Fourteen #2
“Any idea where in Mexico?”
“No,” she said sadly, “and I probably won’t know until we actually get there. I’ll do my best to call you, but keeping in
touch is going to be very dangerous and I’ll only do it if I think I can do it safely.”
“Do you know which flight, anything about airline seats, whatever?”
“No,” she replied, “and he won’t tell me until I’m in the car with him and then I won’t be able to phone you.”
“Keep your gun locked and loaded,” he said. “Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t turn your back on anybody and don’t trust
anybody.”
“Wow. Rules for living,” she said, and smiled. “Not bad, Sheriff.”
“I have trust issues,” he said and he wasn’t joking.
“What about the calves?” she asked.
“The vet’s got them, and he’s got a secure place on his ranch where he’s going to treat them. Since only Raines supposedly
knows about the drugs in the calves’ stomachs, or so we think, they’re not likely to be stolen. You have good neighbors around
the Big Spur. No cattle thieves or rustlers that we know of.”
She was listening to him talk as if she was part of the Big Spur, part of the Everett family, part of the ranch. It was surprising
to her that she felt that way, but she did. The Everetts had become the family she still had when she was little. Her father
had loved her. He’d taken her places and bought her things. But very soon after she was in grammar school, he was gone most
of the time and her mother, God rest her soul, was always helping other people with very little thought to the people she
lived with. That was how it was with some social workers who became so buried in their work that they were blind to anything
except the people they were helping, period. It wasn’t a bad thing. But it was hard on a little girl who was an only child
and had nobody to play with.
“You sound very thoughtful,” Marlowe remarked.
She laughed self-consciously. “I was just thinking that I feel like part of the Everett family. It’s a dream.” Her face fell
as she looked at her feet. “I haven’t had a family in years, long before my mother passed. She was always helping people and
Dad was always off with some other woman. Mama cried a lot where she thought I couldn’t hear her.”
“Life hurts,” Marlowe said.
“A lot of my friends had it worse,” she told him. “One had an alcoholic father who beat her, another was diabetic and her
family argued all the time. She ended up in the emergency room time after time until finally she died of it. Stress can kill.
I’ve seen it done.” She hesitated. “Listen, can you meet me at your office in about ten minutes? I’ll lie to Raines and tell
him I have to check in with you before I can leave the ranch.”
“Yes, I can. He’ll bring you?”
“I can promise you that he will, or I’ll have hysterics all over him.”
He chuckled. “Okay. Ten minutes.”
When Raines came by to pick her up, she told him he had to run her by the sheriff’s office on the way to the airport to check
in.
“I haven’t done it today. If I don’t, he may try to come after me and arrest me. I don’t want to go to jail!” she said, sounding
alarmed.
He bit his lip. “Okay, okay. We’ve got a little time. But don’t be long!”
“I won’t. I promise.” She tried not to sound as relieved as she felt.
He stopped at the detention center and let her out with a reminder to hurry.
“Well, that went easier than I expected it to,” she told Marlowe in his office. “I expected to have to do some persuading.”
Marlowe’s eyes became far away. She knew the look; she’d seen it in agents that she worked with, who’d been in combat in the
military. They called it the thousand-yard stare. It was men looking into nothing and seeing things so horrible that they
could never even talk about them.
She moved just a step closer and looked up at him with her pale eyes. “I have comrades who’ve been in combat,” she said. “Some
drink. One committed suicide. Nights get very long when you’re trapped with your nightmares. When this is all over, I’ll give
you my number on my cell phone. I don’t sleep much, either, so I’m usually awake at two or three in the morning. You won’t
wake me up if you text me. There is one strange thing,” she added. “I won’t talk on the phone. I hate it. I like texts. I’ll
answer those.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m eccentric.”
“That makes two of us,” he said. “I feed stray cats, and I have a bobcat who comes to the back door and scratches to be fed
periodically. I saved it after it was hit by a car.” His dark eyebrows drew together. “Apparently, someone hit it and just
kept going. I picked it up, put it on the passenger seat and took it to the vet. Fortunately, he’s affiliated with the national
people, so he’s listed and qualified to deal with wild animals. Most vets aren’t allowed to touch them.”
“But that’s wrong,” she said. “It’s just wrong!”
“Ohh, that’s only the beginning,” he said. “You have no idea what laws are in place concerning wild animals. If you trap one
like a raccoon or a groundhog, they’re compelled to euthanize it if they have it in a trap. They can’t turn it loose again.”
“But that’s barbaric!” she said. “What kind of lunatic makes such a law?”
“Gets even better,” he told her. “If you pick up a feather in your yard, you better have a scavengers’ license. And if you get an eagle feather, and you’re not certifiably Native American, you can go to prison.”
“I’m living in an asylum,” she said, looking up at him.
He shrugged. He smiled sadly. “Welcome to the world.”
She shook her head. “Why doesn’t the government do something besides trying to kill things that we should be trying to save?”
“You work for it,” he reminded her. “Tell them.”
“You’re law enforcement,” she said. “You could tell them, too.”
His eyes had that faraway look again. “I try to keep away from Washington as much as possible,” he said. “I tend to cause
trouble when I go up there. Big trouble.”
This was fascinating. “What do you do?” she wanted to know.
“Well, once there was a broken window,” he said.
“How did it get broken?” she asked.
He rammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and just smiled. “I demonstrated the defenestration of Prague with a representative
from my district. He was trying to get through a law that would have wrecked the cattle industry here. The authorities seemed
to feel that I overreacted. I didn’t feel that way at all.”
She broke out laughing. She remembered the infamous defenestration of Prague from her Western Civilization classes in college.
“You threw a representative through a window? Did he live?”
“Oh, they made a big deal out of it,” he said. “Lawsuits threatened, one of the policemen tried to arrest me.”
“What did you do then?” she asked, fascinated.
“I called my aunt Lucy,” he said.
“You called a relative when you were arrested?”
“I wasn’t arrested,” he said. “Aunt Lucy came out of a meeting where they were debating a bill,” he said. “Actually, I felt sorry for the policeman. Aunt Lucy can take the hat off a man at ten paces with her language, and she’s not ashamed to go before the cameras with it. Fascinating lady.”
“Is she in politics or something?” she asked.
“Sort of,” he replied. “She’s the deputy director of the FBI and she’s married to the vice president.”
She just stared at him. “One of the dictators in South America has a son who’s married to a former FBI agent and her father
is head of the CIA. I know her. She’s originally from Jacobsville, Texas. Down the road apiece.”
“You have some interesting contacts,” he replied. He cocked his head and smiled at her.
“One day I’ll have to tell you about the rest of mine. One wrestles alligators in Florida.”
She shivered. “I could never do that. I was almost eaten by one once when I was about three years old. We were on a holiday
in Florida. Dad found a woman to flirt with, and he wasn’t watching me. There was a canal out behind the house of the people
we were staying with. I wandered too close to the canal and came within a hair’s breadth of being eaten by an alligator.”
“Who saved you?”
“The husband and Mom’s best friend,” she said and smiled. “He was a mercenary in years past. I think he probably could have
picked the alligator up and tossed it in the back of a pickup truck. As it was, they taped his mouth and relocated him. He
wasn’t really a bad alligator—he was just hungry.”
“You have some interesting acquaintances.”
“Unique people,” she replied. “Very unique. They come in and out of my life because they’re always on the move.
One of them is delta squad. He was my mother’s first beau, but she married my dad instead.
I’m sure he could still tell some stories.
But I know men who’ve been in combat don’t do that so I’ve never asked.
But he got drunk one time and told me. I never told Mom.
She’d have been in the bathroom throwing up. ”
“In our professions,” he said, “we get accustomed to seeing bad things and we learn to deal with it. But then we carry it
on our backs like heavy loads that we can never get off.”
“We all have things in our past that hurt us.” She started to tell him about Eduardo Duarte’s little boy, but that seemed
like privileged information, and she didn’t think he’d want her to share it with the sheriff.
“Thanks for taking care of my ID while I’m gone,” she said. Her expression lightened. “If you need an identifying mark, if
I mess up and you have to find my body somewhere, I have a tattoo of a dragon on my left ankle inside. Green dragon that breathes
fire and has wings and legs like a griffin.” She laughed. “I like fantasy things, especially dragons.”
“Dragons have always been my favorite,” he said. “They should come up with some design in a laboratory somewhere, and they
can make one by using lizard DNA and bird DNA and combining them and getting a lizard that flies. But it would have to be
little and cute and not dangerous to people. It would sell out overnight.”
“I’d buy one,” she laughed.