The Payback Man (11 page)

“Twice a week? Two hundred at ten bucks a pop?” Robert looked at the bull with wide eyes. “Man, that’s more’n I get for a rock.” He glanced at Eleanor. “’Course I never did sell no cocaine. The cops planted it on me.”

“The only difference is that someone has to do the collecting,” Eleanor said sweetly. “Any takers?”

Robert’s eyes grew huge. “No, ma’am!”

She laughed. “Don’t worry. We won’t start collecting him until spring, and by then I hope he’ll have at least a couple of blue ribbons from stock shows.”

“Whew.”

“We feed morning and night and top off the water troughs every morning,” Eleanor said. “The same for Marcus Aurelius, but nobody, and I mean nobody, is to go into that enclosure with him until we know how he reacts around people. Everybody got that?”

“Don’t have to tell Sweet Daddy twice,” Sweet Daddy said.

“He may be a perfect gentleman, but nobody’s ever demanded anything of him in his young life. If he resents our attentions, he could stomp any one of us through to China. Okay, everybody, evening chores, and a soft drink, then you’re off for the night. See you tomorrow early. We have to start getting that second pasture ready for the buffalo and finish bedding the stalls for J.K.’s quarter horses.”

The soft drinks every evening had become a tradition in just the short time that Eleanor had worked with the men. She could afford the minor expense, and the public relations value with her team was well worth it. Now without Mike Newman, everyone could relax, although Selma still kept the shotgun at hand.

Eleanor was leaning against the door of the barn when Steve came over to her.

“May I speak to you?”

“Sure.”

“Can we go into the office? I need some clarification on some of the fields you want in your database.”

“Of course.” She called to Selma, “Chadwick has some questions about the database. We’ll be in the office, but we’ll leave the door open. Is that all right?”

“With the door open? Yeah, fine.” But her mouth twisted in a tiny grin, which Eleanor pretended not to notice.

Eleanor entered the office with Steve right behind her.

She took a deep breath and thrust her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “So, what problems are you having?”

“With the computer program? None.”

“Then why—”

“I had to speak to you. You know why I’m here, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You’ve read my file. I saw it in your face when I mentioned the polo ponies. Don’t ever play poker. You’ll lose.”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation.” She stared past him.

“I swear to you I did not kill my wife.”

“Steve—”

“I haven’t bothered to try to convince anybody I’m innocent for a long time. I told myself it was enough that
I
knew. Now it matters that
you
believe me. It shouldn’t, but it does.”

“A jury didn’t believe you. Why should I?”

“Chelsea was my best friend, as well as my wife. I could never have harmed her.” His voice had grown louder.

Eleanor touched his mouth with her fingertips. “Shh. They’ll hear you.”

He grasped her hand and held it to his lips.

She shivered, but not with fear. “Please. You mustn’t.”

She pulled away from him, but he held her gaze. “Do you know what it’s like to spend years convincing yourself you don’t need the warmth of a touch, a kind word, someone who actually looks into your eyes and sees a human being and not just a number?”

“Steve, please, Selma could come in at any minute.”

“All the more reason to tell you now. I may not have another chance. The day the jury convicted me, I knew I could survive in prison only if I stayed cold and shut myself off emotionally from everything that was going to happen to me.”

His voice now was low and urgent. “Dammit, until now I thought it had worked. I was handling it. Then one day you climb out of that truck. From that moment you never treated us like numbers, like criminals. The way you’ve looked after Big, the way you touched me and worried about me when I was hurt… You’ve awakened memories of a world of peace and love and honor where you don’t have to watch your back every moment or look for ulterior motives in every conversation. It hurts to remember, because I know I can never be a part of that world again.”

“Come on, people, time to go home.” Selma’s voice was louder than necessary.

Steve walked back to the waiting men without a backward glance.

Eleanor leaned against the wall beside the open door and tried to breathe. She was afraid. Afraid of believing
him, afraid of caring what happened to him, of being caught up in everything Raoul Torres warned her about, and most of all, afraid that she no longer had the ability to tell truth from fiction, right from wrong, and simple loneliness from the blossoming of affection.

She hadn’t been emotionally touched by any man since Jerry died. Not even Mac Thorn had stirred her, yet this…this killer heated her blood, left her shaken, confused and frightened.

Jerry had not been the first man in her life. She understood the game, or thought she did.

But nothing had prepared her to feel such a pull of heart against brain as she felt now. This was a looking-glass world in which no one was what he seemed. Raoul had warned her that sociopaths tended to be expert at reading the needs of the people they came in contact with and reflecting them back. But they couldn’t keep up the pretense for long. Sooner or later the true personality emerged.

Had Steve recognized how lonely she was, how she longed to sink into a strong man’s arms? Did he understand how much she ached to feel the body of a man she loved moving inside her?

Did he understand her fear that she would never make love again? That no man would ever want her as Jerry had? Worst of all, that she would never be able to feel that complex mixture of passion and trust that she’d known with him?

Even if she were to trust Steve, they could never be alone together. Even the few sentences they’d spoken had been watched. All the men knew. Selma knew. Ernest Portree and the entire staff of the prison farm probably knew. And laughed at her, even pitied her.

All she knew was that her body and her spirit were hungry for his touch. She longed to feel his lips on hers, feel his body hard against her, see his face above her.

She suddenly realized she was completely alone in the
twilight—Selma and the man had left. She walked through the barn and out to Marcus Aurelius’s paddock. The moment he scented her, he swung his great head toward her, snuffled and sauntered slowly over to where she stood beside the electric fence.

God, he was arrogant. So sure of his maleness, his superiority, his dominance over any female, even a human one.

“Not me, buddy,” she said. “I’m the wrong species.”

She could have sworn he shrugged. She reached carefully across the fence and touched his nose. Without warning he wrapped his tongue around her finger. She scratched the knot of curls in the center of his broad forehead. He sighed.

A moment later he pawed, spun and raced off to the center of the paddock again, for all the world like a fighting bull ready to charge.

“And they say females are changeable,” she said. “This particular female had better get her act together, or she’s going to get her booty bounced out of here before she’s even finished unpacking.”

E
LEANOR WAS SCHEDULED
for a short shift at the clinic—only four hours, five to nine. She walked into the clinic from the staff parking lot in back, passing the cattle holding pen that held the wounded pit bulls in their cages, but in the low light, couldn’t see much. The dogs set up a chorus of barking, but there were no growls.

Up front Mabel presided over an empty waiting room.

“Nobody waiting?” Eleanor asked.

“Dinnertime. Wang Chun just left. Every time I think about how much a lot of our owners look like their pets I think of how Mrs. Milligan and Wang Chun don’t. You think she wanted a Chinese crested because it’s so fragile and dainty and Mrs. Milligan could play linebacker?”

“Tacky, Mabel, tacky. How’re the pit bulls?”

Mabel sighed. “Lost another one today. Too starved to fight the infection.”

“Not the little female? She’s the one I worked on.”

“No, one of the male dogs. We got them all bathed and cleaned up today. Talk about your three-ring circus!”

“Did anybody get bitten?”

“I think they were too scared to bite. A couple of the Humane Society volunteers came in to help, thank heaven. I don’t think any of those poor mutts had ever felt warm water before, much less soap. Had to bathe most of them at least twice, and a couple three times. You should have seen the water—filthy. And then two of them we had to hand-bathe because we didn’t want to get their incisions wet. According to Dr. Rick, most of them are pretty young—under a year old.”

“Most of them don’t survive much beyond that.”

“Terrible to think so, but you’re probably right. That female had no more business having puppies that young than I do.”

Eleanor patted Mabel’s shoulder. “The mind boggles at the thought of you having puppies.”

“Oh, go on back to Dr. Sarah’s office and read your charts. I’ll call you when the clients start coming in after supper. You’ve got a couple of notes from Dr. Sarah. She’s finally stopped throwing up.”

“Any large animals staying overnight?”

“Here.” Mabel handed Eleanor a stack of charts. “Megan Cormack’s Welsh pony is in the founder stall with his front hooves bandaged. He needs a shot of bute every four hours for the pain. Dr. Sarah says watch him, he bites.”

“Ponies usually do.”

“And one of Mr. Montano’s ewes is down at the far end. She had a run-in with a barbed-wire fence and tore her udder. Dr. Sarah stitched her up and says just to watch her, too. She’s had antiobiotics in her feed, so she doesn’t need a shot.”

“Thanks, Mabel.”

“Can I say something?”

“Since when do you ask permission?”

“This new job—are you sure you haven’t taken on too much?”

“Why?”

“Well, frankly, you’ve got circles under your eyes so dark they look like tar pits.”

“I haven’t been sleeping all that well in my new house. I’m not used to the peace and quiet after my little apartment.”

“Those cons, or whatever they’re called in these politically correct days, are they giving you problems?”

“Not the way you mean.”

“Then how?”

Eleanor would dearly have loved to dump all her feelings about Steve onto Mabel’s shoulders, but she knew darned well what Mabel would say and she didn’t want to hear it. Everybody said the same thing. Everybody’s advice was probably right-on. So why couldn’t she accept it? “It’s a long story, Mabel. I can’t really talk about it. I’m handling it.”

She took the folders and walked through the door back to the examining rooms before Mabel had a chance to reply, but she did catch a decided “humph” as the door shut behind her.

The dogs began to bark again the moment they spotted her walking up to the cow enclosure. As soon as tomorrow some of them would be well enough to be exercised in the parking lot and paddocks behind the clinic. Could they be trusted? Did they have any idea how to walk on a leash?

She sat cross-legged in front of their cages and talked quietly to them until they settled down. Several of them seemed downright cheerful, and grinned at her. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea to send them to the prison for rehabilitation. She’d have to work out the details. They wouldn’t be able to share quarters with the men; there wasn’t enough room in the dormitory. But there was
plenty of room in the barn to construct kennels, even large kennels with runs, and if they were found to be trustworthy and trainable, they could accompany the men on their duties.

They might harass the stock, which wouldn’t be acceptable. But if they were still puppies under a year old, or even a little older, their minds might not have been irreparably harmed.

She longed to open the cage of the brindle female, but she knew Mac would kill her if he wasn’t with her, so she had to be satisfied with scratching the dog’s one remaining ear through the wire mesh. “Did you have a name, I wonder? Probably something sweet like Killer. We’ll have to fix that.”

She checked the other patients, gave the pony another shot of Butezalodine for pain, narrowly avoided having a chunk removed from her forearm by his incredibly fast teeth and finally went to Sarah’s office to read the charts.

Tonight, when she didn’t want time to think, there were no emergencies and only a few cases of sniffles among the dogs and cats brought in by their owner. She tried to concentrate on reading up on the diseases of beef cattle, but the words ran together.

She had to make up her own mind about Steve, and to do that, she needed more facts. Why had a jury convicted him? And why only of voluntary manslaughter?

She remembered that the lawyer listed on his case file was Leslie Vickers. She didn’t know the man, but she knew his reputation. He seldom lost a case. Very high priced, high profile. His services must have cost Steve a great deal of money.

She looked up his office number in the telephone book and called, leaving a message on his answering machine for him to call her. Would he? When she was dealing with the aftermath of Jerry’s death, she’d found getting in touch with her lawyer next to impossible. She ended by men
tioning that she was calling about Steve Chadwick. That could work for or against her.

If he didn’t call back, how could she find out more?

What about Steve’s family? If, as the file said, they still lived in the area, then perhaps they’d talk to her. He said nobody ever came to visit him. Did that mean that, they too, thought he was guilty?

She looked up as Mabel walked into the office and stood on the other side of the desk with her hands planted on her ample hips.

“Hey,” Eleanor said. “Who’s minding the store?”

“Up front? Nobody at the moment. I left a note on the registration desk that says ‘Buzz if you need assistance.’ So either we talk here and leave the desk unattended, or you come up front with me and talk there. Your choice.”