Stars & Stripes (42 page)

Zane eyed his father. Harrison glanced at him, meeting his eyes. It seemed a clear-cut decision. It was only money, after all. Money for the lives inside the house was simple.

Harrison nodded at the men in the yard. “I say yes, you know you can push me around. You’ll keep coming back and taking and threatening until I’m dead and buried and got nothing but disgrace to my name. I don’t need money. But I ain’t giving you my pride.”

“Dad,” Zane whispered, both impressed with his father and terrified that they were going to shoot his lover in the head as he watched.

“It’s all right, Zane,” he whispered, and then, to the men outside, “You boys burn down the house, you only hurt yourselves. My money’ll burn down with it, and then what will you do?”

“Uncle Harry, think about this!” Jamie shouted.

“I ain’t your uncle, boy!”

“That’s it,” Cody snarled. He raised the barrel to the back of Ty’s head.

“No!” Zane shouted, panic and rage blinding him as he lunged for the stairs. Harrison grabbed him.

Glass broke as Mark took advantage of the distraction to bust the window with the butt of his rifle.

Ty jerked his head to the side and rolled, kicking the barrel of the shotgun and knocking it aside. It went off as Ty tackled Cody to the ground. Ten feet away, Jamie was knocked to his back, screaming and bloody.

Ronnie raised his gun and Harrison pulled Zane back inside as the man fired at them. The birdshot didn’t even reach the porch at that distance. Harrison slammed the front door as Ronnie switched guns.

Mark and Joe took aim and fired in return, trying to cover Ty as he wrestled with Cody in the yard and trying to deter Ronnie from peppering the house with his .45.

“Dad, go get the girls and get to your truck!” Mark shouted between shots. “Get everyone out the back!”

Harrison looked to Zane, and Zane nodded. Harrison moved away to retrieve Beverly, Annie, and Sadie and get them to safety. Zane peered around the windowsill to see how Ty was faring. He and Cody were scuffling in the dirt, but despite the covering fire, Ronnie was wading in. Ty was an injured man with one good arm and a rope already around his neck, fighting two healthy men. And he was losing. Badly.

Zane took the rifle Harrison had readied and took aim, standing above Mark and looking through the sights at Ronnie as the big man grabbed Ty and held him. Cody pulled a knife from a sheath at his thigh.

Zane let out a breath and pulled the trigger. Ty jerked in Ronnie’s arms and turned both their bodies. The bullet went through Ronnie’s arm and he howled, and Ty cried out too as they both hit the ground.

Cody dove to the gravel and all three men were out of sight.

“Did you just shoot your boyfriend?” Mark cried.

“Fuck!”

Joe and Mark both grabbed an extra gun and darted for the door, on Zane’s heels. Harrison had returned and followed them onto the porch. They were just in time to see Cody get to his feet and grab up a revolver from the grass. He pointed it down at Ty, who was writhing in the dirt, holding his arm where Zane’s shot had hit him.

Zane raised his rifle.

The others all cried out before Zane could pull the trigger. He caught a flash of orange out of the corner of his eye: Barnum the Bengal tiger speeding across the yard toward Ty and the others.

“Ty!”

Ty rolled and saw the tiger coming. He curled into a ball as Barnum rushed him. The tiger leapt over him, claws extended, graceful body long and lean as he attacked. Cody screamed and fired his gun, but the tiger hit him at full force, sending him skidding through the gravel a solid ten feet away.

Claws slashed and teeth sank into flesh. Cody screamed, a bloodcurdling sound that Zane didn’t think he’d soon be forgetting.

Zane sprinted across the yard toward Ty, who was still curled in a ball with his arms covering his head. He grabbed Ty’s arm and yanked him to his feet.

Ty wavered, but seemed to rally as Zane wrapped his arm around him. “Somebody shot me, Zane.”

Zane nodded and pulled the rope off Ty’s neck. He shoved him toward the porch, then bent to check Ronnie’s pulse. The man was alive, but he wasn’t moving. Zane gathered all his weapons, then left him to lie there, unconscious and defenseless, at the mercy of the enraged tiger.

He turned to follow his partner, but Ty was rooted to the spot, watching Barnum savage the ranch hand who had tried to kill him. Zane couldn’t bring himself to look.

“Come on, Ty,” Zane whispered. He tugged at Ty’s arm.

Ty shook his head, then he gave a short whistle. “Barnum!”

The tiger jerked his head up and growled. Ty and Zane both staggered back as if it had been a warning. Ty stopped his retreat, though, and said the tiger’s name again with a little more authority. Zane couldn’t help but glance sideways at the animal. Barnum had Cody’s hand in his mouth, and the arm was obviously broken and possibly beyond repair. There were gashes and punctures all over his body, but nothing like the damage the tiger could have done.

“Easy now. Come on,” Ty said to the tiger, and after a moment Barnum released Cody’s hand and began to prowl toward Ty. Zane started backing away.

Ty held his hand out, breathing out like he was trying to calm himself. His hand was trembling. Barnum approached and nosed his bloody muzzle against Ty’s palm. Ty carefully scratched under his chin “That’s twice you saved me. Good boy.”

Barnum chuffed and then pushed onto his back feet, putting one huge paw on each of Ty’s shoulders. Ty couldn’t take the weight of the 600 pound tiger and they both toppled to the ground. Barnum sat down with a huff and rubbed his face against Ty’s as Ty gasped for air. Then he wrapped his paw around Ty’s head and began licking Ty’s wounded face. Ty didn’t struggle, merely closed his eyes and held his breath.

“Ty?” Zane whispered.

“Just go get someone with a tranquilizer gun please,” Ty said in a soothing, almost sing-song voice. “Slowly.”

Zane backed away, watching in fascination as the tiger lay down in the grass and rested his chin on Ty’s stomach. Mark had already retrieved Annie, and she was readying her tranquilizer gun even as Zane reached the porch.

They tossed out the meat that had been thawing for the BBQ to lure Barnum away from Ty, and as soon as Ty was out of his reach, Annie shot the dart. They had to wait only a minute or two before the tiger was out.

Ty sat down beside him and laid a hand on his head as everyone else surveyed the damage. Harrison’s men and several of the party guests who’d been caught in the house rushed to the barn to try to contain the fire. Minutes later, they could hear the police cars and fire trucks approaching, sirens blazing. Tish and several interns from the Roaring Springs Sanctuary arrived ten minutes after the police to take possession of Barnum and return him to the sanctuary.

Zane thought Ty might cry as they loaded Barnum into the truck.

“Will they have to put him down since he attacked someone?” Ty asked the sheriff as the Roaring Springs truck ambled down the drive.

The sheriff glanced at Cody’s ravaged body and shook his head. “Looks like he got hit by a truck to me. Ain’t that what happened, son?”

Ty stared at him, eyes wide. Then he nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“That’s right. A very angry truck,” the sheriff drawled as he walked away.

The ambulance arrived a full twenty minutes after it had been called. By then, Cody had lost a good deal of blood and gone into shock. Annie refused to treat him, saying that the Hippocratic oath didn’t extend to vets or to people who shot guns at her baby girl.

Zane couldn’t blame her.

Ronnie and Cody would both live, though Cody would likely lose an arm and a few non-essential organs. Jamie had bled out from the shotgun blast to the chest, dying long before help could get to him. Zane suffered a pang of remorse over the death of his cousin, but he didn’t waste much effort in mourning a man who’d been willing to kill them all just for money.

The man in Laredo, and the question of why the drug trade had veered so far off its course, were both large problems. They weren’t Zane’s problems, though, and even if he wanted to be involved, it wasn’t his jurisdiction.

Joe was horrified and crushed by the whole affair. Cody had been his best friend. Zane felt sorry for him, even though he was more relieved to find that Joe’d had nothing to do with any of it.

Beverly sat on the porch swing with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, staring. They had checked her for shock and deemed her in good health, then left her to sit there.

Zane eased into the seat beside her, watching the commotion in the yard in silence for a few seconds. Ty was sitting on the porch steps, his shirt gone, his arm in a sling, and his ribs patched up until they could get him to the hospital. Mark and Joe flanked him. The three of them appeared to simply be sitting there in dazed silence. Sadie perched between Ty and Mark, babbling as they nodded in response. She wasn’t at all fazed, and she was recounting the events of the night as if it’d been a movie she’d watched rather than a terrifying experience she had lived through.

Zane knew one thing for damn sure: he would never make fun of Ty again for teaching a toddler how to jab a pressure point.

Annie and Harrison stood with the sheriff, relating what had happened, and many of the party guests had filtered back toward the house to tell their versions as well. The local press had not been allowed onto the property, but Zane knew they would all be loitering down at the gate. It wouldn’t be long before they got the story.

Beverly turned her head and Zane met her gaze. It was excruciating to look into her eyes and see nothing there but that emotionless mask hiding what she truly thought and felt. Zane never intended to inflict that kind of pain on Ty again.

“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.

“How about ‘good job’? Or ‘thank you’? How about telling me Ty’s a good man and you’re happy for me?”

Beverly stared for long minutes. Zane tried to find some hint of emotion in her icy blue eyes, but there was nothing there. She nodded curtly and looked away, holding her chin high, stubborn and proper as ever.

Zane sighed as the cold settled in his chest. Beverly had never known anything but ranches. Like frontierswomen before her, protecting the homestead was first and foremost, even if it meant sacrificing the things they loved. She was still doing that, protecting her ranch and her family’s legacy. She had simply lost sight of what her family meant.

He looked down at the bandage wrapped around his thigh. The bullet had gone straight through, narrowly missing an artery. He’d been lucky and would only be limping for a while. Ty had fared much worse, all for the sake of Zane’s family.

He nodded, looking over at Beverly one last time. “Good-bye, Mother,” he murmured before standing and limping away.

Ty and Zane spent most of Sunday night, Monday, and the majority of Tuesday in the hospital. Each of them had several bags of IV fluids pumped into them, and when Zane heard a commotion down the hall, he knew that someone had just ordered a new cast put on Ty’s hand. Since Ty had lost a lot of blood and had nowhere to run, Zane was fairly certain he’d wind up in another cast.

Wednesday was almost worse than the hospital—from which Ty had checked himself out early, against medical advice—spent filling out official statements. Ty cursed and muttered the entire time they sat in the barely air-conditioned trailer that served as the sheriff’s outpost for the ranch community. The sheriff had offered to come to them, but Zane knew Ty wouldn’t make a very credible witness while still confined to a hospital bed.

After some intense questioning, one of the Cactus Creek hands had revealed where the stolen tigers were being kept. Tish and her people had already transported the other three tigers back to their homes. Barnum had been deemed a hero by several local news stations, and Ty and Zane were both in a hurry to get out of town before the national press caught wind of the story.

The sheriff’s deputies had gone with Harrison to the pump house, and after a little searching they’d found an entrance to the underground system of caverns carved in the limestone. The river that had been the source of the spring was still trickling; it had merely dug deeper as it beat through the soft stone.

Within the caverns, they found hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine.

Zane knew Laredo was controlled by the Gulf cartel, the same cartel that had dealings with Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. The tenuous connection to his work in Miami was frightening, as was the mystery of why that much product had been shipped so far into the Hill Country. He left the sheriff and the San Antonio field office with enough information to watch over the connection in case it wasn’t a coincidence.

When they were finally able to leave the sheriff’s office, all that was left for them to do was tell Zane’s family good-bye and go home.

Harrison dismounted and wrapped his horse’s lead around the deck railing, then pulled a large manila envelope out of the saddlebag before he walked across the stone pavers toward the guesthouse. Zane chewed on the inside of his lip as he watched from the kitchen window.