Wide Open by Deborah Coates Page B

meaner, but she’d learned things in the army, in Afghanistan. And she wasn’t the same girl who’d left.
    “Hallie!” The sharpness in Brett’s voice told Hallie she’d already said her name more than once.
    “Yeah?” There was another beer in front of her. She picked it up and took a long swallow.
    Brett leaned closer. “Don’t mess with Pete,” she said. “He’s not like you remember him.”
    “I thought he left,” Hallie said. “After the … after that fight.”
    Several months after Hallie left for Fort Leonard Wood and the army, Pete had gotten in a fight with two other young men in the parking lot at the Bobtail Inn. The way Hallie heard it later, the other men started it. But Pete had finished it. Put both men in the hospital, one of them for two weeks while his jaw was rebuilt with wire and steel plates. The only reason Pete hadn’t served time for it was because his father had money and wasn’t afraid to use it.
    “Oh, he left,” Brett said, leaning toward Hallie as the band began to play. “He was gone for two and a half years. But he came back last fall, bringing in men, buying purebred cattle—Charolais and Simmental, some weird Chinese breed. We thought he was actually going to make a go of the ranch.
    “Not make money,” Brett added after a moment. “Because you don’t on purebred cattle—not around here. But we thought he was going to run it like a ranch, make it a showplace or something.”
    “Yeah,” Lorie said. “Then he brought in the lions.”
    “No one knows if that’s true or not,” Brett said.
    “Oh, it’s totally true,” Lorie said. “Maggie Torvall’s mother told her, and she told me. Her mother used to work out there. For Pete’s father, not Pete, because who would want to work for Pete? Except I suppose people do, though not always local people, although—”
    “Lorie!” Both Brett and Hallie said it at the same time, and it seemed so normal, it took Hallie’s breath.
    “Sorry,” Lorie said. “Anyway, the lions are real.”
    “Seriously? Lions? Why?”
    Brett shrugged. “Who knows.”
    “We think Pete has a meth lab up there,” Lorie said confidentially.
    “Lorie!” Brett said.
    “Well, don’t we?”
    “A meth lab?” asked Hallie, because that didn’t sound like Pete, except … well, there had always been a streak in him of recklessness and desperation.
    Dell had always been a little in love with Pete from back as far as sixth grade. He was handsome—dark hair just long enough in back that it curled a little along his neck in summer heat, tall, and lean—Hallie’d always thought he was mean, always looking for a way to get something over on people. “He’s good with horses,” Dell had said, which settled it in her mind, because how bad could he be if he could handle horses? Hallie remembered once when their father was gone and one of the horses had gotten tangled in fence wire. It was Pete whom Dell had called when neither she nor Hallie could get close. He’d walked right up to that horse like it was easy and talked calm and quiet while Dell had cut it free.
    But that was before. Now, he had a lightning bolt on his belt buckle, just like the one on Dell’s neck. And he’d threatened her. “Do you think he had something to do with Dell’s death?” she asked.
    Brett looked at her sharp from underneath her cowboy hat. “Dell’s death was an accident or … an accident,” she repeated. “Why do you think anyone had anything to do with it?”
    “C’mon, Brett. Is that what you really think?” Hallie asked. Is that what you really think of Dell? what she meant.
    Brett rubbed a hand across her nose, unconsciously tracing an old scar. The band was playing; Lorie had just departed for the dance floor. “Sometimes shit happens, Hallie.” She looked bleak for a minute. “Sometimes it just does.”
    “Like I don’t know that,” Hallie said with a flash of anger. Like she’d just been playing at being a soldier, like she