“—stop! Cole, don’t, you’re choking him!”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Let, go, Cole. He’s not who we thought he was.”
Cole’s eyes flicked to her. “He’s not your trespasser?”
“No. I mean, yes he is, he’s the one I saw, but he’s not a trespasser. Not that way.”
Cole eased up slightly. The man gulped in air. Color began to return to his face. But Cole didn’t let him loose.
“Then who the hell are you?” he snapped at the man. “And what are you doing here?”
The man made a rasping sound. He obviously hadn’t regained enough breath to answer. His eyes, the fear ebbing now, shifted as he glanced at Tory.
Tory sighed. “He’s an investigator.” Cole looked at her. She shrugged. “For the insurance company that covered John’s Prize.”
Cole turned his gaze back on the man he still held pinned to the side of the Jeep. “You got some proof of that?”
“In—” The man broke off, wheezing. “Inside jacket pocket,” he finally said.
Cole reached up with his left hand, keeping his right arm in place across the man’s throat. In a moment he’d pulled out a black wallet. He flipped it open, studied the plastic-encased card in the front slot that identified the man as an employee of Western Equine Associates, then, reluctantly, straightened up and let the man go.
“Damn cowboy,” the man muttered.
Cole lifted a brow at him. “Better put a comma in that, or you’ll be back where you were—” he glanced at the identification card again “—Whitfield.”
“Sorry,” Whitfield muttered, eying Cole much like a visitor might eye a zoo’s tiger when they weren’t sure the gate was locked.
Cole glanced at Tory. “He’s the one you saw? Up on the hill?” She nodded.
Cole turned his attention back to the wary insurance man. “You’re lucky, Whitfield.”
“Lucky?” he said in astonishment, rubbing gingerly at his throat.
“If you’d hurt her—”
“I didn’t!” the man yelped. “I was just trying to get her to listen to me.”
“Next time keep your hands to yourself.”
“Look, I’m just doing my job here—”
“Which reminds me,” Cole interrupted, “why did you come back? For that matter, why were you spying in the first place?”
Whitfield’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Cole. “Who are you? I haven’t seen you around before.”
“I’m just a hand who doesn’t want to lose his new job because the Flying Clown goes under. I work here. You’re the trespasser. Why?”
The man shrugged. “We had a lot of money to pay out on that horse of Lennox’s. You don’t pay off a policy that size without checking it out. Especially when there’s a string of dead horses.”
Cole couldn’t refute that. “Which leaves why you came back today.”
Whitfield hesitated. He glanced at Tory, then looked back up at Cole. Cole leaned forward a little, figuring right now his size was his most effective weapon.
“You might as well tell me now. It’ll be easier.”
He said it casually, without a hint of threat, but Whitfield blanched anyway.
“My bosses aren’t happy. Three dead horses makes them very suspicious. The other companies too, for that matter, from what I’ve heard from the Alliance and Worldwide guys. The whole thing is being left open for further investigation. This has gone past simple carelessness or bad luck.” He looked at Tory pointedly. “And we won’t stop until we find out who’s involved.”
His insinuation was clear, and Tory made a small sound of distress. Cole suppressed the urge to go to her, to put his arms around her and reassure her everything was going to be all right. There were too many reasons why he couldn’t. He couldn’t promise it was the truth. She probably wouldn’t believe him. And he had no right to hold her, anyway. Not after he’d told her, within hours of their fierce, explosive lovemaking, that he was walking out on her and her problem.
He shook off the sudden swell of emotion that threatened to choke him.
“Just what were you expecting to find?”
Whitfield shrugged. “A pattern. A reason. Anything.”
It sounded vague, but Cole knew that many times surveillances were exactly that, hours of ceaseless watching, just waiting for the one piece that didn’t fit, the one thing out of synch that might give you the clue you needed. More than once he’d broken cases on little more than a feeling gained by seeing one small thing that didn’t match the rest of the picture.
“It’s not us,” Tory said suddenly, her voice strained. “We would never... We have no reason to...to kill our horses.”
“A kickback out of a million dollar payoff is enough reason—” Whitfield broke off, apparently realizing he’d been careless with his words. From his point of view, he’d just warned a possible suspect they were being watched.
“You’ve got a big mouth,” Cole told him warningly.
Tory was shaking. As soon as Cole realized it, so did she. He saw her try to control it, clenching her hands into fists, savaging her lip with her teeth. He wanted to strike out at anything he could blame for doing this to her.
“Let’s go, Tory,” he said, his voice sounding nearly as strained as hers had.
Whitfield seemed surprised as they began to walk away. “That’s it?”
Cole looked back over his shoulder at the investigator. “Believe it or not, we’re after the same thing, Whitfield. The truth about what happened to those horses. If you can find that by sitting up in those damned rocks all day, have at it.”
He walked Tory back toward the Jeep. Whitfield watched them go, then shook his head and climbed back into his four-wheel drive. By the time they reached the door she’d left open, he was driving off.
They came to a halt beside the Jeep. She had the shaking under control, but tiny shivers still rippled through her. Again he had to suppress the urge to hug her, to reassure her.
“What were you saying to him when I got here?” he asked, trying to divert her.
“I thought...he was the one. I told him if he’d hurt my horses, I’d kill him myself.”
Cole groaned. “Damn it, Tory, what if he had been? Just what the hell did you expect him to do?”
“I don’t know. I was just so angry. All I could think about was—” her voice began to waver, and she gulped in air before she went on “—the horses, and what if M-M-Mac was next...”
She was shaking again, misery clouding her eyes, already weary from a night spent listening to him cry in his beer. Or whiskey, he amended.
His internal joking didn’t work. And this time the urge was beyond suppressing. He reached for her and pulled her tight against his chest.
She didn’t protest, in fact clung to him for support, as if she’d only been waiting for him to offer. In moments, as he wrapped his arms around her, the tremors that shook her subsided. It made him feel guilty that he’d denied the urge until now. It seemed such a simple thing, to return what she’d given to him last night, to simply be there when she needed it.
At the same time it made him feel strangely satisfied that he was able to comfort her simply by being here, simply by holding her, no more. It was a novel sensation for him, and brought with it an edginess he didn’t recognize. But he had the feeling that if he thought about it a little, he’d find it was somehow related to that uneasiness he’d felt when he’d realized he was genuinely happy for Kyra.
He stood there for a long time, just holding her. And tried to deal with the unexpected fact that he was taking as much comfort from it as she was.
* * *
“Insurance guy, huh?”
Cole nodded at Hobie as he chewed on a bit of the sandwich he’d fixed; it tasted like sawdust. He’d gone to bed feeling like he could sleep for a week, but he’d awakened after a few hours feeling as tired as when he’d lain down.
He’d told Hobie
about Whitfield, omitting the details of the encounter, including Tory’s reckless solo pursuit of the man. Tory herself hadn’t reappeared since going to her room this morning after a brief greeting to her uncle.
“Hmm,” Hobie said thoughtfully as he picked up the last of his own sandwich. “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt havin’ another pair of eyes on the place. As long as he don’t go seeing what’s not there.”
“So far, it seems like there hasn’t been a damned thing to see at all.” Cole stifled a yawn.
“Rough night?” Hobie said, his tone a cross between amusement and commiseration.
“Sort of.”
Cole felt a twinge of contriteness as he said it. He wondered what Hobie would say if he knew. What he would think of the idea of his supposed trusted friend taking his beloved niece in a frenzy, on a desk, too frantic to even give her the comfort of a bed?
“Figured as much, when I got up and neither of you were back yet, and then you both come draggin’ in like a couple of tuckered out calves and head straight for bed.”
Cole opened his mouth, realized he could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t make that observation worse, and closed it again.
“Haven’t seen you look this ragged since...”
“The last time I tried riding Stomper?” Cole suggested wryly when Hobie’s words trailed off.
“I was thinking more of the night that big brindle bull tried to make me a permanent part of the arena.”
A shiver swept Cole at the memory. He’d been aboard the big, mottled brown-and-black bull, had even made his ride, although it hadn’t been a particularly artful eight seconds. He’d been halfway off the huge animal in a semicontrolled dismount, when the nightmare of every rider came true—his rigging didn’t release. Hung up, caught by the hand and tossed like a toy despite his size—or, he’d finally realized, because of it—he’d been kicked, slammed against the bull’s massive sides and had his nose broken by a fierce toss of the massive head before he got free. But even through the pain, he knew the only reason he wasn’t dead was that the crazy guy in the baggy pants and the fright wig had kept the bull, aptly named Crusher, from succeeding in his usual habit of crushing hapless cowboys against the arena fence.
And after two other cowboys had helped him out of the dirt and out of the now-furious bull’s path, only the shocked gasp that came from the throats of thousands of onlookers told him the bull hadn’t given up, had merely changed his target. He’d caught and tossed Hobie Flynn’s light weight easily, and the man in the silly outfit had gone down and been trampled repeatedly beneath the deadly hooves before his partner could lure the animal away.
“Thought I’d cashed in my chips for sure, that time.”
Cole tried to smile. “They told us you were a goner. But you were too damned stubborn to die.”
“You got that right,” Hobie agreed easily. “Sometimes stubborn’s all that gets you through.” He gave Cole a thoughtful look. “Don’t know as I ever thanked you for all the time you spent sittin’ with me while I was laid up.”
Cole shrugged. “It was the least I could do. If you hadn’t distracted that damned bull long enough, I would have been the one laid up or dead.”
“That was my job.”
“That,” Cole said flatly, “was over and above.”
Hobie grinned. “Taught you that duty stuff in the army, did they?”
“Tried to.”
Hobie had done that for him, too. In those days, when he’d been alone and headed down the wildest path he could find—his parents dead for years, his grandparents, who’d raised him, recently dead within six months of each other—it had been Hobie who’d suggested the army. Cole had laughed at him. He was making a living—barely—rodeoing, and that was all he wanted.
“They’ll teach you things you need to know. And put you through school, boy,” Hobie had said. “And don’t you ever think an education’s not the most important thing in life.”
Cole had laughed again, but his heart hadn’t been in it that time. He’d once nurtured a dream of going to college, but there was so little money left after his grandparents had died, he’d thought it impossible. When he’d starting rodeoing, he’d hoped to somehow amass enough money to at least try, but he’d had a couple of bad years—when he’d been hurt more than he’d been well—and he’d finally, as Hobie had the year before, seen the sense in hanging it up. And, feeling utterly at loose ends with the world, he’d at last taken Hobie’s advice. He’d never regretted it. He owed this man for more than just saving his life nearly at the cost of his own that day.
“You want to talk about it?”
Cole was snapped out of his reverie by Hobie’s quiet words.
“Talk about what?” he asked warily.
“Whatever it is that’s got you looking like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet.”
Normally the familiar words would have made Cole smile. But he wasn’t in the mood now. Not when he was trying to think of a way to tell this man he owed so much that he was walking out on him at the very time when he needed help the most.
“Hobie, listen, I—”
He broke off as a familiar car pulled up in front of the house. Kurt and Eric, arriving for their afternoon of work.
“Good,” he muttered. “I’ve been wanting to talk to them.”
He got up, conceded when Hobie waved him away from the dirty dishes he’d been about to pick up, and headed for the door.
The two boys looked wary when he hailed them, and appeared more than a little nervous as he approached. They’d been acting that way every time he encountered them, and it was past time he found out why. He didn’t think it was just caution around a stranger; they acted oddly around Tory and Hobie, too. His every instinct told him they were hiding something, and it was time to find out what.
They looked doubly nervous when he ushered them into the tack room. He didn’t blame them. He’d picked the place because it had only one door, and he didn’t want either of them getting past him until he got some answers.
“Okay, boys,” he drawled as he leaned against the doorjamb, well aware that he blocked the doorway quite effectively. “You want to tell me what the problem is, or are you going to make things difficult?”
Eric pushed his hair back from his eyes. “What problem?”
“Yeah,” Kurt agreed, tugging on the gold cross dangling from his left ear, “what problem?”
“The one that has you two jumping like the mice Rocky’s been chasing. The one that has you looking over your shoulder all the time.”
They both voiced an instant denial, but they did it looking first at each other, then at the floor.
“Okay,” Cole said, in a voice that was quiet, yet held a warning that made them both shift uneasily on their feet, “then how about whatever you did that means you can’t look anybody in the eye? Let’s talk about that.”
Eric continued to stare at the floor. Kurt swallowed, his Adam’s apple appearing to bounce up and down his thin neck. Bull’s-eye, Cole thought. These two had been—or were now—up to something.
“You hiding drugs out here or something?” he asked.
Their heads came up swiftly. “No!” they exclaimed simultaneously.
He hadn’t thought so, but he’d succeeded in rattling them, which was what he’d wanted.
“What, then?”
They looked away again. Cole sighed audibly.
“I can see this is going to be a long morning. Can’t you just tell me what you did, and get it over with?”
“We didn’t do anything,” Eric protested.
“Nope, not nothing,” Kurt agreed.
Cole lifted a brow. “A triple negative? That’s protesting a bit much, don’t you think? Come on, out with it.”
Both boys glanced longingly over his shoulder at the sunlight, then returned to staring at the floor. Again Cole sighed. He straightened up. Both boys backed up a step, and for the first time began to look frightened. Cole wasn’t above cashing in
on that fear. He wanted some answers.
“Now, listen, guys, I didn’t get any sleep last night, and right now I’m feeling a bit cranky. Don’t go aggravating me. Let’s not do this the hard way.”
Both boys swallowed, and looked at each other again.
“Damn,” Cole muttered, then reached behind him and slammed the tack room door shut. Both boys jumped. Cole took one long stride toward them.
“All right, all right,” Eric yelped.
“Shut up,” Kurt said.
“We gotta tell him,” Eric insisted. “Besides, it was an accident.”
Cole felt a little spurt of satisfaction. He’d been right, they did know something. “What was an accident?”
“That horse,” Eric said. “The spotted one. We didn’t mean to hurt him.”
Arthur. The water-phobe Tory had told him about. He remembered the pain in her eyes, and wanted to pick up these two and bang their heads together.
“What happened?” he repeated, his voice like ice.
“We were just kiddin’ around, with the little tractor. Racing around. You know, like they do on TV with those trucks? But stupid, here—” he gestured at Kurt, who raised a finger in obscene suggestion “—he clipped the waterline.”
“It wasn’t my fault! The thing skidded!”
“Go on,” Cole said, his voice tight.
“We got scared. We were afraid we’d have to pay for it. So we just quick put the tractor away and took off.”
“You just left the leak going?”
“We didn’t know what would happen!” Kurt exclaimed.
“And I swear,” Eric added urgently, “that horse was okay when we left. We saw him. He musta slipped, just like they said.”
“And now he’s dead.”
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