Border Prey

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Border Prey Page 21

by Jessica Speart


  His body hurtled backward against the wall, where his head collided with Sonny’s black buck antelope skull. Both the skull and the man fell to the ground as I pulled my gun from the drawer, then grabbed his knife off the floor. But there was no need to hurry. My unwanted visitor was soundly knocked out.

  I started to shake uncontrollably. One more of my lives was gone, forcing me to wonder how many I had left. My hand slid along my throat, its skin marked by a prior close encounter in the Louisiana bayou.

  Tempt fate and pay with your life, snickered a ghostly voice.

  I lobbed a loud NO! back into the darkness. Then I walked to the switch and turned on the light.

  The intruder was none other than Johnny Lambert. If this was his latest version of tickle-and-chase, I didn’t want to play another round. I headed into the kitchen and dug out some rope.

  I was in the midst of trussing Lambert up like a roaster chicken when the front door suddenly burst open. I grabbed my .38 and took aim from where I was straddled across Lambert’s back. Sonny Harris came to a dead halt, his mustache twitching like a drunk with the jitters. He took in the scene and tugged on the brim of his ten-gallon hat.

  “Just tell me this isn’t one of those sadomasochistic sex things,” he muttered.

  Leave it to a man to come up with that.

  “Yeah. That’s why he’s trying to fit one of your skulls on his head,” I retorted.

  Sonny grunted. “Sorry to barge in unannounced. But I was up and saw your lights on and it struck me as kinda odd at this hour.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you come sooner?” I demanded.

  Sonny took over tying Lambert up. “It’s like I said. Who knows what sort of kinky things you young folks are into these days?”

  Sonny had cleverly used the magic word ‘young,’ knowing I’d forgive him almost anything.

  “Who’ve you got here, anyway?” he asked. “Some guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer?”

  My social life should have been half as exciting as Sonny liked to imagine.

  “This is former U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Johnny Lambert. I was staking out the Anapra Road at midnight and saw him taking possession of smuggled cargo. My guess is that there were illegal critters inside the crates,” I informed Harris. “I just don’t know how he got wind of what I was up to.”

  Sonny gave a shrug. “Maybe he didn’t. Could be you gave someone else reason to be suspicious, and they decided to nip any trouble in the bud.” He lifted his hat, and patted the thinning hair on his pate. “I suppose what you’re telling me is the truth. Otherwise, you’ve gone to one helluva lotta trouble just to get a skull off the wall.”

  “Actually, I’m beginning to grow fond of the things,” I reluctantly conceded. “One of them saved my life tonight.”

  Sonny looked down at Lambert. “Well, we’re gonna have to figure out what to do with your friend here. Or are you planning to keep him as some sort of trophy?”

  “Not unless I can have him stuffed, mounted, and hung on the Happy Hunting Ranch’s wall.” I grinned, having just noticed Sonny was still in his striped pajamas.

  “In that case, I guess we better call the police and have him taken away.”

  “You can’t do that!” I cried.

  “And why not?” Sonny stared at me incredulously. “You claim this guy attacked you, so why don’t you want him behind bars? Unless there’s other stuff you’re not telling me.”

  “Look, I’m on to something big,” I admitted. “If I reveal my hand now, the other players will be tipped off, and the case could vanish. Besides, you know how the local police feel about us wildlife agents and retired trackers,” I brazenly added, going for the “us-versus-them” approach. “They’ll horn in and close me out without giving it a second thought.”

  Sonny pulled the bandanna off his neck and used it to gag Lambert. I sighed in relief, and Harris nailed me with a warning shot.

  “Don’t go getting any ideas, Porter. I’m not siding with you on this thing yet. I just want to make sure he remains quiet while you fill me in on what’s really going down,” he responded.

  I headed straight for the heart of the matter. “Okay. F.U. Krabbs is apparently running a hell of a lot more than the Happy Hunting Ranch. He’s also heading up a group of wealthy individuals posing as environmentalists. This group, Southwest Heritage, is using F.U.’s other place, the Flying A ranch, as a front, claiming to have turned it into a land trust. But in reality, the group is a private conglomerate conducting some sort of illegal biotech research. Whatever they’re working on involves the use of chimps smuggled in from the wild. The Flying A is where Johnny Lambert took those crates tonight.”

  Harris wasn’t blinking an eye.

  “I need time to head over there and discover what’s going on. Otherwise the group will get wind that Lambert’s been arrested, and the entire operation will only go deeper underground.” I hoped Sonny believed me.

  “You on some kind of drugs?” he snorted.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true. Just give me a day to find some evidence to nail them,” I pleaded. “I have to get onto the Flying A ranch and nose around.”

  Harris cocked an eyebrow in my direction. “Yeah? You and who else? General Custer? Or are you planning this attack all on your own?”

  “No. Someone’s going with me. In fact, he should be arriving any moment,” I added, with a glance at the early morning sky.

  “No way am I gonna keep a former government agent hog-tied up here all day, Porter. Hell! Do you want me to lose my retirement pay?”

  “Give me eight hours, then,” I bargained.

  “One hour,” Harris retorted.

  “Oh, come on!” I howled. “That’ll barely get me inside the gate! How about seven?” I countered.

  Sonny tugged on his hat. “Goddammit, Porter. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll meet you halfway: you get three and a half hours, and that’s the end of it. After that, I have your friend here picked up.”

  “It’s a deal,” I quickly agreed. “Do you mind keeping an eye on him for me? I’ve got to rush and get dressed before my ride gets here.”

  “What the hell else do you think I’m gonna be doing for the next three and a half hours?” Sonny sourly remarked. “Who’s this fellow that you’re meeting, anyway?”

  “Some guy looking for his monkey.” I headed into the bedroom.

  “Now, there’s a pick-up line if I ever heard one,” Sonny replied caustically.

  Come to think of it, he was right. It had certainly worked on me. I jumped in the shower, then threw on a tee-shirt and jeans. I was pulling my curls back into a loose mop when I remembered Sonny had some information for me. I walked back into the living room while sticking my .38 into the waistband of my pants.

  “I forgot to ask. What did you find out about that vulture you had autopsied?”

  “Seems the bird fell victim to a ring of death,” Harris replied, taking a seat on Johnny Lambert’s back.

  The expression generally referred to poisons that ranchers illegally plant in baited meat, hoping to kill off predators who attack their cattle and sheep. The problem is that the poison doesn’t just knock off the critter taking the bait, but also those that dine on the predator’s carcass. Not to mention all the other wildlife which dies as a result of eating the poison’s secondary victims. And so the ring of death continues.

  “Are you telling me that the vulture ate tainted meat?” I asked, wondering if Sonny had just stumbled upon my next case.

  “You could say it was something like that,” Harris philosophized. “Hell, poison is poison and meat is meat. Ain’t that right?”

  Sometimes there was no way to respond to cowboy logic other than to simply nod your head.

  “Did your pathologist friend say what kind of poison the bird died from?” I asked, laying the groundwork while I still had a few minutes to kill. With any luck, it would turn out to be a compound banned by the Environmental Protection Agency y
ears ago.

  “As a matter of fact, he did. Seems the bird was done in by a drug normally used by anesthesiologists. Frank said there’s only trouble if it’s given in too large a dose. Then the patient becomes paralyzed, and winds up suffocating to death,” Sonny explained.

  “You wouldn’t happen to recollect what this drug is called, would you?”

  “There ain’t no way in tarnation I can pronounce the darn thing.” Sonny chuckled as he caught sight of my disappointed expression. “Come on, Porter. I did have enough brains to catch over a thousand men. Whadda ya think, that I lost ’em when I retired? Here. I wrote the name down for you.”

  He handed me a piece of paper. The name of the drug was succinylcholine.

  “How do you suppose a vulture would end up ingesting something like that?” I mused aloud. I thought back to the morning I’d found Timmy Tom dead, and mentally walked through the scene again.

  I remembered the sunrise that had welcomed the day as I sped down the road in my Ford. There was the Driving Aerobics infomercial I’d concocted in my eternal quest to resemble Sharon Stone. Then the buzzards flying overhead, which had led me to Tyler’s corpse. I’d phoned the police, and after that, fought off a vulture which had begun munching on Timmy Tom’s arm.

  Ohmigod! My mind whirled at the realization. The vulture must have been the same bird that Sonny later found. However, there was still something more which nagged at my memory. A tiny detail as annoying as the buzzing of a gnat. It pricked and teased, daring me to remember. I refused to give up, fully determined to recall every minuscule item and fact.

  A freshly imprinted heelmark lay hidden beneath a creosote bush, along with the striated pattern zigzagging through the sand. Timmy Tom’s money belt had coughed up Panfauna’s business card. The only other thing left was what the killer had used to camouflage his tracks—a mesquite branch with thorns sharp as a honey bee’s stinger.

  That’s when I collided head-on with that irritating little detail. A red bump, tiny as a pinprick, had been on Tyler’s arm next to where the vulture fed. I walked over and checked the bottom of Johnny Lambert’s boot, wondering if he could have been Timmy Tom’s killer. Damn! No five-pointed star in the center.

  “Do you think succinylcholine could be injected into a person?” I asked.

  “I don’t see why not. Animal or human, what’s the difference?” Harris replied.

  “What do you mean?” I jumped on the remark. “How would it be used on an animal?”

  Sonny softly clucked to himself as he shook his head. “Hell, Porter. I can understand why I wouldn’t know, but you work with wildlife every single day. Don’t you think that’s something you’d be aware of?”

  I knew Sonny was making me eat crow for having implied he couldn’t remember the drug the vulture had ingested.

  “Okay, Yoda. I apologize for ever doubting your memory. I’m the one that’s forgetful. Now, would you please just tell me?”

  Sonny gave a nod to let me know my apology had been accepted. “Frank said it’s one of the medications veterinarians and ranchers use in dart guns to tranquilize wildlife. Only in small doses, of course.”

  You fool! my brain screamed. Images furiously flashed through my mind.

  After finding Timmy Tom I’d headed straight for the Happy Hunting Ranch. My memory cranked out the succession of events like frames in a movie. I was riding in a jeep with F.U. when I’d spotted deadly razor wire wrapped around a black buck’s neck. Minutes later, a second vehicle sped into view. My mind’s eye zoomed in on the door where Kitrell popped out with a dart gun in his hand.

  How could I have been so blind? Hadn’t I learned anything yet?

  My intuition had warned me something wasn’t right about Kitrell from the very first second we’d met. Why hadn’t I listened to myself back then? Hell! I’d even given the man every hard-earned scrap of my information.

  Suddenly the puzzle was neat, the pieces beginning to fit, leading straight to tonight’s attack. It had to be Kitrell who’d tipped off Johnny Lambert. The only question I had was, why?

  The beaked warrior sprang to life, dancing inside my head. Getting me out of the way must have been the price Kitrell agreed to pay in order to get Gracie back. I began to suspect Kitrell never even intended to show up here this morning. Probably the plan was to have Johnny Lambert knock me off, after which Kitrell would receive his chimp, and business would go on as usual.

  It was the low growl of Kitrell’s Toyota chugging through the pre-dawn air which broke the spell. I pulled my revolver as the Land Cruiser came to a halt and parked in front of my house.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Sonny asked in surprise.

  “You’re about to meet the man who set me up,” I tersely responded.

  “But I thought this guy was gonna help you get on the Flying A ranch,” Harris replied with a puzzled expression.

  “Up until a few minutes ago, so did I,” I told him.

  Kitrell walked in the door to find my revolver pointed straight at his heart. His eyes flew from my .38, to Johnny Lambert on the floor, to Sonny Harris, then back to me.

  “What’s all this about?” Dan quietly asked. But his hands curled into fists the size of grizzly bear paws.

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out,” I firmly responded. “Slowly remove your boots and slide them over to me.”

  Kitrell’s eyes began to smolder. “I don’t appreciate the prank,” his deep bass ominously rumbled.

  “Do it now!” I brusquely ordered. I backed up my command by cocking the .38’s trigger, so there’d be no mistaking that I was serious.

  “I’d listen to her if I were you,” Sonny advised him. “Trust me on this. She can be a mean sonuvabitch.”

  No wonder I was so fond of the man. He deserved at least a couple of extra beers at the bar tonight.

  Kitrell held off, as if still expecting to hear this was some sort of joke.

  “You have exactly two seconds before you join your friend on the floor,” I informed him.

  Kitrell’s eyes never left mine as he proceeded to kick off his boots.

  “Very good. Now slide them over to me,” I instructed.

  He did as he was told. I picked up first one boot, and then the other, carefully scrutinizing each of its heels. Neither bore the imprint I was looking for. A hint of doubt began to eat at me, but Kitrell was a clever man. Most likely, he’d been smart enough to change his footwear.

  “Let me take a gander at those,” Harris offered.

  I kicked the boots over to Sonny, who began his own meticulous examination.

  “Tell me, Kitrell. What kind of tranquilizer do you use to immobilize critters?” I asked.

  “Why should you care about something like that?”

  “Just answer the question, or I’ll tie you up for the sheer fun of it,” I warned.

  “It’s called Sucostrin,” he cautiously replied. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I believe Sucostrin is a form of succinylcholine,” I bluffed, not having the slightest idea.

  Kitrell warily nodded his head. “That’s right. It’s liquid succinylcholine chloride. So what? Almost every veterinarian uses the stuff.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know of many veterinarians who might have wanted to kill Timmy Tom Tyler,” I informed him. “And had enough succinylcholine on hand with which to do it.”

  “That’s how he died?” Kitrell was silent for a moment before snapping out of his reverie. “Is that what this nonsense is about? You think that I murdered him?” He looked at me in astonishment. “What the hell would I go and do something like that for? Tyler had the information I wanted! Only part of which you were able to give me last night. Remember?”

  “And what information were you going to get from Timmy Tom that I didn’t supply you with?” I asked testily.

  “How to get Gracie out of that damned place!” Dan snapped. “For God’s sakes! Tyler was my one and only lifeline!”


  “It’s okay, Rachel,” Sonny interjected before I could respond. “This isn’t the guy who killed Tyler.”

  “How can you be so certain?” I asked skeptically. “He’s just wearing a different pair of boots than the ones he had on when he murdered Timmy Tom.”

  “I’m certain because I found another footprint with a five-pointed star that you missed. The man you’re looking for is smaller.” He threw the boots back to Dan.

  “He still could have set me up for the attack,” I stubbornly insisted, angry that I’d missed yet another piece of evidence. “He had plenty of time to call Johnny Lambert after we parted earlier.”

  “I see you’ve got this whole thing figured out,” Kitrell retorted. “So I expect you must also know why I’d do such a thing. How about letting me in on it?”

  “You betrayed me in exchange for Gracie,” I said angrily, even as I wondered if I might be wrong.

  “Then just what the hell am I doing here now? Can you answer me that?” Kitrell irately demanded. “According to your scenario, I should already have Gracie and be long gone.”

  Sonny came over to my side. “He didn’t do it, Rachel. He didn’t kill Tyler, and he didn’t set you up. You know I wouldn’t say that if I weren’t absolutely sure.”

  I looked at Harris and knew he was right. I nodded my head, and lowered the revolver.

  “That’s more like it,” Kitrell said huffily, pulling his boots on. “Now what happened here? Did this goon break in and attack you?”

  “No. I dragged him home with me for a good time,” I retorted.

  “Porter!” both men cried in unison.

  “All right!” I silently ordered myself to behave. “Juan called last night after I came home. It seems someone broke into his place and absconded with all of Timmy Tom’s business papers. But I didn’t realize how truly serious the situation was until I received a call from Lizzie Krabbs soon afterward.”

  “F.U.’s wife?” Kitrell asked incredulously.

  “An old friend—long story,” I offered, by way of explanation. “She hacked into F.U.’s computer, where she discovered that Southwest Heritage isn’t an environmental group, but a front, headed by F.U., comprised of wealthy business associates.”

 

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