Rocky Mountain Maverick

He couldn’t blame anyone who chose to leave this place. He’d been here less than four hours and he was already aware that the atmosphere was decidedly strange. And that business about the ranch being a research facility was just odd enough to make him decide that even if what was going on here had nothing to do with the Langworthy kidnapping, it was something he intended to understand before he left.

Young Nate Beaumont seemed the ideal place to start.

Chapter Four

It was not yet noon, and Michael already knew a lot about the kid he’d been assigned to partner with. Due to his years on the Royal Flush, he had worked with a lot of ranch hands. There were those who grew to hate the creatures they tended, their small cruelties deliberate. More common were the ones who no longer saw the animals as anything other than commodities, the reason they had a job. Something to protect because that’s what they were paid to do.

Working in the morning’s dusty confusion of sheep and dogs, it would have been easy to pick up on those attitudes. Nate Beaumont manifested neither. He was quick and efficient in taking the blood samples, but he was also careful not to unduly frighten or hurt any of the ewes or lambs they handled.

What they were doing was hot, backbreaking work. Michael had discarded his denim jacket by ten o’clock. The kid was still wearing his long-sleeved shirt, a near twin to the one he’d worn yesterday. Beneath it was a waffle-weave thermal underwear top, its three-button neckline visible at the open throat of the plaid. And despite the growing intensity of the sun, he showed no inclination to shed his outer garment as most of the other men had already done.

“What do they do with them?” Michael asked.

The kid didn’t raise his head, slipping the needle into the vein in the ewe’s neck, which he’d expertly located beneath the close-crimped fleece.

“The blood samples, I mean,” Michael prodded.

“Don’t know.”

“You never asked?”

The answer was a negative motion that set the bowl-cut brown hair swinging. Nate withdrew the needle, and Michael reached for the yellow plastic tag on the sheep’s ear.

He was holding her around the head, as the shearers did. She didn’t seem to even realize she’d been stuck.

“Because you don’t give a damn?”

“Because it’s none of my business.”

There had been no direct eye contact between them as there had at dinner last night. It hadn’t been necessary. The routine they’d worked out, virtually without discussion, ran like clockwork.

Michael dragged the sheep to the table, where Beaumont drew the blood. When that was done, Michael read aloud the number from the animal’s tag, and the kid wrote it on an adhesive label, which he then pressed around the vial. He had rarely looked up in the long hours they’d worked together.

“And you aren’t even curious?” Michael prodded.

“No.”

It had been like this all morning. Nate spoke only when asked a direct question and then in the fewest possible words, his voice so low Michael strained to catch the words above the constant noise of the pens.

“You’re supposed to be teaching him how to do that,” Charlie Quarrels yelled from outside the fence. “You two change places.”

Michael glanced up to find the foreman leaning on the top rail, watching them. Nate didn’t look at Quarrels, but he laid the syringe, which he’d already made ready, back on the table. Without a word, he walked around to where Michael was holding one of the spring lambs.

A small, straw-colored female, she was anxiously watching as her mother was being forced through the exit shoot by Sal Johnson. The lamb voiced her displeasure at that maternal desertion loud and clear.

The adult sheep seemed accustomed to the procedure, but the lambs were a different story. That was part of the reason Michael dreaded having to use this one as a guinea pig for his untested methodology. Conscious that Quarrels was still watching, Michael gave the lamb over to Nate’s more than competent hands and walked around to the front of the table.

He picked up the needle, and as the boy held the lamb in position, he bent over it, searching for the vein in its neck, as he’d watched Nate do a hundred times. The problem was it was less visible on the lambs than on the adults.

He did the best he could, sliding the needle in under the skin. Thankfully, the syringe began to fill with blood. The lamb bleated soulfully, but that seemed more a result of loneliness than pain.

When the vial was full, Michael slid the needle out and straightened. He had begun to turn toward the table to complete the procedure by labeling the vial. Nate’s head was still bent, his left hand holding the small, curly lamb while his right found the tag.

A glitter of silver-gilt where the boy’s lank hair fell forward at the crown caught Michael’s eye. Obviously new growth, it was less than an eighth of an inch long. That line of demarcation between the pale, champagne-blond at the scalp and the muddy brown color of the rest of his hair could only be seen from this angle.

Nate called out the number and then released the lamb, sending her scampering after her mother. Michael pretended to be occupied with the labeling as he considered the implications of what he’d just seen.

It wouldn’t be all that unusual for a boy this age to dye his hair. The more likely scenario, however, would be to go in the other direction. To change the color from a dull brown to that shimmering blond.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the opposite transformation made no sense, unless what he’d suspected last night was true. The kid was on the run.

And for some reason, the mystery of who Nate Beaumont might be hiding from and, more importantly, why was far more intriguing than what would become of the hundreds of vials they had filled this morning with sheep’s blood.

“EVERY ANIMAL in the herd is sampled,” Michael said into his satellite phone. “They bring a part of the flock down from the high pasture on a rotating basis, draw blood and then return them.”

“And no one knows what’s done with the samples that are collected?” Colleen asked.

“If they do, they aren’t saying,” Michael said. “Given the lack of communication among the hands, that’s not surprising. I’ve never seen a stranger conglomeration. Could you run some prints if I sent them to you?”

“We have access to the national database. You have some reason—”

“Just covering the bases.” It was probably a long shot, especially where the kid was concerned, but worth a try. “Before we get into fingerprints, how about running a name for me. See what you come up with.”

He heard a rustle of paper on her end, thankful for the clarity of the sophisticated satellite phone’s transmission. It was the same one he’d used during his last year with the agency. He had taped the phone inside the heater when he’d left to go down to the cabin for breakfast this morning. As far as he could tell, it hadn’t been discovered. Actually, he had found no evidence that anyone had been inside the trailer during his absence, something he hadn’t taken for granted.

It would be a pain remembering to take the phone out of its hiding place and charge it during the few hours the generator ran in the evenings, but it was a necessity. This was the only way he had of communicating with the outside world. And the longer he was here, the more detached he felt from it.

“Okay, shoot,” Colleen said.

“Nate Beaumont,” he said, spelling the last name. “Since that’s probably not his real name, consider anything close. Same initials, for example. I doubt you’ll find anything criminal. I’d be more interested in missing persons. Lost or abducted kids. Runaways. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Blue-eyed blonde. Five-ten or -eleven.”

“You think he’s involved in something on the ranch?”

“I think he’s hiding out here. I’m curious to know why.”

“Okay,” she said again, but he could hear skepticism in her voice.

He didn’t blame her. Even he couldn’t put his finger on what bothered him about the kid. It was like having someone’s name on the tip of your tongue and still not being able to figure out who they were.

“Everything all right there?” she asked, the note of sisterly anxiety clear, even across the distance.

“Meaning am I all right?”

There was a beat of silence. “Are you?”

“I smell like sheep. A lot of sheep. Other than that I can’t complain. You did intend for this to be boring, didn’t you?”

Another pause.