Drake, page 2
Drake’s brow furrowed. “Utah?”
The handsome man with the auburn hair and blue eyes smirked. “I prefer to go by Pierce. I like to think I’ve outgrown the Utah moniker.”
Murdock laughed and pounded Utah on the back. “You’ll never live down Utah. Once an uptight asshole, always an uptight asshole.”
Pierce “Utah” Turner’s lips pressed together. “Thanks.” He held out his hand to Drake. “Good to see you under better circumstances than the last time we worked together.”
Drake gripped the man’s hand, truly glad to see him. “Taking mortar fire while trying to extract that Marine platoon was not one of our cleanest joint operations. You saved my life that day.”
“And you returned the favor five minutes later,” Utah said. “I’d call it even.”
Drake glanced toward the last man he knew in the group and smiled. “Hey, Judge. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Didn’t think you’d remember me, it’s been so long.” Joe “Judge” Smith, former Delta Force Operative, was the old man of the group of men Drake would work with at the lodge. Like Hank, he’d influenced Drake when he was a young Navy SEAL fresh out of training. He’d been an integral part of the first joint operation of which Drake had been a part.
He'd hung back to provide cover fire for the team as they’d exited a hot zone. Judge had taken a bullet to his right forearm and had to use his left arm and hand to fire his rifle. The man hadn’t missed a beat. He’d held on long enough for the entire team to reach the Black Hawk helicopters waiting at the extraction point.
When Judge hadn’t been right behind them loading the aircraft, Drake had jumped out, determined to go back. He’d gone less than twenty yards when Judge had come running, dozens of Taliban soldiers on his heels.
Drake and the rest of his team had provided him cover until he’d dove aboard the helicopter. They’d lifted off under heavy fire and made it back to the Forward Operating Base without losing a single man. He’d made an impression on Drake he would never forget.
“What brings you to Montana?” Drake asked.
“Got tired of wiping the noses of baby Deltas,” Judge said. “When I reached my twenty, I figured it was time to leave.”
“I always wondered why they called you Judge,” Drake admitted.
Judge shrugged.
Grimm laughed. “It came out of a barroom fight. Patterson didn’t like the way a man was treating one of the ladies. When he told him to back off, the man asked him what he was going to do if he didn’t.” Grimm’s lips curled. “He became the Judge, jury and executioner.”
“You killed the guy?” the woman at the drafting table asked.
Judge shook his head. “No.”
“He made him wish he was dead,” Grimm said. “He almost got kicked out of Delta Force. If the woman he’d defended hadn’t come forward to tell her side of the story, his career would’ve been over.”
Drake glanced around at the men he’d fought with and shook his head. “Had I known we were having a reunion, I would’ve come sooner.”
“I want each of you to know I would hire you in a heartbeat for my organization, Brotherhood Protectors, but you all have expressed your desire to fire nail guns, not Glocks. I haven’t given up hope that you’ll change your mind, but I respect that you want to try something different. And with that, I’ll hand you over to your new bosses. Molly McKinnon and her fiancé, Parker Bailey, are from the Iron Horse Ranch.” Hank waved a hand toward the man and the woman who’d remained at the drafting table. “They’re the new owners of the Lucky Lady Lodge.”
“For better or worse.” The man took Drake’s hand. “Welcome aboard. I’m here to do the grunt work, just like you guys.” He turned to the woman. “Molly is the brains behind the project.”
Molly shook Drake’s hand. “Glad to meet you. Now, if we could get started…”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
She turned to the drawings. “We’re in the demolition phase of this project. We have to clean up what was damaged in the mine explosion before we can assess structural damage,” Molly said.
Parker added. “Each man has been assigned different areas to work, not too far from each other in case you run into trouble.”
Molly pointed to the blueprint. “Drake, you’ll take the butler’s pantry and coat closet on the far side of the main dining room. The walls are cracked and crumbling. We need to get behind the drywall to see if the support beams have been compromised. Your goal today is to clear the walls on the mountainside of the rooms and any other walls showing significant damage.”
Parker raised a hand. “I’ll take Drake and Grimm to their locations.”
Molly glanced toward the other three men. “The rest are with me. You’ll find sledgehammers, battery-powered reciprocating saws, gloves and wheelbarrows staged in each of your areas. The power is off, so you’ll have to use the headlamps on your safety helmets. The rooms against the mountain don’t get much natural light.” She handed Drake a helmet with a headlamp. “Thank you all for answering Hank’s call. We needed as many hands as we could get for this project, and sometimes, people are hard to come by in small towns.”
Anxious to get to work, Drake plunked his helmet on his head and followed Parker through the maze of hallways to the back of the lodge. They hadn’t gone far before they had to stop and turn on their headlamps.
Parker continued, explaining what each room was as they passed doorways. He eventually came to a stop in front of a wooden door. “Grimm, this is your assigned area. Judge, yours is the next room. I’ll be two doors down. If something doesn’t feel right, get the hell out. We don’t know exactly how much damage the explosion caused. I’d rather we err on the side of caution. The sooner we see inside the walls, the sooner we can get to work rebuilding.”
“Got it.” Grimm pulled on a pair of gloves, wrapped his hands around the handle of a sledgehammer and nodded. “Nothing like a little demolition to work out all your frustrations. Let’s do this.”
Judge entered the next room and found what he needed to get started. Parker moved on.
Gloves on, Drake grabbed the sledgehammer and went to work knocking big holes in the plaster on the back wall. Piece by piece, he pulled away the plaster and the narrow wooden slats behind it, exposing a couple of feet of the interior beams at a time.
Plaster dust filled the air, making it more and more difficult to see. Judge found face masks in the stack of supplies and pulled one on over his mouth and nose. He’d made it through half the back wall in less than an hour. If he kept up the pace, he’d have that wall done in the next hour. The other walls in the room had only hairline fractures in the plaster. Hopefully, that was a good sign that they hadn’t been damaged to the point they needed to be torn down as well.
One thing was certain; they’d have to wait until the dust settled before they could assess the status of the support beams.
The banging on the wall in the next rooms stopped for a moment.
“Can you see anything?” Grimm called out.
“Not much,” Drake responded. “My headlamp is reflecting off all the dust particles.”
“Same,” Grimm came to stand in the doorway, wearing a mask over his mouth and nose.
“Let the dust settle for a few minutes,” Parker called out.
“Have you had a chance to find a place to live?” Grimm asked.
Drake shook his head, his light swinging right then left, bouncing off the dust in the air. “I just got to town and came straight here.”
“I think there’s room at Mrs. Dottie Kinner’s bed and breakfast where I’m staying. You can follow me there after work and ask her yourself if she’s got another room available.”
“Thanks.” Drake glanced across the room. “I think I can see the wall again.”
Grimm nodded. “Going back to my wall.”
Moments later, the men were slamming their heavy sledgehammers into yet more plaster.
Drake worked on the next four feet of wall, knocking out sheetrock. He grabbed hold of a portion of the drywall and pulled hard. A large portion fell away, exposing a gap between studs that was three feet wide.
Had there been a door there at one time? He removed the rest of the plaster down to the floor and had to wait for the dust to settle in order to see the beams, much less if anything lay beyond the beams.
As the dust slowly settled, Drake’s headlamp beam cut through the remaining particles to a room beyond the wall. It wasn’t more than six feet by six feet square and had been carved out of the rock wall of the mountain.
He stepped between the beams into the stone-walled room. Several wooden crates littered the floor, along with a pile of what appeared to be clothing. He crossed to the crates and found them to be full of bottles of some kind of liquid. None of the bottles were labeled.
Drake suspected the bottles were moonshine and that the stash was left over from the Prohibition Era. He turned the beam of his headlamp to the pile of clothes on the floor. The cloth had a floral pattern of faded pink and yellow. Perhaps it had once been a curtain or a woman’s dress.
As he neared the pile, he noticed a shoe and something that appeared to be a pole or thick stick lying beside it.
His pulse picked up, his empty belly roiling. He leaned over the pile of clothes and the shoe and froze.
The stick wasn’t a stick at all. It was a bone. On the other side of it was another bone just like it.
With the handle of his sledgehammer, he moved the crate beside the pile of cloth and gasped.
On the other side of the crate, lying against the cold stone floor, lay a skull covered in a dry mummified layer of skin with a few long, thin strands of hair clinging to it in scattered patches.
“Parker,” Drake called out.
When the hammering continued, Drake cleared his throat and yelled. “Parker!”
All hammering ceased.
“That you, Drake?” Parker answered.
With his gaze on what he now had determined was a complete skeleton covered in a woman’s dress, Drake said, “You need to come see this.”
Chapter 2
After Deputy Cassie Douglas had issued Drake Morgan a warning to watch his speed around Eagle Rock, she’d driven to the sheriff’s office well past her shift’s end.
The night had been long and uneventful, making it feel even longer than the over nine hours she’d put in from eleven o’clock the previous night to almost nine that morning.
“You’re late,” Sheriff Barron said as she entered the office.
“Had a traffic stop on my way in.”
“Anything interesting?” the sheriff asked without looking up from his computer screen.
Yeah. Drake Morgan had been interesting. New to town. Black hair, blue eyes, and at least a foot taller than Cassie, with impossibly broad shoulders and a tight ass. “Just the usual. In a hurry to get somewhere.”
“Guess he didn’t get where he was going on time.” Sheriff Barron chose that moment to glance up. “Give you any trouble?”
“No,” she said. Except for the way her stomach fluttered when he’d given her a crooked smile and thanked her for giving him a warning.
The man had been ruggedly handsome in an unassuming way. She was human and female, and her body had reacted to him more than she would ever admit. Not that she’d act on any attraction. The frisk had been necessary to ensure her own safety. She’d learned early on in her short career as a sheriff’s deputy that she should never turn her back to a man or woman until she knew for certain that person was unarmed. Even then, she didn’t turn her back.
“Ticket?” the sheriff asked.
Cassie shook her head. “Warning. He didn’t have any outstanding warrants. He cooperated and didn’t get angry, even when I frisked him.”
The sheriff grinned. “I’ll bet.”
She frowned. “He had a gun in his glove box. I wasn’t taking any chances. The man could’ve been hiding another gun on his person.”
Still smiling, Sheriff Barron held up his hands. “I’m not judging. A lone female on duty has to do what she has to do to stay safe.”
“Damn right,” she said, her lips pressing together. She glanced around. “Did Wells make it in?”
The sheriff shook his head. “His mother fell last night. He’s at the hospital in Bozeman with her. Guthrie took his shift. She answered a call out at the Miller’s place. Should be back in town within the next hour.”
Cassie snorted. “Fat chance. Ms. Georgia Miller will keep her for more than an hour, looking over every inch of her two acres while regaling her with stories of her past as a Vegas call girl.”
Sheriff Barron laughed. “You’re right. The exact reason I chose to send Guthrie. She’s got more patience than I do.”
“I believe Guthrie has the mom gene.”
“How so?” the sheriff asked.
Cassie pulled up a chair at a desk and fired up the computer. “It’s the genetic predisposition to ignore certain stimuli, like a crying baby, children arguing among each other…you know, a typical day in the paradise of raising a family.”
“I take it you’re not all that into family,” the sheriff said.
“I wouldn’t mind grown children, but I’d have to get them past those awkward newborn to twenty-five stages.”
The sheriff pushed to his feet. “I need to make a run to the gym. My heart doctor told me I either had to work out or die.”
“Nothing like being blunt,” Cassie said
He glanced at his desk, a frown pulling his brow low. “I’ve got so much to do…” The sheriff shook his head and started to resume his seat. “I might just skip the workout.”
“Seriously, tell me what I can do for you.” Cassie grinned. “You’re going to be gone…what…an hour? Maybe two?”
The sheriff grimaced. “I’m almost certain I can’t do more than an hour of any kind of exercise. I’ll be back in an hour, no more.” He pushed to his feet. “You sure you’ll be okay for another hour?”
She nodded. “I’m always too wound up to sleep after coming off the graveyard shift. I might as well catch up on my paperwork.”
Sheriff Barron grabbed a gym bag from beneath his desk and gave her a lopsided grin. “Then either I’ll be back soon, or Guthrie will, and you can go home to bed.”
“Take your time.” Cassie glanced around the office. “Where’s Marnie?”
“She’s telecommuting,” the sheriff said. “She can handle dispatch from home.”
“I have no doubt about that,” Cassie said. “That woman could juggle knives and talk a jumper off the ledge at the same time.”
He nodded. “Just lock up if you need to leave before I get back.”
“I should still be here. I want to do some more research.”
The sheriff’s gaze softened. “Making any progress on finding your friend?”
Cassie sighed. “Not really. You’d think that after four months, we’d have found something. Anything.”
“And yet, there’s been nothing.” The sheriff shook his head. “No new leads?”
Cassie shook her head, her lips tightening. “I still think it’s her ex-boyfriend who’s done something with her.”
“The detective in Los Angeles questioned him. He was at work when she disappeared. His alibi is airtight.”
“Then he paid someone to do his dirty work,” Cassie said. “He was an abusive bastard. I tried to get Penny to leave him. Every time she said she would, he’d start acting right again and apologize for his treatment of her.”
“It’s a vicious cycle. The abused woman tends to think she’s the one at fault,” the sheriff said.
Cassie nodded and frowned. “You’re not getting to the gym by standing here, talking to me. I won’t have Doc Adams chewing me out for delaying you from the lifestyle he’s prescribed for you.” She grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll stick around and answer anything that comes up.”
The sheriff drew in a deep breath and let it out. “Okay. I’m going.” He pushed through the door and paused on the threshold. “If anything comes up, I can be here in less than ten minutes.”
Cassie chuckled. “This is Eagle Rock, Montana. Since the James McKinnon abduction case was solved, we’ve had a dry spell of crime.” Cassie laughed. “Not that I’m complaining. We’re lucky to get one speeder every other day.”
“And you’ve met your quota for the next two days.” Sheriff Barron nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m outta here.”
Finally, the sheriff made it through the door and out to his service vehicle.
Cassie shook her head. Barron was a good man who did a lot for the community he served. They were lucky to have a man with such solid values and a desire to help others.
Now, if only she could find Penny and bring her home.
Cassie went online to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database, hoping for any updates that might give her a lead to follow in Penny’s disappearance.
She suspected Penny’s ex because of his track record as an abuser.
Penny’s car hadn’t been found. For all Cassie knew, Penny and her car could have been driven off a cliff into the ocean or into a lake where no one would find her or the car for decades.
Deep down, Cassie hoped to find Penny someday, alive and maybe held captive, not dead and buried. The odds of finding a missing person after more than forty-eight hours were slim. Four months had passed with no leads, no sightings and no sign of her car or her on any video surveillance cameras or in any airports, car lots or parking garages. It was as if Penny had disappeared off the face of the earth.
“No,” Cassie said and searched even harder. She wouldn’t give up.
Deep in the NamUs database, Cassie jumped when the phone on the sheriff’s desk rang.
She leaped to her feet and answered. “Deputy Douglas.”
“Cassie,” Marnie’s voice sounded in her ear, curt and anxious. “Is the sheriff around? He’s not answering his cell phone.”
“He’s gone to the gym,” Cassie said. “What do you need?”
