One Lucky Cowboy (32 page)

   "Ellacyn, this is your legacy. Your great-grandfather founded Ranger Oil in the boom days. You can't just sell it. I don't know what you think you've found, but…" Paul started again.

   She held up her hand. "I'm twenty-five as of Saturday. I can do anything I damn well please without anyone's signature. This oil company and the ranch are both mine, Paul. Or at least the oil company was until this morning, when I signed all the papers selling what's left of it to Tex-Okie. And I don't
think
anything. I know every thing. Phone records show multiple calls between you and Ramona. An audit shows that you've been using company funds for your personal high-dollar lifestyle, including paying out half a mil for the first half of the money to have me killed."

   "You can't do this. I've given this company thirteen years. You owe me."

   James stepped up and opened the briefcase. "What I have here is proof that she owes you nothing. It's also proof that you have just about run this company into the dirt. Tex-Okie is buying a flailing whale, and you're the one who killed it."

   Paul took a deep breath and started across the room. He wouldn't stop at his office or make a detour through the penthouse, but would go straight to the private parking lot, get into a low-slung, sleek black Porsche, and drive toward Jackson to implement his backup plan. A con man always had an exit, and he was a profes sional. The nest egg in his foreign account was at the lowest it had been in years but it would get him by until he could find another scam to work. Damn it all, he thought he had this one in his back pocket. What had gone wrong? He'd have to think about it and not make the same mistake twice. One thing about Steven Ferrell, he learned from his mistakes, and with all his identities he would never get caught. That young man who pulled his first con in northern Arkansas had learned a lot in the past forty years.

   But even the best laid backup plans can go to hell in a handbasket. When he opened the door it was in the face of two uniformed officers with handcuffs. They read him his rights and escorted him out to a black-and-white police car instead of a nice, shiny black Porsche. Paul was on his way to prison, not some exotic hideaway where he could conjure up another scam.

   After Jane formally turned the business over to the new buyers, she and James left the building. She didn't even look back.

   "It's amazing what shows up when you start turning over rocks, isn't it?" Jane said on their way to the eleva tors. "Who'd have thought that his name wasn't even Paul Stokes? It was a stroke of luck that you thought about running his fingerprints through the system. I'll be ordering a new tombstone for my mother's grave that has her real name on it. Stokes indeed! Wonder where he came up with that name? It's not even close to Steven Ferrell."

   "Who knows where a person gets a fake name? I understand you used Jane Day when you ran away," James reminded her.

   "Yes, I did. Jane is my middle name and probably what I'll go by the rest of my life. I like the Jane I've become better than the Ellacyn I was. Day is what happens when you almost say Hayes and stutter."

   James grinned. "I imagine you feel like you've been duped your whole life."

   They both got into the steaming hot truck and buckled up.

   "Not really. Momma and Daddy were both very honest. And my grandmother was a jewel. No, I can't say I've been duped my whole life… just the past few years and especially the past six weeks. Even then, there was a good honest man beside me."

   "Slade is a good man. Now you want to talk about selling your ranch or not?"

   "Let's talk about it over dinner," she said. "I'm buying. What do you want?"

   "I've got a four o'clock flight out of Jackson. I won't be here for dinner."

   "Dinner on the ranch is at noon. Supper is in the evening. And I've had enough selling for one day. But I'll either buy you dinner or have my cook fix whatever you want. As far as the ranch, give me a few weeks to get my bearings. If you are really inter ested after you have time to think about it, and I'm still in the mood to sell when I've had time, we'll negotiate. When we do, you'd best have a banker with a lot of money."

   "Why? I was thinking of paying cash."

Slade had been home a week and still hadn't put the Mustang up for sale. He parked it beside the hay barn where he and Jane had worked together those weeks that seemed like a hundred years before. Every evening he sat on the hood and watched the sun go down.

   Sometimes he smiled.

   Sometimes he frowned.

   Always he missed Jane.

   He'd picked up the phone a dozen times to call her, but every time he flipped it shut before he dialed the complete number. She had things to take care of, deci sions to make concerning her properties. If she wanted to talk to him, she'd call. After a week, he gave up hope.

   "You drivin' us to the Silver Saddle tonight?" Nellie asked Slade at the dinner table.

   It had been another hot August day, sun beating down, no clouds in sight, work to be done from daylight to dark. The hands drank more tea and lemonade than they ate food.

   "It's so hot I saw a lizard totin' a canteen on one shoulder and a machine gun on the other," Marty had said.

   Everyone had laughed except Slade, who had a flashback of machine gun fire at the safe house. Agent August had come by the ranch a few days before and told him how things had gone down.

   "So, are you taking us or not? We've got to have time to pretty up." Ellen poked Slade, bringing him back to the present.

   "Guess so."

   "Why in the hell don't you just call that woman? You can't tell us you weren't thinking about her," Marty said.

   "Don't have any idea who you are talkin' about," Slade growled.

   "Yes, you do. Call her and sell me that Mustang. I've drooled over it a whole week. I've got money saved for a down payment and I'll work for the rest or go to the bank. Dad says he'll co-sign for me," Vincent said.

   "Why don't the whole bunch of you leave me alone?" Slade said as he carried his plate to the trash can and went back to work.

   "Think he'll get over her?" Marty asked.

   "I hope not," Ellen said. "I hope it eats at him until one morning we wake up and that Mustang is gone to Mississippi."

   "Well, if it is, I hope it comes back and he sells it to me. That is one sweet little car," Vince said.

   "Boy, you need a pickup, not a
sweet little car
," one of the other hired hands said. "In my day if we'd talked like that someone would have brought out some starch for our wrist."

   "What? Oh! You are crazy. I'm a ladies man. That's why I want the car. Just think how many chicks I can pick up in that ride. Every kid in this area has a truck. I'd be special with that car," Vince said.

   "Dream on," Ellen said. "Until he gets over Jane that car won't budge."

   "Where does she live? I'll go bring her back here myself if it'll help old Slade stop that mooning around every night. Sometimes I expect him to start howling at the moon, the way he just sits there," Vince said.

   "Come on, kid. Let's go back to work. Cars or trucks don't have a thing to do with how them cows are going to get from one pasture to the other before dark," Marty said.

Nellie wore a flowing broomstick skirt in a red bandana print with a matching red T-shirt and red kid leather sandals. Her gray hair was freshly washed and curled around her face. Ellen was dressed in her trademark "loud, cheap, and sassy," as she called it with her hair done up in a red puff with lots of hairspray.

   Slade took a fast shower and put on a pair of soft jeans, the T-shirt with a dolphin on the front that he'd gotten in San Antonio, and his old worn boots. He combed his wet hair with his fingertips and didn't even bother with cologne. He settled into a recliner in the living room and read a J.A. Jance book entitled
Failure to Appear
while he waited on the ladies to make their appearance.

   "Is our chauffeur ready?" Ellen asked as she swirled into the living room in a gauze skirt of bright orange with yellow lilies.

   "He is."

   "And what is he going to do while we are dancing the leather off our shoes?" Nellie asked.

   "He's going to read in the truck. It's a fairly pleasant evening and I've got this new contraption Jane picked up in Galveston. It's a booklight. You just snap it on the top of the book and it sheds enough light to read by. So you ladies can flirt to your hearts content, and I'll get old Jonas Beaumont out of this predicament."

   "Sounds like a real excitin' evenin' to me," Ellen groaned.

   "Why don't you just call her?" Nellie asked.

   "She knows my number and where I live. She's got a lot on her mind to work out. It could be that we were just drawn together because we damned near got killed so many times. We sure didn't like each other before that, so who's to say we would afterwards? Time will tell," he said.

   "Sure, for you. But we're two old women who might not have so much of that precious commodity called time. Humor us and call her," Nellie said.

   "Tell you what. If in six months she hasn't called me, I'll humor you and call her. That's my final word on it. Now are we going to go to the Silver Saddle, or stand here fussing about Jane?"

   He drove them to the dance hall and watched as they went inside. He was the adult and his grandmother and aunt were the youngsters. The roles had reversed and he felt old. They'd dance, have a few drinks, and talk about the fun they'd had for days. He'd sit in the truck and wait to drive them back home like a dutiful father figure.

   Opening his book, he found the right page, clipped the light to the cover, turned the switch, and presto, enough light to read by. It was an ingenious invention that Jane assured him was not anything new but had been on the market for years.

   He sighed and tried to read but his mind wandered. He really should sell the Mustang to Vince. The boy wanted it and it was crazy to just let it sit out there under the stars. But every time he looked at it he remembered all the good times they'd had that week living on the edge, running from an assassin. Who would have thought Slade Luckadeau would be a knight shining Mustang? Maybe in six months he'd be ready to get rid of it.

   He made himself look at the words and read. He liked the J.P. Beaumont better than the Joanna Brady series and had picked up every one he could find as he traveled home the previous week from Mississippi. He wondered if Jane was reading a Jance mystery that evening.

   It took a few minutes of severe concentration but soon he was in the middle of the book following every move Jonas made. An hour later the words began to blur and his head drooped down on his chest. The little light burned on but Slade was dreaming of a burning house out in the corner of Oklahoma and Texas. Jane had kept up with him, her hand in his, and she'd even stepped up and helped get rid of that cell phone. They made a good team when they were scared out of their wits and on the run. When it came to plain, routine, everyday living, the story might be altogether different. In his dream he replayed the whole night up to the time he crawled into bed with her in that motel in Childress.

   They were both too tired for anything to happen after they went to bed but his dream played in a different way. He could feel Jane's body plastered next to his, could smell the beer on her breath and her hands slipping up under his T-shirt to touch the hair on his chest. His eyes fluttered. God, he didn't want to wake up. Dreams were at least better than the nothing he'd have if he opened his eyes.

   "Oh, darlin', I've missed you. I'm so sorry I was so mean," Jane said.

"I missed you, too," he whispered.

   Her lips brushed across his but something didn't seem right. When Jane kissed him every nerve in his body wanted more. These kisses left him feeling like he should clean his mouth with alcohol. He opened his eyes wide but at such close quarters all he could see was double images of mascara-coated eyelashes. Her hands began to fiddle with his belt buckle. He reached up and pushed back on her shoulders and not six inches away, her back plastered against the steering wheel, was Kristy.

   "Good. Now you're fully awake, we can get more comfortable. Let me get this bra off," she said.

   "Don't bother," he said through clenched teeth.

   "Did I upset the baby waking him up? Well, I'll make it up to you, darlin'." She kept tugging at the back of her shirt trying to pull it free from skin-tight jeans.

   He opened the door and practically fell out, his book and light landing on the ground beside the truck. "I said, 'don't bother.'"

   "What's the matter with you? That woman left you high and dry. Don't you realize she's too good for the likes of a plain old farmer? But I'm not, Slade. I promise I won't be ugly anymore. Come on back in the truck, honey. Let me show you how much I love you."

   "Go home, Kristy. I don't love you."

   "But darlin' I love you enough for both of us. Let me prove it. We just never did get to bed. Once we do, you'll see how good I can be," she giggled.

   "You're drunk."

   "But not so much I don't know how to please a man."

   "Go home. I'm not interested."

   "Well, don't ever say you didn't get one last chance. Stay on out there on the Double L and pine away for some rich bitch you can't have. See if I care." She stumbled out of the truck, stepping on the little light he'd dropped, and weaved across the parking lot to her uncle's Cadillac.