Chapter 2
Two
John thanked the cowboys who’d done a very quick but efficient job in building a cage for John’s pet—right down to adding
shredded newspaper litter, a big bowl of water, sun spectrum lighting overhead, a heating unit under one part of the huge
cage and even some smooth wood for the snake to climb on. There was also a very prominent locking mechanism. With a padlock.
“He can’t pick a lock,” John muttered.
“It was your mother’s idea,” one commented with a grin. “Nobody argues with the boss’s wife, you know.”
He laughed. “No. Nobody does. Thanks, guys.”
“Don’t mention it. But a little bonus . . .”
“Get out of here.” He waved them out, but they’d get their bonus. It was a great job, and done quickly and efficiently.
He opened the sack and breathed on Precious, so he knew who was handling him.
Precious relaxed. John lifted him into the enclosure, still in the sack.
He put Precious down, opened the sack carefully and quickly closed the door.
There were air holes to vent the big cage made of plexiglass, so he breathed in one of them to reassure the scaly newcomer.
Precious lay very still at first. But his tongue came out, testing the air for information. Slowly, he moved toward the water,
and his head went in. Then he explored the wood and the litter. Finally, he propped himself a little on the wood and was very
still.
“Happy?” John asked.
Precious moved his head, just a little.
“That’s what I thought,” John chuckled. “Well, you’re rooming with me, so you’ll know you’re safe. Later, I’ll get you some
freeze-dried food. So you know you’re home. Welcome, old fellow. You’re safe here.”
Precious moved, the tiniest bit. John smiled.
Heather and Josie were talking about weather, of all things.
“. . . was dry as a bone, and then one of the men said he knew a Cheyenne man who worked as an anthropologist but could also
bring rain. We were skeptical, but we didn’t have much to lose. So Cole flew up to Wyoming to get him and brought him down
here. He asked us about Paleo-Indian artifacts in the area and after we told him we hadn’t found any yet, he asked if he could
come back and look for them. It seemed a nice trade, so we said yes. He got out some things from an old parfleche bag, said
some words, made a prayer. And, it rained.” Heather looked mystified. “Nobody understood how he did it. But it rained for
three glorious days. My chrysanthemums had almost dried up but they came back to life.” She shook her head. “It seems that
modern people don’t know everything after all,” she added.
“No, we don’t,” Josie agreed. Inside, she was hoping that the rainmaker wasn’t the same Cheyenne man she knew, who lived near
her dad in Wyoming.
Because he’d recognize Josie in a heartbeat. And she couldn’t afford for him to. He knew too much about her. She also had to hope that Heather, who’d seen her at the Grammy Awards, didn’t recognize her. But that had been a brief introduction, and a long time ago.
“It was a lovely meal. Thank you so much. I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble, but he—” she indicated John in the doorway
“—insisted.”
“Of course I did. I can’t afford to lose precious calves to invaders,” John said with a sting in his tone.
“John!” Heather said firmly.
“Sorry,” he said to his mother. “It was unavoidable.”
“I was sort of invading,” Josie admitted, with a side glare at John.
“Stealing is a better choice of words,” John said. “Oh. I forgot. You’d better have this back.” He pulled out her pistol and
handed it to her.
Heather’s eyes grew wider.
“It’s just for snakes and stuff,” she said quickly, as she replaced it in her cross-draw holster at her waist. “A friend of
mine taught me how to use it.”
“A friend?” John asked. “Is he hungry for a steak, too? You might warn him that all our cowboys go armed, and they shoot first
if it’s after dark. Just a thought.”
“Thank you so much,” she said with sizzling sarcasm.
“John!” Heather repeated.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I was just anticipating problems.” He glanced at Josie. “After all, if she has a lot of friends—which
I doubt—they might all be hungry.”
“John!” Heather and Josie chorused, and then they looked at each other and both laughed.
John glared at them.
Josie got up. “If you’ll give me a lift, I’ll get out of your hair,” she told John.
She turned back to Heather. “It was nice meeting you,” she said softly.
“And your cook is wonderful. Thank you for the best meal I’ve had since .
. .” She choked, because the last had been her late mother’s cooking and the loss was still fresh.
“In a long time,” she finished on a forced smile.
“You’re very welcome,” Heather said, getting up to walk their guest and John to the front door. “I hope we’ll meet again.”
Josie looked back at her with real longing. She smiled. “It isn’t likely. But thank you.”
“Yes, the next time she might actually use that peashooter she carries . . .” John began.
Josie ran for the truck. Heather threw up her hands.
John calmly pushed the button on the smart key to unlock the doors. Minutes later, he drove Josie back to the pasture where
they’d met, what seemed like days ago.
“Is one of your cronies meeting you here with a semi truck later, or do you have other plans for the evening?”
“Since you’ve already told me that your people shoot first after dark, I’m not keen to hang around or come back,” she said
icily.
“Just as well. They’re all great shots.”
“Well, thanks for the meal. Your mother is very kind.”
“She is.” His face hardened. “I’m not. Something you might remember.”
“I will.”
He looked around. “I’d rather not leave you here. Just in case. Do you have a place to stay in town?” he added.
“Yes, but I’ve caused you enough . . .” she began.
“Not quite. I don’t have anything to do for an hour or so, until my prospective buyer gets here. I don’t mind driving you
where you need to go.”
This was going to cause some more suspicion, but she couldn’t realistically walk to town. It was hot in spite of the recent rain, and the humidity, added to the soaring heat, was likely to leave her in a puddle on the side of the road.
“Thank you,” she said in a small voice. “I have a room at the motel in Percell.”
He pulled back into the road and drove to Percell, the nearest big town, which was about a twenty-minute drive.
“Your ranch isn’t anywhere near the border,” she said after a few moments of freezing silence when they were underway. “But
it’s on the main drag from El Paso to Dallas. Do you have problems with drug traffickers around the area?”
He gave her a quick, suspicious glance. “In fact, we do. Our sheriff just had a deputy stop what looked like an innocent pickup
with a family inside and a huge mattress and sheets in the bed. It turned out to be a fortune in fentanyl.”
Just what her boss had suspected. But she couldn’t afford to give away how much she knew about such things. “Fentanyl. Isn’t
that the drug that’s killed so many users . . . ?”
“Any drug can do that, given the right amount,” he interrupted. “But, yes, it is. We lost a wrangler to it last year.” His
voice lowered in sad memory. “He’d just lost his wife to cancer. He’d never even used drugs. An acquaintance at a bar offered
him some. Just to get him past the grief, he said. So Henry took it home. But he wasn’t told how much was a safe dose. We
found him a day later.” He winced.
“Did he have children?” she wondered aloud.
“No. That was part of the problem, I think,” he said, vulnerable for just that space of time.
“I think it might have saved him. Men with kids aren’t like other men.
They don’t take as many chances.” He was thinking of his brother, Tanner, whose wife, Stasia, was pregnant.
He wasn’t sure exactly when he’d changed.
Odd, how nobody talked about it around him.
Probably because they all knew how infatuated John had been.
His jaw tautened. He’d been in love with her for years, but she only had eyes for Tanner.
Theirs had been a long and tormented relationship, but in the end, Tanner chose her over the dangerous life he’d been living as a government agent.
“Something you know?” she probed.
“My older brother is married. They’re expecting in the spring. He was a government agent. He gave it up for ranching, because
of the baby.”
“My goodness!”
He glanced at her. “So I guess love has its points.”
“Oh, that sounded sour,” she murmured, her eyes out the window. “My gosh, there are oil pumping wells right out there with
the cattle!”
That amused him and he chuckled. “Well, there are only so many places you can find oil, and a lot of them are on cattle ranches.”
“I know, but it just looks very odd,” she replied.
“I went back East to visit an old army buddy,” he said as they paused at a stop signal. “He lived in a small town. Right next
to a shopping center, there was a little plot of grass with a pumping station right in the middle. I told him he should come
to Texas and see where they were supposed to be located.”
“What did he say?”
He laughed. “He said no, thanks. He lived in a small mountain community in north Georgia. In fact, his hometown was located
on top of a mountain. He said he’d take deep rivers and tall trees in the place of scrub land and mesquite trees any day.”
“It’s not so bad here,” she mused. “In fact, it looks rather like Wyoming, in places.” She could have bitten her tongue. “Arizona,
too,” she added with what she hoped was nonchalance.
“Been there, I guess?”
“Oh, yes. I had friends in both places,” she said. “We used to visit, before they settled down.”
“No inclination to get married?”
“If you’re proposing, sorry, but, no,” she said languidly, just to needle him. “I’m not nearly old enough to give up nightlife for diapers and formula.”
Some nightlife, she was thinking privately. The latest paperback romance and a glass of ginger ale.
He made a gruff sound in his throat.