Sheriff Holloran never let him get past the Kwick Shop without a tail, and it hardly would have felt like a proper homecoming without the escort. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Lance saw the black-and-white sheriff's car that had fallen in behind him.

It was his pride and joy, this car, fully restored down to the last detail. , the engine purring even at seven thousand feet above sea level. It rumbled like a street rod as he ambled up Main Street A 1965 Ford Fairlane, silver-gray, with white walls and an engine designed when gas was a quarter a gallon. Cheerfully, he waved to everyone he saw, grinning at the double takes they did at his car. It would be unrealistic to expect the place to stay completely preserved year after year. Next to the old Rexall drugstore, where Lance had spent many hours over ice-cream sodas, a gourmet coffee shop and French bakery offered upscale breakfast goodies. A brand-name pizza parlor camped next to the lone motel. Even fewer had the faintest clue what Colorado really meant.Īs he reached the outskirts of town, he noticed a few changes-the grocery store had been revamped to look like any big-time supermarket.

Barely three thousand people if you didn't count the tourists and skiers and the new crop of rich folks building half-million dollar 'retreats' on enormous parcels of land buried in the trees. The aspens, shaking their gold-coin leaves against a sky the color of a little girl's Easter ribbon, already showed autumn had arrived. He hung his elbow out the window, feeling a faint hint of September bite. He'd been living in Houston, where the air weighed three hundred pounds per square inch, and nothing could have been finer than the sweet mountain air of home. He breathed the air deep, all the way to the bottom of his lungs, smelling the sharply evocative mix of sunlight and crushed pine needles on earth just faintly damp. Through the windows blew a light, dry mountain wind, combing playful fingers through his always too-long hair. Lance Forrest hit Red Creek, Colorado, much the same way as he always did-radio blaring so loud it seemed as if his car were floating on the sound.

Breaking The Rules by Ruth Wind