Twice in a Lifetime

by Merline Lovelace

  “I know.”

  The knife paused. The foreman peered at her thoughtfully. “You tell him that, missy?”

  “I tried. He wasn’t in the mood to listen.”

  Shad chewed on that for a while. “Give him time,” he advised after a moment or two. “Jake can be stubborn as a brick wall when he sets his mind to it.”

  “So I’ve discovered.”

  Stubborn and loyal and too damned disturbing for Rachel’s peace of mind. She’d almost lost it in his arms at the bottom of a canyon, for Pete’s sake. If she’d had her way, they would have gotten down and dirty right there, rocks and all. Her nipples tingling at the memory, she glanced up to find Shad watching her with a bemused expression.

  “What?”

  “I’m thinkin’ you might be good for Jake, after all. He needs shakin’ up, and you sure been doin’ some serious shakin’, missy.”

  That was one way to put it, Rachel supposed. But where the shaking would lead was still anyone’s guess. She was mulling over the less-than-satisfactory situation when a muffled exclamation floated to them through the open cabin windows.

  Taggart stumbled through the door. His dark eyes blazed above the handkerchief that covered his nose and mouth. He rushed across the clearing clutching what looked like a burlap-wrapped bundle.

  “Look at this!”

  Her nerves igniting, Rachel jumped up and threw Jake a swift glance. He followed more slowly, showing no emotion as Taggart jerked down his mask, dragged in a long breath, and fumbled back the burlap folds.

  “It’s a full brick,” he exclaimed in fierce satisfaction. “Give or take a few bills.”

  Excitement pumped hot and swift into Rachel’s veins. A brick, she’d learned during the investigation, was what came off the line after guillotine-style cutters sliced the newly printed sheets of banknotes. The high-speed blades diced a hundred sheets at a time, first into two units, then into four, finally into individual stacks. The one-hundred note stacks were then banded and packaged into bricks. Each brick contained forty stacks, which meant…

  She performed a quick mental calculation and gulped. Russ Taggart was holding approximately two hundred thousand dollars in newly printed fifty-dollar bills in his hands.

  “McCoy found it.” The FBI operative’s entire body vibrated with elation. “He found the damned container.”

  He shared an exultant, wolfish grin with Rachel before his glance collided with Jake’s.

  “What container?”

  Like a paper bag crushed between two fists, Russ’s glee folded in on itself. Still hefting the brick in one hand, he faced the taut, square-shouldered rancher.

  “I’m not cleared to…”

  “Don’t even think about laying that kind of bureaucratic bull on me, Taggart.”

  Still the agent hesitated, unwilling even now to share specific details of the crash with anyone outside the inner circle of investigators.

  “You’re standing on my land,” Jake reminded him grimly. “Holding money that belonged to Isaac McCoy. It now belongs to Shad, as Grizzly’s only living next of kin, unless or until you prove otherwise.”

  “The hell it does! All it will take is one call from me to certify the authenticity of these bills.”

  “And all it will take is one call from me to my brother Evan to tie you and that stack of bills up in so many legal knots it’ll take you ten years to un-tangle them.”

  Dislike flared in the agent’s eyes, so dark and intense that unease fluttered in Rachel’s chest.

  “I want to know the whole story, Taggart. Now.”

  It was a stand-off. Two gunfighters facing each other on a deserted street at high noon. The problem was, they were both supposed to be the good guys.

  “Tell him,” Rachel said tersely. “If you don’t, I will.”

  “All right, all right.” Clearly put out at having his hand forced, Taggart conceded. “I told you that the fifty you passed came from the downed aircraft. What I couldn’t tell you was that it was part of a shipment of newly printed bills. They were on their way to the Federal Reserve Bank in Salt Lake City when the DC-10 went down. The bills were sealed in a special container, which we didn’t find at or anywhere near the crash site. We think the container was dropped some minutes before the plane plowed into the mountain.”

  “Dropped?” Jake’s brows slashed together. “In midflight?”

  Rachel could see him struggling to make sense of it.

  “The crew had to be pretty desperate to dump their cargo in midair. What were they, off-course and low on fuel or something?”

  “Or something,” Taggart bit out.

  Rachel stepped in before the animosity simmering between the two men could erupt again.

  “We recovered the DC-10’s flight recorder,” she told Jake. “That, plus the evidence that was gathered on-scene indicate someone blew the cargo hatch and caused the plane to suddenly decompress.”

  Her analysis of the damage to the composite materials of the plane’s undercarriage had helped confirm that theory, but she saw no need to mention that now.

  “The pilots were forced to use emergency measures to bring their aircraft down to a safe altitude. The snowstorm obscured their visibility, and in a critical moment of distraction, they flew into the mountainside.”

  It didn’t take Jake long to piece the puzzle together. “Are you telling me someone deliberately blew a cargo hatch in midair? To eject this container of money?”

  “That’s our best guess. We speculate that whoever disabled the security mechanisms and ejected the pod may have put a tracking device on it, intending to drop it to an accomplice on the ground. Either that, or he planned to follow the container out the cargo hatch and parachute down with it. If so, he didn’t make it out of the aircraft in time. All four crew members died in the crash.”

  “Can’t imagine anyone fool enough to consider jumping out of a plane over the Rockies,” Shad commented. “How much was in this here pod, anyway?”

  With a glance at the tight-lipped Russ, Rachel supplied the answer. “Forty million dollars.”

  “Ho-ly Hell!”

  “Teams scoured the mountains within a hundred-mile radius of the crash site,” she told the astonished foreman. “The pod was never located. Nor did any of the bills it contained show up in circulation until…”

  “Until I paid for a beer and a soda at the county fair,” Jake finished grimly.

  Shad tipped his hat forward and scratched his head, still stunned by the idea of forty million dollars dropping out of the sky. “Ole Isaac must have stumbled on the money during his wanderings.”

  “Wanderings?” Taggart jumped back into the conversation. “Where did he wander?”

  “All over these mountains. Him and that bear of his. A full-growed American black will stake out a territory of thirty, maybe forty square miles, but he’ll prowl a whole lot farther in search of female companionship come mating season. Most times, Isaac prowled with him.”

  Taggart swore, low and viciously.

  Rachel guessed what was running through his head. More teams. More search grids drawn across a map. More weeks or possibly months of climbing down steep gullies and up sheer cliff faces.

  “The container was banded and sealed,” she said, thinking aloud. “It must have broken open on impact. My guess is that Shad’s cousin transported the money brick by brick to a safe place.”

  “It’s not in the cabin,” Taggart stated. “I pretty well tore the place apart, but only found this one brick.” He eyed the stack in his hands before giving Shad a look that was half question, half plea. “Any idea where your cousin might have stashed the rest?”

  “Hell, he could have stuck it anywhere. There are hundreds of hidey-holes and caves around these parts. Mountain cats inhabit half of them. The rest are home to bears and skunks and other inhospitable varmints you don’t want to walk in on unannounced.”

  Like a man grabbing at a lifeline, Taggart latched onto the idea of a cave. “What a
bout the bear your cousin adopted? The old man would have known the location of his den. Think he might have hidden the money there?”

  “It’s a possibility.” Shad skimmed the rugged peaks around them with a look that mingled respect and regret. “Where that den is, though, is anybody’s guess.”

  Rachel could almost hear Russ’s mind clicking off the calls he’d have to make. One to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Another to the FBI’s resident expert on bears, whoever that might be. Still more calls to hunters and trackers in the local area to assist in the search. So she wasn’t surprised when Russ laid a thoughtful look on Jake.

  “You pack a first-class hunting rifle, Henderson. You ever hunt these mountains?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “I don’t suppose I can convince you to track McCoy’s bear for me.”

  “You can try.”

  When Marsh Henderson and Coconino Country Deputy Sheriff Buck Silverthorne arrived on the scene, afternoon was rolling into evening. They roared into the clearing on ATV’s piled high with bedrolls and equipment…including, Rachel saw as they unloaded, a rubberized body bag.

  The sun had already dipped behind the peaks. The temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees. It seemed to drop another ten when Jake introduced Silverthorne to Russ Taggart. The deputy wasn’t particularly happy about the fact that the Feds had launched an operation in Coconino County without prior coordination.

  “I was merely following up on a lead in an ongoing investigation,” Taggart said with a shrug that wouldn’t help cement relations. “Until a few hours ago, there was nothing to coordinate.”

  “Well, my boss says I’m to hang around and ‘assist’ the effort,” Silverthorne told him.

  “Fine. We can use all the help we can get.”

  “First things first, though. Where’s ole Grizzly’s body?”

  Reclaiming their seats on the fallen log, Rachel and Shad watched from a distance while the others donned protective masks and made brief forays into the cabin.

  Each time the deputy came out for air, his radio crackled with static as he reported his findings to the medical examiner. Dusk was painting the cabin in dark shadows when the ME concurred in Silverthorne’s recommendation of death from natural causes and released the body for burial.

  Hunching his shoulders, Shad scowled at the zippered bag the men carried out of the cabin. “Don’t seem right, though, buryin’ Isaac in that thing.”

  “Marsh and I will tear some boards from the cabin walls in the morning and nail together a coffin,” Jake promised.

  “Guess I’ll have to go through his belongings in the morning, too.” With a creak of arthritic joints, the foreman pushed to his feet. “Place should be aired out by then.”

  “I’ll help you,” Rachel offered.

  Poking through a dead man’s belongings didn’t rank particularly high on her list of favorite activities, but she wasn’t used to sitting around on the sidelines twiddling her thumbs.

  Shad accepted her offer with gruff thanks. Jake, however, read more into it than mere politeness.

  “Going to look for evidence Taggart might have missed?”

  Heat warmed her cheeks. Shoving off the log, she looked him square in the eye. “Okay, I deserve that hit. It’s the last one I’m going to take about this business, though, from you or anyone else. And just to set the record straight, Henderson, I was merely trying to make myself useful.”

  Satisfied she’d made her point, Rachel dusted the seat of her jeans and announced she was going to wash up.

  Jake set his jaw, his narrowed gaze on her back as she trudged across the clearing to the stream trickling down a slick rock surface. He could have suggested a dozen ways for the woman to make herself useful, not the least of which were laying out the bedrolls and opening some of the cans he and Marsh had retrieved from the cabin. Ellen would have already had the beans simmering, the Spam sizzling and the coffee boiling.

  But Rachel wasn’t Ellen. That had been brought home to Jake in a dozen different ways since the night of the fair. She was tough where Ellen was soft, too stubborn to admit she couldn’t ride a horse or sit on an ATV for hours, and damnably arousing instead of enticing. Even more to the point, Jake knew her well enough by now to suspect she wouldn’t take kindly to the suggestion that the only female in the group take care of the housekeeping chores. Hell, she’d probably report him for sexual harassment.

  Grimacing, Jake rubbed the back of his neck. Okay, maybe that last bit was unfair. But the fact that she’d reported him to the FBI still rankled. That, and the realization of how close he’d come to making a fool of himself over the woman.

  How close he still was.

  Annoyed by the way his gaze lingered on her trim, rounded rear as she bent over to swish her hands in the trickling water, he turned to his brother.

  “After Shad finishes going through Grizzly’s things tomorrow, I want you to take him and Rachel back down. I think I’ll stick around here for a while.”

  Hooking his thumbs in his belt, Marsh eyed him speculatively. “Are you going to track the bear and find Taggart’s missing millions for him?”

  “Could be. And could be I just want to make sure none of those bricks mysteriously disappear, leaving me the prime suspect in this little drama once again.”

  His brother’s gaze sharpened. He flicked a glance at the FBI agent hunched over his radio and lowered his voice. “You think Taggart would set you up like that?”

  “No. But I don’t trust him, despite everything he and Rachel told me this morning.”

  Assuming they’d leveled with him, of course. The idea that Rachel might still be holding back vital information got halfway down Jake’s craw and stuck there. When he admitted as much to his brother, Marsh revealed that he’d called a few friends in D.C. this morning to check on Rachel Quinn.

  “From all reports, she’s got a reputation for straight shooting at the National Transportation and Safety Board. I’ve been trying to square that reputation in my mind with the way she lied to us.”

  “According to Ms. Quinn,” Jake drawled, “she didn’t lie. She merely filtered the truth.”

  Marsh scraped a hand across his jaw. “Guess we all do that on occasion. I sure filtered like hell the first time I met Lauren.”

  The comparison hit home. As his wife told the story, Marsh had rushed to her rescue during an attempted break-in at her sister’s house. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention until much later that he was the one who’d staged the break-in in the first place.

  Since Marsh had been tracking the hit men who’d missed their intended target and gunned Ellen down instead, Jake found no fault at all with his brother’s tactics. But Evan, the lawyer in the family, had let his brother know in graphic and distinctly unlawyerly terms what he thought of that bit of illegal evidence gathering.

  “If you look at it that way, Rachel was only going for the greater good,” Marsh said. “Just as I was when I set up Lauren. Maybe we should cut her some slack.”

  A noncommittal grunt was the only response.

  “The lady’s no lightweight, Jake.”

  Coming from Marsh, that was high praise. And at least partially deserved in this case. Jake couldn’t name any other woman who could have met his anger head-on this morning and tossed it right back at him when her own temper sparked. Or made the long, jarring ride up the mountain without a single complaint. Or handled the sight of Grizzly’s putrefying corpse without losing her breakfast.

  No, he admitted silently, Rachel wasn’t Ellen. Rachel Quinn was her own woman.

  That thought was still kicking around in Jake’s head when she slid into the bedroll beside his some hours later.

  By mutual consent, everyone in the party had opted not to eat or sleep in the cabin. There wasn’t enough room, for one thing. For another, the air inside still carried the reek of death. A meal cooked over a campfire and the bedrolls Marsh had strapped onto his ATV held far more appeal.

  The sleep
ing bags had been spread out under the bright, cold palette of stars. Rachel snuggled into the sleeping bag Jake had placed between his own and Marsh’s. He figured she’d have trouble sleeping on the hard ground, but not three minutes later, she flopped over onto her stomach, mumbled something into the suede jacket she’d bundled to use for a pillow and blew out a long, tremulous breath. Another fluttery sigh followed, then another. It took Jake a moment or two to realize she’d gone out like a light.

  Folding one arm under his head, he tried to blank his mind to the sound of her breathing. As soft as those whispery sighs were, they crowded out the crackling fire, the wind rustling through the pines, even Shad’s rhythmic grunts and Buck Silverthorne’s whistling snores.

  The image of the woman issuing those little puffs crowded out everything else. All it took was a slight shift of his head where it rested on the crook of his elbow, and she filled Jake’s view. Her face was a pale oval, her lashes dark shadows against her cheeks. The hair that spilled over her suede jacket had Jake clenching his fists to keep from snaking out a hand and snagging a tangled strand.

  Dammit, he didn’t want to want her. Wasn’t sure if he could ever trust her again. So why was he lying here with his insides tied up in knots? And why the devil did he have to battle the urge to reach over, drag down that zipper and tumble the woman into his arms?

  Disgusted with the ache that pierced him at the idea of Rachel’s body slick and hot under his, Jake turned his head away from the sleeping woman and stared up at the indigo sky. After another five or ten minutes with the sound of her breathless little sighs thundering in his ear, he started counting the stars.

  Chapter 10

  Jake woke with a crick in his neck, the dawn cold and frosty on his cheeks, and Rachel snuggled into his side. Sometime during the night, she’d flopped over again and rolled right up against him.

  Or he had followed through on the urge that had kept him hard and hurting for what felt like hours last night and dragged her into his arms.

  However she’d arrived there, Jake felt no inclination to disturb her. Her head stayed tucked between his shoulder and chin. Her long, slender curves followed his contours as if they’d been sculpted to match his.