There had seemed nothing she couldn’t say to him in that magic spot beside the crystal water, but here in the sunlight, in the high heat of the day, she found her voice frozen by the lack of a future for them. She couldn’t offer him whatever it was he needed because she’d buried it already. And he? He hadn’t offered her anything except himself, and that precious moment had passed, as well.
He drew Jezebel up abruptly and was staring ahead, rising in his stirrups, leaning forward.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The vultures are circling something up ahead.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Not one of the cattle.”
“Maybe,” he answered. He sat in the saddle and flicked her a strange look. “You might want to hang back here. A dead or dying animal isn’t anything pretty to look at.”
Jeannie thought of the undertaker who’d told her essentially the same thing about her husband and daughter. And she’d believed him and hadn’t gone in to say goodbye. And had been haunted ever since by the lack of certainty that they’d really gone forever and weren’t in some strange witness relocation program and might reappear any day.
Though it wasn’t the same, she used the memory to instill some courage. “I’m going with you,” she said.
As if as uncomfortable with the way the afternoon was ending as she was, he urged his horse forward and trotted south and west.
“How many fires does others mean?” she asked.
“More than three, less than ten,” he said. “Beyond those you had before Pablo and I came out here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shifted in his saddle as if uncomfortable. And Jeannie knew he was uncomfortable. Not about the fires, but about something he wasn’t telling her. Maybe it had something to do with what he’d tried to confess in the chasm when she’d stopped him.
Thinking about it, she realized the wonder wasn’t that he was hiding something from her, nor even that she’d stopped him from telling, but that she’d felt she knew someone well enough to know exactly what he was thinking. To know someone with the kind of inner radar that allowed her to glimpse his thoughts, his needs, his wants was an intimacy she’d believed closed to her forever.
He raised on his stirrups again, everything about him alert, tense and somehow utterly dangerous.
She followed his gaze and gasped. Something was lying in the grass in the distance, something dressed in red, yellow and faded blue. Everything in her screamed a denial, but she kept silent.
When they were some twenty yards away, Jeannie knew what the something was, though she’d tried hard to convince herself it was a pile of clothing or a bunch of rags some careless person had left there.
Overhead, vultures made large lazy circles on huge wings and nasty gargling sounds issued from pink wattles on their misshapen necks. Too many movies, too much present fear managed to send a chill down Jeannie’s back.
“Stay here,” Chance said, reaching out a hand for one of Diablo’s reins and drawing the horse to a stop. “I don’t want to see this, let alone even think about you getting a close-up view.” His eyes bored into hers, the first time he’d truly met her eyes since she’d screamed his name near the water of her magic pond. And in them was a far different demand there than she’d seen earlier that afternoon. A hard command.
Jeannie lifted a hand as if showing him the way. She stayed where she was, holding the reins of a restive Diablo.
Every nerve stretched tight, she watched as he moved away from her, closer to the pile of rags that couldn’t be anything but a body, and again she thought of David and Angela. Maybe she’d done the right thing back then. She’d been haunted by the need to see them again, and all the literature she’d read about grieving had said this desire would ebb and flow with time and healing. But she’d at least always envisioned them whole, not broken and torn.
She chewed on her lower lip and wished for her notebook. She needed to write down some of her thoughts. It was so much easier than dealing with the blatant reality she watched unfolding before her eyes.
She watched Chance urge an anxious Jezebel forward. The horse nervously picked her way across the desert brush. When he was close to the person lying in the grass—Jeannie had no doubt that was what it was—he pulled the skittish horse to a halt, swung a leg over her back and dropped to the ground.
Jeannie had seen his eyes raking the surrounding desert as they’d approached, so she wasn’t surprised to see him do so again. But this time, he transferred the reins to his left hand, and his right hovered near his hip, as if looking for a gun that should be there.
Leading Jezebel, Chance walked a broad circle around the dead man, who wore a yellow shirt, blue jeans and what appeared to be a red shawl of some kind around his neck.
Chance looked at the buzzards circling and crying raucously and uttering their gurgling babble overhead, then glanced at her. His expression was grim and not just dangerous, but deadly.
“I don’t suppose you have a cell phone on you, do you?”
She shook her head. She wanted to be anywhere but out here in this desert. She ached to be back at her magical pond. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t,” she whispered.
She wanted to ask if the person was dead but knew the question was naive. Of course the man was dead. Nothing could lie so still in the New Mexico sun with vile, screeching vultures flying overhead and flies buzzing around in busy activity and not be dead.
“Chance?”
“It’s Jorge Martinez,” he said. “Lucinda’s husband. Damn. Ah, damn.”
Jeannie remembered Doreen saying something about a cousin of hers whose husband had disappeared. “Oh, no,” she said. A thousand questions trembled on her lips. What was the man doing on her land? How long had he been missing? What could she do to help Lucinda, Doreen’s cousin? For who knew better than she did what it was to have the worst of terrible news delivered?
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We report it from the ranch,” he said. “But not to the sheriff. I want you to go back to the ranch and call the federal marshal’s office. Tell them I told you to call and that I want them out here right now.”
“Why—?”
“Jeannie, there’s no time to explain all this. I’ll ride with you to the road so you won’t get lost, then I’ll wait for Ted and Dell out here.”
“Ted and Dell?”
“Deputy marshals,” he said tersely.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said.
“There’s more to it than that. I tried to tell you—hell, that doesn’t matter now. Jeannie, this man didn’t just die out here. He’s been murdered.”
Chance’s last word reverberated through Jeannie’s soul. Murdered. The man hadn’t wandered onto her property and succumbed to heat prostration or gotten lost and dropped from lack of water or food. The man—Jorge, husband of Doreen’s cousin Lucinda—had been killed.
“How?” she asked.
“I think you can take your pick,” Chance growled.
He waved off some flies—making Jeannie wince—and after a careful look around the body, stepped closer to the hapless Jorge. He knelt down and stared, not at the body, but at something lying beside it. Keeping a tight hold on Jezebel’s reins, he pulled a utility knife from his jeans pocket and flipped it open. He snared something from the ground and held it carefully away from him, then studied it closely.
Jeannie couldn’t tell what the object was, at first, as it made so little sense in its present context, then realized she was looking at a trophy of some kind. Gold glinted through the grime on the dust-covered trophy of a man riding a bucking horse. She didn’t need to see the name on the plaque to know who the trophy belonged to.
Out of the thousand questions rushing through her, Jeannie could only focus on one. “How long has he been dead?”
“What? I don’t know. Two days, maybe. Could be more. Doesn’t really look like he was killed here.”
Jeannie didn’t ask him ho
w he knew this. She’d asked her question only because of the children. José and Dulce were at the ranch, alone with Juanita, the sometimes present Tomás and sweet Pablo. She felt a sharp stab of alarm.
“We’ve got to get back to ranch now,” she said. Her voice was sharp enough to make him look up from poor Jorge’s body and the trophy he held by his utility knife. “Right now. We have to make sure the kids are okay.”
“Pablo’s there,” he said. But, even as he said the appeasing words, he was rising from his crouch over the body. “They’ll be okay.”
“We don’t know that,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy, but besides this man here, something’s wrong. I can feel it. Can’t you?”
She could tell by his eyes that he did. She didn’t have to explain it to him. He was there with her, as he had been in the magical pond. The magic still lived, still breathed. “Yes, I can feel it,” he said. And his rough, corduroy voice seemed to hover over the desert every bit as much as the vultures flying above.
“Now, Chance. Please.” She pulled on Diablo’s reins, and he danced beneath her, ready to do her bidding but not sure what she wanted. “I don’t know the way,” she called.
“Wait for me,” he said easily, and it sounded far more complex than a simple command. It had the alluring sound of a vowlike plea.
“I have to,” she muttered.
“That’ll be the day,” he said, mounting Jezebel. “You’re only waiting because you don’t know which way to turn Diablo.” And he made that mystical clicking sound only horses seemed to recognize, and Jezebel launched from a standstill into a full canter.
Jeannie didn’t have to make the clicking. She nearly fell off her mount when Diablo leaped forward, unwilling to be left behind by Jezebel. The macho horse tore across the ground like a racehorse in training, strong forelegs propelling them forward while his hind hooves dug at the earth and sent it flying.
Chance rode in the lead, heading due south, his back straight, his broad shoulders—tanned shoulders she’d caressed throughout the afternoon—forward. He seemed so much a part of the horse he looked like a centaur. A man-beast with a trophy tied to his saddle.
Jeannie didn’t think about her inability to ride. She didn’t consider the hardness of the ground. She only thought of two vulnerable children and a man named Jorge who died on her ranch with a yellow shirt on and a red shawl around his neck.
She could barely see Chance ahead of her, though Diablo labored to close the distance between them. She tried not to think of the afternoon they’d shared. She attempted not to question what confession she’d silenced with her insistence that the pool was so magical lies were acceptable. And, most of all, she strove to keep her imagination in check so as not to picture the children hurt, damaged and, please God, not killed like poor Jorge.
Like some desert sea captain, Chance seemed to know exactly where he was, and within minutes their horses galloped to the road leading into Rancho Milagro, panting but still nervous, as if they knew why their riders had fled the hot desert.
Diablo stomped his feet and snorted while Jezebel shook her head as though trying to slough the adrenaline still pumping through her. Jeannie wished she could do the same.
“You get to the ranch. Won’t take you more than five minutes, straight down the road. I’m sorry to make you do this, but I don’t want—”
He bit off whatever he’d been about to say. Jeannie filled in the blanks. “You don’t want anyone messing with Jorge’s body.”
Chance gave her a long look. “Right. So you head on out. Make that call, get Diablo to the barn and then get the kids inside. If you tell Pablo what we found, he’ll know what to do. Okay?”
“Chance?” She wanted to say so many things. To warn him to be careful, to tell him she hated this ending to a perfect afternoon.
“Trust me,” he said, misunderstanding her.
Trust him. His hallmark. The stamp of a man used to taking charge, saving the day. He’d put out fires on her ranch. He’d tamed children, horses, cattle, puppies and woken her comatose heart.
“I trust you,” she said.
He stared at her as if she’d spoken a foreign language. His hands pulled sharply at Jezebel’s reins, and she sidled into Diablo. “What did you say?”
“I trust you, Chance.”
She felt she shouted it and that the hawks flying overhead called the message to each other. The sky itself should have fallen with the admission.
“Jeannie?”
“I trust you,” she repeated.
“God, woman. You pick your moments, don’t you?”
“Is there a better time?”
He smiled, a ragged, crooked smile that seemed more sad than happy. “God, yes,” he answered honestly. “But I’ll hold you to those words when I get back.”
“I might forget them by then,” she said, smiling at him.
“So write them down in your little notebook,” he said.
Chapter 11
C hance watched Jeannie disappear in a cloud of dust. He cursed himself for not going with her. There was nothing he could do for poor Jorge, and he felt foolish waiting beside the road.
The danger they’d discovered was real and very close. Whoever had murdered Jorge had dumped the body in the middle of nowhere, and not long ago. It could have been while he and Jeannie were making love in that beautiful chasm.
He’d heard nothing, but then, he wouldn’t have. Every sense he possessed had been wholly absorbed in Jeannie, in her delicate taste, her silken body, the way her laughter enveloped him like a warm blanket on a cold night.
But sometime during the day, someone had thrown Jorge onto the desert grass with no more concern, and perhaps less, than someone might discard rotting garbage. And they hadn’t used a vehicle to do this. There were no tire tracks within twenty yards of the body. And no signs of a struggle.
Jorge hadn’t been dead the whole time he’d been missing. He’d been held somewhere. And obviously tortured, but to what end? And what, beyond strangulation, was the significance of the red shawl around his neck?
Chance used his utility knife to once again inspect the trophy he’d tied to his saddle. That it was supposed to be on the fireplace mantel in his cheap rented house in Carlsbad wasn’t the only thing disturbing about finding it beside Jorge’s body in the middle of Jeannie’s ranch. Chance turned it over and couldn’t fail to identify the dried blood on its heavy base. He was certain a DNA test would prove the blood to be Jorge’s. But why had someone gone to such lengths to link a hired hand on Rancho Milagro with a murder victim?
It was like Nando’s call to Jeannie a few days earlier about the drugs. Somebody—El Patron—wanted him out of the picture, even if it took framing him for murder to do it. And there was only one reason someone would go to those lengths—his cover had been blown.
And since he knew none of his deputies would have done such a thing, and Pablo would rather be buried at Rancho Milagro than ever say a word, it could only mean that El Patron, and therefore Nando, had come across some information about him.
But why would El Patron’s hoodlums go to such lengths, then dispose of poor Jorge where he was unlikely to be found any time soon? Was it a cat-and-mouse game? Or was there something far more sinister and much easier to explain? Had they only dropped Jorge on the way to somewhere else, planning to use his broken body later?
Jezebel started and pawed the dirt road at Chance’s sudden and involuntary pressure against her flanks. He stared down the road in the direction of the ranch. What if he was missing something and had unwittingly sent Jeannie directly into the heart of danger?
Diablo took Jeannie right to the hitching post in front of the veranda at the main house. She slid from his back and nearly fell as her trembling legs threatened to give way. But the need for urgency was stronger than her desire to gain her equilibrium.
The puppies in their little pen on the veranda barked excitedly, trying to escape their prison as she hiked the reins over the post i
n a rough knot. Just the sight of the pups made her feel more comfortable. Nothing could be wrong if the puppies were still happy and healthy, could it?
But Jorge’s body on that desert plain, and the look on Chance’s face when he’d recognized him, propelled her forward. She staggered to the steps, calling for Pablo as she ran.
The blast of icy air from inside the house hit her and made her gasp in relief. She called for Dulce and José as she crossed to the telephone. Ignoring the red flashing message light, she fumbled for the phone book, then, abandoning the effort, dialed nine-one-one and told the dispatcher she needed the number for the federal marshal’s office. When the dispatcher wanted to know what her trouble was, she insisted on being connected to or given the number for the marshal’s office in Carlsbad.
Though she was given the number in only a matter of seconds, she had the feeling she should have called Doreen at the post office. In love with one of the marshals, she would have the number memorized.
Jeannie’s hands noticeably trembled as she punched in the number. For a split second, she couldn’t remember the deputy marshals’ names, but when a woman answered and asked if she could help, Jeannie gasped, “Dell or Ted. It’s an emergency.”
“Dell Johnson here,” a deep voice said almost immediately.
“I’m Jeannie McMunn—”
“Yes, ma’am. What’s wrong?”
“Chance Salazar told me to call you. We found a dead body on my ranch. Chance says to tell you it’s Jorge…Jorge Martinez. And for you to come right away. He’s waiting on the ranch road so he can lead you to…to the body.”
“We’ll be right there,” Dell said and hung up without asking any further questions.
Jeannie sagged against the wall. She fleetingly wondered if she’d have received one quarter of the swift response had she called Nando Gallegos, and decided that question wasn’t even worth asking.
“Dulce! José!” Jeannie called the children’s names again, walking down the hall of the bedroom wing that housed them. “Where are you kids?”
No one answered her. She hesitated outside Dulce’s closed door. She knocked and, hearing nothing, turned the knob. She stared at the mess in the room blankly for a minute. In any other teenager’s space, she might not even have given it a second thought, but Dulce was almost preternaturally compulsive about keeping her room tidy. It was as if she’d never had control of anything in her young life and had poured all her need for order into her immediate surroundings.
Cowboy Under Cover Page 16