Married To The Cowboy (Love In Collin's Ranch 3) Read online

  Chapter 3

  My new sense of justice led me to joining the Phoenix police force. The old man’s deputies had already brought the men who had killed my father to justice, but the world was full of bad men and I decided I would do anything in my power to bring them down.

  I joined up with PHXPD during a period in the department’s history when they couldn't find the men to put into patrol cars and would take on anyone who put in an application. Because of this, there was a whole lot of dirt going down within the department, who would turn a blind eye to a lot off things that were happening within the city limits. The good cops in the department just did the best they could to stay alive and stay out of the way of the dirty black-and-whites.

  I was lucky enough to be partnered up with a veteran named Officer Patrick Duncan. Pat was a Mormon with eight kids and a perpetually pregnant wife. He basically cared about two things in life: his family and the job, and I was thankful for his devotion to both. Because of his honesty and integrity, we were given the toughest beat in the city: Roser Road. Roser was actually a pretty nice neighborhood. It was a lot of decent working-class people barely making ends meet and having to live in Section 8 housing. Of course, the danger of Section 8 is that it attracts an element that takes advantage and brings drugs and violence. Mine and Pat's job basically broke down to us making sure nobody hurt the good people, and keeping the criminal element from spreading further out into the surrounding neighborhoods.

  More than a few of our fellow police liked to refer to us as “zookeepers”. It used to get under my skin, so much so that I got into a few of their faces about the slur. Pat would back me off and drag me out to the patrol cars.

  "You can't let them suck you into their hate, kid," he said as we laid in our gear for the night. "Because that's exactly what they want you to do. Before you know it you'll be getting into shoving matches, and then within a few months you'll be agreeing with everything that's coming out of their mouths. Trust me, I've seen it happen a thousand times. It's better to just keep your head down, do the best job that you can, and make it home at the end of the night."

  So that's exactly what I did. Sure, I gritted my teeth in the two years I patrolled Roser Road; there were even a few times when I was dealing with some serious asshole roughnecks when I started thinking of myself as nothing more than a zookeeper. But at the end of the night when I would go home still breathing, I'd wipe those thoughts out of my mind and start the next day with fresh eyes the best I could.

  But after two years of working patrol, I knew I was barely making a dent. The bad men just seemed to be getting badder and growing in numbers, and because of this I decided I needed to up my game and put in a transfer to the narcotics division.

  Being a narc isn't like it is in movies and television. There's no undercover work, there's no shaking down dealers and turning them into confidential informants. What being a narc is, is busting down doors dressed like a storm trooper from Star Wars. Being a narc was putting your body on the line day in, day out, never knowing if you were going to come home on your own two feet or rolled out in a body bag. Over the course of three years I saw it happen more than a few times. Men and women with families, who believed that what they were doing was for the greater good, that they were making a difference busting into the homes of young black and Mexican kids and taking a couple of pounds of dope off the street, and losing their lives our use of limbs because of it. I believed it like a religion, at least until I took a bullet from a sixteen-year-old kid with a fourth-grade education.

  The raid was in my old stomping grounds. We thought we were raiding a meth lab, so we went in wearing gas masks and flash suppressors on our AR-15's in case of noxious chemicals. It wasn't a lab, though. It was just a house full of kids who liked to party and pissed off their neighbors enough that the neighbors called the cops and lied about possible drug activity. The problem was, the kids were also wannabe gangbangers who all carried firearms and opened up on us the minute we came through the door, thinking that a rival gang was coming at them.

  Since it was tweakers who took out my old man, I was the first through the door, the first to take a .45 slug to my shoulder, shattering my collarbone, almost causing me to bleed out. I was one of the lucky ones. Three of the officers behind me all bought a ticket to heaven, and every single one of those eight kids in the house we raided did the same. All that was recovered in the raid were the firearms and a quarter-ounce bag of marijuana.

  Once again, I was back in the same situation. The thing I loved the most had put me in the hospital and nearly killed me, and once again I was adrift after I found out about the futility of the raid. I'd lost my faith, and like the last time, I went back to the one place where I knew I could heal and hopefully find out what my next step in life would be: the ranch.

  Chapter 4

  It's been two years and I've yet to leave. The ranch had always been Henry's thing after he came back from Iraq. He found a real peace in the place and he's built a life out here with his woman, Inez. I try the best I can to stay out of their hair. I work the ranch and stay down at the bunkhouse that was the original ranch house on the property. But Henry and Inez insist I have dinner with them every night when I'm not too worn out from the day, which is actually most days.

  Technically, I'm still a member of the PHXPD, but I don't bust down doors and I don't ride in a patrol car or ride a desk, but still draw full pay. What I do for the PD is, I go to elementary schools around the Phoenix area and give little talks to the kids. I actually don't mind it all that much, it's kind of fun walking into a room of second graders in my full dress blues and listen to them ooh and ah, treating me like I'm some kind of superman. Usually, my little talks are about things like stranger danger and making sure they look both ways before they cross the street. The only times I don't like the gig is when they send me to high schools.

  The sole purpose of sending me to the high schools is to talk about the dangers of dope. I'll walk into gymnasiums packed with unsmiling and sometimes heckling faces. Hundreds of kids who all think of me as the enemy, the guy there to end their good times. And when I look at all of those unsmiling faces, I can say that I honestly don't blame them for their contempt. Because when I step out there in front of them, I'm putting on an act. The words coming out of my mouth are nothing but lip service. In my time of recovery, I've come to think differently on how law enforcement handles the "drug war". But I say the things that I say because I know that no matter my feelings, no matter my thoughts, I'll never be able to change things. So I go through the motions, and wait for days like today when I get to walk into a kindergarten class and feel like a hero.

  ***

  Missy Sanders moved to Apache Junction to take care of her dying grandmother. Her grandma had moved to Arizona from California when Missy had been accepted to Arizona State University. Missy was her only living relative, and she'd transferred to a location in Mesa the minute Missy received her scholarship and acceptance letter. The only thing Missy had ever wanted to do with her life was be a teacher. She knew that it was a thankless job, long hours, low pay, but there were bigger rewards than money, especially when you taught young children who absorbed everything like a sponge. Teaching was what she was meant to do.

  Her grandmother retired from the insurance company she'd been working at for forty years and was one of the last of its employees to receive a full pension. For one reason or another, southern Arizona and its blistering heat appealed to the old woman, although Missy never got used to the hundred-plus degree temperatures. When she graduated near the very top of her class, Missy decided not to stay in Arizona. The state of education in the Grand Canyon state was abysmal and most new teachers started at only $24,000 a year, $28,000 if you had a masters degree. So she decided to move back out to California where it was definitely more expensive, but she would make double what she would make in Arizona.

  She thought that her grandmother would be heartbroken once she told her the news, because the sw
eet old lady had really made a life for herself out in the desert. When Missy broke the news to her over Sunday dinner, all her grandmother did was smile and give her a big hug.

  "That's fine with me honey," she said as she patted Missy's cheek. "I've raised you right, and you know I'll be fine. Just remember to call me more than once a month!"

  Missy's first job was in Riverside, California. The city wasn't much different than Phoenix in appearance or climate, but she was making $48,000 a year teaching kindergarten, and she knew that with more experience she'd become more attractive to better paying, exclusive schools in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. She'd been working in Riverside for a year, building a life for herself (she'd even started dating a cute 7th-grade science teacher) when she received a phone call from her grandmother's next-door neighbor and best friend, Ida.

  "Sweetie, something's happened. You need to come home."

  The something ended up being a massive stroke that paralyzed half her grandmother’s body and caused her terrible memory loss. She basically had to relearn how to do everything, and would need twenty-four-hour-a-day care, which her pension and social security took care of but didn't leave anything for living expenses, which meant Missy had to find work fast. Luckily, due to Arizona's miserable wage for educators, she basically had her pick of schools to choose from, and she choose the one closest to her grandmother's apartment in Apache Junction, Gold Canyon Elementary.

  It was a nice enough school, but poor. It had been built during the housing boom, when families flocked to Arizona for the plentiful jobs and cheap houses. But when the bottom fell out the blossoming young community imploded and families by the thousands defaulted on their sketchy home loans and abandoned their cheaply built, mass-produced shit boxes and moved back home with Mom and Dad to lick their wounds. It left the Apache Junction economy in ruins, and a once-budding young community returned to what it once was: a retirement community on the edges of the Phoenix Metro Area and a home for low-life desert rats and hard-working illegal migrant labor.

  But the dirtbags and illegal aliens still had children who needed to be taught, and with Missy being bilingual, she was an ideal fit for the school.

  The job was demanding, the hours long, the pay low. She had a class of thirty-two children. Most of them were good kids, but she had more than her fair share of children who suffered from serious developmental and emotional disabilities, kids whose parents most likely never wanted them and treated them that way. When they came to her classroom, she tried to the best of her ability to help them and care for them. But there was only so much she could do with the six hours a day she had them; the other eighteen hours were completely out of her hands. It frustrated her to no end, but she did her best and sometimes, when she saw real results from all her hard work, she knew that she was making a difference.

  But some days, even she needed a break from the grind of the day, which is why at least once a week she tried to have a guest speaker come in for an hour or two. She would still have to be on her toes and make sure the kids were paying attention to the speaker. She learned early on that her kids weren't interested in learning about art or literature or anything on an intellectual level (but honestly, what five-year-old was interested in either of those subjects?). It was best to bring in people who worked physical and demanding jobs, jobs that the kids thought were neat because the men and women who worked them drove large, loud vehicles. Their favorites were men who drove construction vehicles like bulldozers and backhoes, and firemen and EMTs were big favorites, too.

  Today's speaker was a police officer from the Phoenix Police Department. She didn't know how the children would react to him. A good portion of her kids had parents who had either been arrested or were actually in prison. And, of course, her Mexican kids had an inherent distrust of police officers or anyone in uniform because they had been trained to fear deportation. But her concerns were completely assuaged the minute Officer Paul Collins walked into her classroom, not so much because the children were in awe of him, but because his beauty and confidence literally took her breath away, and she suddenly didn't care one good goddamn what her kids thought of him.

  Chapter 5

  My superman moment came as soon as I walked into the shabby little classroom. Thirty pairs of eyes turned to me and I seemed to suck all of the air out of the room with excitement. I also seemed to have the same affect on the teacher, Ms. Sanders. But then again, she did the same thing to me. Despite the fact that she looked utterly exhausted (every educator and administrator I'd ever met had the same look; their eyes always seemed bloodshot and slightly panicked, hair disheveled, cloths stained), she radiated a cool beauty. Her skin was milky pale and her thick red hair hung down past her shoulders. She moved with an airy grace, as if her feet were an inch or two above the ground and she floated. I’d never seen a woman so naturally beautiful in my life. She made Jenna look like a beaten old dog, and most likely she wouldn't try stealing from me after we made love.

  Yes, just looking at her made me think of sex even though I didn't know a single thing about her. I didn't know if she was married or had a boyfriend. I didn't know if she was gay or straight, or so dedicated to her job that she didn't have time for anything but the job. For the first time in years, something inside of me that I thought was long dead was stirred by this beautiful young woman: desire. Sure, there had been a few women since Jenna who I'd taken into my bed after a long night of drinking, but all of them were nothing but a warm and willing body; a distant cavity for me to briefly explore and then abandon the next morning, my head full of cobwebs and ghosts. For the first time in years, this slight, graceful woman made me think not only of sex, but of the most dangerous four letter word in the English language, love. Trust me, I know how that sounds naive, like I was nothing more than some horny, star-struck teenager, and you wouldn't be far from the truth—I was awe struck.

  Over the next hour, I was in a haze. I felt like a robot reciting my lines, completely unable to take my eyes off of this beautiful young woman. Finally, the bell rang and the children crowded around me bolted for the door and out into the playground, and I was left alone with Ms. Sanders. We both stared at one another, our cheeks flushed and red, our eyes locked, but shyly glancing away at the same time. Obviously, I wasn't the only one who was feeling like an awkward teenager. I somehow found my courage and voice and opened my mouth.

  "That's a great group of kids you've got there," I said, my voice slightly cracking. I couldn't believe how nervous this woman was making me.

  "Yeah. They really are..."

  "They seem to love you." And who could blame them?

  She blushed even further, her pale face turning the brightest shade of red. It melted me.

  "Well, they're easy to love. I really have to thank you for coming in today. I think that you're probably the best speaker I've had in my class, and I've had a lot of them since I started teaching here."

  "Oh, that's really sweet of you to say. To tell you the truth, I kind of have my little presentation memorized, so it's sold hat to me by this point."

  We both smiled shyly and the classroom filled with an awkward silence until I finally spoke up again.

  "I'd love to come back if you'd have me. Or maybe I could volunteer sometimes here at the school. Believe it or not, I have a lot of free time on my hands."

  "Well, you know, the school's having a carnival on Friday..."

  "Oh, I'd be happy to help out with that! Whatever you need, I could do it."

  "Well, no, we actually have all the volunteers we need. A lot of the parents here at the school are fairly involved and are helping out. We have so much help that I don't even have to lend hand. But, if you're not busy, maybe we could, you know, go together?"

  I was so shocked that my jaw practically hit the floor. I was usually the take-charge type, I was the one who asked a woman out, not the other way around. I found it surprisingly refreshing and a little intimidating. Once I finally regained my composure, my words seemed to t
remble out of my mouth. "Yes... Of course, I'd love to go with you."

  "Great! Um, let me give you my phone number and we'll... talk."

  I spent the final hour of the day in Ms. Sanders classroom helping her with the children, then helping her clean up the classroom, and walking her out to her car.

  ***

  It had been years since Jenna McClean had seen her good little puppy dog, Paul Collins. If she hadn't agreed to pick up her latest boyfriend's 3rd-grader from Gold Canyon Elementary, she most likely would never have seen him again. Her puppy dog was the police, and the one crowd of people she absolutely wanted nothing to do with was the police.

  After Paul had thrown her out of his house and out of his life, things had slowly but surely gone downhill for both her and her family. The McCleans had invested heavily in the housing boom and had lost what little money they had left. Things had gotten so bad that her brother, patriarch of the family, sold off the final twenty acres of their land and the last five thousand heads of cattle to keep their heads above water. Well, his wife and children's heads above water, at least. Jenna was left out in the cold. But that was how things were between her and her brother, always had been, always would be. Especially since the death of their father, they had grown more and more distant.