Stars & Stripes (Cut & Run 6)

The voices of Zane’s family filtered through the dry evening air, but he had no urge to join them. He was feeling decidedly unsociable. He had a lingering headache he would almost have called a hangover, but it hadn’t been nearly as fun to earn.

The sunset over the rolling Texas landscape was astonishing, though. Nothing like the rising sun burning away the mists on the mountaintops of West Virginia or the moon glowing down on the beaches near Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii, but still beautiful in its own way.

He’d been to a lot of places in his life, places most men never got to see. Places most people had never even thought about. The dry tropics of Somalia. The jungles of Colombia. The hard rock mountains of Afghanistan and the desert of Kuwait. But he had rarely stopped to appreciate them until after the fact. It was hard to appreciate the beauty of a place when the scenery was being used to try to kill you.

The occasional roar of Barnum in the distance added a surreal feel to the whole thing. Ty smiled grimly. “I hear you, buddy.”

The cell phone in his pocket began to ring, startling him. He had yet to set his new phone to any of his usual rings, so he had no idea who it was or whether it was worth digging the phone out to answer.

He groaned and shifted forward as he struggled to pull his phone out of his jeans pocket. He couldn’t get his cast past the denim, though, and he couldn’t hold both the cigar and the glass in his broken hand to use the other one. Finally, he had to stand up, and by that time he was cursing and looking around for somewhere to put his drink down.

When he turned to glance behind him, he was surprised to find that he wasn’t alone. Sadie stood there watching him, a doll in one hand and a smile on her face. Ty stared at her for a second and then handed her his wine glass. “Hold this.”

She giggled and took the glass, clutching it and her doll to her chest with both hands as she watched him twist and struggle to fish his phone out of his pocket with his opposite hand.

“Don’t drink it, okay?” She nodded.

When he got the phone out, he sat down and answered it with a distracted, “Grady here.” He reached for the glass, but when Sadie returned it, she also crawled into his lap and curled into the crook of his arm. He put his cigarillo out on the denim of his jeans and let it drop to the floor beside his chair so any lingering smoke wouldn’t be near her.

“Ty,” Dan McCoy said over the phone. “I hear the f**k-up fairy has visited you two again.”

Ty stared at the horizon as he tried to work out how to answer. There really wasn’t a short version. Barnum roared somewhere in the hills. “Uh . . .”

McCoy groaned as if he were in pain. “What have you done now?”

“Nothing. I just . . . nothing is really going to plan down here.”

“You had a plan?” McCoy asked in genuine shock.

Ty pursed his lips. “Not really,” he answered after a moment. “But if I had, I’m pretty sure this is not the way it would have gone.”

McCoy sighed. Ty could imagine him rubbing his forehead.

“You talked to Zane?” Ty asked with an expectant wince.

“He called and said you’d been tranquilized by exotic animal smugglers in Texas,” McCoy said with an almost audible frown. “I prefer when you lie to me, it’s more of a challenge trying to decide if it’s true. Garrett’s not very good at it.”

Ty laughed and closed his eyes. “You’re right, he’s not. He’s telling the truth, though.”

McCoy was silent. “Why, Ty? Why do you do this to me? One day I’m told you’re being loaned out to Richard Burns, the next I hear you’re playing footsy with Tony the Tiger in Texas to help out Garrett’s family ranch!”

Ty smiled and watched as Sadie’s tiny fingers played with the broken pieces of plaster on his cast. “Mac. Do me a favor, okay?” McCoy grunted, not willing to commit. “Tony the Tiger in Texas. Say it three times.”

“Stop it, Grady. Do you two need backup down there or is this just par for the course when you go off the grid?”

“No, Zane handed it over to the locals this morning. Animal control is all over it, they’ve got it under control.”

“He said you’d been lying in a puddle of your own drool for almost a day, there was a tiger loose on his family’s ranch, and no one has any idea who’s behind it, how they’re doing it, or what’s going on.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s ‘under control’?”

“Don’t judge me, Mac.”

“I don’t mind sending in the cavalry down there if it’ll hurry things along. I can make a call to the San Antonio division. Burns says I can’t call you back unless Baltimore is burning.”

“Is Baltimore burning?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll talk to you after the Fourth, Mac. Have a good night.” Ty hung up the phone with a grin. He slid it into his shirt pocket, thinking it would be easier to get it out next time, and tilted his head to look at Sadie.

Her eyelids were growing heavy as he rocked, her head resting on his shoulder as she stared at the setting sun. Ty drank down the last of his wine before putting his glass on the floor, then pulled her closer. He adjusted her until they could both be comfortable.

“Did you got eated by a tiger?” she asked as she poked her finger into one of the tooth marks in his cast.

“I guess I did. He was a good tiger, though.”

“Did he bite you?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Then he was a bad tiger.”

“You think so?”

“Biting is bad,” Sadie said with a nod.

“I guess you’re right.”

She yawned, struggling to open her eyes again. “Will the tiger bite me?”

“No, sweet pea,” Ty said. He rested his chin on her head.

“Daddy will keep me safe.”

Ty stared off into the sunset, pushing at the floorboards with his toes to keep the chair rocking. He nodded and pulled her closer, rocking and holding the little girl to him to keep her bare arms and legs warm as the night grew cooler. If his suspicions about Mark were correct, Sadie’s daddy might not be around to keep her safe for a good long while.

“Have you seen Sadie?” Annie asked as she came into the den where Zane was sitting with his dad. “We can’t find her anywhere.”

Zane and Harrison stood to help look, Zane’s mind going immediately to the tiger on the loose. He pushed back the instinctive panic and chastised himself. It was a valid concern that the tiger would be attracted to the activity of the ranch. They’d been hearing his roars for two nights now. But Barnum was not going to start plucking the people Zane loved out of the house no matter how bad Zane’s luck was.