Wyoming Bold (Mills & Boon M&B) (2 page)

“Oh, no, not one of those premonitions?” Darby laughed. “No offense, Miss Baker, but you need to get out more!”

She flushed, embarrassed.

Tank narrowed his eyes as he studied her drawn features. He turned back to Darby. “Let’s err on the side of caution. Take Tim with you.”

Darby sighed and shook his head. “Waste of manpower, but if you say so, I’ll do it, boss.”

“I say so.”

Darby just nodded. His expression was eloquent. Darby had a degree in physics and was a pragmatist. He didn’t believe in that supernatural stuff. Tank didn’t, either, but Merissa’s worried face haunted him. He just grinned at Darby, who threw up his hands and went to find Tim.

Tank led the
 
way to his big black ranch double-cabbed pickup truck and helped her up into the passenger seat.

She looked around with fascination when he climbed in under the wheel, and started the engine.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Can it cook and do laundry, too?” she wondered aloud, her eyes on all the displays and controls. “I mean, it looks as if it can do everything else. Even satellite radio...”

“It’s a big ranch and we spend a lot of time far away from the house. We have GPS, cell phones, you name it. The trucks are loaded with electronics on purpose. Plus big, expensive V-8 engines,” he added with a wicked glance of dark eyes. “If we weren’t green fanatics who generated our own energy, we’d be singled out for our inexcusable use of gasoline.”

“I drive a V-8, too,” she said with a shy smile. “Of course, mine is twenty years old and it only starts when it wants to. It didn’t today.”

He shook his head. “Maybe Darby is right. You do spend too much time alone. You should get a job.”

“I have one,” she said. “I do web design. It means I can work at home.”

“You won’t meet many people that way.”

Her expression went stiff. “I can do without most people. And they can certainly do without me. You said it yourself. People think I’m a witch.” She sighed. “Old Mr. Barnes’s milk cow went dry and he blamed me. He said it was because I lived near him. ‘Everybody knows that witches cause those things,’ he said.”

“Threaten him with a lawsuit. That will shut him up.”

She blinked and turned her head toward him. “Excuse me?”

“Hate speech,” he elaborated.

“Oh. I see.” She sighed. “I’m afraid it would only make things worse. Instead of that witch woman, I’d be that witch woman who sues everybody.”

He chuckled.

She drew in a breath and shivered. She could barely see through the blinding snow as he drove. “I’ll bet you have problems in this sort of weather. They say the old trail drivers used to stay with the cattle herds during storms and sing to them, to calm them, so they were less likely to stampede. The ones I read about were summer storms, though, with lightning.”

He was pleasantly surprised. “Those old trail drivers did baby the cattle. In fact, we have a couple of singing cowboys who do night duty for us with the herds.”

“Are their names Roy and Gene?”

That took him a minute. Then he burst out laughing. “No. Tim and Harry, actually.”

She grinned. Her whole face lit up. She was very pretty, he thought.

“Good one,” he told her with a nod.

They were nearing her cabin. It wasn’t much to look at. It had belonged to a hermit before the Bakers bought it about the time Merissa was born. Her mother’s husband had left suddenly when she was ten. People whispered about the reason. Most people locally thought it was her mother’s eerie abilities that had sent him to the divorce court.

Tank stopped the truck.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said, pulling up her hood. “But you didn’t have to do this.”

“I know. Thanks for the warning.” He hesitated. “What did you see, about Darby?” he asked, hating himself for the question.

She swallowed, hard. “An accident. But if he takes someone with him, I think it will be all right.” She held up a hand. “I know, you don’t believe in all this hoodoo. I don’t know why I was cursed with visions. I just tell what I know, when I think it will help.” Her soft eyes met his dark ones. “You’ve been kind to us over the years, all of you. When we couldn’t get out because of snowdrifts, you’d send groceries. When the car got stuck one time, you had a cowboy drive us home and get the car out.” She smiled. “You’re a kind person. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. So maybe I’m crazy. But please watch your back anyway.”

He smiled gently. “Okay.”

She smiled, shyly, and climbed out of the truck. She closed the door behind her and ran for the porch. Her red cape, against the fluffy white snow, reminded him of the heroine in a movie he’d seen about a werewolf. The red was stark, like blood, in that background of pure white.

An older woman, with silver hair, was waiting. She looked past Merissa and waved a little awkwardly. Merissa waved, too. They both went inside quickly.

Tank sat with the engine idling, staring at the closed door for a minute before he put the truck in gear and drove off.

* * *

“W
HAT
 
IN
 
THE
world are you laughing about?” Mallory asked his brother as he came into the living room later. Mallory and his wife, Morie, had a baby boy just a few months old—Harrison Barlow Kirk. They were just now able to sleep at night, to the relief of everyone in the household. Of course, Cane, the middle brother, and his wife, Bodie, were expecting. So it would begin all over again in the spring. Nobody minded. The brothers were all gooey over the baby.

A huge Christmas tree sat in the corner, with presents already piled up to the first set of limbs. It was an artificial tree. Morie was allergic to the live ones.

Tank was chuckling. “You remember the Bakers?”

“The strange folk in the cabin?” Mallory said with a grin. “Merissa and her mother, Clara. Sure.”

“Merissa came over to warn me about an assassination attempt.”

Mallory did a double take. “A what?”

“She says a man is coming to kill me.”

“Would you like to explain why?”

“She said it was related to the shooting in Arizona, when I was with the border patrol,” he explained, still uneasy from the memory. “One of the shooters thinks I could recognize his companion and cause trouble for a politician who plans to run for federal office. Drug-related stuff.”

“How did she know?”

Tank made a weird sound and waved his hands. “She had a vision!”

“I wouldn’t laugh too hard at that,” Mallory said strangely. “She warned a local woman about driving across a bridge. She said she had a vision of it collapsing. The woman went over it anyway a day later and the bridge fell out from under her. She barely survived.”

Tank frowned. “Eerie.”

“Some people have abilities that other people don’t believe in,” Mallory replied. “Every community has somebody who can talk out fire or talk off warts, dowse for water, even get glimpses of the future. It isn’t logical...you can’t prove it by scientific method. But I’ve seen it in action. You might recall that we have a well because I hired a dowser to come out here and find water for us.”

“A water witch.” Tank shivered. “Well, I don’t believe in that stuff and I never will.”

“I just hope Merissa was wrong.” He clapped an affectionate arm across his brother’s shoulders. “I’d hate to lose you.”

Tank laughed. “You won’t. I’ve survived a war and a handgun attack. I guess maybe I’m indestructible.”

“Nobody is that.”

“I was lucky, then.”

Mallory laughed. “Very.”

* * *

D
ALTON
 
SAT
 
DOWN
 
with his laptop, having recalled Merissa’s statement about a sheriff in south Texas being shot.

He sipped coffee and laughed at himself for even believing such a wild tale. Until he looked through recent San Antonio news reports and discovered that a sheriff in Jacobs County, south of San Antonio, had been the victim of a recent assassination attempt by persons unknown, but believed to be involved with a notorious drug cartel across the border in Mexico.

Tank caught his breath and gaped at the screen. Sheriff Hayes Carson of Jacobs County, Texas, had been wounded by a would-be assassin in November, and later kidnapped, along with his fiancée, by members of a drug cartel from over the border. The sheriff and his fiancée, who was a local newspaper publisher, had given a brief interview about their ordeal. The leader of the drug cartel himself, whom his enemies called El Ladŕon—the thief—was killed by what was described as hand grenades tossed under his armored car near a town called Cotillo, across the border in Mexico. The assassin hadn’t been caught.

Tank leaned back in his chair with a rough sigh. He was disturbed by what Merissa had told him about his own ordeal, details that only his brothers and members of law enforcement had ever known. She couldn’t have found out in any conventional way.

Unless...well, she had a computer. She did website design.

His brain was working overtime. She had enough expertise to be able to break into protected files. That had to be it. Somehow, she’d managed to access that information about him from some government website.

The difficulties with that theory didn’t penetrate his confused brain. He wasn’t willing to consider the idea that a young woman who barely knew him had some supernatural access to his mind. Everyone with any sense knew that psychics were swindlers who just told people what they wanted to hear and made a living at it. There was no such thing as precognition or any of those other things.

He was a smart man. He had a degree. He knew that it was impossible for Merissa to get that information except through physical, and probably illegal, means.

But how did she know that he’d forgotten details of his ordeal, like the man in the suit, the DEA agent, who’d led him into the ambush and then disappeared?

He turned off the computer and got to his feet. There had to be a logical, rational explanation for all this. He just had to find it.

He’d left his car keys in the truck. He threw on his coat and trudged out through the snow to the garage to get them. The snow was getting really deep. If it didn’t let up, they were going to have to implement some emergency procedures to get feed to the cattle stranded in the far pastures.

Wyoming in snowstorms could be a deadly place. He remembered reading about people who were stranded and froze to death in very little time. He thought about Merissa and her mother, Clara, all alone in that isolated cabin. He hoped they had plenty of firewood and provisions, just in case. He’d have to send Darby over.

He frowned as he noticed that Darby wasn’t back yet. It had been several hours. He pulled out his cell phone and called Darby’s number.

It was Tim who answered.

“Oh, hi, boss,” Tim said. “I started to call you but I wanted to make sure first. Darby got hit with a limb when we brought the tree down.”

“What?” Dalton exploded.

“He’s going to be okay,” Tim said quickly. “Bruised him a bit and broke a rib, so he’ll be out of commission for a bit, but nothing too bad. He said if he’d been there alone, he’d probably be dead. Tree pinned him, you see. I was able to get it off. But if I hadn’t gone with him... He says he owes his life to that little Baker girl.”

Dalton let out the breath he’d been holding. “Yeah,” he murmured unsteadily. “I believe he just might.”

“Sorry I didn’t call sooner,” Tim added, “but it took us a while to get to town, to the doc. We’ll head back in a few minutes. Have to go by the pharmacy to pick up some meds for Darby.”

“Okay. Drive carefully,” Tank said.

“You bet, boss.”

Dalton hung up the cell phone. He was almost white. Mallory, coming into the room with a steaming cup of coffee, stopped short.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I just got cured of my skeptical attitude about psychic phenomena,” Tank said, and laughed shortly.

CHAPTER TWO

D
ALTON
 
COULDN
’
T
 
FIND
 
a cell phone number for Merissa, or he would have thanked her for the information that saved Darby’s life.

He looked up her business on the internet, though, and sent her an email. She responded almost immediately.

“Glad Darby is okay. Take care of yourself,” she wrote back.

* * *

A
FTER
 
THAT
 
EXPERIENCE
, Tank took her advice a lot more to heart. And the first thing he did was to place a call to Jacobsville, Texas, to the office of Sheriff Hayes Carson.

“This is going to sound strange,” Tank told Hayes. “But I think we have a connection.”

“We’re talking on the phone, so I’d call that a connection,” Hayes said dryly.

“No, I mean about the drug cartel.” Tank took a deep breath. He didn’t like speaking of it. “I had an experience on the Arizona border not too long ago. I was with the border patrol. A man who identified himself as a DEA agent took me out to a suspected drug drop and into an ambush. I was pretty much shot to pieces. I recovered, although it’s taking a long time.”

Hayes was immediately interested. “Now that’s really odd. We’re looking for a rogue DEA agent down here in Texas. I arrested a drug dealer a couple of months ago in company with a DEA agent that nobody can find information about. Even his own guys don’t know who he was, but we think he may be linked to the cartel over the border. Several of us, including the local FBI and DEA, have been trying to chase him down. Nobody can remember what he looks like. We even had our local police chief’s secretary, who has a photographic memory, get a police artist to sketch him. But even then, none of us could remember having seen him.”

“He blends.”

“I’ll say he blends,” Hayes said thoughtfully. “How did you connect your case to mine?”

Tank laughed self-consciously. “Now, see, this is going to sound really strange. A local psychic came over to warn me that I was being targeted by a politician who has something to do with the drug cartel and a mysterious DEA agent.”

“A psychic. Uh-huh.”

“I know, you think I’m nuts, but...”

“Actually, our police chief’s wife has the same ability,” came the surprising reply. “She’s saved Cash Grier’s life a couple of times because she knew things she shouldn’t. She calls it the ‘second sight,’ and says it’s from her Celtic ancestry.”

Tank wondered if Merissa’s ancestry was Celtic. He laughed. “Well, I feel all better now.”

“I wish you could fly down here and talk to me,” Hayes said. “We’ve got a huge file on El Ladŕon’s operation, and the men who’ve taken over after his unexpected demise.”

“I’d like to do that,” Tank said. “But right now we’re pretty much snowed in. And with Christmas coming, it’s a bad time. But when the weather breaks, I’ll give you a call and we’ll set something up.”

“Good idea. We could use the help.”

“You’re recovering okay from your kidnapping?”

“Yes, thanks. My fiancée and I had an interesting adventure. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” He laughed. “She held one of our captors at gunpoint with an AK-47, was really convincing. And then she confessed, when it was all over, that she didn’t know if it was loaded or the safety was on. What a girl!”

Tank laughed. “What a lucky man, to be marrying a woman like that.”

“Yes, I am. We’re getting married tomorrow, in fact.” Hayes chuckled. “And going on our honeymoon to Panama City for a few days. Next week is Christmas, so we have to be back by then. You married?”

“No woman in Wyoming crazy enough to take me on,” Tank said dryly. “Both my brothers are married. I’m just waiting to be snapped up by some kind passerby.”

“Good luck to you.”

“Thanks. Keep safe.”

“You do the same. Nice talking to you.”

“Same here.”

Tank hung up and went looking for his brother Mallory. He found him in the living room, by following the exquisite sound of a score from a popular movie. Mallory, like Tank himself, was a gifted pianist. Mallory’s wife, Morie, was better than both of them.

Mallory noticed his brother standing in the doorway and stopped playing with a grin.

Tank held up a hand. “I’m not conceding that you’re better than me. I was just thinking, however, that Morie puts us both in the shade.”

“Indeed she does,” Mallory replied with a smile. He got up. “Problems?”

“Remember I told you what Merissa said, about a sheriff in Texas whose case was connected to the shooting I was involved in?”

Mallory nodded, waiting.

Tank sighed. He perched himself on the arm of the sofa. “Well, it turns out that there actually is a sheriff in Texas who was kidnapped by a drug cartel—maybe the same cartel that shot me up.”

“Son of a gun!” Mallory exclaimed.

“His name is Sheriff Hayes Carson. There was an assassination attempt against him by one of the drug lords he arrested, just before Thanksgiving. He and his fiancée were kidnapped by some of El Ladŕon’s men and held across the border in Mexico. They escaped. But Carson says he had a run-in with one of the drug cartel henchmen before that. There was a DEA agent in a suit who was at the scene. The local police chief’s secretary saw the guy, and has a photographic memory, but even when the police artist drew him, neither Carson nor the feds could recall him.”

“Curious,” Mallory murmured.

“Yes. I remembered, after Merissa came here, that it was a DEA agent, in a suit, who led me into the ambush on the border.”

Mallory let out a long breath. “Good God.”

“Merissa says the same guys are coming after me because they’re afraid of what I’ll remember. The damnedest thing is, I don’t remember anything that would help convict someone. I only remember the pain and the certainty that I was going to die, there in the dust, covered in blood, all alone.”

Mallory got up and laid a heavy, affectionate hand on his shoulder. “That didn’t happen, though. A concerned citizen saw you and called the law.”

He nodded. “I vaguely remember that. Mostly it was a voice, telling me that I’d be all right. Had a Spanish accent. He saved my life.” He closed his eyes. “There was another man, arguing with him, telling him to do nothing. It was too late—he’d already made the call by then. I remember the other man’s voice. He was cussing. He had a Massachusetts accent.” He laughed. “Sounded like old history tapes of President John Kennedy, actually.”

“What did he look like?”

Tank frowned. He closed his eyes again, trying to remember. “I just vaguely remember. He was wearing a suit. He was tall and very pale with red hair.” He started. “I never thought of that.” He opened his eyes and looked at Mallory. “I think he was a DEA agent.” He frowned. “But why would he tell the other man not to get help for me if he was a fed?”

“Was he the same one who took you out there?”

Tank frowned. “No. No, it couldn’t have been him. That guy, the DEA guy, had dark hair and a Southern drawl.”

“Did you describe him to the sheriff?”

Tank got up. “No, but I’m about to.”

He picked up his cell phone, found Hayes Carson’s number in the stored files and autodialed the number.

It only took three rings before Hayes answered. “Carson.”

“It’s Dalton Kirk, in Wyoming. I’ve just remembered a man who called for help when I was shot. There was another man with him who tried to stop him from calling 911. The other man was tall, with red hair and a Massachusetts accent. Does that sound anything like the man you remember?”

Hayes actually laughed. “No. Our guy was tall and sandy-haired and had a slight Spanish accent.”

“A Spanish guy with blond hair?” Tank chuckled.

“Well, people from Northern Spain are often blond and blue-eyed. Some have red hair. And they say the Basque people of Spain settled in Scotland and Ireland.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I, but one of our federal agents is a history nut. He knows all about Scotland. He told me.”

“This whole thing is really strange. The man who led me into the ambush was tall and dark-haired. The man who was with the guy who called 911 was a red-head. But I remember them both wearing the same suit.” He shook his head. “Maybe the trauma unseated my memory.”

“Or maybe the man uses disguises.” Hayes was thinking, hard. “Listen, did you ever see that movie
The Saint
that starred Val Kilmer?”

Tank frowned. “Once, I think.”

“Well, the guy was a real chameleon. He could change his appearance at the drop of a hat. He could put on a wig, change his accent, the whole deal.”

“You think our guy might be someone like that?”

“It’s possible. People who work in the covert world have to learn to disguise themselves to avoid detection. He may have a background in black ops.”

“If I knew somebody in military intelligence, I might be able to find out something about that.”

“We have a guy here, Rick Marquez. He’s a police detective in San Antonio. His father-in-law is head of the CIA. I might be able to get him to check it out.”

“Great idea. Thanks.”

“I don’t know if he can find out anything. Especially with the odd descriptions I’ll have to give him.”

“Listen,” Tank said quietly, “it’s worth a try. If he’s ever used disguises in the past, there’s a chance somebody will remember him.”

“It’s possible, I suppose. But in covert work, I don’t imagine using disguises is exactly a rare thing,” Hayes said. He hesitated. “There’s another interesting connection, in my case.”

“What?”

“My fiancée’s father, her real father, is one of the biggest drug cartel leaders on the continent.”

There was a very significant silence on the other end of the line.

“He helped us shut down El Ladŕon,” Hayes added quietly. “And he saved the man’s family who helped rescue me and Minette. For a bad man, he’s something of a closet angel. They call him El Jefe.”

“A sheriff with an outlaw for a future father-in-law,” Tank said. “Well, it’s unique.”

“So is he. I can ask him to dig into his sources and see if he can come up with anything, like a budding politician with drug cartel ties.”

“That would be a help. Thanks.”

“I’m just as much involved as you are. Stay in touch.”

“I’ll do that. And we should both watch our backs in the meantime.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

* * *

T
ANK
’
S
 
NEXT
 
MOVE
 
was to drive over to Merissa’s house through the blinding snow. What he wanted to talk to her about wasn’t something he was comfortable discussing over the phone. If there was an assassin after him, he might monitor calls. Anyone in black ops would have that talent.

When he pulled up at the front door of the small cabin, Clara, Merissa’s mother, was waiting there. She smiled as Tank got out of the truck and came up the steps.

“She said you’d come,” Clara said with a sheepish smile. “She’s lying down with a migraine headache,” she added worriedly. “She woke up with it, so the medicine isn’t working very well.”

“Medicine from a doctor?” Tank asked softly, and with a smile.

Clara lowered her eyes. “Herbal medicine. My grandfather was a Comanche shaman,” she said.

His eyebrows arched.

“I know, I’m blonde and so is Merissa, but it’s true just the same. I had a little boy just after I had Merissa. He died—” she hesitated, still upset about it after all the years “—when he was just a week old. But he had black hair and dark brown eyes. It’s recessive genes with Merissa and me, you see. Our coloring, I mean.”

He moved a step closer. He noticed that Clara, like Merissa, immediately backed up, looking uneasy.

He stopped dead, frowning. “Recessive genes.”

She nodded. She swallowed, relaxing when she saw that he wasn’t coming closer.

“Clara, I don’t really know you well enough to pry,” he began softly, “but it’s noticeable that you and Merissa start backing away from me if I come close.”

Clara hesitated. Oddly, she trusted Tank, even though she barely knew him. “My...ex-husband...he was scary when he lost his temper.” She managed a laugh. “It’s an old reflex. Sorry.”

“No offense taken,” he replied gently.

She looked back up at him with wide green eyes the same shade as Merissa’s. “I divorced him, with help from our local sheriff—the one before this one. He was so kind. He got help for us, sheltered us through the divorce and made sure my ex-husband left not only the town, but the state.” She managed a weak smile. She swallowed, not dealing with it well, even now. “We were always afraid of him, when...when he got mad. He was big, like you. Tall and big.”

Tank looked into her eyes. “I’m a teddy bear,” he told her with pursed lips. “But if you tell anybody on my ranch that, I’ll send an email to Santa Claus and you’ll get coal in your stocking.”

Clara, shocked, burst out laughing. “Okay.” She sobered. “Merissa says the man who led you into the ambush is coming.”

His face hardened. “When?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “It’s why you can’t prove it scientifically, because experiments under scientific control very rarely work. It’s sporadic. I know things, but they’re usually nebulous in my mind and I have to interpret what I see. Merissa is much more gifted than I am. It’s made her the subject of much cruelty, I’m afraid.”

“I heard about that. May I see her?”

“She’s not well...”

“My older brother Mallory is subject to migraine headaches. He has high-powered medications that can prevent them if they’re taken in time. The ones he wakes up with, though, don’t even respond to meds. He has to try to sleep them off.”

“Merissa’s are bad,” she commented. “Come on in. I’m sorry I kept you out here talking in the freezing cold!”

“I’m wearing a very heavy jacket,” he assured her, and smiled.

* * *

M
ERISSA
 
WAS
 
NOT
 
in bed. Terrible sounds of a meal returning were heard in the bathroom.