by Terry Spear
David cleared his throat and said to Wade, “Our friend Thompson could take her home.”
Wade knew what he was referring to. Thompson had protected her at the club before, and Martin had checked him out and determined he was one of the good guys. Wade still didn’t like the idea.
“It’s about our only choice.”
“The buyer won’t wait forever,” Candy warned.
“All right,” Wade said, hating to agree to this. But if they could take down the buyer, they had to do it. He wasn’t certain that Maya would go along with the plans, but he didn’t want her driving home alone, either. “Wait for me at the car. I’ll be right back.”
Wade stalked into the club and saw Maya watching for his return. He smiled at her, and as soon as he reached the table, he pulled her into his arms and said into her ear for her hearing only, “We’ve got a chance to meet the buyer.”
Her eyes widened.
“I don’t want you to drive home alone,” he said out loud.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’ve got to take care of business. I don’t want you to be alone,” he said again. “If your cousins were here…”
“I could wait for them.”
“No, it could still take a couple of hours for them to get here.” He glanced at the dancers in the club. He was afraid Lion Mane might show up still.
“You need me to take her home?” Thompson asked.
Not looking really pleased but knowing how important this was, she finally let out her breath. “Okay, Thompson can follow me home if he doesn’t mind. We both have our own vehicles.”
Wade gave her a searing kiss and another hug, then reached over to shake Thompson’s hand. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
“I promise you I’ll see her safely home.”
“Thanks.” Then hating it, but pumped up about catching the buyer, he gave Maya one last squeeze and headed out of the club.
“Do you want one last dance?” Thompson asked Maya.
Yeah, with Wade. She looked up at Thompson. “Sure, but I want you to know we’re the good guys.”
“Good guys, how?”
“We don’t steal jaguars. We love them. We would protect them with our lives, but we don’t steal them.”
“I don’t understand. So you’re saying you bought them? Don’t you have to have a license to have them in Texas? Facilities to house them? They can’t be running loose like I saw.”
She danced with Thompson, her attention drifting to three men lurking at the edge of the dance floor, shifters. “Yeah, I agree. We don’t have any jaguars. Despite what you think you saw.” Before the dance ended, she said to Thompson, “We better go before there’s another fight.”
Thompson looked at the men who were lined up, eyeing her. “You’re still popular, I see.”
“I’m a wild cat. Didn’t you know?”
He smiled down at her. “As in shifter. Like you told me before.”
“Sure.” She took his hand and skirted around the men, trying to avoid them. Without David and Wade or her cousins to run interference, the shifters zeroed in on her.
“Wanna dance?” one of the men asked, trying to block Thompson from moving Maya out of the club.
“No, thank you.”
The man grabbed her arm. “Just one dance.”
“Let her go,” Thompson said, his words dark with threat.
The shifter released her. Thompson moved Maya quickly through the club. “They’re following us,” he said under his breath to her.
Not liking this, Maya picked up her pace. Thompson swiftly escorted her to her car. She stared at the tires, punctured, as if the rubber had melted against the hot pavement. Her blood iced with anger.
She glanced back at the club and saw the shifters hesitating at the doorway.
“Come on. I’ll take you in my truck, and your cousins or your boyfriend and his brother can take care of your car,” Thompson said.
She hated leaving her car, but she figured they could be in more of a mess if the shifters decided to play hardball with the human.
Thompson’s truck was black and featured a pack of beautiful gray wolves howling against the backdrop of a snow-covered mountain in a custom airbrushed paint job. He really was a wolf person. It amused her to think that he’d tangled with a bunch of big cats. She was never so glad to be inside a vehicle as when she climbed into the passenger seat of the truck, and he jumped into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine, and gunned the gas.
“Okay, tell me what this is all about,” he said.
She chewed on her lower lip.
Thompson glanced at her.
She folded her arms. “I’ve already explained.”
“That you’re a cat shifter and so are your brother and sister-in-law. So what about the rest of the cats I saw? Your cousins? Wade and his brother?”
“You really don’t believe that, do you?”
“No. I think you’re involved in something. But damned if I know what. I mean, jaguars aren’t trainable like that. Not so that they can serve as obedient guard cats.”
She frowned as Thompson took an exit she hadn’t expected. “This isn’t the fastest way out of Houston to catch the highway we need.”
“We’re being followed.” Before she could ask him anything further, he added, “I’m a hunter. I know.”
Chapter 23
David drove the rental car with Candy in the front passenger seat and Wade in the backseat. Wade texted Martin about their whereabouts in Houston and asked for backup. He also texted Connor to let him know that Thompson was taking Maya home.
Martin responded that Maya’s cousins were the closest to them and on their way. But they were still about an hour and a half away in driving time.
“So how did you get involved in all this?” David asked Candy as she gave him the location to go to.
She shrugged. “I knew the guy who was looking to buy big cats. Then I met Bill and Jim Bettinger.”
Lion Mane was Bettinger’s brother. Wade’s blood chilled.
“Yeah. I met the brothers at the club. The buyer wanted me to check out the place. He said he’d heard rumors that hunters met there who liked to get money for hunting big cats and selling to any willing buyer. I just kept asking guys, like I did your brother, if they were hunters. When I got a yes, I’d ask if they ever hunted big cats. Since you were both headed to Belize, and that’s where some of the jaguars live, I figured you might be on a hunting expedition for someone else.”
“Jaguars are not on the list of legal hunting game in Belize,” Wade said. “Did anyone seem irritated that you were looking for big-cat hunters?”
“A few. One told me he’d kill any bastard who thought to hunt the beautiful creatures. I went along with it. Go with the flow, I always say. Just told him I agreed and moved on to the next table of guys.”
Wondering how long the buyer had been paying to have the cats brought here, Wade bristled. “I’ve heard that thousands of hunters flock to Texas ranches to hunt endangered exotic animals.”
“The animals here are not endangered,” Candy said, her voice taking on a defensive tone. She flipped her hair back off her shoulders. “Not in Texas. Besides, over a quarter million animals come from Asia, Europe, and Africa. Texas has more exotic animals than anyplace else in the world. And it’s perfectly legal to hunt them. So what’s the difference?”
“The difference is that they’re raising dama gazelles and cape buffalo and other exotics alongside the Texas longhorn, and then the ranchers offer hunting at a price to cull the stock of the gazelles and buffalo to raise money to provide for the rest of the animals. But the jaguars aren’t being raised here. They’re being brought in to slaughter. And shooting them isn’t legal. Isn’t that so? The buyer’s not just keeping the cats to breed, right?”
He was against what
the ranchers were doing. Many people agreed with the ranchers—that by bringing the exotic animals here, they were maintaining stock so that these rare animals wouldn’t be exterminated completely. But many, like Wade, felt that the exotic animals shouldn’t be raised just so hunters could kill them.
Candy folded her arms. “I thought you said you hunted big cats. I thought that’s what you were doing in Belize.”
Wade ignored this. “I’ve heard that hunting a dama gazelle on some ranches that offer exotic animals for hunting can run $10,000. The cape buffalo costs hunters about $50,000 to hunt.” He was trying to show he knew something about how much the hunters were paying for a kill. And he wasn’t going to be cheated when selling a jaguar to her boss. “So what does a jaguar price out at on a hunt?”
She smiled at him. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” She sighed. “Okay, here’s the deal. I overheard Jim and Bill talking about the jaguars Bill discovered on your girlfriend’s property. He was angry because one of the cats bit him. He couldn’t have been injured too badly because he didn’t go to the hospital, and he flew out to Belize the next day. But he swore he’d been at Maya’s garden nursery when it happened. Jim was really irate with him when he learned his brother had gone there without him. I figured that was because Jim had the hots for Maya, and he told his brother several times that it served him right that the cat bit him.
“I checked out Maya’s business and discovered she had a jaguar pictured in her greenhouse. I showed the website to the buyer, and he said it was a female. But Bill said he encountered three big males. One was a rarer black. I’m pretty sure Maya wasn’t the one who captured them and brought them to the States. Her brother and sister-in-law are too busy with running a garden to be bringing in jaguars. But your brother and you were there that same night, Bill said. You were in Belize after that. And in the Amazon five months earlier. So, my buyer believes you brought the cats here. If you have a jaguar or two to sell to my buyer, we could make a deal.”
“Who’s the buyer?” Wade asked.
Candy cast a quick smile over the seat back. “If you thought you could deal directly with him, you could cut me out of the market.”
“So you’re the middleman, and we’re really not meeting him.” Wade forced a smile. “Do you know what they do with the big cats after the hunters sell them to the buyer?”
“What do you care? You just hand over the jaguar and get paid for it. End of deal. When you want to sell him another, you can offer him that one, too. He pays $50,000 upon delivery.”
Wade shook his head. “That’s too small a payment for us to go to all that trouble. It costs a hell of a lot to transport them here. We have to pay a lot of money under the table to get them across two borders.”
“If you’ve got three males and a female, it seems to me it wasn’t all that difficult for you to get them here.”
“Looks can be deceiving. I never expected the middleman who arranged for the sale of jaguars to be a beautiful woman, either.”
She smiled at Wade’s compliment.
“So who actually gets to hunt the cat?” David asked.
“The buyer offers a drawing. Whoever wins the lottery gets to hunt the cat.”
“Does he use dogs?” Wade hoped not.
“No dogs. Hunting with dogs is illegal. And so is baiting the animals,” she said.
Like killing jaguars wasn’t.
“There are about three thousand acres, and about a third of them are covered in trees. Lots of woods like the big cat might be used to,” she continued.
“The hunter is on foot?” David asked.
He’d like to get the bastard on foot, Wade thought.
“Some hunt on foot. The ones who really want to live dangerously. Others drive an ATV. It costs more to use the vehicle. My buyer figures that if the hunter doesn’t want to put the real effort into hunting the beast, he can pay for the luxury. He doesn’t let the hunter take home the pelt. Too dangerous if someone should ask where he got the skin, and the hunter couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“So the buyer sells the cat’s pelt to someone else,” Wade said.
Candy smiled at Wade. “I like you. You’re smart.”
“Do you watch the hunt?” Wade wondered if she had the killer instinct like the hunters did, or if she was just in it for the money.
She hesitated to say and David and Wade glanced at her, reading her body language. She fidgeted in her seat, avoiding looking at them. “No,” she finally said, then changed the subject. “So why do you hunt?”
“For the money,” David said.
“For the kill,” Wade said, thinking of Lion Mane and just how he wanted to take the bastard down.
“Does he have a regular group of hunters that bring him cats?” David asked.
“Yeah, but Jim Bettinger came home and said he’d lost his brother and two of the men who help him hunt down the jaguars and then smuggle them into the States. He couldn’t do it alone.”
“Lost?” David asked.
“He wouldn’t say more. But he was really angry, and he didn’t bring back a cat, either.”
“Why don’t you care to watch the hunters kill the cats?” Wade asked.
David glanced in the rearview mirror, frowning at Wade.
“The buyer follows the hunt as much as possible, taking a video of it. The other hunters get to watch it for a nominal charge while the hunt is in progress, open bar at the same time. But it’s really a case of man against beast, so the only ones out there are the hunter and the buyer… and the cat, of course. I just arrange for the sale of the cat.”
“So what’s the time frame we’re talking about for capturing a jaguar and handing it over to him?” David asked.
“He really needs this cat soon. The buyer’s party is this weekend, two days from now. The hunters are in the area, but they’ll be leaving on international business trips and my buyer had to move the date up, promising he’d have the cats available by then. The Bettinger brothers pledged they would have the cat to him before then. When Jim Bettinger came home empty-handed, I had to go to the club last night and ask several guys if they hunted, but everyone said no. One guy said he’d heard of the trouble the other men had in Belize, and there was no way in hell he was going to take on a job like that. You had cats here, but you’d taken off for Belize.”
“What if the buyer can’t locate a jaguar in time for the scheduled cat hunt this weekend?” Wade asked.
“He’s got a backup plan.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s got a female cat, but she’s not all that big, and she’s not that aggressive. He wants one from the wild. He’s afraid the female he has won’t provide a real challenge to the hunter. He’d also have to cancel the other hunter’s chance at the hunt. He hates refunding money. Believe me, these hunts can backfire in a heartbeat. The news spreads by word of mouth and then there’s no more hunting here. Or the hunters will refuse to pay the higher fees even if they still want to hunt the cat.”
Thompson’s missing zoo cat? Wade texted Martin about the possibility of the zoo cat being offered for the hunt.
Martin texted back. If you’re thinking of “selling” a shifter to the buyer to learn who he is and where this business is taking place, I say no. Too dangerous. And as for the location she’s directing you to? There’s no such place.
“Stop the car,” Wade said to David, then turned to Candy. “What is it that you want us to do exactly?”
David immediately pulled up next to the curb and waited for further instructions.
“My buyer doesn’t believe Jim Bettinger can return to South or Central America and pick up another cat in time. He’d have to get some other help, since he’s lost his brother and the rest of his men. My buyer knows you have jaguars that attacked Bill. He must have tried to steal your cats and say they were his and then plann
ed to sell them as his own to the buyer. You must intend to sell them to someone else, or you wouldn’t have them hidden away somewhere.”
“You know that for certain?” Wade asked.
“I went to the garden nursery while you were away to look around the place. So yeah, I know that.”
“You thought to steal them while we were gone? Cut out the hunter in the equation?” Wade growled, doing his best to sound angered.
“No, I just was to verify that you had the big cats before I told the buyer,” Candy quickly said.
“Get out, Candy. You might get hurt.” The threat in Wade’s voice was real.
“What… you can’t leave me out here.” She twisted around to scowl at Wade. “This is a really bad part of town.”
She was right. He couldn’t leave her here. “We weren’t really meeting the buyer, were we? You just wanted to confirm that we had the cats and were willing to sell them.” Wade was already punching in a message to Maya. Where are you?
David said, “You heard my brother. Hit the road.”
Candy didn’t move. “You need me to make the sale to the buyer.”
Wade’s phone rang, and he said, “Yeah, Maya, where are you?”
“All four of my car tires were slashed. I had to ride with Thompson. We’re being tailed. Thompson’s trying to lose them.”
Wade swore under his breath. “Divide and conquer” came rushing into his thoughts as the adrenaline surged through his blood. “Give me your coordinates. We’re coming to your rescue.”
“What about the buyer?” Maya asked Wade, her voice anxious.
He didn’t care about that as much as he was worried about Maya. “We’ll take care of it later,” he said harshly. “Got to take care of Candy, then get back to you.”
“Who’s after Maya, Candy?” Wade grabbed his door handle and shoved the door open, then jumped out of the backseat, ready to toss Candy to the curb.
“Lion Mane. Jim Bettinger.”
“Shit.”
“I don’t know why everyone’s interested in Maya. Must be good in bed,” Candy groused.
Wade yanked Candy’s door open. “Why the hell is he after Maya?” Wade was certain he knew. Maya had killed Jim’s brother.
