Mercenary's Woman (10 page)

72

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

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 com
mittee 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 que
ried.

"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 Ja-
cobsville."

"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

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MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

75

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 wanna-be who fancied himself
a mercenary. He was
forever reading a magazine for arm
chair 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. Har
ley 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 any
where.

"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.

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DIANA PALMER

77

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 ac
complices 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 Cancun, Mexico."

Eb's eyes narrowed.
"Cancun? 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 Cancun." 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 ille
gal," 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."

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MERCENARY'S WOMAN

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

DIANA
PALMER

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 ask
ing 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 re
porting 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