Читать книгу Winning the Widow's Heart - Sherri Shackelford - Страница 13

Chapter Five

If Jack hadn’t been so furious, he might have seen the humor in his current situation. First off, he’d never seen a man so partial to drab brown—the exact color of the hindquarters of a bay mare. Dressed head to toe in the unflattering hue, Cimarron Spring’s sheriff resembled a great mound of lumpy, oozing mud.

The older man’s dirty-blond hair was saturated with gray, and his eyes mirrored the washed-out beige of his stained and wrinkled shirt. An extra-long pair of suspenders stretched over his shoulders. A leather belt hooked on a freshly notched hole, perilously near the ragged tip, strained to cinch his spreading waist. Ferretlike eyes took Jack’s measure.

The sheriff smacked his flabby lips together. “You shoulda told me you was lookin’ for a live horse,” he cackled, his enormous belly undulating with laughter. “Now, that’s a different story.”

Clenching his teeth, Jack let his molten anger cool into hardened steel. He failed to see the humor in sending a fellow lawman on a wild-goose chase. “I’m looking for a live horse and a live man. A man who murdered a woman during a bank robbery.”

Jack had been in Cimarron Springs for several days, waiting for a meeting. Both the sheriff and the town doc had been unavailable. While Jack understood the doc’s busy schedule causing a delay, he’d yet to discern the cause of the sheriff’s stalling. As far as Jack could tell, the only pressing item on that man’s schedule was his next meal.

Under Jack’s unyielding scowl, the jovial smile on the sheriff’s face gradually dissolved into a blank stare. “Don’t get all uppity on me, Ranger,” the man spoke, his tone defensive. “I’ve got a lot going on here. There’s a flu epidemic crippling the town. We’ve had six deaths already. The undertaker had to pile the bodies in the lean-to. Good thing it’s winter or we’d a had a putrid smell.”