“Hi, Merissa,” he said.
She smiled back. “Hello, Mr. Hanes.”
“Been riding fence,” he said, sighing. “I came back to get the chain saw. We’ve got a tree across a fence.” He shook his head. “Bad weather, and more forecast.”
Merissa was staring at him without speaking. She moved a step closer. “Mr. Hanes, please don’t take this the wrong way...but...” She bit her lip. “You need to take somebody with you when you cut the tree down.”
He gave her a wide-eyed look. “Excuse me?”
She shifted, as if she was staggering under a burden. “Please?”
“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.
* * *
“WHAT 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. Yo
u 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.”
* * *
DALTON 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
DALTON 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.
* * *
AFTER 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.
Wyoming Bold (9781460320891) Page 2