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what’s really going on around here?” he muttered under his breath. He’d repeated the words often over the past six weeks, since the night the Summer Lights Festival in Midian had turned into a fucking turkey shoot, rifles blaring off a hillside, some nut in a cowboy hat and duster climbing the Ferris wheel. And his number one deputy, the kid he’d thought for sure had the guts and the stones to take over for him someday, right in the middle of it all.
    Reeve thought about that moment every day. Six weeks later, his exchange with Archibald Stan still burned his ass like a burrito from Surrey’s. It wasn’t the spice that did it, either; it was the incompetence of the making. And it was the same with him and Arch, that little dance they’d done that night. Arch had been up to something, knew something about what had been going on this town.
    He sure as shit wasn’t willing to share it, though. Whatever it was, it made him look dirty. Damned dirty. And it left Reeve a man short at a time when he needed all the help he could get.
    “I’m gonna catch up with your ass sooner or later, Arch,” he said quietly, a vow he seemed to keep making and repeating, like it would reassure him. “Then I’m gonna stuff you like a—” Reeve felt his face screw up. That didn’t sound right, when he said it like that. “I’m gonna catch you,” he said to the river, the sound of his reel slowly turning breaking the slow drift and ambient noise of nature.
    Then again, six weeks on the hunt and he had nothing to show for it. No Arch. No sign of the cowboy. He couldn’t even find Arch’s wife, Alison, or the man in the suit that witnesses had reported helping the cowboy escape.
    “Like a goddamned conspiracy against me,” Reeve muttered as the lure popped out of the water again. He cast again out of rote habit, as his mind was miles away. Didn’t even hear the plop of the landing.
    What he did hear was the trill of his cell phone ringing on the default setting. He glanced down at the bulky thing on his belt and let one hand off the fishing rod to fumble for it. He ripped open the pouch with the signature sound of Velcro tearing, then fished out the little silver device and checked the faceplate. It was the first thing he’d caught today, and it was just the office calling.
    Reeve sighed. He’d left his wife in charge there, answering phones and directing calls, so that he could have a day off, the first in recent memory. He had more open murder cases on his desk right now than even New York City got in a slow month. It was eating at him, watching his little slice of paradise go straight to hell in a handcart. On his watch, no less.
    There was nothing for it, though, so he pushed the talk button and held the phone up to his ear. “Yes, dear?”
    “Well, that is very informal greeting, Sheriff,” came a smooth, irritating voice from the other side. It probably wouldn’t have been half as irritating if he hadn’t know the jackass it belonged to—County Administrator Pike. That Yankee carpetbagging motherfucker.
    “I figured my wife was calling,” Reeve said without much humor. A day wasted, now ruined. “Clearly, I erred.”
    “Well, it’s not exactly the first time in recent memory, is it?” Pike was a smug motherfucker, always seemed like he was putting on airs. Took a little too much joy in that particular pronouncement for Reeve’s taste. It got under his skin, big time. “I know it’s been a few weeks and we haven’t had our meeting yet, so I dropped by to talk.”
    And he couldn’t have done it any other day in the last weeks, of course, when Reeve had been at the office. “Taking a little break today,” Reeve said instead of opening up on the bastard with both barrels. “It’s been a long month or so.”
    “Oh, I know,” Pike said, still smug as fuck. “I think we need to have a face-to-face, talk things over. Get on the same page.”
    Sort of like Reeve had called the administrator’s office to