Gone (Michael Bennett)

about the nanny job in New York City, she’d originally envisioned taking care of some megawealthy power couple’s two children, wheeling them in an expensive stroller through Central Park when she wasn’t taking them to art museums or helping them with their French. The gig she got instead, of course, couldn’t have been further from her expectations. Instead of the power couple, her boss was the NYPD’s busiest detective, and he didn’t have two kids but two kids multiplied by five.
    But she’d done it. That was the funny part. By hook or by crook, over the last several years, she’d learned to effectively manage the rambunctious Bennett clan. Not only had she kept them mostly fed (those teens were bottomless pits), cleanly clothed, and educated, but what filled her with the most pride was that she was actually making strides in teaching them to take care of each other and themselves.
    Though her work was at times quite painful and sometimes seemed hopeless, she was managing to accomplish the hardest, most important, and most unsung job on the face of the earth—raising a large crop of good human beings.
    And just when she was cruising, just when she had achieved the mammoth task of getting down everyone’s schedules and tics in New York City, what happens? A criminal from one of Mike’s cases targets them all for assassination, and they’re ripped from their lives and deposited three thousand miles away, on a California cattle farm.
    It was the most recent events that seemed the most impossible. That someone was actually out to kill her and the kids, someone she had never met, had never done anything to—she just couldn’t understand how any human being could actually be that inhuman.
    But she knew it was true, of course. It certainly terrified her. Her dreams these days were mostly nightmares where she woke up expecting figures to be standing in the dark beside her bed. It had gotten so bad that she’d taken to loading one of the shotguns and laying it on the floor next to the bed, under a blanket. That helped, at least a little.
    She flung the dregs of her tea on the ground and tightened the cap on the thermos. She let out a sigh as she tucked the thermos back into the saddlebag. Sleeping with one eye open, with a shotgun under the bed , she thought, shaking her head. She was out in the Wild West, all right.
    As if reading her thoughts, Spike suddenly snorted out a kind of sigh himself.
    Mary Catherine laughed as she scratched Spike between his ears.
    “C’mon, old friend,” she said. “It’s getting late. I guess it’s time for us poor workhorses to get going. Time to head them off at the pass.”

CHAPTER 39
     
    MARY CATHERINE GOT LOST on her way back to Cody’s farm.
    It was her own dumb fault. As she led Spike through a stand of cypress and black oak, she’d spotted a smaller trail off the main one that she thought looked like a shortcut. But it wasn’t. After a while, the path started going up instead of down and turning in the wrong direction, north instead of south.
    She was just about to give up on it, about half a mile in, when there was a rustle on her right and a man stepped out onto the trail behind her. Spike, startled, wheeled around, rearing back on his hind legs, almost throwing her.
    Mary Catherine managed to calm the horse and get him completely turned around. She sat there, blinking at the figure. He was a scraggly, thin, young white guy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. Beneath his khaki bush hat, long brown hair fell to his shoulders.
    There was also an olive-colored strap over his arm, and then she saw the black barrel of the rifle sticking up over his back.
    Gun! she thought, freaking out. The cartel! They were here! We’ve been found out!
    “Can I help you?” the young man said, something sharp in his voice.
    Not the cartel? Some maniac, then? Mary Catherine thought, still round eyed and frozen in the saddle. An off-the-reservation militia person?
    Then she realized it. Why he seemed angry. She actually clapped a hand to her forehead.
    “Oh, no. I rode onto your property, didn’t I?” Mary Catherine said. “I’m so sorry. I’m staying at Aaron Cody’s place, and I went out for a morning ride. I thought this was a shortcut back. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t mean to trespass.”
    “Oh, Mr. Cody’s. I see,” the guy said, the tension in his voice immediately gone.
    He tipped back his hat and smiled, and Mary Catherine suddenly