Call of the Cougar

by Terry Spear

  As soon as the first man crumpled to the floor, the second man was exposed. The hideaway door across the saloon was shoved open, and a man with a deep, baritone voice full of command shouted, "Freeze! Police!"

  She couldn't be that lucky that a police officer just happened to drop into a ghost town for the day. With her gun trained on the perp, she rose just high enough to peer over the counter and ensure it wasn't one of the gunmen coming back, pretending to be a policeman. Which was a much more realistic scenario than that a lone police officer suddenly dropped by to make an arrest in a ghost town.

  The redheaded man jerked his attention to the tall, blond-haired man standing in front of the hideaway door. His dark brown eyes narrowed, the self-professed policeman was dressed in jeans and a black muscle shirt, and had his .357 magnum trained on the perp.

  The redhead swung around to shoot the police officer, confirming the new man wasn't with these men.

  She fired three times at the gunman's hand, wounding him, and he jerked his hand to the side, forcing his shot to go wild. He dropped his gun as his round struck the wall near the secret entrance. With his uninjured hand, he went for a knife strapped at his leg and whirled around to face her.

  Crap! Did the bastard have a death wish? Maybe he thought he could take her hostage. Fat chance he'd have at doing that.

  "Hands in the air!" She didn't want to kill the bastard. They needed him for questioning.

  The police officer fired a shot, hitting the man in the side of his kneecap.

  Crying out in pain, the gunman collapsed, writhing on the floor. His cold blue eyes turned to her, and she knew before he even moved, he was going for his damn gun.

  The police officer raced across the creaking floor.

  "You've got backup, right?" she asked, praying to God the police officer did, even though he appeared to be off-duty or maybe he was undercover. She rushed to kick the wounded man's gun out of his reach and bumped into the officer, aiming for the same thing.

  She immediately smelled the police officer's sexy cougar scent. Her gaze shot up to his, and she took another deep breath, her lips parting in surprise. And then she recognized him. The man in the coffee shop, who had smelled of horses and leather…and cougar.

  In the type of business she was in, she had made a lot of friends among the various law enforcement agencies because she had to work with the different agencies to get the job done. But running into a police officer who was a shifter? A cowboy? And hot?

  This was a totally new experience. He gave her a slight smile, his dark eyes matching the expression. Then he frowned. "What the hell's going on here, Special Agent Tracey Whittington?"

  ***

  As soon as all hell had broken loose in the ghost town, Hal swore he'd never run so fast in his life as he did trying to come to the agents' aid. Now, he secured the wounded man with a plastic wrist tie, ensured the other gunman was dead, then turned to look down into the prettiest green eyes he'd ever seen—tendrils of dark blond hair caressing the woman's shoulders, the rest of her silky hair still bound, her black T-shirt fitting around a nice package, cargo pants showing off some more curves, and boots, indicating she was a member of a law enforcement agency. She certainly had the weapon to back up her business, and she knew how to handle it. What he didn't know was what the hell was going on with her as far as her being in two shootouts in the same vicinity.

  "What took you so long?" she asked.

  That made his serious expression vanish and his mouth curved up. He couldn't help himself. The woman was a firecracker, but most importantly, she was a hot cougar. In this line of work, he had never met one, female-type, in either a military or civilian police capacity. He was more than intrigued. And he was damn glad Stryker had wanted him to take care of the business with Mrs. Blasdell's call.

  She turned her attention from Hal and kept her gun trained on the wounded man writhing on the floor, and the other man, just in case. "How do you know me? And how do I know you're who you say you are?"

  Hal pulled out his badge and showed it to her. With one hand, she tugged on the long gold chain at her neck and pulled out a badge from inside her shirt that had to have been resting against her breasts.

  "I'm Deputy Sheriff Hal Haverton from Yuma Town, checking on a call from the woman who lives in the house near the end of the road."

  "Mrs. Blasdell. Will you watch him?" She motioned to the wounded man.

  "Yeah, you got it. Do you live around here?" He was surprised as he'd never seen her before.

  "Used to come here when I was a teen. How are we going to get my partner out of here and get him medical attention?" She took hold of her partner's hand, smiling at him, looking worried sick though.

  "I can get reception where our vehicles are parked. I was talking on my cell to Sheriff Dan Steinacker when we heard the gunshots fired. He would have alerted everyone within a reasonable distance to come to our location."

  That's when they heard someone call out, "Police!"

  "Stryker!" Hal turned to Tracey. "Will you be all right with him for a sec?" He jerked his thumb at the wounded gunman. "I'll let the troops know we're here."

  "Yeah, go. We need the EMTs STAT."

  Hal headed out the secret entrance and shouted, "Stryker, we're here. Agent down, GSW. One of the perps also. One gunman dead."

  Suddenly, the area was crawling with law enforcement, while two men were tearing down the boards over the old saloon's entryway, freeing the two swinging doors.

  With the all-clear call given to the EMTs standing by, they quickly moved in to take care of the wounded men. A policeman read the gunman his rights, while Tracey explained to an investigator all that had happened.

  Fascinated, Hal and Stryker Hill, the full-time deputy at Yuma Town, watched her, the way she motioned with her hands when she described where everyone had been, the guilty parties—some informant who had turned on them, and possibly the ringleader of the wildlife trafficking group.

  Hal knew Stryker was just as interested in the she-cat as he was. He smiled a little at Stryker, knowing that his friend would realize that this was one time he should have taken Mrs. Blasdell's call.

  Hal explained what he'd witnessed to a couple of the officers who were helping with the search and trying to identify the men.

  "We saw fingerprints on the bar," Tracey said, "but we don't know if they belonged to any of these men or if they're even viable after all of the shooting that went on."

  Two of the men went to check on it.

  Tracey retrieved her field pack and her partner's. But one of the policemen, who told her he was giving her police protection to the nearest hospital, offered to take the bags for her.

  She let him, and Hal damn well wanted to be the one carrying her bags. What was wrong with him anyway?

  She reached over and held her partner's hand as the EMTs placed him on a litter that they would have to carry him out on, and then headed through the swinging doors as another two officers held them open.

  Hal and Stryker walked outside and watched her leave with the EMTs carrying the litter.

  Hal wanted in the worse way to go with her, to be the one to protect her, but he was needed here for the investigation. Four police officers were providing security for her and her partner.

  Search parties were already combing the cliffs, looking for signs of the two men who had escaped. She glanced back over her shoulder and said, "Thank you," to Hal and he nodded before she disappeared past the rest of the buildings and headed down the remnants of the narrow wagon trail.

  Stryker slapped Hal on the back. "Hell, now that's what I call saving the damsel in distress."

  "Believe me, she's certainly capable of handling a gun."

  A couple of men hauled out the dead man in a body bag.

  "I can see. Sure explains a lot about what happened to the man who was torn up during that last skirmish." Stryker didn't mention that he was talking about the cougar attack, but Hal knew that's what he was referring to.
<
br />   "Yeah. Did Dan and Chase make it here already?" With much anticipation, Chase had been sticking close to home, never knowing when his twins might decide to come into the world.

  "They're both here, organizing the search up in the cliffs. Dan said that when we were through down here, to join the search."

  Tracey had long since disappeared, but Hal couldn't get his mind off the way she had single-handedly taken on four gunmen, until two disappeared, and how she'd protected her partner with her life. And was a cougar to boot.

  Now that was the kind of woman he wanted in his life.

  Chapter 2

  Pacing across the hospital waiting room, Tracey waited to hear the outcome of her partner's surgery. Seeing the blood from Anton's wound after seeing Bill die, forced an icy sweat to cover her skin. She was glad she had taken the other men down, well, with the intervention of Deputy Sheriff Hal Haverton, who helped nail one of the perps.

  But two of the men had escaped and that pissed her off royally.

  That was one of the hazards of having time to think about all of this over and over again, when she wanted to ensure her partner was going to make it, then go after the bastards who might have killed him.

  It would take ballistics a while to see if one of the men who had stayed behind or one of the men who had gotten away had fired the weapon that had wounded her partner.

  A stocky, gray-haired police detective approached her. "We've questioned the man we took into custody. He says he doesn't know the man who hired him. He said he'd never worked for the man before. He'd never taken any jobs that had to do with the killing of animals. He likes animals, he says."

  "Just not humans."

  The detective smiled a little. "He said he'd been paid for this one small job. He didn't know you were Special Agents with FWS. He thought you were buying illegal drugs, except you were holding out on them as far as the agreed upon price was concerned. Anyway, we're still questioning him. He's being held without bail. Several warrants are out for his arrest—attempted murder and armed robbery at the top of the list—so he's not getting out anytime soon. He had no compulsion about killing you or your partner because, according to him, you were the bad guys."

  "Yeah, right. Not paying up on our end of a drug deal." She shook her head. "He really doesn't know who the ringleader is?"

  "Doesn't appear like it. He just needed to get rid of the two of you because you knew too much about the operation, and the guy who hired him would sell the drugs to someone else. I'll update you if I learn anything further."

  "Okay, thanks." She was beginning to wonder if the ringleader had even been at the old saloon as part of the whole setup.

  She couldn't tell the detective that one of the men who had been in this shootout this time had also been at the other. How could she when the only way she knew it for sure was because she'd smelled him?

  When the police officer left, she paced some more across the waiting room. She'd already talked to her boss about what went down before she arrived at the hospital, and she didn't intend to call him again until the doctor came out to speak with her. But when her cell rang, she glanced down to see that it was her boss, a tough, thirty-year-old, Special Forces officer, who was no-nonsense, and totally by the book. She suspected he'd been talking to his boss, and now he had some bad news for her. Like the last time he did when she was involved in a shootout of this magnitude.

  "Here's the deal," Mick Sorenson said. "After you lost your last partner and now Genova was nearly killed this time and this is the second firefight you've been in this year—and damn it, it's only June—you're off the case." Before she could object, he continued, "I'm placing you on administrative leave for two weeks, pending an investigation into what went wrong. This time."

  She swore under her breath, knowing Mick would hear her, but she couldn't help it. She wanted to nail these bastards in the worst way.

  ***

  As soon as Sheriff Dan Steinacker got a call from his good friend Mick Sorenson and—head of one of the branches overseeing Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agents in this jurisdiction that included Yuma, Colorado and the surrounding area—Dan assumed this wasn't a social call.

  "Yeah, what's going on now?" Dan suspected it had something to do with the shootouts at Anderson or maybe someone new was trafficking wildlife in his neck of the woods, and he'd have to organize his deputies to aid the Special Agents assigned to the case.

  But he wasn't expecting this conversation at all.

  "You already know something about one of my Special Agents, Anton Genova, who is at the hospital in Rocky Tower Springs currently in surgery, with around-the-clock police protection. His partner is on administrative leave following the shootout and no one has caught the two perps who got away."

  "I thought the Feds were all over this. What do you need our help with?"

  "I have a special favor to ask you. I…could make other arrangements, but I think this will work out best for all concerned. I need one of our buddies to serve as Special Agent Wittington's pseudo bodyguard and do whatever it takes to ensure she isn't out there on her own."

  Dan couldn't have been any more surprised.

  "You want…a bodyguard for the agent?" Dan knew both of his deputies would offer to serve and protect, but he suspected more was going on here than that she needed a bodyguard.

  "Yeah. She's damn good at her job."

  Dan could just imagine both his bachelor deputies fighting to serve as her bodyguard.

  "She has great cat instincts," Mick continued. "I don't want her killed. She's special—because she's one of us and has our natural gifts. I trust you guys to watch over her. You know how it is with really dedicated agents. If I tell her to back off the case—"

  "She'll go looking for trouble." Dan rubbed his chin as he considered how to handle it.

  "Right. So I need you to coordinate a few things for me. Get a cabin at Chase Buchanan's resort for me if you can. I imagine it's already booked for the summer, but I think that would be the best location for her. Maybe he can work out some arrangement that will accommodate her. I know Chase has got babies on the way, but he could be there kind of watching out for Tracey. Beyond that, whenever she's not up at the resort, I need her to be occupied with other stuff—other than investigating this case. I know you're busy running the whole show there, but if Stryker or Hal could handle it, I'd be much obliged. If neither of them are up for it, and you can't provide any other backup, let me know. We're really tight on staffing with cutbacks and now with one of my investigative teams in a shambles, it's even tougher."

  "Are you going to let her in on this? Don't tell me it's going to be a sham case of one of the guys dating her and then she learns he's only there to protect her."

  "No. I'll tell her what I expect of her. She hasn't dated in forever. Bad divorce. So she's not going to date anyone, per se. And she's not going for a bodyguard scenario because she's highly trained herself. But if I tell her it's either that or she moves in with me—"

  Dan smiled.

  "No one who knows me wants to move in with me."

  Not as much of a perfectionist as he was. "Okay, but just make sure she understands what's up. Or this is on your head."

  Mick chuckled. "Yeah, yeah. The guys will have my head. She's a nice woman, smart, funny, and she kicks ass. The only problem I can see you having is determining who's going to win the lottery to serve as her protection."

  Dan shook his head. "I'll do what I can. But if she really wants to go after this case, I assume nothing's going to stop her."

  "I'll owe you."

  "Yeah. You will." They ended the call and Dan phoned Chase to see what they could do about the situation with a cabin next, knowing that at the height of the season the Pinyon Pines Resort was always booked. "Hey, Chase, I've got a bit of a situation."

  ***

  When her boss called her at the hospital, Tracey was afraid he would put her on administrative leave, per regulation, but she was raring to get back on t
he case before it grew too cold. Her reasoning wasn't just because her partner was shot and could be fighting for his life. Or that one of them had been involved in the shootout that killed her other partner. But these men were dangerous to anyone and they had to be stopped.

  "We went by the book." Which for them meant improvising a lot because there was never any way to know where their investigations might lead. She and Anton had no way of knowing they were being led into an ambush. And she had to find the damn informant who had set them up. Ricky. That's all they knew about him—dark brown hair and eyes, scraggly beard, slight build, nervous—always looking over his back, and appeared to be barely eighteen. But he'd fed them the best information before. Not this time.

  The boss spoke up again, as if she hadn't said anything about going by the book. The problem was they could really go out on a limb and as long as they resolved the case without any dead bodies and no injured or dead partners, the boss considered the job done correctly—and by the book—no matter how off the book it might be. "Until you have a psychologist clear you for field duty again, you can't work anything but a desk job once you return."

  Grinding her teeth, she choked back a response. She knew the drill. She'd had to go through this in January when she lost her first partner. She knew Mick wouldn't find anything wrong with what had happened. It was just two cases of misinformation, and certainly not enough to get search warrants, convictions, nothing. That was their job—to investigate the allegations that these men were up to their eyeballs in wildlife trafficking. The boss knew that. Damn it.

  "I want you to take a vacation."

  She opened her mouth to speak, and then clamped her lips shut. He was telling her something. Clueing her in. He wasn't telling her to take a vacation. She didn't think. "Where should I go on vacation?" She hoped she was right.

  "Genova will be in the hospital for a time. Why don't you stay in the area? Good skiing."

  "It's summer."

  "Hiking, I meant."