“Fourteen of them,” Pablo said proudly. “On my father’s side. No relation to the boss, here.”
“Any of them related to El Patron?” Ted asked, and Chance could see he was immediately sorry when Pablo sprang to his feet. Suddenly the little man didn’t seem nearly so small. The team’s man Friday abruptly became a badger, short, feisty and able to take on a grizzly.
Ted raised both hands, surrendering. “No offense meant, man. I was just hoping. Because then we could round up your cousins, sisters, aunts, uncles—what are there, seven thousand or so of you?—and we could take him out. Not legal, for sure, but one heck of a ride.”
Chance cleared his throat, and the tension eased a notch. “I have a plan,” he said quietly. “As you pointed out a minute ago, El Patron isn’t after Pablo because he sees Pablo as a simple hired hand around here—no badge. Everybody knows he’s been working here lately, but he’s worked a hundred other jobs over the years.”
“And you’re the rodeo king,” Ted said slowly. “The guy who only cadges coffee over at the marshal’s office on his daily rounds of mooching lunches, drinks, dinners—and nighttime invitations from pretty ladies.”
“Right. That’s all anyone knows around here. So no one will be surprised if I go looking for a job to tide me over between rodeo accidents.”
“The undercover federal marshal going deeper undercover.” Jack groaned. “Just remember, I’m supposed to retire in a few weeks. Don’t do anything to screw that up.”
“I won’t,” Chance said.
“Hell, you made me age twenty years the day you pulled back into town a few months ago acting the rodeo circuit cowboy. You even had me fooled for a while. Finally you flashed your badge at me that night. We’d been asking for someone to do something about El Patron for so long, we never guessed a federal marshal would show up.”
“You’re the one who suggested someone come in undercover,” Chance reminded his senior deputy.
“Well, yeah, but you… I never expected them to send a local guy.”
“It’s worked, hasn’t it?”
Jack shook his head. “Yeah, but why make me the supposed marshal? I was doing just fine as a deputy.”
“Paperwork always leaves a trail somewhere,” Chance said. “I could change the name on the documents but I couldn’t hide the transfer altogether. I may be the most noble of this bunch, but I still like a paycheck now and again.”
His men chuckled.
Jack said, “I’ll tell you, Cora about had a heart attack when I told her I was taking on the title of marshal. She was sure one of El Patron’s boys would come gunning for me.”
“An under undercover,” Ted quipped. “And I suppose we’re supposed to cover you?”
The team moaned at the pun, and Chance said, “Something like that.”
“But I still don’t see why they would hire you and Pablo over somebody with real experience.”
Chance put on his hat and opened the office door. “What do you think that trophy on my mantel is for, anyway?”
“That tin-plate guy riding a bronco? I thought you got that at a garage sale for fifty cents.”
“Okay, José, can you draw me a picture of a cowboy?” Jeannie asked, holding out a black crayon to the little boy. She decided she had cowboys on the brain.
Dulce snorted. “Draw? He can’t even talk.”
Jeannie didn’t look at the derisive girl. She was secretly pleased that Dulce had spoken a phrase that didn’t contain a swear word.
“Everybody can draw,” Jeannie said, then amended, “well, maybe not me.”
José gave her a questioning look and slid the blank paper on the butcher-block dining table her way. He pushed her hand, with the crayon still in it, toward the sheet of paper.
Dulce snorted again as Jeannie assumed a look of tremulous courage and bent over the paper. With mock intensity, she drew the worst stick-figure rendition of a cowboy she could conjure. It wore a hat more closely resembling a lumpy pancake than any sort of headgear, boots that could have fit a woolly mammoth, a bandanna roughly the size and shape of Texas and a smile that looked like a jack-o’-lantern’s toothy grin.
The drawing certainly didn’t appear a thing like the cowboy that had been haunting her dreams the last few nights, the man-wall who grinned at her from every corner of her sleep.
She sighed and assumed a doleful expression as she turned the drawing around for the children to critique. The reaction was all she could have hoped for and more. José giggled behind his short fingers, and even Dulce swiftly hid a bark of laughter.
“You call that a cowboy? Sheesh.” Dulce reached for a blank sheet of paper and pulled the crayon from Jeannie’s fingers. She started to sketch, then looked up to glare at José and Jeannie. “Did I tell you to watch me?”
Jeannie turned to José. “I heard her say that, didn’t you? She was down on her knees begging us to watch. I thought she’d never stop. ‘Please, please watch me.’”
Dulce snorted, and Jeannie could see the girl clamping her lips tightly together, squeezing back a wayward smile.
Within seconds, the girl tossed the paper across the table and flipped the crayon beside it.
Jeannie realized she’d been holding her breath, half afraid Dulce was going to draw something inappropriate. Instead, she’d lightly executed a shadowy figure on a mesa, thunderclouds in the distance and a long dust coat snared by the wind.
While it was no perfect rendition and was somewhat stiff in form, it was still a remarkable drawing. Jeannie bent closer to José and pulled the sketch so it rested on the table between them. “Now that’s a cowboy. Wow.” She didn’t trust herself to look at the too-silent Dulce. She could feel the girl’s fragility like a palpable presence. “Okay, that settles it.”
“Settles what?” Dulce asked finally.
“We need an art gallery.” When José looked a question at her, she explained, “A place to hang really good pictures.”
José pointed at the blank wall on the south side of the dining room. Jeannie studied it for a moment. “I think that’s perfect. And we have our first one.”
Still without looking at Dulce, she rose from the table and rummaged through a drawer in the sideboard—a sideboard designed to house food and utensils for some twenty children but holding a host of other things, as well—and found some masking tape. A few seconds later, the lonely cowboy drawing was displayed dead center in the middle of the wall.
She stood on the other side of the dining table to study the effect. The drawing was really quite good but looked too small all alone on the wall. José seemed to think the same thing, for he handed her the atrocious stick figure and pointed at the wall.
She chuckled and shook her head. “Nope, only good drawings for this wall.” She waited for Dulce to say something, and when the girl remained silent, she finally risked sneaking a look in her direction. “What do you think?” Jeannie asked softly.
It could have been the light, or perhaps some of the girl’s heavy makeup had suddenly dropped into her eyes, but Jeannie could see a definite sheen of tears. They hung in the teenager’s eyes for a moment, making the heavy mascara glisten then streak down her cheeks.
“I think it’s dumb,” she growled and stomped from the room, the sound of her combat boots echoing throughout the house.
Jeannie sighed, feeling a hopeless sense of disconnection with the girl. She couldn’t help but wonder if her daughter, Angela ever would have gone through such a phase. Her daughter had been a sunny, happy baby and a sunnier toddler. Surely, Angela would never have grown resentful, nasty and so prickly that even compliments would make her angry and defensive. But then, Angela would never have been abandoned by her parents, wouldn’t have been shuffled from one foster-care situation to another, each one seemingly worse than the last.
And perhaps Jeannie couldn’t imagine Angela ever being like Dulce because Angela would forever be two years old, chubby-cheeked and cherub-mouthed, giggling at everything from butter
flies to tummy tickles. She couldn’t imagine it because Angela would never see fifteen, would always and forever be that baby of two years old. Quick, hot tears stung her eyes. The tears were as much from discouragement over Dulce as from the ever sharp pain of Angela’s loss.
She felt a feather-soft touch on her hand and blinked away her tears. She had thought perhaps José touched her from sympathy, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were locked on the panes of the French doors leading to the broad veranda. He lifted a finger and pointed at the horizon.
Watery from her tears and the afternoon heat, the horizon shimmered in wavy lines against the stark blue sky. A wisp of smoke drifted across the image.
Jeannie’s tears dried as suddenly as they’d come, and she dashed to the doors and threw them open. The acrid tang of burning weeds and scorched earth stung her eyes and nose. Sounds carried long distances in the desert, and so did the smell of smoke. And where there was smoke…
She pushed José into the hacienda, telling him to go get Dulce and for both of them to find the housekeeper, Juanita, and stay inside. Jeannie watched him run out of the living room, then slammed the doors behind her and ran for the barn, yelling for Juanita’s husband, Tomás.
As Jeannie was finding common on such a large ranch, the man was nowhere to be found. After hurriedly throwing some blankets, a fire extinguisher and two bags of sand into the back of the Jeep, as instructed by the local volunteer fire department after the last range fire, Jeannie tore out of the ranch headquarters.
She tried telling herself the fire wasn’t on the headquarters side of the newly created fire wall, but the farther down the road she went, the less hope she had that this was true. The smoke began to obscure the road in places, and the sky became a sickly gray-brown. When the smoke started filtering in the vent system of the Jeep, Jeannie shifted into four-wheel drive and whipped the vehicle into the shallow bar ditch and out, onto the open prairie and away from the smoke.
She proceeded more swiftly than caution dictated, especially given the recent flash-flood type of rains that had created gullies and arroyos where none had existed before. But thanks to the high heat of the past few days, the ground was crusty, and few patches of mud impeded her progress.
Within what seemed like seconds, the sky turned a hot orange-red, and she could see the flames beneath the acrid plumes of smoke. She’d read accounts of fires that wiped out thousands of acres in a matter of minutes. This one was still relatively small, only a couple of hundred feet square. Small enough to contain, she hoped, but large enough to be a very real danger should the wind change direction by the slightest degree.
On the headquarters side of the fire, an old scabrous pickup truck sat cantilevered against a rise, and she could make out two figures rushing in and out of the smoke.
She slammed on the brakes and spun crazily in the sand for a moment or two, killing the Jeep’s engine in pure panic. She leaped from the still rocking vehicle, yelling as loudly as possible as she yanked the shovel from the back of the Jeep.
She couldn’t recount later what she screamed at the two men before the fire—demands they get off her ranch, commands to put out the fire, threats? All she was cognizant of was a painful, sick fury that someone was harassing her ranch. She hadn’t been able to save her husband and daughter from their deaths in that dreadful car accident, but she would stop these creeps who were harming the safe haven she was trying to create for Dulce and little José. She would take them out if she could.
She tore across the expanse of baking desert at hyper speed, pummeling into the most incredible heat she’d ever felt. She’d heard fires likened to living creatures and knew as the smoke-laden air enveloped her that this description was accurate. The flaming beast on her ranch writhed and groaned like a supernatural animal giving birth to hell itself. The blaze didn’t crackle or snap like a simple fireplace flame but roared and shrieked, deafening her.
The two men hadn’t heard her cries nor, apparently, had they seen her furious approach. They continued fanning the flames with blankets and dancing before the fire as if in glee.
Despite the heat and smoke scorching her lungs, Jeannie managed another almost inhuman cry of rage and hefted the shovel above her shoulder, holding it as if she were a baseball player with a surefire homer coming her way. She aimed directly at one of the men’s backs.
The taller of the two men turned toward her as she swung the shovel with all her might. The split second before it connected with his body, Jeannie recognized him and felt a jolt of adrenaline sweep through her. She tried to deflect her vicious swing.
With lightning quick reflexes, Chance Salazar whipped out a hand to catch the handle of the shovel. The impact of the shovel handle against his hand had to hurt, but he gave her a swift, white grin and yanked the shovel from her suddenly limp hands. He flipped the tool like a baton and caught it, then crammed it deep into the ground. With a primal cry, he hauled the combined dirt and sand from the ground and hurled it onto the nearest pocket of flames.
“We have to dig a trench around this section,” he yelled. “Wind’s blowing toward the road—that’s good. If we can block it on this side, it’ll likely burn itself out.”
The smaller man continued beating at the flames with a blanket, not fanning the fire or dancing in glee as she’d thought, but desperately attempting to smother the rapidly spreading blaze while staying out of its grasp.
She found herself muttering, “Sorry, sorry,” as she ran to the Jeep. After snaring the fire extinguisher, she chanted, “Thank you, thank you,” on the way back.
As if trained to work as a team, Jeannie and the two men fought side by side to subdue the fiery beast on her ranch. She took the left flank, spraying the ground with the foamy chemical compound. Chance dug a trench and hurtled sand and dirt over the blaze while his friend beat the flames back with the scorched blanket.
It seemed like days before the beast of fire was contained within the confines of the main ranch road and the new trench they’d created. Though empty, the fire extinguisher suddenly seemed to gain fifty pounds in weight, and Jeannie let it slip from her arms and thud to the ground. She stared at the still smoldering desert without comprehension.
Small wisps of smoke rose from patches of twisted and charred plant life, but the westerly wind picked up and began carrying the smoke away, leaving patches of blue sky. Soon the only heat came from the August afternoon sun, hot and blazing but clean.
She felt strangely renewed, powerful. She looked at the two men who had struggled at her side. Soot and sweat streaked their faces. Because they had squinted during the fight, their eyes, though red from the burning weeds, stood out on their dirty faces as if they’d worn goggles. Both men were grinning, and Jeannie knew they were experiencing the same exhilaration she felt.
She looked at the charred land, a large square of black, and scarcely started when Chance Salazar dropped a filthy hand on her shoulder. As she’d done in front of the theater in town, she allowed him to propel her, this time to face him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She realized that her unconscious mind had remembered his voice exactly, for this was the corduroy baritone she’d heard in her every dream the past few nights. She nodded.
“Are you sure?”
“Truthfully? I feel great,” she said and realized they weren’t shouting for the first time in what seemed like hours. “How about you?”
His eyes raked her face, and for half a second Jeannie had the oddest notion that he might kiss her. His hand tightened on her shoulder, and she found herself fighting an urge to lean into him. The natural sounds of the desert—the shriek of a hawk, the rustle of dry grass—were muted to a low thrum that seemed more inside her than out.
Chance smiled. “We’re fine.”
“I thought—” she started, then broke off, suddenly aware of her surroundings, abruptly aware she’d been about to say she thought he was going to kiss her.
Chance grinned. “I know wh
at you thought.”
She could only hope he didn’t and that he would attribute her high color to the fire and the baking heat from the sun.
“You thought we started it. You damn near got me with that shovel.”
She couldn’t help but smile in return, albeit ruefully. “You put it to much better use,” she said shakily.
“Well, I think so. You seemed pretty intent on rearranging my features. And I rather like my face the way it is.”
So did she, she thought. Soot and all.
As if reading her mind, he chuckled and shook his head. “Of course, there are plenty of folk who would disagree with me if they could see me now.” His friend gave a bark of laughter, and as if only then realizing he was still touching her, Chance dropped his hand from her shoulder.
“You were a godsend,” she said simply.
“Thanks.” He wanted to say a lot more but couldn’t. He wanted to tell her she was in danger and that he was there to help her with her troubles. But he couldn’t tell her that, either.
“It wasn’t lightning, was it?” she asked, as if resigned to a negative answer.
He gave a ragged chuckle at her recognizing the obvious, relieved she leaped to the truth without him having to tell her and, by telling her, possibly blow his cover. “Whoever started this little fire was long gone by the time we came along.”
She looked up, as though she could divine truth from the puffs of lingering smoke, the cloudless blue sky. “So you think it was started deliberately?”
Should he frighten her or not? He didn’t know much about her, but he knew she was no fool. A bit out of her element, maybe, and somewhat confused, but there was nothing wrong with her brain cells. She thought something was amiss on her property and now she’d found out she was right. She’d gone to Nando. She’d tried to get help. And, unfortunately for her, Nando had been typically Nando, lazy and fatly paid by El Patron.
Instead of trying to duck the issue, Chance said, “Sure. Someone’s lighting fires on your place.” Damn that Nando Gallegos. How dare he let this lady live in fear?
Cowboy Under Cover Page 4
