Breathe (Colorado Mountain 4)

When she’d died, Chace was left with everything. Her money, her belongings, all of it. He’d given it all away. Her parents took her personal belongings and the rest went to a couple different charities.

His thoughts made him sigh, he took a sip from his coffee and scanned the landscape he had long since memorized but it didn’t mean he didn’t still gain some peace or wasn’t quietly moved by the scenery.

This was a feeling he liked having back. He’d lost it when Misty was in the house, a place he escaped as often as he could. He didn’t sit on his porch and drink coffee when Misty was around. He didn’t take the time to gaze at the view when he was coming or going. He dreaded coming home and he was always in a hurry to leave.

Taking another sip of coffee, as usual whenever his mind was on Misty, it drifted from her to when Chace had approached IA. He informed them of what was happening at CPD, his willingness to make it stop and he’d taken his pay packets to them.

Every officer on Arnie Fuller’s personal team got a packet once a month, the size determined by what they could fleece from local businesses and blackmail out of powerbrokers. Chace had accepted his because it would have been suspect if he did not.

He was a willing foot soldier as far as they knew.

He drew the line at approaching local businesspeople and forcing their donations to the Carnal Police Widows and Orphans fund. He also drew the line at being a blackmail go-between. He explained this to Arnie by showing him the wisdom of folks in town thinking there might be one or two honest cops on the payroll. Arnie had fallen for it so of all of the muck Chace had to swim through and the other filth he had to turn a blind eye to, at least he was clean of that garbage.

But he’d placed every envelope in a safety deposit box in a bank in Chantelle and handed all of them over to IA when they’d launched the undercover investigation.

There was nearly fifty thousand dollars in those packets. Six years of being on the take. IA made sure it was leaked to the media that Chace had turned in his money. They set him up as the poster boy for all that was good and right in law enforcement. They wanted no one to have any doubts so they set about making that so, using Chace to do it. Although it was true, in fact, everything they shared with the media was true, just selectively chosen as to what they’d share, it wasn’t anyone’s business. The way they shared it made it seem like he was some sort of white knight with a sword endowed with mystical powers, which he was not.

Luckily all that had died down, as it usually does, the infested personnel had been fired or incarcerated and replaced and the town seemed to be settling, slowly but they were doing it.

Which brought Chace to his plans for the day. Grocery shopping for the weekend and his meet with Tate Jackson.

Tate was part owner of Bubba’s bar but he was mostly a bounty hunter. He had once been a cop. So when the citizens of Carnal had a problem they couldn’t trust the police to handle they went to Tate. Tate, a good cop who never got dirty under Arnie’s rule, a good man, always did what he could.

Since Chace’s unexpected meeting with Clinton Bonar, Tate had been out of town after a skip. Chace had phoned him and told him they needed a meet as soon as he was home. Frank Dolinski knew about Bonar. To cover his bases, Chace needed Tate to know as well as a select few other men in town.

Tate got home yesterday.

They were meeting that afternoon.

On this thought, and another sip of coffee, something caught the corner of Chace’s eye and he turned his head to gaze at the lone road that wound through the ranchland around his house. Seeing as the area between Carnal and the base of the mountain where Chace lived only had one road, Chace knew every car or truck that came down that road. Living there eight years, he even knew the vehicles of friends and family members.

This was not one of those vehicles.

It was a black Jeep Wrangler.

Chace reckoned he knew who was in that Wrangler.

The Goodknight family was a Jeep family. Faye, Sondra and Silas all drove Jeeps of varying ages.

Silas drove a black Wrangler.

Watching Faye’s father’s approach, sipping coffee, preparing for what was to come next, vaguely it occurred to Chace that Faye and Sondra, when it came to cars, were like mother like daughter. Their cars were not new. Faye had never upgraded hers that he knew of. Sondra took over Silas’s vehicles when he was done. By the look of her and the way she acted the times he saw her, no nonsense, busy and active, she probably didn’t care what she drove just as long as it got her where she wanted to go.

Chace watched Silas drive through the doublewide opening in the white picket fence at the end of Chace’s lane which led to a fenced off enormous backyard. The rest of his land was unfenced. He liked the land, the space, the quiet, the peace. He didn’t give a f**k if the livestock of his neighbors wandered onto his land. If they chewed the grass it meant Chace didn’t have to mow the shit.

But that white picket fence was what sold him on this property and he sanded it and painted it once every two years. Any time there was a repair needed, he saw to it as soon as he could and he walked the fence occasionally just to check. The house was big, you could build a family there, you could add to it if you needed more room. But that long, white, rectangular line of fence surrounding it, delineating it, creating a yard, circling and highlighting the house made it seem like a home.

Chace waited until Silas made it to the end of the lane and stopped close to the house before he took his feet off the railing. He rose as Silas threw open his door. He walked to the top of the steps and leaned a shoulder against the white painted porch post as Silas made his way up the cleared of snow flagstone walk Chace laid six years ago.

“Mr. Goodknight,” he called when Silas was halfway up the walk and Silas, eyes to his boots, lifted a hand and kept up the path.

Only when he stopped at the bottom of the steps did his crystal blue eyes rise to Chace.

“Call me Silas, Detective Keaton,” he invited.

Chace jerked up his chin and returned, “Chace.”

Silas jerked up his own chin then tipped his head to Chace’s coffee mug. “Got more ‘a that?”

As answer, Chace turned and walked to the house, opening the storm door, the front door and moving through, turning to hold the storm door open for Silas to follow.

He did and in they went, Chace leading the way over the oak floors that led to the back of the house that he’d laid four years ago when Misty was on a two week vacation to visit a friend in Maryland.

Left side, a big dining room with rectangular table. The room had hints of western, hints of country, all of it with an underlying class that was all his mother.