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had been the truth. Problem was, they were never the right boys. The boy who might have been right, who had grown up on the neighboring ranch, had been too shy to approach her once she reached puberty. It had always been the football players and the rodeo boys who came on to her. She had lost her virginity at sixteen to a calf roper who wore skintight Wranglers and a belt with a buckle the size of an elk’s hoof. She could remember lying on her back on the rough straw of a horse trailer, the roper’s quarter horse, Charlie, peering down at her from the stall divider while the roper pumped obliviously away. She remembered thinking,
He doesn’t even know I’m here.
    Both her attempts at marriage had ended on the same note. When her second husband, Burt, a cattle auctioneer from Miles City, opened his mouth about ten times too often in the Mint Bar one night, she stood screaming while a ranch hand beat him senseless. Flinging herself onto the hand’s back, she was cast aside as if she were a bag of feed. Later, pacing the lobby of the emergency room while her husband’s jaw was wired shut, she found that she was furious at her own helplessness to do anything when the fight started. It wasn’t concern for Burt, who was an asshole and deserved the beating—the marriage had been on its way to the Dumpster for several years—it was her own inadequacy to handle the curves life threw you. She’d been brought up in a tradition of self-reliance, but had the misfortune of being pretty and had allowed herself to be subjected to the wills of alpha males ever since high school, losing most of her self-esteem in the process. She didn’t know exactly how, just yet, but that was going to change.
    The day after she filed for divorce she put in an application for the police academy in Billings. She was accepted to fill a gender quota but rose through the ranks on her own merits, which included several marksmanship trophies and a brown belt in karate. Ten years after graduating from the academy, while she was serving as deputy sheriff of Hyalite County, she’d been invited to a dance held annually at the Cottonwood Inn during the August Sweet Pea Festival. By Montana standards it was a gala affair, where schoolmarms in sequined flapper gowns vied for space on the dance floor with cowboys wearing jeans, Stetsons, and tuxedo shirts. A fight broke out over a divorce that one man had assumed to be final and another had assured him wasn’t, and the next thing Martha knew she was standing over a two-hundred-pound drunk with the heel of her shoe dug into his ear hole.
    “Move one inch, dirtbag, and you’ll be the first man in Hyalite County to be deceased via a woman’s high-heel shoe,” she had shouted at him. The night before, she’d been watching
Hill Street Blues
resurrected on a cable channel.
    Martha was only vaguely aware of a growing circle of dancers, among whom stood several of the city fathers, including the mayor, Stan Vogel. What they saw was an attractive, slightly chunky brunette woman, sweating and braless under a V-neck silk gown, who was totally in control of the situation.
    With no handcuffs handy, Martha marched the man outside and stuffed him into the passenger seat of her date’s Jeep Wrangler. Followed outside by a small crowd, she declined invitations for help—“He’s not going to give me any trouble, are you, mister”—and drove away.
    “Just like Gary fucking Cooper in
High Noon
,” one of the dancers wrote in a letter to the editor the following day. The newspaper quote, minus the F-word, struck a chord with the city. Cooper was a native Montanan who had actually gone to high school in Bridger back in the 1930s. Two and a half months later, Martha Ettinger won a three-wayrace for sheriff by fifteen points. But the dance at the Cottonwood Inn had been the last chance she’d had to wear the blue silk gown.
    “H ow are the boys?” Doc Hanson said by way of a greeting. It came out all one