More Than A Cowboy

“OH, SWEETIE! Oh, baby! Oh, you poor thing!” Tess Tankersly crouched before the pen and laced her fingers through the metal mesh. “How could they do this to you?”

The furry shape huddled at the far end of the cage didn’t open its eyes. Lying in a filthy nest of shredded newspaper, the big cat looked dead at first glance. Its ribs and shoulder blades and hipbones stood out starkly below the matted pelt.

Was it even breathing? Tess drew her nails along the mesh—and was rewarded with the faintest quiver of one black-tasseled ear. “You don’t belong in there,” she crooned to the animal. “Locked away from the sunshine. No snow to run through. No trees to climb. This isn’t right! Not right at all.”

She sat back on her heels and looked up at the hand-lettered sign wired to the top of the home-built cage.

Danger! Look, but don’t touch!

Canadian Lynx. Killer of the North Country!

“Yeah, right. Bunny rabbits, beware.” Tess leaned forward again to peer through the wire.

A free spirit of the forest and mountains imprisoned in a box so small it could barely turn around! Tess doubted the lynx could have stood upright in there.

But was it even well enough to stand? Tess had grown up on a ranch. She knew a sick animal when she saw one—the harsh coat, the hunched misery.

She had never been able to bear cruelty to animals. Hated to see wild things caged. Normally you couldn’t have dragged her to a roadside petting zoo, for fear of sights just like this. But one of her pickup’s tires had gone flat a few miles back toward Albuquerque. Although she’d changed to her spare, with two hundred miles to go between her and home, and a forecast of a late-spring snowstorm for this evening, she’d thought it wiser to stop and have the flat repaired at the first gas station she came to.

Killing time till the mechanic could get to her job, she’d made the mistake of following the signs that beckoned from across the two-lane country highway. Hazeltine’s World-Famous Petting Zoo promised

Adorable, Exotic Animals!

Thrilling Beasts and Hideous Reptiles!

Hug the Llamas and Hold the Rabbits!

There wasn’t a child in all of New Mexico who would’ve allowed his hapless parents to drive past that sign without stopping. And even at twenty-five, Tess still had a child’s delight in animals. Growing up far from the nearest town, she’d had more friends with four legs than two. So she’d paid her dollar admission and entered the dimly lit, dingy concrete-block building that housed Hazeltine’s zoo.

And past the not-so-huggable llamas—llamas bored enough to spit—then the pen of black-and-white goats who begged for treats and nibbled at the hem of her jacket… Beyond three cages of resigned rabbits and a cracked aquarium housing a surly bull snake mislabeled as a Deadly Diamondback Rattlesnake! she’d come at last to this…this outrage.

She gazed around, angry words leaping to her lips as the proprietor shuffled up behind her. “This cage is too small. And your lynx, Mr. Hazeltine, just look at him! He’s sick.”

“She. Ol’Zelda’s just taking a catnap, missy. She don’t get lively till sunset.”

“No, sir, I’m sure she’s ill. See how her eyes are running? And her nose? And clearly she hasn’t been eating. I’m a wildlife biologist, and believe me, you’ve got a sick animal here. She needs a vet.”

Bristles rasped as he rubbed his weathered jaw. “Well, maybe she has a cold. She’ll get over it, same way we all do. Sniffle and wait.”

Or she wouldn’t. Maybe Zelda had no reason to live, if this smelly box was all life offered. She hadn’t been made for this. “Do you even have a license to keep wild animals?”

“Hey, hey, if you’re going to start ragging on me, maybe you should take your money back and get on outta here. I do the best I can. And Zelda there’d be a lady’s coat if it wasn’t for me. Bought her off a fur farm up in South Dakota last year. She’s got nothin’ to complain about. Only one complainin’ is you.”

Tess stood, wove her fingers together and clenched them till they ached. Temper. She had a hot one at the best of times, and when she saw things like this— She swallowed a swift retort. Probably Hazeltine was doing the best he could. But whether he was or not, the point here was to save all that ragged, desperate beauty before it slipped away.

That was the whole point of her life, trying to save the creatures that ought to be saved.

“I’m sorry. I’m glad you took her away from a fur farm. How anybody could—”

But that was another wonder, for another day. How much money would she have left after paying for the tire? Eighty dollars? Maybe ninety and change? Somehow Tess didn’t think Hazeltine’s World-Famous Petting Zoo accepted credit cards, and it must be miles to the nearest ATM. The cat needed hope and help now—right now. She thrust a hand into her coat pocket and gripped her wallet. “Considering that she’s sick and she needs a vet, would you sell her to me? I’m headed up past Santa Fe. I’m sure I could find a doctor there to look at her.”

Hazeltine scratched his jaw again, and his squinty little eyes slid away over the surrounding pens. “Hadn’t rightly thought ’bout lettin’ her go. Zelda’s the star attraction, you know. Kids like to be scared of something.”

“You’ve still got that magnificent rattler,” Tess wheedled. “And truly, I don’t think you’ll have Zelda much longer without a doctor. And vet bills for an exotic cat can’t be cheap.”

He grunted wry agreement and bent to look down into the cage. Blew out a disgusted breath and straightened. “Reckon I could take two hundred for her. Cash.”

“I…could do that.” The mechanic across the road had admired the elaborate stainless-steel rack system on the back of her pickup, a gift from her father at Christmas. Surely she could cut some sort of deal, if she offered it to him cheap? “I’ll take her! Umm, please.”

Hazeltine’s smile shifted from wary to gotcha. “Then there’s the cage. Lotta work and material went into buildin’ that cage. You wanna buy that, too?”

THE NEW ORLEANS Police Department health plan didn’t allow for private hospital rooms. As soon as they’d determined that Detective Adam Dubois meant to go on living, they’d moved him from the blessed isolation of Intensive Care down to a double room on a post-surgical ward.

If Adam hadn’t been sworn to uphold the law, protecting and serving civilians everywhere, no matter how undeserving, he’d have thrown his roommate out their fourth-floor window. Him and his television that yammered from lights-on till lights-off beyond the curtain that Adam had insisted on drawing. Him with his non-stop snoring that sounded like a chainsaw with water in the gas tank—Gasp, wheeze, rumble, snort-rumble-grumble!

Adam gave himself one more day of this nonsense, then he was out of here, even if he had to crawl.

Clutching a pillow over his face with his good arm, teeth gritted and muscles tensed, he didn’t hear his visitor arrive. When a finger tapped his wrist, Adam jolted half-upright, then swore at the pain. “Crap! How many times do I have to tell you not to wake me?”

But when he dragged the pillow down, he wasn’t glaring up at Nurse Thibodaux, with her sexy smiles and her offers of backrubs. Or Nurse Curry with her prune mouth and her ready syringes. “Gabe! What are you—?”

But the answer was obvious. Adam and his cousin had always been close, as close as two grown men could be who lived a thousand miles and a world apart. If Gabe was the one who’d been shot, nothing would’ve kept Adam from his bedside. “Who told you?”

“Hospital contacted me—or contacted my answering machine. Sorry I couldn’t make it sooner. I was up in the San Juans, snow-tracking lynx. Didn’t get the message for almost a week.”

Right, he’d listed Gabe Monahan as his next of kin on the insurance forms. There was nobody closer, legally or emotionally. Still. “You didn’t need to…” His voice had roughened and his eyes stung. Damn! His emotions had been up and down, all over the map, since the shoot-out. He swallowed audibly and swung his head toward the curtain, while tactful Gabe busied himself with pulling up a chair and settling in.

“Sure, but it was a good excuse for a break,” he said, his words discounting the worry in his eyes as he looked Adam over, then studied all the damnable devices he was hooked up to—monitors, IV lines and worse gizmos. “Figured I’d drop by and pay my respects, then chow down on crawfish at Mam’ Louisa’s before heading back to snow country.” He leaned closer and scowled at Adam’s chest. “They’ve sure got you gift-wrapped. What’s below all the bandages?”

By now Adam had learned better than to shrug. “Coupla busted ribs.” He’d taken a few kicks there, before he’d rolled far enough away to draw his gun. “Cracked collar-bone—bullet clipped it.” The same bullet that had collapsed his right lung.

“Nurse at the desk said you almost bled out, that was why all the intensive care. Took ’bout five quarts to top you up, she said?”

Adam shifted irritably. His life was his own to control. And information about it was strictly his to dispense or withhold, and generally he withheld. But let a pack of bossy women start giving a man sponge baths, and next thing you knew, they’d figure he was theirs to gossip about. “I wasn’t counting. Took a hit in my thigh, that was the bad one. Grazed an artery.”

“Ouch!” Gabe winced in sympathy.

“Oh, could’ve been worse. I must’ve straddled that bullet. Two inches higher and an inch right, and I’d be singing the lonesome blues, falsetto.”

“You always had the devil’s own luck.”

Which was a ludicrous statement, on the face of it. Adam was the cousin who’d lost his alcoholic father to a car wreck when he was twelve, then lost his mother a year later when she collapsed under the burden of grief and double shifts as a barmaid, trying to support them. Gabe was the cousin who’d grown up surrounded by a large and loving family on a southwest Colorado ranch. He’d been nurtured by a stay-at-home mom during the same years that Adam had passed through a grim series of foster homes, skipping school to run with the toughest street gang in the city.

Adam’s luck had turned around when his mother’s brother—Gabe’s father—had discovered his whereabouts and his situation. From age fifteen to eighteen, he’d lived with Gabe’s family, learned to cowboy, and relearned what it was to be loved by good, caring people. Another year and it would’ve been too late. He’d seen enough lost kids in his job to know how close he himself had come to the edge. So, yes, he supposed he did have his share of luck. “At least at poker,” he admitted wryly.

“And women.”

Short-term scoring, sure, he did all right, but the long-term win? His one time at bat—with Alice—he’d struck out big time. Swung for the bleachers and fallen flat on his face.