Lawman's Redemption Read Online Free

and a detective with the Kansas City Police Department, and after Reese and Neely, he was the closest thing to a friend Brady had. “Jace.”
    â€œYou heading off this early? You know a few dozen of these folks will be here until the early hours of the morning—including me.”
    â€œI’m not much on parties.”
    â€œReese says you’ll be acting sheriff while he’s gone.”
    â€œYeah.” He’d never officially held the position—Reese wasn’t in the habit of taking vacations—but he’d been in charge every other weekend for the past two years. He could handle it for three weeks. It wasn’t as if Canyon County was likely to develop a rash of crimes the minute the sheriff left the state.
    â€œWatch out,” Jace said good-naturedly as Brady reached his truck. “Don’t let the paperwork get to you.”
    Something had already gotten to him, Brady thought as he climbed in, and it wasn’t work. He waved goodbye to Jace, then headed for Main Street.
    It took five miles, and passing a half dozen cars, to catch up to the convertible with California tags. He got only close enough to be sure it was Hallie’s car, then dropped back a fair distance.
    He wasn’t going to follow her to the motel, and there were adozen reasons or more why. She was his boss’s sister-in-law, and anyone knew you didn’t mess with a man’s family. He’d be better off home alone. She’d been hurt before. He would just be using her, and she’d been used enough.
    When they reached the Buffalo Plains town limits, she headed into downtown, where a right turn would take her to her motel on the east side of town. After a moment’s hesitation, he took the first right, onto Cedar Street, and drove the block and a half to his house.
    Until two weeks ago, he’d spent his entire six years in Buffalo Plains in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment on the west end of town and had been satisfied there—satisfaction being relative, of course. Then one day while on patrol, he’d seen an old man hammering a For Sale sign in the yard that fronted a small neat house. He’d stopped to ask him about it and had driven away a half hour later with the keys in his pocket and a sales contract pending.
    It wasn’t a great house. It was sixty years old, one story, painted white with dark green trim. There was a front porch wide enough for a swing and a back stoop barely big enough for a man to stand on. Inside was a living room, a dining room and kitchen, one bedroom and bathroom, and an additional room he planned someday to incorporate into the living room. The floors were wood, with cracked and peeling linoleum in the kitchen, and the walls needed painting, the bathroom updating, the roof reshingling. He’d paid cash for it, and could have done the same for a house ten times its price, but he hadn’t wanted a bigger, nicer place.
    After all, he hadn’t been buying a house but a memory.
    One of the few childhood memories he recalled with fondness.
    He pulled into the gravel driveway and parked next to his sheriff’s department SUV, then shut off the engine. Nights were quiet in this part of town. The lots were several acres, the houses distant from each other, and behind them was pasture. Forty acres of it had come with the house, but the old man had leased it to a neighboring rancher, and Brady had continued the lease.Someday, though, he planned to put up a barn and buy a few horses from Easy Rafferty, one of Reese’s friends over in Heartbreak who raised damn fine paints.
    He went inside the dark, empty house, turned on the TV and settled on the sofa with a beer. Welcome to his usual Saturday night.
    Most of the time he didn’t care how alone he was. Hell, he’d been that way so long it had come to feel natural. Growing up, he and his kid brother, Logan, had pretty much been each other’s best—and only—friends.