LITMIR.BIZ

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into his. She swallowed, then made a little sound as she licked her lips—his stomach muscles jerked tight. He straightened hastily, turned to drop the spoon in the sink. It jangled against a pot he’d yet to wash.

      “Honey…” She broke the charged silence. “Dr. Murray says it’s—”

      “Yeah, I know he did, but…” But Natwig had hurt her already, allowing her to ride that green-broke colt. Didn’t matter that she’d begged him to let her. What kind of fool took a chance with the thing—the person—that mattered most in all his life?

      And if he hurt her again, he’d never, ever forgive himself. She seemed so tiny and fragile, trapped in that hateful chair. To satisfy himself at a risk to her? No way. It was better to wait.

      But wait for how long? Forever? howled a voice like a lost coyote in the back of his mind. He swallowed around a lump of rock in his throat, then said gruffly, without turning, “want some peaches on top of yours?”

      Her answer was a long time in coming. “No, thanks.”

      “Well, I do.” He rummaged in the cabinet, found a can, focused himself on opening it. “How about tuning in the news?”

      “I could, sure, but Joe—?”

      The phone rang and he snatched it up with relief. “Hello?”

      “Ah, you are there. Good.”

      Larson, calling him at home. Rage washed over him in a boiling wave. Get out of my house! They met once a month to conduct their business. That was the only claim Larson had on him, and that was bad enough.

      Alarm swirled in anger’s wake. Something’s wrong, him calling me here where he never has before! But whatever it was, Natwig couldn’t deal with it now, not with Karen sitting there with her feelings hurt and her ears pricked. “Can’t this wait?”

      “Something urgent’s come up. If you can’t speak freely from there, then go where you can and call me back. My usual cell phone number.”

      “But—”

      “I’ll be waiting for your call.” He hung up.

      Natwig stood, his hand clenched on the buzzing receiver. Bastard! Think you own me, just because you pay me?

      “Who was it?” Karen demanded behind him. “Joe?”

      He blew out a breath and his shoulders sagged. Till he paid off their debts to the hospital, laid up some cash against the rehab bills that kept on coming, Larson as good as owned him. There was no other way out but sell the ranch. And if he lost his land, lost his pack animals, then how was he to earn a living?

      “That was…” Lying to Karen didn’t come naturally to him, but he was learning. He’d had more practice in the past six months than he’d had in the first twenty years of their marriage. “That was Cody, over at some bar in Cortez. Says he came out to his truck and he’s got a flat and damned if his spare isn’t flat, too. Wants me to come bail him out.”

      “He can’t call his wife?”

      “Suzie’s not answering her phone,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I was feeling restless. Drive’ll do me good.”

      Karen’s third blasted cat, the tabby, thumped up onto the counter beside him. He grabbed the animal with a snarl and deposited it on his wife’s lap. “Damned cat! Tell a dog once not to do something and it’ll learn, but a cat?”

      Beast and woman stared back at him in wide-eyed, wounded astonishment. Then Karen turned her head aside and wheeled toward the living room. “Come on, Posy, let’s go watch the news.”

      He took a minute to cool down, then followed, to set the bowl of ice cream and a spoon on the coffee table at her elbow. Stood, shifting from foot to foot, yearning to touch her. “I won’t be gone long.”

      Her hands smoothed the cat’s fur, her eyes stayed fixed on a beer commercial, where a pack of drunken college kids cavorted on an endless, sunny beach. Not a care in their world. “Take all the time you please.”

      HE MET Larson halfway to Durango, at a roadside rest stop. “What’s your problem?” he growled, as he fitted himself into the Porsche’s low seat.

      “Our problem.” Larson corrected him with a chilly smile. “It shouldn’t be a problem, if you move fast. We’ve learned that a female lynx has finally bred and she’s about to give birth. One of the DOW tracking planes spotted her. Four kittens, they’re estimating. That works out to roughly three hundred thousand apiece they’ve spent to achieve that. The taxpayers are out of their minds to put up with this nonsense!”

      Natwig nodded grim agreement, though he seemed to recall that the lynx restoration program was financed by a voluntary check-off on the state income tax. Still, that kind of money. He felt a tickle of fear, like a cold breeze on his cheek. No way the damned bureaucrats at the DOW could afford to let all their cats vanish. Sooner or later, somebody would figure out that this wasn’t Mother Nature winnowing the weak. Once they did, somebody was bound to come after him.

      Let him come. He’d almost welcome a flesh-and-blood enemy for a change. Better somebody he could face—somebody he could pound into the ground—than this formless fear and frustration that came creeping every night to crouch on his pillow.

      “—be the Division’s media darlings, if we don’t watch out,” Larson was saying. “Before that happens, before somebody gets photos of the kittens and posts them on the DOW Web site, they need to disappear. Dead. Gone. Eaten by a bear or a coyote or a porcupine or whatever they care to imagine. But out of sight, out of the public’s mind— ASAP.”

      Larson’s chubby fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he glared through the windshield. “We’re just starting to see the first complaints in the papers and on talk shows that this program is a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. Momentum is building. But let the bleeding hearts and the tree huggers have a litter of fuzzy, adorable kittens to rally around and…” He shook the awful image out of his head and briskly turned. “So, get on this immediately.”

      “I will, but—” Natwig paused. He had a client scheduled, the day after tomorrow. A long-time client, who’d booked a week of fly-fishing and wildflower photography with him every summer for ten years now. No way would he let the man down. An outfitter’s reputation was built on dependability, as well as on delivering whatever the client wanted, from a trophy buck to a rare bird sighting.

      But try to tell that to Larson, who saw him only as a tool for his own purposes.

      “But what? This is crucial. Time is of the essence here.”

      “Well, it may take a while, running the queen down. If she has a litter, she won’t be straying far from her den. And she won’t let the kittens out to play for weeks, not till their eyes open and she thinks they’re old enough.”

      “She’s not a—a soccer mom, she’s a dumb animal!”

      Dumb? I’d like to see you up there, with nothing but your claws and teeth and wits to feed your family. You and yours would starve in a week! Natwig dwelt on that comforting image for a minute, then said, “Once she’s down in her hole, my equipment won’t pick her up. It’s line of sight, remember? So if she isn’t moving around much, it’ll take longer. I may have to circle in till I cross her prints, then track her to her den.”

      “Whatever it takes. Just do it. My…friends have authorized a bonus. An extra five thousand per kitten, on top of your usual ten.”

      Natwig gulped, did the math. Five times ten, plus four times five—seventy thousand dollars, all in one den? That would put him past the halfway mark on his debt. No way could he take this assignment and shove it, much as he’d love to.

      “But there’s one stipulation to that bonus.” Larson gave him an odd look—a twitch of guilty pleasure, instantly buried. “Since the kittens won’t be wearing a DOW collar, my clients will need some other sort of proof that you took them.”

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