Ken Goddard - Double blind

Ditto for the local FBI, DEA, and sheriff's offices. While Lightstone didn't question a local federal agent or sheriff deputy's ability to relay a carefully worded message, such a request — especially at one-thirty in the morning — would almost certainly require a personal display of his credentials or, at the very least, more of an explanation than he was willing or able to provide at that moment.

Which only left one more option, and a very interesting question.

If these military — or militant, that's always a possibility in this area of the country, he reminded himself — characters could tag a supposedly alert team of covert federal agents to what Lightstone assumed was Charlie Team's operational warehouse, what were the chances that this group had also tagged all of Bravo Team to Bobby LaGrange's ranch?

The more he thought about that, the less he liked it.

The phone rang three times before a very familiar voice answered in an equally familiar, grumpy manner.

"You never did like getting called out at one-thirty in the morning, did you?"

"What?"

"Without mentioning my name," Henry Lightstone directed carefully, "do you know who this is?"

The wild-card agent could easily visualize his ex-partner snapping wide-awake.

"Yeah, you sound vaguely familiar. What's up?" LaGrange's voice carried a discernible — and dangerous — edge.

"We may have a problem." Lightstone briefly described the sequence of events starting from the confrontation at the restaurant and ending with his purchase of the motorcycle.

"Christ," the ex-homicide detective whispered. "Do they know about it?"

"No, not yet."

"You want me to make contact with them?"

"No, too dangerous. You were the link to the old coot with the genuine Apache Indian hunting charms," Lightstone reminded him. "If everything else connects, we could easily be on a party line right now."

"Yeah, right." Bobby LaGrange fell silent for a few moments. "Shit."

"Exactly," Henry Lightstone responded, knowing what kind of thoughts raced through his ex-partner's mind. "Can you two camp out somewhere?"

A pause.

"Yes."

In the background, Henry Lightstone heard a drawer opening, then the familiar sound of a semiautomatic pistol slide slowly being drawn back.

That's right, buddy, he thought approvingly, Susan's number one, no matter what.

"Then you'd better do it, just to be safe. What about Justin?"

"He's with his… relatives for the rest of the week."

"Can you keep him there?"

"Sure, no problem. What about you?"

"I'm staying put. If I've got a tag, there's no point complicating things at your end."

"Yeah, right," LaGrange acknowledged. "Are you secure?"

Translation: do you want help? Just say so. I'll get Susan tucked away somewhere safe, and then be there with the cavalry ASAP. Lightstone smiled. Good old Bobby. Hell of a partner.

"I'm fine, but I'm out of contact with everyone else right now, so if Larry calls, tell him what's going on, and that I'll connect up with them sometime tomorrow morning."

"Will do. Anything else?" Bobby's question came out a little faster than usual.

In a hurry to get Susan out of there. Good thinking.

"Still got your beeper?"

"Yeah, somewhere. I'll find it."

"Okay, get going. I'll be in touch."

Lightstone was in the process of hanging up the phone when he sensed a presence in the doorway.

He turned around slowly, trying to decide what he could say, and then saw — to his immense relief — what, under any other circumstances, would have absolutely terrified him: a pair of glowing yellow eyes hovering at about waist height.

"Christ, you scared the hell out of me, Sasha," he whispered.

The panther responded with a deep-throated growl that sounded more like a cough.

It occurred to Lightstone that he'd never been alone with the fearsome animal for any significant period of time before, and that the panther might consider his presence in the woman's office an unacceptable transgression.

But then the big cat made another noise that sounded both familiar and demanding.

"What do you want? Something to drink?" Lightstone hazarded a guess.

The panther immediately turned, walked down the hallway, and waited patiently for a disbelieving Henry Lightstone to open the secured door to the restaurant's kitchen.

"We could both get into serious trouble for this," he whispered as the cat proceeded to rub the side of her head against the edge of the commercial refrigerator. "But you don't care, do you?"

Apparently deciding an answer to such a dumb question constituted a waste of a perfectly good growl, the panther sat silently and waited patiently for Lightstone to open the refrigerator, find an already-opened half gallon of milk, and locate a bowl.

He poured about a half pint of milk into the bowl, put it down on the vinyl floor, and stared expectantly at the panther. She stared right back at him, unmoving.

"You want more?"

He poured another half pint or so in the bowl and got exactly the same response.

"Christ, what are you, picky or — ?"

At that moment, it occurred to Henry Lightstone that a hundred-pound panther probably wasn't all that much different from an eight-pound Manx… especially in terms of self-serving attitude.

Accordingly, he opened the refrigerator, rooted around until he found a quart of cream, glared at the panther once more, dumped the milk into the nearby sink, and replaced it with the cream.

He barely managed to get the bowl on the floor before the panther butted him aside and began lapping happily at the cream.

Muttering to himself, Lightstone returned the milk and cream to the refrigerator, noticed a partial loaf of pumpernickel and a plastic-wrapped plate of sliced turkey on one of the upper shelves, and realized he was hungry.

Five minutes later, as he chewed a first large bite of the thickly stacked turkey sandwich, something else occurred to him.

The letter.

It took him another two minutes to find his way past the public rest room to the door of the back room of the tiny post office, which the woman apparently had forgotten to lock.

Fortunately, enough moonlight came in through a skylight to illuminate the area.

Lightstone found two envelopes in box number fifteen, a manila one about an inch thick, and a second plain mailing one — identical, as best he could tell, to the envelope Karla had sold the man with the strange eyes — that felt like it contained a single, folded piece of paper. The addresses on the envelopes, each obviously written by a different individual, were both block-printed. And even more interesting, Lightstone realized, both individuals used the adjacent Dogsfire Inn Post Office Box Number Fourteen as a return address.

The covert agent momentarily considered opening both envelopes, but then immediately rejected the idea. Tampering with US mail was a fairly serious felony, and he well knew that the probable-cause information he possessed was circumstantial at best — and certainly far less than any federal judge would require to issue a search warrant for a subject's private mail. Meaning that any leads he might obtain as a result of opening and reading those letters would inevitably fall under the "fruit-of-the-poisoned-tree" rule.

In all, three very good reasons to put both envelopes right back where he found them.

Lightstone started to do exactly that, but then noticed an assortment of letters and flyers in box thirteen. A quick check confirmed that mail had been accumulating there for several days.

Smiling maliciously, he put the thick envelope back into box fifteen, but slipped the thin envelope — the one he was almost certain the man with the cold gray eyes had addressed and sealed — into the middle of the mail stack in box thirteen.