Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

As he made the last climb back to Union County, Sage thought about Commissioner Pete and the little dog. It was a sacred thing, to see a man before God on his porch. The commissioner had worn his flannel pajamas, but his soul was naked in the moonlit hours before dawn. The man, lavishing affection on a ridiculous dog, had been the same person who arrested Sage and fed him a burger. There’d been no difference between the two—no fakery, no pretension, no phony friendship. Commissioner Pete—the man he would help capture or maybe even kill —was undeniably good. The truth made Sage a villain in this story. Could he live with himself, knowing that he’d brought down a good man?

Sage pushed into the climb and let the sweat and the cold numb him. He decided to take it one-thing-at-a-time, and now, he knew what was next: the arms and lips of Aimee Butterton.

Sage reached the police cruiser with time to spare. He didn’t bother driving into La Grande. He needed her touch and he could shower at her house.

He parked the police cruiser around the corner from the Buttertons, then walked the last quarter mile on the gravel lane. There wasn’t nearly as much snow in the town of Elgin as Wallowa Valley, a thousand feet higher in elevation.

Sage knocked, and Mrs. Butterton showed him in. He was the first to arrive for the Sunday visit. His eyes followed the swing of her ass in her customary denim, and he almost missed the loaded glance that Mrs. Butterton shot Aimee as she showed him into her room.

What was that? he wondered.

Then, the sight of the girl swept away any rational thought. She was dressed in cut-off shorts with the fringe hugging the line where her ass met her legs. On top, she wore a perfectly-crisp, white T-shirt that rode the curve of her breasts like the snowfields he’d just crossed to get here. He could almost see her nipples finishing the perfect curve with a “screw-you” to gravity.

He blinked, wordless. She laughed out loud.

“Don’t just stand there.” She flashed her bright smile. “Go shower.”

Sage realized he still wore his snowshoeing getup: layered, merino wool top, fleece mid-layer and a wind shell. He’d worn his snow pants to the house because he had nothing else to change into.

“Does your dad’s closet have, um, a pair of sweats or something I could borrow? Maybe a T-shirt, too?”

The mention of her dad sent a cloud across her face, but her smile returned. “Yeah, but you’re going to be swimming in them. He was a big guy. I’ll find you something. They’ll be outside the bathroom door.” She pointed toward the hallway. “To the showers, Soldier.”

Soldier?

Sage tore his eyes away from her breasts and headed out of her room. It took a second for him to identify the door that must be the bathroom—the slightly narrower one. He didn’t want to wander into her mom’s room by mistake. She’d probably be getting made up for the captain.

Sage dreaded the coming debrief with Chambers. Once he told the captain what he’d seen, there’d be no way to stop the coming conflict.

Heck, he thought as he dug through the cupboard for a towel. There probably wasn’t anything he could do anyway. Captain Chambers had his cap set on taking down Commissioner Pete. Sage was just the new guy following orders.

He hurried through his shower because the water was ice cold. The natural gas lines had died long before Sage had arrived. After the miserable shower, he reached blindly into the hallway and felt a stack of fabric. Indeed, it was a pair of unfamiliar underwear, some gray sweats, and an “Elgin Eagles” T-shirt.

Aimee laughed when he returned to her room. “We need to fatten you up, young man.” She reached over and pulled him close by the waistband of the sweats.

He let himself be tipped off-balance, and fell on top of her on the bed. He was freezing and needed her warmth. They toppled into a deep kiss, and from there, directly to the good stuff. Sage abandoned his worries while they had sex, but afterwards, his grinding guilt returned.

As much as it seemed like a bad idea, he couldn’t stop himself from talking to her about his misgivings. The flush of hormones swamped him and his mouth proceeded without checking itself. He knew he should minimize risk of something bad getting back to the captain, but he had an agonizing need to sort this out.

Could he trust her?

Aimee took it surprisingly well—the story of his recon into Wallowa. He told her about Commissioner Pete and his dog. Sage admitted that he was having second thoughts.

She listened in silence until he finished. “You’re not from around here,” she stated the obvious. “You don’t know our history, and you don’t understand the rivalry between Wallowa and Union. We share a lot of family ties. Ranch land has gone back and forth, split so many different ways between siblings, cousins and distant relations. Today, there’s bad blood everywhere you look. Pete Lathrop and Wallowa County screwed us over, big time, when they deeded the Zumwalt prairie over to the Nature Conservancy. In one stroke, those tree-hugging assholes sold out the elk hunting land we’d used for the last hundred years. You don’t understand, Sage. Trust me—Commissioner Pete is NOT who you think he is. He’s a dirty, double-dealing bastard. If you get the chance to knock him down a peg or two, you take it.”

Her eyes burned with fury—an anger that’d probably been passed down through her DNA. When she said the words “ranch land” it almost rhymed with “holy ground.”

Then, she flashed back to her effervescent smile and his apprehension melted away. “I’m just saying,” she reiterated, “you’re doing the right thing, helping Captain Chambers. One word of advice, though: you can talk to me about this stuff, but don’t ever talk to anyone else.