Montana

Book 1: Montana

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Two families. Nine generations. One stretch of land under the Big Sky of Montana Territory.

From national bestselling authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone, a bold new saga of the American West centuries in the making, from the brave ranchers who staked their claims in the spring of 1842, to the lawmen who risked their lives to keep them, and the descendants who carried their dreams into the 21st century…

Bordered by the Blackfeet Reservation to the north and mountain ranges to the east and west, Cutthroat County is seven-hundred glorious square miles of Big Sky grandeur. For generations, the Maddox and Drew families have ruled the county—often at odds with each other. Today, Ashton Maddox runs the biggest Black Angus ranch in the country, while County Sheriff John T. Drew upholds the law like his forefathers did over a century ago. A lot has changed since the county was established in 1891. But some things feel straight out of the 1800s. Especially when cows start disappearing from the ranches. . .

Residents and news media still recall a gun-blazing tale of the land-grabbing battles fought by Maddox’s and Drew’s ancestors. Meanwhile, their present-day descendants face a new kind of war that’s every bit as bloody. Sheriff Drew’s girlfriend/deputy is shot and seriously wounded in what appears to be a routine traffic stop. When Ashton Maddox’s rival rancher’s foreman is found murdered and a modern-day vigilante group hires a hard-drinking, publicity-hungry retired Texas Ranger to investigate, Drew and Maddox decide to do what their forefathers did so many years ago: join forces against a common enemy. Risk their skins against all odds. And keep the dream of Montana alive for generations to come . . .

Release date: January 23, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

After opening the back door, Ashton Maddox stepped inside his ranch home in the foothills of the Always Winter Mountains. His boots echoed hollowly on the hardwood floors as he walked from the garage through the utility room, then the kitchen, and into the living room.

Someone had left the downstairs lights on for him, thank God, because he was exhausted after spending four days in Helena, mingling with a congressman and two lobbyists—even though the Legislature wouldn’t meet till the first Monday in January—plus lobbyists and business associates, then leaving at the end of business this afternoon and driving to Great Falls for another worthless but costly meeting with a private investigator. After crawling back into his Ford SUV, he’d spent two more hours driving only twelve miles on the interstate, then a little more than a hundred winding, rough, wind-buffeted miles with hardly any headlights or taillights to break up the darkness, which meant having to pay constant attention to avoid colliding with elk, deer, bear, Blackfoot Indian, buffalo, and even an occasional moose.

Somehow, the drive from Basin Creek to the ranch road always seemed the worst stretch of the haul. Because he knew what he would find when he got home.

An empty house.

He was nothing short of complete exhaustion.

But, since he was a Maddox, he found enough stamina to switch on more lights and climb the staircase, clomp, clomp, clomp to the second floor, where his right hand found another switch, pushed it up, and let the wagon wheel chandelier and wall sconces bathe the upper story in unnatural radiance.

Still running, the grandfather clock said it was a quarter past midnight.

His father would have scolded him for leaving all those lights on downstairs, wasting electricity—not cheap in this part of Montana. His grandfather would have reminded both of them about how life was before electricity and television and gas-guzzling pickup trucks.

Reaching his office, Ashton flicked on another switch, hung his gray Stetson on the elk horn on the wall, and pulled a heavy Waterford crystal tumbler off the bookshelf before making a beeline toward the closet. He opened the door and stared at the mini–ice maker.

His father and grandfather had also rebuked him for years about building a house on the top of the hill. “This is Montana, boy,” Grandpa had scolded time and again. “The wind up that high’ll blow you clear down to Coloradie.”

Per his nature, Ashton’s father had put it bluntly. “Putting on airs, boy. Just putting on airs.”

What, Ashton wondered, would Grandpa and Daddy say about having an ice maker in his closet? “Waste of water and electricity!”

Not that he cared a fig about what either of those hard rocks might have thought. They were six feet under. Had been for years. But no matter how long he lived, no matter how many millions of dollars he earned, he would always hear their voices.

Grandpa: The Maddoxes might as well just start birthin’ girls.

Daddy: If you’d gone through Vietnam like I did, you might know a thing or two.

Ashton opened the ice maker’s lid, scooped up the right number of cubes, and left the closet door open as he walked back to the desk, his boot heels pounding on the hardwood floor. Once he set the tumbler on last week’s Sunday Denver Post, which he still had never gotten around to reading, he found the bottle of Blanton’s Single Barrel, and poured until bourbon and ice reached the rim.

Grandpa would have suffered an apoplexy had he known that a Maddox paid close to two hundred bucks, including tax, for seven hundred and fifty milliliters of Kentucky bourbon. Both his grandpa and father would have given him grief about drinking bourbon anyway. As far back as anyone could recollect, Maddox men had been rye drinkers.

The cheaper the better.

“If it burns,” his father had often said, “I yearns.”

Ashton sipped. Good whiskey is worth every penny, he thought.

Glass still in his hand, he crossed the room till he reached the large window. The heavy drapes had already been pulled open—not that he could remember, but he probably had left them that way before driving down to the state capital.

They used to have a cleaning lady who would have closed them. One of the hired men’s wife, sweetheart, concubine, whatever. But that man had gotten a job in Wyoming, and she had followed him. And with Patricia gone, Ashton didn’t see any need to have floors swept and furniture dusted.

He debated closing the drapes, but what was the point? He could step outside on the balcony. Get some fresh air. Close his eyes and just feel the coolness, the sereneness of a summer night in Montana. Years ago, he had loved that—even when the wind come a-sweepin’ ’cross the high plains. Grandpa had not been fooling about that wind, but Ashton Maddox knew what he was doing and what the weather was like when he told the man at M.R. Russell Construction Company exactly what he wanted and exactly where he wanted his house.

Well, rather, where Patricia had wanted it.

Wherever she was now.

He stood there, sipping good bourbon and feeling rotten, making himself look into the night that never was night. Not like it used to be.

“You can see forever,” Patricia had told him on their first night, before Russell’s subcontractor had even gotten the electricity installed.

He could still see forever. Forever. Hades stretching on from here north to the Pole and east toward the Dakotas, forever and ever and ever, amen.

The door opened. Boots sounded heavy on the floor, coming close, then a grunt, the hitching of jeans, and the sound of a hat dropping on Ashton’s desk. “How was Helena?” foreman Colter Norris asked in his gruff monotone.

“Waste of time.” Ashton did not turn around. He lifted his tumbler and sipped more bourbon.

“You read that gal’s hatchet job in that rag folks call the Big Sky Monthly?”

“Skimmed it. Heard some coffee rats talking about it at the Stirrup.”

“Well, that gal sure made a hero out of our sheriff.”

Ashton saw Colter’s reflection in the plate glass window.

“And made Garland Foster sound like some homespun hick hero, cacklin’ out flapdoodle about cattle and sheep prices and how wind’s gonna save us all.” Holding a longneck beer in his left hand, Colter lifted his dark beer bottle and took a long pull.

Ashton started to raise his tumbler, but lowered it, shook his head, and whispered, “‘while beef and wool prices fluctuate, the wind always blows in this country.’”

The bottle Colter held lowered rapidly. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.” Ashton took a good pull of bourbon, let some ice fall into his mouth, and crunched it, grinding it down, down, down.

The foreman frowned. “Thought you said you just skimmed that gal’s exposé.” Colter never missed a thing—a sign, a clear shot with a .30-.30, a trout’s strike, or a half-baked sentence someone mumbled.

Raising the tumbler again, Ashton held the Waterford toward the window. “He didn’t put up those wind turbines,” he said caustically, “because of any market concerns.” He shook his head, and cursed his neighboring rancher softly. “He put those up to torment me. All day. All night.”

A man couldn’t see the spinning blades at that time of night. But no one could escape the flashing red warning lights. Blinking on. Blinking off. On and off. Red light. No light. Red light. No light. Red light. Red . . . red . . . red . . . red . . . all night long. All night long till dawn finally broke. There had to be more wind turbines on Foster’s land than that skinflint had ever run cattle or sheep.

Ashton turned away and stared across the room. Colter held the longneck, his face showing a few days growth of white and black stubble and that bushy mustache with the ends twisted into a thin curl. The face, like his neck and wrists and the forearms as far as he could roll up the sleeves of his work shirts, were bronzed from wind and sun and scarred from horse wrecks and bar fights. The nose had been busted so many times, Ashton often wondered how his foreman even managed to breathe.

“You didn’t come up here to get some gossip about a college girl’s story in some slick magazine,” Ashton told him. “Certainly not after I’ve spent three hours driving in a night as dark as pitch from Helena to here by way of Great Falls.”

“No, sir.” The man set his beer next to the bottle of fine bourbon.

“Couldn’t wait till breakfast, I take it.” Ashton started to bring the crystal tumbler up again, but saw it contained nothing but melting ice and his own saliva. “I figured not.”

Few people could read Colter’s face. Ashton had given up years ago. But he didn’t have to read the cowboy’s face. The voice told him everything he needed to know.

Colter wasn’t here because some hired hand had wrecked a truck or ruined a good horse and had been paid off, then kicked off the ranch. Colter wasn’t here because someone got his innards gored by a steer’s horn or kicked to pieces by a bull or widow-making horse.

Frowning, Ashton set the glass on a side table, walked to the window, found the pull, and closed the drapes. At least he couldn’t see those flashing red lights on wind turbines any longer.

Walking back, his cold blue eyes met Colter’s hard greens. “Let’s have it,” Ashton said.

The foreman obeyed. “We’re short.”

Ashton’s head cocked just a fraction. No punch line came. But he had not expected one. Most cowboys Ashton knew had wickedly acerbic senses of humor—or thought they did—but Colter had never cracked a joke. Hardly even let a smile crack the grizzled façade of his face. Still, the rancher could not believe what he had heard.

“We’re . . . short?”

Colter’s rugged head barely moved up and down once.

Ashton reached down, pulled the fancy cork out of the bottle, and splashed two fingers of amber beauty into the tumbler. He didn’t care about ice. He drank half of it down and looked again at his foreman.

No question was needed.

“Sixteen head. Section fifty-four at Dead Indian Pony Crick.” His pronunciation of creek was same as many Westerners.

Ashton took his glass and rising anger to the modern map hanging on the north-facing wall, underneath the bearskin. Colter left his empty longneck on the desk and followed, but the foreman knew better than to point.

Ashton knew his ranch, leased and owned, better than anyone living. He found section fifty-four quickly, pointed a finger wet from the tumbler, and then began circling around, slowly, reading the topography and the roads. “You see any truck tracks?”

“No, sir. Even hard-pressed, a body’d never get a truck into that country ’cept on our roads. What passes for roads, I mean. Our boys don’t even take ATVs into that section. Shucks, we’re even careful about what horses we ride when working up there.”

Ashton nodded in agreement. “Steers? Bull or . . . ?”

“Heifers.”

“Who discovered they were missing?”

“Dante Crump.”

Ashton’s head bobbed again. Crump had been working for the Circle M for seven years. He was the only cowboy Ashton had ever known who went to church regularly on Sundays. Most of the others were sleeping off hangovers till Mondays. A rancher might question the honesty of many cowboys, but no one ever accused Dante Crump of anything except having a conscience and a soul.

Ashton kept studying the map. He even forgot he was holding a glass of expensive bourbon.

Colter cleared his throat. “No bear tracks. No carcasses. The cattle just vanished.”

“Horse tracks?” Ashton turned away from the big wall map.

The cowboy’s head shook. “Some. But Dante had rode ’cross that country—me and Homer Cooper, too—before we even considered them cattle got stoled. So we couldn’t tell if the tracks were ours or their’uns.”

“Do we have any more cattle up that way?” Ashton asked.

“Not now. We’d left fifty in the section in September. Dante went there to take them to the higher summer pasture. Found bones and carcasses of three. About normal, but he took only thirty-one up. So best I can figure is that sixteen got rustled.”

“Rustled.” Ashton chuckled without mirth. The word sounded like something straight out of an old Western movie or TV show.

“Yeah,” the foreman said. “I don’t never recollect your daddy sayin’ nothin’ ’bout rustlers.”

“Because it never happened.” Ashton let out another mirthless chuckle. “I don’t even think my grandpa had to cope with rustlers, unless some starving Blackfoot cut out a calf or half-starved steer for his family. Grandpa had his faults, but he wasn’t one to begrudge any man with a hungry wife and kids.” He sighed, shook his head, and stared at Colter. “You’re sure those heifers aren’t just hiding in that rough country?”

The man’s eyes glared. “I said so” was all he said.

That was good enough for Ashton, just as it had been good enough for his father.

“Could they have just wandered to another pasture?”

“Homer Cooper rode the lines,” the foreman said. “He said no fence was down. Sure ain’t goin’ ’cross no cattle guards, and the gates was all shut and locked.”

They studied each other, thinking the same thought. An inside job. A Circle M cowboy taking a few Black Angus for himself. But even that made no sense. No one could sneak sixteen head all the way from that pasture to the main road without being seen or leaving sign.

“How?” Ashton shook his head again. “How in heaven’s name . . . ?”

Colter shrugged. “Those hippies livin’ ’cross the highway on Bonner Flats will say it was extraterrestrials.” Said without a smile, it probably wasn’t a joke.

In fact, Ashton had to agree with the weathered cowboy.

The Basin River Weekly Item had reported cattle turning up missing at smaller ranches in the county, but Ashton had figured those animals had probably just wandered off. The ranchers weren’t really ranchers. Just folks wealthy enough to buy land and lease a pasture from the feds for grazing and have themselves a quiet place to come to and get a good tax break on top of it. Like that TV director or producer or company executive who ran buffalo on his place and had his own private helicopter. There were only two real ranchers left in Cutthroat County, though Ashton would never publicly admit that Garland Foster was a real rancher. He’d been mostly a sheepman since arriving in Cutthroat County, and he was hardly even that anymore.

Ashton looked at the curtains that kept him from seeing those flashing red lights all across Foster’s spread. “How did someone manage to get sixteen Black Angus of our herd out of there? Without a truck or trucks. Without being seen? That’s what perplexes me.” He moved back to the map, reached his left hand up to the crooked line marked in blue type—Dead Indian Pony Creek—and traced it down to the nearest two-track, then followed that to the ranch road, then down the eleven miles to the main highway.

Colter moved closer to the map. Those hard eyes narrowed as he memorized the topography, the roads, paths, streams, canyons, everything. Then he seemed to dismiss the map and remember the country from personal experience, riding a half-broke cowpony in that rough, hard, impenetrable country in the spring, the summer, the fall. Probably not the winter, though. Not in northern Montana. Not unless a man was desperate or suicidal.

His head shook after thirty seconds. “I can take some boys up, see if we can find a trail.”

Ashton shook his head. He had forgotten about a wife who had left him, had dismissed a fruitless trip to the state capital, and then an even more unproductive meeting in a Great Falls coffee shop with a high-priced private dick. “No point in that,” he said. “They stole sixteen head of prime Black Angus because we were sleeping. Anyone who has lived in Montana for a month knows you might catch Ashton Maddox asleep once, and only once. I’ll never make that mistake again. They won’t be back there. Any missing head elsewhere?”

“Nothin’ yet,” Colter replied. “But I ain’t got all the tallies yet.”

Ashton remembered the bourbon and raised the tumbler as he gave his foreman that look that needed no interpretation. “I want those tallies done right quick. There’s one thing in my book that sure hasn’t changed since the eighteen hundreds. Nobody steals Circle M beef and gets away with it.”

One of these days, Mary Broadbent thought, I’ll learn how to cook.

Then she wouldn’t have to eat breakfast at the Wild Bunch Casino.

At 7:19 A.M. the counter was packed. She had learned fast after arriving in Basin Creek two years back that she was not the only person in Cutthroat County who couldn’t cook.

A highway construction worker in his orange safety vest and hard hat was shouting for another Coors when he turned to see Mary walk inside. His mouth hung open for what seemed like minutes, and then he spun around on the dingy black stool and called out to the waitress, “Make it a coffee, sweetheart. Don’t leave room for any milk or nothin’.”

His friends chuckled and went about mopping up runny eggs with biscuits straight from a package and slurping down their coffees. A pockmarked teen turned around from a video keno game and smiled at her, then winked. She shook her head, thought about asking him if his mama and daddy knew he was cutting class this morning, but then realized the boy had probably dropped out of school in eighth grade.

She dismissed eating at the counter and found a table near the big window. A truck driver sat alone at one table, waiting on his breakfast, and tourists—a balding man, plump wife, two grade-school-age kids, likely home-schooled since it was early May—sat with their specials of the day. They’d be the ones in the SUV rental out front. Probably on their way back from Glacier National Park to the airport. Billings . . . Great Falls . . . maybe Missoula . . . possibly as far away as Salt Lake City or Denver. She’d seen the silver Chrysler Pacifica parked in front of a unit at the Cowboy Up Motel yesterday evening.

The boy stared wild-eyed at the automatic pistol holstered on her hip.

“Don’t stare,” his father whispered over his coffee.

“She’s got a gun,” the boy whispered back. “She’s a cop.”

“A policeman.” The mother gasped, looked up at Mary, and smiled. “Sorry. A policewoman.”

“Like Angie Dickinson.” The truck driver laughed at his joke. The parents, it appeared, were too young to remember television from the 1970s.

Fact was, Mary Broadbent was too young to have seen the original run of that series, but she had heard so many references to Police Woman, she had grown used to it. She had googled the show just to see what the fuss was about, and quickly decided there were worse actresses to be compared to than Angie Dickinson.

Mary had blond hair, blue eyes, too, but any resemblance probably ended there. She was short. At five foot, two inches, barely tall enough to get into Montana Law Enforcement Academy, and four inches above the minimum height to be a United States Marine. But she was solid, strong, and smart. Of course, she could never wear tights the way Angie did in Rio Bravo—the only movie Mary could recall ever seeing Angie Dickinson in.

Pulling out the chair, Mary removed her hat, laid it on the other side of the table, and sat down. The little girl, maybe five years old, stared over her cereal bowl.

Mary smiled. The girl smiled back.

“Are you having a nice vacation?” Mary asked.

The girl shook her head. “We haven’t seen a bear or eagles.”

Mary nodded, leaned forward, and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “Want to know something?”

The parents looked on in silence. The boy’s mouth hung open, unable to believe a sheriff’s deputy was talking to his kid sister.

“I’ve lived here just over two years, and I’ve never seen a bear once.” Well, she thought, not a live one.

“Really?”

“Cross my heart,” Mary said, and looked up at Polly Poe, the redheaded waitress who had been working there forever.

“Coffee and the Number Four.”

“What I figured,” Polly said, and went back to the counter.

“How about an eagle?”

Mary blinked, found the girl again, and smiled.

“Yes. I have seen eagles. Which way are you going from here?”

“East Glacier,” the father answered.

She had guessed wrong. They had not come from but were going to. Vacation had just started. No wonder the girl hadn’t seen an eagle yet. “Well, when you get into the Always Winter Mountains, just look high in the trees along the river. And if you’re going into the park, I’m pretty sure you’ll spot many an eagle. Some osprey, too.”

The boy found his voice. “What’s an osprey?”

“A raptor,” Mary said. “Like an eagle. Looks like a bald eagle a bit. They both have white heads, but the eagle’s is solid white. And the eagle is bigger. The osprey’s body is white, the eagle’s dark. Both are absolutely beautiful to see.” She smiled.

Polly came with her coffee and a glass of water.

Mary let the tourists get back to their breakfast, and she stared out the window as Basin Creek came to life. Across the street, a Chevy truck stopped, and two men climbed out, walked to the bed, and pulled out a sign. She let out a sigh as the two men began pounding a sign into the grass.

Too bad, she thought. If she were outside, she could cite them for illegal parking, but they’d be gone by the time she got across the street. And John would chastise her for writing a ticket for a village offense when her jurisdiction was Cutthroat County . . . and for giving Carl Lorimer more copy to fill his Basin River Weekly Item.

A black sedan caught her eye next as it turned left, which meant coming in from the north, and parked next to her navy blue Interceptor. A white-haired man stepped out, glanced at Mary’s SUV, and reached back inside his car, over the driver’s seat and into the passenger side. He pulled out a cowboy hat, and settled it on his head. As though that made him a cowboy. It was a cheap hat, probably off the shelf at the Wantlands Mercantile. New, black, it had the standard curled brim and ubiquitous cattleman crease. He wore jeans and a blue shirt. The boots were scuffed, worn, with those awful-looking ultra-wide, flat toes.

He walked away from the car, which chirped as he hit the lock button on the keychain, and walked inside. Having paid his bill, the truck driver stopped and sucked in his stomach as he let the man in the new cowboy hat slide past him.

The car . . . the man . . . seemed familiar.

“See ya, doll,” the trucker called to Polly, nodding at the cash and change by his empty plate, and left the restaurant for his Mack truck and empty trailer.

The newcomer looked at the table and sat down. He didn’t even look at the counter or the other tables. He sat and looked out the window.

He was neither handsome nor ugly. Average height and weight. The type of man most people would hardly give a second glance. But there was something about him, the way he looked, held himself. His eyes studied everything outside the window.

Now, if she were a suspicious detective, Mary would try to figure out what he was up to. But what would anyone be up to in Basin Creek? Planning a bank heist? There was a First Bank branch in the courthouse, which was little more than an ATM. Most people did their banking in Choteau or Cut Bank. Construction workers, and sometimes even Mary, often cashed their checks at the Wantlands Mercantile, where Dottie took out only a couple of dollars for the trouble—during peak season, anyway. She’d charge more in winter when money got tight throughout the county.

But Mary was pretty sure the man looked familiar because she had seen him on a poster. Maybe if she had gotten more sleep last night . . .

Polly hurried over with a rag. Maybe she thought the guy would steal her tip. She said, “Lemme clean this up for you, mister.”

The man reached over, grabbed the bills and change, and held them out for her, smiling.

“Why, thank you, hon,” Polly said, and took the money and stuffed it inside the apron pocket. She busied herself wiping down the table. That trucker ate like a pig. Then Polly stepped back, shoved the rag inside the back pocket of her jeans, wiped her hands on the front pant legs and smiled. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Hot tea?” he asked.

“We can do that for you, yes sir.” Polly bit her lower lip. “Let’s see. I think we got black tea, and lemon tea, or I can pour you some iced tea—unsweetened—and put it in the microwave.”

“Your choice.” He smiled again.

Mary didn’t recognize the voice.

Smitten, Polly said, “I’ll fetch you a menu. Our special today’s corned beef hash.” Leaning. . .