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was warm in the studio, Faith hugged herself to ward off the shiver that skimmed up her spine.
    Dammit, she was letting her imagination get away from her! It’d been eighteen months since she’d felt so edgy and defenseless. She hadn’t liked it back then. And she damn well didn’t like it now.
    Shaking off the chilly sense of unease, she focused her attention on Mike, who was signaling with his fingers through the glass window draped in flashing red, white, and green Christmas-tr ee lights. Three… two… one.
    “And that was ‘Wild Wind,’ from Robert Earl Keen’s Live from Austin album. You’re talking with Faith, on 91.5 FM KWIND, Wyoming’s best mix of classic and young country. Coming up we’ve got Miranda Lambert’s ‘Kerosene.’ Rut first, here’s a message from Joe Redbird’s Used Auto Trader, where the Rocky Mountain High Country goes for a fair deal. If Redbird’s doesn’t have it, Joe’ll get it.”
    Since coming to work at KWIND, Faith had found it hugely ironic that she’d ended up playing country music for a living. She also definitely identified with Lambert’s line about life being “too long to live it like some country song.”
    Faith had been bo rn into a country song. Her mama, a former Miss Teen Del Rio, had dreamed of escaping the Texas border town, moving to Nashville, and becoming a famous country-music star, just like Tanya Tucker or Reba McEntire.
    She made it out of Del Rio by marrying an oil-rig worker she met while singing in a biker bar. He took her to Houston, where the marriage broke up five months later when she caught him in bed with a red-haired cocktail waitress from the roadhouse where she’d gotten a gig singing for tips.
    Deciding that Diane didn’t sound much like a country star, she changed her name to Tammy—after her idol, Tammy Wynette, who also hadn’t had real good luck with men—and hooked up with a small-time hood who introduced her to drugs and supported their habit by boosting TVs and other electronics from the containers that came into the Houston port.
    That marriage had ended when he was arrested in a sting operation after selling a case of video cameras to an undercover cop.
    More men followed, including Faith’s father, a Hell ’ s Angel who ended up in a maximum security prison for manslaughter before Faith had begun to walk.
    Tammy had continued her downhill slide, drifting around the Southwest, selling her body to pay for drugs as the singing jobs dried up. When she noticed her johns paying more attention to twelve-year-old Faith than they did to her, a lightbulb flashed on over her head. That’s when she began selling her daughter.
    Unsurprisingly, Tammy never made it to Nashville; she’d OD’d sometime in the night right after Faith's thirteenth birthday; at the time Faith had considered it the best—and only—gift her mother had ever given her. She still did.
    As the brash, confrontational rock country lyrics began blasting out into the dark, spookily still night, Faith decided the idea of burning up your past made for a good song.
    Unfortunately, as she’d learned the hard way, it wasn’t all that easy in real life.
     

 
     
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    S alvatore S asone hated three things: Democrats, spaghetti sauce from a jar, and cold weather.
    Before being forced into making a living chasing down fugitives as a bounty hunter, he’d spent twenty years on the mean streets as a cop and had long ago concluded that laws passed by bleeding-heart Democratic politicians were responsible for the revolving door that was laughingly called the American judicial system.
    Given that his great-grandfather had immigrated to America from Sicily, obviously an appreciation of spaghetti (which had, by the way, been invented in his ancestral city of Catania) had been woven into his DNA with his black hair and dark eyes. Right along with the need for sunshine and a warm climate.
    There was no way in hell he would even be here in Bumfuck, Wyoming, if it