Jaguar Pride

  “You said you went to West Texas A&M. Did you ever run as a jaguar out here? There are only scrub trees, no real place to hide.”

  “Lots of wilderness out there,” she said. “Red canyons, lots of live oak, cedar, pinyon pine, and rocks. I saw a puma once, a couple of coyotes, jackrabbits, roadrunners. A wolf, even. Though I thought that was odd since supposedly the last wolves in the area were caught or killed in 1970. That was it. No people. Though I must admit, I didn’t run as a jaguar much out there. Only at night. Just when I had to let off steam.”

  “You?”

  She smiled. “You don’t want to see me when I’m crotchety.”

  He laughed. “I’ve seen you when you’re aggravated. Doesn’t bother me.”

  “Yeah, but not with you. Then you might feel differently.”

  He chuckled. Somehow he didn’t think so. It was Genista’s silence when she was annoyed that had bothered him. He’d rather know when someone was irritated with him and not have to guess about it.

  When they reached the development where Jackson’s sister, Eloise Struthers, lived, they parked a few houses down from her house. Martin had called them with a few details on the way there—the sister was currently living with some guy, divorced twice, no children. Currently unemployed. The guy she was living with was a security officer at the university and most likely would be working. Huntley made the call to Eloise.

  “Hello, Ms. Struthers? I’m an army buddy of Tim Jackson, and I talked to his mom about getting together with him. She said he wasn’t there, but that he might be visiting you. I was just passing through the area and thought I could drop by and say hi.”

  “He’s not here,” Eloise said abruptly. “We haven’t seen him in a couple of years.”

  Huntley immediately concluded that either she was angry with her brother for not getting in touch with the family, or she wanted to protect his butt because he’d been there recently or was still there.

  “So you wouldn’t know how I could get in touch with him.”

  “When my parents moved back to the States, Tim hated it. He joined the service, and we heard he went back to South America when he got out. We don’t know what he does down there, and we don’t care.”

  Which sounded to Huntley like the family knew what was going on or strongly suspected Tim was into illegal stuff.

  “I’m sorry if you’re an old army buddy of his and wanted to see him, but we can’t help you.” Eloise hung up on him.

  “She says he’s not there.”

  “How much do you want to bet she knows more about him than she’s willing to admit?” Melissa asked as they waited and watched the house.

  “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.” He studied the house, hating this part of the job.

  After twenty minutes, they were ready to move on.

  “I knew it was a long shot,” Melissa said, “but worth checking out. Martin said they checked here for Jackson, but that was three months ago. Martin still believes he’s in South America.”

  “Never hurts to be thorough.” Huntley started the car and was about to leave when the front door was opened by a redheaded woman who matched the photo they had of Jackson’s sister. She stalked out to her car, dropped her keys on the driveway, and hurried to retrieve them. Then she climbed into her car, backed down the driveway, and sped off.

  “Maybe she has a hair appointment or she’s just going shopping or something. Although she looked a little rattled, didn’t she?” Melissa asked.

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.” More than a little rattled. She’d fumbled with her car door even after she retrieved her keys, and she’d nearly dropped her purse as it slid off her shoulder. The purse almost hit the pavement before she caught it.

  They followed her to a trailer park a mile away and waited down the road as she drove into a gravel drive in front of a beige mobile home with stairs leading to a tiny wooden deck. She climbed the wooden steps in a hurry while Melissa and Huntley rolled down their windows and listened.

  Melissa was already on the phone with Martin. “Did Jackson have any other connections in Canyon?”

  “Not that we are aware of.”

  She gave Martin the address of the mobile home in case he could ID the person who owned the place and maybe tie him in with Jackson. Maybe Jackson was even there.

  Eloise knocked on the door, then wrung her hands. She glanced nervously around, but she wasn’t wary enough. She didn’t pay any attention to Huntley’s black car, the tinted windows making it hard for her to see them at the distance they were parked from the mobile home. Though Huntley was good at tracking and keeping his distance.

  Then someone opened the door and spoke to her, and she shook her head.

  The woman threw her hands up in a gesture that appeared to say she didn’t know.

  “I just realized you didn’t give your ‘army’ name to her,” Melissa said.

  “She didn’t ask. Best-case scenario.”

  Martin called Melissa back, and put the call on speakerphone.

  “Phil Gorsman owns the place. He has a rap sheet two miles long. Mostly petty stuff. Lots of theft. Drug possession. Illegal gun possession. What’s going on?”

  “As soon as we called Jackson’s sister, she denied he’d been here for the last couple of years, same with the parents, but then she took off and arrived at this house. She’s having an angry conversation with someone inside, though she’s still standing on the front stoop. We’re not close enough to hear what’s being said,” Melissa said.

  “I’ve got men on it, searching to see when this bozo was last out of the country. Wait. Looks like he was in Venezuela just last month.”

  They watched a man’s hand stretch out, grab the woman’s arm, and drag her into the house.

  “Rescue mission,” Huntley said, whether it was or not. He wasn’t taking any chances. Jackson’s sister might be up to her eyeballs in criminal stuff herself and just hadn’t gotten caught yet. But Huntley didn’t want Phil Gorsman to take matters into his own hands.

  Chapter 6

  Huntley was out of the vehicle in a flash with Melissa right behind him after telling their boss what they were doing. She had turned the phone off speaker, and Huntley could just imagine their boss having a conniption. Not that they weren’t trained for this kind of action. But Martin still worried about his agents like a she-cat mother.

  “Yes, we’re armed,” Melissa whispered to her boss as they reached the trailer.

  Huntley motioned for her to go around back, while he went to the front door and rushed up the steps. Only one way to do this. Knock on the door, pray Phil didn’t shoot at it, and then if he didn’t open the door, break it in.

  ***

  Okay, so this wasn’t exactly what Melissa had in mind on this mission. Tracking Jackson down, yes. But taking down bad guys here? She really figured they’d be back to rainforest duty before they knew it.

  As soon as she heard Huntley knock on the front door, nice and loud and manly, she heard the back window slide up.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. The game was definitely in her court.

  Two gunshots rang out. Damn it!

  Then a scrawny man tried to scramble out through the window, but Melissa was on him. Despite being in her human form, she still had a cat’s agility and pounced on the bastard as soon as he landed on his feet.

  “Back here!” she shouted to Huntley, not wanting to shoot the man, but having difficulty throwing him to the grassy ground the way he was fighting her.

  Phil was wiry and seemed to be high on something. Melissa was struggling with him so hard that she didn’t see Huntley jump out the window. He slammed a boot into Phil’s leg in an attempt to break it, but she didn’t hear a crack. Still, Phil cried out, dropped his weapon, and fell to the ground. She kicked his gun away from him while Huntley handcuffed the creep.

/>   “The woman?” Melissa asked Huntley.

  “She’ll need a doctor.”

  Melissa was on it, running into the house and calling her boss, who called 9-1-1. Martin would handle the situation by using the cover story that his Golden Claws were an undercover DEA unit that had heard a gunshot fired and had to go into rescue mode. It had always worked before. They would flash their badges, help the real police where they could, and then disappear before the real agents showed up. Even if they didn’t manage to slip away in time, they were with the special unit, which said it all.

  Inside, the place smelled like beer. Empty cans were sitting all over a coffee table that had one leg broken and propped up on telephone books.

  Melissa had to wade through fast-food trash scattered on the floor to get to the woman who lay on her back, clutching her chest with blood all over her T-shirt. Her face was ashen, and her green eyes stared up at Melissa in a kind of a haze.

  Melissa grabbed the quickest thing she could find—a filthy pillow off the couch—and held it against the woman’s chest. “The ambulance is on its way. You’ll be okay. Just hang in there. Did Phil work with your brother?” As much as she hated to interrogate the woman now, she had to or lose any opportunity to catch him.

  “What’s he done now?” Eloise asked, barely able to get the words out.

  So the sister, at least, was well aware that Jackson had been in trouble before.

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  “He’s got himself into real trouble in South America. Has he got in touch with you?” Melissa asked.

  “Get off me, man!” Phil said beyond the trailer.

  “Talk, damn it,” Huntley said. “When was the last time you spoke with Tim Jackson?”

  Jackson’s sister coughed up blood. “Ever since we were little, he was in trouble.” And then she took a last breath and her heart stopped beating.

  The EMTs rushed through the door, and Melissa quickly relinquished her job to them, managed to secure the woman’s cell phone, and headed outside. She showed her ID to the police who were just pulling up, verifying that she was one of the agents that Martin had vouched for before she joined Huntley. Another couple of police officers were taking Phil into custody for attempted murder. If the EMTs couldn’t revive Jackson’s sister, Phil would be charged with murder.

  “Are you okay?” Huntley asked, seeing the blood on Melissa’s shirt as he led her back to their vehicle.

  “It’s Eloise’s, not mine. Her heart quit beating, and I didn’t have time to revive her before the EMTs arrived.” She hated this part of the job—when someone innocent, who was most likely trying to protect her brother, got in the way.

  “Did you get anything out of Phil? He’ll be going away for a while. Either Eloise didn’t know anything or she didn’t want to squeal on her brother. She asked what he had done this time.”

  “According to Phil, Jackson’s still in Costa Rica. He was looking to put a team together and wanted Phil on the job. He was supposed to be leaving on a flight tomorrow.”

  “Great.”

  “Yep. And you won’t believe it, but Jackson is doing business in Costa Rica again. Not even going to another area to conduct his operations. He must have the right setup where he is now.”

  “He’s not going to the same park, is he?” Melissa asked.

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to prove he can do the job without losing his catch—and his men—this time. Maybe he’s got a buyer lined up and the deal is too good to back out on now. In any event, I called Martin and he’s got us on a flight back down there later tonight out of Amarillo. He’ll have our car picked up and left off at the Dallas airport when we need it for the return trip home. Like us, he never thought the man would be fool enough to try the same thing twice or Martin would have just left us down there.”

  “Maybe that’s what Jackson thinks too. That no one would suspect he’d return that soon. Are you ready to go back to the rainforest and end this?” She smiled up at Huntley.

  He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and walked her to the car. “Hell, yeah. Best place in the world for a couple of jaguars to take a vacation. Don’t you think?” He handed her a cell phone. “Phil’s. See if you can get anything on it.”

  She waved Eloise’s phone at him. “Working on hers first.”

  She got into the car and Huntley drove them back to the hotel in Amarillo so they could pick up their bags, check out, and get on a flight.

  “Why did Phil shoot Eloise?” Melissa asked.

  “Maybe he suspected she might have led the police to his doorstep?”

  “Maybe. He shot her after you knocked on the door. You could have been anyone, but he was high on something and probably figured you were the police. But he was thinking coherently enough if he thought to eliminate someone the police could interrogate.”

  “Because she knew something about the crimes her brother is involved in? I bet you anything that she’s not squeaky clean, even if she doesn’t have an arrest record,” Huntley said. He turned the vehicle around and headed back to Canyon.

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’ve got some time before our late flight. We’ll drop by her place and check it out. See if we find any clues about her brother’s illegal operations there.”

  “What if their mom and dad are also involved?”

  “Could be,” Huntley said. “Either just covering for him, or involved in the operation themselves. I remember a case where a mother of three older teens who was on welfare had no trouble with the law—until police discovered that her sons were selling drugs and Mom was depositing the drug money in her bank account. She had a couple of million dollars. She was the sweetest woman. No one suspected a thing. Though a couple of million red flags should have caught someone’s attention.”

  “Could be.” Melissa called Martin and gave him a heads-up about their next move, figuring the police would be investigating Eloise’s place next.

  They arrived at her house a few minutes later, but the police weren’t there yet.

  “Do we go in or wait for the police and then show them our badges?” she asked.

  “Here’s a car coming now.”

  They left the car and showed their badges. After half an hour, Melissa and Huntley finished their investigation and left.

  “Did you find anything?” Huntley asked on the way to Amarillo.

  “Hair dye. Black. Eloise is a natural redhead. The description of her boyfriend states he’s a redhead also. I’m betting Jackson used the hair dye. He’s a blond, but his scent was all over the bathroom and on the used-up vials dumped in the trash. Bloodied cotton balls smelling of hydrogen peroxide were also in the trash. Bandage wrappers. A few blond chin whiskers in the sink. But best of all? Jackson’s scent on the beard shavings. Wonder when or how he got injured. But it shows she was lying about when she saw him last. What did you find?”

  “Men’s clothing in a spare bedroom, smelling of Jackson. Couple of Glocks and one tranquilizer gun. Police confiscated them.”

  “Hmm. Do you think he managed to come here while we were still looking for him in the rainforest?”

  “Looks recent, so I’d say that was a good probability.”

  “Then he got in touch with Phil, and they were going back out on the job. When you called his parents, they probably called his sister’s place to either warn him or learn if he was there. He was and took off.”

  Huntley let out his breath. “Yeah, sounds like it.”

  Melissa updated Martin on what they’d found at the sister’s place. “He might be flying out today.”

  “I’ll have a team look into it,” Martin said, sounding exasperated.

  “Hey, boss, if he’s planning on flying the coop again, he might not get word that Phil shot his sister. Maybe we can
get the hospital and the police to give out the story that she’s in critical condition, if the EMTs were able to revive her. Maybe Jackson would come back to see her.”

  “Or to kill Phil for it. All right. I’ll make some calls.”

  “Okay. I was checking through her phone’s text messages and emails. She was supposed to get in touch with a guy named Monty. But there’s no last name, no number for him. Jackson told her he had a job for Monty in CR.”

  “Costa Rica.”

  “Huntley got Phil’s phone. Let me check that really quick.” She looked through the texts. “Yeah, Jackson said he’d see him. Nothing about locations or anything, but we kind of figured that would be too easy.”

  Chapter 7

  “So what made you go into the JAG?” Huntley asked Melissa as he drove her back to Amarillo. It wasn’t just small talk. He’d heard she and her sister had joined the organization because of some past history with the JAG, but he didn’t know what that entailed. He didn’t think it was because she’d been getting into trouble when she was a teen. But he was curious.

  “Martin. When we were thirteen, he rescued my sister and me from a hostage situation.”

  Now that Huntley hadn’t expected to hear. He wished he’d been there to help the girls. He would have been sixteen and ready to tackle as many of the men as there’d been, all on his own.

  “They picked the wrong house to burglarize,” Melissa continued. “Dad and Mom were at work, and Bonnie and I were in the kitchen doing homework—we were homeschooled. We were working on creative writing. After that, we both rewrote our stories.”

  He smiled at that. “About the break-in…”

  “Yeah. Anyway, the three men thought everyone was gone. When they saw both my mom’s and dad’s cars had left, they broke the back door. They didn’t even bother to knock to see if anyone would answer. I grabbed the phone off the dining-room table and called my dad, but we didn’t wait around. My sister and I ran for the front door, but one of their men was standing on the front porch. He caught us as we threw the door open, probably waiting for his friends to unlock it for him. He looked as startled to see us as we were to see him. He waved a gun at us, and we were afraid they’d kill us because we saw their faces.”