Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Denver, Colorado
Friday 13 October 1995

Buck Wilmington stood in the street, cradling a near-hysterical Chris, staring at the scorch mark in the driveway. They'd already been to the impound, seen exactly how little was left of Chris' 1990 Jeep Grand Cherokee Ltd. 4X4. It was still twenty months from being paid for, although a small part of Buck's stunned mind supposed that really didn't matter, now.

But they'd had this crazy idea. Maybe it wasn't really Chris' Jeep, after all. Maybe the whole thing was one bad nightmare, and if they could just get to the house ...

Only it wasn't a nightmare, not the kind a man could wake up from. The evidence was there in front of them: the burn mark in the driveway, the charred remains of the garage, with the twisted wreck of Adam's brand-new two-wheeler sticking out forlornly like the skeleton of some heretofore-undiscovered dinosaur. All of the windows on the driveway side of the house were shattered; most of the rest were cracked if not outright shattered. Diablo was nowhere to be seen, but they hadn't actually gotten inside the house, yet. Buck wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, now.

He cast sick, dull eyes at the house. The emerald green door, the porch posts with their flags, each touting a Denver sports team - the Broncos, the Nuggets, the Rockies and the newly-arrived Avalanche; the flagpole still stood straight and proud in the yard, but flying debris had left its mark on the flags. The Stars & Stripes and the state flag of Colorado were both torn, and the orange-white-green flag of Ireland had caught fire, burning away to all but nothing.

It would be days before Forensics was finished combing through the mangled hulk of the Cherokee. They found what remained of Sarah's left hand still gripping the steering wheel, fused into a gruesome claw, her rings welded to the bones. It took nearly a week for them to dissect Adam's booster seat; to discover bones, fragments of bones. Enough to draw a definite conclusion that there had been a child of six sitting there when the vehicle exploded. To separate the melted remnants of Sarah's green fleece vest and Adam's brand-new Avalanche sweatshirt from what was left of the seats. To realize the clump of something that had been sitting on the passenger seat was Sarah's purse.

He hadn't come to Sarah's high school graduation party; he hadn't come to the wedding. He hadn't come to the hospital when Adam was born; he hadn't come to a birthday or holiday or anniversary or anything after Sarah had left his house in March of 1988. But Hank Connelly made a point of showing up at the memorial service, if only to look at the shattered husk that was Chris Larabee, and blame him for the deaths of his own wife and son.

"It's your fault they're dead! It's all your fault, Chris Larabee! If you'd just left my daughter alone, she'd be alive today!"

Buck had been too busy trying to keep Chris from killing Hank to tell the old fool that it wasn't Chris's fault, it was his. He had been the one who'd wanted to stay in Mexico City that cursed one extra night. That Buck Wilmington was the reason that Chris had been thousands of miles away when Adam and Sarah had needed him. But the words weren't said that day, and Hank wouldn't have believed them, anyway.

It would be after the first of 1996 before someone found Diablo living in the rail yards near the newly-built Coors Field. Chris was existing in a cracker box of an apartment Buck wouldn't have condemned cockroaches to live in, and the landlord didn't allow dogs. Buck's did, so he and the black Lab settled into an uneasy two-years-and-some-odd-months inhabiting the same space, until Chris decided to relocate to the ranch he and Sarah had just closed on before that fateful trip to Mexico, and wanted his dog back. Considering what Diablo's attitude towards the world had deteriorated into by that time, Buck wasn't sorry to see him go. In the high mountains of Summit County, west of the Eisenhower Tunnel and nearly an hour from the city, there weren't so many neighbors around to threaten lawsuits over a vicious dog. No longer chained down in a postage stamp excuse of a backyard in the city, Diablo would vanish into the mountains for days on end. Returning in response to some instinct or summons only he could decipher.

The days turned into weeks, months, three years. Adam and Sarah's files were put in a box and placed on a shelf in a sterile, warehouse-like room where nobody ever went, to molder away into dust with the rest of the cold cases. Chris had long ago left the Denver PD; Buck stayed. It was the first time since September of 1975 that they weren't together like thunder and lightning. Eventually, even the guys at the station house quit asking Buck how Chris was. If someone happened to encounter Chris, it was spoken of as akin to an Elvis sighting. He was never approached or spoken to.

Until the day in October of 1997, two years after The Tragedy, when Chris simply appeared in the doorway of the locker room as Buck was changing, coming off duty. For the first few minutes, Buck honestly hadn't recognized him. Until Dave Jennings - who had been a rookie at the time, and hadn't gotten a whole hell of a lot brighter since - breathed in an awed voice, "Jeez, it's Detective Larabee!" Chris hadn't dignified Jennings with so much as a glance, simply staring at Buck with that green burning-ice glare. Tugging himself into some semblance of decent, Buck had followed Chris out into the hall, returning less than five minutes later to clean out his locker. He'd left his badge and gun on Captain Fletcher's desk on his way out the door.

By March of '98 they were legends. A little over a year later, Chris learned the truth of that one awful day. He made a special trip to Washington DC to swear out a federal warrant against Ella Gaines, on the charge of murder.

And he waited. Waited again; days, weeks, months, years. The boys adopted a philosophy: She done it to Chris, she done it to all of us. As October 1995 had melted into October 1997, January 1998 into June 1999, eventually June 1999 transformed itself into Summer, 2007.

Until one hideously early morning in July 2007, Chris' phone rang, jarring him from sleep ...

Dallas, Texas
July 2007

The man stood in the shadows of the warehouse, surrounded by pallets of stolen weapons. Exhaust from the eighteen-wheelers that had brought the weapons here and the ones that would take them away hazed the air, mixing with the rain that had been falling sullenly since late afternoon. For a region that was usually a slave to drought, it had been raining entirely too much in Texas lately, and there was no visible end in sight. Other men stood or sat, singly or in groups of no more than five, talking quietly amongst themselves. Some read, some played handheld video games or watched portable DVD players. One guy sitting in the open cab of a Peterbilt was frowning over the Sudoku from the previous day's Dallas Morning News. A few, like the man standing in the shadows, were actively keeping watch.

At a glance, he was in his late twenties; three inches over six feet, even without the help of the custom-fit black python Lucchese boots. Upwards from there were midnight blue Levi's; a black snakeskin belt with a gold buckle the size of a cake plate, commemorating the 2006 PBR Bull of the Year, Mossy Oak Mudslinger; a midnight blue button-down shirt, collar open over a navy blue T-shirt. Hair so dark brown it was sometimes mistaken for outright black framed a deadly serious face, the focal point of which was a pair of equally dark eyes, eyes that never stopped moving. His arms were crossed loosely in front of him, right over left and just in front of the belt buckle, a wicked-looking submachine gun held in a loose-but-firm grip in his right hand, ready to swing into play at a second's warning. A hand-tooled black leather shoulder holster kept a matte-black Colt .45 M1911A contained under his left arm, a matching belt holster held a Colt .40 at the small of his back. There was a knife hanging on his right thigh, another strapped to his left ankle beneath boots and jeans. Except for the belt buckle, he was difficult to see in the shadows, unless one looked closely. Most women - and some men - took the time. He was what his cousin had teasingly referred to as, "Teen-soap handsome." He'd let the remark slide; it had been Christopher's last night in the U.S. before shipping out for Afghanistan, and although he'd more than understood Christopher's reasons behind enlisting in the Army, he'd still been gut-twisting scared.

Still was, though he tried very hard not to let on whenever Christopher was home on leave, or in their infrequent letters, even less frequent e-mails and the international satellite telephone calls that were more precious than the Holy Grail.

Slinking around the perimeters of the gathering were several women, blindingly beautiful and as scantily dressed as possible. Rain notwithstanding, it was still July in Dallas after all, and even in the single hours was just hot and muggy enough to be uncomfortable. One of them turned on a portable stereo and put on a CD that was barely younger than the watching man himself. A flicker of wry humor skated across his eyes as the lyrics soared over the open warehouse.

"I was born the son,
Of a lawless man.
Always spoke my mind,
With a gun in my hand ...” ¹

His own father didn't know where he was this night; an arrangement they'd long ago discovered made things a great deal easier on both sides of what had often been a decidedly strained relationship.

In point of fact, his father didn't know where he'd been for the last six months. They'd spoken, briefly, at Christmas, and then the younger man had simply ... dropped off the radar. Since he hadn't seen his face on FoxNews, he could guess with some degree of hopeful certainty that his family realized what exactly he'd been up to recently. It would be considerably unpleasant to walk into the house tomorrow or the next day - or whenever this was over - and get the riot act for missing his grandparents' seventy-third anniversary without someone knowing he'd had a damn good excuse.

A series of signal whistles had everyone on the alert, and the young man watched as distractions were hastily packed away. Someone hollered in angry Spanish to shut off that damn stereo, you bitch! Christopher Cross was cut off in mid-chorus.

Shielded by the bulk of the subgun, the man moved just his index finger beneath the flashy belt buckle, pressing a button hidden there. In a seemingly abandoned moving van parked three warehouses over, a whipcord-lean black man nodded, and spoke into a lip mic. Three blocks from there, running lights flashed on, and the silence of the night was split by the distinctive rumble-grumble-snort-growl-snarl of a diesel engine. A bull-nosed silver Dodge Ram eased out of the shadows of some long-forgotten industrial building.

Across the wide aisle of the warehouse, another man stepped out from between a pallet of LAW rockets and launchers and one stacked high with Stinger ground-to-air missiles and launchers, blond and blue-eyed where his compatriot was dark, a good five inches shorter, and seven years older. They locked eyes briefly across the room, and the younger man's mouth twitched briefly. 'Message sent.' The blond blinked once, then faded back to his position. They had utmost faith in their friends - the black man in the moving van, the man coming in the silver Dodge every criminal in Texas could identify on sight. The ones who would come simply because that man had said to. When the sludge of Texas wanted their little spawns to clean their slime pits, there were certain names they invoked.

A limousine pulled into the warehouse, long, sleek, black; a predator in search of prey. As he stepped forward to open the door, the watching man found himself unable to shake the image. Though raised to wealth himself, he'd never been comfortable with the vehicles. Letting someone else do the driving took too much control out of his own hands. As a boy, he'd been forced far too often to stand aside as his life was ordered to the satisfaction of others. It was only one among the many things he and his father had mutually decided were best if they weren't talked about.

"Why, Garrison, thank you. So nice to see someone of your generation with decent manners." The woman was barely over five feet, and wore six-inch stiletto heels to over-compensate. She was dark-haired, with unnervingly pale blue eyes, and a Virginia drawl that seemed to almost purr. He found himself having to constantly replay in his head that old Marty Stuart music video, the one with the Forties-style radio preacher, exhorting his congregation about temptation often being a thing of beauty. From the first time he'd met Ella Gaines, he'd been put in mind of Nagaina the Cobra from the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

'Garrison Johnston' offered her a bland smile. "My grandparents were from the old school, ma'am." One of the keys to effective undercover work was knowing just how much truth to weave together with the lies. It was something he hadn't needed to be taught, he'd grown up keeping his true thoughts and emotions hidden from various members of his family. Unbidden, his father's voice sounded in his mind.

"Don't forgive and never forget; Do unto others before they do unto you; and third and most importantly - keep your eye on your friends, because your enemies will take care of themselves."

The old man had never quite expected his sons to turn that advice around on the one who'd given it to them.

For now, 'Garrison' stood aside to let the remaining passengers alight from the limo, a man of undeniably Middle Eastern descent, although he wore a Western-style three-piece-and-tie, four of his closest bodyguards, dressed in Bodyguard Black and armed to the teeth, and finally, Ella's personal companion.

Naturally four inches taller, she was therefore forced to wear flat shoes. Slender as a willow tree, with long, brown hair touched with auburn fire cascading down her back. Wavy enough to avoid being pin-straight, but not quite true curls. Blue eyes as dark as midnight on the Texas prairie, she was dressed in a gold lace floor-length gown that only the slimmest of women could comfortably wear; a dramatically low-cut creation, mostly backless, with precious little more material making up the front and a side slit all-the-way-up-to ... there. She carried no purse, only an excuse for a shawl made of some sheer gold material. As he had since meeting her, 'Garrison' gave her a polite bow, nodding his head respectfully. She'd spoken to him once or twice over the past months, in a shimmering Irish brogue; once he'd charmed a smile out of her. She appeared to be not much more than his own age, and heartbreakingly fragile. Her name was Sarah O'Rourke

Last out of the car was her son, who proved if nothing else that she was actually several years older than she appeared, because the sullen wraith that emerged from the limo was in his late teens at least, if not very early twenties. He'd taken the guise of the vampire - black clothes; black-dyed hair that flowed halfway down his back; stark white make-up relieved only by equally stark black at his eyes and lips. Jewelry was a hodge-podge mix of religious icons and pagan symbolism. He snarled more than spoke, and sneered at the world through eyes that put 'Garrison' in mind of nothing more than two chunks of green ice on fire. More than once, he'd caught whiskey on the kid's breath. Having seen what he'd seen over six months, he had been reminded of something his mother had more than once said to his father - "Joan of Arc would be a drunk, too, if she was married to you!" If he was a mind to, the kid would answer grudgingly to Adam O'Rourke.

Ducking back into the car for a moment, Adam emerged with a distinctively-curved plastic bottle, wrapped in an equally distinctive red label, which he nonchalantly tossed at 'Garrison' in passing.

"Hey, thanks."

"Hot enough to melt your bones out here. Don't you people ever have cool weather?"

"Yeah, from 11 o'clock in the morning to five in the afternoon, every February 20^th. We time it."

Adam grunted, almost ready to believe it. It was somewhere between midnight and dawn, and he'd already been forced to lose his oilcloth duster, brocade-embroidered suede vest and silk over-shirt - all black. He was down to a plain black T-shirt, and wasn't planning to take that off. The body art he was proud to display. The scars were another matter.

'Garrison' took his place at her side at Ella's call, ready to stand witness to the final phase of the deal. As the terrorist who was going to take delivery of the weapons Ella had arranged to have stolen from American military installations all over the country ordered one of his personal guard to open the trunk of the limo, the blond calling himself 'Harper Thomas' stepped forward to guard his 'boss.' He very carefully didn't look at 'Garrison Johnston.'

In the good old days, it would have been briefcases full of American greenbacks. Now however, it was only one such briefcase as a show of good faith, and a promise that the balance would be electronically transferred to Ella's offshore accounts within three business days. Out of respect for the man's Muslim beliefs, Ella forewent the tradition of shaking hands, smiling her mint-julep smile and purring about what a pleasure it had been to do business with him, they'd just simply have to get together like this again, sometime.

Nothing showed on their faces or in their body language, but 'Garrison' could well imagine that 'Harper' was breathing the same internal sigh of relief he was. It was a done deal, and they'd gotten it all, video and audio both.

And nothing had ever looked so good as that silver Dodge barreling in, with Texas Ranger Captain Cordell Walker swinging down from the driver's seat before the truck had even stopped. Suddenly there were cops all over the place, even rappelling down from the rafters. Ella jerked away in shock, jerking again when 'Garrison' took her by one arm.

"Going somewhere, ma'am?" The carrying sling of the subgun was looped over his right forearm, with that hand holding Ella's arm. With his left hand he reached into his left back pocket ... and pulled out a Dallas Metro Police Department badge.

"Ella Gaines, you're under arrest."

It was after noon before they got it cleaned up to the point that they could return to Texas Ranger HQ and get started on the in-depth interrogations. 'Garrison Johnston' was revealed to be Detective John Ross Ewing III, 'Harper Thomas' was Trent Malloy, PI. Knowing debriefing was going to be the nightmare of nightmares, John Ross stole a minute in the men's can to leave a fast message on his older brother James Beaumont's voicemail. "Case busted, I'm okay. Don't know when I'll be around. See you when I see you. Love y'all." That would keep the pack of vultures he was related to at least pacified until he could put on an actual physical appearance at Southfork. Folding his phone in his pocket, John Ross bent over the sink, splashing cold water on his face. For a scant moment, he stood like that, hands braced on the countertop, head hanging wearily.

'God, please, the next time Walker tags me for an undercover assignment, let me remember how hellish this one was, so I will have the common horse sense to tell him "Not just no, but HELL NO!"' But he knew he'd say "Yes!" in a heartbeat. Walker led by example and from the front, never asking of his 'posse' what he wasn't willing to demand of himself, and therefore ensuring said posse would follow him to Satan's front door if he only asked.

Texas Ranger - and former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver - Jimmy Trivette pounced him the second he stepped out of the men's room. "The Coke truck," his eyes were wide in his dark face.

"What about it?" One of the transport vehicles had been a hijacked Coca-Cola van, a big Ford E-Series. John Ross hadn't been privy to its contents - besides being reasonably sure it wasn't soda - but Ella had insisted that the van be guarded to the last man. Five guys had taken her at her word.

"You heard about the hard drives that went missing from the Pentagon, back in April." It wasn't a question; Trivette knew John Ross had a cousin in Afghanistan.

John Ross had been about to turn, to go down the hall and find Walker, the ramrod behind this entire operation. Mildly surprised Walker hadn't come looking for him personally, he was going to be either debriefed or participate in the interrogations. He was betting on debriefing first. But Trivette's words stopped him in his tracks, dead cold. "Excuse me?" In mid-April, several computer hard drives containing a wealth of information about the War on Terror had suddenly come up missing from one of the highest-security buildings in the world. John Ross had spent several sleepless nights over the last three months, thinking about those hard drives, about them getting into the wrong hands. About Christopher.

"The hard drives, we found them. They were in that Coke truck."

For a fast minute, John Ross thought he was honestly going to pass out. He was suddenly light-headed, as if he'd overdosed on antihistamines, and the hallway spun sickeningly for several seconds. Over the loud buzzing in his ears, he was dimly aware of Trivette calling his name, of strong hands helping him to sit on one of the long wooden benches that lined the halls. He was urged to sit with his head between his knees. Voices faded in and out around him.

"What happened?"

"I told him about finding the hard drives. He folded up like a wrecked ‘Vette."

"Get him some water."

Ranger Sydney Cooke walked into the middle of this, clutching some papers that were still warm from the printer, and looking for Walker. Seeing what was happening, the petite woman held back. Her partner, Gage, caught her eye, and she mouthed 'Walker,' Gage nodded. After a few minutes, John Ross was helped carefully to his feet, and with the help of Gage and Trent's friend and business partner Carlos Sandoval went to Dallas County District Attorney Alex Cahill-Walker's office to lie down for a time. As they passed Walker, Gage nodded behind them.

"Sydney's looking for you."

Walker turned, accepting the papers Sydney held out, and arching one reddish-blond eyebrow at her comment of, "Walker, we've got a situation."

"Sydney, we've had a 'situation' for the last six months." He turned his head slightly as someone touched his shoulder. He didn't need to see her to know who it was - the Chanel No. 5 gave her away.

For not the first time since they'd met, Sydney ruthlessly stepped on the impulse for envy. If God had wanted her to be tall, blonde and graceful, she'd've been born tall, blonde and graceful. There was no use being jealous of Alex Cahill-Walker for what couldn't be changed.

For the better part of the last fifteen or so years, the joke around the Metroplex had been that Walker and Alex "worked for each other." Walker found the bad guys, Alex provided warrants; Walker caught the bad guys, Alex fried them in court. When asked if there was anyone in the state pen at Huntsville he hadn't put there, Walker would reply dryly, "The warden."

Now Alex glanced at the papers Walker held. "What's going on?" Walker turned his attention to the papers, quiet until he'd read them over. Then he looked up at Sydney. "I'd have to say that Sarah O'Rourke looks pretty good for a woman who died in a car bombing eleven years ago."

Alex let out a breath. "I'll say." Then she stopped as a thought flashed through the best law library in the state of Texas - the one logged in between her ears. "Walker, Sarah O'Rourke's husband would be Chris Larabee. He's the SAC for Team 7, one of the RMETF teams the ATFE put together after Waco. And Vin Tanner is their sniper."

Vin Tanner was one among the many who had passed under Walker's personal tutelage; one of the few who had become not only a student and protégé but a true friend as well. It had taken years before Vin was able to view Walker through that lens, however, holding on to a personal image of Walker as an idol and mentor as opposed to an equal. Tanner leaving the U.S. Marshals to take the job in Denver had a great deal to do with that, Walker believed. Vin was also someone Walker believed he saw far too little of. Aside from a disastrous Colorado skiing trip in 2004 - he and Alex simply could not take a vacation without something going haywire - they hadn't seen Vin personally since he'd left Texas after Christmas 1997.

"Chris Larabee is more than Vin's boss," Walker had more information between his ears than a Pentagon super-computer. Even after fifteen years of working together, it still amazed Jimmy Trivette, the stuff Walker could come up with seemingly out of thin air. When Carlos was still with Dallas Metro and had been 'tagged' by Walker for an undercover role - one that had been achingly personal for Carlos - he had commented to Trent that it was great working with Walker, but a little intimidating as well. "The guy knows everything." Trent's response had been a laughing, "Tell me about it." "When we went up there in '04, I mentioned to Vin how close he and Chris were. He told me that Chris is also his older brother."

Malloy residence
118 Providence Way
Dallas, Texas

"Olivia! Come on, we gotta go! All the good stuff will be gone by the time we get there!" Seventeen-year-old Tandy Malloy moved through life at one speed - All Ahead Full. Trent had laughingly nicknamed her 'Blurr,' after a character on the old Transformers cartoon. Todd - who was only three years older and had been her alternate accomplice and worst enemy during their childhood years - told his friends, "Tandy doesn't sleep. She plugs herself in and recharges."

"O-LI-VI-AAAAAA!" There was a sidewalk sale at the mall, and Tandy's idea of 'getting there early' was to be sitting in the parking lot a half-hour before the mall opened.

"All right, all right! Dang, can I brush my teeth first?" Fourteen-year-old Olivia 'Greer' had been living with the Malloys for three years, ever since she had used Jimmy Trivette to rescue herself from the streets, and the downward spiral she would have inevitably found herself on had he not been where he was at that one moment in time ...

Dallas, Texas
November 2005

It was a dark, cold, rainy, generally miserably lousy day, and one that suited Jimmy Trivette's mood perfectly. John Ross and Trent were in the hospital, John Ross's so-called 'family' wanted Walker's head on a pike, and he was on the serious outs with Walker for the first time he could remember, after having called the older Ranger's judgment into question. Rhett Harper had told Walker about the vengeful father he suspected of framing him for murder, how could Walker have not followed up on that theory, leaving things until the man had managed to smuggle a gun into the Tarrant County Courthouse and try to shoot Harper, putting Alex in the crossfire and therefore John Ross and Trent in their current situation? It just wasn't like Walker to ignore something like that.

'Okay, okay,' Jimmy conceded to the conscience that had been savaging him since his last go-round with Walker, in the office not half an hour ago, which had led to Jimmy stalking out, slamming doors on his way. 'So saying so straight to his face wasn't exactly the brightest idea I've ever had.' The hurt and disappointment that had been layered under Walker's anger had etched themselves into Jimmy's soul like acid. Not to mention the treatment he was getting from Alex - which was to say, no treatment at all. As far as she was concerned, Jimmy Trivette had died, just nobody had gotten around to burying him yet. The end result was that he was in the perfect mood to undertake a self-appointed task he hated doing.

4100 S. Buckner Blvd. loomed overhead; a towering building of some unknown industrial intention, long ago abandoned to rust into oblivion. Eight years ago, it had been the site of a confrontation between Walker, Trent Malloy and Carlos Sandoval against an insane ex-Dallas-Metro-cop-turned-cop-killer named Rod Barkley. Jimmy himself had missed the fight, having been in the hospital recovering from the bullets Barkley had pumped into him. Walker had ended up with a bullet in his own shoulder, and Carlos had been rendered nearly helpless by his fear of heights and the structure's open-air stairways and catwalks. The final fight had been between Barkley and Trent, ending in Barkley's death when he and Trent had tumbled over one of those catwalks. Had it not been for Walker and Carlos, Trent would have shared Barkley's fate.

One of the end results was that Barkley's malevolent ghost had taken up residence in the place, and he was an active haunter. This in itself wouldn't have been a problem, except that it had also become a target for Dallas' ever-increasing population of castoff children. A building sitting in the middle of a large open space with surprisingly good sight lines for an industrial area, ostensibly abandoned, and seemingly unclaimed by both the criminal predators and the older elements of the Metroplex's shadow population. The homeless teens and children who descended upon the place to make it theirs must have thought they'd stumbled on a gold mine.

Until they had their first encounters with Rod Barkley. It had become clear that the malicious spirit was looking for a portal through which he could regain entrance into the corporeal world. In his own twisted mindset, he'd left unfinished business - Carlos Sandoval still lived, and Barkley held Walker and Trent responsible for his own death. Barkley wanted a body to possess, a spirit to take over. He wanted back in. It became a contest of wills - the street kids may not have had much, but they would fight for what little they did. They weren't about to give the place up, ghost or no ghost, no matter how evil it was. Rules were instituted: no drugs, no alcohol, no one who was obviously mentally ill. A mind that wasn't entirely stable or was clouded by chemicals would be just the entry point Barkley was looking for. No mysticism - and that included séances and Ouija boards. A side effect of this was that the kids who did subscribe to such beliefs had defiantly set up a defensive perimeter in the abandoned warehouses and such that ringed '4100 South.' They claimed to have created a 'protection circle' Barkley couldn't pass through. The residents of 4100 South had responded to that in their own turn by scavenging fencing, and setting it up just inside the 'circle,' therefore keeping the circle's own architects OUT.

In spite of all perceived precautions, Barkley still managed to raise enough chaos that the coroner's van was a common sight at 4100 South, and the religious houses in the neighboring area - a scant handful of churches, two synagogues and one mosque you'd drive right by and not even realize it was one unless you knew it was there - had become used to shaking-scared young people appearing on their doorsteps at all hours, begging for help. Jimmy figured the kids had to have had the place blessed a few hundred times by now. So he'd taken it upon himself to go around periodically and see if he could talk a kid or two or three into giving the world one more chance. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

He pulled up to find a knot of boys and young men standing underneath a lean-to that hadn't been there last week, built out of what looked like old wooden storage pallets. A prodigious amount of smoke was pouring out from underneath it, though the lean-to didn't appear to be on fire itself. Jimmy grinned, getting it immediately. Resourceful by necessity, they'd managed to cobble together an apparently reasonable facsimile of a barbecue grill. The lean-to was to make sure the weather didn't put the fire out. A young man who called himself 'Outlaw' looked up as Jimmy's Mustang cruised to a stop.

"Hey, Starman's here." 'Starman' was the street name they'd stuck Jimmy with after someone had found out he'd once been a Dallas Cowboy. Walker was 'Yessir,' Alex was either 'Class,' 'Grace,' or 'Style,' depending on who was speaking of or to her. Gage was 'Hotshot,' and Sydney was 'Jaguar.' When she'd asked why, Outlaw had replied, "Because you're little, but you're tough." Pound-for-pound, the jaguar was one of the strongest of the big cats, despite being smaller than its more glamorous lion, tiger and leopard cousins. For no other reason than purely to be contrary, the 'Perimeter Covens' had tagged Sydney with a variety of nicknames, all relative to the North American mountain lion.

"Hey, Outlaw," Jimmy unfolded himself from the Mustang and walked over to the lean-to. 'Today's Special' appeared to be hot dogs, most likely scavenged from the 'past due' files of the Winn-Dixie a few blocks away. The grill was of the Southern smoker variety - a fifty-gallon drum cut in half, hinged on one side and a grill grid laid within. Three of the smaller kids sat off to one side, industriously going through bags of hot dog buns - there was a Wonder Bread outlet around the corner from the Winn-Dixie, and the manager would quietly give the about-to-be-tossed stuff to the street denizens. The boys were opening the bags and going over the buns carefully, cutting out any moldy pieces. Past-due hot dogs and moldy buns - this was a regular gourmet feast around here. Jimmy himself had grown up in the Baltimore projects as the baby of eight, and there had been lean times, especially after his father had died. But there had always been a roof, a bed, clothes, decent food and most importantly, love. To be grateful for past-due hot dogs, moldy buns and a malevolent ghost waiting for your slightest misstep was something Jimmy could not imagine. He met Outlaw's liquid brown eyes head on. Twenty-four now, Outlaw had been one of the first kids to homestead 4100 South after Barkley's death in May of 1997, and had over time become the de facto leader of the place. His parents had come from Mexico by way of the Rio Grande when Outlaw was barely six weeks old. His father had found work in construction, expecting his son to follow in his footsteps. But Outlaw wasn't, couldn't, be his father. The body of a construction worker housed the soul of an artist, something the older man couldn't, wouldn't, understand. Add that to the fact that Outlaw struggled under the burden of ADHD/LD, nevermind the language barrier - he hadn't begun speaking English until his early teens. He'd attended school sporadically at best as his family hop-scotched around the Southwest, perennially one step ahead of Immigration. At fifteen he'd finally given up and dropped out. A few months later, he'd been kicked out of the house - catching his only son in his room with a girl, Outlaw's father might have tolerated, certainly understood. Catching him with another boy - Outlaw considered himself lucky to have been alive to get thrown out.

"You want lunch, Starman?"

Jimmy stomach gave a slow, rolling lurch as he wondered how many of these kids had a case of food poisoning to look forward to. "I'll pass, thanks. I'm taking Erika out to dinner tonight." Erika was Jimmy's wife, known around here as 'Saint.' He skated a look around the area - the only visible activity was around the lean-to, the weather had everyone inside what shelter there was available - then met Outlaw head-on again. "So, how are my odds?" They never tried to take anyone out of this place by force; anyone who left - not counting those the kids themselves made leave - did so of their own will.

Outlaw chuckled, while Trance and Slice got in a minor squabble over the distinction between 'done' and 'burnt.' "Not good today, old friend. Things are going pretty good. Laser, he got a job at the Winn-Dixie, he's gonna let us know when there'll be food." Laser - the last person to call him Lysander to his face had been his so-called mother, the night she chose her crack-dealer boyfriend over her twelve-year-old son - was one who had given the world another chance, but like many of his fellows, remembered the place where he'd found sanctuary. He was also Outlaw's 'OA2' - his On-Again-Off-Again. When Jimmy had been their age, there had been other words for it.

The Mustang sat alone, at a little distance from the lean-to, and well out of the fitful circle of light from the nearest 'working' streetlamp. Jimmy had parked it at an angle, so that the passenger door wasn't easily visible from where he was standing. Being a convertible it didn't have a traditional 'dome light,' but a light was built into the rear-view mirror, and would come on if the door was opened far enough. It was well dark - exacerbated by the lack of 'proper' lighting - and the rain was beginning to come down harder, lessening even that visibility. A shadow moved within shadows next to the car. She hadn't heard or seen Jimmy activate the security alarm, indicating that he didn't intend to be out of direct sight of the car. With utmost care she tested the passenger door - unlocked. Jimmy had his back to the car, Outlaw was concentrating on him, and the others were focused on the food. She could only hope that nobody who had a window on this side of the building was looking out. She would have to work harder to get into the car without triggering the light.

After a few minutes more of conversation and shaking his head, Jimmy said his farewells to the ragtag group and headed back for his car. If the situation with Walker improved - and it would be hard for it to get much worse - he'd come out here next weekend with reinforcements.

Settling back into the car, he cranked it over and pulled out, reaching over to flip on the heat. As he pulled out, he slid a CD by Colorado-based smooth jazz group Dotsero into the CD player. That was one of the rare things he didn't like about living in Dallas - there wasn't a dedicated jazz radio station. Texas Christian University and Northern Texas University's campus stations played jazz, but they ran other things, too, and weeding through the rest of it for the good stuff wasn't always worth bothering with. His cell rang, and he flipped on his hands-free.

"Yeah, Trivette."

"Jimmy, it's Alex." For a second, he was honestly struck speechless. She'd actually called him? 'Wow, look how fast I rejoined the land of living humanity.'

"Hey, Alex. What's up?" 'Like the kid said in the book, Who's acting? I'm a natural normal. I guess we're all just going to act like the whole thing never happened, huh? Yeah, riiiiiiight. And I'm getting my football career back tomorrow, too.'

"Can you swing by the H.O.P.E Center real quick? I just realized I still have that file from the Bridgehill Park case in my car and Sydney said you'd told her you needed it."

Bridgehill Park was a new development in Braddock County that made Stepford, CT look like San Francisco. Gage had said it reminded him of the city on the planet Camazotz in the book A Wrinkle in Time - the one in which absolutely everything was exactly the same, and non-conformity was severely punished. In Bridgehill Park, it had been as well. An 'unpopular' student at the local high school had been tricked into attending a house party - where she had been lured into the basement and savagely beaten. Her assailants had then stuffed her into a large laundry sack, drove out into the countryside and dumped her, to die of her injuries. One of the youthful conspirators had made the mistake of bragging about the incident on her blog, using the phrase 'Sic semper FREAKS.' Tandy Malloy had been tipped off by another student at the same school, whom she knew from Bible Retreat, and had in turn provided Jimmy with the link to the blog. Predictably, the so-called 'parents' of Bridgehill Park had lawyered up; covering for their little altar boys and choir girls, and blaming the dead girl's family for 'not keeping her under proper control.' One or two of the kids had sung the 'We Didn't Really Mean To Hurt Her, Just Scare Her A Little Blues,' with the standard chorus of 'It Was Only Supposed To Be A Joke.'

"You bet, Alex. From where I am, it'll take me about a half an hour."

Alex said a surprisingly pleasant goodbye, and Jimmy rang off. The heater was finally starting to kick in, obliging Jimmy to in turn flip on the window defogger. The windshield wipers were already set on presto. He hummed along with Dotsero as he navigated the streets, sucking air in through his teeth as he eased the car through a large puddle that was forming under an overpass. He flicked his gaze up to the rear-view mirror after he'd gotten through it, nodding wearily as a high-rider four-by-four blasted through the same puddle. If this rain kept up, by tomorrow the Metroplex would be dotted with those puddles, some of which could morph into respectably-sized ponds if nobody got after them with a pumper truck. It only took six inches of water to float a regular car or truck.

In the time it took him to reach the H.O.P.E Center, the rain had lightened to a misty drizzle, but the sky had darkened. The clouds were lowering, so the glass-and-steel towers of the city were cut off midway up. He was going to have to push it if he wanted to make his dinner reservation with Erika.

The sign outside the white frame house read H.O.P.E. Center - it stood for Help Our People Excel. Looked harmless enough. She managed to slip out of the Mustang the same way she'd slipped in, giving a quiet gasp as the air hit her, feeling colder than ever now that she'd been inside the warm car. The kitchen door was unlocked, the room dark and empty. She passed through it quickly, emerging into the hall. She'd learned long ago that the best way to handle these situations was to act as if you belonged here.

The black Ranger was talking to a tall, classy blonde - presumably the 'Alex' he'd been talking to on the phone. She reminded the girl of a hazy memory from her earliest childhood - another classy blonde. Who had she been, the memory was never clear, she remembered Denver, Colorado but not much more. Hazy faces she couldn't always place names to, a memory of blind fear and the knowledge that she had deeply disappointed somebody she desperately wanted to trust her. She often lay awake at night, all night, trying to make the memories stand clear. She invariably spent several days after such a night with a whanging headache.

There was a purse hanging off a coat tree not five feet away, just at the border where the light from the front hall met the shadows where the young girl stood. It was crafted out of blue denim in the currently fashionable 'hobo' style, tattered and worn and frayed at the edges. It had been slung over the coat tree in such a way that the bulk of it was in the shadows, and the wallet was about to fall out. A wallet that was well-stuffed with cash, she could count it from where she stood. She started edging toward the purse, keeping one eye on the blonde, who was facing the purse and would see what was going on if she only turned her head a little. The black Ranger had his back to the coat tree. She didn't see a dark-haired young woman who had also been keeping an eye on the purse. She'd been caught with her hand in that particular cookie jar, once.

"Hey, Miss Alex, your purse." Melissa Martinez shook her head, long dark hair sifting across her shoulders. It had been four years since she'd tried to lift Alex Cahill-Walker's wallet, and she tried very hard not to think about that Halloween, about how it would have ended if Alex had been anyone other than who and what she was.

Jimmy took two long strides across the room, catching the young intruder by the wrist, with Alex's cash-filled wallet firmly in her hand. Her astonished face quickly turned to anger as she jerked back, hard. "Hey! Lemme go!" But Jimmy had spent several years having to hold on to something others wanted to take away from him, and he wasn't turning loose. He simply brought his other hand around to take the girl by the collar of her ragged blue jean jacket and drag her into the lit area.

She greeted Alex with a look that defined pugnacious. "Should learn not to leave your cash out in plain sight like that." Shooting a suspicious look at Melissa's half-laughing, half-groaning, "I've been trying to tell her that for how long now?" She stepped over to the coat tree to retrieve the purse and hand it to Alex, nipping the wallet from the newcomer's startled grasp on her way back by.

The kid couldn't have been more than twelve, dressed in once-black jeans, a hugely-oversized Denver Broncos sweatshirt that looked new enough to have to have been shoplifted, the jean jacket and a Colorado Avalanche ballcap likely 'picked up' at the same time as the sweatshirt, turned backward over dark honey hair which was yanked back in a coiled-up tail at the base of her skull. In the way of street children she was willow-thin, her wide dark eyes waif-like in her narrow face. Alex shook her head. "Turn her loose, Jimmy. She was only looking for enough money to keep body and soul together for a few more days. And Melissa's right, you'd think I'd learn not to keep leaving my purse hanging around like that."

"Or at least make sure your wallet's not about to fall out all over the place," Josie Martin was one of the directors/house parents Alex had hired when she started the H.O.P.E Center. They'd gone to law school together, until Josie had had to drop out due to a family tragedy. She could see in the girl's eyes the same defiance and anger that had once been in Melissa's; with a side order of hopelessness the girl was desperately trying to hide. Jimmy let her go, and she made a show of rubbing the wrist he'd been holding, and making certain that the collar of her jacket was sitting properly, all the while giving Jimmy the evil eye.

"Y'know, my mother's mother came from Haiti, and there are some who say her grandmother was a voodoo priestess. Certain I saw my mother do things I couldn't explain."

"Then what were you doing at 4100 South? You should know they don't tolerate that stuff there." He shot back.

She huffed. "I never said she taught me anything. It's stuff you have to learn, it doesn't come through blood." She shook her head. "Typical ignorant."

Alex's laughter had a distinct edge to it, despite the seemingly friendly look on her face. "Yeah, we get that with him sometimes. It's an ongoing process."

Melissa groaned dramatically. "Oh no! Not another learning experience!" A scattering of other kids of various ages had left their other activities to see what was going on, and they joined in the laughter.

Alex looked at the girl. "I have a policy - I like to know the names of people who try to pinch my wallet."

"My name is Stray," at Jimmy's disbelieving snort, she gave him the evil eye again. "She never said she wanted my real name. Olivia Greer." She heaved a fatalistic sigh. "I was in care in Minnesota, so I figure I must be in the computer somewhere, but I'm NOT going back there, you can't make me. You send me back to Minnesota, I'll just bail again."

"She says Minnesota, but she's wearing Colorado sports gear." Jimmy shook his head. He had a bad memory of one particularly bitterly cold Monday Night in the old Mile High Stadium, getting his can kicked all over the field, and pelted with snow- and iceballs from the stands. The tunnel from the visitors' locker room had come out underneath the notorious 'South Stands,' and the Broncos Faithful - 'Broncomaniacs' was the perfect name for them - let you know you were The Enemy from the second you set foot on Their Field.

Alex didn't say anything out loud, but the look in her eyes was clear as day - 'Don't push your luck with me today, Jimmy.'

Oookay, so he wasn't off the hook, after all.

Olivia had her arms folded defensively over her middle, standing with her weight tipped back on her right foot, discreetly measuring the distance between her and the door. A kid in a Longhorns shirt shook his head. "You better not, Trivette played wide receiver for the 'Boys. He'd catch you before you got two steps."

"One step," another kid disagreed.

"I'm more interested about how he knew where I came from." Olivia snarled.

"I knew you were in my car before I left." Jimmy scowled at her snort of disbelief.

"What's important right now isn't where she came from, but where she's going," Alex announced, her voice brooking no argument. At that moment the front door opened and in came Walker, his butternut Stetson darkened by the drizzle, and an older man behind him. He took in the scene before him, and quirked one eyebrow at Alex. "Now, what have I told you about leaving your purse hanging around?" Teasingly, like a parent exasperated by a child who's been reminded a thousand times. The older man harrumphed.

"She's always been forgetful like that. If I had a nickel for every time her mother and I had to remind her about her bookbag, I could give up law completely. Hello, punkin." Gordon Cahill came to Alex's side and bussed her temple.

"At least I came by that honestly, Mom and I had to remind you not to forget your briefcase at least as often." And only Jimmy and Walker knew that the reason Gordon had needed to be reminded about his briefcase was that he'd been drunk more often than not back then.

Olivia took one look at Walker and felt all of her sass evaporate. The ghosts of Colorado floated closer, tantalizing her with the knowledge they held just out of reach. She remembered a book she'd read about wolves, and how each pack had only one alpha male. She shifted her hands to her back pockets and dropped her eyes, submissive now. "H'lo, Yessir."

"Stray." He sounded amused rather than angry, which prodded Olivia into taking a peek from under her eyelashes. Inwardly, she was cringing. She hadn't ever seen Alex down at 4100 South, and therefore hadn't recognized her here. She certainly wouldn't be going back there now! "Caught with your hand in the cookie jar?"

Olivia's "I guess," was accompanied by a jerky, nervous shrug. At 4100 South, it was common knowledge that the sayings 'Don't Mess With Texas' and 'One Riot, One Ranger' specifically meant Cordell Walker.

A voice spoke from the stairs. "She could stay with us."

Tandy Malloy had been coming down from upstairs, and had held her position until there was an acceptable break in the conversation.

Alex gave her a surprised look. "Your Mom won't mind, Tandy?"

Tandy shook her head. "She was saying this morning how empty the house is starting to feel, with Trent and Becky and Emily in their own place, Tommy over in Afghanistan, and Todd's gonna be gone next May. I guess I don't make enough noise, just me by myself. Maybe I should start slamming doors every chance I get," she ended wistfully.

And that was how it had happened. Before Olivia could gather a breath to protest, Carlos Sandoval was there with his black Dodge Durango, she was taken back to 4100 South to collect her few possessions, and then on to Katie Malloy's house. Her feeble protests that this time of upheaval in the Malloy family wasn't the time to be dropping a new person into the mix went entirely unheard. Since she'd spent a lot of time in libraries, she was able to bluff her way into being placed in seventh grade, where she should have been. By a roundabout route, the ghosts in her mind settled into their proper places, though she managed to keep her big mouth shut, but good.

Now, Katie Malloy looked up as the girls bounced into the kitchen. "You two take something with you to eat, there's muffins." She waved at a wicker basket lined with a red-and-white checked cloth and filled with muffins. Tandy gave the basket a dismissive glance.

"There's no blueberry."

"Take what there is," her mother admonished.

Heaving the sigh of the martyr, Tandy picked out an apple cinnamon, while Olivia grabbed an orange with chocolate mini-chips.

Tandy noticed. "That's the last orange chippy."

Olivia nodded. "I know."

"That's Todd's favorite."

Olivia nodded. "I know."

"He's coming over later."

Olivia nodded. "He also owes me ten bucks." She may have given up stealing pocket watches, but she was still Olivia Greer.

"Oh. Well, moving right along, then."

Katie was laughing as the girls pelted out the door.

They ended up making a full day of it, hitting not only their intended destination but three other Metroplex-area malls and two farmer's markets, which Katie was glad to see when they came home.

"Good, I can skip that when I go shopping tomorrow. Oh, here's Trent," as a Cowboys-blue Dodge Durango pulled into the driveway behind Tandy's ten-year-old Mustang convertible. With his abrupt marriage to another former 4100 South resident, Becky, Trent had been forced to give up his beloved steel-blue 1972 Corvette. Becky had a three-year-old daughter, and a 'Vette seated only two. As a compromise, Becky hadn't asked him to sell the 1991 Harley-Davidson FLST Springer Softail he'd bought when he joined the Army. Because of Trent's affiliation with Walker, criminals in Texas now saw that bike in their nightmares. Because Trent had sold the 'Vette, Tandy had had her Mustang re-painted in Early 1970's Chevrolet Corvette Steel Blue.

Because the investigation was still ongoing, Trent didn't say very much about the case that had taken him away from home for the last several months. He mostly just listened to his family filling him in on what they'd been up to while he was gone, and moaned in sympathy with Todd about how lousily the Texas Rangers baseball team was doing. As of the All-Star Break, the Rangers were 38-51, playing .472 ball, sixteen games out. They were breaking exactly even at the Ballpark at Arlington, having a 22-22 record at home, but playing an abysmal 16-29 on the road. None of the Malloy brothers were all that enthused with Sammy Sosa being in town - Tommy called him 'Sammy So-So' - and to make the whole mess that much worse, popular first-baseman Mark Teixeira had been on the Disabled List since early June and was now rumored to be on the trading block.

"Even the Colorado Rockies are playing better than the Rangers. They're 45-and-44, playing .506 ball, and they're only four-and-a-half games back. They're playing 26-and-19 at Coors Field, and 19-and-25 on the road." The only light Todd was seeing at the end of the Rangers' tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming freight train. "It's just pitiful."

"Come on, Todd," Olivia cajoled. "There must be someone doing worse than the Rangers."

"Oh, there is," Trent answered for his brother. "Tampa Bay, Washington and Cincinnati. But that's only three teams out of the thirty. Speaking of Colorado, I heard from Vin Tanner today. He'll be in town tomorrow."

Olivia thought she did an admirable job of not choking on her steak fries as Katie asked whether Vin would be bringing his 'friends' with him, and Trent replied in the affirmative. Oh no, oh no, oh no. Now what was she going to do?

Later that night, Tandy slept, oblivious as her roommate packed. Olivia was amazed at how quiet she was being, as fast as she was moving and as nervous as she was. Nervous hell, she was downright terrified. She'd thought 661 miles was enough to protect her; went to show how wrong-headed her thinking still was, no matter how she'd tried to rewire herself.

She knew what was going to happen. Chris Larabee would tell Katie exactly who and what she had living under her roof; Vin would let her know how disappointed he was that she'd tried to steal Alex's wallet; Buck would be furious with her for losing his pocket watch; and that was all besides her having to explain exactly where said pocket watch was, which would just get Chris and Buck that much angrier at her. Like the saying went - she didn't have to go home, but she couldn't stay here.

Trent thought he'd put a fairly sophisticated security system in the house, but the old sense of challenge had reared up in Olivia, and she'd made a point of figuring out how to beat it. She'd succeeded, and now she slipped out of the house undetected. She wasn't about to make a bad situation worse by trying to hot-wire either Tandy's Mustang or Katie's Chrysler Town & Country minivan to get away, even though she'd known how to jump a vehicle before she'd started first grade. She simply set out on foot with what she could carry, sometime between midnight and dawn.

Denver International Airport
July 2007

One upshot of Buck discovering he was Jock Ewing's illegitimate son - however wrong it was for the older man to have waited over forty years to ''fess up to the fact' - was that Team 7 now had their own personal jet. The Bombardier Global Express XRS was really bigger than they needed, but Buck had asked specifically for it, after having asked Ezra to do the pursuant research. He'd originally planned on asking for a much smaller aircraft, until Ezra had quite reasonably explained that it could be used not only to transport Team 7 themselves around their Rocky Mountains-Great Plains-Gulf Coast 'theatre of operations,' but also to take wives and family on "horrendously rare and therefore exceedingly precious and likewise desperately needed" vacations. After some grumbling for form's sake - and telling J.R. to shut the hell up - Jock had choked down the plane's $45.5 million price tag, and Team 7 got a way to get from Denver to anywhere and back that didn't involve forking over several hundred dollars for plane tickets, and then having to deal with the ever-increasing migraines involved with transporting 'needed hardware' on commercial airlines. It was their damn plane; they could take whatever they damn well wanted. That the jet had come decorated in the black-and-gold Ewing Oil paint scheme, they wrote off as the cost of doing business. That it burned the heck out of old Blake Carrington to have a Ewing Oil jet permanently stationed in Denver, they considered an unexpected bonus.

And besides, Ezra, Vin and J.D. got such a huge kick out of flying the thing. Technically, the plane should have had a four-man crew, but the job could be handled nicely with three men, and Ezra, Vin and J.D. thoroughly enjoyed the challenge. When it had arrived in Denver, the only description for their reactions had been three kids handed the keys to not just the candy store, but the entire candy factory. They'd given it a better inspection than it had gotten leaving the factory, all the while constantly reminding each other that it wasn't an F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18, F-22, F-35 ... "What comes after an F-35?" For Buck, Nathan and Josiah, it meant never again being six-foot-plus on a commercial airliner.

It had come as a surprise that Vin had a pilot's license, although once he'd had a chance to think about it Chris realized he really shouldn't have been. He'd at first thought that being closed into a cockpit for several hours would have triggered Vin's claustrophobia, until Vin explained that it was closed-in and dark places he disliked so strongly, and even a cockpit during a night flight was a closed-in space that he was in control of. Ezra's pilot's licenses (plural, he was qualified to fly damn near everything that had wings and/or rotors) they simply chalked up to Something New We Learned About Ezra, with Josiah choosing to file it under Things We Should Have Realized Before. That J.D. was interested in learning was no surprise at all, and Ezra had no trouble justifying helping J.D. pay for flying lessons. Buck hadn't been terribly wild about the kid practicing his new skills on 'his' plane, but talked himself through it by reminding himself that Ezra and Vin wouldn't let J.D. fall. For his part, J.D. had that much more reason to be extra careful; if he crunched Buck's plane, he knew he'd better hope he died in the crash, or Buck would kill him!

As the XRS's engines skirled up, Chris and Buck were quiet, pensive even. Of the team, only Buck knew exactly why they were going to Dallas. Even Chris's own younger brother, Vin, didn't know why. Chris had reasoned that he needed Vin's attention on what he was doing, that he'd tell Vin why after they landed, and let Vin be mad about the not knowing later. But he couldn't not tell Buck. The others knew only that they were going to Dallas, that something had come up regarding Ella. For now, that was enough for the rest of them. That he was going to Dallas for any reason was enough for Vin; that it involved a potential break on the bitch who had taken his sister-in-law and nephew from him before he'd ever even met them was icing, sprinkles and ice cream on the side.

Josiah and Nathan noticed, of course. But if Chris wasn't talking and Buck had his back, prodding them would get roughly the same results as teasing a cobra, and was therefore to be similarly avoided at all costs. The men would speak up when they were bloody well ready, and not one second before.

"I packed some pictures. The ones I had to take for the insurance." Chris only heard Buck's voice because they were sitting side-by-side. "The - what was left of the Jeep, the burn mark in the driveway, the damage to the house."

Chris nodded absently. "All right. Any particular reason why?"

Buck shrugged. "Dunno. Just while I was packin' I thought of them, thought I should bring 'em. Maybe Vin's Comanche sixth sense is rubbin' off after all these years."

"Didn't Ray say you-all had some Cherokee blood? Maybe you've got a sixth sense of your own." A few years back, Buck's half-brother Ray Krebbs had gotten on a kick of exploring the Ewing family genealogy - even exploring the history behind the Ewing name itself - and had dug up some very interesting information in the process.

That got a snort out of Buck. "Sayin' I'm part Cherokee because there's one up my family tree nine generations back is like sayin' I got a right to the throne of Scotland because the Ewings come out of there, Pard."

The plane began to roll forward, and Chris stifled the urge to go forward and ask Ezra and Vin what the speed record was for a plane of this size between Denver and Dallas - and then order them to shatter it. Vin guarded his license as zealously as he guarded anything he'd once thought he'd never be allowed to have. And not even for the most important thing in his life would his brother ask him to risk that license. Besides, the XRS's cruising speed was 562 mph; it was 661 miles to Dallas. Counting time lost screwing around with both DIA and DFW airports, it would only be a two-hour trip. It would have actually taken longer to drive from Denver up to Cheyenne, Wyoming, barely one hundred miles away.

They were airborne minutes later, and Chris looked out the window as Colorado faded away behind them. 'Hold on, sweet Sarah. Just hold on for a little longer. I'm coming as fast as I can.'

Somewhere outside Dallas
July 2007

That the situation was degenerating to what C.D. Parker would have described as "Hell in a basket" didn't bear repeating, and Walker was redeploying to the place he best knew how to defend - his own ranch.

With him in the truck were Alex, John Ross and Sarah O'Rourke, who had quite readily and eagerly admitted to being Sarah Larabee. Once she'd been assured that Ella was well and truly caught, that she wasn't going to slither free and exact retribution against anyone who talked, the story had come pouring out. It had been as if she couldn't talk fast enough. The abduction of herself and her young son; the separation from the twins she'd been pregnant with at the time, after they were born; being forced to serve as a Ella's 'deal-maker' - a beautiful American woman dressed up and trotted out as a prize to the dealers of all manner of human misery that Ella associated with.

But there had been Adam. Surly, defiant Adam, who in his black temper had very nearly tried his luck against Gage, if Trent and Carlos hadn't been within batting distance as well. Wary, broken Adam, covering his internal sense of defeat with rage. Knowing only too well where the young man was coming from, John Ross had broken protocol, a little. He'd promised Adam that they'd take him to a safe house before actually clearing the idea past Walker. Such was the trust Walker instilled, that John Ross had done so before consulting the Ranger, knowing he'd be backed up. And he was, Walker approved and signed off on transporting Adam to safety before John Ross was through explaining. Adam had grumbled and growled that there was no such thing when dealing with Ella, but he'd given in once Sarah had promised she'd be joining him as soon as she finished her statement. Such was his anger and sorrow and confusion that he'd given even his mother a look of such sheer distrust that it tore at something in John Ross's soul, but he'd gone along after that.

John Ross had originally intended to ride along to the safe house. Matt Waite, another Dallas Metro cop, had asked to trade so he could log in some overtime. Waite's wife had recently been 'restructured' out of what they'd thought was a secure job, and money was suddenly a concern. John Ross didn't need to worry about next month's rent, so he'd agreed.

He would now be the rest of his life regretting it. The terrorist Ella had been dealing with was someone far outside her normal depth; she'd been in over her head and hadn't understood it. The weapons had been a trifle, what he'd really been after was the hard drives, and having lost them was interested only in cutting his losses and tying up any and all loose ends. He'd ordered several of his men to hold back, and they hadn't been captured. When he was, they had their orders.

Gage and Sydney had drawn the detail to provide security for the van, and when Sydney saw a helicopter paralleling their path down the freeway she'd shouted to her partner, "Oh Hell, not AGAIN!!!!!" and grabbed for the radio to alert the van. As it had been the last three times this had happened on their watch, her warning was too little too late, as the van was rocked by a blast from a shoulder-fired rocket launcher. Gage desperately slammed on the brakes as the van erupted into a fireball behind them.

The driver had apparently had some sort of warning, because he'd attempted to yank the ponderous vehicle off to the side of the road and get away. Momentum carried the van in the new path, off the road just before an overpass and down the embankment. It was dark out, and in the sudden chaos, nobody saw the van's starboard side double doors pop open, or the shadow of a whipcord-lean figure leap out, tucking and rolling as he hit the ground.

Adam scrabbled up the side of the embankment, his heart pounding in his ears, praying the helicopter wouldn't try a flyover. He was pretty sure the only weapons the two Rangers had on them were their service sidearms. He didn't know if those were adequate to bring down a chopper - 'That'd have to be the shot of a lifetime, right?!?' - and he wasn't hanging around to see if the guys in the chopper were bringing their AK-74s to the party as well. He knew what one of those could do to a man who had been 6'6" and way over 200 pounds, and Sydney Cooke was smaller than his Mom! He wasn't sticking around to see her ripped to pieces in a hail of automatic-weapons fire.

There was a chain-link fence at the top of the embankment, and flying debris from the van had sliced a gaping hole in it. One quick glance over his shoulder to make certain nobody was looking in his direction - and to notice that the helicopter hadn't stuck around at all - and Adam was through that hole and vanishing into the back alleys of a rundown industrialized area. To borrow a line from a famous Southern rock song, Adam "too busy moving and hoping he didn't run out of luck."²

But with typical teenage impulsiveness, mixed in a toxic blender with his emotional distress and the sudden shock of the attack, he hadn't stopped to think of what effect his disappearance would have on his mother. When Sydney had called back to Walker and told him what happened - to her and Gage yes, AGAIN - of course the first thing Walker had inquired about was the possibility of survivors. Sydney had quite logically reported that there was no way anyone could have gotten out of that. Walker had then been left with the duty of telling Sarah what had happened to her son. It was times like these that drove home all over again how smart he'd been to let Alex Cahill catch him. Alex had been a rock, as she always was in times of crisis. With a quiet dignity Sydney could only admire, Sarah had simply asked how long it would be, before Forensics was able to examine the wreckage of the van; Jimmy had responded that he'd do whatever was necessary to have the job done tonight, and alert Walker as soon as he had answers. She had also taken the time to tell Gage and Sydney that she didn't blame them at all. They'd thanked her, but she could see on their faces, in their eyes, that they blamed themselves.

Walker had closeted his posse in his office and round-robined. He and Alex would escort Sarah to their ranch, where she would remain until further notice. Nobody further up the chain of command argued with him; Walker had been attacked on his own ground - several times actually - but the rare bad guy who did live to bark about such a feat was doing so from behind bars. And with the way the weather had been lately, the only way anyone was getting to Walker's shortly would be with an ark! John Ross had asked to go along, feeling guilty for having agreed to trade with Matt Waite on the van run. The case had been personal before; now John Ross was personally pissed.

Sydney and Gage stayed at Ranger HQ to finish their report and follow-up on the van attack. Trent and Carlos were sent out to rattle cages and shake trees; if anyone in the Metroplex knew about who'd hired the chopper and/or supplied the weaponry, they were to find out. Jimmy continued with the interrogations of the men they had captured, gathering and collating and cross-referencing every scrap of information, no matter how inconsequential or circumstantial it at first appeared. Cases, Jimmy knew, could rise or fall on the tiniest piece of evidence. They'd busted an environmental sabotage case because the twelve-year-old son of one of the company's secretaries had wondered where in the world one of the janitors - a young African-American from a low-income family - had gotten access to a computer. The defense had tied themselves in knots trying to have the whole case thrown out because of that, but it ended up being the break Alex had needed to fry the company's CEO and his lackeys.

They pulled up to Walker's place shortly before ten o'clock and a little over a half an hour before the XRS lifted off from Denver. For the duration, six-year-old Angela Walker and her 13-month-old brother Hayes would be staying with Gordon, in the city. Alex went through her clothes, looking for something Sarah could wear besides that excuse of a dress. She had a full four inches on the other woman and their coloring was worlds apart, but Sarah didn't need fashionable right now, just functional. Walker grumbled about it - not always good-naturedly - but it was times like this that Alex's love of shopping did prove useful. She came back with a whole laundry basket full, and gently led the quietly complacent woman to a guest bedroom.

"You and I aren't exactly the same size, but these should do you for the short-term." She smiled when Sarah went straight for an emerald-green T-shirt and a pair of black jeans that Tandy had accidentally left behind the last time she'd stayed over. Tandy was much closer to Sarah's size. The shirt was oversized on Alex, it would swallow Sarah.

"Chris has always liked me in green. He said - he says," she was quick and sure in emphasizing the correction, "that 'there's just somethin' about an Irish woman wearin' green.'" Her voice deepened slightly as she attempted an imitation of her husband.

Alex laughed. "I've heard that myself, but mostly from my father, and usually only on St. Patrick's. I know it's awful, but it seems like that's the only time we pay attention to being Irish." She glanced over her shoulder; they couldn't hear Walker and John Ross from up here. "Walker and I have had a couple of run-ins with the IRA."

"My Ma's uncle was in the IRA, that's why she was so quick to accept when my father asked her to marry him. She wasn't involved, but she knew the authorities might not be so particular about distinctions when they came calling. Da was an officer in the Air Force, stationed in England. He'd come to Belfast to look up his own ancestors, and met her when he stepped into her aunt and uncle's pub for dinner and a pint. She was after a way out of Ulster, and he offered her one. She didn't give herself any time to stop and think about what sort of man she was marrying. I sometimes wonder, if she hadn't gotten sick, whether she'd have stayed with him."

"How old were you?" Alex had come from a broken home, and lost her mother while she was in college.

"Ten when she was diagnosed, thirteen when she died, eighteen when I met and married Chris. I had to walk myself down the aisle, my father was so wretched he wouldn't even come to his only child's wedding."

That Alex could not fathom. She remembered her father being attacked by an assassin just before her own wedding, the terror that she would lose him when they'd only been reconciled for such a short time, and on the eve of what should have been the happiest day of her life. Inadvertently, however, Gordon's injury had provided Walker and Trivette with a needed clue in the case. Downstairs, Alex could hear Walker's cell phone; Jimmy had downloaded George Strait's 'If It Wasn't For Texas' for a ringtone. His own was 'Down In Mary's Land' by Mary-Chapin Carpenter. A moment later she could just hear Walker's voice, and guessed that he was standing at the base of the stairs. She turned back to Sarah, who had already slipped out of the gold lace and was sitting on the bed to pull on the jeans.

"You'll be all right, then?"

Sarah looked up and nodded. "Oh, yes, I'm fine." She looked at the pale peach 'power suit' Alex was wearing. "That doesn't look terribly comfortable."

Alex made a face. "It's not, I should have paid better attention when I bought it. But it was on sale and it looked great. It's going into the donation pile, for a program I know of that helps low-income women find nice-looking clothes to wear on interviews, so they can get better jobs and start bettering their lives. Hopefully, it's better meant for someone else. It also helps - " she nodded in the direction of downstairs, "with me dumping money on something I may only wear once or twice."

Sarah's grinned impishly. "He's a man, he doesn't understand. But oh, if it's something he's wanting for his truck ... "

"Or the horses," Alex replied. "I've never quite been brave enough to ask who he loves most, me or those horses." They shared a laugh, and Alex found herself glad that this woman was connected to Vin Tanner. It meant Sarah wasn't someone who would simply pass out of Alex's life when the case was over. She might be able to turn a case into a friend.

"Alex?" Walker's voice carried up the stairs, and Alex quickly stepped out into the hall. Sarah busied herself with slipping the T-shirt over her head, grinning ruefully at the size. She gathered up the excess at her left hip and tied it off, which made it a little better. She rummaged around in the basket until she came up with a pair of plain white sneaker socks. Catching sight of herself in the full-length mirror standing in one corner of the room, she rolled her eyes. She thought she looked about nineteen. Alex was in the doorway again.

"Walker just talked to one of your husband's men; he thinks they'll be taking off from Denver within the hour." She tilted her head to one side. "Come on, you can keep me company now."

Sarah followed her down the hall to a room filled with rustic furniture in solid, dark old oak. "You have a lovely home."

"Thank you, although I feel compelled to admit that I can take personal credit for very little of it. The house originally belonged to Walker's grandparents, and then to his Uncle Ray. Walker came here to live with Ray when his parents died in '65, and less the time Walker was in the Marines, they shared it until Ray passed in '96. Walker and I were married in '99, and sometimes I still feel like an extended guest." Alex uncaged herself from the suit, and the blouse that had seemed like such a bargain but had itched from the second she'd slipped into it this morning. The whole mess was tossed with no regrets into the large nylon sack she'd put in one corner for clothes designated for donation. Sighing with relief, she reached for a sunny yellow T-shirt and sky-blue jeans. "Oh, much better." She ducked into the master bath to ruthlessly brush her hair out of the oh-so-sophisticated twist that had taken her fifteen minutes to fashion that morning. "I love my job, but sometimes I could really skip the theatrics." She'd kicked off the five-inch ankle-breakers when she'd first stepped into the room, and finished by gratefully sliding her feet into a well-worn pair of white low-top Reeboks.

Sarah smiled. "I was a teacher ... before. Sometimes I wondered why my students could wear whatever they pleased, while I always had to be 'on.' One day I was out with Chris and Adam, and I was wearing a pair of shorts I'd cut down from an old pair of jeans, and one of Chris's old Navy T-shirts. Later that week I got a scathing letter from a member of the school board about setting a bad example for the children." She grinned a bit wickedly. "A week later, that man was caught in Black Hawk, losing school board money at the casinos. He tried to claim I'd set him up, taken out a personal vendetta against him because he'd lectured me on my morals, and that his arrest was a conspiracy, because Chris was a Denver cop."

Alex shook her head. "Don't people amaze you, sometimes? Walker, Jimmy and I worked a case in '95 that connected a respected Dallas businessman to the adult-film industry and the trafficking and exploitation of underage girls. Even the mayor was stunned. What subject did you teach?"

"Middle-school English. Before Adam and I were taken, my students were helping me plan a yard sale, because we were going to be moving out of the city. I was still going to be at that school, but we'd just bought a place in the mountains, up in Summit County." She shook her head, dark auburn hair sifting across her shoulders. "Sometimes it feels like ... like a - a movie, or a TV show. Like something I read about in a book that happened to someone else. I keep having to remind myself that it was really my life. There had been one murder on our street, and two more a couple of blocks over, and awful gang violence all over the city two years before. I wonder if people still talk about it like we did back then - The Summer of '93, like New Yorkers talk about 1977 being 'The Summer of Sam.' A little boy was shot in City Park, a little thing not even two years old, yet. Chris and Buck made horrid jokes about feeling like they were back in the Teams, and that got Chris and I talking about getting out of the city."

"That's one of the reasons Walker and I live way out here, even though it's a commute and a half, especially when the weather's lousy - " Alex cut herself off when a flash of lightning preceded a growl of thunder, and rain began to patter yet again on the windows. "Like it is now!" This was directed at the ceiling in exasperation, before she looked back at Sarah with a rueful grin. "As long as we don't think about the times work ... follows us home, like now."

Sarah took a deep breath, thinking carefully about what she wanted to say next, how she wanted to say it. A favorite saying of her mother's floated through her mind. 'This way be dragons.' "Alex ... if I told you something ... about Adam ... would you think I'd lost my mind?"

"Does it involve a combination of mother's intuition and what our Irish ancestors would call 'the sight?'" Sarah nodded, and Alex smiled. "Then no, I won't. I'm a mother myself, and I'm married to a half-Cherokee. We've all learned that when Walker's having one of his 'Cherokee hunches,' you don't argue with him, you just roll with it."

Sarah let out a sigh a relief, then looked Alex square in the eye. "Alex, my son did not die in that van. Somehow, he got out. And now he's alone out there."

Chapter Text

The MixMaster
Dallas, Texas

Going back to 4100 South had never been an option. After tromping through what felt like half of the Metroplex, she ended up at the MixMaster, the intersection of the I-30 and I-35 interstate freeways that connected the cities to the rest of the world. A multi-layered concrete forest of ramps and over-and underpasses with its own subculture of the homeless. Olivia slipped in with the eerie gray non-light that heralded the borderlands between night and day. Knowing what to look for helped, and she found a shack that was little more than a thrown-together pile of cardboard and storage pallets with a stained remnant of dark green carpeting for a door. From the looks it hadn't been occupied for at least a few weeks, and she wondered why it hadn't been dismantled and become part of its neighbors yet. She rearranged her pitiful baggage slightly, trying not to knock the whole thing over when she brushed aside the carpet scrap and stepped inside.

The first clue she'd been wrong was seeing a black oilcloth duster spread out on a rickety military-surplus cot. The second was the two arms that snaked around her from behind like the coils of an anaconda. One pinned her arms to her sides, the other came up around her shoulders and one hand clapped over her mouth. A rough voice that smelled like whiskey rasped in her right ear.

"Don't bother trying to shake me off, you'll snap your neck the way I've got you. I can't make any promises, but I will do my best not to hurt you, unless you give me no choice. And I have no problem with knocking you unconscious if you scream. You can stomp once with your right foot if you're not going to scream if I let you go. And if you do try to scream anyway, we're going to have a very hard time together."

Squeezing her eyes shut, Olivia took a moment to curse the fact that she was still only a white belt. She just didn't have anything lower to demote herself to. There was no such thing as a 'no-belt,' you needed a belt to keep your gi closed. No help for it, she stomped her right foot, and felt the arms loosen. There was a moment of charged silence, as her new companion waited to see if she'd scream no matter what threats he laid out. When she didn't, he grunted in satisfaction and gave her a short push at the small of her back to propel her into the shelter, such as it was. "Set your gear down and take a load off." He turned to rummage in a battered polystyrene cooler. "You like bologna sandwiches? It's all I got."

Olivia shrugged as she set her stuff down. Her school backpack, purse, Thunder Karate duffel and two airplane carryon bags landed on the concrete 'floor' next to a similar collection of her new 'roommate's' belongings. She bent down to rummage in her Thunder Karate bag. "I got some lemonade." Soda was rarely seen in the Malloy home, and she'd thought juice would go bad too quickly, so when she'd ducked into a 7-11 earlier she'd grabbed two plastic 20-ounce bottles of Country Time, surprised to see both regular and pink. "I'll take the pink, you don't want to be seen around here drinking pink lemonade. I'm Stray."

In the gloom of the shack he gave her an uncomprehending look. Whatever bitter knowledge lived in his eyes, it hadn't gotten there from living on the streets.

"You need a street name. You don't ever tell your real name out here. It's like the old days, with the People." You couldn't hang around Walker and not pick up Native American lore. "You'd have the name everyone knew you by, but then you'd have a name your parents gave you when you were born, and you never told anyone else that. So out here, I'm Stray."

He gave it a minute, thinking. "Slinger." He hadn't only picked up his clothes when he'd slipped back into the hotel hours ago. Ella's bodyguards weren't always careful about not leaving things lying around in plain sight, especially when they didn't have any reason to believe they wouldn't be coming back to reclaim it. All of the doors of the rooms Ella had paid for still had their 'Do Not Disturb' cards hanging from the doorknobs, and not a cop in sight. Using the keycards he'd filched, he let himself in and out of the rooms until he had what he wanted.

He looked about the same age as her, and there was something about him that stirred old memories she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to remember, but there was just something about him that just seemed so familiar ...

"Sorry there's no mayo, I didn't think it'd keep," he handed her a sandwich.

"The reason I didn't buy juice," she replied. "Besides, this is better than a wish sandwich. That's when you've got the bread, and you wish you had something else to put between the slices." She passed back the bottle of yellow lemonade.

He grunted in what might have been amusement as he rummaged around in the cooler again, coming up with a large bottle with a familiar white label. He drank about an inch-and-a-half off the lemonade, and then tipped the Jim Beam into it to make up the loss. He re-capped both bottles, set the whiskey back in the cooler, then gave the spiked lemonade several good shakes to mix it. "I think I've got enough bologna to avoid that, if we can eat it before it goes bad, don't know how long the cooler packs will last. And I've got a little money, anyway." There was a huge beanbag next to the cot, covered in moth-eaten blue corduroy, and he flopped down on it. "I'll be a gentleman and let you have the bed."

"You mind me sitting on your coat?" It felt strangely bumpy when she sat down, until she noticed the backs of the metal studs that had been punched into the tough oilcloth.

"It's not like I need it to keep warm, even at night." He watched her as they ate, and halfway through his sandwich he finally had to ask. "Ran, or got thrown out?"

"Ran, because I'm chicken." Properly it was more information than she should have been giving out on the street, but she just felt like trusting somebody, for once. That she hadn't trusted the Malloys enough to stay she tried not to think about. "I'll get yanked back fast enough if I don't keep moving, though. You?"

"On the run, more like. You're free to come with me, or go on your own."

Strength in numbers, or traveling light, fast and alone? "You buy that whiskey, or lift it?"

"Bought it, but it's a phony ID. My Mom's ... boss gave the Commonwealth of Virginia a doctored birth certificate. I just turned eighteen on the Fourth, the world thinks I turned twenty-one."

"I'll turn fifteen on August 22." She noticed but chose to ignore his hesitation in naming the person who had given him the ID. Or was it that he hadn't known exactly what to call them?

He gave her a long look. "You don't look fourteen. You look eighteen, seriously."

She gave him a delighted smile. "Really? You think so?"

"I'll get carded before you do."

Smiling, Olivia polished off the rest of her sandwich. The light was starting to come up more, giving her a better look at Slinger. That odd sense of familiarity kept nagging at her. Was it something about his eyes?

"So. You want to head out now, or rest for a while?"

Olivia shook her head. "I've spent hours prowling through half the rat holes in the Metroplex. All I want to do right now is crash."

Slinger nodded. "Okay. Probably be better to head out after dark, anyway. They'll have had time to get our descriptions out over half of Texas by that time, but most of the active searchers will probably have gone home."

"Yeah," Olivia knew better. Once Trent reported her missing, Walker would have most of northern Texas out looking for her. But not even Walker could be everywhere at once. All they needed to wait for was one unguarded hole in the net.

Walker Ranch
Outside Dallas

She'd thought about getting some sleep - she was certainly more than tired enough - but knowing that Chris's plane would be taking off within the hour and the short flight time between Denver and Dallas kept her awake despite her weariness. Once they landed at DFW, it would take a little less than another two hours to get from the airports to the ranch - the 'commute and a half,' Alex had good-naturedly complained about earlier.

So she lay awake in bed, in the dark guest room, listening to the rain pounding on the roof. It occurred to her that the weather might be bad enough to prevent the plane from landing at DFW - where would they be diverted to, Lubbock? Amarillo? She wondered if Chris would bring Buck with him, Alex had mentioned "one of your husband's men," she wasn't sure what to make of that. Chris was a Denver cop; unless he'd transferred to some special task force or something, why would he have other men working for him, and why would he bring them along? Then she thought of Alex, and of Sydney Cooke, and thought it might be better if Chris left Buck in Denver, because the big man was sure as the rain to make a fool of himself. The phone rang, and some minutes later she heard Walker and Alex up and moving again. They'd lain down to catch a little sleep, with John Ross keeping watch downstairs. So she got up and went down.

"I can't imagine why she'd do it, though. She's been doing so well." Alex's voice was full of worry and bewilderment as Sarah came into the living room. She was sitting on the couch looking up at Walker and John Ross, both of whom looked as confused as she did. Alex focused on John Ross, who had apparently fielded the phone call. "Did Trent say anything about what might have set her off?"

John Ross shook his head. "I asked; he said he went over there for dinner. Given the case, he didn't do a lot of talking; mostly let them catch him up on what he's missed. Commiserated with Todd about how rotten the other Rangers are doing. Todd mentioned that the Rockies are playing better ball than the Rangers - hell, Colorado's playing better than the New York Yankees - and Trent said he'd mentioned that Vin Tanner was coming into town. But that can't be it, Olivia doesn't know Vin."

"That we know of," Walker interjected, to Alex and John Ross's surprised looks. "Remember, there's twelve years of Olivia's life we've never asked her about."

"But, that doesn't explain why Olivia would be afraid of Vin. Vin would never hurt a child, especially one who had been in the system, like he was." Alex shook her head, getting up from the couch to look at the pictures crowding the mantle. Almost every flat surface in the room was filled with framed photos, and the photo albums stuffed into the bookcases were groaning at the seams. Walker could see that something else was going to have to be done, and soon. Alex searched among the pictures until she came up with the one she wanted - a slender girl in her mid-teens, wearing a white-with-blue-sleeves #23 Mark Teixeira Texas Rangers 'alternate home' jersey, open over a red camisole and dark blue denim capris, with her honey-blonde hair pulled back through the keyhole in a blue Rangers ballcap. She was smiling as she affected a 'glamour pose,' draped across the hood of Trent's old 'Vette. It had been copied and sent to Tommy Malloy's unit in Iraq, for a morale booster. Sarah took one look at the picture and felt a wave of memory wash over her.

Ella was dragging a hysterical eight-year-old girl out to the springhouse, telling her how wicked she was, and that wicked little girls like her deserved to be punished.

"Sarah?" Alex's voice broke into her memory.

"I know this girl, she was one of Ella's hostages. Her name is Olivia Briggs." She moved to sit down on the couch. "Her parents came to the estate before me, Michael and Marella. It was Ella's father that started the practice of stealing people from their lives and turning them into slaves, rather than hiring servants they'd have to pay and treat decently. Marella is the nanny to the younger children, until they turn thirteen and are allowed to move into their own rooms. Michael is the tutor to the teenagers." She stopped for a moment, looking into the middle distance - or perhaps inwards. "There was something they had, something Ella and her father wanted, badly. When Mr. Gaines was still alive, he'd keep insinuating that they might have their freedom if they'd just give him what he wanted. Shortly before Mr. Gaines died, Michael said to him, “I know you've read Don Quixote. You might recall the line 'My honor is dearer to me than my life.’” I never asked him what he meant by that, perhaps I should have."

John Ross spoke up. "I guess none of you ever talked much about your pasts?"

Sarah shook her head decisively. "Oh no, never. You never talked about who or what you were before."

The MixMaster
Dallas, Texas

They'd slept the day away, waking shortly after sundown. Slinger greeted the evening with some hair of the dog, to pacify his hangover. Olivia still had a few swallows in her own lemonade, so that and another bologna sandwich was 'supper.'

"We're not going to get away clean anywhere here in the city. What we need to do is get out of town, and try to pick up a ride there. I think there's a small bus depot in Braddock, up northeast of the city, if we can just get that far."

Slinger grunted, reaching over to fumble with the camping lantern he'd picked up at the hotel. One of the bodyguards was a survivalist type, and never traveled without a bunch of camping junk. The lantern was one of the newer styles that could be converted into a flashlight. Just to be on the safe side, he'd also taken one of the old-fashioned steel cylinder flashlights, because the same guy had once pointed out that it weighed two-and-a-half pounds when filled with three fat D-cell batteries, and could therefore serve double duty as a passable blackjack, if one didn't absolutely need it to see where they were going. Slinger figured he could use the lantern for light and the steel cylinder in its purported blackjack capacity. He reached back to yank the shirt he was wearing over his head and put on a new one. Once they got out of Texas, he'd see about getting them at least a roadside motel room for a night, so they could take real showers.

Olivia happened to turn while Slinger still had his back to her, so she could clearly see the body art on his back - a magnificent leopard seal that covered his shoulders and upper back, mouth open in a ferocious snarl. There were lines and waves and bubbles surrounding the seal, to create the illusion of water, and under the seal's tail and Slinger's left shoulder, the bubbles morphed into a cloud, from which a rainbow descended The rainbow cascaded down his back to where a whimsical looking leprechaun snoozed, leaning back on his pot of gold.

The reason for the tattoos was obvious, as well. Adam's back was criss-crossed with scars. Someone had beaten him, belt-whipped him, and badly. The world spun sickeningly as she was whirled into unwilling memories ...

A clawlike hand was snarled in her hair, dragging her by it in the dark. The gray stone façade of the springhouse rose up in front of her and she fought desperately to be free. She cried out as her shining, honey-blonde hair was pulled out by the root, and again as her captor slapped her, a vicious backhanded strike that snapped her head around. She felt a sharp, tearing pain in her neck and tried to hold still, but her attacker was shaking her now, like a dog shaking a rag doll in its mouth.

"Wicked, wicked little girl! I'd like to know just exactly who it is you think you are, little miss! Nobody, that's who you are! Quadroon trash, not fit to be allowed among decent people! You should be grateful I allow you to live here, and for everything you're given! Who do you think you are, to covet more than you're a right to? Wicked, sinful, thieving little wretch!" The iron door of the springhouse creaked open, like the creaky door on a Halloween gag CD. Inside it was as dark as a grave, and bitterly cold from the spring that still burbled up from the ground, like liquid ice.

"N-no! Noooooooooooooooo!" She writhed in terror, suddenly realizing what her punishment was going to be, for such a seemingly innocuous crime as having taken two cookies from the plate that had been presented to her. The claw in her hair gave another cruel yank, and she fell to her knees in the grass. Her jailer leaned close, hot breath pouring over the defenseless child's face and neck like sulfuric fumes from a volcano.

"You're going to learn decent manners, you ungrateful little bitch, if it kills you! Do you think I'm running a charity home? When you're allowed to have a cookie, you may have A cookie! I have better and more important things to spend my money on than feeding bottomless pits that are too spoiled to be grateful when someone takes them in hand!" The claw slid down to her neck, and the child was hauled without ceremony off her feet and tossed like a discarded doll into the springhouse. She landed in a similar sprawl of arms and legs on the dirt floor, upside down and looking out at the open door and the figure silhouetted in it, barely able to tell them from the darkness outside.

"A night out here should be sufficient to teach you decent gratitude, and not to be greedy with what doesn't belong to you!" With this, her abuser took their leave, slamming the door behind with a thunderous clang. Whimpering in terror, the child pulled herself into a ball, trying to keep warm. She was only eight years old.

She must have dozed off, but she didn't realize it until the door creaked open again. She pulled into a ball again, trying to melt into the stone walls. "No, no more, I'll be good, I promise I'll be good. Please ... " She'd have promised anything at that moment, just to be allowed back into the house. She was beyond cold, her teeth weren't even chattering anymore.

"Shhh," a different voice, and she couldn't put paid to any of the sounds she was hearing, until a blanket! was draped over her shoulders, and something deliciously warm pushed into her hands. "It's a Hot Pocket, hope you like chicken and broccoli, it's all there was."

It tasted like heaven, especially inside. "She-she'll lock you in here next."

She felt more than heard her savior shrug. "She's already done the worst thing she can do to me, she can't hurt me anymore." But he did look over his shoulder. "But I had better go, before the next round of bed checks. See you in the morning."

"’Bye. Thank you."

"No big."

But it was a big deal the next morning, when the tall, dark-haired boy, no older than she was but eleven, was dragged into the courtyard and made to kneel on the crushed white rock. What had been his favorite Denver Broncos T-shirt - the one with Terrell Davis on it - was physically ripped off, and he was belt-whipped until his back was a bloody mess. All because he'd brought her a blanket and a Hot Pocket.

Not once had he cried out. In the short space of five years, he'd already learned not to give them that satisfaction.

She made her escape a week later, the night of the thunderstorm that knocked out power all over Northern Virginia. She survived by hook and by crook for four years, using what skills as she had, and her childish cuteness to avoid the pitfalls of street life, until she slipped into Jimmy Trivette's Mustang at 4100 South one rainy November night.

And all over two plain, single-stuff Oreo cookies ...

"Stray? Stray, are you okay?" The shack underneath the MixMaster, that's where she was. Whatever she was laying on was horrendously lumpy, an image of black oilcloth dotted with silver studs swam through her mind. Oh, yeah, the cot she'd slept on. Someone kept talking at her.

"Let me get you something to drink ... damn, never mind, I forgot, all we've got left is mine. We'll get you some water or something. Something." Slinger, that's who it was. And Slinger was ... her mind threatened to slither off again, but she concentrated and hauled it back. Slinger was Adam O'Rourke, who had risked and received a belt-whipping to bring her a blanket and food when she'd been eight and he eleven, and Ella Gaines had locked her in the springhouse because she'd taken two Oreo cookies.

"I remember you."

He whipped around, black hair swinging across his face like a curtain. Across his eyes ... his eyes ... Oh, sweet Lord, his eyes.

With the light from the lantern, she could see them now, two pieces of burning green ice. Chris's eyes. Running out in the Denver street, while Morgan Coltrane's Harley burned behind her. "Mama, Mama!" Her mother - the woman she'd thought was her mother - turning to catch her in a desperate hug.

And Chris turning away, a look of anger on his face, in those burning crystal-green eyes. They'd spent the next day at his ranch in the mountains, and she'd been as good as she knew how, because she knew he was very disappointed and angry with her. If she'd just stayed with Ezra, Nathan and Josiah like she'd been told, J.D. wouldn't have gotten hurt. She'd apologized to J.D. without having to be told, only a little mollified when he'd pulled up one leg of his jeans and showed her the scar on his right shin. A drunk outside the annual Boston College-Boston University hockey game had slipped on the icy sidewalk, coming up with a busted Sam Adams bottle with which to take on the young cop working crowd control. He could laugh about it now, having gotten over the terror that he'd lose the leg or worse, because he hadn't been able at the time to remember if his mother's slender budget had ever included her only son's tetanus vaccinations. But she'd never forget the look in Chris's eyes that night, that unspoken but deadly condemnation - You let me down. I trusted you, and you let me down.

And all because she'd wanted two cookies ... the terror suddenly overwhelmed her again. She could all but hear Chris roaring in her head. "Because of YOU, Olivia! It's all your fault! He was belt-whipped and it's ALL YOUR FAULT!" Someone had her by the shoulders, shaking her. "Olivia! Olivia!" She turned into a wildcat, twisting until she could bring her arms in, push against whatever had her. Moves she'd learned from Trent, from Walker, from Sydney, and practiced over and over and over until she'd wept from fatigue and physical agony. Once in the early days, she'd slipped out of bed to work out in the backyard, collapsing from exhaustion and even sleeping through the rain shower that had passed overhead, not to be found until morning by Trent. Frozen to the bone and unable to move, she'd spent three days in bed. Trent had taken the responsibility on his own shoulders, admitting that he'd been pushing her in school. "I see something in Olivia, she's got real potential. I let myself get carried away, wanting her to be the best she can." The demons howled closer, this time even Buck would be disappointed with her. "Eight's plenty old enough to know better, little lady." Ezra, "The first lesson is never to get caught. You recognized a man palming cards when you were six, but could not do the same with a cookie two years later?" But I promised Mama I wouldn't anymore! And Vin, "Oughtn't ta ask fer more than yer a right ta, 'Livia." Nathan and Josiah and J.D. simply melded into a faceless blur of disapproval. 'It was only a cookie!'

Someone gently touched her face, smoothing the blonde tangles away from her eyes. "Olivia, hey. Calm down, it's just Adam. It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you." He smelled like whiskey ... Chris had smelled like whiskey, she'd seen him standing with a glass tumbler in his hand that one day, swirling the liquor gently and sipping occasionally. And when the huge black dog had come out of the mudroom and spat a mangled, barely recognizable baseball at her feet, Chris had set the tumbler aside and hunkered down, asked her if she knew how to throw a fastball. Of course she hadn't. So they'd gone outside - even in the snow in Summit County, Colorado in February - and Chris had shown her all of the pitches the big leaguers used on TV, while the black dog chased and brought the ball back. Buck had snorted that it was the first time he'd seen the dog retrieve anything besides his supper, and Chris had laughingly replied, "He missed that pot roast by, what, six inches?" The ball had been so big, her hand so small, she could barely fashion her fingers into the positions Chris wanted and still hold on to it properly. And Chris had smelled like whiskey. She couldn't see anything of Slinger's - of Adam's - face except those green eyes, and even those blurred as the tears started to fall. Adam made some quiet, broken sound of his own and pulled her close, her face buried in the soft, black jersey of the new shirt he'd pulled on at some time while she'd been passed out. She could feel his heart this close, a steady rhythm that she focused on while she tried to find her way back to reality.

"I'm s-s-sor-r-ryyyy. You got ... you got ..." she couldn't say it, she could barely breathe through the sobs. "And-and-and ... it-it'ssss all-all ... m-m-my f-f-f- ... "

"No, Olivia," she heard him from above her, felt the vibrations of his words in his chest. "I brought you the blanket and the food. And I knew what Ella would do the next day. I used you, not the other way around. I was trying to yank her chain, and you just happened to be there."

"Noooooooooooooooo ..." she was all but helpless in her sudden misery, the deep, internal agony raging in her soul, tearing her to shreds after years of being caged. "My fault, my fault. He's gonna be so mad ... and, and Buck - " she could hardly bear to think about it, those gleaming blue eyes, darkened in censure, that roguish grin changed to an angry frown.

She suddenly found herself looking into a pair of stunned green eyes. "You know Buck?"

Whoops. "Y-yeah ... you - your eyes. You have ... Chris's eyes." She stopped, wondering what he'd do next. Oh, if only she'd gotten the courage up to do this seven years ago ...

"You know my father." For several moments, neither of them moved nor spoke. Time froze in the tiny shack. Olivia didn't realize she was holding her breath until her lungs began to burn. She was more than a little light-headed when Adam finally let her go to pace away a few steps in the limited space they were in. He plowed one hand through his already-disordered black hair and let out a gusty sigh. Olivia gulped in a few breaths, before speaking in a quiet voice.

"He should already be here; I heard they were coming in last night. That's - that's why I took off." She felt her face flame.

He swung around to face her again. "You can't possibly be afraid of them. They're not gonna be mad at you over a dumb cookie, Olivia."

"It's not just the cookie - or you getting whipped, either. I - I - " she broke off. How to say what she was so upset about, without it sounding any lamer than it already was? "I took something of Buck's, and then I left it behind when I ran away from Ella's. I don't want him to know I've lost it - or where I lost it, either." His father. Chris was his father. She was in so much trouble ... taking a deep breath; she reached up to dash the tears from her face, trying to change the subject. "Look, we'd better get going, we've let them get a huge head start on us. If we don't want to get busted the second we stick our noses out of here - "

"Olivia." He stepped back to her, reaching out to cradle her face in his hands, tipping her head up so she could look nowhere but at him. "There's something I've been wanting to do for a long time." Slowly, so slowly Olivia could have backed away anytime she'd wanted to and couldn't imagine why she wasn't, he lowered his face to hers. He kept his eyes open all the way down, looking into hers. Olivia had a sudden, giddy moment to wonder if this was how Sarah had felt, the first time Chris kissed her. Then all thoughts of the past few out of her mind. Their lips were a hairsbreadth away from meeting ...

"Hey! You kids in there! Hey!" The moment shattered like a fine crystal vase dropped carelessly on a stone floor, a million pieces scattering. In a split second, Olivia found herself pushed behind Adam as he clenched his fist. How it had made its way through the MixMaster and into the shack, Olivia didn't know, but a flash of sunlight glanced off the full-finger dragon ring on Adam's right hand. The wings were hinged, and their outer curve had been sharpened to a cutting edge. Adam stepped forward, and twitched the green carpet door aside just enough to see out.

"Yeah?"

A man's voice that Olivia thought she ought to have recognized answered him. "You kids better vamoose. There's some pretty tough-looking customers flashing your pictures and asking if anyone's seen you. They don't look like the kind of guys who take no for an answer."

"Maybe Middle Eastern accents?" Adam was mentally kicking himself. They must have had a mole or something inside the cops, which was the only way they'd have known he wasn't in the van. But how could they have known about Olivia? Or that they were even together?

"Yeah, real mean-lookin' suckers. I'd advise gettin' gone from here, and right quick about it."

"Thanks, man." Adam came back in, then scanned their 'luggage.' "We can't bring all of this."

Olivia suddenly had a brainstorm. That kid who had just been kicked out of the H.O.P.E. Center last month lived near here, and the last time her and Tandy had seen him, he'd been driving a tricked-out Ford Crown Victoria. "Yes, we can, if you've got enough change to make a real fast phone call."

Twenty minutes later, they were stuffing their gear into the trunk of Pablo Ortiz's car. "You sure you know how to get there?"

"No problema. My Tia Consuelo lives in Braddock. I was up there last weekend for my cousin Isabella's quinceañera." Pablo had come into the lot of the abandoned gas station with lights and radio off, in response to Olivia's desperate phone call. He'd pulled enough of his gang brothers out of bad situations to recognize the circumstances.

"And you won't tell Walker you saw us."

"Man, I wouldn't give him the time of the day. For real." He pulled out of the gas station and headed for the freeway. In less than an hour, he was letting them off in front of the Braddock County bus depot.

Adam tried to push a fifty into Pablo's hand. "For gas, and for coming out after us."

Pablo pushed it back. "De nada, amigo. No worries." He gunned the Crown Vic's souped-up engine and Adam had to step back. Shaking his head, he closed the passenger side door and watched as Pablo peeled out.

"He'll be dead a week from now," Olivia's voice was hollow, to match the hopelessness in her eyes. Pablo had almost been a friend, until he almost got Sydney killed. Almost.

"Probably. The point for us now is to make sure we won't be." He shouldered his gear and looked at the bus depot. They hadn't been quick enough in getting here, and Braddock wasn't big enough to keep its bus depot open 24/7. The hours were printed clearly on the door, it wouldn't be open again until six o'clock the next morning. "And the first thing I guess is to find a place to sleep tonight." He looked around. Braddock was a small town, the population was under 2,000. It looked like everything except the local roadhouse was closed down already, and Adam wasn't quite crazy or desperate enough to try going in there with Olivia. The sound of a honking horn had him turning, thinking Pablo had changed his mind and was coming back for that fifty. But it wasn't Pablo.

A silver Mercedes of late Seventies vintage pulled in, and the passenger door swung open. "You kids need a ride someplace?"

The driver was a cowboy, who looked to be not much older than Adam and Olivia themselves. He was dressed in the typical outfit of scarred and worn brown boots, blue jeans, a blue work shirt open at the throat over a white T-shirt and a straw cowboy hat that had been soaked and reformed more than once. A man's voice came out of the stereo, smooth and easy. "Well, if the whiskey doesn't get me, I know the memories will. 'Cause you've left a hole in my heart, too deep to fill."

"Just a place to sleep tonight, until the bus station opens." He looked harmless enough, with an open, friendly face under the hat, framed by a mop of dark brown curls that looked as if no brush tamed them for long. He reached over and flipped open the glove box, pressing a white button. The Mercedes's automatic trunk gave a metallic 'click.' "Just toss your gear in the back, you can crash in my cousin's barn. He won't mind."

"You sure?" The leather seats were as soft as butter when Adam slid in. The song continued to soar out of the stereo.

"The sun goes down,
The blues come around.
And the choice is black and white.
Low down and lonesome,
Or high as a kite.
When you can't win for losin',
Oh, you know it's just not right.
It's a headache tomorrow,
Or a heartache tonight."³

The cowboy pointed at the roadhouse as they passed. "He's in there tryin' to keep his brother from dyin' of liver failure. I decided to split before the brawl got started, thanks." They were out of town in less time than it took to tell it, cruising through the Texas ranchlands.

"Nice car," Olivia commented, running an appreciative hand along the seat. It was the kind of car she'd associate with Ezra, not a hired hand on a ranch. But she knew that in Texas, appearances were often deceiving. John Ross Ewing's uncle was one of the richest oilmen in the state, but he was just as likely to be seen in a battered F-250 that had been new when Ronald Reagan was in office, as he was in his red Mercedes.

"I wish I could say thanks, but it actually belongs to my cousin's sister-in-law. She contributed to me wreckin' my truck last week, so she's loanin' me this 'til mine's out of the shop. Beats the used Escort the insurance company wanted to loan me."

"Boy, I'll say!"

They drove for most of half an hour, accompanied by the country music coming from the stereo. Having lived with the Malloys as long as she had, Olivia knew she was listening to what most radio programmers nowadays called 'classic country,' which seemed to be anything produced during what Trent called "BG" - Before Garth. A gravelly voice she recognized as Merle Haggard came out of the speakers now.

"I can make it, for a day or two, without you,
And maybe, I can make it through the night.
I can smoke, and I can drink,
And probably be alright until morning.
But what am I gonna do,
With the rest of my life."⁴

There was no mistaking 'King' George Strait for anyone else, even in one of his early hits:

"If you're thinkin' you want a stranger,
I'll soon be there.
You're gonna see a change in me,
This time I swear.
No more late nights,
Comin' in at daylight.
And no more doin' you wrong.
If you're thinkin' you want a stranger,
There's one comin' home."⁵

Adam actually asked the name of the next singer, and Olivia laughed out loud that he didn't recognize Conway Twitty:

"And then, if someone asks you,
What I got you for your birthday.
You can say, Why,
He didn't get me anything.
But he sure took a lot of things away.
Happy birthday, darlin',
I've no presents, no fancy cake.
But I hope I'll make you happy,
With everything I take."⁶

Kenny Rogers was singing, "And she believes in me, I'll never know just what she sees in me,"⁷ when the Mercedes cruised over to the side of a dirt road, and the cowboy turned to look at them, an apology in his eyes.

"I'm really sorry, I forgot I have to make a turn just on up the road here, I won't be goin' your way. If you head straight through those woods, you'll come out on the back of my cousin's place. He never remembers to set the alarm on his barn, you'll be okay." He pointed out into the pitch-dark field off to their right. "I really do apologize."

This time Adam wouldn't be deterred, after he and Olivia had gotten their stuff out of the trunk. "Here, for gas." He pushed the fifty into the cowboy's hand.

The cowboy took a look and grinned. "Hey, thanks! Now I can take my girl out for supper! Thanks!" He watched until they'd crossed the fence, then peeled out again. Adam handed Olivia the steel-cylinder while he took the lantern. They crossed about two hundred yards of field before coming to the woods, and found a well-worn trail.

Adam was about to say how easy this was going to be when they heard it. A thunderous crash, two large, heavy vehicles colliding, obscenely loud in the darkness. Olivia's eyes were huge in her face.

"Oh, my God."

Adam was busy shaking off his bags. "We gotta go help him, he helped us. Jesus, sounded like he hit a train. Or got hit by one."

Olivia shook out of her bags and followed Adam back across the field, their running pace causing the lights to shake crazily.

They found the turn the cowboy said he had to make about another five hundred yards down the road. There was no evidence of an accident. "Maybe he got further than we thought. Sound carries better at night." Olivia tried not to think about how it had rained while Pablo was driving them up from the city. And how there were no obvious tire tracks in the still-wet dirt road.

"Yeah, come on." They pressed on through the dark, eventually coming out at a vast, open expanse of grass, bordered by what seemed like miles of split-rail fencing, glowing ghostly white in the moonlight. The lights of a large ranch house shone in the distance, and Olivia gasped as she suddenly realized where she was. This was Southfork Ranch. If she was to get caught here ...

And there was no car wreck in sight.

"Okay, okay, this is - "

"Let's just get back to our stuff."

They ran the seven hundred yards back to where they'd left their baggage. And got another shock. The well-worn trail had vanished in a tangle of undergrowth.

"Nobody's been by here in at least twenty years," Olivia was really starting to get freaked out.

"'The Ride,'" Adam's voice was quiet. "It's - it was, at least - one of Buck's favorite songs. This guy - David Allan Coe - he's hitchhiking to Nashville, and he gets a ride from - "

" - From Hank Williams, Sr.'s ghost. Yeah, I've heard that one. There's 'Phantom 309,' too, by Red Sovine. This guy is hiking from California back East, and he gets caught out of town. This truck driver gives him a ride, and gives him money to get some coffee at the truck stop. When he tells the people at the truck stop this guy gave him a ride, he finds out that the trucker died ten years ago, at the spot where he was picked up." She looked around. It was starting to drizzle again. "Look, there's no way we'll make it back to town in the dark. Let's just find our way through this," she waved a hand to indicate the woods. "And then we'll figure out what to do in the morning. Maybe his cousin will give us a ride."

It took them a good twenty minutes to forge through the patch of trees, coming out just as they'd been told, on the back side of a small ranch house and barn. The barn wasn't locked, the alarm off. They got inside just as the thunder growled outside.

"Does it ever stop raining around here?" Adam looked around until he found where the blankets were stored, making them comfortable beds on hay piled in an unoccupied stall. There were about five horses in the barn, who greeted their arrival with curious whickers and quiet but friendly whinnies.

"This is very not normal, it's usually dry as dust around here. Last year, there was a wildfire right in Arlington, right in the middle of the city." Olivia was digging through one of her bags. She needed to change, there was no way she'd sleep in damp clothes.

"Well, wherever that cowboy went, he took my money with him. It's not back in my wallet," Adam commented.

"Was that all we've got?" The bright pink Colorado Rockies long-sleeved T-shirt would be warm enough to sleep in, and tomorrow she could shove up the sleeves to stay cool. Now for a pair of jeans, here they were.

"Not hardly, I just haven't sat down to count it all." Adam was digging through all of his bags, looking for something he didn't seem to be able to find. For a moment, Olivia was torn. She wasn't sure she liked to see him drinking, and not just because he was underage. But if this kind of borderline frantic was what happened when he was starting to sober up ...

"The lemonade, or just the whiskey itself?" And why did her voice suddenly sound so defeated to her own ears?

"Never mind, I just found it." He pawed around in the green duffel bag, coming up with the spiked lemonade.

Olivia opened the nearest door, which conveniently led to the tack room. She changed in there, and came out with her rain-dampened clothes in hand, which she stuffed back into her Thunder Karate duffel. Adam took her cue, changing into a pair of jeans time-worn and softened from black to charcoal gray, and a Colorado Avalanche 2001 Stanley Cup Champions sleeveless T-shirt. When he stepped back into the stall, Olivia could see more tattoos on his arms. The logos of several Colorado sports teams marched down his left arm - the Broncos, Nuggets, Rockies, Avalanche, Rapids, Crush, Mammoth and Outlaws. On his right arm was a broken heart, with the date '10-13-95' in fanciful script over it. It got her wondering what might be on his chest.

Bologna sandwiches were quickly made, with Adam commenting, "This'll be the last time we can trust the bologna, guess I shouldn't have bought so much." Folding and rolling two blankets each to serve as pillows, they settled down for the night, again. Within minutes, they were both sound asleep.

A little over an hour later, Ray Krebbs slipped into the barn, stepping over to the stall and looking in on them. He'd been woken out of a sound sleep by the appearance of his cousin Mickey Trotter standing at the end of his bed. His twenty-four years dead cousin. Mickey had given him a peaceful smile, and said, "Check the barn," before fading from sight. Ray leaped out of bed and ran to the barn, barely having the presence of mind to stuff his feet into a pair of sneakers, and not bothering with a shirt at all; he'd fallen asleep as his usual habit, in his jeans. He recognized Olivia on sight, and guessed that the young man with her must be the Adam Larabee that John Ross and Buck had told him to be on the lookout for. Ray checked the clock mounted on the wall nearby, the John Deere novelty clock his daughter Maggie had bought for his last birthday. It was sliding past eleven o'clock, closer to midnight. He'd leave them alone, call John Ross in the morning.

And if John Ross was looking for them, he'd just spend a couple hours tonight making sure that his firearms collection was loaded and ready to go, maybe call over to Southfork and see if some of the boys were a mind to raise a little old-fashioned Texas hell.

Walker Ranch
Outside Dallas

Vin drove. That way, if they did get pulled over for going 80 in a 35 in a rental Excursion, he could get them out of it. Besides which, he was the only one who really knew the layout of the area, and where they were going. In the two years since he'd been discovered to be a Ewing, Buck could get himself from DFW to Southfork, from either of those to the Ewing Oil offices at Fountain Place down on Ross Ave., around to the major sports arenas - the Cotton Bowl, Texas Stadium, American Airlines Center, Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, FC Dallas's new Pizza Hut Park - and to Reunion Tower and the Oil Baron's Club. Beyond those selected locations, the Metroplex made about as much sense to Buck as J.D.'s Boston did to Vin.

Chris barely noticed when the city became suburbs became farmland, fields and woods. The parental intuition he'd thought long dead seemed to have been only dormant, and now that it knew its primary focus was still alive, it was screaming at him. Something was very wrong, Adam was in deep trouble.

Buck shifted in his seat, second shotgun. Vin was driving, Chris was first shotgun, Buck right behind him. Now Buck angled his big body in between the front captain's seats, trying to see the dashboard. "Hey, Junior, what's the top end on one of these rigs?"

"Ain't," Vin replied flatly. "S'dark, s'rainin', we're outta town. Ain't."

"Okay, just askin'." Buck sat back.

"'Sides," Vin continued as he began pumping the brakes to dump velocity. "This here's th' turnoff fer th' rez. We'll be at Walker's place in 'bout fifteen, mebbe twenty minutes." He began cranking the wheel to the right as the headlights lit up a sign announcing their arrival at a Cherokee reservation. Predictably, they moved off the paved road and onto dirt, which was more like mud now. Numerous vehicles - most of them pickups and SUVs - had churned up the road, and Vin growled as he downshifted, pushing the drive into four-low.

Vin was focused on one thing right now - getting Chris to Walker's front door in the shortest amount of time possible. Chris had pulled him aside and explained the situation at the airport, including why he hadn't said anything before they left Denver. Vin couldn't really argue with his brother's logic. To Sarah, he was a stranger. Chris and Buck could tell her that she could trust Vin from now until the Rangers won the World Series, but talk was cheap. Vin was going to have to prove himself - all the boys were. He hissed as he braked the Excursion before a water-covered bridge. "Dang it all."

They piled out, coming to stand in the Excursion's headlights. What looked like a normally placid creek was now about to break its banks, and had covered the bridge. Thanks to the murkiness of the water, they couldn't see if the bridge itself was even still there, or if it had been washed away to leave only the railing to mislead the unwary. On the other side, an early-Nineties Ford Bronco eased to a stop, marked with the shield of the Cherokee tribal police. A lean-built man in his mid-50s swung down, his uniform covered with a dark green full-length poncho, the hood back to accommodate his Stetson. "Don't cross, it's out!" He hollered across.

"We's tryin' ta git ta Walker's!" Vin called back. "Is there 'nother way?"

The tribal cop gave Vin a considering look. "Sees Beyond The Sky? I thought you were in Colorado?"

"I am, Sheriff Coyote, but Walker called me back here, an' I got ta git ta his place. Is there 'nother way?"

Tribal Sheriff Sam Coyote looked first up the creek, then down. "You know where Red Cloud lives? You could try going by his place. But don't take the turnoff to George Black Fox's, that's flooded out, too."

"Yeah, I know by Red Cloud's, thank ya kindly. Hey, if'n Dep'ty Black Fox is flooded out, Bitter Water's gonna be in trouble right quick. Someone go in an' git White Eagle ta high ground?"

Sam shook his head. "I was out there yesterday, he won't budge. And Judge Fivekills has been after him for weeks."

"He'll see reason when he's got ta doggy-paddle out, I reckon. Y'all be careful." Vin turned back to the Excursion, the others following him. Sam Coyote stayed, to put up some red nylon warning flags.

Vin was cussing in Spanish when they got back in the SUV. "Puts 'nother forty-five minutes, mebbe a whole hour on it."

"Just get us there safe, Vin. That's all I'm askin'." Buck clipped his seat belt closed.

Chris nodded. "Won't do me any good if we drown."

Vin reversed and got them back on the paved road, driving for another twenty minutes before turning onto a second dirt road, this one in slightly better condition. They passed three trucks coming the other way, Vin stopping each time to ask the drivers if they'd been up to Red Cloud's, was the way still clear. The third person they spoke to was Deputy Sheriff George Black Fox, who reported that he'd just come from Bitter Water himself, and no, the shaman White Eagle still wouldn't leave.

"I keep tryin' to remind myself that he's seen this weather a lot more than I have, and that he should know when it won't be safe to stay there any longer." Black Fox groused.

"Jist r'member, if'n he does need rescuin', ya don't tell an elder ya done tol' 'im so." Vin grinned.

"Oh, I can't," Black Fox agreed. "But believe me, Judge Fivekills will."

Something occurred to Vin. "Hey, if'n yer flooded out an' Bitter Water's threatened, Judge must have water comin' up his place."

"Oh, he does," George cackled as he reached to put his Bronco in gear. "But he's up in Anadarko, visiting his grandson!"

Vin was chuckling as he rolled the window up.

"'Magine this floodin' must be a nuisance fo' most folks," Nathan was sitting behind Vin, with Josiah between himself and Buck. J.D. and Ezra had what J.D. called 'the way-back' to themselves. "But 'round here - "

Vin cut him off. "'Round here, th' People take care of each other."

A battered Chevy station wagon came up behind them a while later, stopping as it drew even. A woman leaned over the 9- or 10-year-old girl sitting shotgun. "You going up to Red Cloud's? Who - Vin Tanner?"

"Yeah. Hey, Rachel. Thought y'all'd be in Florida with Brian."

The little girl ducked her head, shiny black hair falling forward over her glasses, and her childishly round face.

"We would have been, but Brianna," Rachel nodded at the girl. "Came down with an ear infection and can't fly."

Vin gave the little girl a sympathetic look. It was obvious from her posture that she was blaming herself, as children her age tended to when something went haywire in their lives. "Whyn't ya try ta stay in our tire tracks, I'll take ya up ta Red Cloud's? We's tryin' ta git ta Walker's but th' bridge on th' main road washed out."

"Yeah, Luther Iron Shirt and his truck almost went with it." Rachel Falcon settled back into the driver's seat, waiting until Vin pulled the Excursion ahead.

"Man, if'n Brian's floodin' out, Bitter Water's got ta be next."

"How old is White Eagle?" Josiah inquired.

"Old 'nough ta've bin in Korea," Vin replied. "An' I think him an' Judge Fivekills both had ta lie 'bout they's ages ta git there. Walker's Uncle Ray tried, but th' Army found out his older brother - Walker's Daddy - was already enlisted an' sent 'im home."

"I'll bet he didn't like that," Josiah's voice held more than a hint of a laugh.

"He tried goin' up when Walker enlisted in th' Marines fer Vietnam, but Walker like ta killed him. Tol' 'im, 'I need ya here, so's I know I got somethin' to come back ta.' Ray was th' only family Walker had left, his Momma's family disowned her when she married Walker's Daddy, on 'count of she was white, and John Firewalker was Cherokee. In 1950, they didn't cotton ta such things, 'specially 'round here. It's what ended up gittin' 'em both kilt, when Walker was thirteen. He survived 'cause he looked more like her than his Daddy."

"It happened to an acquaintance of my father's," Ezra's voice was quieter than they were used to. "Her father was white, but her mother had come from Haiti. Her father left the family when Marella was barely three. Ten years later, the trailer she and her mother lived in was torched with them inside. Father had gotten off the highway at the wrong exit, then taken a wrong turn trying to find his way back. The odds that he would have been in that place at that time ... he was able to save Marella, but not her mother. He subsequently took responsibility for her - her education and upbringing. She went on to become his right arm." He was silent for a few moments more, then, "She died for her loyalty."

"And you lived," Josiah didn't look around. The headlights from the station wagon behind them would provide too much light for Ezra's liking if he did. Ezra didn't answer, Josiah hadn't expected him to. It had been clear from his tone of voice that Ezra still didn't consider it an even trade-off, and Josiah knew from Maude that Ezra's father had died in 1986.

Ten minutes later, a large two-story frame house was lit up by the Excursion's headlights. Several vehicles were parked around the clearing, as Vin had expected of a house on high ground.

He got out, to help Rachel and Brianna get their stuff inside, waving the others to stay inside. Buck looked like he was about to object, until J.D. stopped him.

"We're outsiders, Buck. We may be Vin's friends, but around here, we're outsiders."

Buck sat back, silent, watching Vin and Rachel walk back and forth between the station wagon and the house. A tiny woman who could have been anywhere from fifty to ninety stood on the front porch and scolded them, smacking Vin on the arm once when he sassed back. Brianna appeared in the door with a piece of fry bread in her hand, and gave Vin a quick, one-armed hug. He backed away from the house, talking to the old woman, shaking his head 'no' the whole way. She finally gave up and went inside when his back rapped against the Excursion's fender.

He waited until they were well out of sight to rub his arm. "Dang, glad I never had her fer a teacher." They were on a new road, one that went at a right angle from the one they'd been on before.

"What did you say?" Chris asked. Vin slanted a sly look across the vehicle.

"It loses somethin', goin' from Cherokee ta English."

"Yeah, I just bet it does." That got a laugh all around, as they'd intended.

"Th' good news is, we shouldn't have any trouble gittin' ta Walker's from here. John Red Hawk said they jist come up from that way, didn't have no trouble. Passed Walker's on th' way, saw lights on. They'd've tried ridin' it out at their place, 'ceptin' the power already gone out on 'em a couple times, an' Katy's asthma. She has a machine if'n she has a bad attack, but they don't got a generator if'n th' power quits for a long while. Red Cloud has."

A little less than another thirty minutes after that, they came upon a house in a large clearing, with a white-trimmed red barn to one side, surrounded by corrals. The house had porches front and back on the first story, but not along the sides, or on the second floor. Lights were on inside, and a small light over the back door lit up a child's bright pink bike, with training wheels. Chris felt his heart twist - they'd just taken the training wheels off Adam's bike the weekend Before, and he had still been a little wobbly, still wanted an adult close by.

"A bike," Vin was shaking his head. "Th' last time I's down here, Angela was still pullin' herself 'long th' furniture, hadn't even took her first free steps, yet. Now she's got a bike."

"It does go quick," Nathan intoned. He had been the first of them to get married and start a family - Obadiah had turned nine in June, and little Ebany had been born in April. Chris was very grateful that Rain had been there from the beginning of Team 7, and that she understood him hauling Nathan off to Texas when they had a three-month-old in the house. It wasn't that Obadiah wouldn't help his mother, it was simply the matter of dynamiting the kid out of whatever book he'd buried himself in at the moment. Harry Potter was a huge hit in the Jackson home.

They'd come up to the house from the back, which meant Chris could just get out and walk up to the front door, without having to round the front of the truck. Walker's Ram was parked close to the house, a considerable coating of mud dulling its silver paint, so Vin pulled beyond it. He couldn't see Alex's black Durango, but if there was trouble -

'Uh, 'scuse me, IF'N?' A loud little voice in his head piped up suddenly. 'IF'N there's trouble? This's Walker we's talkin' 'bout, here. An' then throw y'all lot in, an' ya want ta talk ta me 'bout IF'N?'

Oh, shut up, you, Vin mentally snarled back at it. Walker woulda jist driven both of 'em back in th' Ram, left Alex's rig in town. Cuts down on escape options, sure, but he wouldn't have ta worry 'bout gittin' split up in th' travelin'. Th' bad guys've gotten ta Alex that way b'fore, y'know. An' aw Hell, I'm talkin' ta myself, now of all times. He braked the Excursion to a stop, hissing through his teeth as the SUV shimmied and slid a bit in the mud bog that was usually Walker's driveway. Walker's grandfather had never had the drive graded, so his uncle had never had it graded when he inherited the house. So Walker wasn't about to have it graded now, no matter that even though he and Alex both had 4WD, they still risked sinking axle-deep when it did damn rain. Vin entertained a short but very amusing mental picture of Jimmy Trivette's shiny black Mustang sinking up to the windows, if for whatever reason he was foolish enough to come out here before the ground dried out. That would be some fun scene to watch. For now, he cranked the wheel hard right, trying to get out of the mud and up on the grass. For a few seconds it looked as if even such a vehicle as an Excursion might get stuck in the thick Texas gumbo, but then the front tires found traction. They ended up under the tree in the front yard, and Vin shifted into park.

Sarah had tried not to worry, but the phone calls had started coming in. Tribal Sheriff Sam Coyote had intercepted seven men in an Excursion at the bridge on the main road, one of them had been a 'Vin Tanner' who it seemed Walker and Alex knew. Sam had redirected Vin and his companions to the road going up to 'Red Cloud's place,' and Deputy Sheriff George Black Fox reported seeing them along the road. Then Rachel Falcon had called from Red Cloud's house exactly, saying she could see Vin's taillights going away. As Alex had said goodbye to Rachel, she'd smiled at Sarah and told her that Chris would be here within half an hour, surely no more than forty-five minutes. She'd then given Walker a quick rundown of the 'refugees' currently taking shelter at Red Cloud's and elsewhere - families with exotic names like Red Hawk, Bright Hawk and Iron Shirt; Iron Hand, Crow Feather and Bright Feather; Who Talks, Little Bear and Gray Wolf; Little Eagle, Running Bear and Running Wolf; Lone Wolf, Going-Snake and Grey Fox; Red Bird and Raven and Ironhorse. She laughed at herself; to these people, names like Larabee, Connelly and O'Rourke were the exotic ones.

When she caught herself watching the clock and the window, she begged Alex for something - anything! - to do. "My mother would be appalled at me making a guest help me sort laundry," Alex had admitted with no small amount of chagrin.

Sarah looked up at the utility-room ceiling. "Mrs. Cahill, I hope you're not minding, but if I've nothing to do but compare the clock to the window for the next hour, I'll be as mad as Ella before Chris ever gets here, and that's the truth of it!" Alex was laughing so hard she had to hold on to the dryer to keep from simply collapsing in a pile on the floor. It took her several minutes to regain her composure.

"I don't remember a lot about my Dad's family, but I do have a vague memory of being about nine or ten, and my Great-Aunt Orlagh - and that's why I can remember this, because I've never met anyone else named Orlagh ever again - explaining to me the difference between 'shanty Irish' and 'lace-curtain Irish.'"

John Ross had been drawn by the laughter and now held up the doorframe, thumbs hooked in his belt loops. "There's a difference?" At Sarah's arch look he threw up his hands palm-out to ward her off. "Hey, I'm Scotch, I don't know!"

"There's truth," Sarah agreed. "You can always tell a Scotsman. You just can't tell him much."

Alex's laughter now was more of a groan as she rolled her eyes. "I can say the same thing about a Cherokee."

"I heard that!" Came from down the hall, somewhere to John Ross' left.

"You were supposed to!" Alex fired back. "We're going to have guests any minute, and you want me to get started on your misadventures now, darling?"

"To answer your question, John Ross, 'lace-curtain' Irish set store in the 'niceties,' as my Ma would call it. It's important that a task be completed, but it must be completed with style. Appearances are essential, the smallest detail is as vital as the largest." She glanced at him to see if he understood. He was nodding.

"Sounds like my grandmother. And shanty Irish?"

"Well now, the shanty Irish like a wee dram of whiskey now and again, love to laugh, and take life as it's handed to them."

Now John Ross laughed. "And that's Granddaddy, Scotch though he may be. Come to think of it, that's pretty much all the men in my family, except we mostly skip the whiskey part. Daddy had to get a new liver about twelve years ago, he started drinking when he was in high school, nearly fifty years - I was really shocked he hadn't keeled over a long time before that. Uncle Gary's better now, but back about fifteen, twenty years ago, he was on and off the wagon half a dozen times at least. Uncle Ray and Uncle Bobby stopped after Daddy got sick and they got scared. Buck I guess still does, but he knows when to stop himself, he doesn't get stupid with it. And he doesn't when he's down here visiting, out of respect."

"And you?" Sarah asked gently. John Ross snorted.

"I am the only son of J.R. Ewing and Sue Ellen Shepard. I never even started drinking at all, I grew up with those two for parents. Momma is much better now, she's been on the wagon for about twenty years, but Daddy made the best part of the twenty years before that a living Hell for her. When Daddy got sick, I said I wasn't at all surprised, it was just a matter of which one of them it was going to be first. His coming down with cirrhosis scared her into getting a full check-up."

"I really need to get after my own father about that," Alex muttered as she sorted Walker's shirts. "If you get a shirt that's Walker's, Sarah, check the seams and the buttons before you put it in this pile. His clothes take a lot of abuse."

"Grandma says she mends my shirts more now than she did when I was ten." John Ross chuckled. "And it wasn't that my cousin and I weren't pounding each other's faces into the dirt every chance we got back then, either."

The phone rang, and Walker called out that he had it. John Ross tipped his head back to hear better, then mouthed 'Trivette,' to the two women. Alex nodded, and Sarah suddenly became very interested in sorting shirts. The only reason she could think of for Jimmy Trivette to be calling was to inform Walker that Forensics was finished with the bombed van. She looked up when Alex touched her arm gently. Alex had a sympathetic, supportive look on her face. What she would have said Sarah didn't know, because just as Alex opened her mouth, a car horn sounded from outside, a simple two-toot signal.

The utility room - distinctly unlike most such rooms John Ross knew of - wasn't directly accessible from outside the house. One had to enter by the back door and walk down a short hallway, and the room's only window would have been a tight squeeze for the male bobcat whose territory included the ranch. Knowing Walker had the front of the house covered - front and back doors only, there was no 'side door' here - John Ross held one hand palm-out to signal Alex and Sarah to stay where they were while he drew his .45 and checked the back door.

"It's okay, John Ross," Walker called from the front. "It's them; Vin just hit the dome light."

Every butterfly in Texas suddenly invaded Sarah's stomach, and her heart began to race.

Outside, Chris and Buck slid out of the Excursion, while Vin held out one hand to forestall the others. "We wait, fellas. Bucklin'll let us know when it's time, but jist now, we need ta give Chris a minute er two."

Chris turned just before he shut the door. "You can tell them now, Vin." Then he walked toward the house with Buck in tow. Buck didn't look anything like his usual steady.

Sarah felt as if she was floating, that her feet weren't touching the floor. She wished she wasn't wearing borrowed clothes; 'At least the shirt is green,'; how much would he have changed? She hadn't dared ask in March of 2000, when Ella had given triumphant birth to a green-eyed baby girl she'd named Faith Christina. She'd simply savored her own inner sense of triumph when Faith's favorite person turned out to be Adam.

The door opened before Vin could knock, Walker standing there in jeans and a Longhorns T-shirt. He let them in without a word, then faded off into the living room. Alex was nowhere in sight. Buck stayed by the door, actually leaning back on it, as he in no way trusted his legs to hold him up. Tomorrow he'd go back to being the Rock of Gibraltar; tonight, he had about as much strength as the sand in his kids' sandbox. From here, he could see clear down the long hall, almost to the back door. The floor plan of the house wasn't quite a modified shotgun, but it was durned close. He was just taller enough than Chris to see beyond him, to catch a glimpse of dark auburn hair and an - oh, dear LORD - emerald green T-shirt, a split hair before an anguished cry of "CHRIS!" rang through the house.

Sarah wasn't aware of moving but she must have, because the very next thing she was aware of was being in Chris' embrace, held high off the floor, his arms strong and tight around her, like the implacable coils of a python. Holding her so tight she nearly couldn't breathe and didn't care. A shadow couldn't have slipped between them. Her name sounded like torn silk in her ears, she simply chanted his.

"Sarah, sweet Sarah. I have missed you so much, and I've been livin' in Hell without you. My sweet Sarah."

His face was strangely blurry when she looked at him, until she realized she was crying and blinked the tears away. Her mother's voice in her head again, "Sadness is when you hold the tears inside," words meant to comfort a teenager who was trying to be 'a good Air Force daughter,' to be stoic in the face of her mother's terminal illness. Sarah couldn't imagine that Maureen O'Rourke Connelly had ever envisioned her only daughter's life turning out as it had. She brought one trembling hand up, to frame the left side of Chris' face. She'd wondered how he might have changed, and the evidence was right there, in those crystalline green eyes. The merry sparkle she'd so loved was gone, and in its' place was a hard, cold darkness, a burning kind of rage. Green ice, on fire. It was a look she could see on their son, any day of the week.

"It's really you, you're really here." Chris's voice was full of surprised wonder, as if he hadn't quite allowed himself to believe. Sure that he was being played, certain that at the last minute everything would be yanked away, like Lucy van Pelt and Charlie Brown and the football. But no, this time it was real, the dream/nightmare that had taunted him for over a decade was real. And Sarah was not at all surprised to see hot tears melting that burning green ice.

"Sarah ... " A hand, shaking as much as her own, raised to brush across her cheek, smooth over the dark fire silk of her hair. His face blurred again, but only because he had pulled her up again, aligning their faces for a kiss. He tasted like whiskey, but only a little.

Buck had gone straight down to his knees when Sarah had cried out, crumpled by the weight of his own emotions. Buck had never been, could never be, stoic and controlled like Chris or Vin or Ezra. Everything Buck Wilmington felt was right out there on full display. Joy, sadness, rage - for good or ill, the world knew exactly where things stood with Buck. He looked up now, as Chris began to speak again.

"If I had even had a second to think ... Sarah, sweet Sarah ... even a hint that I hadn't lost you forever. Sarah, my God, twelve years. We've lost twelve years."

It was the words 'lost you forever,' that dropped the final penny for Sarah. She gave him a stunned look. "Lost me? Why would you think ... oh, Chris!"

Now it was his turn to look stunned. 'She didn't know I thought ... ' of course not, he realized, as anger finally shoved through the sheer soaring joy. Ella hadn't told Sarah that she'd fixed things to make him think ... and Sarah and Adam had spent all this time living on that shoestring of hope. That all they had to do was stay alive for One More Day. Tomorrow, he'll find us.

A memory of himself at 17, the final fight with his father. He'd been a little drunk, and a lot full of teenage male machismo. What Col. David Larabee had started with words, his son had been determined to finish another way. They had paced around the family room, the old lion and the overgrown cub. Trading shouts accompanied by the barking of Laurel Larabee's ever-present Golden Retrievers, until David had unwisely strayed too close to Chris' personal airspace. The last thing Chris really remembered yet to this day before waking up in the ER with a grinning Buck was taking that first fateful swing. And if Adam was anything like he had been, had spent all this time thinking Chris knew he was still alive, and thought his father should have been looking for him ...

"Oh, Lord, is Adam gonna be pissed ... "

Down the hall, John Ross mouthed an incredulous 'Gonna be?' to Alex and earned himself a slap on the arm.

Chris dropped his forehead to rest against Sarah's. "One of Ella's goons planted a bomb in my Jeep, love. I thought ... all this time ... " he suddenly remembered. Buck had the pictures, in his carry-on. And Buck's carry-on was sitting outside in the Excursion, stuffed along with the rest of their luggage - and Ezra and J.D. - into the way-back. Neither he nor Buck had considered themselves a mind to drive, or they would have rented a second vehicle just for their gear.

Most of the time it caught her unaware - the infamous 'pot roast incident' flashed across her mind - but sometimes Sarah could feel her Irish 'going up.' She wanted Ella Gaines' throat within arm's reach, and she wanted it there right now, if you please. Chris was turning, looking back toward the door. "Buck?" A deep sigh. "Hey, Buck." And she peered around Chris to see Buck on his knees, quickly scrubbing his face on the sleeve of a cobalt blue shirt that almost matched his eyes. He forced himself shakily to his feet, and managed a watery smile, holding his arms out in a polar bear posture as Sarah came to him.

A polar bear hug, indeed, and she felt as much as heard his greeting. "The wind blew, the clouds parted, and out came the sun."

She could only laugh as she looked up at him. "And you haven't changed a bit."

The watery grin turned sly. "Why mess with perfection, darlin'?" As quickly as that, he sobered again, hands coming up to catch her shoulders. "Sarah, there's somethin' I need to say to you, somethin' I need to apologize for - "

Chris groaned in exasperation. "Are you gonna drag this out again? Buck, I've told you - "

"And you're gonna let me get through it, for once!" For just a moment - she'd have missed it entirely if she hadn't been paying such close attention - fire flashed through Buck's eyes. "For just once, Chris, you are gonna let me get through this." The two men shared a long look over her head, before Chris sighed and shook his head. Buck nodded and returned his attention to Sarah.

"Sarah, that day ... you know me and Chris were supposed to be home the night before. And that's my fault, darlin'. I talked Chris into stayin' the extra night. Just so I could cozy up to a little lady I met at the hotel bar. And I kept Chris in Mexico, when you and Adam needed him so badly in Denver."

Chris was shaking his head and muttering, "I coulda just caught the flight out and left you to catch up the next day yourself."

Sarah could see the guilt and sorrow in Buck's eyes, glowing like the lights of his native Las Vegas. This gorilla had been sitting on the big man's shoulders for twelve long years. She shook her head in amused exasperation. One of the multitude of 'Dutch aunts' of her military brat childhood had introduced her to the Anne of Green Gables books, and Mrs. Rachel Lynde's famous, "Well, isn't that just like a man." But 'Aunt Pat's' version had been more like, "Well, he's a man, what do you expect?"

"And if you had come back on schedule, wouldn't Ella have simply bided her time, waiting for another chance? And someone might really have been killed. Or worse! Buck, the only person at fault for what happened to us is Ella herself, and she's finally getting her comeuppance. You are entirely innocent, and I've never once blamed you." She stood on her toes to press a kiss to his damp cheek as Chris exclaimed "SEE?" behind her. Buck let out a shuddering sigh that shook his entire frame and hugged her close again, the weight of Mount Everest lifting off his shoulders. When Sarah stepped back again, sliding like the breeze from his arms into the curve of Chris', Buck's trademark goofy grin was back in place.

"Thank you, little darlin'."

Chris was glad that was over, though he bet there was going to be a repeat with Adam. "Why don't you go get those pictures now. And get the guys in here, already. I was gettin' cramped in the front seat, you and Nate and 'Siah must have been dyin', stuffed in there together."

"Me and Nate, sure, but you know Josiah. He's still stuck on that 'sufferin' is good for the soul' business." Buck chuckled as he reached back for the doorknob.

"So were the nuns at every school I ever attended!" Sarah shot back with asperity. "I believe my soul's suffered quite enough, thank you!"

Buck laughed his way out the door, waving at the truck. "Come on in and meet her, boys! Hey, Kid, grab that pack of photos in my bag on your way out?"

"We have to excavate yours, first, Mr. Wilmington." Ezra replied, gratefully extricating himself from the SUV's rear seats. He speared J.D. with a look that would have melted diamonds. "Never again, Mr. Dunne."

J.D. stuck his tongue out as he pawed through Buck's carry-on. "You mean these, Buck?"

"Those're them, thanks." Buck slipped the paperboard folder between his denim shirt and the T-shirt he wore under it. "Come on, she's only Momma Bear if you get her Irish goin'."

Inside, Walker, Alex and John Ross had finally emerged. John Ross ducked into the living room to snag the picture of Olivia, which he was now tapping against one denim-clad thigh. He stood back as Sarah was introduced to the balance of Team 7, then caught Vin's eye. He passed over the picture.

"She's been staying with Miz Katie Malloy, but she rabbited earlier tonight, after Trent said you were coming in. Her name is Olivia."

Vin had been frowning at the picture, but the frown turned to a look of astonishment as John Ross revealed the girl's name and his mind made the connection.

"She ran? Why'n th' Hell would she do a dang fool thing like that?"

"We were hoping you'd know," Alex's heart took a final sharp dive, like that first drop on a roller coaster.
 

Chapter Text

Ray Krebbs' ranch
Braddock Co., Texas

Ray looked around his kitchen in satisfaction. Three truckloads of Southfork hired men had answered his call, along with Bobby, James and James' teenage son, who went by the self-created name of 'Jarick.' His younger brother Jack had complained mightily at being ordered to stay home, but a range war at Southfork had always had one hard-and-fast rule - all participants had to be old enough to be charged as adults. Nobody on the Ewing side was going to be hung with a juvenile record if something went wrong.

Adam and Olivia still slept in the barn. Bobby, James and Jarick had helped Ray silently do the morning's chores, and turn the horses out. Ray had confiscated Adam's Jim Beam, pouring both it and the doctored lemonade down the drain. Mickey would have been 47 this year, if not for the booze. Between Ray calling over to Southfork and the men arriving, a folded $50 had mysteriously appeared on the mantel, next to a picture of a smiling Mickey with Ray's niece Lucy Ewing. A single, shining, golden moment in time, shattered irreparably a scant 48 hours later.

"I still think we oughtta call John Ross, have him bring Walker and them up here. If these bastards do track Adam here, we can catch them between the Devil and the deep blue sea." Jarick never called John Ross 'Uncle,' there wasn't even ten years between them. He was currently zeroing in his favorite elk rifle through Ray's kitchen window.

"If what I got from John Ross is true, Buck's friend won't leave his wife - Adam's Momma - alone at Walker's, in case 'these bastards' track her there. And he sure won't bring her here." Ray told him.

Jarick shrugged. "So stop off and leave her havin' tea with Nana Ellie 'til we get through this."

Ray shook his head. Had he ever been that cocky? Yeah, he had. Right up until that military transport touched down at Tan Son Nhut. Vietnam had had her ways of dealing with young American hotheads, though he still personally believed that if Uncle Sam had sent over more rednecks and hillbillies instead of city kids, they'd not only have won the war, but there would be Wal-Marts and Masonic lodges in Saigon, now.

James reached over to smack his eldest upside the head. "You're just aching to spend the rest of your life in Huntsville, aren't you? Don't drop the soap, genius."

"Hey, at least if someone sticks a shiv in me in the joint, I'll know it's for somethin' I actually did, not because I'm gettin' hung with the blame for Granddaddy hornswogglin' somebody." Jarick snapped his head around to give his father a pointed look that Bobby and Ray chorused with chortling. Somewhere between the War on Terror and a pair of particularly nasty ladies named Katrina and Rita, J.R. Ewing had been his usual oh-so-charming self, characteristically sticking someone else with cleaning up his messes. 'Someone else' in this case being Bobby, James and Sue Ellen. It had taken a lot of midnight oil, a lot of prayer and a lot of good old-fashioned shuck an' jive, but they'd managed to save Enron's past from becoming Ewing Oil's future. J.R. sometimes had trouble remembering that the high times of the 1980's were decidedly over. It wasn't Alzheimer's, he just wasn't ready for his own personal good times to stop rolling, no matter what the economy of the rest of the world said.

One of the men gave a warning whistle. "We got company, comin' in from the south."

Jarick reached over and tapped a button on his cell phone, the kind that had two-way radio capabilities. As far as Ray could tell, the only functions the damned thing didn't serve were to open the kid's soda and drive his truck for him. Where in the world did you find the time to listen to 5,000 songs? Two beeps came through the speaker, the boys in the barn had seen their uninvited visitors.

After that, things got very interesting, very quickly. Whoever 'these bastards' were, they sure hadn't planned on being rebuffed by a bunch of Texas cowboys. They made an attempt at running, only to find they'd been boxed in by men on horseback. Angry American men on horseback. In less than ten minutes, it was all over but the paperwork, and Ray was shaking his head at the bodies in his yard. The Marine as well as the Texan in him more than understood the concept of death before dishonor, but he also believed in the ideal that war wasn't about dying for your own country. It was about making the other poor bastard die for his. He guessed that was what separated Americans from most of the countries that hated them. An American soldier's normal instinct was self-preservation, living to fight another day. Bobby's Christopher had recounted in his letters and e-mails some interesting conversations with Afghan tribesmen along the concept of martyrdom for your chosen cause right now vs. living to continue the struggle later. Christopher refused to believe that the mythical promise of "72 virgins in Paradise" explained anything.

Jarick echoed his thoughts. "Christopher's right, I totally don't get it."

Ray gave the kid a thin smile. He was shaky and pale, and Ray wouldn't lay money on his supper hanging around long enough to wave to breakfast on its' way out the door, but he'd handled himself well, overall. He still looked a damn sight better than the two kids standing on the back porch, looking at the burning barn. How he'd never know, but they'd managed to grab all of their gear before the roof caved in. The barn cat lay on a chaise lounge nearby, lazily grooming her kittens. Ray did a quick head count as he walked by, pleasantly surprised to see that Momma Cat had likewise gotten out with all ten kittens intact. He had some tuna to hold them over, until he could get to the feed store later this week and stock up on cat food, until he could get a new barn put up. And that was another thing, they hadn't had a barn-raisin' around these parts in longer than he cared to think about.

A whistle from the front of the house, then, "Nevermind, it's John Ross! Hey, wiseass, what's the PowerBall numbers this week?"

"What the Hell happened here?!? Uncle Ray? Uncle Bobby?" Damn, he'd recognized Bobby's red F-250. Someone obviously directed him around back, because he came jogging around the house moments later, a worried look on his face. The first faces he saw were Adam and Olivia. He stopped and planted his hands on his belt, turning to look at the barn. Nobody was bothering to call the fire department - Hell, some of these men were the local volunteer fire department. The ground immediately around the barn for a good fifty feet had been soaked with a hose, and the water kept turned on as a precaution; but with the weather lately, nobody could really see any reason to bother whoever was on duty at the station proper in town.

John Ross turned back around. "Judas Priest on a pony, you two. Buck's about ready to call an Amber Alert across the whole damn Southwest."

Olivia didn't know about Adam, but once the bullets started flying, her nerve went with them. "You don't gotta shout, I'll go peaceably."

"First peaceable thing you've done the whole time I've known you." He shifted his gaze to Adam, who looked away fast, cursing his inability to control his tendency to blush. He was one of those Irishmen who had moon-pale skin to go with his naturally dark red hair. He jammed his fists in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. John Ross had mercy. She'd only actually shot him once, but growing up with J.R. and Sue Ellen for parents was as close to a war zone as John Ross ever wanted to get.

"We have every intention of calling the boys at the Sheriff's office to come help us clean this up," Bobby announced, in what he hoped was a repentant tone of voice. It didn't work on his nephew.

"Oh, yeah, I just bet you do." He sighed and shook his head, thinking he was going to give himself whiplash doing that one of these days. He looked at the pair on the porch again. "Okay, you two. Gather up your stuff and let's go. It's a long way out to Walker's - even longer since the main road's out at the rez - and we'll be hitting town just in time for rush hour. You need a hand?"

Pride warred with Misery, and Misery won. Adam nodded, and John Ross stepped up on the porch to shoulder a few bags himself. He favored Olivia with a sardonic grin.

"Piece of advice, shortstop? Next time you bail out like this, don't carry your Thunder Karate bag through the 'Plex. You might as well just take out a billboard on the freeway." She mustered up enough sass to cross her eyes at him.

Ray came back from where he'd disappeared into the house. "Hold up a second there, John Ross." He passed a folded $50 to Adam. "This yours?"

Adam dropped it like it had burned his hand. He recognized it, all right. Right down to where someone with a red magic marker had put a dot in the lower left-hand corner of the front. His voice when he found it was hollow and shaky. "I gave it ... to that cowboy. He ... the one who gave us a ride from town. He had to let us off, back there." He turned to point off into the woods.

Olivia crouched to pick up the money. "We were just about to the trees, it sounded like he messed with a train. We went to look, came out on the front side of Southfork, he was just ... gone. Then when we went back to where he'd let us off, there was this trail, but when we got back there, it was all ... grown over." She looked up at Ray. "He said you were his cousin."

Ray nodded. "I was. He turned up in my room, told me to check the barn. I found you two, that's when I called in the cavalry." He gave a jerk of his head to indicate the men standing 'round. Then he showed them the framed picture in his hand.

Adam took one look and jumped straight back, almost going over the chaise lounge. Momma Cat yowled a protest, chorused by her kittens. Olivia's brown eyes were huge in her pale face.

It wasn't just the picture, it was the calendar, clearly visible over Lucy Ewing's left shoulder: April 1983. Bobby scowled at the image. "Ray, you don't seriously think ... "

"That's the guy who gave us a ride, that's even the outfit he was wearing. Even the hat. He was driving an old Mercedes, silver. Said ... said it belonged to his cousin's sister-in-law. She'd made him wreck his truck, so she was loaning him her car while the truck was in the shop."

"Explains the music coming out of the stereo." At Bobby's look, Olivia hurried on. "What Am I Gonna Do (With The Rest Of My Life) by Merle Haggard, Happy Birthday Darlin' by Conway Twitty, If You're Thinkin' You Want A Stranger(There's One Coming Home) by King George, A Headache Tomorrow (Or A Heartache Tonight) by Mickey Gilley, and She Believes In Me by Kenny Rogers. Five songs right straight in a row, but the radio station never once broke in."

Bobby looked back at Ray, whose face was set in stone. "The newest song on that list was Merle, and I know that that was released in '83. Mickey picked these two up at the bus depot, in Sue Ellen's old Mercy, the one she - they - were in that night. He let them off where him and Lucy cut that path between here and Southfork. The crash they heard was the Mercedes collidin' with Walt Driscoll's car."

John Ross let out a long breath. He'd been not-quite three, he didn't remember. Only that Lucy's boyfriend Mickey had been there one day and not-there-anymore the next. Ray had blamed J.R., saying that if the older man had treated his wife even halfway decent, she wouldn't have been driven to the bottle, wouldn't have tried to go tearing off that night, half in the bag already. "Momma was going to go out that night. She'd had a fight with my father - one among the many, she'd caught him cheating for about the fifty-millionth time - and she was three sheets to the wind. Mickey was dating my cousin Lucy, they were outside talking and saw Momma take off. Mickey could see she was in no shape to drive, he thought he could stop her, he jumped in the car. A silver 1978 Mercedes. They made it to the end of the drive, and another car came up the road. Someone Daddy had swindled - "

"Oh, of course!" Jarick groaned. "How did I know you were gonna say that?"

John Ross slanted him a look, but otherwise ignored him and continued telling the story. "Momma was going too fast, and so was Walt Driscoll. He was pretty toasted, too. When they collided, Momma's car flipped, rolled and went into the ditch. She'd been wearing her seat belt. Mickey wasn't. His neck was broken, he was going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life. He ended up dying in the hospital. He was, what, twenty-two, twenty-three?"

And only Bobby and Ray knew that John Ross had left out the end of the story. That Mickey had died because he hadn't wanted to live that way. He'd begged Ray to unplug him, to deliberately disconnect the machines keeping him alive. Ray had, and had been put on trial for murder. He'd been cleared, and had come after the person that in his mind was ultimately responsible for the young man's death: J.R. Ewing. There was a fistfight, and somehow in the middle of it they'd started a fire, right there in the middle of Southfork. Sue Ellen and John Ross had been upstairs - Sue Ellen passed out drunk, John Ross having cried himself to sleep because he couldn't understand why Lucy had shouted at and slapped him when he'd innocently asked her "Why Mickey no come see you today?" J.R. had saved Sue Ellen, Bobby had saved John Ross.

Cracking a rueful smile, Ray took the $50 from Olivia's unresisting hand and gave it back to Adam. "Here, use it to buy somethin' for Olivia. If I ever knew Mickey at all, that's what he would have wanted."

Olivia gave a quiet little sob. "He said ... he was gonna take his girl out to supper with it." She looked at the picture one last time. Mickey Trotter and Lucy Ewing looked so happy, young and so much in love. If she hadn't despised J.R. Ewing before, she certainly did now. She passed the picture back to Ray, shouldered her Thunder Karate duffel and turned away, not daring to look back lest she completely fall apart.

Silent, the teens followed John Ross around the front to his Cowboys-blue Silverado. Their stuff went in the back seat, and John Ross shoved the center console back to allow Olivia to take the center front seat. He waited to turn over the engine until they were all buckled in.

"Hope you two like Bo Duke, or at least have the sense not to say you don't."

A Southern man's voice, rich and smooth like summer honey, poured out of the truck's speakers.

"'Cause there was a woman,
Who made him turn lonesome.
Her memory turns over,
And over again.
And he's like an old stallion,
Who's lonely for freedom.
Tryin' to outrun the wind."⁸

Adam stared at the dashboard. "Jeez, I almost want to say I remember this stuff."

"I don't, but I think I could learn to lie about it," Olivia had shifted until her feet were on John Ross's side of the gearshift, while her head rested on Adam's shoulder. John Ross couldn't imagine how she could be comfortable like that, unless she had a Slinky where her spine was supposed to be.

"It was the Eighties, you had to be there."

Adam was as tense as a cat in a rocking-chair factory the entire time they were on the freeway, constantly looking out the windows. He glanced over at John Ross as they navigated the MixMaster.

"Are those two Rangers okay?"

John Ross grinned. "I was wondering how long you'd sit on that. Yeah, Gage and Sydney are fine. This is about the third, no, fourth time that's happened to them. Fifth if you want to count Gage being present that time a bank robber blew up Trivette's 'Stang ... with the tuxes for Walker and Alex's wedding in the trunk."

"I heard about that," Olivia giggled. "Gage said he was ready to pack his bags for Australia."

"Wouldn't have been far enough."

John Ross flicked a glance in the rear-view mirror, then downshifted to overtake a panel van that was turtling along at 45 on the freeway. He didn't like how long that black Lexus had been behind them. He thought about getting off and trying to shake it on the surface streets, then discarded the idea. The kids had had a hellish couple of days, culminating in the gunfight and the revelation about their ghostly encounter. If he got off the freeway now, they'd know something was up. This also let out calling in on the radio. 'Oookay, Walker. If that Cherokee sixth-sense of yours ever kicked in, let it work right now, because I could really use it.'

"Hey, Jimmy and Gage are behind us. Where'd that black car come from? PUNCH IT, PUNCH IT! THEY'VE GOT A - "

Bo Duke soared out of the stereo. "It's a short walk from Heaven to Hell." ⁹John Ross had heard tell of the singer's youthful misadventures in his native Georgia, him and his cousin in their souped-up '69 Charger. He wished that he had that car now, as he downshifted again, viciously, tires squealing as he ripped around a Peterbilt. "It's a Silverado, not Terry Labonte's Monte Carlo!" 'Thank you, Walker!'

In the rear-view, he saw Gage's green-and-tan F-250 drop back behind the Lexus. Someone - Carlos - had risen up from the back seat of Jimmy's black Mustang ragtop and was rasslin' with the guy who had leaned out of the Lexus with the RPG launcher. Now Sydney sat up in the F-250's open window, her hair whipping behind her like a seal-black banner as she took aim at the Lexus' rear tires. The back window of the Lexus and the F-250's windshield shattered. John Ross took a moment to be grateful Gage wasn't driving his prized '69 Chevelle SS convertible. Because if he had been, he wouldn't have done what he did now, which was to speed up and ram the Lexus. The guy with the RPG slumped. It was illegal about fifty different ways, but one thing Carlos held over from his 'bad old days' in the Tres-Sevens street gang was that he carried a 6-inch switchblade in his back pocket. Carlos grabbed the grenade launcher and slung it behind him into the Mustang, then shoved the thug back into the Lexus, just as Gage gave the black car another good solid rap in the ass. He then dropped back again, and this time Sydney scored two direct hits, shooting out both back tires. The Lexus went up and over and down. Trivette swung his Mustang crosswise in the road in front of it, coming out with gun drawn as the F-250 squealed to a stop behind.

Sydney's voice crackled over the radio. "John Ross, go on ahead, we'll take care of this."

John Ross let out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "I will owe you guys forever for this. We're gone."

Adam had pulled Olivia down across his lap, covering her with his own body. Now they both sat up, Olivia shoving her hair away from her face as she snagged the radio from John Ross. "I have never been so glad to see anybody in my whole life!" She hung up the handset on Sydney's laughter and sat back. "I've been scared to death twice today, and I haven't even faced Chris and Buck, yet. You people must think going-on-fifteen's too young for heart failure."

Adam gave John Ross a long-suffering look. "She thinks they'll be mad at her for something that happened to me."

John Ross gave Olivia a confused frown. "Angry doesn't seem to be in Chris' dictionary today."

"You just don't know him well enough," Olivia muttered darkly.

Walker Ranch
Outside Dallas

Vin and J.D. were taking advantage of a rare moment between rain showers to pass a football in the yard when John Ross pulled up, and J.D. darted into the house to announce them. He and Vin nodded politely to Adam before mobbing Olivia, sweeping her off her feet and hugging the stuffing out of her, yammering questions at her a-mile-a-second as to What'n th' hey were ya thinkin'? and We've been worried sick about you! Nathan and Josiah were first out of the house, and J.D. tossed her through the air to Nathan with a playful, "Going up!" She didn't have time in the middle of it all, to realize that neither Walker's silver Ram nor Alex's black Durango were in the yard. Only a dark red Excursion she didn't recognize.

Nathan had had every intention of giving her his usual grilling to make sure she wasn't hurt, but she was clinging to him like a barnacle to a ship, her face buried in his shoulder. She resisted being pulled away until Josiah quietly spoke her name in her ear, then she latched on to him just as hard.

Adam hung back by the truck, watching as the older guy passed Olivia down to some guy who looked like he'd just stepped out of an issue of GQ. Talked like it, too, that Southern drawl was thicker than molasses running uphill in February.What the Hell would his Dad and Buck be doing, hanging around someone who wore a $2,000 linen Versace?

"Oh, Adam!" Sarah flew off the porch and ran to her son, who pushed away from the Silverado and allowed himself to be enfolded in a heartfelt hug. He muttered an apology in Irish into her hair, it sounded better that way. She broke away, catching his hands in hers.

"Come, come inside. Your Da and Buck are here, you can meet the rest in a minute. But come inside now."

The GQ ad, the scruffy-looking guy and the dark-haired guy in the Red Sox T-shirt had made a circle around Olivia, with the old guy and the black guy backing them up as she machine-gunned through an explanation-slash-apology. As Adam and Sarah passed, the black guy looked up long enough to offer a gentle "You okay?"

"I've had better nights, but I think I'll live. I've had worse ones, too."

GQ gave the black guy a look of sheer exasperation. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, Mr. Jackson! At least let him see his father and Mr. Wilmington before you commence with the badgering!"

'Jackson' swung around to spear GQ with an answering look of aggrieved suffering. Olivia giggled.

"Don't mind them, Adam, they're just like this."

Scruffy and Red Sox chuckled, while the Elder gave them all a serene smile. But Adam had an idea there was something underneath that serenity he'd be well not to tread too hard on. Then he jumped as a voice boomed out from the house.

"Olivia, little darlin'! You ain't gonna make me come out there, are ya?"

It was the wrong thing to say, at the wrong moment in time. Olivia went white as ice, and Adam turned to his mother.

"You didn't tell Dad and Buck about the time ... Oreos, Olivia in the springhouse, me and a blanket and Hot Pockets?" The look on Sarah's face said it all. "Aw, Mom!"

Buck was filling up the doorway, then out onto the porch. Olivia looked desperately for escape, but she was hemmed in on all sides. Josiah stepped away to catch Buck at the porch steps.

"A moment, Brother Buck. I think you may have unintentionally frightened our lost lamb."

Ezra had turned to one side to admonish Nathan, and when Josiah turned to catch Buck, that created a hole between Ezra and Vin. Olivia darted and ran in a move Emmitt Smith would have been proud of. She beat a path to the Silverado. She knew lots about driving a stick, this was the one she'd learned on ... hot-wiring it would only take seconds ... it was starting to rain again ...

An arm in a black shirtsleeve came around her waist like a striking anaconda, lifting her back off her feet. "Whoa!" A breath of whiskey floated past her ear, and Olivia turned into a wildcat. But Chris had learned self-defense from his time in the Teams, and he easily countered every move in Olivia's repertoire, even the stuff she'd learned on the streets. He didn't try to hurt her - let her get a few shots in on him - kept her from hurting herself, until he felt her sudden burst of fear-induced adrenaline burn itself out. When she slumped in panting defeat, he picked her up and turned back to the house.

She was beaten, but the temper was still there. Olivia huddled in his arms like an angry kitten. 'I'm not crying! I'm NOT! I'm just so mad, that's all!' She looked up to take distant notice of the fact that cradled against Chris' chest like this, she was caught directly between him and Adam. Adam couldn't take a swing at Chris with her in the way, and Chris couldn't defend himself if Adam decided what-the-Hell and swung anyway. And why on Earth was she all of a sudden thinking like that at all? Sarah laid a gentle hand on Adam's arm, spoke his name. He moved his arm in a sharp, twisting motion, shaking his mother off. The rain seemed to hesitate, then made up its mind From drip to sprinkle to spray to roar, in that many seconds.

"Where were you? Where in the Hell have you been? I was waiting for you! WE were waiting for you! I could have damn been killed the other night and again today! WHERE WERE YOU?!?"

Where was Buck? He'd just been right here ... this was twisted, or backwards, she couldn't get her mind around it. Chris and Buck were supposed to be mad at her, this was all wrong. She began wriggling desperately to be let loose, Adam was going to take a swing, he'd all but called Chris out right there in Walker's front yard! And where was Walker? Chris half-dropped her more than let her down, lifting his hands to ward Adam off.

"Adam, son, please, you have to listen, I didn't - " He didn't mean to shout like this, but just to be heard over the rain ... and when had the kid gotten so tall? Saying goodbye at DIA, Adam had still been small enough to pick up and hold. Now they were eye to eye. Dimly he heard Buck from the porch, "Damn, Rascal! Look how tall you got!"

"No, you didn't, did you? You didn't and you don't and you never will!"

Chris reeled back as if he'd been shot, his face a mask of pain. "No, Adam, please listen to me, that's not what happened, son! I thought you and your mother ... Ella tricked me, she made me think - "

"You and Ella and thinking don't even live on the same planet, Dad." If Olivia had ever thought of Chris's eyes as green ice on fire, she was skipping the ice part looking at Adam. His eyes were pure green fire, and she was still standing between them. She gave Sarah a desperate look, 'What do I do?' She stepped closer to Adam, reaching up to touch his chest. His heart was racing.

"Adam, stop. Just let your Dad explain - " The rain was coming down hard enough to actually hurt, hard enough that the drops bounced a good three feet back up, the first time they struck the ground.

"Whose side are you on?" Now that rage was focused on her, and the thought flashed through her mind that not twenty-four hours ago, he'd almost kissed her. Now he looked like he was about a fast half a second away from ... she sensed more than saw Chris come up behind her, too close for Adam to swing unless he stepped back.

"Adam, please! You have to listen to me!" And the Surreal Express took another sharp left turn. Because that simply couldn't be Chris Larabee behind her sounding that desperate. As if he was a hairsbreadth away from breaking down ... NO.

And that was when Chris heard his own voice coming out of his son's mouth. An exact quote from that last argument with his own father, a teenage man's face twisted in rage. "I'm through listening to anything you have to say, old man."

And that was when someone - much later she'd realize it was Buck - reached out to pull Olivia away. Chris made the fateful mistake to try and take Adam by the arm, a last-ditch effort. 'He's not really this angry at me, he's just upset, and he's coverin' it with the anger, like I do! He just doesn't understand, if I can just get him to listen to me for five seconds!' Someone, Olivia or Sarah or both, cried out a warning, but the rain had loused his vision, and he didn't see Adam's fist coming until his teeth ground together. His feet tangled and he went down in a heap, stunned. He almost managed to drag Adam down with him, but Adam had the advantage and fought loose. By the time Chris realized he was gone it was too late. He scrambled to his feet, barely able to see a black-clad figure running away through the downpour. "NO, ADAM! PLEASE, FORGODSSAKE, COME BACK!" Some blur of pink and blue latched onto Adam, slowing him down almost enough for Chris to catch up. Then that blur hit him square amidships and they both went down. It was Olivia, Adam had literally thrown her at him. He'd nearly managed to get them standing up again when Adam made the trees. Chris made to go after him again when he felt the hair on the back of his neck going up, soaked as it was ...

Olivia felt herself falling again, felt Chris under her, then he rolled to shield her. There was such a strange humming in her head all of a sudden; her whole body was tingling, had she hit her head somehow ...?

Sarah had realized what was about to happen, and would have been there when it did except Buck had her, and then it was too late. The light was blinding, the heat seemed as if it would sear her flesh from her bones, she had no idea if she'd screamed. And the noise, this must be what the crack of Armageddon sounded like ... And Olivia, at least, went 'somewhere else.' For a very long time.

Adam never even slowed down.

That was the morning.

It would be after sundown before Olivia returned to herself again, waking up suddenly in the guest room at Walker and Alex's ranch, waking up as suddenly as she'd been stricken unconscious. She woke up crying, calling Adam's name as if her heart would break for the lack of his presence.

And Adam wasn't there, but Ezra was, leaning over her suddenly, then going out of the room. A moment later she heard him calling to Nathan that she was awake. By the time Nathan arrived, that initial terror of awakening had receded, and she was able to answer his gentle questions. Someone had changed her clothes, dressing her in a pair of gray sweat shorts and her favorite Superman T-shirt, the one with the Man of Steel's famous S logo done in Stars and Stripes. The same person had wrapped her head turban-style in a towel. Now why ... oh, that was right, she'd been out in the yard when it began to pour, caught between ... she looked up at Nathan. "He hasn't come back, yet, has he?"

Nathan sighed. Just like Olivia, to wake up with perfect recall after having been fried by lightning. Chris had been standing in a low spot of the yard, his black Red Wing boots in a good four inches of water, when he'd caught Olivia. The bolt had struck Chris square between the shoulders, he'd only awoken an hour or so ago himself. Buck and Sarah had been knocked senseless as well, but only for about two hours. The rest of them had gone up on the porch when the rain started to fall again, and into the house when Adam's temper went off. As much as they'd wanted to intervene, they knew it wouldn't have been appreciated. As J.D. had said before, they were outsiders. But they'd come charging back out at once, ears still ringing from the explosion of thunder. Walker and Alex had returned about ten minutes later. With all available hands on deck, they'd done what they could. No ambulance was getting through this, they'd just have to wait and pray.

Olivia was still looking up at him, tears sliding down her face to soak into the towel around her head. Nathan was seized by the sudden desire to shake Adam Larabee until his skeleton rattled apart, just like the guy who got eaten by the demon in BeastMaster. "No, baby. He ain't come back yet." No use trying to lie to her, either, she'd see through that like a window. "It's gettin' dark now, nobody's gon' go out lookin' 'til mornin'. Not in this." Not at all surprised to see her start at the lightning, he pulled her into his arms as the thunder roared. It was as if Adam had called the storm, cast a spell to make the sheer electrical fury remain centered over the house. As the thunder grumbled away, she twisted to be let go, rolling over on her side and putting her back to him.

"I ... I'd just like to be left alone now, please."

"Chris said he wanted t'be told when you came 'round. Wants t'see fo' himself that yo' alright. An' Buck's worried sick."

That sigh had to come straight from the center of her heart. Oh, Adam was getting a huge chunk of his mind, maybe several.

"Just Chris and Buck, then. Tell Ezra and J.D. and Josiah ... just ... just later, okay?" She hadn't seen past Nathan to see Ezra still in the doorway, didn't see the pain that flashed across his face before he turned away. And she did manage to hold back the whimper of pain when Nathan gently squeezed her shoulder. Everything just ached, like she'd had a charley horse over her entire body.

Chris needed Buck's help, but he got there, giving her a weary, lopsided grin. "Hey, Sparkler. Guess we know what chicken-fried steak feels like, huh?" He sat up, propped up against pillows and the headboard. Olivia slid across the bed until she was lying across his lap. He pulled her up to sit, his arms feeling like safety in a hurricane. Buck sat on the side, pulling a fright face and making her smile through her tears, if only for a moment. "You big goof. If you were a dog, you'd be a Saint Bernard. Big and goofy, but totally harmless."

Chris tactfully decided not to mention that Cujo had been a Saint Bernard, or Buck's eerie resemblance to the actor who'd played the father in Pet Semetary. "He's certainly good at savin' people. I'm losin' count of the times now that he's saved my sorry hind end." Something flickered in Olivia's peripheral vision and she looked up to see that it was only Sarah, coming to sit on Chris's other side. She'd had time to run her borrowed outfit through the wash, though she'd replaced the jeans with a pair of Red Sox sweatpants, obviously borrowed from J.D. "Are you alright, Olivia?"

"I guess so. I just ... " she looked down at her shirt. "When he comes back, I'm gonna kill him."

The adults shared a chuckle. "He's certainly in line for a goin' over from me as to the proper way to treat a lady," Buck commented mildly. "Throwin' your girlfriend at your Daddy like you're Jeff Francis, she's a split-finger fastball and he's Yorvit Torrealba ain't exactly what I call a good startin' point."

"Split-finger?" Chris snorted. "Felt like a full-on four-seamer from where I was standin'. And Adam pitches more like Cookie than Francis, besides."

Alex's voice in the hallway, rich with laughter. "Oh, is this Wet Eagle, come to his senses at last?"

A man's voice from downstairs, "This old Eagle's feeling too foolish and ashamed of himself to even argue with you about that!"

Sarah shared a grin with Alex as the blonde passed in the hallway. "The tribal shaman. Apparently he's been threatened with getting flooded out for some time, but he wouldn't leave his home."

"In '99, there were a lot of wildfires in Colorado." Buck rolled his eyes at Chris's quiet words. "I felt like if one more person asked me if or when I was goin' to have to evacuate, I'd just have to start shootin'. Turned out the people who got chased out of their own house was Ezra and Inez, when the Hayman Fire started snackin' on Highlands Ranch. Nobody even thought he'd be in danger, he lived in town. I'm up in the mountains. The fire didn't make it as far as their place, but it was a heck of a scare for Ezra."

"I thought about you that summer," Olivia admitted, her head resting on Chris' shoulder. "Where we were living, they just said there was a fire in the Rockies, west of Denver. I couldn't find anyone to tell me if it was close to you or not. I almost called, half a million times I almost asked Mama Terry if we could call. But she was always so sad and anxious all the time. I didn't know she was already sick, then. I was only little, and I didn't know." And her all-over charley horse feeling didn't matter in the least when Chris tightened his arms around her.

"Sarah told us about some of what happened to you, Sparkler. You got nothin' to apologize for."

Downstairs, Vin gave White Eagle a thumbnail description of Adam as the shaman sat in the kitchen having a hot coffee before he went up to take a shower. He squashed his disappointed sigh as the elder replied that he hadn't seen the teenager, because he would have brought Adam with him if he had. All Vin could see behind his eyes was the positive streamer of the lightning rising up from Chris's back as Adam disappeared into the treeline. If the kid had just kept going straight, there were a couple of places he might eventually end up. But if he'd taken a right or a left once he was sure he was out of sight, that opened up at least four or five other options. And Vin didn't like any of them. Adam didn't know where he was, didn't know the land like Walker did, or even Vin himself. And Vin was willing to bet that his nephew had never been in anything even remotely resembling flood conditions. The way the weather was going, the kid could get swept halfway to the Gulf!

They'd made sure to get Adam's description out to the tribal police, at least, and Sam Coyote had promised to pass it along to the sheriff's departments of the 'Anglo' counties surrounding the rez. They didn't think he'd get off the rez on foot in these conditions, but it didn't hurt anything to be extra careful.

Somewhere on the reservation

It seemed like a strange place to put a cabin, just sitting out there all alone by itself in a small clearing ringed by what looked like ash trees, but there it was. The door was unlocked, not that he couldn't have forced it if it wasn't. He peered inside carefully, hoping he didn't find a ... well, he wasn't entirely sure what! looking back at him. But it was empty, except for an old military cot piled with blankets in one corner. He made a point of locking the door behind him.

Inside wasn't perfect, but it was four walls, roof and floor, and it got him out of the hammering rain. And more importantly, hopefully, away from the lightning! He shrugged out of his oilcloth duster, the drenching rain had even defeated his coat, he was soaked to the bone. He peeled out of his clothes and used the giant-size towel he found tangled up in the blankets to scrub himself dry. His hair left black dye on the light blue towel when he dried that, but he'd never wasted money on the high-quality stuff, anyway. Spreading the towel out next to his longcoat in the vain hope both would dry at least a little, he wrapped up in the blankets and sat down.

He felt like hell, and not just physically. Had that raging animal really been him? What the hell had gotten into him? He'd hit his father! He'd decked his father! He hadn't even let the older man get a word in sideways. What was wrong with him? He'd yelled at Olivia, accused her of being on ... there was no 'other side,' what had he been thinking? He choked on a sob, then couldn't hold it in any longer. What was in him had to come out, or else kill him in the trying. He slumped over on his side, curling up like a shrimp in a ball of misery. He cried for most of an hour, though he wasn't aware of that, finally sniffling and hiccupping to a badly needed sleep.

It was pitch dark out when he woke up, stiff and sore from sleeping in a ball. But on a night after like the days before had been, warm and dry he considered worth stiff and sore. He carefully straightened his body, wishing it was as easy to untangle his mind. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton - wet cotton - and pounded with a wrecking ball headache. He figured he'd burned off whatever whiskey had been left in his system by the trip here, so at least he wasn't facing this night with a hangover. Not that that little realization made him feel any better overall.

"Like Ella says, you're free, white and 18, Adam Jonathan. You may well have burned your last bridge. You go back there, he doesn't have to have you back anymore."

How could he have screwed up so badly? Up until that little encounter with the guys in the black Lexus - and please, God, if You haven't completely given up on me, could You please let that be the last of them? - he'd spent the entire trip from Braddock County rehearsing what he wanted to say to his parents. But he'd taken one look at his father, standing there in the rain cradling Olivia like a broken doll he was about to fix, and some demon had taken over his mind. Everything had gone red, and the only thing that came out when he'd opened his mouth had been fire. Scraps of what he'd said came back to him. "You didn't and you don't and you never will!" Where had that come from? And his parting line, that "I'm through listening to anything you have to say, old man." Jeez, why hadn't he just taken John Ross's .45 and shot his father? From the look on Chris Larabee's face, that might have hurt less. "You and Ella and thinking don't even live on the same planet, Dad." Oh, that had been inspired, yeah, that was a real winner. Once she was old enough to understand, he'd be lucky if Faith didn't slit his throat in his sleep over that one.

"Oh, jeez, Faith!" He scrubbed his hands over his face, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars and lines and pinwheels, which didn't help his headache any. Faith, and Mark and Laureen. Dad didn't even know about them, unless Mom had told him by now. The cabin was lit up from outside by the blue-white brilliance of lightning, and the ensuing roar of thunder shook the little structure on its' rock foundations. Adam blinked, seeing everything in negative for a few moments after the lightning. He checked his watch. It was nearly midnight, it had been nearly ten in the morning when they'd arrived at Walker's, Olivia had asked John Ross the time as they'd pulled up behind the house. He'd been gone for over twelve hours. He had no idea where he was, and even less as to how he'd get back. The rain was still falling like Niagara outside. The towel, his longcoat and his clothes were still wet, and there was nothing to eat. Nothing to drink, either, but he thought that might have been at least 90% of his trouble, earlier.

Nothing for it, he trudged back to the cot and sorted through the blankets, finding a thin mattress under them. He made up a semblance of a bed, then laid down. He thought of the song that had been playing on the stereo in John Ross's truck, when they'd realized the black Lexus was back there. Something about it being a short walk from Heaven to Hell.

"No foolin'." Another blast of lightning and thunder, and Adam rolled over and pulled the blankets over his head.

Walker Ranch
Outside Dallas

Trent's kid brother Todd, Walker, John Ross, White Eagle, Sam Coyote and George Black Fox and a dozen other men from the rez were standing around, trying to guess where Adam had taken himself off to. Walker's place was marked by a seven-sided die Todd had had in his pocket from the role-playing game tournament Trent had shanghaied him from. It was of course turned up to the number 7.

Sam Coyote shook his head. "I still don't think he could have gotten off the rez itself, and White Eagle, you didn't see him on your way here from Bitter Water." He tapped a point northwest of the die.

"We wouldn't be here talking about it if I had," the shaman asserted.

"It's flooded around from Bitter Water, my place, the Judge's, Brian and Rachel's, and your place, Luther," George Black Fox described a wavery half-circle on the map, glancing up once at Luther Iron Shirt as he spoke. "He couldn't have gotten through that from here, so that at least lets out anything between Willow Creek and Red Cloud's."

"Every bridge between the main road and Red Hawk's is out, too, and John said he hadn't seen any sign of anyone at his place when he went back there this morning. So that lets out anything from Red Hawk's to town." Sam's crooked right angle was southeast of George's half-circle. Walker looked at the map.

"That still leaves Miller's Caves. If he got that far, he'd go in the caves to get out of the rain, not knowing like we do about how tangled those caves are." Walker looked up as two of the younger men, about the same age as John Ross, shared an 'Aha!' look.

"Ash Cabin! Lenny Ironhorse's old hunting cabin, remember? We used to go up there with Joseph and get drunk, until he tried to kill Brian, anyway."

John Red Cloud smacked himself on the forehead. "I'm sorry, Washo. I should have thought of Ash Cabin, but after the thing with Joseph, it went right out of my head."

Joseph Ironhorse had been a young man from the rez, part of the original Team Cherokee crew. But Joseph had become bitter and resentful, had thought it should have been him and not Brian Falcon in the car. He'd conspired with the racist owner of another team, had nearly got Brian killed. He was in Huntsville, now.

Vin scrutinized the map. He knew Ash Cabin, himself, Joseph's older cousin Lenny had been an acquaintance of his own, until Lenny had drunk bad moonshine and got himself dead. "What flooded White Eagle out's got ta be comin' through Split Rock Creek. That means if'n Adam was goin' like he'd go ta Miller's Caves, he'd be forced ta turn ... here. Where Split Rock passes Badger Rocks." Badger Rocks was named because for as long as even elders like White Eagle and Judge Fivekills could remember, there had been an unbroken succession of exceptionally foul-tempered badgers living there. "An' that trail'd spit him out right on Ash Cabin's front steps."

Chris sat back. "So how do we get from here to there, besides a helicopter or an ark?"

Sam gave a groaning chuckle. "Gets much worse around here, I might start building one." He focused his attention on the map. "The closest road to the cabin is what we call Pancake Alley. Don't ask," he said to the out-of-towners, earning a round of chuckles from the locals. "If you've got four-wheel drive, it's passable, but it's a five-mile hike from there to the cabin. If you don't mind my saying, Chris, you don't look like you've got even a five-miler in you just now."

Chris wasn't sure he even had from here to the barn and back 'in him' just now. "No offense taken, believe me, Sam." Then his own thoughts had him sitting forward suddenly. "However, if I'm not the one doin' all the work ... is that five miles a horse can handle?"

That got a long round of exclamations, and cackling laughter from White Eagle. Luther addressed the crowd with "Wow! What kind of Indians are we, if this white-eyes government agent has to tell us our business, huh? What kind of Indians are we?"

Sam laughed as he swept one arm to indicate the room at large. "The rest of you go home, or wherever you're staying. We'll call you when we find the kid. Lee, Joe, thanks for remembering the cabin."

Walker headed out the door, as well. "I'll go hook up the trailer. Does Adam ride?"

Sarah nodded. "He talked Ella into giving him a pedigree Morgan stallion, from the University of Vermont breeding program. His name is Searcher."

Chris' jaw was on his chest. "A UVM Morgan is worth more than one of Ezra's suits. Maybe two suits."

Sarah gave her husband a fond look. "Wait until you see the circus wagon of a truck he talked her out of."

Walker pulled the truck close to the door so Chris wouldn't have to walk across the yard. It was decided that only the two of them would go, Adam might be likelier to listen to reason if there wasn't a crowd.

Ash Cabin

Ugh. If there was anything worse than having to put back on damp clothes, Adam didn't want to know what it was. Even his longcoat was still damp. His sneakers squelched when he walked. He followed the Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post and Colorado Clarion websites as faithfully as he could, navigating around the filters and firewalls and lockdowns Ella had installed like the Berlin Wall on his computer, to make sure he didn't call out for help. He knew that Colorado was in the grip of several years of drought. Right now, drought didn't seem like a bad thing at all.

In the front yard of the cabin, his suspicions of last night were realized. He couldn't remember which way he'd come from. But there was a trail leading off to his right that didn't look as badly grown back as the other two, so he figured he'd try that.

He figured he'd covered about two miles, the sun was coming out, and he was starting to steam-roast in his damn coat when he heard what had to be the best sound in the world. A horse, whinnying a greeting. The wind was blowing from behind him, had to be blowing his scent right in the horse's face. Squelching sneakers or not, he busted into a run, nearly falling on the uneven trail a half a dozen times, once nearly braining himself on a rock the size of a Newfoundland that suddenly reared up out of nowhere. The trail took a couple of twists and turns for no reason he could imagine, but ahead through the trees he could see two men on horseback, leading a third, riderless horse. One of them looked enough like Walker to convince him it was, and the other one was wearing a black shirt and black jeans.

"DAD! DAD, I'm here!"

Chris's head snapped around at the shout, searching through the woods. Walker spotted the splash of black in the background of green. "There he is, right up ahead, there."

Chris stepped on the urge to push his horse into a full-on gallop. He took the reins of the extra horse and nodded. "Give us a minute?"

"Of course."

Adam winced at the bruise darkening Chris's jaw, and the older man didn't look at all steady. Had he cracked his skull on something when he'd fallen? "Dad? Dad, are you okay?" He stepped forward to catch a beautiful chestnut Quarter Horse mare's bridle. The horse that had obviously been brought for him was an equally attractive and spirited palomino Quarter gelding.

It took more than Chris wanted to admit to swing down out of the saddle, but he did it. He was barely down before Adam was engulfing him in a bear hug, crying and apologizing and begging forgiveness, all tangled up together. The arms Olivia had likened to an anaconda and Sarah to a python felt more like a teddy bear, but he got them up and around right. For a minute or two or ten, they just stood like that, Chris rasping out fragments of a mostly-forgotten lullaby into Adam's hair.

"Jeez, Dad, I'm sorry. I don't even know why I said all that junk. I didn't mean any of it. I'm sorry." Adam finally stepped back to look at him out of ashamed and fearful eyes. It was so easy just now to see that bright-eyed little boy, hidden in the almost-man he was becoming. Chris pulled him back in. "There's nothin' needs forgivin' between us, Adam, and you got nothin' needs apologizin' for. You've had a hellish couple of days to top off a hellish twelve years. I'd be more worried if you hadn't exploded at someone. Remind me, sometime, to tell you about the time I called my own father out. Better yet, ask your Grandma. Believe me when I say it didn't end this well."

Adam sighed, feeling Chris's heartbeat through the black shirt. A memory burbled up, triggered by the fragments of lullaby. Being sung back to sleep with that heartbeat under his ear, while an Irish temper cleared monsters from under the bed, inside the closet and away from the windowsills. "How mad is Mom?"

"She's not mad at all. I explained to her what happened." He ducked his head to catch Adam's eye, looking up when Adam raised up. "Adam, last night you asked me where I was, where I'd been, told me you'd waited for me. Adam, I didn't know I should have even been lookin' for you. One of Ella's hired thugs planted a bomb in my Jeep. Blew it to pieces, the garage and half the house with it. I knew your Mom's Taurus was in the shop, the transmission was screwed up, so she was usin' my blue Cherokee. And one of Ella's men blew it up. Adam ... until two nights ago, I honestly thought that you and your Mom were dead, that I'd never see you again."

Adam's head swam as his knees unhinged. Dead. He'd thought they were dead. The palomino snorted in alarm and side-stepped closer, catching Adam on his powerful withers. Chris came up behind, giving Adam what little strength he had in himself at the moment. He'd actually been struck by lightning twice before in his life - once in high school and once in the Navy - he knew it was going to take a few days at least before he felt at all like himself again.

He happened to have his left arm within sight, so he could see it was close to three minutes before Adam regained his composure. "Dad ... "

"I'm right here, son. I'm right here. I've got you safe now." And Chris thought he'd gladly relive the last 48 hours - hell, the last twelve years! - just to hear Adam say "Dad," again, in that tone of voice.

"Jeez, Dad." Adam couldn't even imagine. His mind didn't want to go there. He refocused on Chris. "Are you okay? Jeez, I didn't hit you that hard, did I?"

Chris chuckled. "You remember throwin' Olivia at me? You might want to manage a little grovelin' in her direction, last night she did threaten to kill you when you came back. Anyway, after I caught her, a bolt of lightnin' decided to see what we tasted like."

"Lightning?!?" That threatened to send Adam's mind skidding away again, like a muscle car on a wet road, but he managed to yank it back into line. "Where is she?"

"She's back at Walker's. She and I missed most of yesterday, I think she's decided to call today a wash, too, at least she was still in bed when Walker and I left to come out here lookin' for you." Chris gave his son a serious look. "Took a lot of courage at eleven to bring her a blanket and hot food when Ella locked her in the springhouse, knowin' what Ella would do to you the next day. You know who Craig Morgan is?" Adam nodded silently. "Well, Craig wrote a song about his own son, goes somethin' like, 'There's an awful lotta man in that little boy.'¹⁰That's what I thought about you, when your Mom and Olivia were tellin' me about that night."

"She thought you and Buck were gonna be mad at her, because I got belt-whipped over it."

Chris chuckled. "Me and Buck and the five other guys you didn't get to meet yesterday monopolized Olivia's life for 48 hours when she was all of six years old. She built up a bunch of pretty tall pedestals under our all-too-human feet. She may be wearin' a Superman shirt, but she thinks we are."

"When I was six, I knew you were." Adam rubbed his forehead against the palomino's neck, and the horse turned to nibble at the collar of his longcoat. The horse's wise dark eyes studied Adam with absolute trust, and Adam realized that the gelding had been gentled, not broken. Too many people didn't realize there was a huge difference, and it all too often carried over into how they treated one another. "You need a hand getting back up?"

"The way I feel today, I just might!" But he did manage it alone, though he was glad he wouldn't have to do it again today. When they got back to the house, he was going to call Nathan and Josiah to cart him up the stairs, and follow Olivia's example of scratching this day. Adam let the palomino get used to him for a moment or two, then swung expertly into the saddle.

"We riding all the way back?"

"Nah, there's a road at the other end of this trail, Walker's truck is waitin' there."

"He better have air, I'm boiling in this stupid coat."

"Funny, I've got a coat that looks a lot like that at home. Just ... without the studs and all."

Adam's mouth twisted in a sardonic grimace. "It's just a mask, Dad, I can shake it off anytime I want to. It's just that I tried a few things, and I realized Ella hated it. So the more she hated it, the more I laid it on with a shovel." He looked at the trees around them. "I don't even like black half the time! I feel like I'm undercover at a Raiders game and I can't get out of it! I want a Jay Cutler jersey and a Todd Helton jersey, and a Joe Sakic sweater before he hangs up his skates!"

Chris laughed out loud, and God, that felt good! "I think I can manage that. What you call a mask I don't mind. If it pissed Ella off, so much the better. I feel like a hypocrite, callin' you out on somethin' God knows I've done way too much of myself, but Adam, the drinkin' we are gonna have a problem with."

"No, we're not," Adam replied, in a voice that declared the matter no longer up for discussion or debate. "If yesterday morning is what the whiskey gets me, I'm cutting myself off. Ella caught me with my hand in the bar about a year or so ago, and she never tried to stop me. She figured out what I liked, and made sure there was plenty lying around, got me a fake ID so I could get my own."

"And the list of charges grows. You know what the whiskey got me? Her. She caught me on a night me and Buck and the other guys in our SEAL team were 'sendin' off' a couple of guys who hadn't made it back from our last mission. In the condition I was in that night, all I saw was a pretty face, a body that looked like it could make the next mornin' worth it, and she didn't say no. I was twenty-three and an idiot."

"I have this shirt in my closet back in Virginia: 'I Am Not Worthless. I Can Still Serve As A Bad Example.'"

"'The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.'"

Adam whipped his head around. "Does it have a skull and crossed sabers? I've got that one!"

"'I'm Only Wearing Black Until They Make Something Darker,' with dark brown letterin'."

Adam shook his head. "Don't got that one."

"Yet. You know who gave me that one? Olivia, for Christmas of '98."

"Nuh-uh, no way."

"Wait 'til you see the one she gave Buck!"

Walker's truck did indeed have air - after one horrendously close call, Alex wouldn't let a broken A/C go longer than a week anymore - and Adam gratefully slung his longcoat OFF, tossing it on the driver's side of the QuadCab's back seat. He then worked very hard at looking anywhere and everywhere except at Walker. Walker didn't try to push him, just got the truck and trailer turned around and headed back to the ranch. Finally Adam couldn't stand himself any longer.

"How'd you know where to find me?"

"Process of elimination, mostly," Walker answered. "Once we figured out what was too flooded out for you to have gone that way, what was left after that. Then a couple of the younger guys remembered going up to Ash Cabin to get drunk with a friend of theirs. It used to be his older cousin's hunting cabin. If you weren't there, I was going to suggest calling in the National Guard."

"You can't," Chris cracked. "They took all their high-water vehicles overseas, to fight in the desert."

"The sad thing is, you aren't kidding."

Walker Ranch

Sarah had been sitting with Olivia and Buck, regaling Olivia with tales of his past misdeeds, while he protested his innocence and attempted to explain his side of the stories. Sarah had loved Nathan's retelling of how Olivia had 'introduced' herself to Buck. Ezra was suddenly in the doorway. "They have returned. Mr. Wilmington, I believe Mr. Larabee would like your assistance."

"Got it." Sarah bade Olivia goodbye and followed Buck out. Ezra sat down in the space Buck had vacated. "How are you feeling?"

"You mean in general, or about ...? Hey, I can think of worse people to have for an older brother. It means I get to keep the rest of the guys, too."

Ezra smiled. "That's what Mr. Dunne said. 'You mean we get to keep her?' I believe were his exact words."

"You gotta teach me how to play Texas Hold 'Em. I'm awful at it. And Pai Gow, too. Completely mystifies me."

"Oh, pshaw, Pai Gow's the easiest thing on the planet."

"Not for me, for some odd reason. Hey you."

Ezra turned to see Adam in the doorway, looking decidedly uncertain of his welcome. Because he had once been going-on-twenty with his world blown to pieces around him, he was more inclined than a lesser man might be to mercy. "Hello, Adam, come in and sit down."

"If I sit I'll fall." But he came in, hands in his pockets. Olivia had her arms folded over, and her left ankle crossed her right under the covers. Her left foot was making a tapping motion. Adam sighed and sat down.

"I'm sorry for what I said. I'm sorry I threw you."

"You apologize to your Dad?"

"Yeah, we got it all worked out." He looked and sounded, Ezra thought, as if he were on his way to the executioner. Lovesick, he thought, with even more sympathy. He had been the same way with Inez, and had likely made similarly dumb mistakes because of it. He decided to give them some privacy.

He emerged into the hall just in time to see Buck and Chris get to the top of the stairs. "Mr. Larabee, I daresay you actually look worse than you did immediately after the event."

"You're all heart, Ez."

Within about fifteen minutes, the house was quiet again. Adam took a shower and put on dry clothes, endured the teasing from his father and Buck that he had more body art than a Japanese gangster. There was an American flag, Irish flag and the state flag of Colorado surrounding his heart, a four-leaf clover, claddagh and a Celtic cross on the front of one shoulder. Despite the heat of the day, Alex made him a mug of hot chocolate and a bowl of chili, telling him he was colder inside than he realized. Ezra was teaching Olivia how to play Texas Hold 'Em, using M&M's in place of chips. Nathan sat in to make sure Ezra taught it straight. Vin tried but eventually gave up listening in on Josiah's conversation with White Eagle.

Olivia was just about to doze off again, when she heard Adam let out an anguished cry. Nathan stepped out in the hall, encountering J.D.

"Buck left the pictures from when Adam and Sarah were taken out. Adam just found them."

The screen door squealed on its' hinges, then slammed shut as Adam flew out of the house. He headed for the barn, desperately hoping he made it. Chris was trying to push himself back up out of bed, Buck pushed him back down.

"I got him, Chris. I should have put the pictures away."

"I forget, too often, to thank you, don't I? I ask too much of you, I always have. Hell, I've been usin' you since Gerry Ford was in office, and I never do thank you."

Buck grinned. "Will you hush, and let me go do what I'm good at? You never know, one of these times I might drop the ball."

"Not bloody likely."

When the big rogue had gone out, Chris turned to Walker. "Sometimes I wonder, how far I have to push before Buck won't back me up. Then I realize I never want to find out."

"Sounds like me and Jimmy. And don't get Alex going on everything I've put her through over the years."

Adam made it around behind the barn, just barely, before the hot chocolate and chili came back up. He'd heard his father's explanation, but seeing the pictures ... Oh God. He jumped at a footstep, cowering back against the building.

"Easy, Rascal, it's just ol' Buck."

"Buck ... " the big man had water, which he used to rinse with. They moved a few feet away, so Adam could collapse more than sit on an overturned washtub. Buck lowered himself into a crouch at the kid's side.

"I'm sorry, Adam, I should have packed those pictures away. I shouldn't have left them out where you could see them."

"Why, Buck? Why? How could she do that?"

Buck chuffed out a laugh that held little humor. "Rascal, if I had the answers for questions like that ... I've never been real good at mazes, I leave that stuff to Ez and 'Siah. And Ella's mind is one of the dark and twisted kinds I don't think I'd care to go too deep into even if I was good at them."

"Half of me has a thousand questions I'd like to ask her, the other half doesn't ever want to see her again. And right now, a big part of me just wants to beat her face in. What was she planning to do with us, when she went looking for Dad in 1999?"

"I'm really tryin' not to think about 1999 any too hard, myself. And I can honestly tell you that Ella Gaines is the one woman in this world I have no trouble at all callin' a bitch, and meanin' it. I think I might even say it straight to her face." Buck looked up at the sky for a moment. "You're old enough to make up your own mind now, but if you'd like my advice, I think you'd be better off facin' her.

"Yeah?"

Buck gave his godson a sad smile, and looped one long arm around the kid's shoulders. It suddenly occurred to him that Adam was only a year younger now than J.D. had been, back when they'd all jumped on this hayride. But there was none of J.D.'s youthful exuberance and eagerness in Adam. His was the scarred caution of Vin Tanner, eternally cursed to be far older than his years. Fitting that they'd end up related. He thought for a minute, wanting to say this right.

"Adam, for years I thought my Daddy was just some guy who got my Mom knocked up and then took off. I wrote him off when I was about thirteen, figured if he hadn't been man enough to face up to his responsibilities, then to Hell with him. Mom and I did fine on our own, we didn't need him. And then ... and then Mom died. She was murdered, knifed by some guy the Vegas PD still haven't caught, and next month it'll be 32 years since I lost her. I've never been able to face that man, to look him dead in the eye and ask him how he could do what he did. I think about that, a lot. On Mom's birthday, on the day she died. She was just turned 32 when she died, she woulda been 64 this year. When I watch my Mary with our kids. Our little one, we named her Sarah-Anne after your Mom, she reminds me of my Mom so much it just kills me sometimes. So two years ago last month, Trent Malloy, that private detective friend of Walker's, he tracks me down. He knew Vin back when they were about Olivia's age, before Vin high-tailed it to Denver to get out of what Texas was callin' 'Child Services.' Anyway, he comes lookin' for me, says there's an old man in Texas, thinks I might be his son. Turned out that my Daddy knew about me the whole time, had been more than willin' to acknowledge me as his son, raise me up right along with the sons he already had. But Mom wasn't havin' it. She took off for Nevada, never left a forwardin' address or anythin', and it took him over forty years to find me again. And I haven't got any way to ask Mom, what was goin' through her head, why she kept me away from him for all those years. I got a whole family history that's just stories and pictures to me. And the reasons behind all of it are just one big, fat question mark I'll never have the answers to. Now, I'm not sayin' Ella's goin' to make any hell of a lot of sense - I never did care for her, never did see what ol' Chris ever saw in her longer than the one night - but at least if you do face her and ask her, you'll get somethin' for an answer."

Adam didn't say anything, just turned to give Buck a long-overdue hug, which Buck gratefully returned. "Hey, Buck? Do me one favor?"

"You just name it."

"Don't ever call me Rascal again where Olivia can hear you."

Buck laughed, but it was a little soggy.

Back inside again, and Alex - who seemed to have a bottomless well of kindness, it was a little scary, nobody could really be that nice all the time - scared up a new toothbrush for him. He wound up back in the room his parents were using. He didn't remember falling back to sleep, but when he opened his eyes, Chris was growling because his cell phone was suddenly malfunctioning. Adam looked out the window, realized with a small sense of shock that it was dark out again. Olivia was in the doorway, then crawling on the foot of the bed.

"I fried my phone, too, Sparky. And Vin's and Trent's and John Ross's."

Chris tossed the phone down in disgust. "Figures. The first time this happened, I wrecked a brand-new turntable. Boy, was Buck's girl hot. The second time, I made CIC go haywire just by walkin' down the passageway outside. Some hotshot rookie Tomcat jock fresh out of Annapolis with his wings barely cool from bein' cast came lookin' for me, said I'd almost gotten him killed. He found out fast that what he'd learned in SERE wasn't goin' to stand up against a SEAL."

Olivia blinked. "You've been hit before?"

"Me and Buck skipped school to do some mountain climbin', up in the Maroon Bells, southwest of Aspen. I found out the hard way why their nickname is 'The Deadly Bells.' What got us both was that Buck had been above me when the lightnin' struck. Then when we were in the Navy, we were comin' back from a mission, and our extraction was an aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation. I wanted to go for a jog, but they were runnin' flight ops on deck, so I had to jog around the hangar deck. It was overcast and choppy, but they had the storm hatches open. There hadn't been a whisper of lightnin' in the forecast, either. I remember stoppin' by one of those storm hatch openin's, waitin' while they loaded a Tomcat on the elevator to take it up on deck. The next thing I remember was wakin' up in Sickbay, with Buck sittin' next to me." He let out a long breath at the ceiling, then chuckled as he looked at the two teenagers. "Damn, I hope I don't screw up the avionics on Buck's plane, I'd hate like Hell to have to walk home to Denver from here!"

Buck loomed in the doorway. "Bet ya can't make your phone work."

"You win. Call Casey and see what's doin'?" While Buck dialed, Chris explained that when he had to go out of town like this, J.D.'s wife and five-year-old daughter Rachel stayed at his Summit County ranch.

"Hey ... Rachel? Did you get to the phone before Mommy? Good for you, little darlin'! How ya doin'? Diablo and Charger okay? Oh, he did, huh? He knows he's not supposed to eat people food. You givin' Diablo his medicine? Good girl. What? Did he get bit? Oh, that's good. What did Mommy do with it? I'll make sure to tell Uncle Vin, so he can go up there and get it when we come back. Oh, I'm sorry, little darlin'. Uncle Chris is sleepin' right now. He's had a rough coupla days. Okay, Rachel, love ya li’l bit, 'bye. Hey, Case. What's this about Charger and a rattlesnake? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How long? How many rattles? Lord, that mutt's got more guts than he has good sense. Oh, ha-ha, very funny, young lady. Yeah, I'll tell Vin, he said somethin' about a new belt a month or so ago. Now, Casey, I don't want to worry you or anythin', I told Rachel he was asleep. But the truth is, Chris got hit by lightnin', yes, again. He was just tryin' to call you, can't make his phone work. Well, at least this time he didn't get fricasseed alone, Olivia took her licks, too. Yeah, that Olivia, how many Olivias do we know? Oh, you're just on a regular roll today, aren't ya? Come again? Oh, what'd that old crab say this time? Well, I hope to shout Nettie told him how the cow ate the cabbage! The best and worst thing that place ever did was make them two neighbors. Yeah, I'll tell him. Thanks, Case. See ya, darlin'." Buck folded his phone into his pocket, then collapsed crosswise over the foot of the bed, face down.

 Chris chortled as Sarah came in to sit by his side. "Okay, let me see. Charger got to someone's supper, then tangled with a rattler, which Casey dispatched to the Great Rattlesnake Hereafter. Said rattler is now occupyin' space in one of my freezers. And to top the whole week off, Hank got into it with Nettie again."

Buck turned his head enough to speak. "That's pretty much the long and short of it, yeah. Casey said the snake was about four feet long, twelve rattles. Damn dog."

"Hey, I'd rather Charger found it than Rachel."

"Well, you got a point, there."

Dallas-Fort Worth Airport
Three days later

Adam stared at the plane that would be taking him back to Colorado. Ho-lee Toledo.

"Buck really owns that?" Olivia spoke behind and to his right.

"I guess so."

They were being separated again, but this time only temporarily. Adam was going home, Olivia back to Ella's estate in Northern Virginia to be reunited with her natural parents, and the rest of Ella's 'hostages.' Ella herself had been turned over to the custody of the federal government. Olivia also had high hopes of retrieving that blasted pocket watch, if Ella hadn't figured out her hiding place in the ensuing years.

Adam was trying not to think about the penalty for high treason, and how happy he was that Ella would soon be entirely and forever out of his life. Sarah had told Chris about Mark and Laureen, the twins she'd been pregnant with when she and Adam had been taken; about Faith, the daughter he'd given Ella when she went after him in 1999; about the five children she'd borne, from the men Ella had sent her out with. Chris's response had been, "They're my children now. I'm their father now." The exclusive New England boarding school Sarah's children had been sent away to had been contacted, and legal proceedings were grinding into action to bring them to their proper home in Colorado.

"Hey, this isn't forever, and we know where each other is, now. It's not like Before. This is the beginning of July, you'll be in Denver before baseball season ends, we can hit a Rockies game."

She simply turned into him, wrapping her arms around him and holding on tight. "We came so close, Adam. We came so damn close."

"I know, Sparkler, I know. But that's all behind us, now, and we're never going back there again. We've got the whole rest of our lives to look forward to, now."

"Yeah," but she held on tight again. She just didn't want to let him out of her sight.

"They are eighteen and going-on-fifteen, Mr. Larabee. Two months is the other side of forever to them right now." Ezra would be taking Team 7 back to Denver, then boarding a hated commercial flight to Washington, D.C. Olivia would be traveling straight from Dallas to Washington, in the company and temporary care of Walker, Alex and John Ross. Walker had dredged up a few old contacts, pulled a few strings, and called in a few favors incurred during the Johnson administration. They were to be met upon arrival in Washington by what Walker had been assured were the two best lawyers the Navy and Marine Corps had to offer. He had utmost faith in the Marine lawyer, sight entirely unseen; he would reserve judgment on the Navy lawyer, even after they met.

"Olivia was a cute little kid," Chris replied quietly. "But she's growin' up to be a real beautiful young lady."

Buck jogged over to the young couple, and Olivia reluctantly untangled herself from Adam, to be engulfed in a Buck bear hug.

"I promise I'll take better care of him this time, darlin'. Sometimes I do need to learn the hard way, but if you beat on my hard head long enough, eventually even I get the idea."

She giggled and reached around to try for his wallet. He let her think she almost had it, then reached back quick as a striking cobra to snag her wrist.

"Fool me once, fool me twice, darlin'." Giggling again, Olivia let go and stepped back. "You take care of you, too. Be careful."

"I always am, darlin'." He moved just far enough away to give them a few minutes more of privacy, but still close enough to remind them it was time for Adam to be going

The chorus of one of the songs that had played in John Ross's truck passed through Adam's mind, and he smiled at Olivia, even though the song was far older than both of them.

"They say I don't need no doctor now,
No medicine of any kind.
No nurse's hand on my fevered brow,
No, I just need your hand in mine.
They say I need some attention from you,
And some help from the stars above.
No, I don't have anything too serious,
It's just a bad case of love."¹¹

Tears in her eyes, Olivia slanted a quick look over at Buck, grateful beyond words to see only his back. Bracing her hands on Adam's shoulders, she went up on her toes as his hands came up to catch and frame her waist.

It was a chaste kiss, and over quickly. Chris only saw the tail end of it, Olivia settling back on her feet, smiling up at Adam. She blushed prettily, fiddling with the collar of the Broncos-blue polo shirt Adam wore. He felt a sharp pang in the region of his heart. His little man wasn't little anymore, and neither was Olivia. It had happened so suddenly. At a slight remove, yeah, but he'd been able to watch Billy grow up on schedule, turning from that serious little boy into a scrappy, gangly kid and on into that awkward adolescent monster, no longer a child but not quite an adult, fitting in nowhere and expected to be all things, both and neither at once and exactly whatever others thought he 'should' be, according to how they saw fit. He'd extended Billy an open invitation, and more than once his phone had rung at odd hours, Billy needing to pour out frustrations he could barely put words to. They were mostly over that stage now, Billy was fifteen himself, those nightmarish years of early teenagedom fading into the background as he began to get a stronger-every-day grip on the man he was working on becoming.

Those steps and stages hadn't happened with Adam. Ella had robbed them of that time, and Adam had gone from child to man in the blink of an eye, and mostly on his own, unless Chris counted the other kids around Adam's age that had been hostages for no other crime than Ella and her father before her had gotten to their parents first. Adam had hesitantly asked permission for Olivia to pass along to "the guys," his new Colorado phone number. Chris had a feeling his phone would again be ringing off the hook, and nobody was going to remember the two-hour time difference between Virginia and Colorado. He nodded reluctantly to Buck.

"Time, you two. C'mere, darlin'."

One final round of hugs, and then the XRS's engines skirled up and the sleek jet was nosing up into the cloudy Texas sky. John Ross carried Olivia to his Silverado; he'd won a rare coin toss against Walker, and Olivia would be staying at Southfork until they left for Washington.

Colorado

If he heard his Mom exclaim "That wasn't there twelve years ago!" one more time, he was going to crack up laughing. Coors Field looked okay in passing, Invesco Field was the ugliest football stadium he'd ever seen, and he'd been too busy trying to untangle the loops in the roller coasters at Six Flags to take much notice of Pepsi Center. They were on I-70, out of the city and heading into the mountains now. Adam had just noticed a sign for 'Floyd's Hill' when Chris spoke over the stereo. "Adam, you still have that bogus ID?"

"Nobody's taken it away from me, yet, why?"

Chris looked across the truck at Sarah. "Want to stop in Black Hawk, feed the slot machines?"

She gave him an indulgent smile. "Another day. What I want right now, Chris, is to be home."

Chris shifted the truck into gear. "As the lady requests."

Adam sat forward as the buildings came into view. "Okay, I almost want to think I remember this place. I remember the house and the barn, I know I remember that."

"I put in a few other things over the years," Chris admitted as he swung the truck around the barn. "Expanded the house."

Like a heated swimming pool and a hot tub, enclosed in a glass pool house. The greenhouse was attached to that, with the garden beyond. Down from the garden was a huge wooden playground that would have been the envy of any three grade schools. The backyard between the house and the pool had been bricked over to create a patio, which was dominated on one end by a weathered cedar lean-to the size of the truck. Inside the lean-to was a massive barbecue grill/rotisserie, built into the patio and tied into the same gas line that fed the house. "No chance of runnin' out of gas with a grill full of half-cooked chicken, that way."

Next to the barn, several horses stood around a large corral. Sprawled across a chaise lounge on the patio was a huge, outrageously shaggy pile of Black-and-Tan fur, who Chris introduced as Charger. He greeted Adam and Sarah with caution, and Chris explained that Charger's former 'owners' had left him chained to a tree when they'd moved away, and Vin had found the big mixed-breed at the Dumb Friends' League shelter.

Casey poked her head out the door, then emerged carrying her cell phone and iPod and grinning wickedly. "Speaking of chargers, hold still, you, because that's what I need to do with these."

"Cute. Casey Dunne, I'd like you to meet somebody."

Casey was stunned, to say the least. She'd just spoken to J.D. not an hour ago, and he hadn't said one word! She was just about to say just wait until the next time she got her hands on Buck Wilmington when there was a loud thump and a childish wail from inside the house.

"MOMMY! Diablo got out!"

And the doggie door cut into the mud room exploded outward as a black Sidewinder missile rocketed across the yard, scent-locked onto the teenager who crumpled more than crouched to absorb the impact. The collision flattened Adam onto his back, with one hundred pounds of cantankerous black Labrador standing over him, whining. He snuffled at his master's face for a moment, then commenced to wash it with a sloppy tongue.

"Aw, man! Dude, you reek! What has Dad been feeding you?"

"Me?" Chris queried. "When do I have time to feed that dog?"

"Oh, yeah, he's just starving to death," Casey shot back. "He's just bones and a fur coat."

"I'll tell you one thing," Sarah declared. "The next time either of these dogs tells me not to leave the house, I'm locking myself in a closet until Chris gets home." Whining, Diablo came to her side, slopping his tongue obediently over the hand she held out. He shuddered and groaned deep in his barrel chest when she stroked his head and scratched his ears. She bit her lip when she saw the grizzle-gray on his face. Some dogs 'went gray' just like humans did, and Diablo was apparently one of them. They had gotten Diablo as a ten-week-old puppy when Adam was six months. Now Adam was 18 and strong. Diablo was also 18 - 'And my Heavens, he's 126 in dog years!' - and elderly. Charger - who now sniffed at Sarah's hand and lapped at her fingers - was the primary guard dog now.

"Diablo tried to keep us from going outside that day," Adam clarified for Chris. "Snarling, growling, showing his teeth. Getting between us and the door, getting me by my jacket and trying to drag me away from the door, the whole thing. Mom ended up dragging him upstairs and closing him in the guest room."

No small feat, Chris reasoned, given Diablo's hundred pounds versus Sarah's one-fifteen. "Explains the teeth marks in the back of the guest room door. He literally tried chewin' his way out to keep you from leavin'."

Within the hour, Casey and Rachel had taken their leave, and the core of the Larabee family was finally alone. Diablo Velcroed himself to Adam's side. They had a simple meal of steaks and potatoes, and watched the Rockies lose 3-0 to the Washington Nationals. For the twelfth straight year in their fourteen-year existence, it looked strongly like the terminally-mediocre-on-a-good-day-and-they-didn't-have-too-many-good-days Rockies would be playing golf and not baseball in October.

Adam claimed one of the guest rooms for the time being, until something more permanent could be sorted out. He was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, with Diablo flopped crosswise across the bed at his feet.

Chris' room was still downstairs, at the end of the long hall. The solid oak furniture and warm ivory walls were accented with pine green drapes, bedding and carpet. The enormous four-poster bed was canopied and draped. Sarah took one look at that and felt her cheeks heat up. Chris was holding her as if she were something very precious and fragile, that he was only allowed to hold for a moment, but never to keep.

"Sarah, sweet Sarah. I don't want to make you shy of me. After what she put you through ..."

"I could never be shy of you, Chris. And perhaps I'm a mind for another green-eyed Hell-raiser." She began to unbutton his shirt, then smiled. "When you untie those drapes, do they close in the entire bed?"