Damn, that was the weirdest dream, thought Jeremy, as he rolled over and slowly pried open one eye. I must have had a lot more to drink than I realized. Five o’clock! Gotta get up and milk the cows. After draining his bladder and slapping some cold water on his stubbled face, he returned to the bedroom, still too dazed and tired to fully grasp his alien surroundings. He threw back the curtains, expecting to be greeted by the Wyoming pre-dawn haze. Instead, his eyes were assaulted by the fierce rays of the New Orleans summer sun. He recoiled and stared again at the clock on the nightstand. Five-o-three! Afternoon? No! What is this? Where am I? Lavender walls? What the fuck! My bedroom isn’t lavender; it’s blue for chrissakes! The bed, the furniture, the wall hangings—none of it seemed real. Then, he spotted the note tucked halfway under the alarm clock. “Thanks, cowboy. Had to run some errands. Hope you slept well. Can’t wait to see you again and pick up where we left off. Brandon.”

Brandon? Oh, yeah. The cute kid in my dream.

“We’ve gotta talk.”

The voice startled Jeremy. Reflexively, he dropped the note and turned sharply to find Brad...uh, Ford...standing in the doorway. All of a sudden, it all came flooding back to him. It wasn’t a dream. He really did get sucked off in that gay bar, spend the night with his incredibly handsome future brother-in-law (the hunk now glaring at him in the bedroom), and fuck the shit out of the most adorable kid west of the Mississippi.

“And put some damn clothes on!” barked Ford.

Jeremy looked down to confirm that he was, indeed, stark naked. He also realized that he was still sporting a partial boner. Instinctively, he stroked it a couple of times and then looked up again at Ford and blushed. Ford stared back with a mixture of anger and lust.

“They’re in the living room,” Jeremy mumbled. “My clothes.” Ford didn’t budge from the doorway. As Jeremy squeezed past him, his half-hard cock brushed against the hairs on the back of Ford’s strong hand. He froze. Their eyes locked on each other. Time evaporated. Fire surged in Ford’s dark eyes.

“Goddam you, you bastard! Why do you have to be so fuckin’ hot?” Ford clamped onto Jeremy’s dick with one hand and threw his other arm around his shoulders. He pulled the naked stud close and devoured his tongue. He squeezed his growing manhood and then grabbed his ass to rub their crotches together. He knew it was wrong. He had come home to tell Jeremy so. It was all one terrible, unfortunate mistake—one they must never speak of and certainly never allow to happen again. Yeah, right! Tell that to my fuckin’ cock! The battle raged between the dark-haired head on Ford’s shoulders and the tingling purple one on his cock, and the one on his shoulders was clearly losing.

Once again, it was the doorbell that broke their concentration. “Damn! That’s Kenny. Get dressed!” Ford peeked through the peephole to make sure that the visitor was, in fact, his patrol partner before opening the door. Kenny stepped in just as Jeremy was retrieving his briefs from the living room floor.

“Holy shit, Brad, you’re right! He is a fuckin’ stud!”

The remark threw Jeremy at first, and then he recalled that Ford’s friends called him Brad and that Kenny was the hairy hulk he had seen getting shagged by the fireman on the pool table at the Talon.

Brad (Ford) shot a disapproving leer at Kenny. “Stifle it, man. I’ll be right back.” He tramped into his bedroom, snatched up a small bag, and began to stuff it with his toiletries and a few articles of clothing. Then, he spotted it: the piece of paper on the floor. He scanned the note from Brandon, dismissed it, and tossed it into the waste basket.

Meanwhile, Jeremy dressed nervously as Kenny stood over him and ogled him like one of the erotic dancers at the Oz, another gay bar on Bourbon Street.

“Kenny!” scolded Ford. “Let’s go!”

Jeremy glimpsed the bag in Ford’s hand. “Ford, what’s—?”

“I’m gonna crash at Kenny’s for the rest of the weekend.” snapped Ford. “Make yourself at home,” he added frostily. “I left a key for you on the nightstand.”

“But, Ford....”

Ford was out the door before Jeremy could finish his sentence, and Kenny trailed belatedly behind, grinning as he sized up Jeremy one last time.

******* 

Amy! Jeremy hadn’t spoken to his fiancée since she and her parents dropped him off at Bourbon Street. Gotta give her a call. He needed to hear her voice. Of course, he couldn’t tell her what he had done, but somehow he had to pull himself back into reality. He had to make sure that he hadn’t completely fucked everything up.

“I know, sweetie. I wish we could talk longer too, but I’ve got a million things to take care of. You just enjoy yourself, and I’ll see you at the rehearsal.”

Enjoy myself? That’s the fuckin’ problem. I’m enjoying myself too damn much, and I just don’t understand it.

For the next six hours or so, Jeremy cruised the French Quarter, trying to clear his head, but the din of Southern Decadence made that impossible. Instead of treating himself to a fine meal at Brennan’s or Galatoire’s, he stuffed his face with hot dogs and pretzels from sidewalk vendors. When he got back to Ford’s apartment, he thought about calling home to see how things were going back at the ranch, but he had complete confidence in Wade Dawkins to manage things. Besides, what was he going to say? “Hey, man, you won’t believe who I’ve been screwing in New Orleans.”

He tried calling Ford on his cell phone, but there was no answer. He started to leave a message, but he didn’t want to sound desperate, so he just hung up. He undressed, got into the big, empty bed, and spent another sleepless night.

Cheyenne’s office workers were rushing home to supper by the time Sheriff Nick Scarpelli finished his paperwork and headed back to the hospital where he had left his prime suspect.

“He’s awake,” reported Dr. Singh, “but he’s very weak. Five minutes. No more, please.”

Sheriff Scarpelli nodded and walked past his deputy guarding the door as he entered the room.

Seeing Wade Dawkins standing over his son Randy, Nick observed that the boy had definitely inherited his father’s handsome genes, but time and circumstances had molded them differently. While Wade Dawkins’ muscular body had been toned by hard work on the ranch, Randy’s had been forged on the streets of Chicago’s south side. Though both men walked with a slight swagger, Wade’s expressed reassuring confidence while Randy’s betrayed a vigilance rooted in self-preservation. Wade’s black hair was cut so short that it didn’t seem so dark, but Randy’s fell over his eyes like a Gothic veil. Wade’s eyes, black as Wyoming coal, floated like pearls on the pond of a Japanese meditation garden while Randy’s raged like obsidian stones caught in water spouts in the River Styx. Wade wore no jewelry except for a watch purchased at a discount store while Randy’s ear lobes glittered with strings of zirconium studs.

 “Hi, Randy. How ya feelin’?”

The young man glared briefly at the sheriff and turned his head in silence.

The sheriff edged closer to the bed and tried again, gently, but firmly. “Can you tell me what happened last night?”

Silence.

“Look, Randy. I can’t help you unless you talk to me.”

“Yeah, like you really wanna help me.”

Nick Scarpelli had seen this attitude before. Hell, he had lived it. Twenty-five years earlier, that could have been him lying in that hospital bed with a cop hovering over him. He decided to try a different tack.

“I brought you something,” he said, pulling a plastic bag from his pocket. Randy’s eyes widened at the sight of the broken beaded bracelet. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”

“What happened to it?” asked Randy.

“We found it in the barn.” The sheriff took a deep breath. “Believe it or not,” he continued, “I do want to help you, but I can’t do that unless you tell me what happened. Why don’t you start by telling me what you were doing in the barn last night?”

Randy stared at Nick like he wanted to say something but didn’t know where to start.

“I know you were taking drugs. What was it? Heroin, crack?”

“Just pot,” replied Randy meekly. “I never touch the hard stuff.” Nick noticed the eyebrows on Wade’s forehead rise ever so slightly, but he decided not to challenge the boy on that point—not yet anyway.

“OK, and did that have anything to do with why you were in the barn?”

“Sometimes I go there to hide out, and sometimes I go there just to crash.”

Good. That’s a start.

“Was there anybody in the barn when you went in there?”

“No, I don’t think so…at least, I didn’t see anybody else.”

“So, Carl came into the barn after you were already there.”

“Carl?”

“Carl Pipkins, one of the new hires.” Randy stared quizzically. “The man who was killed.”

“Killed? Oh, my God! Carl was killed?”

“You must’ve seen him, Randy.”

“No, I didn’t, I swear. I went up into the hayloft to smoke a joint. I crashed, and the next thing I knew, I woke up here in the hospital.”

“And you weren’t doing anything but pot?”

“No, I swear.”

“And you don’t remember seeing or hearing Carl Pipkins or anyone else in the barn that night?”

“No! Oh, fuck!” the boy screamed. “You think I killed him, don’t you? Holy shit!”

“That’s enough!” yelled Dr. Singh, responding to the rapidly increasing tones on the heart monitor.

“Just a couple more questions,” said Nick.

“No,” snapped the doctor. “Do you want to kill him? Get out! Now!”

10 Years Earlier

“Hey, that’s my sandwich!”

“Correction, kid. It was your sandwich. Now it’s mine.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Tough shit,” said the older boy.

“What am I s’posed to eat now?”

“You want somethin’ to eat?” asked the bully, chomping off a big chunk of the sandwich. “Here. Eat this,” he commanded, slapping a big wad of cud on the table in front of the little one.

“I’m gonna tell what you did.”

“Well, we’ll see about that,” said the bully, scooping up the slop and dragging the little one down the hallway to the boys’ room. “What the hell are you looking at?” he sniped at the three boys smoking in the corner of the room. Once they had vacated the premises, he shoved the little one into one of the empty toilet stalls.  “You’re hungry, huh? Eat this, turd,” he ordered, stuffing the cud into the little boy’s mouth and forcing him to swallow it. As the little boy choked, the older boy added, “Jeez, I’ll bet you’re thirsty now. Well, here. Have a drink.” The little one came up gasping for breath when the bully finally pulled his head from the toilet.