Fuck. Fuck. He wiped his face on his shoulder. Called down, “Stand back, MacAllister. It’s raining men.”
“Are you kidding me?”
His tone was priceless. Will bit back a ferocious grin, and went back to hacking at the knapsack straps. A few more slices and he had it. The backpack tumbled down a few feet, knocking needles and cones and twigs loose — along with the corpse’s other boot.
Will lowered himself down swiftly, pursuing the knapsack. He found it lodged in the V of the trunk and a branch.
Grabbing it by the severed straps, he swung it once, twice, out beyond the span of the branches — and let it fly. “MacAllister, heads up!”
The pack went sailing and then dropped to earth like a stone.
Will let himself down fast, ignoring the scrape of rough bark on his hands. A few feet from the ground he balanced on a thick limb.
Taylor had retrieved the bag. He knelt in the mud and pine needles, knapsack wide open, staring up at Will. “You sure you don’t want to run away to Mexico with me?” He held up a neatly bound stack of greenbacks.
“Nah.” Will jumped down, landing lightly on the soft wet earth. “Salsa gives you indigestion.”
“True.” Taylor tossed the stack of dollars to Will.
The money felt damp, sinister to his touch. He thumbed through it. Benjamin Franklin’s skeptical expression flashed by over and over.
The rain began to fall.
Chapter Three
“You warm enough?”
Taylor didn’t bother to respond, staring out the mesh window of the tent at the rain sheeting down the sides.
Of course he was cold. He was freezing his ass off. Will had told him not to wear Levi’s. He’d told him to dress in layers. Wool socks, long underwear, lightweight wool sweater or acrylic sweatshirt, military surplus pants or jungle fatigues. But no, Mr. Know-It-All had chosen flannel shirts and Levi’s and a leather jacket. He’d changed his soaked clothes for dry, but he was still chilled, fine tremors rippling through his body every few minutes.
It had taken them a few minutes to set up the tent after the skies opened up. Now the rain beat down on the plastic and sheeted off the sides, puddling on the ground outside. Inside the tent it smelled of rubber, damp wool, and something dank and moldering.
The money and backpack sat in the far corner. They had been through the backpack. No ID there either. No clue at all as to who the dead man was, but Taylor thought he fit the general description of Jon Jackson, one of the suspects in the Black Wolf Casino robbery. As a former employee of the casino, Jackson had come under investigation despite — or maybe partly because of — the fact that he’d left town two days before the robbery and hadn’t been heard from since.
Will opened his mouth to tell — suggest — that Taylor change into his own spare fatigue pants, but Taylor said abruptly, “Only one hijacker got on that plane.”
“Looks that way.”
“One robber gets on the hijacked plane. The others split and go their separate ways.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe. Either way, they go prop up their alibis — maybe they are each other’s alibis.”
Will scratched his bristling jaw, considering. Taylor was a natural at this kind of doublethink. In fact, he was a little too good. Some of his scenarios were straight out of Agatha Christie, in Will’s opinion. But this one sounded reasonable: Wile E. Coyote leading the hounds off the trail of the foxes. Still, there were problems with it.
He said, “You think they trusted him to get on that plane and fly away with all that money? What happened to the ‘no honor among thieves’ rule?”
“I think it’s more of a guideline. Anyway, it was a risk, sure. But it’s not like they weren’t the gambling kind.”
Will acknowledged that.
Taylor said, “Getting that money out of town was one way of protecting it — and maybe protecting them — assuming they were local.”
Will turned it over, nodded. “Maybe. Yeah, they couldn’t take the risk of being stopped with the money, and they sure wouldn’t want it turning up in any subsequent searches. They couldn’t know how much time they’d have to stash it.” He wished he could read Taylor’s face, but Taylor was mostly staring out at the rain — and it was the first time Will had ever felt lonely in his company.
“They’ve probably spent every weekend up here since the snow started melting searching for that plane.” He gave another of those little shivers.
Will said, “Maybe. Maybe they figure he double-crossed them.”
Taylor finally glanced Will’s way, his eyes oddly colorless — almost gray — in the dim light. “Maybe. But say they did some checking around. It probably wouldn’t take long to figure out that no one ever saw Jackson after that night in December.”
“If it was Jackson.”
“They’d know the plane went down. I think they’d figure Jackson — yeah, if it was Jackson — and the money went down with it.”
“It fits,” Will agreed slowly.
He studied Taylor’s sharply etched profile. It was hard to see in the fading light, but little details struck him: the black stubble on Taylor’s jaw, the length of his eyelashes, the soft dark hair growing over his collar, the set line of his mouth. It was kind of a sexy mouth. Sensual, even a little pouty, though Taylor was not the pouty kind, and his mouth spent a lot more time laughing and shooting itself off at the wrong moment than it did pouting.
Taylor had his faults, God knew, but he was smart, savvy, and tough. He was good company most of the time; the best partner — the best friend — Will had ever had. He’d missed him badly these last six weeks. Hospital visits, even stopping by Taylor’s place once he’d been released, hadn’t been enough; in fact, it felt like he’d barely seen Taylor since the shooting.
The shooting.
It had been a routine op.
