Tag, You're It!

by Penny McCall

  Tag thought about it a minute, then repeated her eye roll. “Your cowboy in town? The one you think got Jackass drunk?”

  “Sounds like him. And knowing Rusty, he’s not alone.” Alex waved an arm. “Rusty?” she called out.

  “Alex. Hoo-eeee,” he yelled back, “I told you boys it was Alex Scott, alive and well and looking for the Lost Spaniard.”

  She gave Tag one last I-told-you-so look and got to her feet. Tag joined her.

  Mick and Franky stayed behind their rock, but Tag heard the distinctive sound of a gun cocking, coming from that general direction. He and Alex shouldn’t have been the ones in those particular crosshairs, but the spot between Tag’s shoulder blades started to tingle. You never could tell with Franky.

  He glanced at Alex. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

  “You do love those pithy sayings, don’t you?”

  “It seems to sum up the situation pretty well.”

  “But it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Friends of yours?” Mick asked, still behind his rock.

  “Not really,” Alex said.

  “Then I suggest you move it or lose it.”

  “Now there’s a saying I can get behind.” Alex edged off to one side, giving Mick and Franky a clear shot.

  That wasn’t enough for Tag. He hooked a finger in the waistband of her jeans and towed her backward, so they were behind their kidnappers—who were suddenly their protectors, much as he hated to admit it.

  “Say something to him,” Mick told Alex.

  “No.”

  “Say something, dammit.”

  “Promise you won’t shoot him.”

  Mick didn’t make any promises, he didn’t look at her, but his shoulders slumped for a second before he squared them. Tag knew just how he felt.

  “I’m not gonna shoot him. I just want him to know he’s got some competition.”

  “Competition for him is a guy who can stay on a really mean bull longer than he can.”

  “Fine, so I want him to know I have a gun. I’m not planning on using it on him.” Unless he makes me. Mick didn’t finish the sentence, but they all knew how it ended. Including Rusty.

  Alex called out to him. He walked toward her, rifle carefully held out to one side. When Mick and Franky stood up from behind their rock, his step faltered, but only for a moment.

  “Hired muscle?”

  “Something like that,” Alex said.

  Rusty’s smile lost a bit of its charm. “Sorry about the noise,” he said. “I was just taking potshots at lizards, y’know, keeping in practice.”

  “You were signaling to your buddies,” Tag said.

  Rusty made to spread his hands in an “aw-shucks” manner. Mick and Franky didn’t like the fact that he was still holding a rifle when he did it.

  “Whoa,” he said when two pistols were leveled at him. “I’m not here to cause any trouble.”

  “What about your friends?” Mick asked.

  Rusty tried a smile, gave it up when it didn’t work on the “hired muscle.”

  “Come on out, fellas,” he said.

  Three men appeared out of the rocks behind Rusty, who wasn’t the least embarrassed by his own scheming.” ‘Course now that we stumbled across you folks,” he said, “you won’t mind if we tag along.”

  “I mind,” Franky said.

  “Seems to me Alex is in charge here,” Rusty said.

  “We’re in charge,” Tag corrected. “I mind if you tag along. Alex?”

  She hesitated.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Tag said under his breath, “but do you really want these guys having a shoot-out with us in the middle, unarmed?”

  She flashed him a resentful look, but she made the only decision she could. “I thought I made myself clear in town a few days ago,” she said to Rusty.

  “You sure about that, Alex? You might be thankful for our help some of these days. We ain’t the only ones shadowing you.”

  “How many?” Tag asked.

  “Don’t know. At least four.”

  “How long?”

  Rusty lifted a shoulder. “They were here when we got here, just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere. We figured they were waiting on something, and that something was probably you.”

  Tag exchanged a look with Mick.

  Rusty didn’t miss it. “We’d be glad to hook up with you, provide a little additional… insurance.”

  “We’ve got all the insurance we need,” Mick said. “It would be in your best interest to move along.”

  “Well, now, it’s a free country—”

  “Not always,” Mick said. “Think about how high a price you want to pay before you get too close next time.”

  ———

  “JESUS, IT’S A FREAKING PARADE,” FRANKY SAID.

  They’d broken camp that morning at daybreak and set off for the next site marked on Juan’s map. Every now and then Rusty and his pals appeared at the top of a hill at the same time Alex, Tag, Mick, and Franky topped a hill. Ground distance-wise they were about a mile ahead. As the crow flies they were within rifle range. It was making them all edgy, but Franky had proven himself particularly susceptible to edgy. And when he was edgy he talked. A lot.

  That gave Alex ideas.

  “By tomorrow this place will be crawling with hicks like that.”

  “Let ‘em come,” Mick said. “What do we care?”

  He had a point, Alex thought. Rusty and his friends weren’t so bad as shadows went. If it had been Junior and his goons trailing them, the gunfire probably wouldn’t have been a wake-up call so much as a get-dead call.

  If they found the treasure it might come down to that anyway. Rusty and company were only hanging back to see if the Lost Spaniard got found. If they found the Lost Spaniard Mick and Franky weren’t going to let them keep it. The smart thing would be to run like hell and let the guys with the guns shoot it out, winner take all. But it was her sweat, and Tag’s, that would have made it possible; the idea of having it stolen out from under them ticked her off. There had to be a way to prevent it.

  She would have loved to discuss the problem with Tag, but they couldn’t exactly make plans with their kidnappers listening in. Even if he hadn’t made that clear, she’d have figured out that much for herself. What puzzled her was the way he was acting. And if she was completely honest with herself, it was the “nothing personal” that stuck in her craw.

  What did Tag care if Mick and Franky knew they were closer than partners? Hell, what would Mick and Franky care if they knew she’d slept with Tag? It wouldn’t make a difference in their search for the Lost Spaniard, right?

  She was missing something. Something important. And it wasn’t just the strange and troubling symbiosis between Tag and Mick, the way they seemed to silently concur when there was a decision to be made. There was a subtext riding below the surface of every happenstance and every conversation that had taken place since she’d met Tag Donovan.

  And now he was watching his words and guarding his expressions, and she wasn’t quite sure how to get through to him.

  Mick and Franky were another story, or at least Franky was. They were definitely keeping secrets, and she hadn’t missed the way Mick stepped in every time Franky started to lose it. Or Tag did—another mystery that kept her mind spinning and her stomach churning.

  What she felt for Tag… She’d fought it, but there was no getting around the fact that she had feelings for him. And she’d taken enough college psychology to know she was using sarcasm and bitchiness to try to push him away because she was afraid. He’d destroyed her defenses so quickly, wormed his way into her heart so deeply that she didn’t know what she would do if she discovered he’d been lying to her. And considering how their relationship had started, and how it had progressed so far, she figured there was a better than even chance that he was.

  If she had any sense she’d cooperate and keep her eyes and ears closed. But she couldn’t allow
fear to blind her to the truth. She’d lived through Bennet Harper, she could live through Tag Donovan if she had to. Letting a man, any man, destroy her again wasn’t an option. Neither was passivity.

  The sooner they searched the last two sites the sooner this thing would be over, she told herself. She could get back to her life without having lost more than a couple of weeks. And there, she thought, was a lie worthy of Tag Donovan. There was no going back to her old life after this. With or without him.

  They’d moved due east this time. The Rockies were still a beautiful, very dominant backdrop to the scenery, but they were moving farther into the foothills. There were fewer patches of bare rock and more wild grasses and spring flowers. And there were fewer obvious landmarks.

  The area was far from flat, the land stretching away like a big wrinkled carpet as far as the eye could see. They reined in at the top of a hill and stared out at the landscape, all having the same thought—or at least three of them were. Franky was gazing at the sky, looking like he was contemplating the meaning of life. Or sleeping with his eyes open. The rest of them were coming down from the previous day’s high and realizing just how daunting and impossible the search really was.

  “So what now?” Tag asked.

  “This is going to be a challenge,” Alex said dryly.

  “And the last one was a piece of cake?” Mick said.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him if he’d rather abandon the search, but she had a feeling he’d say yes, and she wanted to give this a fair shot before they up and quit. Otherwise she’d wonder for the rest of her life if they were inches from the treasure and had allowed themselves to be intimidated by poor odds.

  “I guess we spread out and see what we can find.”

  “Don’t spread out permanently,” Mick warned, his hand on his shoulder holster.

  Alex didn’t entirely buy the threat, but when bullets were involved there wasn’t a lot of margin for error. Besides which, Franky had a gun, too, and Franky wasn’t what you’d call a stable personality. That was enough to keep her on the obedient side of the line. As long as it suited her purposes.

  They spread out a little and rode forward, watching the ground for anything likely. This time it was Franky who stumbled across the place, literally. His mare caught a hoof and went down to her front knees, pitching Franky over her head. He started cussing and yelling; they all went racing over and found him on his ass in the dirt, his mare grazing serenely about fifteen yards away.

  “Stupid horse tripped,” he said, giving his mare a look that had Jackass sidling over to stand in front of her.

  “Anything broken?” Alex asked hopefully.

  “No, but my ass hurts.” Franky gingerly got to his feet and patted himself down, hissing in a breath and bringing his right palm about an inch from his face. “And I got a sliver.”

  Mick rolled his eyes, but Alex jumped off Jackass and hunkered down a couple of feet from Franky.

  “I think this is something,” she said, brushing carefully at the dirt with her fingers.

  “This decayed log?” Tag asked, squatting down beside her.

  She met his gaze, nodded. He flashed that easy grin of his, and her heart lurched. But it was more than her heart, it went deeper. Just for a second she felt like they were together, a couple, on the same wavelength. And then the stupid filter fell off, the picture snapped back into focus, and he was just a guy who was in her life until… until he wasn’t anymore. She could either obsess about it or take it as it came.

  “I don’t think it’s just a decayed log,” Alex said, getting to her feet and pacing the length of it, half stooped over so that when another decayed log intersected it at a right angle she saw it. By the time she was done, she’d paced a square roughly fifty feet on a side that brought her back to where Tag was standing.

  “’Maybe it’s the remains of a wooden structure,” he suggested.

  “It’s definitely man-made.”

  Franky was still sitting in the dirt, digging one grubby nail into the palm of his hand. Mick had wandered back to the top of the hill behind them and stood so he could just see over the top of it. Watching for Rusty, Alex figured, then she put them all out of her mind.

  “I don’t think it was a building,” she said to Tag. “Look at the ground inside, it’s pretty rough.”

  “If this site was about gold, they wouldn’t have bothered with wood floors.”

  “They wouldn’t have bothered with wood buildings. If they had, the floor would have been dirt, but it would have been level, at least. This follows the slope of the hill.”

  “And?”

  “I think this was a corral. There were dozens of temporary settlements peppered throughout the area around the gold fields. Juan labeled this riachuelo de Smith. The Smith part is obvious; riachuelo translates as ‘stream’ or ‘creek,’ which makes sense. Back then there was water running through here that would have washed some gold down out of the mountains. Mr. Smith and whoever was with him would have needed a place to keep the horses, but they wouldn’t have built permanent housing just to pan for gold. They would have lived in tents.”

  “You think Juan might have been one of them?” Tag asked.

  “Possibly. We couldn’t find a claim filed for him at the National Archives, and the sack attached to the map contained gold dust, which would indicate panning instead of placer or lode mining. Maybe we should dig some exploratory holes, just to see what we find.” She didn’t honestly think anything was there. Even if there was, the chance of them stumbling across it was practically zero because there was nothing to indicate a possible hiding place, on the map or at the site. But there was still an opportunity there. “There’re four corners,” she said, “let’s each take one.”

  “I ain’t digging no holes,” Franky said. “My hand hurts.”

  “It’s just a sliver,” Alex said. “Jeez, my little sister is more of a man than you are.”

  Franky jumped to his feet, both hands fisting.

  Tag grabbed Alex by the arm and pulled her aside. “This is the first I’ve heard of a sister.”

  “That’s because I don’t have one.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “It’s pretty obvious,” she said, pulling her arm out of his grip. “And you’re not a man who can’t figure things out for himself. I seem to always be one step behind. I’m just trying to catch up.”

  She turned away. Tag’s hand slid down her arm to close around her wrist. She didn’t turn back, but she stopped.

  “There are some things going on here that I don’t understand yet,” he said.

  “But you know more than I do.”

  “You’re right” he said quietly. “I’m keeping things from you, but I have good reasons. If you do something stupid—”

  “It’s too late for that,” she said and walked away.

  Falling in love with him wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done, but that was involuntary. Compounding her lunacy with blind trust would be the supreme act of stupidity, and that she wasn’t prepared to commit.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  TAG COULD FEEL THE WHOLE CASE SPINNING INTO the toilet. Everything appeared normal, but it was going down the crapper, sure as shit. They made camp and opened a couple of cans for dinner. The three men were having pork and beans. Alex was having Franky.

  She had a plan, Tag concluded, and it consisted of gnawing holes in Franky’s patience and self-control, in the hope that information would come spewing out of him volcano fashion. There wasn’t a whole lot of patience and self-control there to begin with; she’d be damn lucky if he didn’t explode all over her in the process. Or maybe she was counting on Tag and Mick to run interference.

  They’d been trying like hell to. Tag had attempted to take her aside but she wasn’t having any of it, and it was kind of hard to talk sense into her if she wouldn’t talk to him at all. He’d thought about gagging her, but it was to the point where just the way she looked at Franky was enough
to make him mutter and squirm.

  Mick wasn’t having much luck either, but Tag had to give him credit for his persistence. And optimism. “So where do we stand?” Mick asked Alex the next time she drew a bead on Franky.

  “We’ll go to the third site tomorrow,” she said. “It’s south of here, back into the rockier terrain like we searched yesterday.” Her gaze shifted to Franky. “Not great on horseback, but it shouldn’t take us more than two days to work our way through it.”

  “Two days! Aw, Mick…”

  “Shut up, Franky.”

  “Why we gotta do this anymore? We already been out here two days, ain’t that enough?”

  “Enough for what?” Tag asked.

  “What’s the matter?” Alex said in a tone of voice that was all the more infuriating for its casual matter-of-factness. “Can’t handle a little physical exertion, Franky? You’ve got kind of a low pain threshold for a guy in your line of work.”

  “I ain’t usually the one in pain.”

  “And when you are you turn into a whiny, sniveling baby.”

  Franky spiked his plate onto the ground and took to his feet, looming over Alex. Mick jumped up and planted both hands in his chest, shoving him back a couple of steps. “Back off,” he said, then he whipped around to loom over Alex himself. “And you shut your trap.”

  If she was afraid she kept it to herself, right down to the slight, derisive smile on her face. “Or?”

  “Or I’ll shoot you.”

  She laughed, her gaze going to the guns. Mick usually kept them out of sight, but tonight Alex’s rifle was propped on a handy rock next to his blanket—in honor of Rusty and his friends, Tag figured.

  “That threat might work coming from Franky,” Alex said. “If I thought he had the guts to do it.”

  Franky’s response was an inarticulate roar. He shoved Mick aside, hands out, going for Alex’s throat when Tag threw himself in the way. Thankfully, Mick took a side and between the two of them they were able to drag Franky away from her.

  Alex followed, as that didn’t suit her purposes. “You think you’re sick of this after two days?” she asked, getting back in Franky’s face. “I’ve been manipulated and lied to and pushed around for nearly a week now.”