A Forever Christmas Read online

  Rick had smiled at him and rather than offer platitudes or say something that lacked sincerity, the sheriff had said to him, “That’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?”

  And then he and the sheriff had shaken hands on it.

  The first couple of days on the job, Alma had stuck to him like glue, explaining absolutely everything until he began to believe his sister thought that he was six years old and incapable of understanding anything unless broken down to the simplest terms and shortest words.

  On the third day, he’d just about had his fill. But before he could say as much to Alma, Rick had given her a look that succinctly and silently put the senior deputy in her place. After that, whenever she began to explain something to him, she’d stop herself, murmur, “You’ll get the hang of it, Gabe,” and went back to doing whatever she’d been doing.

  Now, after almost four weeks, Gabe had to admit it was an interesting change of pace from being a rancher. Certainly less physically tiring. There’d been times when he’d thought about getting his own spread, but his father still needed help with the ranch now and then. Besides, that ranch technically belonged to all of them. His father had seen to that.

  Around the time when they’d lost their mother, all six of them had joined forces, taking any job they could, to help their father pay off all the medical bills that had accumulated. They’d also raised money to keep the bank from taking away the ranch because their father had fallen behind in payments.

  Paying off the bills was a point of honor for Miguel Rodriguez, so they had all pitched in together, pooled their resources and their money. They did everything and anything until the bills were paid off and their father was back on good terms with the bank.

  That was when Miguel Sr. had them all accompany him to the bank. He’d been very mysterious about why he wanted them there, not really saying anything by way of an explanation until they were all assembled in the bank president’s office. That was when he told them that he was having the title on the deed changed so that it included all their names under the word Owner.

  Stunned, they’d tried to argue him out of it, but their father had been adamant about it, refusing to change his mind. So now they were all proud joint owners of the ranch where they had grown up. And although no one said as much to their father, as far as they were all concerned, the ranch still belonged to him. Rafe, Mike and Ray still lived on the ranch and worked it while the rest of them lent a hand whenever they were needed.

  But Alma worked predominantly as a deputy and Eli had his own spread to tend to, so that cut down on the number of “hands” his father could tap into.

  Which was why he’d hesitated when Alma had initially suggested his taking Larry’s place.

  “It’s only going to be temporary. C’mon, what’ve you got lose?” she’d urged in that way of hers that got people to come around no matter what it was she was pushing.

  So he’d said all right, and before he knew it, he was holding his right hand up and swearing his allegiance to both the state and the town, promising to do the best job he could, “So help me, God.”

  And just like that, he, Gabriel Rodriguez, was a U.S. deputy sheriff.

  So far, he liked it. But he had to admit, the job was far from exciting.

  The rain had all but stopped. That was when he first saw it. Saw the car that appeared to be tottering on the edge of the ravine. It looked like something straight out of an action movie—and not a very good one at that.

  Except that this was real.

  All too real.

  The closer he came to the scene, the worse it appeared to him.

  He would have said that it looked as if someone had run the vehicle off the road—if there’d actually been a discernible road to begin with. But whether by design or accident, the end result was that the vehicle was precariously positioned on the edge of the ravine. It gave every indication of being on the verge of going over if there was so much as the slightest breeze to give it a push.

  He had no idea how it had managed to withstand the forces of the rain. In his opinion, it had rained hard enough to send the sedan plummeting into the ravine.

  He supposed the fact that it hadn’t came under the heading of a miracle. He would need another one if there was anyone inside that sedan who needed rescuing.

  Gabe hoped the supply of miracles hadn’t suddenly run dry.

  He’d been a deputy sheriff for less than four weeks, but he’d been a man a great deal longer than that. And as a man, he reacted a certain way.

  Basic instincts, literally honed at his father’s knee, had him acting almost automatically, without needing to stop to think anything through. Seeing someone in danger, his immediate reaction was to try to help, not to “go and get help.”

  Gabe brought his weather-beaten 4x4 to a dead stop less than a foot away from the precariously perched sedan.

  From what he could make out through the clouded windows, there was someone inside the car.

  He caught his breath. Every second counted. The smallest wrong movement on either that person’s part—or his own—and the car was going to be history. As would be the person inside.

  Moving carefully around the vehicle in a wide semicircle, Gabe assessed the situation, confirming there was only one person inside the car. A woman. And she wasn’t moving.

  Was she in shock, or—

  Gabe pressed his lips together, contemplating his next move. He wanted to call out, to ask the woman if she was all right, but that might startle her. Much as he wanted reassurance that she was alive, he didn’t want to risk her making any sudden moves that could throw off the car’s fragile equilibrium.

  The most logical thing was for him to drag the woman out of the car, but that had an extremely risky downside to it.

  What he needed to do, Gabe decided, was to drag the car away from the edge and back onto solid ground again with all four tires firmly planted on a flat surface.

  Easier said than done.

  Gabriel pushed his hand through his hair. He had to find a way to hook up her car and his 4x4 so that he could pull the sedan away from the edge of the ravine with a minimum of risk.

  He thought of calling Mick, the town’s best mechanic. The fact that Mick was also the only mechanic in town didn’t in any way affect the fact that the man could perform miracles with vehicles of all sizes and shapes. Taking out his cell phone, Gabe looked uncertainly at the teetering sedan.

  How long had it been like that? More to the point, how much longer could it stay that way?

  But even as he pressed one of the preprogrammed numbers on his keypad, he didn’t know if he had enough time to wait for Mick to get here.

  What if the rain started up again, full force?

  He glanced down at the screen and saw that he had only half the number of bars that he usually did. The storm was probably responsible for that.

  A gravelly voice answered on the other end. Rather than a formal greeting, the man said, “Yeah?”

  “Mick, it’s Gabe Rodriguez.”

  At hearing the name, Mick’s voice softened just a touch. “What can I do for you, Deputy?” Mick asked, putting special emphasis on Gabe’s new title.

  “You can get yourself out here about ten miles out of town, by Lazarus Ravine. I’ve got a car all set to go over the edge and I need a tow.”

  “Yours?”

  “No—”

  “Belong to anyone you know?”

  “No—” Again, he didn’t get time to finish.

  Mick’s approach to life was very cut-and-dried. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “There’s someone in it.” As he spoke, he looked into the sedan again. The woman hadn’t moved. Maybe that was just as well. If she came to—if she was able to come to—she might panic. One wrong move might prove fatal, not to mention her last. “I don’t think she’s conscious from what I can see. But if I try to get her out—”

  “She’d fall into the ravine. I get it. Sit tight. I’m on my way,” the
man promised. And with that, the connection was broken.

  Sit tight. Ordinarily that would have sounded like good advice. Gabe thought. But in all good conscience, he couldn’t take it, not when a woman’s life quite literally hung in the balance.

  He was torn.

  Anything he could do might result in making it worse, he reasoned. Still, he didn’t feel comfortable about just sitting here and waiting for Mick. A lot could happen in that short amount of time.

  Right about now, hauling the town drunk into one of the jail cells to sleep it off was beginning to sound like an enviable alternative to this.

  He continued to stare at the sedan.

  He hadn’t heard any sounds coming from the woman inside so he still didn’t even know if she was dead or alive, but went with the latter.

  Feeling somewhat anxious, Gabe returned to his 4x4 and began to look through both the cab and the cargo area, searching for either a really thick, strong length of rope or, better yet, a chain that he could use to hook up to the victim’s car.

  He finally found a length of chain all but hidden at the back of the cargo area. It was buried underneath a large pile of his belongings, which had been there since he’d moved into town a few months ago. He’d yet to sort through them and decide whether to bring them to his new living quarters, leave them at the ranch in case he decided to move back or just throw them out.

  A triumphant, strongly voiced “Yes!” escaped his lips when he saw the chain. Pulling it out of the truck bed, he vaguely remembered that he’d used the chain to help remove a rotting tree stump on Eli’s property. That had to be over six months ago, he realized.

  “That’ll teach Alma to stop nagging me about never putting anything away,” he muttered under his breath, even though there was no one around to overhear him.

  At the time, he’d secured the chain around the stump and then anchored it to the back of his vehicle. Once he was sure it would hold, he slowly coaxed the stump out of the ground by driving away in almost slow motion.

  It had taken close to half an hour and three separate tries, but finally the stump had come out of the ground. Most of its roots were still attached.

  “Here’s hoping we have the same luck here,” he said to himself. Gabe looked into the sedan one more time. The woman inside still hadn’t moved. How long had she been like that?

  He was wasting time, wondering instead of doing, he admonished himself.

  Working as fast as he could, Gabe secured one end of the chain to the rear bumper of the woman’s car and the other end to his truck’s front bumper. Offering up bits and pieces of a prayer his mother had insisted that all her children learn by the time they were old enough to talk, Gabe got in behind the wheel of his truck, threw it into Reverse and ever so slowly backed up.

  He never took his eyes off the sedan and its still passenger.

  The ground was exceedingly wet after the storm and traction not what it could have been, but of the two vehicles, his, fortunately, was the heavier one. Otherwise, he might have found himself sliding toward the one in jeopardy, not away from it.

  He held his breath as his truck continued to slowly move away from the edge of the ravine.

  Little by little, inch by inch, the sedan began to tilt toward him, away from the ledge, until finally he managed to get all four of the vehicle’s wheels on the ground. Still in Reverse, he got the sedan far enough away from the edge of the ravine so that it no longer was in any danger of tumbling into it.

  The second he got the other vehicle securely on flat ground, Gabe quickly turned off his engine and jumped out of the truck. Rushing over to the banged-up sedan, he found that the doors on both sides were jammed shut. Rather than attempt to wrestle with them, trying to pry one of them free, he took out the firearm that the sheriff had issued to him.

  Turning it around so that the butt of the weapon was facing the window, he struck at the windshield as hard as he could. Two attempts later, the glass finally cracked. Under the forceful pressure of his hand, the small, spidery cracks began to spread out. As they did so, they weakened the glass enough so that when he swung the hilt of his weapon against it, the windshield finally shattered. Parts of it fell into the car.

  Which left the rest for him to deal with. Moving quickly, Gabe removed chunks of the glass until he’d managed to clear a sufficiently large enough opening for him to snake through. He made it into the passenger seat, glass fragments clinging to his hair, casting small rainbows.

  The woman was still strapped into her seat. There was blood over her right eye thanks to the head wound directly above it.

  She was blonde and probably not more than about twenty-six, he judged. Her eyes were closed and for a moment he thought she was dead. Feeling her neck for a pulse, he wasn’t sure if he detected any, or if what he felt faintly throbbing was merely the pulse within his own fingers.

  He moved the blonde gently back so that she was in a more accessible sitting position. Gabe put his head against her chest, straining to detect even the faintest of heartbeats.

  He didn’t hear anything.

  But just as he was straightening up, he thought he felt the slightest brush of material against his cheek. Stunned, he stared at her chest intently. That was when he saw it. Just the smallest hint of movement.

  She was breathing.

  The woman was still alive!

  His pulse began to race and he grinned.

  She was still alive.

  Chapter Two

  Gabriel was torn between leaving the woman where she was until help arrived and trying to get her out of her totaled vehicle.

  Weighing pros and cons, he was leaning toward the former since the ground was wet and he had no idea what sort of internal injuries she’d sustained. Since he had no medical training, he was afraid that moving her, if he unintentionally did it the wrong way, might make things worse for the blonde.

  But the silent debate ended abruptly when he became aware of the very strong smell of gasoline. It was coming from her car, never a good thing considering the kind of damages the vehicle had sustained.

  Staying in the wrecked vehicle was definitely not a safe choice for either one of them. Gabriel shifted, trying first one door, then the other, hoping that at least one of them was more pliable from the inside of the sedan than from the outside.

  But they weren’t. Neither door gave an inch, nor gave any indications that they could be moved if enough pressure was applied.

  They remained sealed even when he attempted to kick his way out.

  The force he’d exerted reverberated all the way up his leg to his thigh. The door still didn’t budge.

  Since the doors appeared to be permanently sealed, he thought his next best bet was the front windshield. He’d already crawled in through the windshield to reach the unconscious woman, but that had been at a price. He’d gotten half a dozen or more cuts along his arms and torso for his trouble. Using this route to get out meant he had to do some more cleaning up. The woman was already bleeding from her scalp. He didn’t want to add to her injuries if he could help it.

  Bracing himself on the seat, Gabriel raised both of his legs up as high as he could, then kicked against the windshield as hard as he was able.

  It wasn’t enough.

  He did it again.

  And again.

  With each kick, a little more of the windshield shattered and drops of glass rained down on either the hood or directly into the car. Before he’d gotten started, he’d covered up the blonde with his jacket as best he could, trying to protect her from the falling glass.

  Taking his jacket back now, he wrapped it around his arm, and then swung his arm in a giant sweeping motion, clearing away as much of the broken glass fragments as he could. He wanted to be able to get her out, onto the hood, with as little of the jagged edges grabbing on to her as possible.

  Gabe was well aware that the maneuver would have been a great deal easier if there was someone outside the vehicle to hand her off to. But he was fi
ghting against the clock. Who knew how much more of a safety zone he had left to work with? He had the uneasy feeling that the car could blow up at any moment and he needed to get them both out of there and in the clear before that happened.

  Besides, taking a closer look, he saw that she was still bleeding from her temple. He needed to get the blonde into town and to the doctor.

  It occurred to Gabe, as he struggled to get the unconscious woman through the opening he’d created, that a year ago there would have been no doctor to take her to. At least, none in Forever and none around for a fifty-mile radius. Any medical emergency had to be handled in Pine Ridge, which boasted of a hospital within the town limits. Before Dan Davenport had arrived, Forever had been without a doctor for the past thirty years.

  And now they had one.

  Forever wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of progress, but they were getting there, little by little, Gabe thought. He supposed that baby steps were better than no steps at all.

  Despite the fact that it was cold and the woman he was struggling to get out of the car was little more than just a slip of a thing, Gabe found himself working up a sweat. There just wasn’t all that much space to successfully maneuver in.

  Pausing to catch his breath, he rubbed the perspiration from his forehead with the side of his forearm before it fell into his eyes.

  “Okay now,” he muttered, positioning his hands where he knew she would have protested had she only been conscious, he squared his shoulders and shoved, “one last big push.”

  Exhaling the breath he’d been holding, he experienced a surge of triumph. She was out! Time for him to be the same.

  Gabriel scrambled out of the mangled death trap himself.

  A small spark seemed to materialize out of nowhere. The sudden gleam reflected in the side mirror caught his eye. Gabriel instantly reacted even before the actual image even registered in his mind.

  His feet hitting the ground, he grabbed the blonde up in his arms and raced to his truck. Pushing her into the passenger seat, he had just enough time to jump in behind the wheel and throw the vehicle into Reverse. His foot urgently pressing the accelerator all the way down to the floor, he put as much distance as humanly possible between his truck and the totaled sedan.