'She?' Lightstone's head came up. 'Are you sure it was a woman?'
'Oh, yes, it was definitely a woman's voice,' the young woman nodded. 'She had a real strong accent. Sort of Germanic, I think.'
Lightstone forced himself to remain calm. 'Do you remember what was it, exactly, that she said to you?' he asked, feeling his blood pressure starting to rise as he remembered A1 Grynard's words: And Scoby hasn't checked back in from a routine contact with a female informant somewhere in southern Arizona.
'Well, let me think. Humm, first of all, when I asked who she was, she said that she didn't want to give me her name because it was not a big deal and she didn't think-'
'Listen, uh, Tracy,' Lightstone interrupted as he quickly read the nameplate on the front of the desk, 'this is very important. Do you have any idea of where Agent Stoner was to meet this informant?'
'No, he didn't say, but he might have written it down in the notebook on his desk. He usually-' she started to add, but Lightstone was already sprinting to Stoner's small office, where he rummaged around the top of the cluttered desk and then in the lower file drawer.
'Uh, sir, I'm really not supposed to let you do that,' the young woman said as she came in through the doorway with a determined look on her face. But Lightstone already had the spiral-bound notebook opened to the last entry. A moment later he was out the door and running down the wide corridor to the elevator.
At six-foot-nine, and three hundred and ten pounds, Special Agent Dwight Stoner had long since become accustomed to the fact that his presence tended to intimidate people.
And while that sort of thing was perfectly okay when facing down defensive linebackers like Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, or malicious biker punks like Brendon Kleinfelter, it was often a disadvantage when the formidable special agent tried to interact with the general public.
Thus, when Dwight Stoner saw the momentary look of fear in the very attractive young woman's eyes, he immediately tried to compensate by relaxing his guard.
'I didn't mean to frighten you, ma'am,' Stoner said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he held out his badge and credentials. 'I'm Special Agent Dwight Stoner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I believe you called me this morning about an illegal rack?'
'Oh yes, Officer. Please come in.' Carine Mueller said in a shaky voice, genuinely startled by the immense size of the federal agent. She decided immediately that she wouldn't let Sonny Chareaux draw the game out with this man the way he wanted to. 'I was afraid that you might have changed your mind.'
'Had to stop for gas, and then I made a wrong turn back at the junction.' Stoner shrugged his massive shoulders apologetically. 'Took me a while to find somebody who knew this part of the country well enough to give me directions.'
'It was very kind of you to drive all the way out here,' Mueller said as she led him in through the kitchen and out the back door, then started walking toward a large, decrepit barn at the far corner of her acre-sized lot. 'My neighbor was so frightened.'
'Is that Mr. Nakamura?' Stoner asked, observing the slender, nervous-looking Oriental man who stood next to the partially opened side door of the barn.
'Yes,' Carine Mueller nodded. 'He's such a nice man, and he and his wife are wonderful neighbors. But they haven't been in this country very long, and he was afraid that he'd be arrested if he kept it at his house. And he didn't know what to do, so I told him that he could keep it in our barn until you got here.'
'Mr. Nakamura, I'm Special Agent Stoner, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,' Stoner said as he walked up and slowly extended his large hand.
'Yes, I thank you very much that you come to help me,' Kiro Nakamura-a Shotokan fourth-degree black belt- said in broken English, taking professional note of Dwight Stoner's limp as he returned the agent's handshake with his deliberately relaxed right hand.
'I understand you had a run-in with a poacher out here?'
'Yes,' Nakamura nodded with wide-eyed enthusiasm. 'He say that for very little money, I can have big animal trophy and family name in record book. I say yes, but now he want more money, and I not want,' Nakamura stuttered, forcing his lethal hands to tremble visibly. 'I am visitor in your country. Not want to go to jail.'
'It's okay, Mr. Nakamura,' Dwight Stoner said soothingly. 'I'm here to help you, not to arrest you, okay?'
'Yes, okay, I like that.' The Oriental man smiled happily as Stoner turned back to Carine Mueller.
'You said the rack is in the barn?'
'Yes, let me show you,' Mueller said as she led the way into the dark, cobwebby barn that was filled with stacked boxes, trunks, gasoline cans, and a vast array of farm equipment that looked like it hadn't been touched in years.
'Ugghh, this place gives me the willies,' she shuddered as she fumbled around in the semidarkness. 'I almost never come out here. I hate spiders, and I can never remember where the light switch is.'
'Is this it?' Stoner asked as he stepped between two head-high stacks of old cardboard boxes and looked down at the huge, eight-point elk rack that had been propped up against a pair of wooden ammo crates.
'Yes, that is what he want to sell to me,' Kiro Nakamura said in an excited voice as he moved up past Stoner. 'But then he say I no have papers, so I must pay more.'
'What did you say the man's name was?' Stoner asked as he bent down to examine the record-sized rack more closely.
'Chareaux,' said a familiar voice to Stoner's right.
'What-?'
Dwight Stoner started to come up and around just as Sonny Chareaux lunged forward and swung the baseball bat square across Stoner's right knee, causing the surprised special agent to roar in agony as he collapsed on the concrete floor.
As Stoner went down, Kiro Nakamura immediately moved in to grab for his shoulder-holstered. 45 SIG-Sauer automatic. Pulling Stoner's jacket aside with his right hand and reaching in his left, Nakamura unsnapped the restraining strap and had the heavy weapon halfway out of its holster when Dwight Stoner brought his head up with a savage look in his pain-filled eyes and closed his huge right hand around Nakamura's left wrist.
Reacting with blinding speed, Nakamura yelled out a guttural 'Ki-ai!' as he drove the heel of his right palm into Stoner's nose, slamming the agent's head backward in a spray of blood. Yelling out again, Nakamura brought his tightly closed right hand around in a vicious back-fisted strike that caught Stoner square across the right eye and snapped his head around to the left. He then delivered a knife-hand thrust to the agent's exposed throat.
Stunned and nearly unconscious, Stoner dropped hard onto his knees with an agonized gasp, but somehow he managed to find the strength to snap Nakamura's wrist, causing the Oriental to release the SIG-Sauer pistol, which clattered to the floor.
Then, using the broken wrist for leverage, Stoner sent the injured karate master stumbling into Carine Mueller just as she was reaching into one of the boxes for her. 357 revolver.
'Get him… agghhhl' Mueller cried out in pain as her head struck the metal edge of a table saw, splitting the skin over her left eye. She cursed in her native-German as she fumbled around under the boxes, searching desperately for her weapon.
Dwight Stoner was still trying to recover from the savage blows to his nose and throat, and the agonizing pain in his shattered knee, when he saw movement out of the corner of his rapidly swelling eye. He barely managed to turn away in time to absorb the impact of the bat against his upper arm and shoulder rather than against his head. But the blow jarred him backward, and all he could do was to try to twist around and bring his massive forearms up to ward off Sonny Chareaux's next swing when…
Ka-booom!
… the sudden concussive detonation of a high-velocity pistol round going off in the contained area seemed to send ice picks through his eardrums. The 180-grain jacketed hollow-point bullet tore through the back of Sonny Chareaux's right hand and sent pieces of the bat flying in all directions.
Stunned by the impact of the expanding 10mm projectile, and groaning from the terrible pain of shattered bones and torn nerves, Chareaux stumbled forward. Then, turning around in a daze, one bloody hand clutched tight against his stomach, the Cajun poacher found himself staring into a very familiar face.
'I'd kill you right now,' Henry Lightstone whispered as he centered the sights of the stainless-steel automatic between Chareaux's blinking eyes, 'but I'd rather see you rot in jail.'
'You!' Chareaux rasped, his eyes widening in disbelief. Then, in an incredible display of rage, the Cajun
