Unbound Pursuit (6 page)

“So what happened? What turned him into a drug dealer, Wyatt?”

“Mark was in the Marine Corps from eighteen through twenty-six. He joined just as I was joining the Navy to go into the SEALs. He went into black ops with Force Recon. He was over in Afghanistan most of the time, and he saw a lot of action and combat. According to my father, when Mark got out of the corps at twenty-six, he went to Nogales to find work as a truck driver. It made no sense to me or my family. Mark’s a damned intelligent person. But, according to Mattie, he wasn’t anything like he used to be.”

“What does that mean?” Tal asked, frowning.

“PTSD symptoms—anxious, irritable, couldn’t sleep at night, nightmares, and flashbacks,” he muttered. “It upset Mattie a lot. He wasn’t the person she had been friends with all her life.”

“I’m sure it would be jolting,” Tal murmured, sympathetic. “So? When did the drugs enter the picture?”

“Mattie said he’d be gone for days at a time and wouldn’t tell her where he was going. He lived in Nogales, but he had a truck route where he could stop off and see her and Sage maybe once or twice a month. He just started seeing less and less of Mattie. She went to Sage, who works at their father’s ranch, and asked her if she knew anything about Mark’s strange activities. Sage had no idea. She didn’t know why Mark was disappearing weeks at a time either. Mark wasn’t telling his father, whom he hates, or Sage when this disappearing act would happen.”

“So, he went dark for some unknown reason,” Tal said, moving her fingers across his chest.

“Yeah, ’fraid so.”

“Poor Mattie, my heart breaks for her, Wyatt.”

“Mark became a ghost in her life,” Wyatt muttered, sadness in his tone.

“That’s hard, when you’ve had a friend for so long who starts removing themselves from your life,” Tal said. “No wonder she looks so sad and beat down.”

“Yeah, it knocked the stuffing out of her,” Wyatt quietly agreed. “And of all the kids, she’s the most vulnerable among us. The one that has no shields in place to protect herself from shit like that. I’m surprised my family brought it up tonight, to tell you the truth. It’s one of the so-called skeletons in our closet. We tend not to talk about Mark in front of Mattie. It’s like the elephant that’s in the room; no one wants to say it’s there. She’s still suffering badly over it.”

“She was blindsided.”

“For damn sure,” Wyatt grimly said. “She’s twenty-nine now and still hasn’t come out from under it. I personally think she’s grieving. Why those two never said they loved one another, when it was clear to all of us, is a mystery.”

“She doesn’t have a present relationship?” Tal asked.

“No. Since Mark more or less left, she’s lost interest in life. No matter what Cat or Jake do to introduce her to a new man, a good man, she won’t engage with him at all. She’s still carryin’ a torch for Mark, and I don’t know why.”

“Is Mattie one of these women who falls in love and can never love again if she loses the love of her life?”

“Wish to hell I knew, Tal. It appears to be that way. The whole family is flummoxed by it. So is Sage. They’re like sisters, but Sage is the opposite of Mattie. She’s one tough, boarded-up customer. Doesn’t take shit from anyone. In fact, according to my dad, she runs the ranch. Jeb, the father, has had a series of strokes over the last five years due to his drinking habit and is pretty much housebound. Most of the time, he doesn’t know where he’s at. Sage hired a foreman a while back, from what my dad said, and things are straightening out at the ranch for them, finally. Sage has put their homestead back on solid financial footing since that new foreman was hired a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he’s ex–Delta Force and knew Mark. He called Sage and told her that he was getting out and looking for a foreman’s job, so she hired him.”

“I’m glad for her. You said Mark went to a federal penitentiary?”

“Yeah, he got two years for drug running and just got out a little while ago. Appears he’s back doing the same thing. My dad’s really bothered by it, and I don’t blame him. It’s not a good sign.”

“What does it mean, Wyatt?”

“That the Cardona drug cartel is now moving east and thinking about using our ranch land as a route to transport drugs through back roads,” Wyatt admitted grimly.

“Is this the first time any of your dad’s wranglers have seen Mark and his drug convoy on your land?”

“As far as I know, yes, this is the first time. What I worry about is that Cat and Jake work here on the ranch. They’re out there either riding an ATV or on horseback, often by themselves, in some of the far reaches of our property. What if Mark and his cartel soldiers run into one of them? What will they do? Shoot them? Jesus, I worry about Cat being taken captive, hauled back over the border, and raped by cartel soldiers, and then held for ransom or even worse.”

Tal made a sympathetic sound and slid her arm across his torso, trying to comfort him. She heard the edgy anxiety in Wyatt’s deep drawl. He wasn’t a man to worry much about anything. He was a man of action. And in this case, she felt every protective cell in Wyatt’s body orienting toward his brother and sister, who might become casualties of drug running along the Texas-Mexico border. “What else does this cartel do?” she asked, fearing the answer.

She felt Wyatt squirm.

She reached up, sliding her fingers along his sandpapery jaw, feeling him withdrawing, trying to protect himself from his own emotions or the answer she was seeking.

“Diego Cardona is the leader of the Cardona cartel,” Wyatt began heavily, sliding his fingers through her loose hair. “He’s forty-five, bloodthirsty, and took over the cartel seven years ago from his father, who he murdered in order to become the leader.”

“Great,” Tal muttered. “A psychopath. But which one of them isn’t?”

“Just different shades and intensities of the same thing,” Wyatt agreed.

“Did he change the course of the cartel?”

“Yes. When his father had it, it was strictly focused on bringing drugs over the border. Now the son, Diego, is up to his ass in the sex-slave and sex-trafficking trade. He captures young kids, eight years old up to their teen years, as they try to cross the border to get into the U.S. Then he gets buyers in the U.S. and Canada, or he moves them by truck to either the East Coast or West Coast. Container ships from China and other Asian countries take these sex-slave captives on board, hauling them to other ports around the world and selling them off as they go.”

“God,” Tal breathed. “That’s horrible!”

“Yeah, and it’s a very lucrative business. The latest stats Artemis has received from Border Patrol say Cardona is making sixty percent of his money now in the sex-slave trade. The other forty percent is from running drugs from Central and South America into the U.S.”

“You think this intrusion onto your family’s property is new?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted wearily, running his fingers through his hair. “I’m going to sit down with Dad tomorrow after breakfast and see what else he knows. Then I’m going to contact Artemis, and we’re going to connect with the U.S. Border Patrol and other federal players who are tapped into this issue, and try to get a fuller picture of the situation. If they don’t have a drone flying over the northeastern boundary of our ranch, I’m going to get someone to do just that, so we have twenty-four-hour surveillance to prove it out one way or another.”

“This is awful,” Tal whispered. She stilled her hand across his slowly beating heart.

“I’m sorry, Tal,” he said, easing up on one elbow. Wyatt held her dark, turbulent gaze. “This was supposed to be a vacation for you, no stress, no threat level.”

“It’s okay, Wyatt,” she reassured him, searching his angst-ridden eyes. “Let’s figure out what we can do together here to keep your family safe from that cartel. We’ll be here until January second. You’ve brought your Toughbook laptop, and you have every kind of electronic device known to mankind, so you can hook up with Artemis back in Virginia to get what we need to know.”

“I wanted this to be a happy time for you down here, Tal. To get to know my siblings, my parents, under less pressured circumstances.”

“I still will, silly goose.” She smiled and saw his eyes become less stormy as she smoothed her hand across his cheek, threading her fingers through his short hair. “You can do the black ops stuff here in your bedroom. We don’t need to tell anyone what you’re doing, except your parents, of course.”

“I sure as hell don’t want Mattie knowing a thing about this. She’s been in a depression since Mark disappeared. Nothing has pulled her out of it. I really worry about her.”

“I’ll spend some time with her,” Tal reassured him. “Not that I’m so great on guys.” She gave him a warm look. “You chased me for three years before you caught me. I wasn’t interested in getting into a new relationship because of my past, either. Mattie and I have some common ground, Wyatt. Maybe I can lift her spirits. Or get her to see she has a future regardless of what happened in the past between her and Mark.”

“Good luck on that one,” he grumbled. “All of us, myself included, have tried to get Mattie to let go of Mark. I just don’t know why she doesn’t. It confounds the hell out of me.”

“I know what it’s like to love deeply, Wyatt.”

“Yeah . . . I know you do.”

“It took me years to climb out of my own heartbreak over losing Brian before I allowed you into my life.”

“Maybe that’s good news. She could still crawl out from under her heartbreak and find a nice wrangler who’ll love her, who’ll know what he’s got in Mattie.”

She heard the pain in Wyatt’s voice for his sister. “It’s a process,” she whispered, looking into his eyes. Wyatt was not normally this emotional about anything. He always hid how he felt under that Texas good-ol’-boy drawl and easygoing nature of his, as if nothing bothered him. Now she was seeing squarely his feelings and worry, which had come to the surface. He was hurting for Mattie. And she wished she could do something to assuage his pain. Family dynamics could be a bitch; she knew that firsthand from her own. None were perfect. They were always a work in progress. She saw that everyone wanted to help Mattie but knew that sometimes a person just needed time to work through a painful process on her own terms.

“You need to go to sleep,” Wyatt growled, gathering her up into his arms and kissing her lips lightly.

“We both do,” Tal agreed, exhaustion stalking her. “It’s been a long, hectic day.”

Grunting, Wyatt pulled Tal in beside him, holding her gently. “This mess is unexpected as hell. I was looking forward to doing so many things here on the ranch with you.”

Tal smoothed her hand across his chest. “We still can, Wyatt. Let’s take it a day at a time. You go about your black ops business after breakfast tomorrow morning, and I’ll see if Mattie will let me tag along with her to work. I think she needs a friend.”

“I just wonder if Mark realizes he needs to give the pieces of her broken heart back to Mattie,” Wyatt sighed.

Tal smoothed his T-shirt across his shoulder, wanting to ease some of his sadness. “For all of Mattie’s idealism and being a softy, she’s got the Lockwood backbone, which isn’t anything to sniff at. I feel Mattie’s a lot stronger than any of you suspect.”

W
yatt tried to
tame the nest of snakes churning in his gut as he walked out into the equipment barn of his father’s ranch. He found Hank Lockwood working on a tractor engine. It was midafternoon, and he tried to gird himself as he approached.

“Hey, Dad, do you have a minute?”

Hank looked up from where he had his head stuck into the engine of his tractor. “Sure, son. What’s up?”

Wyatt pointed to the laptop he held in his left hand. “Got some stuff I need you to look at. To make some decisions about.”

Hank grunted and pulled a rag from the back pocket of his jeans. His fingers were greasy. “What have you been up to? I’ve not seen hide nor hair of you all morning,” he said, gesturing to a bench out near the entrance to the shed. He grabbed his straw cowboy hat sitting on top of the tractor hood.

Mouth turning down, Wyatt walked with his father to the bench, sitting and opening his Toughbook laptop. “I was doing some black ops investigation on this problem with drug runners coming across our land. And I saw something I didn’t really want to see,” he muttered. He turned the screen so that his father could see it and said, “This is the northeastern corner of our ranch.” He traced it with his index finger on a black-and-white photo that was rather grainy.

Hank narrowed his eyes, leaning forward, studying the photo on the laptop. “What am I lookin’ at, Wyatt?”

“It’s a satellite flyover that includes that section of your ranch, Dad. And it was taken five days ago.” He pointed to the date and time stamp in the corner of it.

Hank scowled. “Satellites are taking photos of this area?”

“Yes, they’re moving them around all the time. Because of all the issues on our southern border with Mexico, the government is utilizing satellite flyovers as well as drones to cover large, empty areas to try and stop the intrusions over the border. But this is from a commercial satellite. It’s not classified, which is why I’m showing it to you.”

“What am I looking at, then?” Hank asked.

“A satellite has camera equipment on board, and it photographs everything within a certain distance,” Wyatt explained. “This morning, I had my Mission Planning people go through the photos to find the coordinates of our ranch. Then they narrowed it down to that section and began studying the photos. Now, with one of the government’s Keyhole satellites, which are top secret, you can see a quarter on the ground from fifty thousand feet, and see it clearly. But since this is just a common commercial one that’s on lease to the U.S. government, the photos are grainy. If you look at it close, you’ll see a black vehicle with four white pickup trucks behind it on that dirt road that’s inside the boundary of our property. The women in our Intel section looked at the photo with special equipment to refine the image and could identify it as a black Jeep with four white Toyota pickup trucks behind it,” Wyatt said.