at all dangerous. All I have to do is infiltrate a gang of Indian grave robbers and halt the flow of Anasazi artifacts out of this country.”
“You’re going to Mesa Verde!”
“Among other places. Why?”
“I’ve been wanting to visit that place for years!”
“Now, Miranda,” he hedged, realizing where her mind was going, “if you think that I’m going to take you along, then you have another think coming.”
“Why?”
“Because the job might have some small element of danger and I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Then it is dangerous! You lied to me!”
Longarm could see that he wasn’t getting anywhere and that his hopes for a romantic last evening in Denver were beginning to fade. “Look,” he said, “why don’t we go out to dinner someplace nice and have fun? We can come back here later and talk about this and-“
“Oh, no! You’ll just try to get me to drink too much wine over dinner and then soften me up for a good time in bed.” Miranda glared at him. “I know you, Custis!”
And she did, for that was exactly his plan. It was not original, but then again, it was straightforward and uncomplicated, just as he was. “Tell you what,” Custis said, “I’ll buy you a steak dinner and you can drink water with it if you like.”
“Thank you very much!”
“All right, if that doesn’t suit you, then drink wine or whiskey!” he exclaimed, getting exasperated. “But this is our last night out for a couple of weeks, and I sure hate the idea of squandering it in a fight. That doesn’t do either one of us any good.”
“I want to go with you to Mesa Verde. I’ll make it fun for you and I’ll-“
“No.”
“Then I’ll stay at Cortez, where I can’t possibly be a bother,” she told him. “I’ve done some reading on Mesa Verde, and I know that there are a number of guides that are routinely taking sightseers up there for two-day, three-day, and even week-long trips.”
“Miranda, it just won’t work.”
Her eyes flashed and her chin jutted out stubbornly. “Custis, I’m taking my vacation and it’s going to be in Mesa Verde. Maybe you can ignore me, but you can’t stop me. It’s still a free country. You’re the law and you ought to know that, for cripes sakes!”
Longarm ground his teeth with frustration. Miranda was a real bulldog when she got an idea in her head. She was as stubborn as a mule, and Longarm knew that the more he tried to talk her out of Mesa Verde, the more determined she’d become.
“All right. We’ll leave tomorrow on the afternoon train going south to Pueblo, then take the stage over to Durango and on to Cortez.”
“Really!” Her entire demeanor changed from anger to elation. “Custis, do you really mean it!”
“I do. After all, it is a free country and you’re right saying that I can’t stop you.”
She fairly danced around the room, light and happy as an elf. “Maybe we could hire a guide together and pose as newlyweds. That way, we’d look like regular tourists and you’d have a perfect cover.”
Longarm blinked with surprise because this was actually a very fine idea. With a woman at his side, he could go on the tour and look like anyone else. And after he’d had the opportunity to poke around in the cliff dwellings and study the layout, then he could leave Miranda with her tour group and strike off on his own after the grave robbers.
“You like the idea, don’t you,” she said, grinning.
“Yeah, actually I do,” he admitted. “It’s not bad at all.”
“Not bad? It’s brilliant! But we’ll need some props.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, if we are posing as newlyweds, we’ll need to buy ourselves a set of wedding rings.”
Longarm gulped. He hadn’t thought it out, but again, it made sense. It would look funny if they were hate- fingered. Still, the idea of buying wedding rings made him damned uncomfortable, even queasy in the gut.
“I don’t have much money,” he said, stalling.
“That doesn’t matter! We can buy them on credit. I know the man at the jewelry store and he trusts me. Besides, when I tell him that you are a United States deputy marshal with a regular paycheck, he’ll-“
“He’ll figure that I’m a damn risky customer for credit ‘cause I might get ventilated.”
“No, no! Trust me, Custis. He’ll give us the credit, and I’m sure that we can find a set of wedding rings that aren’t all that expensive.”
“But I don’t want to get stuck with rings that I don’t intend on keeping!”
Miranda’s eyes flashed. “You’ve told me bunches of times that the day was coming when you wanted to settle down and be married to me.”
Again, this was true. Another major blunder that was coming back to haunt him.
“You weren’t lying to me, were you?” She asked him.
