Montana Creeds: Tyler Read Online Free PDF

Jake’s funeral—”
    Messed up? They’d gotten into the mother of all brawls, he and Logan and Dylan, down at Skivvie’s Tavern. Wound up in jail, in fact, and gone their separate ways—after saying a lot of things that couldn’t be taken back.
    Tyler shook his head, shifted to fumble with the doorknob. The thing was so rusted out, he’d never bothered with a lock, but that day, it whisked open and Kit Carson shot over the threshold, growling low, his hackles up.
    Dylan was right at Tyler’s back, carrying his guitar case and duffel bag. “What the hell?” he muttered.
    Somebody was inside the cabin, that was obvious, and Kit Carson had them cornered in the john.
    â€œWhoa,” Tyler told the dog, setting aside the stuff he was carrying.
    â€œCall him off!” a youthful voice squeaked from inside what passed as a bathroom. “Call him off!”
    Tyler and Dylan exchanged curious glances, and Tyler eased the dog aside with one knee to stand in the doorway.
    A kid huddled on the floor between the pull-chain toilet and the dry sink, staring up at Tyler with wild, rebellious, terrified eyes. Male, as near as Tyler could guess, wearing a long black coat, as if to defy the heat. Three silver rings pierced the boy’s right eyebrow, and both his ears and his lower lip sported hardware, too. The tattooed spider clinging to his neck added to the drama.
    Tyler winced, just imagining all that needlework. Gripped the door frame with both hands, a human barrier filling the only route of escape, other than the tiny window three feet above the tank on the john. The kid glanced up, wisely ruled out that particular bolt-hole.
    â€œI wasn’t hurting anything,” he said. His eyes skittered to Kit, who was still trying to squeeze past Tyler’s left knee and challenge the trespasser. “Does that dog bite?”
    â€œDepends,” Tyler said. “What’s your name?”
    The boy scowled. “Whether he bites me or not depends on what my name is?”
    Tyler suppressed a grin. Aside from the piercings and the spider, he reckoned he and the kid were more alike than different. “No,” he said. “It depends on whether or not you stop being a smart-ass and tell me who you are and what the hell you’re doing in my house.”
    â€œThis is a house? Looks more like a chicken coop to me.”
    Standing somewhere behind him, Dylan chuckled. He’d set Tyler’s guitar case and duffel bag down and, from the clanking and splashing, started working the pump at the main sink.
    â€œOkay, Brutus,” Tyler said, looking down at the dog, “get him.”
    Kit Carson looked up at him in confusion, probably wondering who the hell Brutus was.
    â€œDavie McCullough!” the kid burst out, scrambling to his feet and, at the same time, trying to melt into the bathroom wall, which was papered with old catalog pages and peeling in a lot of places. “All right? My name is Davie McCullough! ”
    â€œTake a breath, Davie,” Tyler told him. “The dog won’t hurt you, and neither will I.”
    Somebody had hurt him, though. Now that the kid was up off the floor, and dusty light from the high window illuminated his face, Tyler saw bruises along his jawline, fading to a yellowish purple.
    Again, Tyler flinched. Either Davie McCullough had been in a tussle with some other kid recently, or an adult had beaten the hell out of him. Having had an alcoholic father himself, Tyler tended toward the latter theory.
    â€œWhat happened to your face?” Dylan asked, poking wood into the stove to boil up some java, as soon as Davie edged out of the bathroom, past both Tyler and the dog.
    Davie kept a careful distance from everybody. Quite a trick in a cabin roughly the size of one of those clown cars that spill bozos at the rodeo.
    â€œYou’re really going to build a fire on a day like this?” Davie countered.
    â€œI asked my