Call of the Cougar (Heart of the Cougar Book 2) (24 page)

"Hmmm," she said, liking that plan and prayed nothing bad would happen during the rest of the night. And beyond.

***

At five in the morning, Tracey's phone jingled, waking her. She recalled that Hal had relieved Stryker sometime in the night and then returned to spoon her for the rest of the morning. Hal stirred and Tracey groaned. She grabbed her phone, frowned at the caller I.D., and said, "Ricky?"

"In two hours, I'm meeting with my brother at that gold mine where you found the tusk fragment."

Tracey sat up in bed. "You can't. Not after what already happened last time."

"He wants to talk, but he's afraid to say something around the rest of the guys."

"No. Ricky. You can't trust him."

"He's my brother."

"Right and he could have had you killed."

"I think it was Benny who set us up."

"It was your brother who sent me looking for the evidence at Anderson. He's been working all along with Mooney."

"You said this Mooney guy takes people on hunts."

"As a guide, yes."

"Well, my brother never did any hunting. Our dad was shot and killed by a hunter who said he thought he was a deer. Anyway, neither my brother nor I ever wanted to hunt after that. We were with him, and I was seven years old and hadn't even used a rifle, but dad wanted us to know how he hunted. Father-sons kind of thing."

"I'm so sorry, Ricky, that you lost your father like that. But your bother doesn't mind hunting people—especially those in law enforcement. And you know how to shoot."

"Yeah, for protection. We'd go to the firing range. Sure. But we didn't hunt any animals. Besides, I think Benny is the guy who's the bad egg."

"But your brother set me up."

"Maybe he didn't know it was a setup. Maybe Benny or Mooney told him to do it, and he was told it was for some other reason. Not to kill you."

"Not to kill you, either?"

"That's different. They had to have been watching me. Seeing if I got in touch with you. And once I did, they were following us and shooting at us."

"I don't want you going there."

"Your choice." Ricky hung up on her.

Damn. Had it really been Ricky? Or was it his brother?

She explained everything to Hal. "But then I had the notion that it might not be Ricky." She kept forgetting how much the brothers sounded alike.

"I'll call Ted and tell him to make sure Ricky doesn't leave the ranch. Hogtie him if he has to, if that really was him calling, and he has the notion to go to the gold mine." Hal made the call.

"I'll let my boss know." She touched her boss's contact number and put the call through, then waited forever for him to wake up enough to answer the phone. She told him what Ricky had said and waited for her boss's reply.

"I don't want you going into another ambush. I'll send men just in case. You stay out of this."

"Ricky's already left, Ted said," Hal was sitting on the edge of the bed now, looking like he was ready to go with her if they were heading out. "And he's got his gun with him."

"Great." She conveyed the information to her boss.

"Stay put. I don't want you walking into another trap. I'll coordinate with other law enforcement officials and have it checked out," Mick said.

"All right. Your call." But she didn't like it one bit.

"Out here."

Watching her, Hal's body remained tense, ready for action. "Go? No go?"

"We stay here. I hate this and I hate that Ricky could be in danger. But there's nothing we can do about it."

"If it's Ricky's brother and his cohorts, how much do you want to bet the police won't find any of them there?"

"I agree." She laid back down and pulled the covers over her chest, but no way could she sleep.

"Do you want to go out there?" Hal climbed into bed and pulled her into his arms.

She appreciated Hal's offer, figuring he wouldn't want her anywhere near the danger, so he was telling her that they could handle it—together, and she really liked that. "No. I just feel that this all has to do with the ghost town of Anderson somehow. We know that the traffickers had stored the ivory tusks in the town, but it was gone, so nothing for them to try to keep secret there."

"Then your informant calls and says that they'd had illegal stuff there at some time, maybe evidence of wrongdoing, but it's too late for you to really catch them at anything. You said he was murdered because he was trying to backstab his competition and they learned about it. How did he sound? Coerced?"

"Honey sounded like his usual self. Cocky."

Hal stroked her arm, and she pondered the situation further.

"He knew you'd take the bait. It was New Year's Day, and yet, you'd still run off in a snowstorm and check it out."

"Always."

Hal continued to stroke her with a gentle caress. "You suspected Honey set you up at first, until you found him dead. That he was trying to set up his competition by…?"

Her lips parted, but she didn't know what to say at first, the whole thing becoming muddled. She rested her chin on Hal's chest and looked up at him. "I…thought he was telling me about the site because he knew that they were using it. I'd catch the bad guy's evidence, enough to maybe nail them for their crimes. He would have fed me good information yet again, and I would have paid him. They could have gone to prison, and that would eliminate his competition. That's what I thought once I learned he was dead, and then I assumed his competition nailed him instead. So they knew he had sent me out there and then were waiting."

"But wouldn't it have been better if they killed you, and left Honey alive? Then he was the one who would have set you up and the blame laid on him."

"In this business, they don’t want the competition. And if he had tried to gain money by telling on their operation so he could continue his, I could see why they'd kill him."

"What if
he
set you up?"

Tracey frowned at Hal. "Honey? But he was dead. He wouldn't have set me up to have me killed and then what?" She really couldn't wrap her mind around that scenario.

"Why were the men there to ambush you when he only thought there might be a hint of evidence? The stuff had already been moved. It was New Year's Day. Only you and your partner would be dedicated enough to go out there. It seemed like a perfectly safe venture."

"My partner hadn't planned to go."

Hal's brows furrowed as he studied her.

She shrugged. "Like you said, it seemed like a perfectly safe venture. My partner said to wait until the end of the week. I had nothing better to do, and I wasn't waiting. Though he said he wasn't coming, he joined me out there." She took in a deep, settling breath, hating that he had died.

"All right." Hal started to rub her arm again in a soothing way. "Would Honey have known that?"

"He might have. My partner had failed to go with me on several expeditionary missions to find evidence."

"Why the hell was that?" Hal's voice was growly, and he sounded like he would have taken her partner to task if he wasn't already dead.

"He was having a rough time of it. He'd had a recent divorce, and the agency was forcing him to retire out of his position."

"He shouldn't have been neglecting his job and left you to do all the work, and risking your neck because he couldn't deal with life any longer. You should have had an agent who was watching your back like you would his. What did Mick say about it?"

"Are you kidding? I didn't tell him. And don't you dare tell him either."

"Hell, Tracey." Hall took a deep breath, but he still looked angry. "All right, then if Honey knew that, he might have assumed you would have been alone. Easier to take down one Special Agent."

"But why would Honey have done it?"

"Maybe the trafficking evidence left in the old schoolhouse wasn't Mooney's, but Honey's."

Tracey shook her head and rested it on Hal's chest again, listening to his heart beating.

"Did you see Honey's dead body?"

"Yes."

"And you're sure it was really Honey? The same guy who had been your informant."

"Unless the guy was acting as the informant for someone else."

"But you discovered he had been involved in trafficking."

"Small time. Not as big an operation as Mooney's."

"What if the small time operation wasn't Honey's? What if it was Mooney's made to look like Honey was into trafficking on a smaller scale?"

"I don't know. And why would he do that?"

"Just trying to come up with far-out scenarios we might not have considered. How did you end up with Ricky as an informant?"

"He contacted me through the agency. Like Honey had done. They check out the informant's first information to make sure he's not putting agents in danger, or that the 'informant' isn't just a nut case. He was young, so they believed he was working for someone else as a cover for the other guy. He gave them three good leads and then they turned him over to me so that I could work with him since I had lost my informant. But he had nothing to do with this other case."

"He had information about the same site that Honey had. And again, you were ambushed."

"Ricky's brother called me with the information."

"And you know that for certain?"

"No." She hated to admit it, but despite everything, she really couldn't completely put her trust in Ricky. What if he didn't even have a brother?

"I had the notion that Benny might be Mooney. Do you have a picture of Mooney?" Hal asked.

"Yes, and I had asked Ricky already if he'd ever seen Mooney before. He said no."

"Okay, so Benny isn't Mooney. Does Benny have a last name?"

"Smith."

"Figures." Hal wrapped his arm around her. "You're sure that Mooney was there at the scene of the shootout?"

"No. I figured he would be there if he was in charge of the operation though."

"All right. If you wounded the man who got away like you believe, I wonder how badly he was injured."

"I have no idea. I'm certain that I shot both men. But they managed to get away until I tracked the one and took him down as a cougar. The other couldn't have been too bad off because he got away."

"You were injured yourself by then."

"
Quit
reminding me."

He frowned at her as if he didn't like that she'd been injured, and he'd keep reminding her every time she beat herself up mentally over losing the man. "I tracked the scent of a male for a long time that same day when you saw me in the cliffs running as a cougar, but it was several days after he had left the area. None of us could risk shifting while the Feds were looking into the attempted murder. He had to have had a vehicle parked on another side-road nearby. He probably wanted to make sure Mrs. Blasdell didn't see them."

"Wait. If they were hauling stuff from the schoolhouse, it would have been impossible to carry it over the cliffs."

"It would have been too great a risk to run it by Mrs. Blasdell."

She sighed. "Agreed. Mrs. Blasdell watches everything that goes by her house, unless there's another more recently-made trail. Or if she leaves home on a regular basis at a particular time, and they know her schedule."

"That's entirely possible."

Tracey's phone rang and Hal reached over, grabbed it, glanced at the caller I.D., and handed the phone to her. "Ricky."

Her heartbeat raced as she answered the phone. "Ricky, where are you? At the gold mine?"

"What? No."

"You didn't call me saying you were going to meet with your brother at the gold mine?" She felt ill to her stomach.

"No.
Damn him
. He called you again?"

"Yeah." Or at least she thought it was him. Maybe
this
one was the brother and not Ricky.

Tracey was already getting out of bed. "What horse loves you?"

"What?"

Tracey was struggling to pull her jeans on as she kept the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder. "The one that you've made friends with because you're scared of horses."

"Who said I was scared of horses? Ted? He doesn't know what he's talking about."

"One of the horses is shy with people. You're afraid of horses, but she likes you, because you're not aggressive toward her. What is her name? If you don't tell me, I'm hanging up on you."

"Ahh, hell, you're testing me. Holly. That's her name. But I'm not afraid of horses."

She smiled, but then frowned. "I got a call about meeting your brother at the gold mining town where we were shot at. The voice belonged to the same person who said he was you."

"Hell no. Why would I do that?"

Hal was already wearing his jeans, shirt, and boots and offering to talk to Ricky so she could finish putting her clothes on.

"Here, talk to Hal while I get dressed." But she didn't relinquish the phone to him and asked Ricky instead, "Where are you exactly?"

"I just parked at the end of the wagon trail. Tell Ted I'm not afraid of no horse. I'm going to explore around and see if maybe there was something you missed there. You know I'm good at research, but not just on the Net. I can help with this case. But there's a cougar on the prowl out here, and I wonder if it's the one that killed that trafficker."

Because she couldn't let go of the phone as much as she wanted to hear what Ricky had to say, Hal helped her on with her socks and boots. "A cougar," she said half under her breath. "Did it see you?"

As soon as she mentioned cougar, Hal glanced up at her with a wary expression.

"I don't think so. But I got my gun and I'm shooting him if he comes after me."

"Ricky,
listen
to me. Return to your car and go back to the ranch. Let Ted know you're on the way.
Please
, do as I say."

"I'm sorry. I should have told you I was coming out here. I just wanted to help, and I know you wouldn't let me if I said anything about it to you earlier. You would have made sure Ted was watching me."

"You were supposed to be home taking care of the horses that you're not afraid of. Why are you really there?" She didn't believe Ricky just randomly went there in the dark of night for no good reason.

She held her arms out for Hal to pull her bra on, then fastened it. Then he helped her on with her shirt. She knew Ricky wouldn't listen to her and chill bumps coated her arms as she feared the cougar was a shifter—Benny or his buddy.