Carnosaur Crimes (19 page)

Instinctively, she knew it was Parker even before his shadowy outline filled her vision. When his left hand reached out and slowly slid the glass partition away, she merely stared. He wore nothing, and steam curled around his brown physique as misty caresses. She positively couldn't take her eyes off of him. He was beautiful. Every inch of him.

His own masculine gaze was filled with heat. “Mind if I join you?”

She wanted to say something witty, calm, and collected as he stood there feasting his eyes on her wet, naked form, but her brain wasn't connected to her body any more and her knees felt like rubber. This was crazy. Insane. But the thought of tomorrow didn't exist for her. The ache inside her lonely heart and the throb in her groin taunted her mercilessly. She needed him more than anything else in the world right now.

“Parker,” she whispered.

He stepped into to the hot spray of water in one sinewy motion, arms encircling her with raw maleness as the fullness of his form pressed against her. She was engulfed in a wash of pure carnality as Parker kissed her again, this time with such passion and hunger that she was pushed against the back wall of the shower.

She responded to his touch, taste, and smell in kind with a blatant urgency unknown to her in many months. Parker's strong, powerful hands roved across her body and she surrendered, melting sensually into him with every part of her: skin, muscle, and vein. Warm, gushing rivulets blessed their union and drowned out their cries.

And, God help her, she wished he was Reid.

Chapter 23

“The eyes of men speak words the tongue cannot pronounce.”

Crow

She had to get out of here.

Ansel rolled on her right side and stared at Parker. He was lying on his back, the wrinkled white hotel sheet covering his body from the waist down. His eyes were closed, his breathing soft and even. After their love making in the shower, the Black Angus take-out had arrived. They'd gorged themselves on Delmonico steaks, baked potatoes, corn on the cob, and spinach salad. Then they's made love again in this very bed, more slowly and more intimately.

Both satisfied, they'd talked for a while but the consequences of piloting the early morning chopper flight to Billings and the undercover work at the store had taken its toll on Parker. He'd apologized for his flagging attention span. He needed sleep and so did she, but she hadn't been able to rest. Suddenly Parker's dark eyes opened and darted in her direction.

“I didn't mean to wake you. Go back to sleep,” she whispered.

“I got a couple hours of rest. I feel better. Why aren't you sleeping?”

Ansel shrugged. “Too much to think about.”

Parker smiled. “Me, I hope.”

She languidly stroked his hairless chest.“Yes, but not what you think.”

“I'm disappointed.” He turned on his side and took her chin in his right hand. “What's bothering you?”

““I think I'm out of my league with an FBI pilot. I don't even know you.”

“You want to know about me? I'll tell you.” He sat up and swung his legs out of bed before Ansel knew what was happening.

“Wait, where are you going, Parker?”

“I want to show you something.”

The room was dark with the heavy curtains pulled across the window, but Ansel could still see his naked form as he traversed the room to a bureau set against an opposite wall. He grabbed something and came back, sliding in beside her under the sheet, then turning on the lamp next to him. The glare stunned Ansel's eyes.

“Ouch. Do we have to do this now?” She sat up in bed, pulling the sheet over her breasts.

Parker's face was tense and determined. “It's the perfect time. I don't know how much we'll be able to speak with each other tomorrow.”

“You mean today, don't you?” He'd brought over a brown leather tri-fold wallet, not the fake one he'd used at Accent on Antiquities.

“Yeah, today.” He opened it and flipped to some plastic photo sleeves. Pointing to a picture, he passed the billfold to her. “I was seventeen years old and an only child living on the reservation with my grandmother who raised me. My parents died when I was twelve.”

Ansel looked at the picture and hardly recognized the thin, angular-faced teen as Parker Standback. His thick, ebony hair fell below his shoulders and across a faded jean jacket with a dirty red tee beneath it. His boy-man face was sullen and unsmiling under long, black eyebrows. He looked angry and suspicious with clenched jaws and a sideways stare, like the weight of the world had been dropped squarely on his shoulders. Most disturbing were Parker's large, brown eyes. They were dilated and flat. Dead eyes providing a window into a conscienceless spirit like those frightening mug shots she'd seen of hardened felons filled with anger and hatred.

“I can't believe it's you.”

Parker stared at his photo. “I was getting into trouble. Lots of it. I skipped school. I drank. I fought. For a while after this picture was taken, I was even huffing paint. Anything to either vent or escape my problems.”

“What problems?”

“Reservation life. You name it, I hated it. I felt like a trapped animal caught inside my own skin. Being Indian disgusted me,” he admitted quietly. “I was trying to claw my way out of the poverty and despair any way I could.” He looked at her. “Probably sounds corny to you, huh?”

Ansel brushed his cheek with her fingers. “No. I just don't know what to say. I didn't live on the reservation. I can't even pretend to know what it was like. You probably think I'm a spoiled little Indian girl who's had everything nice handed to her all her life. And you'd be right. My mother's people are still on the rez in Browning. I don't even know them that well. My mother left the reservation physically but kept it near her soul. She instilled in me the power to be proud of who I was and where I came from no matter how despairing the reality.”

Parker smiled. “I think you're blessed. I would have given anything to be you.”

“So what happened? How did you end up becoming a chopper pilot?”

“I almost got sent to reform school after I threw rocks through the windows at the Tribal Council building, but an Indian coach at the local high school stepped in and said if I could throw rocks hard enough to crack one-inch glass, I could surely throw baseball pitches. In order not to go to reform school, I accepted his offer to attend the school and play for the team. Thought I'd slum for a season then run away. Damn, if I didn't like the game and was good at it. I stayed in school and graduated by the skin of my teeth not because I was a bad student, but because I'd done a kamikaze job on my GPA up until High School.”

“Then what?”

“I went to junior college and got a degree in criminal justice. Straight from there, I went back to the rez. I was a tribal policemen for four years. I liked the work but not the environment. That made me very ambitious. The next step seemed to be trying to get in with any Sheriff's department that would take me. I was accepted as a Big Horn County deputy and took flying lessons on my own time. Eventually, I got my private and commercial pilot licenses.”

Ansel smiled with him. “Next step the federal government, right?”

“You bet. And here I am. The point I'm making is that this guy,” he said, tapping his teen photo, has nothing to do with this guy.” He flipped the sleeves and showed her his driver's license, “except that neither of us is going back to the reservation. I'm out and I'm staying out.”

She regarded Parker carefully. The pronouncement made her very sad. She was proud of her heritage. She couldn't imagine disavowing hundreds of generations of ancestors because you were born into a bad situation.

“You can't change who you are, Parker. You've risen above your negative experiences and you have a lot to be proud about, but being Indian isn't the problem. It's being treated like you're less than human by people who aren't Indian. You sound ashamed of your people.”

He closed the wallet and set it on the night stand. “Ansel, I'm not ashamed of them. I'm realistic. It's an Anglo world, and I want to advance in it. That's all.” He leaned over and nuzzled her on the neck, signaling that the conversation was closed. “You taste very good,” he mumbled.

Ansel wasn't satisfied with his answer, but decided to change the subject. “What happens now? You'll take me back to Big Toe tonight, right?”

“Uh, huh,” he said in between kisses along her shoulder.

“And will we see each other again?”

“You can count on it. This isn't just a one night stand. I don't operate that way.” His eyes peered deep into hers with desire and truth. “I'm normally stationed in Hardin. When things settle down with Operation Dragon, I'll be back. I mean that.”

Ansel believed he believed it, but Parker had been the first to admit that he was always on the move with the FBI. What kind a relationship could they have? “If you're being totally honest right now, I'd like another truthful answer from you,”she insisted.

“What answer?”

“Tell me why everyone in the task force is wearing a gray plastic ring.” He didn't bat an eye, but Ansel could see the meditative wheels turning behind them.

“I'm not wearing a gray ring.”

“You were. I saw it the night you flew me to the bluff. Don't play head games with me, Parker. If there's one thing you should know, it's that I make my livelihood from observing small details and placing them on canvas. Somebody on the ERT lost or damaged their ring because I found the foil tab with a chip on it from inside one at the T-rex dig two nights ago.”

Parker blew air through his lips. “You should be a cop, but you're not, Ansel. This detail is FBI business.”

“Am I just FBI business?”

“Of course not. I just told you how I feel about you.”

“Then please tell me about the rings.”

He snorted through his nose and shook his head disparagingly “You shouldn't put me in this position. I can't talk about it.”

“Oh, but you can put me in the position of being flat on my back in your bed,” Ansel countered. “Very nice, Parker.”

He reached out to her. “That's not the way it is.”

Ansel jerked away from his attempt to touch her arm. “Liar.”

“All right.” Exasperated, Parker threw his hands up in the air. “They're dosimeters.”

It all made sense to her in an instant. She leaned against the headboard, amazed that she'd forgotten all about her college training in radioactive geologies until this moment, but the multiple gray rings and the odd yellow color of the Vernal skull they tried to buy told her the true story. Occasionally, Morrison Formation fossils hosted for radioactive mineralization because bones in particular stayed in the ground for long periods of time and had a tendency to bind with mobile, radioactive elements distributed by ground waters.

She stared at Parker. “The Allosaurus skull is loaded with uranium, isn't it?”

“Yeah. Or, as the gamma spectrometric analysis says, a load of one-hundred-fifty-million year old parent uranium and radioactive decayed daughter nuclides containing bismuth, lead, and radium 226.”

“How many rem per minute?”

“About eighty.”

Ansel was horrified. Radiation caused atoms to loose electrons and when that happened in the human body, the ions damaged cells. That damage could come from either a low radiation dose over a long period of time or a high dose in a short period of time. If the cell damage was low level, the human body could repair itself. If it was too much, radiation sickness was the ultimate result. At eighty rem, you should definitely wash your hands after handling contaminated materials.

“Anything over one-hundred rem per minute is a time bomb dosage waiting to explode into a death sentence, depending on how long you were exposed to it,” Ansel said. “That skull could be deadly.”

Parker sighed. “The Vernal skull isn't the real problem. A whole load of radioactive bones were stolen from the Vernal area, not just specialty pieces like skulls, claws and feet. Almost a couple of complete skeletons came up missing. If they're all being stored in the same place, they're pumping out radiation hot enough to cook anyone who gets near them. That's why we're wearing the rings.”

Ansel had listened and watched his body language very carefully. He was calm and direct, looking into her face and not making any mannerisms that indicated he was overly nervous or lying. She believed him.

“Shouldn't the FBI make a public plea requesting the return of the fossils because they're a health hazard?”

“Why? These people are criminal scum. Anybody dealing with stolen radioactive merchandise deserves to microwave from the waist up as far as I'm concerned.”

Ansel squinted at him. “Even criminal scum have children. What if they're storing the fossils somewhere near their kids or somebody else's?”

Parker placed his hand on her arm and she didn't pull away. “You can't save somebody who doesn't want to be saved, Ansel. Crime is a volunteer profession. When people cross the legal line, they know it. Don't waste your sympathy on them. They'd kill you and your children just as soon as look at you.”

She didn't agree, but at least he'd been honest about the rings. It was too late to argue. She folded herself against him. He smelled like the hotel shampoo. “Turn out the light. We've got to get some sleep.”

Parker tilted his head and kissed her, tongue probing in such a way that sent shivers down her spine, while his arm reached out and fumbled with the lamp switch. In seconds a cocoon of darkness enveloped them, and Parker slid down with her into the sheets. He wrapped his protective arms around her.

“I'm going to miss you while I'm away, Ansel. ”

She ran her fingers through his hair. “Don't worry. You can't get rid of me that easily.”

Parker laughed. “That's a given.” In a few minutes, he was sound asleep.

Ansel hated clock watching, but that's what she did for the second night in a row. She could see the digital clock provided by the hotel on the night stand quite clearly if she lifted her head a bit and got her line of sight just over Parker's rising and falling chest. When the clock said one-fifteen, she began her slow disengagement from Parker's out flung arm over her waist with a snail-like vigilance. No way was she getting caught in the room by Agent Outerbridge in the morning.

Ansel slowly slid away from Parker, and his hand fell with a low thud to the mattress. She froze, watching to see if he jolted awake. He didn't, and she continued to move sideways away from him and toward the far side of the bed. Then came the lower body swing to get her legs off the edge. A quick feet-on-the floor push up and she was standing. Parker still hadn't budged. In seconds she had grabbed her boots, cowboy hat, and saddle purse from near the bed and hurried into the bathroom. Closing the door left her in total darkness.

When she flicked the overhead light switch, every cell in her eyeball screamed bloody murder to her optic nerves. The tiny bathroom looked positively ugly, sterile, and washed out by yellow light. Peeling off Parker's tee, she groped for her clothes folded on the toilet tank.

Five minutes of fumbling and stumbling with her clothes, especially buttoning the split-front skirt, was finally rewarded with victory. She used her brush to tame her wild, frizzy hair, applied some powder, blush, and lipstick. Next she put on her jewelry and twisted her hair up into a top knot before donning her hat. At last she was presentable for entrance into Dixie's domain.