Cowboy Justice by Melissa Cutler Page B

heavy. Maybe a short rest was in order after all so she’d be at the top of her game when she delivered the flash drive to Vaughn’s office.
    She dropped her jeans and shirt to the floor, pulled the band from her hair, and crawled into bed in her underwear. Her room’s window faced the afternoon sun. It speared through the cracks of the blinds, glowing yellow. She studied the pattern of light until the warm quiet dragged her into slumber.

Chapter Six
    Vaughn’s younger sister Gwen was a riot. A brazen loudmouth with a wisecracking sense of humor like the rest of their mother’s side of the family, the Italian side.
    Of the three Cooper kids, Gwen had received the highest concentration of Finocchiaro blood, complete with olive skin, curly black hair, and a fiery temper. Vaughn and his youngest sister, Stephanie, shared the black hair, skin tone, and loud mouths, but they’d missed out on the temper, thank goodness.
    The way he and Stephanie figured it, the temper trait must be a hit-or-miss phenomenon because Mom was as mild-mannered an Italian as ever existed, while Vaughn’s nonna was as much of a surly spitfire as one might expect from a four-foot-nothing grandma who, as a child, had immigrated from the Mediterranean climate of Sicily to the Texas desert. Then again, by some relatives’ account, her temper hadn’t truly triggered until her only daughter married Gregory Cooper, a local, poor-as-dirt Irishman.
    Nevertheless, Gwen’s temper came with her out of the womb and hadn’t simmered down yet. When she got herself wound up real good, she even got to looking like Nonna—her face red and scrunched, her gestures wild, and her long, curly hair tossing around like a black-leaf tree in a hurricane. Once, when she was a teenager, he told her as much, which nearly made her head explode from the pressure of her indignation. She’d given Vaughn the silent treatment for weeks.
    No one knew who Gwen inherited her kleptomania from. It was the one Finocchiaro-Cooper family anomaly. First time she was ever caught stealing in public, at least in Vaughn’s memory, she was four years old to Vaughn’s ten. After a morning spent in the family’s blacksmith shop on the campus of Tucumcari’s farrier college, Gwen had come home with a pocket of horseshoe nails. During a lengthy interrogation by Mom, Gwen led them to the room she shared with baby Stephanie. Under her mattress, she dug out dozens of stolen shoe nails.
    Shoe nails evolved into trinkets lifted from their nonna’s house and odds and ends from her school. Their parents’ reaction was abject horror. Vaughn remembered eavesdropping on a lot of whispered, heated discussions about Gwen and her issue through the years. He’d sense the mood shift on the other side of his closed bedroom door and creep out to listen.
    Stealing from friends and family became shoplifting when Gwen was a teenager. That’s when therapy started. What a waste of money those quacks had been, because no matter how many hours she spent on a counselor’s sofa, no matter what kind of antidepressants they pumped her with, her impulse to steal only grew more powerful.
    Vaughn earned his police badge with the Albuquerque City Police Department when he was twenty-two. That year marked Gwen’s first arrest, after she shoplifted a necklace from a Tucumcari jeweler. Wallace Meyer himself did the honor. Didn’t matter to him that Gwen’s parents had tended his horses every week for years. He recommended the maximum sentence to the judge for a petty misdemeanor—ninety days in juvenile hall and a five-hundred-dollar fine.
    Vaughn pulled his patrol car into the driveway of the house he grew up in, parking behind his dad’s four-by-four Chevy. He knew by the collection of beat-down, piece of crap cars lining the street that Dad was holding class in his workshop. He’d retired from service as a farrier and now taught at the college full-time. When the mood struck him, he held class at his personal