Raising the Stakes

CHAPTER ONE

Four years later:

GRAHAM BARON stepped out of the terminal at the Austin airport and wondered how he’d ever survived spending the first seventeen years of his life in Texas. He was thirty-three and lived in New York now but whenever he came back here, the fact that he’d been born in this place always surprised him. It all seemed alien. The people. Their lazy drawls. The vastness of land and sky. The weather.

Oh, yeah, he thought, the weather, as the heat washed over him like an open furnace. And it wasn’t really summer. Of course, there were those who said this wasn’t really Texas, either. The guidebooks called the area hill country. So did people back East.

“Are you really from Texas?” somebody would say, if the subject of his birthplace came up.

“Yup,” he’d reply, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops and putting on a John Wayne drawl, “ah surely am.”

It always got a laugh, considering that he had no accent, didn’t wear cowboy boots and had washed away the stink of oil, cattle and horses sixteen long years ago.

“Where in Texas?” they’d ask. And when Gray said he’d been born in Austin, someone would nod wisely and say, Austin, huh? Wasn’t that, like, different? Weren’t there green trees and rolling hills in Austin? It wasn’t really the same as the rest of the state, right?

Like hell it wasn’t, Gray thought as he put down his briefcase, peeled off his suit jacket, loosened his tie and rolled back his shirtsleeves. A man accustomed to a soaring Manhattan skyline had little use for the puny imitation of this one, and the hills of Central Park rolled as much as the land around here.

Dammit, he was in a rotten mood. For what had to be the hundredth time since he’d boarded the plane at La Guardia this morning, he wished he hadn’t let himself get talked into making this trip…but he had. What was that old saying? Curiosity killed the cat. In his case, it had put him on a 6:00 a.m. flight to Texas.

A horn beeped at the curb. Gray looked over, saw a dark green Jeep with the Espada longhorns painted on the door. Abel Jones waved a hand. Gray waved back and trotted over.

“Nice of you to pick me up,” he said as he got into the seat beside Abel and dumped his briefcase in the back.

Abel gave him a long look, then spat out the window and pulled into traffic. “Jes’ part of the job,” he said laconically.

So much for conversation. Not that Gray was surprised. Jonas Baron’s foreman was a lot like the old man himself. Tall, spare, seemingly ageless, and not given to small talk. Well, that was fine. Gray wasn’t much interested in conversation. He sat back, let the coolness of the air-conditioning wash over him as they made their way out of the airport and onto the highway that led from the city to the town of Brazos Springs, and tried to figure out what his uncle could possibly want.

Jonas had phoned late last night. The call had drawn Gray from the kind of deep sleep that came of having a woman lying warm and sated in his arms. The woman, someone he’d been seeing for several weeks, murmured a soft complaint as he rolled away from her and reached for the telephone, an automatic reaction that came of eight years of practicing criminal law.

You got a lot of middle of the night calls, when your clients weren’t exactly the salt of the earth.

“Gray Baron,” he said hoarsely.

The voice that responded was one he hadn’t heard in a long time, an easy Texas drawl laid over a whip-sharp tone of command.

“Graham?”

“Jonas?” Gray peered at the lighted dial on his alarm clock

, then sat up against the pillows. “What’s happened?”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your old man, if that’s what you mean. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with nobody you care about, so you can relax.”

“Gray?” the woman beside him murmured. “What’s the matter?”

That was what he was trying to figure out. He reached back, smoothed his hand over her warm skin. Telephone at his ear, he got to his feet and walked, naked, from the bedroom.

“What’s that supposed to mean? That there’s nothing wrong with anybody I care about?”

“It’s jes’ a statement, boy. No need to try and parse it.” There was a brief pause. “I guess you’re wonderin’ why I’m callin’ so late.”

“You guessed right,” Gray said dryly.

“What time is it there, anyways? Midnight?”

“It’s almost two. What’s up, Jonas?”

There was another silence. “I just, uh, I just thought…I thought that we ain’t seen you in these parts for a while.”