The hunter fingered the mountain lion claws in his pack. He smoothed the dried-out fur, as lifeless now as the beast itself. But the claws were every bit as deadly as they'd ever been, and better because they no longer retracted.
He'd corral the boy first, leave something to terrify Leeza Nelson and put the fear of the devil into Daggert's half-breed heart, then proceed to make the boy understand the rules. Rules of survival, of boundaries; simple rules of life. And death.
Chapter 7
"We should go," Daggert said, stowing the cleaned and empty plates into his saddlebags.
Leeza nodded, unable to look at him. He'd given her more that afternoon than any man before him ever had. And she didn't understand it or know how to accept it. It wasn't just the physical glory he'd given her, but his words and the honesty in his granite face and heated eyes. And what had she given him in return? A pathetic tale about her childhood and a few moments' respite from a search that had to torment him.
"Sancho didn't come in," she said, unable to voice any of her confusion.
"He will," Daggert said, dusting off his jeans before tightening the cinch on one of the saddles.
"What if he's found Enrique?"
"Then he'll let us know."
"How did you train him?"
"It wasn't really training. We work together," Daggert said.
"Like you and Stone."
"Like that, yes." Daggert kicked out the small fire he'd made to heat their lunch. He cupped his hands to help her up onto Belle. "You're working with Belle now, too."
As she swung her leg over her mount's long tail, she realized that what he said was true in a way. When she'd started on this trek—was it only two days ago?—she'd distrusted the horse, considering her more a wicked beast than a helpmate. Yet not once had Belle failed her. A patient animal, she'd suffered a novice rider and undoubtedly inexplicable commands on her gentle mouth, and still hadn't spooked at any strange sounds, rustlings in the grass, nor had she tried ridding herself of the tired woman on her back.
They had become a team, this woman from the east and this horse from the west.
And she and Daggert? Wasn't there a parallel there, as well? She hadn't trusted the tracker beyond the obvious reliance on his skills. When had that changed? When he'd pulled her from her horse that first day? When he'd kissed her? When he'd told her about his son? She didn't know. She only knew that she did trust him. With her life. With Enrique's.
What did that mean? What could it mean in the future, the days beyond finding Enrique? Dare she even give such a thought consideration—that there might actually be a time when Enrique was safe and sound, and she and Daggert could see each other as an ordinary man and woman getting to know one another? Somehow that seemed impossible.
As it was impossible that she trusted Daggert now.
Except for Jeannie and Corrie, she didn't trust anyone. Never had and had firmly believed she never would.
Yet here she was in a mountain wilderness, trusting a man she had absolutely nothing in common with.
That thought made her pause. Were they really so dissimilar? Daggert was used to getting his own way. So was she. He was dedicated to his task. So was she. He was aloof and seemingly cold. Was she? Of course she was. There were more people who were scared of her than who appreciated her, let alone liked her.
Daggert had said he'd driven everyone away from him, turned them away. Hadn't she done the same thing over the years? Driven to succeed, to rise to the very top of the venture capital game, had she ever taken time to lend someone a helping hand along the way? She realized that if she asked anyone who had ever worked with her such a question, he or she would likely try to hide a snicker. "Leeza Nelson" and "consideration" wouldn't have been lumped together in any sentence.
She hadn't even offered a little, lonely boy comfort on a chilly night when he'd missed his parents.
Revenge drove Daggert; a need to prove herself drove Leeza. The motivations weren't the same, but they obviously produced some of the same results. They left him alone and single-minded. Left her the same.
Did that make them a team?
No, but it made them natural allies in a sad sort of way.
And when this journey was over—when Enrique was back at Rancho Milagro, drawing pictures, grounded until his late thirties and telling the other children about his great adventure—Daggert would be pursuing Donny's killer, and she…Would she go back to being the Leeza Nelson she'd always been?
* * *
Three hours later, with the sun dipping toward the western horizon, Daggert barked a command for Stone to stop. He whistled again for Sancho, something he'd done several times in the past few hours.
No brown blur sprang from the horizon.
Surprising her, Daggert abruptly swung from his saddle with lithe grace.
Leeza's heart jumped into her throat. Enrique.
She didn't want to see what drew Daggert's attention, afraid it would be the broken body of a little boy. A little boy she so desperately wanted to draw into her arms and hold tightly. Too little, too late. Please don't let it be too late.
While she refused to let her eyes drop to the ground, she followed every hard line of Daggert's stiffening form. That something was terribly amiss was evident in his stance. The tension seizing the tracker was palpable, and Leeza found herself holding a hand over her mouth to keep in a keening cry of horror.
Stone whickered to Belle as if he understood his rider's motives. Belle sidled nervously.
Daggert slowly began to circle away from his horse. He'd gone about thirty yards when he stopped abruptly and knelt down, resting on his boot heels. But nothing about him was relaxed.
Even at that distance, Leeza could feel the tracker's worry. Her own heart rate accelerated as she watched Daggert staring down at the earth in front of him.
"What is it?" she called finally, summoning the courage to look at the ground, and not seeing the broken body she was so terrified of discovering lying there.
When he didn't answer, she slid from Belle's back and took up both horses' reins. She dragged them forward, her impatience to find out what Daggert had found at making her forget her general apprehension of horses. "Come on," she muttered.
The pair followed her as she crossed the clearing.
Daggert held out a hand to hold her back.
"What is it?"
He jutted his chin at a small wooden box lying in a patch of green grass among the pine needles. The box was small, roughly four inches long and some three inches high.
Daggert pulled out a handkerchief and shook it open. He used it to gingerly lift the box, and pried the lid open with his knife.
"What's in it?" she asked.
He held it out for her to see. It was a staggeringly lovely silver knife hilt, with an elaborate lightning bolt zigzagging down its length. The lightning was inlaid with turquoise and obsidian.
Still using the handkerchief, Daggert pried the hilt free from its case and depressed a small button hidden in the inlay. A curved knife blade with a signature etched in the carbon stainless steel sprang into position. The blade was serrated and obviously deadly.
It was no less beautiful now that it was revealed as a weapon. But it had a dark beauty, as if the knife had been tempered with evil and polished with a cloth of foul intention.
"What's wrong?" she asked, knowing only that something had to be, for James Daggert was literally shaking. Anger, despair, a grief too deep to be expressed all warred for supremacy on his rugged face.
"We're not alone on this mountain," he said, and the words were so softly spoken that they might have been casual thoughts. "Donny's killer is here."
Adrenaline shot through her. "Your son's killer?"
"The man who stole Donny, the man who killed my son, used a knife just like this one. Perhaps this very knife. This serrated edge has a unique pattern. And see the lightning bolt on the handle? This symbol was carved on the tree above Donny's…body. Your partner's husband
, Chance, wasn't marshal back then. Jack was a deputy marshal, though. He believed Donny must have carved it himself. I knew better, but Jack wouldn't listen. He found Donny's little pocket knife open on the ground and pointed to that as evidence that Donny carved it. Hell, that little blade wouldn't have carved the crust off toast much less a lightning bolt in a spot a full foot higher than Donny could even reach."
Leeza took this in and, after a hard struggle, forced herself to think about the present. "How can you know this box hasn't been out here for years?"
Again Daggert jutted his chin toward the spot where the knife had been lying. "The grass isn't disturbed, see?"
"Yes, but—"
"If it had been here even a day or so, the grass beneath would have withered or turned yellow. If the box had been here for years, it would have discolored, too. The grass isn't yellow at all, and see? It's already springing back, losing the imprint of the box. No, the knife's been here only a few hours at most."
"But someone else could have a knife like this," Leeza suggested hopefully. "Jeannie told me there are others out looking for Enrique. It could have been one of them."
"It's possible," Daggert agreed, lifting haggard eyes to hers. "But this is a custom-made knife. Even the presentation box is hand-carved, see? Something like this would cost almost a thousand dollars. No, it's the same man. I know it. I feel it."
He slid the lid back on the box, keeping it wrapped in his handkerchief. "He's between us and Enrique."
"What?"
"Enrique camped there beneath the trees where we…where we had lunch. Remember? I pointed it out. He tied his horse to that big pine on the riverbank." Daggert gestured back the way they'd come. "Didn't you see traces of the fire he tried to start? The wood was wet. I'm surprised we didn't see smoke last night, but his campfire probably didn't burn long enough for us to glimpse it."
Daggert was standing with his hand on the saddlebag, his gaze turned inward, when suddenly he whirled on her. "What did you say about others searching? Who? Who are the others?"
Startled by the abruptness of the question and the sharp note of urgency in his voice, Leeza blinked. She couldn't remember the names Jeannie had given her. She said as much to Daggert.
"Think, damn it. You know."
"I am thinking," she snapped back. "It didn't seem important to me, and I usually don't pay much attention to things if they're not of obvious importance."
"Everything's important about this. Think, Denzhoné. Did she mention professions? Are they law enforcement? What? Butcher, baker, candlestick maker?"
At his prompting, Jeannie's words began to filter through Leeza's memory. She felt foolish, having so quickly forgotten. "One of them is the man you mentioned—Jack, Chance's former deputy. He's retired, I think."
Daggert's eyes narrowed. "Jack." He said the name with a note of despair in his voice. "It frustrated me when he couldn't see what was so obvious to me, but I never thought ill of him. Suspected he might be responsible." And his tone let Leeza know that Daggert would die another death if it proved that Jack was the madman who'd murdered his son. "He's been a deputy marshal for years, a man who would do anything for someone he cares about."
"One of them is a grocer—I don't remember his name. Another manages Annie's Café."
"Anyone else?"
"No, I'm sure it was just those she mentioned."
"A grocer—that could be John Jenkins or Tommy Gonzales. Or if you really stretched it to include a convenience store, Jordy Greathouse. God, this is a nightmare. And Bill Thompkins manages Annie's. I've known them all for most of my adult life."
"Shouldn't we be going?" Leeza asked, aching to stop Daggert's obvious torment and eager to find Enrique before their mysterious adversary did.
Daggert handed her the pretty box wrapped in his handkerchief. "Stow this in your saddlebag," he said.
Leeza took the deadly object from his hand, not asking why he was leaving it in her care. He was keeping it wrapped for possible fingerprinting later, but was giving it to her because he planned on ditching her at some point in the near future. She knew this with as much certainty as she knew the sun would rise in the morning and go down at night.
Once she'd safely secured the package in her bag, he asked, "Can you manage?"
Her heart leaped. He wasn't leaving her. "Of course," she said swiftly.
"Good. Then do whatever business you have to over there behind those trees and we'll head out."
"Where's Sancho? Shouldn't he be here by now?" Leeza asked, and wished she'd kept silent when Daggert's frown of worry intensified.
But all he said was, "He'll find us on the trail."
Leeza quickly made use of the sheltering trees and was back in the saddle again within minutes.
Daggert pushed the horses a bit faster, cutting through the thick foliage with such nervous energy and scarcely checked fury that Leeza felt her own nerves stretched to the breaking point. Every noise, every rustle seemed to harbor an evil that hadn't existed before.
On the journey thus far, she'd worried that Enrique might have fallen from his horse and be lying somewhere with a broken arm or a bump on his head or else covered in cactus needles. She'd pictured him cold, frightened and lonely. She'd never allowed herself to consider greater dangers.
She'd even managed to squelch fears of mountain lions or bears as soon as they entered her mind. When Daggert had told her what happened to Donny, she'd ruthlessly thrust away any correlation to Enrique. As she'd told Daggert, denial was an attractive piece of real estate and she'd readily taken up residence.
With the discovery of the knife Daggert recognized, with the awareness that someone was traveling between little Enrique and the people who desperately sought him, with the host of emotions playing on Daggert's face, Leeza was suddenly, sharply aware that a danger the likes of which she'd never encountered lurked just out of sight.
Every shadow hid a madman creeping behind pine and scrub oak. Her skin prickled with the feel of his murderous eyes upon her.
"Please, let us find Enrique safe," she whispered. And in her heart, she could hear the plea echoed, and another added to it: Please let me have a second chance.
Chapter 8
The hunter caught up with the boy shortly before darkness blanketed the mountains.
The boy was wary of him, but not scared. He'd met him before, had accepted a stick of candy from him on at least two different occasions. All the children did. Some of the adults, too. There were no rules about not accepting candy from people you know.
"A lot of folks are out looking for you, son," the hunter said.
The boy appeared mulish, the way children did when they knew they were doing something wrong but intended to do it anyway. Lessons upon lessons.
"Where are you heading?"
"Are you going to stop me?" the boy asked.
"Maybe I'm here to help you."
"My parents are coming for me. They'll help me."
The hunter was interested. He knew for a fact that the boy's parents were dead. The days when he'd worked for El Patron had been good ones, days filled with adventure and purpose.
He asked the boy, "How are they going to find you out here?"
"They just know," the child said. He looked bedraggled and tired.
"Tell you what, boy, I'm as hungry as a bear after a long winter's nap and could use some grub. Care to share a picnic with me? And then we'll decide what to do about finding your folks."
The boy studied him with acute distrust for a long minute—something he'd have to pay for later—then asked, "Are you gonna light a fire?"
"Why, you cold?"
"Yes, but I don't want anybody to see the fire. There was a lot of smoke when I tried one."
You're telling me, the hunter thought. If Daggert hadn't been so blinded by the Nelson woman's red pajamas, he'd have seen the smoke himself. "Well, see, I got some of them new-fangled army rations. You just pull a tab and the stuff heats up all by itself. I swear. So we'l
l have some hot food and wrap you up in some blankets for a good sleep, and we can be ready for the worst the world can throw us tomorrow. What do you say?"
The boy nodded.
"Let's ride up a piece and see if we can't find a better place to camp. I'm not partial to porcupines creeping in my sleeping bag."
The boy giggled.
The hunter smiled and winked. He felt like giggling himself.
* * *
Daggert pushed on where the sun dipped below the horizon. But eventually, when it grew too dark to see, Stone refused to go another step. The big sorrel stomped his feet and shook his great head. He snorted when his ride pressed with his knees and gave the forward signal.
Daggert wanted to swear with frustration.
"What is it?" Leeza asked.
"We've got to stop," he muttered. He felt irrationally angry with her, as if it were her fault the sky had darkened, as if she had ordered Stone to halt. She'd brought more life into him than he'd felt in years. At the same time, if she weren't with him, he would continue, no matter the dangers.
"We can't stop!" she cried, once again proving that the lady had grit.
"We have to," he said. "It's too dangerous to keep going. Even knowing the terrain, I can't see three feet in front of me. We could ride right off a cliff or fall down a ravine or a sinkhole. I've got a flashlight, and it's a good one, but it won't do much if I'm on horseback. When the moon rises we might be able to ride another couple of hours. But in this light, we could go right past Enrique and never see him."
"And if you're right and Donny's killer is out there?"
For a moment her words took him to that carved tree on the top of Cima La Luz. He saw his son's maimed body. Saw it and felt it to his core. Daggert shook his head, as if throwing the image away. "Damn it, Leeza, there's not a thing I can do about the darkness. We can't keep going."
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