Wyoming Bold

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS ONE of the worst blizzards in the history of the Rancho Real in Catelow, Wyoming. Dalton Kirk stared out the window and grimaced as the flakes seemed to grow in size by the minute. It was the middle of December. Usually weather like this came later.

He pulled out his cell phone and called Darby Hanes, his foreman. “Darby, how’s it going out there?”

“Cattle are pretty deep in it,” Darby replied, his voice breaking up with static, “but we’re holding our own with feed so far. Getting hard to reach them, though.”

“I hope this doesn’t last long,” he said heavily.

“Me, too, but we need the snow for the spring water supply so badly, I’m not complaining.” Darby chuckled.

“Take care out there.”

“Sure. Thanks, boss.”

He hung up. He hated the storms but Darby was right about their desperate need for snow. The summer drought had made it hard on ranchers all over the West and Midwest. He just hoped they’d be able to get feed to the cattle. In an emergency, of course, federal and state agencies would help to airlift bales of hay to the animals.

He went into the living room and turned on the History channel. Might as well occupy himself instead of worrying so much, he thought amusedly.

MAVIE, THE HOUSEKEEPER, frowned as she thought she heard something at the back door. She was clearing away dishes in the kitchen, nervous because the storm seemed to be getting worse.

Curious, though, she went and peered through the white curtains and gasped when she saw a pale, oval face with wide, green eyes staring back at her.

“Merissa?” she asked, shocked.

She opened the door. There, in a hooded, bloodred cape, almost covered with snow, stood a neighbor. Merissa Baker lived with her mother, Clara, way back in the woods in a cottage. They were what local people called “peculiar.” Clara could talk out fire and talk off warts. She knew all sorts of herbal remedies for illness and they said she had the “second sight” as well, that she could see the future. Her daughter was rumored to have the same abilities, only magnified. She recalled that when Merissa had been in school, her classmates had shunned her and victimized her so badly that her mother pulled her out of the local high school because of her ongoing stomach problems. The school system had sent a homeschool worker with her classwork and oversaw her curriculum. She had graduated with her class, with grades that shamed most of them.

She’d tried to work locally, but her reputation was unsettling to some of the conservative businesses, so she went home and helped her mother, earning her living with a combination of fortune-telling and online website design, at which she was quite good. She had an older computer, and a cheap internet connection at first, but as her business grew, she’d started making money. She’d managed to afford better equipment and higher internet speed. Now, she was very successful. She designed websites for at least one quite famous author and several businesses.

“Come in out of the snow, child!” Mavie exclaimed. “You’re soaked!”

“The car wouldn’t start,” Merissa said in her soft, delicate voice. She was almost as tall as Mavie, who was just above five feet seven inches. She had thick, short, wavy platinum hair and pale green eyes that were huge in her face. She had a rounded little chin and a pretty, naturally pink bow-shaped mouth, and tiny ears. And a smile that could have melted stone.

“What are you doing here in a storm?”

“I have to see Dalton Kirk,” she said solemnly. “And it’s urgent.”

“Tank?” Mavie asked blankly, using the youngest Kirk brother’s affectionate nickname.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask what it’s about?” Mavie asked, confused, because she didn’t think the family had any business dealings with Merissa.

Merissa smiled gently. “I’m afraid not.”

“Oh. Well, let me go get him, then.”

“I’ll wait here. I don’t want to drip on the carpet,” the young woman said with a laugh that sounded like silver bells.

Mavie went into the living room. There was, fortunately, a commercial. Dalton had turned the sound off.

“Damn things,” he muttered. “One minute of program and five minutes of commercials, do they really think people are going to sit there and watch so many at once?” he huffed. He frowned at Mavie’s expression. “What’s wrong?”

“You know the Bakers, don’t you? They live in that cottage down the road, in the cottonwood thicket.”

“Yes.”

“Merissa is here. She says she has to talk to you.”

“Okay.” He got up. “Bring her in here.”

“She won’t come. She got wet walking here.”

“She walked? In this?” He gestured at the window where huge flakes of snow were falling. “There’s almost a foot of snow on the ground already!”

“She said her car wouldn’t start.”

He sighed. He turned off the television and put down the remote control. He followed Mavie into the kitchen.

His eyes took in the slender figure of his guest. She was very pretty. Her lips were a natural red. Her eyes were big and soft and green. Her face was rather pointed, and her rounded chin made her seem vulnerable. She was wearing a hooded red cloak and it, and she, were soaked.

“Merissa, isn’t it?” he asked gently.

She nodded. She was self-conscious around men. Afraid of them, too, really. She hoped it didn’t show. Dalton was very big, like all the Kirk boys. He had jet-black hair and dark eyes and a lean, angular face. He was wearing jeans and boots and a chambray shirt. He didn’t look like a very wealthy man at all.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

She glanced toward Mavie.

“Oh, I’ll just go dust the living room for a bit,” Mavie said with a grin. She left them alone, pulling the door closed behind her as she went into the hall.

“You’re in terrible danger,” Merissa said without preamble.

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. I just blurt these things out, I don’t mean to.” She bit her lip. “I have visions. My mother does, too. The neurologist says it’s an aura from migraine, which I also have, but if that’s all, why do the visions always come true?” She sighed. “I had a vision about you. I had to tell you about it right away so you wouldn’t be hurt.”

“Okay, I’m listening.” Privately he thought she needed a good psychologist more than a neurologist, but he wasn’t going to say that. She was very young; barely twenty-two if he remembered correctly. “Go ahead.”

“You were attacked in Arizona by four men, just a few months ago,” she said. Her eyes were closed. If they hadn’t been, she’d have seen Dalton’s suddenly still posture and taut features. “One of the men with you was wearing a paisley shirt...”

“Damn!”

She opened her eyes and grimaced as he glared at her.

“How did you know that?” he asked, moving forward so fast that she backed up too quickly and stumbled into a chair, almost falling. She caught the table just in time. “Who told you?” he demanded, although he stopped going toward her.

“Nobody...told me. I saw it,” she tried to explain. Heavens, he was fast! She’d never seen a man move like that.

“Saw it, how?”

“In my head. It was a vision,” she tried to explain. Her cheeks were flushed. He thought she was crazy. “Please, let me finish. The man in the paisley shirt, he was wearing a suit and you trusted him. There was another man, a man with dark skin wearing a lot of gold jewelry. In fact, his pistol had gold plating and pearls on it...”

“I only ever told my brothers that!” he said angrily. “Them, and my supervisor and, later, the DOJ guys!”

“The man in the paisley shirt,” she continued. “He isn’t who you think he is. He has ties to a drug cartel.” Her eyes closed again. “He’s made some sort of bargain with a man high up in politics in this country. I don’t know what, I can’t see it. But I do know this. The other man is running for public office, some very high office with money and political superiority in the balance...” She swallowed and opened her eyes. “He wants to have you killed.”

“Me?” he asked. “What for?”

“Because of the man in the paisley shirt,” she explained. “He was with that man who shot you, who’s now second-in-command to the leader of the drug cartel. But it isn’t known. The cartel put up money so he could run for public office, high public office. Once he’s elected, if he is, he’ll make sure the drug convoys get across the border with no interference. I don’t know how.” She held up a hand when he looked as if he might question that. “They’re going to try to have you killed so that you can’t tell on him.”

“Hell, I identified the shooter to the authorities. They have notes on my debriefing,” he scoffed. “It’s all in there, about the shooter with the gold-plated weapon, the gold jewelry, the lizard-skin boots, the gold tooth with a diamond that he wore for a front tooth—the works.” He laughed curtly. “It’s too late for them to silence me.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw,” she stammered. “It isn’t about the man with the gold-plated weapon—it’s about the man wearing the paisley shirt. He’s working for the politician. He’s already tried to have a sheriff killed, a man who might have recognized him. The sheriff was shot...” She closed her eyes and squinted, as if her head hurt. In fact, it did. “He’s afraid of both of you. If you recognize him, his ties to the politician will be made public and the politician will end up in prison. So will he. It isn’t the first time he’s killed to protect his boss.”

Tank sat down. This was intense stuff. It brought back nightmarish memories from the shooting. The impact of the bullets, the smell of blood, the dark-skinned man’s insane laughter while he fired the automatic pistol. There really had been another man there, a man in a paisley shirt, as she said, wearing a suit...

“Why didn’t I remember that?” he mumbled out loud. He put his hand to his eyes. “There was a man in a paisley shirt. He asked for backup. He said a drug deal was going down, a big one. I drove out there with him. He said he was from the DEA—” He broke off and gaped at Merissa.

“You hadn’t remembered that,” she said slowly.

He nodded. His face was ashen. There were beads of sweat just above his chiseled mouth.

She knelt on the floor beside his chair and held his big hand, the one that wasn’t rubbing his eyes. “It’s all right,” she said in a tone of voice that sounded like he imagined an angel of mercy would sound. “It’s all right.”

He didn’t like being babied. He jerked his hand away, and then was sorry when she stood up and backed away, looking hunted.

She couldn’t imagine the memories she’d kindled within him. He was trying to deal with them, and not very successfully. “People say you’re a witch,” he blurted out.

She didn’t take offence. She only nodded. “I know.”

He stared at her. There was something really other-worldly about her. She was almost fragile, despite her height; quiet, docile. She seemed so much at peace with herself and the world. The only turmoil was in her big, soft green eyes, which were looking at him with a mix of sympathy and fear.

“Why are you afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.

She shifted. “It’s nothing personal.”

“Why?”

“You’re very...large,” she faltered. She shivered.

He cocked his head, frowning.

She forced a smile. “I have to go,” she said. “I just wanted you to know what I saw, so that you could keep your eyes open and be alert.”

“We have a fortune invested in surveillance equipment here, mostly because of our prize-winning bulls.”

She nodded. “It won’t matter. They sent a professional assassin after the sheriff in Texas. He had surveillance equipment, too. Or at least I think he did.”

He drew in a long breath. He stood up, calmer now. “I know some people in Texas. Where?”

She shifted uneasily. He towered over her. “South Texas. Somewhere south of San Antonio. I don’t know anything else. Sorry.”

That should be easy to track down. If there’d been a shooting of a law enforcement official, it would be public and he could search for it online. He wanted to do that, if only to prove her so-called vision false.

“Thanks anyway. For the warning.” He smiled with pure sarcasm.

“You don’t believe me. That’s all right. Just...watch where you’re going. Please.” She turned and pulled up her hood.

He recalled that she’d walked here.

“Just a sec,” he said. He went to the hall closet, pulled out a shepherd’s coat and threw it on. “I’ll drive you home,” he said, digging in his pocket for his car keys. Then he remembered that he’d put them on the hook beside the back door. With a grimace, he retrieved them.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she began uneasily.

“What? Drive you home? It’s almost a blizzard. You can’t even see where you’re going in this!” he said, waving his hand toward the window.

“Hang your keys there,” she faltered. There was a strange, opaque look to her eyes. “You shouldn’t do that. He’ll find them there and get access to the house.”

“He, who?” he asked.

She looked up at him and blinked.

“Never mind,” he muttered. “Come on.”

THEY WERE GOING into the garage when Darby Hanes pulled up in one of the other ranch pickups. He got out, shaking snow off the shoulders of his wool jacket. He seemed surprised to see Merissa, but he tipped his hat to her and smiled.

“Hi, Merissa,” he said.

She smiled back. “Hello, Mr. Hanes.”

“Been riding fence,” he said, sighing. “I came back to get the chain saw. We’ve got a tree across a fence.” He shook his head. “Bad weather, and more forecast.”

Merissa was staring at him without speaking. She moved a step closer. “Mr. Hanes, please don’t take this the wrong way...but...” She bit her lip. “You need to take somebody with you when you cut the tree down.”

He gave her a wide-eyed look. “Excuse me?”

She shifted, as if she was staggering under a burden. “Please?”

“Oh, no, not one of those premonitions?” Darby laughed. “No offense, Miss Baker, but you need to get out more!”

She flushed, embarrassed.

Tank narrowed his eyes as he studied her drawn features. He turned back to Darby. “Let’s err on the side of caution. Take Tim with you.”

Darby sighed and shook his head. “Waste of manpower, but if you say so, I’ll do it, boss.”

“I say so.”

Darby just nodded. His expression was eloquent. Darby had a degree in physics and was a pragmatist. He didn’t believe in that supernatural stuff. Tank didn’t, either, but Merissa’s worried face haunted him. He just grinned at Darby, who threw up his hands and went to find Tim.

Tank led the way to his big black ranch double-cabbed pickup truck and helped her up into the passenger seat.

She looked around with fascination when he climbed in under the wheel, and started the engine.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Can it cook and do laundry, too?” she wondered aloud, her eyes on all the displays and controls. “I mean, it looks as if it can do everything else. Even satellite radio...”

“It’s a big ranch and we spend a lot of time far away from the house. We have GPS, cell phones, you name it. The trucks are loaded with electronics on purpose. Plus big, expensive V-8 engines,” he added with a wicked glance of dark eyes. “If we weren’t green fanatics who generated our own energy, we’d be singled out for our inexcusable use of gasoline.”

“I drive a V-8, too,” she said with a shy smile. “Of course, mine is twenty years old and it only starts when it wants to. It didn’t today.”

He shook his head. “Maybe Darby is right. You do spend too much time alone. You should get a job.”

“I have one,” she said. “I do web design. It means I can work at home.”

“You won’t meet many people that way.”

Her expression went stiff. “I can do without most people. And they can certainly do without me. You said it yourself. People think I’m a witch.” She sighed. “Old Mr. Barnes’s milk cow went dry and he blamed me. He said it was because I lived near him. ‘Everybody knows that witches cause those things,’ he said.”

“Threaten him with a lawsuit. That will shut him up.”

She blinked and turned her head toward him. “Excuse me?”

“Hate speech,” he elaborated.

“Oh. I see.” She sighed. “I’m afraid it would only make things worse. Instead of that witch woman, I’d be that witch woman who sues everybody.”

He chuckled.

She drew in a breath and shivered. She could barely see through the blinding snow as he drove. “I’ll bet you have problems in this sort of weather. They say the old trail drivers used to stay with the cattle herds during storms and sing to them, to calm them, so they were less likely to stampede. The ones I read about were summer storms, though, with lightning.”

He was pleasantly surprised. “Those old trail drivers did baby the cattle. In fact, we have a couple of singing cowboys who do night duty for us with the herds.”

“Are their names Roy and Gene?”

That took him a minute. Then he burst out laughing. “No. Tim and Harry, actually.”

She grinned. Her whole face lit up. She was very pretty, he thought.

“Good one,” he told her with a nod.

They were nearing her cabin. It wasn’t much to look at. It had belonged to a hermit before the Bakers bought it about the time Merissa was born. Her mother’s husband had left suddenly when she was ten. People whispered about the reason. Most people locally thought it was her mother’s eerie abilities that had sent him to the divorce court.

Tank stopped the truck.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said, pulling up her hood. “But you didn’t have to do this.”

“I know. Thanks for the warning.” He hesitated. “What did you see, about Darby?” he asked, hating himself for the question.

She swallowed, hard. “An accident. But if he takes someone with him, I think it will be all right.” She held up a hand. “I know, you don’t believe in all this hoodoo. I don’t know why I was cursed with visions. I just tell what I know, when I think it will help.” Her soft eyes met his dark ones. “You’ve been kind to us over the years, all of you. When we couldn’t get out because of snowdrifts, you’d send groceries. When the car got stuck one time, you had a cowboy drive us home and get the car out.” She smiled. “You’re a kind person. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. So maybe I’m crazy. But please watch your back anyway.”

He smiled gently. “Okay.”

She smiled, shyly, and climbed out of the truck. She closed the door behind her and ran for the porch. Her red cape, against the fluffy white snow, reminded him of the heroine in a movie he’d seen about a werewolf. The red was stark, like blood, in that background of pure white.

An older woman, with silver hair, was waiting. She looked past Merissa and waved a little awkwardly. Merissa waved, too. They both went inside quickly.

Tank sat with the engine idling, staring at the closed door for a minute before he put the truck in gear and drove off.

“WHAT IN THE world are you laughing about?” Mallory asked his brother as he came into the living room later. Mallory and his wife, Morie, had a baby boy just a few months old—Harrison Barlow Kirk. They were just now able to sleep at night, to the relief of everyone in the household. Of course, Cane, the middle brother, and his wife, Bodie, were expecting. So it would begin all over again in the spring. Nobody minded. The brothers were all gooey over the baby.

A huge Christmas tree sat in the corner, with presents already piled up to the first set of limbs. It was an artificial tree. Morie was allergic to the live ones.

Tank was chuckling. “You remember the Bakers?”

“The strange folk in the cabin?” Mallory said with a grin. “Merissa and her mother, Clara. Sure.”

“Merissa came over to warn me about an assassination attempt.”

Mallory did a double take. “A what?”

“She says a man is coming to kill me.”

“Would you like to explain why?”

“She said it was related to the shooting in Arizona, when I was with the border patrol,” he explained, still uneasy from the memory. “One of the shooters thinks I could recognize his companion and cause trouble for a politician who plans to run for federal office. Drug-related stuff.”

“How did she know?”

Tank made a weird sound and waved his hands. “She had a vision!”

“I wouldn’t laugh too hard at that,” Mallory said strangely. “She warned a local woman about driving across a bridge. She said she had a vision of it collapsing. The woman went over it anyway a day later and the bridge fell out from under her. She barely survived.”

Tank frowned. “Eerie.”

“Some people have abilities that other people don’t believe in,” Mallory replied. “Every community has somebody who can talk out fire or talk off warts, dowse for water, even get glimpses of the future. It isn’t logical...you can’t prove it by scientific method. But I’ve seen it in action. You might recall that we have a well because I hired a dowser to come out here and find water for us.”

“A water witch.” Tank shivered. “Well, I don’t believe in that stuff and I never will.”

“I just hope Merissa was wrong.” He clapped an affectionate arm across his brother’s shoulders. “I’d hate to lose you.”

Tank laughed. “You won’t. I’ve survived a war and a handgun attack. I guess maybe I’m indestructible.”

“Nobody is that.”

“I was lucky, then.”

Mallory laughed. “Very.”

DALTON SAT DOWN with his laptop, having recalled Merissa’s statement about a sheriff in south Texas being shot.

He sipped coffee and laughed at himself for even believing such a wild tale. Until he looked through recent San Antonio news reports and discovered that a sheriff in Jacobs County, south of San Antonio, had been the victim of a recent assassination attempt by persons unknown, but believed to be involved with a notorious drug cartel across the border in Mexico.

Tank caught his breath and gaped at the screen. Sheriff Hayes Carson of Jacobs County, Texas, had been wounded by a would-be assassin in November, and later kidnapped, along with his fiancée, by members of a drug cartel from over the border. The sheriff and his fiancée, who was a local newspaper publisher, had given a brief interview about their ordeal. The leader of the drug cartel himself, whom his enemies called El Ladŕon—the thief—was killed by what was described as hand grenades tossed under his armored car near a town called Cotillo, across the border in Mexico. The assassin hadn’t been caught.

Tank leaned back in his chair with a rough sigh. He was disturbed by what Merissa had told him about his own ordeal, details that only his brothers and members of law enforcement had ever known. She couldn’t have found out in any conventional way.

Unless...well, she had a computer. She did website design.

His brain was working overtime. She had enough expertise to be able to break into protected files. That had to be it. Somehow, she’d managed to access that information about him from some government website.

The difficulties with that theory didn’t penetrate his confused brain. He wasn’t willing to consider the idea that a young woman who barely knew him had some supernatural access to his mind. Everyone with any sense knew that psychics were swindlers who just told people what they wanted to hear and made a living at it. There was no such thing as precognition or any of those other things.

He was a smart man. He had a degree. He knew that it was impossible for Merissa to get that information except through physical, and probably illegal, means.

But how did she know that he’d forgotten details of his ordeal, like the man in the suit, the DEA agent, who’d led him into the ambush and then disappeared?

He turned off the computer and got to his feet. There had to be a logical, rational explanation for all this. He just had to find it.

He’d left his car keys in the truck. He threw on his coat and trudged out through the snow to the garage to get them. The snow was getting really deep. If it didn’t let up, they were going to have to implement some emergency procedures to get feed to the cattle stranded in the far pastures.

Wyoming in snowstorms could be a deadly place. He remembered reading about people who were stranded and froze to death in very little time. He thought about Merissa and her mother, Clara, all alone in that isolated cabin. He hoped they had plenty of firewood and provisions, just in case. He’d have to send Darby over.

He frowned as he noticed that Darby wasn’t back yet. It had been several hours. He pulled out his cell phone and called Darby’s number.

It was Tim who answered.

“Oh, hi, boss,” Tim said. “I started to call you but I wanted to make sure first. Darby got hit with a limb when we brought the tree down.”

“What?” Dalton exploded.

“He’s going to be okay,” Tim said quickly. “Bruised him a bit and broke a rib, so he’ll be out of commission for a bit, but nothing too bad. He said if he’d been there alone, he’d probably be dead. Tree pinned him, you see. I was able to get it off. But if I hadn’t gone with him... He says he owes his life to that little Baker girl.”

Dalton let out the breath he’d been holding. “Yeah,” he murmured unsteadily. “I believe he just might.”

“Sorry I didn’t call sooner,” Tim added, “but it took us a while to get to town, to the doc. We’ll head back in a few minutes. Have to go by the pharmacy to pick up some meds for Darby.”

“Okay. Drive carefully,” Tank said.

“You bet, boss.”

Dalton hung up the cell phone. He was almost white. Mallory, coming into the room with a steaming cup of coffee, stopped short.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I just got cured of my skeptical attitude about psychic phenomena,” Tank said, and laughed shortly.