Bound by Honor: Mercenary's Woman
“And I can tell how much he needs it,” she said with dry humor as Eb helped her back into her own seat.
“That makes two of you,” Eb told her. His eyes were kind, and now full of concern. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes.” She hesitated with her hand on the doorknob. “Eb, is it always like that?”
He frowned. “What?”
She looked up into his eyes. “Physical violence. Do you ever get to the point that it doesn’t make you sick inside?”
“I never have,” he said flatly. “I remember every face, every sound, every sick minute of what I’ve done in my life.” He looked at her, but he seemed to go far away. “You’d better go inside. I’ll take you and Stevie out to the ranch Thursday and Saturday and we’ll put in some more time.”
“For all the good it will do me,” she managed to say nervously.
“Don’t be like that,” he chided. “You got overpowered. People do, even ‘big, strong’ men. There’s no shame in losing a fight when you’ve given it all you’ve got.”
She smiled. “Think so?”
“I know so.” He touched her disheveled French knot. “You wore your hair down that spring afternoon,” he murmured softly. “I remember how it felt on my bare chest, loose and smelling of flowers.”
Her breath seemed to stick in her throat as she recalled the same memory. They had both been bare to the waist. She could close her eyes and feel the hair-roughened muscles of his chest against her own softness as he kissed her and kissed her…
“Sometimes,” he continued, “we get second chances.”
“Do we?” she whispered.
He touched her mouth gently. “Try not to dwell on what happened tonight,” he said. “I won’t let anyone hurt you, Sally.”
That felt nice. She wished she could give him the same guarantee, but it seemed pretty ridiculous after her poor performance.
He seemed to read the thought right in her mind, and he burst out laughing. “Listen, lady, when I get through with you, you’ll be eating bad men raw,” he promised. “You’re just a beginner.”
“You aren’t.”
“That’s true. And not only in self-defense,” he added dryly. “You’d better go in.”
“I suppose so.” She picked at the buttons of the shirt he’d loaned her. “I’ll give it back. Eventually.”
“You look nice in it,” he had to admit. “You can keep it. We’ll try some more of my clothes on you and see how they look.”
She made a face at him as she opened the door. “Eb, do I have to go and see the sheriff?”
“You do. I’ll pick you up after school. Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “He won’t eat you. He’s a nice man. But you must see that we can’t let Lopez’s people get away with this.”
She felt a chill go down her arms as she remembered who Lopez was. “What will he do if I testify against his men?”
“You let me worry about that,” Eb told her, and his eyes were like green steel. “Nobody touches you without going through me.”
Her heart jumped right up into her throat as she stared at him. She was a modern woman, and she probably shouldn’t have enjoyed that passionate remark. But she did. Eb was a strong, assertive man who would want a woman to match him. Sally hadn’t been that woman at seventeen. But she was now. She could stand up to him and meet him on his own ground. It gave her a sense of pride.
“Debating if it’s proper for a modern woman to like being protected?” he chided with a wicked grin.
“You said yourself that none of us are invincible,” she pointed out. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to admire a man’s strength, especially when it’s just saved my neck.”
He made her feel confident, he gave her joy. It had been years since she’d laughed so much, enjoyed life so much. Odd that a man whose adult years had been imbued with such violence could be so tender.
“Okay now?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m okay.” She glanced toward the road and shivered a little. “They won’t come looking for me?”
“Not in that condition they won’t,” he said matter-of-factly. “And they’re very lucky,” he added, his whole face like drawn cord. “Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been so gentle.”
Both eyebrows went up at the imagery.
“You know what I was,” he said quietly. “Until comparatively recent years, I lived a violent, uncertain life. Part of the man I was is still in me. I won’t ever hurt you,” he added. “But I have to come to grips with the old life before I can begin a new one. That’s going to take time.”
“I think you’re saying something.”
“Why, yes, I am,” he mused, watching her. “I’m giving notice of my intentions.”
“Intentions?”
“Last time I stopped. Next time I won’t.”
Her mind wasn’t quite grasping what he was telling her. “You mean, with those men…?”
“I mean with you,” he said gently. “I want you very badly, and I’m not walking away this time.”
“You and what army?” she asked, aghast.
“I won’t need an army. But you might.” He smiled. “Go on in. I’m having the house watched. You’ll be safe, I promise.”
She pulled his shirt closer. “Thanks, Eb,” she said.
He shrugged. “I have to take care of my own. Try to sleep.”
She smiled at him. “Okay. You, too.”
He watched her go up onto the porch and into the house, waiting for Dallas, who came out tight-lipped with barely a word to Sally as he passed her.
He got into the truck with Eb and slammed the door.
“What happened to Sally?” he asked, putting his cane aside.
“Lopez’s men rushed the truck when she had a flat. I don’t know if it was premeditated,” he added coldly. “They could have lain in wait for her and caused the flat. The tire was almost bald, but it could have gone another few hundred miles.”
“She looked uneasy.”
“They assaulted her and may have raped her if I hadn’t shown up,” Eb said bluntly as he backed the truck and pulled out into the road. “I want to have another look, if the ambulance hasn’t picked them up yet.”
“You sent for an ambulance?” Dallas asked with mock surprise. “That’s new.”
“Well, we’re trying to blend in, aren’t we?” came the terse reply. He glared at the tall blond man. “Difficult to blend in if we let people die on the side of the road.”
“If you say so.”
They drove to where Sally’s pickup truck was still sitting, but there was no sign of the two men. The house nearby was dark. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
As Eb digested that, red lights flashed and a big boxy ambulance pulled up behind the pickup truck, followed closely by a deputy sheriff in a patrol car.
Eb pulled off the road and got out. He knew the deputy, Rich Burton, who was one of the department’s ablest members. They shook hands.
“Where are the victims?” Rich asked.
Eb grimaced. “Well, they were both lying right there when I took Sally home.”
The deputy and the ambulance guys looked toward the flattened grass, but there weren’t any men lying there.
“Unless one of you needs medical attention, we’ll be on our way,” one of the EMTs said with a wry glance.
“Both of the perps did,” Eb said quietly. “At least one of them has broken bones.”
The EMT gave him a wary look. “Not their legs, by the look of things.”
“No. Not their legs.”
The EMTs left and Rich joined Eb and Dallas beside the truck.
“Something’s going on at that house,” Rich said quietly. “I’ve had total strangers stop me and tell me they’ve seen suspicious activity, men carrying boxes in and out. That’s not all. Some holding company bought a huge tract of land adjoining Cy Parks’s place, and it’s filling up with building supplies. There’s a contractor been hired and a plan has gone to the county commission’s planning committee about a business starting up there.”
“How much do you know about the men who live here?” Eb asked coolly.
Rich shrugged. “Not as much as I’d like to. But my contacts tell me that there’s a drug lord named Manuel Lopez, and the talk is that these guys belong to him. They’re mules. They run his narcotics for him.”
Eb and Dallas exchanged quiet glances.
“What sort of business are we talking about?” Eb queried.
“Don’t know. There’s a huge steel warehouse going up behind Parks’s place,” Rich replied, and he looked worried. “If I were making a guess, and it is just a guess, I’d say somebody had distribution in mind.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“A DISTRIBUTION CENTER,” Eb said curtly. “With Manuel Lopez, the head of the most violent of the international drug cartels, behind it! That’s just what we need in Jacobsville.”
“That’s right,” the younger man replied. He scowled. “How do you know about Lopez?”
Eb didn’t answer. “Thanks, Rich,” he said. “If I hear anything about the men who attacked Miss Johnson, I’ll give you a call.”
“Thanks. But I’d bet that they’re long gone,” he said carelessly. “They’d be crazy to stick around and face charges like attempted rape in a town this size. Lopez wouldn’t like the notoriety.”
“My guess exactly. So long,” Eb said, motioning to Dallas. Rich drove off with a wave of his hand. Eb hesitated, and once Rich was out of sight, he looked for and found a board with new nails sticking through it. It was lying point-side down, now, but the wood was new and there was a long cord attached to it. Evidently it had been placed in the road just as Sally approached, and then jerked away once Sally had run over it. That meant that there had to be a fourth man involved, besides the man on the porch and the two men who’d assaulted Sally. That disturbed Eb.
“They set a trap,” Dallas guessed. “She ran over this. That’s how she got the flat.”
“Exactly.” Eb threw the board in the bed of the truck before he climbed in under the wheel. “There were at least four men in on it, and I don’t think assault was the sole object of the exercise. I think I’ll go over and have a talk with Cy Parks first thing in the morning. He may know something about that new construction behind his place.”
CY PARKS WAS GRUMPY. He hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, and he was groggy. Even after four years, he still had nightmares about the loss of his wife and five-year-old son in a fire back home in Wyoming. He’d moved here to Jacobsville, where Ebenezer Scott lived, more for someone to talk to than any other reason. Eb was not only a former comrade at arms, but he was also the only man he knew who could listen to the unabridged horror of the fire without losing his supper. It kept him sane, just having someone to talk to. And not only could he talk about the death of his family at Lopez’s henchmen’s hands but also he had someone to help him exorcise the nightmares of the past that he and Ebenezer shared.
The knock on the door came just as he was pouring his second cup of coffee. It was probably his foreman. Harley Fowler was an adventurer wannabe who fancied himself a mercenary. He was forever reading a magazine for armchair adventurers and once he’d actually answered one of the ads for volunteers and, supposedly, had taken a job during his summer vacation. He’d come back from his vacation two weeks later grinning and bragging about his exploits overseas with a group of world-beaters and lording it over the other ranch hands who worked for Cy. Harley had become the overnight hero of the men. Cy watched him with amused cynicism. None of the men he’d served with had ever returned home strutting and bragging about their exploits. Nor had any of them come home smiling. There was a look about a man who’d seen combat. It was unmistakable to anyone who’d been through it. Harley didn’t have the look.
None of the ranch hands knew that Cy Parks hadn’t always been a rancher. They knew about the fire that had cost him his family—most people locally did. But they didn’t know that he was a former professional mercenary and that Lopez was responsible for the fire. Cy wanted to keep it that way. He was through with the old life.
He opened the front door with a scowl on his lean, tanned face, but it wasn’t Harley who was standing on his porch. It was Ebenezer Scott.
Cy’s eyes, two shades darker green than Eb’s, narrowed. “Lost your way?” he taunted, running a hand through his thick unruly black hair.
Eb chuckled. “Years ago. Got another cup?”
“Sure.” He opened the door and let Eb in. The living room, old-fashioned and sparsely furnished, was neat as a pin. So were the formal dining room—never used—and the big, airy kitchen with not a spot of dirt or grime anywhere.
“Tell me you hired a housekeeper,” Eb murmured.
Cy got down an extra cup and poured black coffee into it, handing it across the table before he sat down. “I don’t need a housekeeper,” he replied. “Why are you here?” he added with characteristic bluntness.
“Did you keep in touch with any of your old contacts when you got out of the business?” Eb asked at once.
Cy shook his head. “No need. I gave it up, remember?” He lifted the cup to his wide, chiseled mouth.
Eb sipped coffee, nodded at the strength of it, and put the mug down on the Formica tabletop with a soft thud. “Manuel Lopez is loose,” he said without preamble. “We think he’s in the vicinity. Certainly some of his henchmen are.”
Cy’s face hardened. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Why is he here?”
“Because Jessica Myers is here,” Eb replied. “She’s living with her young son and her niece, Sally Johnson, out at the old Johnson place. She got one of Lopez’s accomplices to rat on Lopez without giving himself away. She had access to documents and bank accounts and witnesses willing to testify. Now Lopez is out and he’s after Jess. He wants the name of the henchman who sold him out.”
Cy made an impatient gesture. “Fighting out in the open isn’t Lopez’s style. He’s the original knife-in-the-back boy.”
“I know. It worries me.” He sipped more coffee. “He had three, maybe four, of his thugs living in a rental place near Sally’s house. Two of them attacked her last night when her truck had a flat tire just down the road from them. It was no accident, either. They’ve obviously been gathering intelligence, watching her. They knew exactly where she was and exactly when she’d get as far as their place.” His face was grim. “I think there are more than four of them. I also think they may have the same sort of surveillance equipment I maintain at the ranch. What I don’t know is why. I don’t know if it’s solely because Lopez wants to get to Jessica.”
“Is Sally all right?”
Eb nodded. “I got to her in time, luckily. I broke a couple of bones for her assailants, but they got away and now the house seems to be without tenants—temporarily, of course. Have you noticed any activity on your northern boundary?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” Cy replied, frowning. “All sorts of vehicles are coming and going. They’ve graded about an acre, and a steel warehouse is going up. The city planning commission chairman says it’s going to be some sort of production and distribution center for a honey concern. They even have a building permit.” He sighed angrily. “Matt Caldwell has been having hell with the planning commission about a project of his own, yet this gang got what they wanted immediately.”
“Honey,” Eb mused.
“That isn’t all of it,” Cy continued. “I investigated the holding company that bought the land behind me. It doesn’t belong to anybody local, but I can’t find out who’s behind it. It belongs to a corporation based in Cancún, Mexico.”
Eb’s eyes narrowed. “Cancún? Now, that’s interesting. The last report I had about Lopez before he was arrested was that he bought property there and was living like a king in a palatial estate just outside Cancún.” He stopped dead at the expression on his friend’s face. Cy and Eb had once helped put some of Lopez’s men away.
Cy’s breathing became rough, his green eyes began to glitter like heated emeralds. “Lopez! Now what the hell would he want with a honey business?”
“It’s evidently going to be a front for something illegal,” Eb assured him. “He may have picked Jacobsville for a distribution center for his ‘product’ because it’s small, isolated, and there are no federal agencies represented near here.”
Cy stood up, his whole body rigid with hatred and anger. “He killed my wife and son…!”
“He had Jessica run off the road and almost killed,” Eb added coldly. “She lived, but she was blinded. She came back here from Houston, hoping that I could protect her. But it’s going to take more than me. I need help. I want to set up a listening post on your back forty and put a man there.”
“Done,” Cy said at once. “But first I’m going to buy a few claymores…”
It took a minute for the expression on Cy’s face, in his eyes, in the set of his lean body to register. Eb had only seen him like that once before, in combat, many years before. Probably that was the way he’d looked when his wife and son died and he was hospitalized with severe burns on one arm, incurred when he’d tried to save them from the raging fire. He hadn’t known at the time that Lopez had sent men to kill him. Even in prison, Lopez could put out contracts.
“You can’t start setting off land mines. You have to think with your brain, not your guts,” Eb said curtly. “If we’re going to get Lopez, we have to do it legally.”
“Oh, that’s new, coming from you,” Cy said with biting sarcasm.
Eb’s broad shoulders lifted and fell as he sat down again, straddling the chair this time. “I’m reformed,” he said. “I want to settle down, but first I have to put Lopez away. I need you.”
Cy extended the hand that had been so badly burned.
“I know about the burns,” Eb said. “If you recall, most of us went to see you in the hospital afterward.”
Cy averted his eyes and pulled the sleeve down over his wrist, holding it there protectively. “I don’t remember much of it,” he confessed. “They sent me to a burn unit and did what they could. At least I was able to keep the arm, but I’ll never be much good in a tight corner again.”
“You mean you were before?” Eb asked with howling mockery.
Cy’s eyes widened, narrowed and suddenly he burst out laughing. “I’d forgotten what a bunch of sadists you and your men were,” he accused. “Before every search and destroy mission, somebody was claiming my gear and asking about my beneficiary.” Cy drew in a long breath. “I’ve been keeping to myself for a long time.”
“So we noticed,” came the dry reply. “I hear it took a bunch of troubled adolescents to drag you out of your cave.”
Cy knew what he meant. Belinda Jessup, a public defender, had bought some of the property on his boundary for a summer camp for youthful offenders on probation. One of the boys, an African-American youth who’d fallen absolutely in love with the cattle business, had gotten through his shell. He’d worked with Luke Craig, another neighbor, to give the boy a head start in cowboying. He was now working for Luke Craig on his ranch and had made a top hand. No more legal troubles for him. He was on his way to being foreman of the whole outfit, and Cy couldn’t repress a tingle of pride that he’d had a hand in that.
“Even assuming that we can send Lopez back to prison, that won’t stop him from appointing somebody to run his empire. You know how these groups are organized,” Cy added, “into cells of ten or more men with their chiefs reporting to a regional manager and those managers reporting to a high-level management designee. The damned cartels operate on a corporate structure these days.”
“Yes, I know, and they work complete with pagers, cell phones and faxes, using them just long enough to avoid detection,” Eb agreed. “They’re efficient and they’re merciless. God only knows how many undercover agents the drug enforcement people have lost, not to mention those from other law enforcement agencies. The drug lords make a religion of intimidation, and they have no scruples about killing a man and his entire family. No wonder few of their henchmen ever cross them. But one did, and Jessica knows his name. I don’t expect Lopez to give up. Ever.”
“Neither do I. But what are we going to do about Lopez’s planned operation?” Cy wanted to know.
Eb sobered. “I don’t have a plan yet. Legally, we can’t do anything without hard evidence. Lopez will be extra careful about covering his tracks this time. He won’t want anything that will connect him on paper to the drug operation. From what I’ve been able to learn, Lopez has already skipped town, forfeiting the bond. Believe me, there’s no way in hell he’ll ever get extradited from Mexico. The only way we’ll ever get him back behind bars again is to lure him back here and have him nabbed by the U.S. Marshals Service. He’s at the top of the DEA’s Most Wanted list right now.” He finished his second cup of coffee. “If we can get a legal wiretap on the phones in that warehouse once it’s operating, we might have something to take to the authorities. I know a DEA agent,” Eb said thoughtfully. “In fact, he and his wife are neighbors of yours. He’s gung-ho at his job, and he’s done some undercover work before.”
“Most of Lopez’s people are Hispanic,” Cy pointed out.
“This guy could pass for Hispanic. Good-looking devil, too. His wife’s father left her that small ranch…”
“Lisa Monroe,” Cy said, and averted his eyes. “Yes, I’ve seen her around. Yesterday she was heaving bales of hay over the fence to her horse,” he added in the coldest tones Eb had ever heard him use. “She’s thinner than she should be, and she has no business trying to heft bales of hay!”
“When her husband’s not home to do it for her…”
“Not home?” Cy’s eyes widened. “Good God, man, he was standing ten feet away talking to a leggy blond girl in an express delivery uniform! He didn’t even seem to notice Lisa!”
“It’s not our business.”
Cy moved abruptly, standing up. “Okay. Point taken. Suppose we ride up to the boundary and take a look at the progress on that warehouse,” he said. “We can take horses and pretend we’re riding the fence line.”
Eb retrieved high-powered binoculars from the truck and by the time he got to the stable, Cy’s young foreman had two horses saddled and waiting.
“Mr. Scott!” Harley said with a starstruck grin, running a hand absently through his crew-cut light brown hair. “Nice to see you, sir!” He almost saluted. He knew about Mr. Scott’s operation; he’d read all about it in his armchair covert operations magazine, to say nothing of the top secret newsletter to which he subscribed.
Eb gave him a measuring glance and he didn’t smile. “Do I know you, son?”
“Oh, no, sir,” Harley said quickly. “But I’ve read about your operation!”
“I can imagine what,” Eb chuckled. He stuck a cigar into his mouth and lit it.
Cy mounted offside, from the right, because there wasn’t enough strength in his left arm to permit him to grip the saddle horn and help pull himself up. He hated the show of weakness, which was all too visible. Up until the fire, he’d been in superb physical condition.
“We’re going to ride up to the northern boundary and check the fence line for breaks,” Cy said imperturbably. “Get Jenkins started on the new gate as soon as he’s through with breakfast.”
“He’ll have to go pick it up at the hardware store first,” Harley reminded him. “Just came in late yesterday.”
Cy gave him a look that would have frozen running water. He didn’t say anything. But, then, he didn’t have to.
“I’ll just go remind him,” Harley said at once, and took off toward the bunkhouse.
“Who is he?” Eb asked as they rode out of the yard.
“My new foreman.” Cy leaned toward him with mock awe. “He’s a real mercenary, you know! Actually went on a mission early this summer!”
“My God,” Eb drawled. “Fancy that. A real live hero right here in the boonies.”
“Some hero,” Cy muttered. “Chances are what he really did was to camp out in the woods for two weeks and help protect city campers from bears.”
Eb chuckled. “Remember how we were at his age?” he asked reminiscently. “We couldn’t wait for people to see us in our gear. And then we found out that the real mercs don’t advertise.”
“We were like Harley,” Cy mused. “All talk and hot air.”