One Lucky Cowboy

by Carolyn Brown

  They'd made it. She was twenty-five and the oil company was hers. Now all she had to do was learn to live without Slade.

  "Please stay until Monday morning. I'm still scared out of my wits until I sign the papers tomorrow morning before the board meeting," she begged Slade on the way to the ranch on Sunday afternoon.

  He nodded. Leaving was going to be difficult no matter when. Today. Tomorrow. It didn't really matter.

  "Besides, I'd like you to see where I live."

  "Maybe I'll buy a horse from you with what's left of our Depression money."

  "Honey, you pick out whichever one you want and it will be delivered to the Double L on Tuesday morning."

  Chapter 15

  ON MONDAY MORNING JANE DRESSED CAREFULLY IN A black power suit with a short skirt and hip-length jacket over an ivory silk blouse. She wore her grandmother's pearl earrings and bracelet and her mother's pearl and diamond ring. Her lawyer and Slade had stayed at the ranch the night before.

  Slade left at the break of dawn, taking her heart with him. She hadn't known what to say or do when he threw his new duffle bag into the Mustang. "Call me when you get home," she'd said.

  "I will. You could call Nellie and tell her I'm on the road."

  "I'll do it—and Slade…" she'd stopped because the words wouldn't come out past the lump in her throat.

  He took two steps forward and hugged her fiercely. "You don't have to say a word. Just remember that phone line works both ways. You call me when you have time to catch your breath. You're going to have a lot of decisions to make. Good luck today." And then he was gone. She watched the tail end of the silver Mustang until it turned at the end of the lane and was gone. Then she went to her room and got the crying jag over with all alone.

  James, the lawyer, would go to the board meeting with her, taking a whole briefcase full of papers. He'd managed to get done in two weeks exactly what she wanted, which was just short of a miracle.

  She was ready two hours before time to go, so she paced the floor, talking herself out of going to the board meeting and going after Slade. The doorbell rang and she took off downstairs without putting on her spike heels, hoping that Slade had turned around and come back for her.

  Agent August waited on the other side of the door, a serious look on his wide face. "Ellacyn Hayes, I need to talk to you."

  "There's nothing to say. I'm twenty-five. It's over and my life can get back to normal. I'm mad as hell at you for that phony safe house, but I'll get over it."

  "I owe you an explanation. May I come inside?" he asked.

  She stood aside and let him enter her home but didn't offer him a chair. The foyer was wide with doorways showing a sitting room, a dining room, a formal living room, and a winding staircase wide enough for six people to walk down together side by side. Shiny hard wood floors, crystal chandeliers, and the aroma of fresh flowers in sparkling vases all attested to the fact that the man who'd put the contract out on Ellacyn had indeed had his eyes on her physical worth. Too bad he hadn't seen the strength the little lady had beforehand or he'd have known she was a fighter.

  Agent August was intrigued by the house but his business wasn't a tour of an old plantation home. "You have a lovely home."

  "Thank you but I don't think you came all the way to Mississippi to take a look at the house," she said.

  "You are right. I came to tell you that Agent Jones and John were distant relatives and both served on the same special ops team in Iraq. He was Ramona and John's inside man. He and John are both dead.

  Jane gasped. One was a son-of–a-bitch, the other his accomplice, but still death was so final. Besides she'd pictured them both in prison for the rest of their lives, not dead.

  Agent August went on. "It's probably best because he authorized government equipment to set up the safe house bombing. If he wasn't dead, he'd be on the run or spending the rest of his life in prison. Ramona used her lawyer to send out a message to an accomplice who took care of John and Agent Jones the day after the bombing. If you would have called in, we could have saved you a lot of running and hiding. John is dead so he can't talk, and Agent Jones is also dead so there's no one to talk there, either. She won't hang for the crimes against you because there are only dead ends, but we've got her for previous crimes."

  "The lawyer?" Jane asked. It was hard to wrap her mind around the fact that John was really dead and that the nightmare was over.

  "His only crime was being an idiot. She slipped the note into his pocket and someone slipped it out. The only way we discovered it was when we watched the surveillance tape from her cell for the hundredth time. She sneezed. He offered her his handkerchief. She put a small piece of paper in it when she handed it back. He stopped at a convenience store on the way home and got his pocket picked. Handkerchief, wallet, and comb all in one swift motion. He reported it to the police. Found it all crammed down into a trash can not a block from the store. Money gone. Everything else intact," the agent said.

  "How'd she get paper and pencil or pen?"

  "She is very good. It had to be from the lawyer but neither he nor we can figure out how. She's still up for previous crimes and they'll put her away for a long, long time. But I thought you deserved to know what happened out there and that John is dead."

  "Thank you," she murmured. She had loved the man enough to give him her heart and soul and all she felt was immense relief. A rock had been lifted from her heart and she was free at last but some where down deep lurked a guilty feeling at the news of his death.

  "I'll be going now. Hopefully, I'll never have contact with you again."

  "That would be a good thing. Good-bye." She showed him to the door and watched as he drove away.

  She met her lawyer, James, coming down the stairway as she started back to her bedroom located on the ground floor of the huge house.

  "You are ready early," he said.

  "No, I'm not ready at all, but I will be shortly. Have you had breakfast?"

  "Yes, ma'am. You have a wonderful cook. I tried to steal her away from you. I've been out to see the horses and talked to Lanson. You want to sell this place?"

  "You want to buy it?"

  A wide grin split James' face. "Always wanted a horse ranch but thought I'd settle in Texas. Got any good-lookin' women around these parts?"

  "Few," she answered.

  "Let's take care of the oil company and when that's done have a serious talk about your ranch."

  She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "You serious?"

  "Could be if the price was right. Besides you owe me enough for the down payment already."

  "I'll think about it," she said.

  Her mind raced as she took off the expensive suit, threw it on the bed, and pulled on a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt from San Antonio with a dolphin on the front. She kicked her panty hose and high-heeled shoes into a corner and picked up the cowboy boots she'd worn the night before when she showed Slade the horses. She wished she would have slipped into his room and spent the night making love to him until dawn.

  The cheval mirror at the foot of her bed was a reflection of Jane, not Ellacyn. Jane had survived the six-week experience, and Jane would walk into the boardroom and deliver her news. Burn the house down, like Bob Lee said in the movie she'd watched with Slade. Paul had put out a contract on Ellacyn; Jane would bring the consequences.

  James didn't even raise an eyebrow when she declared she was ready to go to the board meeting. She looked a lot more confident in her jeans and boots than she had all nervous in that black power suit, anyway. That stepfather of hers would run and hide if he knew what kind of woman was on her way to the office.

  The conference room at the Ranger Oil Building was long and narrow with raised panel oak siding stained a rich cherry and enough glass on the east side to make the department heads around the table feel as though they were sitting outside beside the river. The glass-topped oak table had twelve padded chairs around it, eleven filled and one empty chair waiting on
Ellacyn to fill it.

  When Jane slung open the double doors, Paul had just stood up at the head of the table and begun to talk. He stopped mid-sentence and turned an ashy gray when he saw Ellacyn with several serious-faced men and women behind her, taking up places around the room like sentinels in a castle. Paul had always been handsome beyond words with his premature gray hair, angular face, and clear blue eyes. Everything about him said, "Trust me. I would never take advantage of you or hurt you in any way."

  He opened up his arms and smiled brightly, "Ellacyn, darlin', you've come home. I've been so worried. What are you doing here, though? You need to be resting. I'll call Dr. Harrison to come take a look at you. You have dark circles under your eyes and my God, Ellacyn, you've never come to the office looking like that."

  "Paul, this is my company now. I intend to fire your sorry ass, but I've got a few things to say first."

  "I'm sure you are under duress still. Take a few days. Are you sure you don't need professional help? Are you mentally stable, Ellacyn? You're acting crazy and you never come into the office looking like that," he repeated himself, groping nervously for something solid to convince everyone that she was insane. "I'm thinking maybe I should send you to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation."

  "I said sit down and I don't mean in my chair," she said.

  With a wave of the hand meant to tell eleven other people that he was merely appeasing his stepdaughter, he took the empty chair midway down the table. "Oh, by the way, happy birthday, Ellacyn. I'd planned a company party, but you were gone. Maybe later you can tell me what happened between you and that nice man you were supposed to marry. He was devastated."

  Any other time Paul would have intimidated her. Everyone else around the table looked confused. Eight women in black suits with their makeup and nails done to perfection; three men in various shades of custom made suits and power ties.

  "That nice man I was supposed to marry is dead. You hired him and his girlfriend to kill me before my twenty-fifth birthday, but he's dead and she's in prison," she said.

  "Hey, that's a pretty heavy accusation. Can you back it up with facts?"

  "Yes, I can. You put out a hit on me. Ramona gave the job to John, who took out a million dollar life insur ance policy on me so he could get paid double. He's dead so he's not talking. Ramona is in custody and she's not saying a word about the assassination attempts. Yes, there were many this past six weeks. I overheard John and Ramona talking about it the night before the wedding and believe me, your name was brought up."

  "I didn't…" Paul started.

  Everyone else was deadly silent.

  She shook her head. "No excuses necessary. While I was running away from bullets and bombs I hired a lawyer and gave him access to everything in the company. Even though I couldn't legally have it all until I was twenty-five, I still had a password and enough clout to look at everything. It's amazing what I can prove, isn't it Paul? And I am filing charges against you for embezzlement. I'd love to file on you for murder because I'm sure you had my father killed as well as my mother, but I can't prove it at this late date. This morning I signed the papers and this oil company is now a part of Tex-Okie oil out of Houston, Texas. Please meet the new staff. Heads will roll. Heads will stay. It's up to them, not me."

  "Ellacyn, this is your legacy. Your great-grandfather founded Ranger Oil in the boom days. You can't just sell it. I don't know what you think you've found, but…" Paul started again.

  She held up her hand. "I'm twenty-five as of Saturday. I can do anything I damn well please without anyone's signature. This oil company and the ranch are both mine, Paul. Or at least the oil company was until this morning, when I signed all the papers selling what's left of it to Tex-Okie. And I don't think anything. I know every thing. Phone records show multiple calls between you and Ramona. An audit shows that you've been using company funds for your personal high-dollar lifestyle, including paying out half a mil for the first half of the money to have me killed."

  "You can't do this. I've given this company thirteen years. You owe me."

  James stepped up and opened the briefcase. "What I have here is proof that she owes you nothing. It's also proof that you have just about run this company into the dirt. Tex-Okie is buying a flailing whale, and you're the one who killed it."

  Paul took a deep breath and started across the room. He wouldn't stop at his office or make a detour through the penthouse, but would go straight to the private parking lot, get into a low-slung, sleek black Porsche, and drive toward Jackson to implement his backup plan. A con man always had an exit, and he was a profes sional. The nest egg in his foreign account was at the lowest it had been in years but it would get him by until he could find another scam to work. Damn it all, he thought he had this one in his back pocket. What had gone wrong? He'd have to think about it and not make the same mistake twice. One thing about Steven Ferrell, he learned from his mistakes, and with all his identities he would never get caught. That young man who pulled his first con in northern Arkansas had learned a lot in the past forty years.

  But even the best laid backup plans can go to hell in a handbasket. When he opened the door it was in the face of two uniformed officers with handcuffs. They read him his rights and escorted him out to a black-and-white police car instead of a nice, shiny black Porsche. Paul was on his way to prison, not some exotic hideaway where he could conjure up another scam.

  After Jane formally turned the business over to the new buyers, she and James left the building. She didn't even look back.

  "It's amazing what shows up when you start turning over rocks, isn't it?" Jane said on their way to the eleva tors. "Who'd have thought that his name wasn't even Paul Stokes? It was a stroke of luck that you thought about running his fingerprints through the system. I'll be ordering a new tombstone for my mother's grave that has her real name on it. Stokes indeed! Wonder where he came up with that name? It's not even close to Steven Ferrell."

  "Who knows where a person gets a fake name? I understand you used Jane Day when you ran away," James reminded her.

  "Yes, I did. Jane is my middle name and probably what I'll go by the rest of my life. I like the Jane I've become better than the Ellacyn I was. Day is what happens when you almost say Hayes and stutter."

  James grinned. "I imagine you feel like you've been duped your whole life."

  They both got into the steaming hot truck and buckled up.

  "Not really. Momma and Daddy were both very honest. And my grandmother was a jewel. No, I can't say I've been duped my whole life… just the past few years and especially the past six weeks. Even then, there was a good honest man beside me."

  "Slade is a good man. Now you want to talk about selling your ranch or not?"

  "Let's talk about it over dinner," she said. "I'm buying. What do you want?"

  "I've got a four o'clock flight out of Jackson. I won't be here for dinner."

  "Dinner on the ranch is at noon. Supper is in the evening. And I've had enough selling for one day. But I'll either buy you dinner or have my cook fix whatever you want. As far as the ranch, give me a few weeks to get my bearings. If you are really inter ested after you have time to think about it, and I'm still in the mood to sell when I've had time, we'll negotiate. When we do, you'd best have a banker with a lot of money."

  "Why? I was thinking of paying cash."

  *********

  Slade had been home a week and still hadn't put the Mustang up for sale. He parked it beside the hay barn where he and Jane had worked together those weeks that seemed like a hundred years before. Every evening he sat on the hood and watched the sun go down.

  Sometimes he smiled.

  Sometimes he frowned.

  Always he missed Jane.

  He'd picked up the phone a dozen times to call her, but every time he flipped it shut before he dialed the complete number. She had things to take care of, deci sions to make concerning her properties. If she wanted to talk to him, she'd call. After a week, he gave up ho
pe.

  "You drivin' us to the Silver Saddle tonight?" Nellie asked Slade at the dinner table.

  It had been another hot August day, sun beating down, no clouds in sight, work to be done from daylight to dark. The hands drank more tea and lemonade than they ate food.

  "It's so hot I saw a lizard totin' a canteen on one shoulder and a machine gun on the other," Marty had said.

  Everyone had laughed except Slade, who had a flashback of machine gun fire at the safe house. Agent August had come by the ranch a few days before and told him how things had gone down.

  "So, are you taking us or not? We've got to have time to pretty up." Ellen poked Slade, bringing him back to the present.