Montana Creeds: Tyler. Linda Miller Lael

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      Tyler turned, ready to fight, but drew up when he saw Dylan’s side-slanted grin and the bring-it-on glint in his blue eyes.

      “That city-slicker rig of yours break down someplace?” Dylan asked.

      Tyler unclenched his right fist, let out a breath. Much as he would have liked to punch his middle brother, he figured it might scare Kit Carson, so he didn’t. The dog had been through enough. “I swapped it for a truck,” he heard himself say. “And that broke down.”

      Dylan raised one eyebrow. “Need a ride?”

      Tyler looked down at the mutt, resting watchfully at his feet, brown eyes rolling from one brother to the other. The poor critter looked as though he expected to be smashed between two giant cymbals at any moment.

      “Yeah,” Tyler said, reluctantly agreeing to Dylan’s offer. “The tow truck’s out on another call, and I’m fifth in line, so it might be tomorrow before they can haul the Chevy in and fix it.”

      After he’d told Vance Grant, the only mechanic on duty, that he’d check back in the morning, Tyler and Kit followed Dylan out into the afternoon heat. They made a stop at the supermarket, for dog kibble, coffee and a few other staples, and headed, by tacit agreement, for the ranch. In all that time, barely two words passed between them.

      They were a good three miles out of town, in fact, Kit panting happily in the backseat of Dylan’s extended-cab pickup, before it occurred to Tyler to wonder how his brother had happened along at just the right—or wrong—time.

      Reflecting on the question, Tyler idly rubbed his sore shoulder, where Dylan had slugged him. “Did you come into the shop looking for me?” he asked.

      “Yup,” Dylan answered easily, without so much as glancing in his direction. The slight tilt of amusement at the corner of his mouth told Tyler he’d seen him nursing that arm, though. “Word gets around. Big news, when a Creed hits the old hometown.”

      Tyler sighed. “Not much happens around here, if we’re news.”

      “You’d be surprised,” Dylan said. “If you ever stuck around long enough to find out what’s going on around Stillwater Springs, that is.”

      They’d run into each other a little over a week before, at the home of a mutual friend, Cassie Greencreek, but it hadn’t exactly been a family reunion. Tyler had met Dylan’s little girl, Bonnie, and taken a fierce liking to her, even fetched her some medicine when she was sick, but that was the extent of the brotherly bonding.

      “Catch me up,” Tyler said, because Dylan was bent on talking, evidently. And when Dylan was bent on anything, it was easier to just ride it out.

      “Well, I got married,” Dylan said. “To Kristy Madison.”

      Tyler absorbed that. “Okay,” he said. “Congratulations.”

      “Gee, thanks. Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.”

      “She’s half again too good for you,” Tyler commented, at something of a loss. There was so much bad blood between him and his brothers that he didn’t know how to carry on a civil conversation with either of them. “Kristy, I mean.”

      Dylan laughed. “True,” he answered. Then he proceeded to bring Tyler up to speed on all the latest doings in Stillwater Springs, Montana. “They dug up a couple of bodies on the old Madison place,” he went on. “And Sheriff Book retired early, a week before the special election. Mike Danvers was running against Jim Huntinghorse, but he dropped out of the race, so Jim’s The Man now.”

      “Bodies?” Tyler echoed. He’d barely untangled himself from the shock of seeing Lily Ryder again, and that little girl of hers, and now Dylan was laying all this stuff on him.

      “Murder victims,” Dylan confirmed.

      “Holy shit,” Tyler said. “Anybody we knew?”

      “Probably not,” Dylan answered, as they bumped off the main road onto one of the old cattle trails snaking through the ranch like a network of ancient tree roots. A muscle tightened in Dylan’s jaw. “A drifter who worked for Kristy’s dad for a while, and a young girl who went missing during a family camping trip a few years back.”

      Tyler remembered the media frenzy surrounding the missing girl. Searchers had turned over every rock in that part of Montana, without success, and eventually the hoo-ha had died down and the parents had gone home, defeated and hollow-eyed with despair. “Did Floyd nab the killers?”

      “Do you ever read a newspaper?” Dylan countered, sounding semi-irritated now. Now there was a tone Tyler understood.

      “No,” he snapped back. “My lips move when I read, and that makes me testy.”

      “ Everything makes you testy, little brother.” Dylan paused, sighed. Went on. “Freida Turlow killed the girl—some kind of jealousy thing. And the drifter—well, that’s another story.”

      “Those Turlows,” Tyler said, “are just plain loco.”

      Dylan laughed again, but it was a raw, gruff sound, without a trace of humor. “Coming from a Creed, that’s saying something.”

      In spite of himself, Tyler laughed, too.

      “What brings you back to the home place, little brother?” Dylan asked. He was downright loquacious, old Dylan.

      “Stop calling me ‘little brother,’” Tyler told him. “I’m a head taller than you are.”

      “You’ll always be the baby of the family. Deal with it.” Dylan downshifted, with a grinding of gears, and they jostled up the lake road, toward Tyler’s cabin. “Answer my question. What are you doing here?”

      Tyler let out a long sigh. “Damned if I know,” he admitted. “I guess I’m tired of the open road. I need some time to think a few things through.”

      “What things?”

      Again, Tyler’s temper, never far beneath the surface, stirred inside him. “What the fuck do you care?” he asked.

      Kit Carson gave a fitful whimper from the backseat.

      “I care,” Dylan said evenly. “And so does Logan.”

      “Bullshit,” Tyler said flatly.

      “Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

      The cabin came in sight, nestled up close to the lake. It was more shack than house, his hind-tit inheritance from the old man, but Tyler loved the solitude and the way the light of the sun and moon played over that still water.

      Logan, being the eldest, had scored the main ranch house when Jake Creed got himself killed up in the woods, logging, and Dylan, coming in second, got their uncle’s old dump on the other side of the orchard. That left Tyler in third place, as always.

      Hind-tit.

      Tyler unclamped his back molars, reached back to reassure the dog with a ruffling of the ears. Ignoring Dylan’s question, he asked about Bonnie instead.

      “She’s fine,” Dylan answered.

      He brought the truck to a stop in front of the log A-frame, and Tyler had the passenger-side door open before Dylan had shut off the engine. Kit Carson waited, shivering a little, with either anticipation or dread, until Tyler hoisted him down from the backseat.

      “Thanks for the lift,” Tyler told his brother, reaching over the side of the truck bed for the kibble and the grub they’d picked up in town. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

      Dylan got out of the truck, slammed his door.

      “Don’t you have things to do?” Tyler asked tersely. Kit Carson was sniffing around in the rich, high grass, making himself at home—and he was all the company Tyler wanted at the moment. Once inside, he’d prime the pump, build a fire in the antiquated wood cookstove and brew some coffee.