Hot on the Trail. Vicki Tharp

to the jump seat behind him.

      Finger by finger, he stripped the leather gloves off, laying them across his tank. He unfastened his chin strap and pulled the helmet off his head. All his movements slow, purposeful, as if that little effort consumed all his concentration.

      Jenna took a hesitating step forward. She tried for a smile, but it felt stiff, wrong.

      He brushed his fingers through his short-cropped hair, but the action did little good against the helmet hair. He had bags under his eyes, and his color was two shades off from normal. But then again, it had been a long time since she’d seen him last, so what did she know?

      She took another step forward. “Hey.”

      He looped the strap of the helmet over the throttle. A chin bob was his reply. He put the kickstand down and swung his leg over, taking a quick step to balance himself, like a sailor hitting the docks after months at sea.

      He looked beat and done in and yet at the same time so, so…Quinn.

      Her stomach knotted, her throat tightened, and she sniffed back the tears. Not happy tears for seeing him again after so long. Tears of sorrow for a man who’d lost his best friend, tears of regret, tears of guilt.

      She hurried the remaining steps over to him, hitting him too hard as she wrapped him in a hug. He took another balance step, his arms hanging at his sides.

      “It’s really good to see you,” she said into his chest.

      One of his arms came up and rested lightly on her back, not as if he wanted to hold her, but as if he didn’t know what else to do with his hand.

      Jenna took the hint, and a step back. “How was the drive?”

      “Long.” He undid the bungee straps and shouldered his rucksack.

      She guessed that meant he was staying there. It said a lot about his relationship with his parents that he preferred to stay at the ranch. “Was it hard getting leave?”

      “No. I’m not flying, and I have leave saved up.”

      “Not flying? Still? After the accident?”

      “It wasn’t an accident. It was a goddamn crash.”

      Jenna took another step back. “Sorry, I—”

      “Jenn.” He lowered his voice. Hands on his hips, he stared down at the ground and huffed out a heated breath. When he glanced back up, he looked everywhere but at her. “Can you stop with the pleasantries and show me Kurt’s cabin?”

      “Yeah, sure.” She made a motion toward his bike. “You wanna ride or walk?”

      “Walk. I need to stretch my legs.”

      Quinn wasn’t much taller than she was, but she half-walked/half-jogged to keep up with his ground-eating pace. A hundred yards from Kurt’s cabin, Jenna heard the screen on the kitchen door slam and Dink raced over to them.

      Dink whined at Quinn’s feet, his lips pulling back into a doggie grin. Quinn squatted and ruffled his hand through Dink’s scruff. “Hey, old boy, how are you?”

      Dink jumped up and hugged Quinn’s neck, knocking Quinn on his butt. Jenna stomped down on the stupid stab of jealousy that her dog had gotten a better greeting than she had.

      Then again, Dink had never broken Quinn’s heart.

      A few licks and rubs later, Quinn stood. He wasn’t smiling, but the persistent furrow between his eyes had vanished.

      At Kurt’s Mustang, Quinn came up short, ran a hand over the sanded Bondo on the side of the driver’s rear quarter panel. This wasn’t a collector’s edition Mustang, newly restored to factory condition. Each body panel, hood, and door were a different color, as if the car was the vehicular version of Frankenstein’s monster. The roof was a sun-faded black, so she assumed that had been the original color.

      “I remember when he bought this. On the way home, it broke down on the side of the road. Had to have it towed. Money-wise, he would have been better off putting a bullet through the block, but Kurt…” Quinn chuckled, sad, rueful. He glanced up at her. “When Kurt got something in his head, when he committed, he saw it through. And no one could tell him different. Stubborn bastard.”

      “I saw a piece of that…that stubbornness, that inability to give up on the horses he worked with.”

      Quinn scratched at the day-old scruff on his jaw. “That’s what I don’t get. How does a guy like that, a guy who won’t give up on his piece-of-shit car, a guy who doesn’t give up on the horses, how does a guy like that give up on himself?”

      * * * *

      Quinn stepped up onto the cabin’s porch, not expecting Jenna to have an answer to his question. He certainly didn’t have one. His hips creaked as badly as the floorboards, his joints stiff from so many hours on the bike. The tips of his fingers tingled as the feeling returned to his extremities.

      All that vibration—from the bike, from the tires, from the road—did a number on his body. He was glad he’d installed the palm lever on his throttle, because he’d left whatever strength he had in his right hand somewhere near the Utah/Wyoming border.

      He worked the fingers on his right hand, but they refused to form a fist. Jenna stepped around him and opened the unlocked front door. Dink trotted inside and hopped up on the bed.

      Quinn glanced around as he walked in. Standard setup. Like the cabin he’d stayed in six years ago while he worked on the S as a hand. Only this cabin was newly built, the curtains unfaded from the sun and the bathroom fixtures a neutral white, not puke green.

      On the left side of the cabin, Kurt’s covers lay in a tangle on the bottom bunk, a dent in the pillow from the last time Kurt had laid his head there.

      “No note?” Quinn asked again. Not because he didn’t remember her answer, but because reconciling the man he knew with what Jenna had said, didn’t jibe.

      “No note.”

      Kurt’s jacket hung from a hook on the wall at the foot of the bunk beds. It was an old-style, green canvas army surplus that all the skateboard kids back home wore to look cool while boarding along the beach’s sidewalks, even in the heat.

      Quinn ran his hands through all the pockets. Coming up with a book of matches, a dead prepaid cell phone, and a bent business card for a guy named Ward Holleran—with a number scribbled in flowing purple ink on the back.

      Quinn dropped the items onto the table. “The sheriff wasn’t interested in these?”

      “Either they didn’t check Kurt’s pockets, or they didn’t think it was relevant.”

      “Not relevant?” Renewed anger poured in, and as tired as Quinn was, he couldn’t be bothered to keep his voice from rising. “Not ‘relevant’? What kind of Barney Fife we got working our county now?”

      “It’s not like that.” Jenna laid a hand on his forearm, but Quinn stepped away. “Sheriff St. John is a good guy. I’m sure he’s doing his best, it’s…”

      “It’s what?”

      She glanced away as if she didn’t want to say, but he gave her points for meeting his eye when she spoke. “The case is pretty cut-and-dry.”

      The base of his neck prickled, and the sensation had nothing to do with the fact it was late in the day, the windows were closed, and the cabin lacked air-conditioning.

      He shrugged out of his riding jacket, the protective plating making the garment hot and heavy. As the sleeve pulled free, it yanked a layer of dried blood and scabs with it. “Jesus Chr—”

      He’d been in such a hurry to leave his apartment that he hadn’t rebandaged his forearm before putting on his jacket. Sometime during the ride, the mesh on the inside must have chafed, causing the delicate skin to bleed and stick to the fabric.

      Quinn