Renegade Man (2 page)

Once the Chevy
rattled over the first cattle guard, she still had another forty-five minutes
of driving through isolated countryside before she reached Tomahawk Flats. Her
campsite was set up under a grove of cottonwoods on a flat stretching away from
Renegade Creek. The campsite consisted of little more than two canvas tents she
had pitched atop the cushioning blue gamma and shorter buffalo grass. One tent
would serve as a crowded workroom, replete with four folding card tables and
chairs; the other would be her living quarters.

Due to a lack of
amenities, the inside of this tent was much more spacious; it held just one
card table to function as a dining table, a GI grub box for tableware and a
portable butane cooking burner and refrigerator. For light, a kerosene lamp was
suspended from the tent’s ridgepole over her sleeping bag. Her wardrobe fit
inside a duffel bag. It wasn’t much, but it was a damn sight better than the
inside of the dirt-floored shack of her childhood.

On the other
hand, the bathroom was even more Spartan than what she had grown up with: the
great outdoors, or, when nature called at night, a bucket. As for bathing, a
marvelous hot spring—a two-mile tramp away—had been lined with smooth stones by
a hippie commune that had eventually come of age and decamped.

She had
carefully selected her excavation site after calculating where Renegade Man
would have been most likely to make his camp. All the evidence pointed to this
locale, the crossroads of several Indian cultures, where Toltec Indians from
Casas Grandes, Mexico, had traded feathers for Mimbres pottery, and where the
Basket Weavers of west Texas traded yucca- fiber sandals for fish hooks made
out of shells from the Pacific coast.

The flat would
have been a lake then. Renegade Man could have sat on his haunches on one of
the surrounding hills and seen everything that came to the water to drink, or
he could have crouched along the banks to gather clay for his pottery, which he
had decorated with images of the humpbacked god Koko Pelli. Only a few examples
of such pottery had been found, but Rita-lou was sure it had been created not
by any currently known culture, but by the Renegade Man whose existence she
hoped to prove.

The thought of
the work to come aroused a sense of excitement in her. It always had, even
before her very first dig as part of an Earthwatch team on the banks of the Rio
Motagua in Guatemala, searching for pre-Columbian jade. Her excitement dated
back to her childhood days, when she would find arrowheads and pottery sherds
here on the Split P. With each small discovery she had felt an exhilarating
sense of leaping backward through time.

Magnum, the
black Labrador retriever Trace had bequeathed her when he’d gone off to UCLA,
made his own leap toward her as she got out of the car. The dog’s tail wagged
joyously. Chuckling, she scratched him behind his ears. “Hey, fella, you’re not
just another pretty face, are you? Did you miss me?”

Magnum’s tail
wagged another joyous response that correlated with the “Whoof!”

Anxious to get
to work on her project, she stashed her perishable groceries in the minuscule
refrigerator, then went to the other tent and found a hammer, a steel measuring
tape, a compass, surveyors’ stakes and a ball of twine. By noon she had staked
out a twenty- yard grid that resembled the sheet of graph paper she had
prepared earlier. Sweat trickled down from her hairline, and she wiped her damp
palms on the back of her shorts before she began to string the twine along the
stakes, creating a waffle effect.

As she worked,
steadily, methodically, meticulously, she was conscious of the light breeze
stirring the cottonwood leaves and of the doves perched on the branches, cooing
in noisy chorus. A good feeling, a feeling that all was right with the world,
welled up inside her. It was a perfect day, a day without the intense heat that
would come later in the summer.

She hadn’t
realized how much she had missed the Gila wilderness. As a child, she had run
wild here come roundup time, when her mother had been brought out to the Split
P’s ranch headquarters for two weeks every spring and fall to cook for the
cowhands.

At thirteen,
that term had been one of the first things Rita-lou had learned from Chap.
Cowhands were the proudest members of the cattle industry, the riders who
worked cattle—trailing, cutting, roping, branding and rounding-up. “When you
call them cowpokes,” he had told her, grinning, “you smile and act like you’re
just kiddin’.”

Cowpokes, the
aubum-haired fourteen-year-old had gone on to explain slyly, needed only one
thing: a poor sense of smell. They rode with the cattle during rail shipment,
when it was their job to see that none of the animals lay down, because that
could cause others to stumble when the train’s brakes were applied. Their name
came from the small sticks they carried to poke the cows and urge them back to
their feet.

Of course, she
had eventually learned much more from the shy, handsome boy. She had learned
the joy of loving and giving, and the devastating agony of being left to face
down the condemning stares and vicious gossip alone. Well, not exactly alone.
Before long she had had their son Trace to brave the world with her.

The two of them
against the world. No, she thought, fiercely rehammering a stake into place, it
had eventually been the three of them against the world: she and Trace and her
husband Robert.

Hot and sweaty
and more than ready for a lunch break, she laid aside her hammer, painted
fluorescent yellow so it could be easily located, and, with Magnum trailing,
strolled across the flat’s gravelly silt.  It was strewn with driftwood from
recent rains. After a heavy rainfall the creek became a violent river that
overflowed its bank. Yet normally it appeared and disappeared along its course
until it emptied into a small lake in Chihuahua, Mexico.

Along this
portion of Tomahawk Flats, the Renegade was shallow, wide and rapid. Kneeling,
she dashed the chilly water over her face, then washed her hands. She was
fastidious, overly fastidious for an anthropologist.

She sat back on
her heels, patting her face dry with the back of her sleeve while she watched
the shifting pattern of light and shadow on the river. Her interest was caught
by the opposite bank, higher than the one on her side and with an overhanging
ledge.

She had walked
this area of the creek extensively on her preliminary exploration, but this was
the first time she had seen things from this angle. If she hadn’t been
squatting, she wouldn’t have noticed the steel cable anchored in the solid
underside of the rocky ledge and dipping down into the water. It swayed
slightly with the current. Curious—and a little concerned—at this evidence of
other human habitation, she rose and followed the cable downstream, searching
for stepping- stones to the opposite bank. Trails through this area had been
heavily used in the 1820s by fur trappers as a route to the beaver grounds of
the Gila River. But once the area became cattle country, it had been relatively
unpopulated.

A Gambel’s quail
took flight at her and Magnum’s approach. The Renegade looped here, deepening
as the creekbed narrowed. In an area with a dense growth of desert willow and
salt cedar, she found a suitable crossing. The boulders, large and planed
smooth by centuries of rushing water, crossed the creek where it ran six feet
deep or more. The cable spanned the rocks in the middle of the crossing, and
several yards downstream it moored a blue plastic pontoon on which some kind of
machinery was mounted.

She turned her
attention back to negotiating the slippery rocks. On this side of the Renegade,
the sunlight was filtered, the air cooler. Although she was concentrating on
her balancing act, she gradually became aware of the eerie hush of the river
birds. She felt a little shiver of nerves wholly unlike her. On the bank beside
her, Magnum whined unhappily.

“Coward,” she
whispered.

She didn’t even
carry a gun, though a drug enforcement agent had warned her to do so in this
area of the state. With illegal aliens and drug smugglers creeping through the
border wilderness, anything could happen.

It did.

As if she were
living a scene from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, something slick and
black slithered into her peripheral vision, rising from the water to wrap its
arms around her and yank her back¬ward into the icy depths.

Chapter 2

H
e had seen a lot
of action as a SEAL. He had almost been run down by a drug smuggler’s
powerboat, had been shot by a South American revolutionist and carved up by a
berserk, knife-wielding terrorist, and had survived three underwater mine
explosions. But in all his twenty-year navy career he had never wrestled a
woman in a river. And that the claim jumper was female, he was certain. Her
body, curved like that of Venus rising from the sea, attested to that fact.
Talk about finding the mother lode! Reluctantly he released his latest
discovery.

On the bank, a
dog snarled ferociously. With a snap of his fingers and a command of “Sit!” he
intimidated the Labrador into at least backing off—but with its fangs still
bared.

The woman came
up sputtering. Her dripping shirt clung to her breasts and outlined her
nipples, as round as creek pebbles, and her shorts molded hand-filling hips.
Her long hair fell back from her face, and she planted clenched fists on her
hips. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, mister?”

He tugged off
his mask. “I might ask the same of you, lady. You’re on federal land, twenty
acres to which I hold the mining rights.”

“A prospector!”
she said, disgust curling her lips. “Well, I beg to differ with you on one
point. We are on federal land, but
I
hold the archaeological rights. I
filed an assessment map with Santa Fe’s Bureau of Land Management over a week
ago. That gives my claim priority over either a grazing or a mining claim.”

He had hated to
strong-arm her, but he most certainly didn’t want some snooper blabbing around
in Silver City about what he hoped would turn out to be a hot area for “placer
gold,” gold deposited by water in places other than where it originated. The
Bureau of Land Management gave a miner a ninety-day grace period until the
claim was officially recorded in the county courthouse for all to see, and he
wanted that head start.

“Lady, I staked
out the corners of my claim almost two weeks ago.” He swept a hand toward a
corner post stake he had driven, just visible through the trees. Beneath it he
had buried a common plastic pill bottle holding the necessary plat and papers
recording the mine’s name—Landlubber—the date and location of the claim, along
with his own name as locator. “Until the BLM can rule on this,” he growled,
“you’re nothing but a claim jumper as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got sixty
seconds to clear out of—”

“It’s you!”

“What?”

Her wide-eyed
gaze dropped to his long, narrow feet, slid up his skintight black wet suit,
paused at the knife strapped to his thigh, scooted on past his one-
hundred-pound leaded weight belt and settled on his face, framed by the
close-fitting black hood. “I don’t believe it. Jonah Jones!”

He blinked the
water from his lashes and stared hard at her. With her hair plastered against
her head and streaming down her shoulders like sargasso seaweed, she didn’t
look particularly familiar. Yet the way she said his name told him who she was.
Dismayed, they stared at one another, regarding each other across a distance of
twenty years. Pain that had long been dormant flickered in the eyes of one,
twinges of uncomfortable guilt in the other’s.

“Ritz,” he
drawled finally.

Her mouth
tightened. “Rita-lou.”

He ignored her.
His cynical green gaze took in the strong, wide mouth, the dark slashes of her
brows and the deep pools of her eyes, contrasting startlingly with her pale
hair. “The last time we talked, you had dropped out of Western High and—”

“Gotten pregnant
and left town.”

“Had gone to
work for the Kingsleys,” he finished firmly. He didn’t bother to keep the
contempt from his voice. “1 was lumber jacking for their lumber mill that
summer, Ritz—if you remember.”

He remembered.
All too well. She’d been standing in the doorway to the Kingsley carriage
house, which had been converted to living quarters for the help. She hadn’t
changed out of her black uniform with the white cuffs and collar. She had
always looked remote, untouchable. But she had never looked so remote as she
had that evening, when she had told him it was over between them. He remembered
feeling awkward, feeling like digging his boot toe in the lush green grass,
running his finger inside his suddenly tight collar and begging. But he hadn’t.
And he wouldn’t now. It had simply been a schoolboy crush, and he was long over
her.

She cocked her
head and studied him. “So where’d you go after you left Silver City?”

His smile was
chilling. “I joined the navy and saw the world. And you?”

She didn’t even
bother to smile, nor did she answer. She wrapped her arms around herself.