Tag, You're It!

by Penny McCall

  “Nooooo,” Alex said. “The second? As in junior?”

  One corner of Tag’s mouth quirked up but his eyes stayed on the Hummer driver. “I wouldn’t say that within earshot.”

  “His name is bigger than he is.”

  “So’s his ego. From what I hear, he lives up to all your expectations of men.”

  “He’s not the only one.”

  Tag grinned at that. “I have some surprises left.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” She would have walked away, but things had started to get interesting. Just because she enjoyed her own company so much didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate what other people got up to.

  “We are looking for the Lost Spaniard treasure,” Junior announced in a pronounced French lisp. “We would be grateful for any help that can be provided, and then if you would kindly keep out of our way, we would be most appreciative.”

  “Does that usually work for him?” Alex wondered.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not impressed,” Tag said.

  He wasn’t the only one. It started with one lone voice Alex didn’t immediately recognize, probably Jess or one of his cronies. The voice sounded old, and the tone of it was senior-citizen-with-a-right-to-know. The effect on the crowd was the Little Dutch Boy pulling his finger out of the dike.

  Junior was peppered with questions. The crowd surged forward in a mad panic to establish a pecking order, threatening to flatten him against the side of his vehicle. Death by Hummer. Hummercide.

  “What are you grinning about?” Tag asked her.

  “Nothing.” But she kept grinning. It was the only entertainment she was likely to get, because the intended victim lifted a hand and crooked a finger.

  The Land Rover and the Jeep vomited out a passel of black-clad knuckle-draggers who locked arms and shoved everyone back so there was an island of personal space big enough for the Hulk.

  The crowd subsided verbally, too, relegated to threatening looks and angry mutterings, and subjected to some pretty fierce body odor, judging by the grimaces of the people in armpit proximity.

  Junior looked down his nose at everyone, very French aristocrat. Then he caught sight of Tag. And he smiled.

  “That’s not a nice smile” Alex said, apparently too loudly.

  Junior shifted his gaze to her, held her eyes long enough to give her the creeps, then went back to supervising crowd intimidation.

  “Is that sulfur I’m smelling?” she asked.

  “He’s small, but potent,” Tag said. “Not somebody you want to mess with.”

  “There’s no love lost for you, either.”

  “He considers me competition.”

  “What do you consider him?”

  “A loose cannon. And a pain in the ass.” A dangerous one, but Tag could see she’d already figured that out. What she hadn’t clued in to was the possibility she was in Dussaud’s sights right along with him.

  “A loose cannon and a pain in the ass. That sounds like something you’d say about me,” Alex observed. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you have.”

  “Not yet. I was saving those for the next time you ticked me off.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to overwork your vocabulary,” she said. “I think you’re going to need all the words you can come up with, and maybe a few weapons, to deal with Junior.”

  Tag didn’t have a response for that. She was in the same boat, but telling her that wouldn’t do him any good. She was more the actions-speak-louder-than-words kind of woman, a philosophy that, if she wasn’t careful, might get her killed.

  “I’m going to my room, and I intend to sleep for about a week,” Alex said. “Hopefully when I wake up this will all be over,” she pushed away from the wall where she’d been leaning next to Tag, adding for his benefit, “and you’ll all be gone.”

  The crowd had begun to thin out, Junior apparently having grown tired of flexing his hired muscle for the benefit of the entire town. Unfortunately, he’d decided on a private showing. Alex’s forward momentum ground to a halt behind what she thought was a pedestrian traffic jam. Turned out the obstruction was one of Junior’s flunkies. The people in front of her went either way around him. Alex tried to do the same, but he shifted to block her. Not so much an obstruction as a brick wall with an IQ just high enough for him to follow orders. And the orders were to keep her from leaving.

  “Mademoiselle Scott.”

  She turned, but not toward the voice. She knew who the voice belonged to, but she was looking for Tag. She found him standing where she’d left him, leaning a shoulder against the diner wall. Watching.

  Alex squashed her irritation. She wanted him to leave her alone, and he was leaving her alone. Even when it wasn’t convenient for her.

  Three more of Junior’s flunkies lined up with the first one, and she thought maybe it would be in her best interest to deal with Junior now and Tag later. If there was a later. “C’est dommage” she said, shifting her attention sideways—and down—to Junior.

  “What is a pity?” Junior asked.

  She looked over her shoulder at the no-neck brigade.

  “You mistake me, Miss Scott. I feared you would not want to talk with me, and I am right, n’est-ce pas? I wished only for a chance to… how do you say, talk my piece.”

  “You could have asked.”

  “You would not have listened.” Dussaud looked over at Tag.

  He straightened away from the building—he stayed where he was, but something dangerous came over his face, and it wasn’t aimed at her. These two were definitely communicating, Alex thought; there was a whole subtext she wasn’t clued in to. And didn’t want to be, she assured herself. In fact, the subtext ticked her off. It was bad enough to be dragged halfway into some stupid treasure hunt, but add in a couple of alpha males intent on butting heads, and she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  This time, when she tried to walk away, Dussaud was the only one who stopped her, with a hand on her arm.

  “I really do not mean you any harm, Miss Scott.”

  She brushed his hand off. “How do you know my name anyway?”

  “I make it my business to know as much about a predicament as I can, before I go into it.”

  “I’m not a predicament.”

  “I have a feeling you will be. If you continue to keep company with Monsieur Donovan.”

  “Your feeling is wrong this time,” Alex said. “I’m not going after the Lost Spaniard,” her gaze swiveled to Tag, “no matter what you hear.”

  Dussaud gave Tag a long, disdainful look. “Mr. Donovan can be very persuasive, especially where the ladies are concerned.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m not a lady.” She attempted to leave, but it was hard to make a classy exit when you couldn’t actually exit. She tried to stare down the goon in front of her. His lip curled and he sort of growled at her—very junkyard dog, trained to mindlessly guard his territory, considered eye contact a challenge, possibly rabid.

  “Do you really think you could leave if I preferred you to stay?” Junior asked her, the French accent making the question condescending. Even at his most irritating, Tag had never talked down to her. It would have been a point in his favor, if she’d ever intended to subject herself to his good points again, let alone the bad ones.

  “Do you really think it’s macho to turn three hundred pounds of muscle—three-ten with his head—loose on a woman less than half his size?” she said to Junior.

  “I have a feeling you can take care of yourself, Miss Scott.”

  “Damn right she can,” someone in the crowd called out. “Drive his gonads up into his armpits, Alex.”

  She was still staring at the flunky, so she raised an eyebrow. He hunched automatically, but she had to give him credit; he didn’t budge. He looked at his boss, and after another minute of torture, Junior the control freak inclined his head and let his hireling step aside.

  Alex started to walk past him, but there was something she really need
ed to know. “Tell me you’re not the one who burned down my cabin,” she said turning back to Junior.

  “Mais non. Of course not.” He even seemed genuinely surprised. “In fact, I had hoped I might convince you to work with me.”

  “No.”

  “I will pay you, of course. I will even give you some of the money up front. You will be able to rebuild your cabin and return to your studies.”

  “I have insurance.”

  “That will take time. With my help, you could order the things you require, and by the time our search is over everything will be in readiness.” He spread his hands, all benevolence. “I will even leave one of my men here to put things in order for you.”

  Alex perused the choice of potential worker bees and concluded they didn’t have one good brain between them. “Tempting, but I have a feeling traveling with you would be detrimental to my health.”

  Junior took a moment to digest that, not happy about being refused but doing his best to play along. Clearly it wasn’t an easy task for him, which made Alex wonder why he was making the effort. She might have asked if she’d thought it would ever matter.

  “I am sorry you feel that way,” he said after a moment. “If you change your mind…” He held out a card.

  Alex shrugged and took it, tucking it in her pocket without looking at it. “We won’t be crossing paths again,” she said.

  “In a town this small, Miss Scott, we can hardly avoid it.”

  ———

  THERE WERE SOME PEOPLE WHO WERE BETTER OFF alone. Alexandra Scott was one of them. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people as a rule, and it wasn’t that they didn’t like her. It was the disappointment.

  Alex had grown up in Boston, where blood was blue, money was old, and those who had both stuck together like a big, inbred dysfunctional family. Alex had tried to fit in. She’d never quite managed it, swallowing her disappointment when she begged to go to science camp but instead was enrolled in finishing school in hopes she could be pressed into the vapid, mall-haunting, socialite-in-training mold. Breeding would tell, her mother insisted, then set out to prove it. No matter what it took.

  It turned out her mother was right. Unfortunately the only thing Alex had inherited was the knack for disappointment, beginning with the four years she’d spent in a tiny sub-Ivy League dorm room with three red-blooded, non-monied roommates, and ending with a bachelor’s degree in the history of American settlement on the indigenous animal species of the West, then a PhD in zoology, and finally a grant to study mountain lions and a one-way ticket out of Boston.

  Okay, so there’d been a detour, a major detour. She’d been young and she’d wanted to please her mother. One thing had led to another, and she’d actually wound up engaged. That had been a mistake, or rather he’d been a mistake. And a liar and a cheat and a minuscule excuse for a human being. But she’d fixed that, and come out the other end with a rock-solid determination to never again let other people’s expectations dictate her life to her.

  She hadn’t regretted her decision once in six years. She might have been living in a log cabin only slightly larger than her dorm room, with no electricity and no indoor plumbing, but there were no other occupants, and solitude, Alex decided, made up for a lot.

  She’d have that again. She’d rebuild the cabin and finish her survey of the mountain lions, then move on to another study. Just as soon as she found out what her insurance covered.

  “Nothing,” her agent said when she finally managed to get hold of him. “You didn’t pay your last premium.”

  “I… don’t recall getting the bill,” she said after she racked her brain and came up empty. “Mail delivery is kind of spotty where I live.” Her memory was at fault for the rest of it. She tended toward tunnel vision when she was working—which was most of the time. She counted on the mail to remind her of that sort of thing, and that brought her back to the beginning of the circle. Her agent was sympathetic but sympathy wasn’t going to buy her power bars and bottled water, let alone rebuild her cabin.

  So she called the rest of her contacts, which took precious little time—the downside to being a loner—and netted her exactly what she’d gotten from her insurance company. The grant money had all been awarded for the year, and the few friends she had in the business weren’t the kind of people who had spare cash lying around. Field zoology wasn’t a profession you went into if you wanted to get rich. It wasn’t a profession you went into if you wanted to have an actual savings account. Alex had just enough left in her checking account for some clean underwear and about a week of living out of a hotel room. Then she’d be truly homeless.

  Except for Boston. But she was going to have to be a lot more desperate before she could bring herself to go that route. Besides, who would look after Jackass? He wouldn’t fit in with the pedigreed mounts in Boston stables any more than she belonged in the drawing rooms.

  It seemed like a good time to get some sleep, forget about her problems for a while. Thank god she’d gotten a room first thing, because in the two hours it had taken to exhaust her funding possibilities, Casteel’s population seemed to have doubled, and not in a good way. A lot of the newcomers seemed to be looking for an easy buck, but greed wasn’t unique to the newcomers. She’d have bet the prices at the diner and market had already gone up, and there wasn’t a room left to rent within fifty miles.

  Not that she could get to hers, situated as it was above the bar in the Casteeley Inn. The place was wall-to-wall people, all of them had questions, and as soon as she made her appearance, she was elected answer man. Her own, site-specific, fifteen minutes of fame.

  If she’d been hungry or thirsty, she might have hung around. She could probably live off her insider status for a while. Hell, considering the way she was being pestered every other minute she ought to set up a booth and charge for what she knew. Not a bad idea. Except she didn’t know anything.

  So there she was, halfway between the front door and the stairs, completely surrounded by strangers, when a hand reached into the press of people, latched on to her arm, and dragged her out of the throng and face-to-face with Tag Donovan.

  “You have a room in this dive?” he wanted to know.

  Great, because of him she had nothing and he wanted half of it? “You’re not sleeping with me.”

  “No offense, but I’m really tired. How about you let me into your room for now and we’ll talk about your pants later.”

  “How about no to both?”

  “You saved my life,” he said, “twice. In some cultures that means you’re responsible for me.”

  “This is America. Land of every-man-for-himself.”

  “The rest of these guys can find their own women to sponge off of.”

  Alex rolled her eyes and started to work her way toward the stairs, head down, not stopping for anyone. Tag was right behind her, taking advantage of the path she was cutting through the crowd. The next time somebody asked her a question, she pointed a thumb over her shoulder and said, “Tag Donovan.” She didn’t have to tell them who he was; his name was already better known than Bigfoot—and he had about the same amount of credibility as far as she was concerned.

  Unfortunately her diversion backfired. News traveled around the room in about two seconds, everyone converged on Tag’s position, and there went her hope of getting to the stairs. But there was a wide-open path to the front door.

  Sighing, she went back out to the street and pointed her weary body toward the sheriff’s office. A wafer-thin cot over wire mesh was a far cry from the soft mattress she’d been looking forward to, but she was at the point where anything horizontal would fit the bill.

  She woke up an indeterminate time later, and after the second attempt at trying to stand up she decided it might be best to lie there for a few minutes. Vertical was still a bit much to ask for. Her head was buzzing and her muscles were stiff. If not for her rumbling stomach she probably would have slept the night through.

  Matt hadn’t been there when
she arrived earlier that afternoon, and he wasn’t there now. Probably somewhere in town breaking up… something. Or arresting somebody.

  That got her on her feet. She didn’t want to be around when the occupancy rose in these particular sleeping quarters.

  The clock on the wall said it was past midnight by the time she began the eight-block walk to the bar. The clouds of the day before had cleared off completely, but Casteel didn’t count streetlights among its modern conveniences.

  From the look of things a tent city had sprung up in the grazing land across the river. There were a lot of lights that appeared to be campfires over there, anyway. The street seemed to be pretty deserted, but Alex felt like somebody had painted a target on her back. All those warnings from Tag and her run-in with Junior were getting to her, she decided.

  Or maybe it was the two guys who grabbed her from behind and shoved her into the alley between the sheriff’s office and the bakery next door while she was in that first breathless moment of disbelief and shock.

  She got a handle on herself pretty fast and put her back to the wall, heart pounding, eyes straining to make out anything in the absolute blackness of the alley.

  “What did Donovan tell you about the treasure?” one of them said, his face close enough to bathe her in garlic breath.

  Disgusting, but she had more to worry about than a few singed nose hairs. Like how to get herself out of this alley in one piece. Amped on adrenaline, she could probably handle herself against one ruffian, but not two, especially if they were armed. She didn’t have her Winchester because Matt didn’t allow guns to be carried in town. She thought it was a bit too optimistic to hope her assailants were obeying that particular ordinance.