Stripped Down

June

ANGEL

Blackhawk Ranch doesn’t run dry on my watch. Almost three hundred years the Mendozas have owned this part of California, my forefathers wrestling the arid landscape into submission. We reign here. We’re the fucking kings, and it’s not an empty title. Stetsons instead of crowns are the rule, but I’ve still got power. I run a fifty-thousand acre spread with ten thousand head of cattle. Forty cowboys depend on me for their living, and it’s about more than keeping the lights on and beer in the fridge. These boys are mine, and in exchange for their loyalty, I take care of them.

My name is Angel Mendoza, and anyone who hurts what’s mine learns fast that I’m more devil than not.

Protecting and defending isn’t the problem. Rain is.

This is the second well I’ve visited today. The first one was bone-dry, and this one yields only a sluggish trickle. Even a Mendoza can’t force the winter rains to come. The creek we get our surface water from is dried-out mud, the bed baked into razor-sharp ridges by the unrelenting sun, and the surviving wells fight to bring the water up nine hundred feet. If will could do it, I’d yank the water from the ground and feed it to the skin-drying heat of our California summer. Instead, for only the second time in my life, I’m fucking powerless.

The cowboys accompanying me eye first the well and then my face. They’re gonna take their cue from me. I yank my Stetson lower and head back to my truck. My boys fall in behind me, led by Dare, my foreman. Dare’s a tall, lean bastard who walks with a limp he took from a bad fall three years ago out in the mountains. The landing cut up his face some too because he and his horse planted on an old section of barbed wire fencing. It took us all night to get to him, and by then some of the damage was permanent. He wasn’t dead, though, so that went in the victory column as far as I was concerned. And he’d ride if he had to tie himself to the horse because he’s mean son-of-a-bitch if you push him hard.

“We’re dry,” Dare states the obvious as he stares at the well. He flicks the brim of his Stetson back so he can get a better look at Trouble with capital T. He’s not a pretty man. Unlike some of the guys who ride the Blackhawk spread, he’ll never be cowboy poster material. His buzzed-short hair and scarred face makes him look more MMA fighter than rider. He commands respect, though. The other cowboys don’t say shit when he talks, just wait for one of us to come up with a solution, to take charge.

I have one ace in the hole. “We’ll drill deeper.”

Sometimes cash can solve a problem and I’ve got money. Plenty of it.

“You so sure we’ll hit water?” Dare leans on the edge of the concrete reservoir, assessing first the water level and then the big yellow pipe sucking the wet stuff up from underground. He and I both know this isn’t a mechanical failure. Dare fixes things. If a wrench could make this shit better, he’d be all over it.

“I will.”

It’s that fucking simple. Plan. Execute. Succeed. Failure simply isn’t an option.

“Give me a drill date,” he says. If I say it’s done, it’s done and he knows that.

“I’ll have that for you tomorrow,” I tell him. “Until then, truck the water in from the reservoir.”

Hauling water is gonna cost money, but the ranch can handle it short-term. Longer term, we bleed cash, and I didn’t build my ranching empire by losing money.

After Dare is sorted, I get back in my ride and steer the battered pickup over the dark dirt road. Setting my plan in motion is as simple as punching the driller’s number on my cell phone and giving the order to go deep. Drilling for water is expensive, the price rising with each foot you punch down and ending in a price tag that makes Tiffany’s look like the Dollar Store. I know this, but even still the driller quotes me a per-foot price that makes my breath catch. For that kind of cash, he’d damned well better hit water and it had better taste like liquid gold.

Time kinda slows to heated, sensual shimmer outside the cab while the driller blah-blah-blahs his way through next steps because there’s one driving urge pounding through everyone and everything on my spread: find water. The cattle need it. My vaqueros covet it. I’ll be damned if I allow a dry well to consume what I’ve built here.

Making a living from the land means fighting every step of the way. Fortunately, I love a good fight and I’ve also planned for this day—already have the solution. I drill, the cattle can drink, and we all live happily fucking after. If I hit water. If it’s enough.

I drive for what seems like hours, making the rounds and ironing out problems. I’m the best at what I do, and everybody wants a piece of me. I oblige, but by sunset I’m pissed off and hot. Taking a few minutes for myself is a no-brainer when the turnoff for the swimming hole appears out of the shadows. I aim the pickup down the dirt road. I’m bone tired from a day that began before sunrise and has only just ended. I’m hot, and I smell like sweat, horse, and probably a dozen other unpleasant things as well. Right now, a swim sounds perfect, exactly what I need to cool down and think things through.