A Cold Creek Baby

By the time he was dressed, Cisco wasn’t the only one sweating. She felt like she had just roped a steer singlehandedly in the dark.

“Do you want to tell me again how you managed to drive all the way here from Salt Lake City?” she asked as he took an unsteady step toward the door.

“Wasn’t that hard. Took I-15 to Idaho Falls and then turned right.”

She glared at him, even as she leaned in closer to support most of his weight. “I’m glad you find this amusing. I don’t. What if you had passed out? You could have driven off the road and killed both you and that darling little girl.”

He made a face she assumed was supposed to look repentant. “Sorry, Easton. Shouldn’t have come home. Not your problem.”

He had made it her problem. As she contemplated the logistics of loading him to the rental car—better than her pickup, so she could put the carseat in the back, she had realized—she thought about how simple her life had seemed this morning when all she had to worry about were falling beef prices, rising feed costs, taking her cow-calf pairs up in the mountains, the creek near one of the haysheds that was about to overflow its banks and the capricious eastern Idaho weather.

Chapter Three

“A bar fight? That’s really what you’re going with here, Cisco?” Maggiee Dalton pulled the thermometer away and shook her head at the numbers there.

He could only imagine. He was on fire, burning up from the inside out. Another half hour of this and all that would be left of him on the exam room table at the Pine Gulch Medical Clinic would be a little pile of charred ashes.

He couldn’t remember when he had ever felt so lousy.

Okay, maybe a few times came to mind if he jostled his recall. There had been that gunshot wound in Honduras when a stupid, spooked sixteen-year-old sentry had forgotten the password to the rebel camp he’d been infiltrating at the time and had mistaken Cisco for a hostile combatant. Okay he had been a hostile combatant, true enough, but the kid had no way of knowing that when he fired on him with—unfortunately for Cisco—better aim than his normal efforts.

And there was the time he had enjoyed a few delightful hours of torture from a particularly zealous arms dealer/terrorism financier in Panama after Cisco’s cover had been blown, before his support team could stage a rescue.

This was right up there among his least enjoyable moments. He was so damn tired, he just wanted to tell Maggiee to go away so he could curl up on the floor and sleep for a couple of weeks.

He couldn’t seem to shake this woozy, out-of-body feeling, the weird sense of disconnect.

“Yeah,” he grunted, after a too-long pause while he tried to collect his disjointed thoughts, for what they were worth. “Little dump outside Barranquilla. Drunk thought I was making eyes at his señorita.”

“Were you?”

He might have been, if there indeed had been a bar and a drunk with a knife instead of a brutal mid-level drug dealer with more vicious machismo than brains.

“Don’t remember,” he lied. “I’m sure she couldn’t have been as pretty as you.”

Maggiee rolled her eyes and yanked the blood pressure cuff tight enough that he winced.

Despite her current overzealous efforts to check his vital stats, he liked Maggiee. Always had. She’d been a couple years older than him, but he had known her a little from school, back when she had been plain Magdalena Cruz. Pine Gulch was a small town after all, and her family’s ranch had been on the same bus route as theirs.

He had been sorry to hear what happened to her in Afghanistan, especially when she had only been trying to provide medical care. Funny thing about that. He had been going through a rough patch of his own and had been on the brink of walking away from his complicated web of lies when Jo had told him Maggiee had been grievously injured in a terrorist explosion while she’d been deployed.

The news had shot new determination through him like pure-grade heroin gushing through his veins and he’d stuck it out a little longer.

Seemed a lifetime ago. She seemed to be getting around pretty well on a prosthetic leg, he was happy to see.

Or he would have been happy if he could manage to think through the pain and the slick nausea curling through his gut.

“You can try to sell that story of a bar fight if you want, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy it,” she said.

“You’re a hard-hearted woman, Magdalena.”

“True enough. Just ask Jake.” She smiled a little. “And where does the baby come in?”

How did he answer that? Guilt twisted even more viciously than the damn knife wound. His fault. Soqui was dead because of him, that sweet little girl an orphan because he hadn’t been able to protect her mama.

He should never have let Soqui in on the operation. After John’s murder, she had begged him to let her bring down El Cuchillo. He should have just sent her to safety, maybe here in the States with John’s family. Instead, he had used her fierce need to avenge her husband to help his own cover.

And now she was dead.

El Cuchillo’s thugs might have fired the shot that killed her, but Cisco might as well have been the one holding the AK-47.

“Mother was a friend of mine,” he finally muttered to Maggiee.

“Was?”

“She … died last week. But all the paperwork’s in order, I swear. She gave me custody before she died.”

He didn’t want to close his eyes. He could still see that grimy warehouse, bodies everywhere—including Cuchillo’s—Soqui bleeding out on the concrete.

She had known. He didn’t know how, but somehow she had sensed they were walking into an ambush. Maybe she had known it would end like that from the moment she begged him to be part of the operation, months ago.

“I have papers,” she had rasped out, her voice already thready and weak as her life ebbed away. Her hand was icy cold in his and each word seemed to choke her throat.

“Hidden under the … sink. Custody papers. Take my sweet Belle to Johnny’s family. Where she’ll be … safe. Swear to me, Francisco.”

Her voice seemed to echo in his aching head, heavy on the reverb.

How could he refuse? He owed her this much at least. He had failed to protect Soqui, but he would do whatever it took to take care of her little girl.

“All legal, Maggiee,” he said now. Technically, anyway.

Yeah, he had been forced to move both heaven and hell with a couple different embassies to speed up the process and had pissed off about a dozen agencies, but nobody could find any legal loopholes. He was Isabella’s legal guardian until he signed custody over to her family. Whenever that happened, the sooner the better.

“She has an aunt. Boise. She’s coming to take her in a few days.”

Maggiee probed around the six-inch gash just below his rib cage. Though her movements were gentle, he was desperately afraid he was going to pass out.

Big, bad super spy. That was him.

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to clean things up a little before Jake comes in to take a look.”

“S’okay,” he lied.

“Why didn’t you have this looked at in Colombia?”

Because he was too busy getting Belle out of the country before Cuchillo’s psycho baby brother discovered her existence—and before all the people he bribed or threatened changed their minds about letting him leave with her.

“Then I would have missed your tender, loving care, Mag.”