Honor Road Jason Ross (any book recommendations .TXT) 📖

The girl—Leah—shuffled her feet. “A family stays together forever, unless someone commits a sin against the Holy Ghost. Committing a sin against the Holy Ghost is like spitting on God’s wife. That person goes to Outer Darkness. Are we going back to get my dad?”

Cameron thought about his dad. Dead, on his precious couch, decomposing in the California heat, his cells collapsing one-by-one, dripping into that unsightly swale in the collapsing middle. His dad and that couch would be together forever, now, until Judgement Day, sins against the Holy Ghost or not.

Cameron’s mom had inherited an expanding waistline from “her people.” He wondered what he’d inherited from his dad. A lonely, meaningless death, most likely.

He reached out, put his hand on the girl’s head and smiled. The calories had kicked in and he felt better than he had in weeks. She wasn’t his daughter, but she felt like family anyway. Like a niece or a cousin’s kid.

“Let’s go get him,” Cameron said. It sounded galactically stupid, but it felt like Christmas morning.

He slung his rifle and followed her back to the thicket.

14

Sage Ross

Donna Butterton Residence

Elgin, Oregon

Sage laughed and tossed down the last of his beer. It was getting warm, anyway. The girl had been poking fun at Enterprise High—the only high school over in Wallowa County. Apparently, La Grande had beaten them in football ten years running. To call it a rivalry might be overstating things. Enterprise High pulled from three thousand residents and La Grande pulled from twenty-seven thousand. Raw math was on La Grande’s side.

Talking to the girl—she’d said her name was Aimee—felt like taking a shower after working in the dust. She even smelled like civilization. Sage could listen to her prattle of local gossip for days. When she talked, he forgot about freezing to death up on Blue Mountain. He forgot about killing those men. Sitting with Aimee on her mother’s couch felt like returning, finally, from war.

When he first came back from his recon mission into Wallowa County, Captain Chambers hailed him as a conquering hero, like a special forces soldier embedded in the captain’s department for “high value missions.” Apparently, they’d expected him to get picked up right away and sent directly back. The fact that he’d lasted three days, then returned with information on cattle numbers and general intel, catapulted Sage into the inner circle of the police department. When he reported about his meeting with Commissioner Pete, Captain Chambers leaned over his desk in disbelief.

“That self-righteous sonofabitch had a meeting with you?” Sage nodded, not sure what it meant. “I haven’t been able to get him to talk to me since the meltdown—that stuck-up prick. Cattlemen are all like that.” He sat back abruptly in his chair. “They think they’re the only true cowboys. Unless you have a hundred head or more, you’re not even a man to them.”

After his successful recon mission into Wallowa, the department moved Sage into the town of La Grande, to a room at the Best Western hotel. They took him off the security duty roster. Instead, Sage worked out of the police station, though they hadn’t given him anything specific yet to do. For the time being, he went for coffee and food from the town square, where the ladies ran a soup kitchen. The higher-ups in the department took Sage with them on important calls as a back-up gunman, like when they got reports of theft or trespassing by out-of-towners. They even issued him a Glock 17, nine millimeter sidearm.

The hundreds of rank-and-file officers—really more of a militia—called the captain and his close confidants “The Five.” The Five were all high school buddies, had gone to La Grande High School, and had served in the La Grande police department for a decade or more. Sage became their mascot.

Sage’s acquaintances from the militia started calling him “Number Six.” Sage preferred that to “Stack,” but it made him nervous when they said the “six” thing around one of the actual Five. He wasn’t there to rock the boat. He’d promised his dad that he’d do whatever it took to survive, and serving, heads-down, loyal to the La Grande police department was as close to a sure thing as he’d probably find in America. He was not going to screw it up.

The fringe benefits, as it turned out, were out-of-this-world, and they included Aimee Butterton.

The Five, plus Sage, had taken their Sunday afternoon jaunt over to the town of Elgin, as was their custom. There, they visited the home of Donna Butterton and her daughters. The man of the house had passed away years before Black Autumn in a four-wheeler accident, but he’d left behind a beautiful wife and five gorgeous farmer’s daughters, each with chestnut hair and sparkling green eyes. The youngest, Aimee, was still too old for Sage, but she seemed like she was into him, so he sat back and enjoyed the ride.

Sage had never had much trouble with the ladies. He was a trim, corded-arm teenage stud with a winning smile and a devil-may-care whip of the hair. His good looks and his dad’s mansion bought him entré into any social circle he wanted, back in Utah.

Like every high school boy who won at the game of popularity, Sage knew deep down it was all bullshit. He hadn’t done anything to be esteemed by anyone, and the ladies who flocked to him were seeing what he wanted them to see—decent genes and his dad’s money.

Back then, he wasn’t about to turn his back on a good thing, so he enjoyed rolling around with the hottest chicks; turning and burning through the Instagram Hall of Fame in his hometown of Oakview.

Then, one day, the cleaning lady found weed in the bottom of his dresser drawer. The maid belonged to some kind of uptight religion, so she went to Sage’s dad with his baggie of skank. His dad freaked out, Sage cut loose, screaming obscenities at his old man, and got his