Dragon and the Dove (25 page)

“Stop worrying, Jen. You’re like an old
woman,” Shulan said in Cantonese, her voice rising enough for
Jackson to hear her over the drone of the engines. She sounded
exasperated with the old man in the seat next to her. “She will
accept him onto the island, and she will take care he is not
harmed. I can do no better for him than to bring him here, away
from Hong Kong and my mother’s spies.”

She? Jackson thought, his body tensing in
spite of himself. He didn’t need another “she.” He didn’t want
another “she” running and ruining his life. He’d always known
maritime bounty hunting was dangerous work—pirates had only gotten
more daring and more ruthless over the centuries, not less—but he’d
never thought it would be a woman who finally brought him to his
knees, let alone three: Baolian, the “hell has no fury like a woman
scorned” contingent; Shulan, the one who had saved him for reasons
he’d rather not believe; and now the new “she,” the one who would
take him and keep him on a small strip of land floating between the
earth and the sky.

He, the hunter, had been trapped by women,
captured by women. His only consolation was in knowing his brother,
Cooper, had survived Baolian’s ambush on the godforsaken beach
south of Singapore where he’d been shot. Shulan had sworn that was
true, and Jackson believed the pirate princess. It was easy to
believe her when she held his hands in hers and gazed at him with
her warm amber eyes, her expression sweetly innocent, assuring him
she only had his welfare at heart. It was harder to believe her
when she had an extra chain added to his bindings. He wished she
would hurry up and ransom him, get the whole ordeal over with. He
could imagine no other reason for her interference in her mother’s
fit of deadly pique, despite her wild story of him being her
long-lost half brother.

The plane dropped in altitude, making a slow
descent into the mist. Within seconds, they were enshrouded in
impenetrable fog. The mountain and the island’s rolling green hills
were gone, along with the azure sea and the streaking brilliance of
dawn across the horizon.

An unexpected calm overtook him in those
silent moments of blind flying, a peace he shouldn’t have felt.
Maybe it was merely acceptance of the inevitable, but it felt like
something more, like a promise of life, or joy.

The fanciful thought brought another wry
grin to his lips. Joy. Right. He was losing it.

“Sedate him,” Shulan ordered, and his peace
shattered.

He swore, a vicious sound that had no affect
whatsoever on his jailers. He felt the prick of the needle and the
flood of warmth that always preceded a deep, dreamless sleep.

“When he’s out, take off the cuffs and
chains, and be careful with him.” Shulan’s voice came to him as if
from a far distance. “If he drowns in the surf, I’ll turn you all
over to my mother!”

Hell, he decided in one last hazy thought.
Not life. Not joy. The island was going to be pure hell.

* * * * * *

Read on for an excerpt from
Stevie Lee

One

Halsey Morgan was alive—bad news sure
traveled fast.

Stevie Lee Brown held the telephone receiver
at arm’s length and gave it a long, hard look, barely fighting the
temptation to rip the darn thing off the wall. Ten lousy calls in
the last four hours had all reported the same lousy news—Halsey
Morgan was alive. From the Grand Lake postmaster to the station
attendant at the Gas Em Up, everybody wanted to extend their
sympathies.

“Halsey Morgan,” she muttered, finally
hanging up the phone in disgust. With the unconscious ease of
habit, she slumped against the beer cooler and absently wiped her
hands on the bar towel wrapped around her waist. Dampness stained
the front of her worn jeans. Loose strands of honey-brown hair
clung to her cheeks and trailed down the front of her red shirt,
adding to her mussed and tired appearance.

Sure as the sun rising in the morning, she
was doomed to spend the rest of her days in this backwater
wilderness tucked up against the Rocky Mountains. The Trail’s End
Bar actually would be the end of her trail. The same old faces, the
same old gossip year after year, she thought, and all thanks to a
miraculously resurrected Halsey Morgan. Obviously the rumors about
his death in the South Pacific had been just that—rumors. If half
of the rest of what she’d heard about his exploits was true, he
should have been dead a long time ago. But he wasn’t, and now her
plans were ruined.

“Hey! Stevie! What’s a guy gotta do to get a
drink around here?” A booming male voice carried the question into
the semidarkened hall.

A weary sigh escaped her lips. Too tired to
kick the man out, she crossed her arms and leaned harder into the
beer cooler to wait him out. How she’d ever allowed Kong Kingman to
overdrink was beyond her. Sure, she’d had a lot on her mind, but
only a fool would let the behemoth of Grand County get snockered in
her bar, and the one thing Stevie prided herself on was being
nobody’s fool.

“Hey! I know you’re back there!” Kong
hollered again. Of course she was there, she thought irritably,
tucking her hands further under her arms. She was always back
there, cleaning up, serving up, and dishing out.

Damn that Halsey Morgan anyway.

* * *

Halsey had gotten himself another bargain,
that was for certain. Why he didn’t invest in a real car instead of
always picking up somebody else’s lemon was beyond him; or rather,
it was beyond his financial situation. Everything was beyond his
financial situation. Delilah had sucked him dry.

He dropped the last of his groceries into
the bed of the pickup truck and wrestled a tarp over them to keep
out the high country blizzard. Heavy gusts of wind whipped his hair
and chilled his face. His half-frozen fingers struggled with a
length of climbing rope.

It was springtime in the Rockies, when
Mother Nature let loose with her whole bag of tricks from blizzards
to thunderstorms, rolling them all up into one and throwing them
across the night sky. Bolts of lightning danced behind the
low-hanging clouds. Thunder rumbled across the Kawuneeche Valley
and echoed off the Never Summer Range. The beauty and power of the
display got his blood going; Mom Nature was good at that. She’d
stolen his heart at a very young age, and she’d never let go.

He slip-knotted the rope, then jumped in the
cab and slammed the door a couple of times until it caught. Each
attempt deposited a fresh layer of snow on the seat, and tightened
his mouth another degree toward grim. He didn’t need this kind of
trouble, not after what he’d been through. People had been looking
at him funny all day, setting his nerves on edge. Halsey wasn’t a
common name, but the wide-eyed, slack-jawed response of the Grand
Lake postmaster had made him wonder if it was stranger than he
thought. He hoped not. He needed to figure out a way to make a
living in this town, which meant getting a job—which wasn’t likely
if everyone he ran into looked at him funny.

With equal amounts of cussing and praying,
he turned the key and waited through the truck’s prerequisite
coughing and hacking. When the engine finally caught, a flicker of
a smile crossed his mouth. “Just get me home.” He gave the dash a
solid pat.

Home. The word had a foreign sound in his
mind. He’d spent too many years in faraway places, he thought as he
wiggled and shook the gearshift into first—and too many months
stuck on that island where even the greatest boat builder in the
world couldn’t have put back together what the South Pacific had
taken apart.

Hal didn’t know what the rest of the world
had called the maelstrom of wind and water that had swallowed his
sailboat and spat it out on a strange and desolate shore, but he
called the storm ‘Delilah,’ the lady who had laid him low. If a
cruising yachtsman hadn’t spotted the wreckage, he’d still be
rotting away under the coconut palms, living on sushi, and trying
to rig together everything that could float. The episode had put a
slight crimp in his adventuresome spirit and a major fracture in
his bankroll. He told himself he was damn lucky to be back in the
good old U.S. of A., told himself he was glad to be home—but he
wished like hell he still had
Freedom
under his feet with
the wind in her sails.

Instead what he had under his feet was a
worn-out clutch and a gas pedal that went through the floorboard.
He’d never seen the likes of it. A rainstorm in Utah had soaked him
to the knees, and now his legs were encased in a thin layer of icy
cotton.

Yessiree
, he thought with a wry grin,
darn glad to be back in the good old U.S. of A.
Maybe he
should have a drink to celebrate his return before heading back to
the cabin.

As if seconding his thoughts, the engine
groaned and choked
. Hal slammed
down on the clutch and gave the truck more gas. The damn thing
loved gas. Hal doubted if they’d missed a station between the West
Coast and the Continental Divide. The engine warmed up in spits and
jerks, and then, out of the blue, it died. Not a hesitant death,
not in the least. Nope. Hal had enough experience to know when an
engine left for the great beyond, and his just had.

Wonderful
. He slumped over the
steering wheel, muttering every dockside obscenity he knew. The
list took a couple of minutes to complete and did little to ease
his anger. Now, besides needing a drink, he needed a ride home.

Fat chance, he thought. The grocery clerk
had locked the door behind him and was probably long gone. He
glanced out the windows for another sign of life in the deserted
mountain town and found only one.

TRAIL’S END . . . TRAIL’S END, a flash of
blue neon glowed at the end of the block, backlighting the flurries
of wind-driven snow. He sighed. This wasn’t at all how he’d
imagined his end of the trail. An ice crevasse on Mount Everest
maybe, or getting “Maytagged” in a stretch of white water, but not
freezing to death in the middle of Grand Lake, Colorado.

A wry smile curved a corner of his mouth
again and stuck.
Trail’s End
. If he wasn’t so tired and
hungry, the situation would be funny. But there wasn’t anything
funny about freezing to death, so he hauled himself out of the cab
and began the cold walk to the Trail’s End Bar.

* * *

“He looks a little rough around the edges,
Stevie. I wouldn’t want to tangle with him.”

Stevie heard her older sister’s summation of
Halsey Morgan through the buzz and crackle of the phone line and
let out another heavy sigh before answering. “I don’t plan on
tangling with him, Nola. If he’s got the money to get his property
out of hock, fine. If not, I’ll pay the taxes on it again this year
and it will be mine. All legal. All tidy.”
All shot to hell in a
hand basket,
she added silently, doubting if Mr. Morgan had any
intention of losing his cabin and acreage to back taxes. What a
sweet deal it had been.

“Well, he didn’t look as though he had much
money.” Nola’s voice lifted hopefully.

“His kind never do.” But his kind managed to
wander the world freely, which was more than Stevie could manage.
No one could tell her he didn’t have something stashed away.

“Dried beans, generic coffee, a loaf of
bread, a dozen eggs, ten pounds of potatoes, peanut butter, no
jelly . . .”

Stretching the phone
cord behind her, Stevie
walked over to the window and pressed her nose against the glass.
“Nola?” she asked, interrupting the rundown of Morgan’s grocery
list. “Why are you telling me this?” A snowplow turned onto the
main street and lowered its blade. Great, she thought, she
shouldn’t have too much trouble getting home. Her Mustang had
chains, but she wasn’t up to putting them on tonight.

“And three of those little boxes of macaroni
and cheese,” Nola added, finishing the list. “Isn’t it obvious? The
man is broke. Your position is secure.”

That was a pretty big leap of logic, even
for Nola, Stevie thought as she walked back to the beer cooler and
rested against the door. The phone line hummed and buzzed through
the silence in typical backwoods style, even though the call
originated less than two blocks away.

“Okay,” her sister finally conceded. “I’m
sorry, honey. We all know how much you were counting on . . . well,
on Halsey Morgan being dead or something.”

Unvarnished with particulars, the truth
sounded awful, and Stevie felt an immediate pang of guilt. That it
was her first pang all day only increased her unease. Ridiculous,
she chided herself, trying to brush the emotion aside. Most people
wouldn’t last a week doing the things Halsey Morgan did year in and
year out, but then Halsey Morgan wasn’t most people.

From the Himalayas to the Amazon Basin, he’d
blazed a trail of danger and adventure. When he had first
disappeared in the South Pacific, some folks had believed he’d be
found, hale and hearty, soaking up French Polynesian sunshine on
one of the outer islands. They had discounted his disappearance as
a mere breakdown in communications. “Halsey Morgan,” they said,
“followed his own star.” Skeptics, like Stevie, usually added,
“—right off the edge of the earth.”