. Once around the bend, the road straightened out for about a half mile, and the house sat in the middle of the straight stretch, sitting back about five hundred feet from the road. There were several trees around the house, now burned down to blackened stubs, but with no furniture or other yard ornaments, it didn’t appear there had been much landscaping or many plantings to burn up.
    “That’s not a good sign,” Otto said. He pointed at the burned-out truck. “You’d have thought they’d have taken both vehicles when they evacuated.”
    Josie pulled into the driveway. Even with half of the house