Return To Sender

by Merline Lovelace

  “Tell me about the postcards.”

  She waited to reply until the waitress had placed a brimming basket of tortilla chips on the table and taken their drink orders.

  “They usually come in batches,” she told Harry. “Two or three will arrive within a week of each other, then a month might go by before another set comes in.”

  “I figured as much,” the marshal said, almost to himself. “He’d have to send backups in case the first didn’t arrive. Have any others come in with this one from Rio?”

  “Two. The first was from Prague. The second from Pamplona.”

  “Pamplona?” His brow creased. “Isn’t that where they run bulls through the streets? With the locals running right ahead of them?”

  “That’s what the scene on the card showed.” Sheryl hunched forward, recalling the vivid street scene with a shake of her head. “Can you imagine racing down a narrow, cobbled street a few steps ahead of thundering, black bulls?”

  “I can imagine it, but it’s not real high on my list of fun things to do,” Harry admitted dryly. He loaded a chip with salsa. “How about you?”

  “Me? No way! I have enough trouble staying ahead of my bills, let alone a herd of bulls. Uh, you’d better go easy on that stuff. I heard the green chili crop came in especially hot this year.”

  “Not to fear, I’ve got a lead-lined stom—Arrggh!”

  He shot up straight in his chair, grabbed his water glass and downed the entire contents in three noisy gulps. Blinking rapidly, he stared at the little dish of salsa in disbelief.

  “Good Lord! Do you New Mexicans really eat this stuff?”

  “Some of us do,” Sheryl answered, laughing. “But we work up to it over a period of years.”

  The waitress arrived at that moment. Harry shot her a look of profound gratitude and all but snatched the Don Miguel light he’d ordered out of her hand. The ice-cold beer, like the water, went down in a few long, gulping swallows.

  The waitress turned an amused smile on Sheryl. “Didn’t you warn him?”

  “I tried to.”

  Winking, she picked up her tray. “Another gringo bites the dust.”

  Sheryl eyed the marshal, not quite sure she’d agree with the waitress’s assessment. His golden brown eyes watered, to be sure. A pepper-induced flush darkened his cheeks above the line of his mustache. He drained his mug with the desperation of a man who’d just crawled across a hundred miles of burning desert.

  She would categorize him as down, but certainly not out. He showed too much strength in those broad shoulders. Carried himself with too much authority. Even in his boots and jeans and casual open-necked shirt, he gave the impression of a man who knew what he wanted and went after it.

  For an unguarded moment, Sheryl wondered if he would pursue a woman he desired with the same single-minded determination he pursued the fugitives he hunted. He would, she decided. He’d pursue her, and when he caught her, he’d somehow manage to convince her she’d been the hunter all along. The thought sent a ripple of excitement singing through her veins. She shook her head at her own foolishness.

  Still, the tingle stayed with her while Harry dragged the heel of his hand across his eyes.

  “Remind me to listen to your warnings next time.”

  The offhand remark made Sheryl smile, until she realized that there probably wouldn’t be a next time. As soon as she filled Marshal MacMillan in on the details from the postcards, he’d ride off into the sunset in pursuit of his quarry.

  How stupid of her to romanticize his profession. She’d better remember that he lived the same lifestyle her father had. Here today, gone tomorrow, with never a backward glance for those he left behind.

  Recovering from his bout with the green chilies, Harry got back to business.

  “Prague, Pamplona and Rio,” he recited with just a hint of hoarseness. “We’ve suspected all along that our man is triangulating his shipments.”

  “Triangulating them?”

  “Sending them through second and third countries, where they’re rebundled with other products like coffee or bat guano, then smuggled into the States.”

  “Why in the world would someone bundle uranium with bat guano and...? Oh! To disguise the scent of the metal containers and get them past the Customs dogs, right?”

  “You got it in one.” He leaned forward, all business now. “Can you remember any of the words on the cards?”

  “On two of them. I didn’t see the one from Prague. My friend Elise described it to me, though.”

  “Okay, start with Rio. Give me what you can remember.”

  “I can give it to you exactly.” She wrinkled her brow. “‘Hi to my favorite aunt. I’ve been dancing in the streets for the past four days. Wish you were here.’”

  Harry stared at her in blank astonishment. “You can recall it word for word?”

  “Sure.”

  “How?” he shot back. “With the thousands of pieces of mail you handle every day, how in the hell can you remember one postcard?”

  “Because I handle thousands of pieces of mail every day,” she explained patiently. “The white envelopes and brown flats—the paper-wrapped magazines and manila envelopes—all blur together. Not that many postcards come through, though, and when they do, they catch our attention immediately.”

  She decided not to add that the really interesting postcards got passed from employee to employee. The male workers particularly enjoyed the topless beach scenes that American tourists loved to send back to their relatives. Some cards went well beyond topless and tipped into outright obscenity. Those they were required to turn into the postal inspectors. Sheryl had long ago ceased being surprised at what people stuck stamps on and dropped in a mailbox.

  Harry had her repeat the message. He copied the few sentences in his pad, then studied their content.

  “I don’t think this is Carnival season. I’m sure that happens right before Lent in Rio, just as it does in New Orleans.”

  He made another note to himself to check the dates of Rio’s famous festival. Sheryl was sitting so close she could make out every stroke. His handwriting mirrored his personality, she decided. Bold. Aggressive. Impatient.

  “Maybe the four days has some significance,” she suggested.

  “It probably does.” He frowned down at his notes. “I don’t know what yet, though.”

  “Do you want to know about the picture on the front side?” she asked after a moment.

  “Later. Let’s finish the back first. What else do you remember about it?”

  “What do you want to start with? The handwating? The color of ink? The stamp? The cancellation mark?”

  He sat back, his eyes gleaming. He looked like a man who’d just hit a superjackpot.

  “Start wherever you want.”

  They worked their way right through sour cream enchiladas, smoked charro beans, rice and sopapillas dripping with honey. The mariachi band came to their table and left again, richer by the generous tip Harry passed them. The tables around them emptied, refilled. They were still working the Rio postcard when Harry’s phone beeped.

  “MacMillan.” He listened for a moment, his brow creasing. “Right. I’m on my way.”

  Snapping the phone shut, he rose to pull out Sheryl’s chair. “I’m sorry. Inga Gunderson’s lawyer just showed up and wants to see his client. We’ll have to go over the rest of the cards tomorrow. I’ll call you to set up a time.”

  A small, unexpected dart of pleasure rippled through Sheryl at the thought of continuing this discussion with Marshal MacMillan. Shrugging, she chalked it up to the fact that she still had something worthwhile to contribute to his investigation.

  She drove out of the parking lot a few moments later, thinking that she’d better reschedule the last-minute layette shopping spree she and Elise had planned for tomorrow night. As determined as Harry was to extract every last bit of information from her, they might have to work late.

  She couldn’t know that he would walk into the
post office just after nine the next morning and reschedule her entire life.

  Chapter 4

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Sheryl repeated for the third time. “I can’t hand out a DHS check over the counter. Even if I could, I wouldn’t give you a check addressed to someone else.”

  The runny-eyed scarecrow on the other side of the counter lifted an arm and swiped it across his nose. His hand shook so badly that the tattoos decorating the inside of his wrist were a blur of red and blue.

  “That’s my old lady’s welfare check,” he whined. “I gotta have it. I want it.”

  Yeah, right, Sheryl thought. What he wanted was another fix, courtesy of the Department of Human Services. She wondered how many other women this creep had bullied or beaten out of their food and rent money over the years to feed his drug habit.

  “I can’t give it to you,” she repeated.

  “My old lady’s moved, I’m tellin’ ya, and she didn’t get her check this month. She sent me in to pick it up.”

  “I’m sure someone explained to her that the post office can’t forward a DHS check. We’re required by regulations to deliver it to the address where she physically resides or send it back.”

  “Send it back? Why, dammit?”

  The angry explosion turned the heads of the other customers who’d come in with the first rush of the morning. In the booth next to Sheryl’s, Elise glanced up sharply from the stamps she was dealing out.

  Holding on to her patience with both hands, Sheryl tried again. “We have to send the checks back to DHS because a few people abused the system by moving constantly and collecting checks from several different counties at once. Now everyone has to pay the price for their fraud.”

  The lank-haired junkie fixed her with a malevolent glare. “Yeah, well, I don’t give a rat’s ass about them other people. I just want my old lady’s money. You’d better give it to me, bitch, or I’m gonna—”

  “You’re going to what?”

  At the dangerous drawl, both Sheryl and her unpleasant customer jerked around.

  The sight of Harry MacMillan’s broad-shouldered form sent relief pinging through her. Relief and something else, something far too close to excitement for Sheryl’s peace of mind. Swallowing, she ascribed the sudden flutter in her stomach to the fact that the marshal looked particularly intimidating this morning.

  As he had yesterday, he wore jeans and a welltailored sport coat, this one a soft, lightweight, blue broadcloth. As it had yesterday, his jacket strained at the seams of his wide shoulders. Adding to his overall physical presence, his jaw had a hard edge that sent off its own silent warning. The gold in his eyes glinted hard and cold.

  Sheryl could handle nasty characters like the one standing in front of her at this moment. She’d done it many times. But that didn’t stop her from enjoying the pasty look that came over the druggie’s face when he took in Harry’s size and stance.

  “Nah, no problem,” he replied to Harry, but his mouth pinched when he turned back to Sheryl. “Me ‘n’ my old lady need that money.”

  “Tell her to contact DHS,” She instructed once again. “They’ll issue an emergency payment if necessary.”

  His thin, ravaged face contorted with fury and a need she could only begin to guess at. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t necessary, you stupid—”

  He broke off, slinging a sideways look at Harry.

  The marshal jerked his head toward the lobby doors. “You’d better leave, pal. Now.”

  The watery eyes flared with reckless bravado. “You gonna make me, pal?”

  “If I have to.”

  Like waves eddying around a rock, the other customers in the post office backed away from the two men. A tight, taut silence gripped the area. Sheryl’s knee inched toward the silent alarm button just under her counter.

  The thin, pinch-faced junkie broke the shimmering tension just before she exerted enough pressure to set off the alarm. With another spiteful glance at Sheryl, he pushed past Harry and shouldered open the glass door. A collective murmur of relief rose from the other customers as the door thumped shut behind him.

  Harry didn’t relax his vigilance until the departing figure had stalked to a battered motorcycle, threw a leg over the seat, jumped on the starter and roared out of the parking lot.

  “Nice guy,” one of the women in line murmured.

  “Wonder what his problem was?” another groused.

  “Do you get many customers like that?” Harry inquired, moving to Sheryl’s station.

  No one objected to the fact that he cut ahead of them in line, she noticed.

  “Not many. What are you doing here? I thought you were going to call and set up a time for us to meet?”

  “I decided to come in person, instead. Can you get someone to cover for you here? I need to talk to you privately.”

  “Yes, of course. Wait for me in the lobby and I’ll let you in through that door to the back area.”

  With a nod to the other customers, Harry turned away. Elise demanded an explanation the moment the glass doors swung shut behind him.

  “Who is that?”

  “He’s—”

  Sheryl caught herself just in time. Harry had told her not to discuss the case with anyone other than her supervisor. She hadn’t, although the restriction had resulted in another uncomfortable phone conversation with Brian after she’d driven home from El Pinto.

  “He’s an acquaintance,” she finished lamely, if truthfully.

  “Since when?”

  “Since last night.”

  Elise’s dark-red brows pulled together in a troubled frown. “Does Brian know about this new acquaintance of yours?”

  “There’s nothing to know.” With an apologetic smile at the lined-up customers, Sheryl plopped a Closed sign in front of her station. “I’ll send Peggy up to cover the counter with you.”

  She found the petite brunette on the outside loading dock, pulling in long, contented drags of cigarette smoke mixed with diesel fumes from the mail truck parked next to the ramp.

  “I know you’re on break, but something’s come up. Can you cover for me out front for a few minutes?”

  “Sure.” Peggy took another pull, then stubbed out her cigarette in the tub of sand the irreverent carriers always referred to as the butt box. Carefully, she tucked the half-smoked cigarette into the pocket of her uniform shirt.

  “I have to conserve every puff. I promised myself I’d only smoke a half a pack today.”

  “I thought you decided to quit completely.”

  “I did! I will! After this pack. Maybe.” Smiling ruefully at Sheryl’s grin, she strolled back into the station. “How long do you think you’ll be? I’m supposed to help Pat with the vault inventory this morning.”

  “Not long,” Sheryl assured her. “I just need to set up an appointment.”

  Contrary to her expectations, she soon discovered that Harry hadn’t driven to the Monzano station to make an appointment.

  She stared at him, dumbfounded, while he calmly informed her and her supervisor that Albuquerque’s postmaster had agreed to assign Miss Hancock to the special fugitive apprehension task force that Harry headed.

  “Me?”

  Sheryl’s startled squeak echoed off the walls of the stationmaster’s little-used private office.

  “You,” he confirmed, pulling a folded document out of his coat pocket. “This authorizes an indefinite detail, effective immediately.”

  “May I see that?” her supervisor asked.

  “Of course.”

  Pat Martinez stuck her pencil into her upswept jet-black hair and skimmed the brief communiqué he handed her.

  “Well, it looks like you’re on temporary duty, Sheryl.”

  “Hey, hang on here,” she protested. “I’m not sure I want to be assigned to a fugitive apprehension task force, indefinitely or otherwise. Before I agree to anything like this, I want to know what’s required of me.”

  “Basically, I want your exclusive time a
nd attention for as long it takes to extract every bit of information I can about those postcards.”

  “Exclusive time and attention? You mean, like all day?”

  “And all night, if necessary.”

  Sheryl gaped at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He didn’t crack so much as a hint of a smile. “No, Miss Hancock, I’m not. My team’s been at it pretty much around the clock since we tracked Inga Gunderson to Albuquerque. I won’t ask that you put in twenty-four hours at a stretch, of course, but I will ask that you work with me as long as necessary and as hard as possible.”

  “Look, I don’t mind working with you, but we’re shorthanded here. The box clerk is on vacation and Elise could go out on maternity leave at any moment.”

  “So the postmaster indicated.” Calmly, Harry nodded to the document held by Sheryl’s supervisor. “We took that into consideration.”

  “The postmaster is sending a temp to cover your absence,” Pat explained. “If Elise goes out, he’ll cover that, too.” Her eyes lifted to Harry. “You’re thorough, MacMillan.”

  “I learned my lesson after the fiasco with the warrant,” he admitted. “This time, I made sure we dotted every i and crossed every t.”

  Sheryl wasn’t sure she liked being lumped in with the i’s and t’s, but she let it pass. Now that she’d recovered from her initial surprise, she didn’t object to the detail. She just didn’t care for Harry’s highhanded way of arranging it.

  As if realizing that he needed to mend some bridges with his new detailee, the marshal gave her a smile that tried for apologetic but fell a few degrees short. Sheryl suspected that MacMillan rarely apologized for anything.

  “I didn’t have time to coordinate this with you and Ms. Martinez beforehand. My partner and I were up most of the night running air routes that service Prague, Pamplona and Rio through the computers. We’re convinced our man is bringing in a shipment soon, and we’re not going to let it or him slip through our fingers. We’ve got to break the code that was on those postcards, and to do that we need your help, Sheryl.”

  Put like that, how could she refuse?