The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

“Twenty bucks says you’re not going to be getting your vacation,” Joe murmured.

“McKendrick,” Beckstead replied, “you’re the only agent in the Bureau who knows the business end of a cow from a rump roast. We need you on this case. Now we’ve traced our witness, a Dr. Margaret Prescott, to a rodeo in Durango last week. She’s using the alias Maggie Rawlings and has taken a job providing medical care to injured performers on the rodeo circuit. We know where she is and where she’s going but we don’t have any way to get an agent close to her.”

The “royal we” the FBI was so fond of grated on his nerves, as it always did. Damn, he was tired of it all. Colt let Scout’s foreleg drop to the ground and gave him a slap that sent the gelding cantering off through the corral, his newly cleaned hooves kicking up little clouds of dust.

He pinched at the headache beginning to brew between his eyes. “And you think I could manage to get close to this Maggie Rawlings?”

“You have to admit, you’re the logical choice. Besides the fact that you’re a damn good agent, you’re the only cowboy we’ve got. The lone ranger, so to speak. You have any idea how hard it is to find another special agent who’s ever even seen a rodeo, much less competed in one?”

Colt snorted. “I rodeoed in college. I was twenty-two years old last time I was stupid enough to ride into the ring. Twenty-two and a hell of a lot more reckless.”

“This is a big case, McKendrick. Huge. Michael Prescott embezzled millions from at least two dozen clients over the years. He gambled most of it away but some is still hidden away somewhere, and we owe it to those clients to try to find it, to those people who trusted him to invest their life savings.” He paused, then poured it on. “To those little old ladies who lost everything.”

“Like the little old ladies who whacked him?” Colt said dryly.

Beckstead gave up the motherhood and apple pie routine. “Okay, so he ran with a bad crowd, too. Look Colt, I won’t lie to you We’re after somebody bigger than our dirty accountant ever dreamed about being. For at least one of his clients, Prescott offered a nice extra service. He prepared a set of phony books for somebody we’ve been after for a long time. Lucky for us, though, we discovered the accountant kept a copy of the real records. Insurance, maybe, or extortion. Who knows. We think it’s on a computer disk in the same place he hid the money. We figure if we can find it, we can nail his client.”

Colt didn’t want to be curious. If not for this damned inquisitiveness, he never would have joined the Bureau in the first place, after his stint as an MP in the Marines, back when he had nowhere else to go.

“How big?” he finally said. “Who was Prescott in with?”

“Big. Damian DeMarranville.”

The string of epithets Colt bit out at the name didn’t seem to surprise his boss. “Yeah, that’s what I figured you’d say,” Beckstead drawled. “You and DeMarranville go way back, don’t you?”

“Far enough.” Colt thought of lost innocence and broken trust. The face of his former partner formed in his mind, and he frowned. The decent, decorated agent who had trained him had just been a front; he’d been hiding insides as rotten and worm eaten as a whole tree full of bad apples.

“Prescott was dumb enough to think he could steal from the big dog himself and get away with it,” Beckstead went on. “Skim a little off the top and think nobody will notice.”

He jerked his mind from the past. “Stupid and slimy. A bad combination.”

“A deadly combination.”

Colt leaned on the split-rail fence and stared at the hard blue of the Montana sky, at a pair of magpies darting across the air, at the mountains bursting with color. He wanted to stay right here, dammit. Just for a little while, until the ghosts became too loud.

But he wanted DeMarranville more.

“How does the wife fit in?” he finally asked.

“We’re not sure, other than that she witnessed the hit by two of DeMarranville’s associates. Carlo Santori and Franky Kostas. You know either of them?”

“Yeah. Not the nicest crowd. Is she clean?”

“We don’t know. I doubt anybody could be married to Prescott for six years and keep out of his business, but you never know. That’s what we want you to figure out.”

Nobody was innocent. If he’d learned one indisputable lesson in the last ten years, it was that.

“Why don’t you just haul her in for questioning?”

Beckstead paused. “Frankly, she’s safer where she’s at.”

“If the Bureau can find her, DeMarranville sure as hell can. Seems to be the smartest thing would be to put her into protective custody.”

“It’s not that easy right now.”

The SAC was hedging. Colt had worked with him long enough to read the signs. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“We think Damian still has contacts on the inside. How else could he have escaped prosecution all these years?”

He’d often thought the same thing. DeMarranville seemed to know every move the Bureau planned against him long before they made it. It was one of the most frustrating things about him.

“You’d be working deep undercover so we can keep her whereabouts a secret,” Beckstead went on. “Only Dunbar and I would know you’re not just taking an extended vacation.”

“Who would be my contact?”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?” Beckstead didn’t bother to conceal his satisfaction. Like a fisherman who knew he’d just hooked his sucker, Colt thought. The analogy was an apt one. He couldn’t think of any other bait but DeMarranville enticing enough to make him give up the chance to spend time on his ranch in exchange for a summer wearing his rear out traveling to every two-bit town with a rodeo across the West.

He gave the mountains one more regretful look then pinched at the bridge of his nose again. “Looks like I don’t have much of a choice.”

He hung up the phone and glared at Joe Redhawk. “Don’t say a word. Not one damn word.”

“Who me?” the Shoshone’s mouth twisted into the closest he ever came to a grin. “Looks like you owe me twenty bucks, brother.”

* * *

“You got another one comin’ in. Busted-up shoulder.”

At the shout from the doorway, Maggie jumped at least a foot. The bandage roll in her hand flew across the little trailer, unraveling into a gauzy mess as it sailed into the corner behind the examination table.

“Sorry, hon.” Peg’s eyes shimmered with sympathy inside their fringe of thick black mascara. “I keep forgettin’ I’m not supposed to sneak up on you that way.”

Maggie fought to control her breathing, the panic that spurted out of nowhere these days at loud noises or sudden movements. Would she ever stop jumping at shadows or would the fear always be lurking there, just under her skin?

She forced a smile that quickly turned genuine as she caught sight of Peg’s ensemble for the evening—skintight hot pink jeans with a glittery western-cut shirt and matching pink tooled-leather cowboy boots. With her bleached hair and her smile as big as Texas, Peg looked like an older, lessfavorably endowed Dolly Parton.

“It’s not your fault. I’m just a little jumpy tonight.” She retrieved the now-contaminated bandage roll from the floor and tossed it in the garbage. “Too much caffeine on the road this afternoon, I think.”

“If you say so, darlin’.”

She looked away from Peg’s worried frown. She knew her father’s second wife—and widow—was brimming with curiosity about why she had abandoned her new apartment and her job at the clinic so soon after Michael’s death. But to her relief, Peg hadn’t pushed for an explanation, either when a desperate Maggie called her in the middle of the night three weeks earlier or in the intervening time they had traveled the rodeo circuit together.

Instead of answering the unspoken questions, Maggie busied herself gathering the supplies she would need to treat a cowboy with a bum shoulder.

“How’s Nicholas?”

“Last I checked, he was runnin’ Cheyenne ragged, and that granddaughter of mine was lovin’ every minute of it.”

“She’s the best baby-sitter that rascal has ever had. I don’t know what we would have done without the two of you.”