The Dinosaur Hunter(34)

Startled, she hastily put down the binoculars. “Nothing. Just looking,” she said.

I climbed up beside her. “May I?” I asked, indicating the binoculars and she reluctantly handed them over. I looked at Blackie Butte and saw two people standing on a ledge about halfway up it. “Is that Pick and Tanya?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “I’m glad Tanya found him. Lost as usual.”

Laura had lied to me. She had definitely been watching the pair but, if so, why hadn’t she said so? My first guess, me being a man, is that she was jealous that Tanya was alone with Pick.

“Look,” I said, “one of the Haxby brothers caught me and he wasn’t too happy about us being here. Let’s go back.”

“We have a permit,” she said.

“Yes. That and permission from the rancher who leases the BLM is all that we need to hunt fossils on this land. We have one but not the other.”

Laura looked at me. “Did you find anything?”

I showed her my plastic bags. Nothing interested her except the claw. “Nice,” she said. “Where’s the rest of it?”

I smiled. “I don’t know.”

“OK. Let’s go back. I’m kind of tired, anyway.” She rubbed her shoulder and winced.

I crouched beside her. “I used to know how to give a decent shoulder rub.” When she didn’t say anything, I took it as permission to proceed. She was muscular and some of those muscles were in knots so I had my work cut out for me. She leaned back into my hands.

“That feels good,” she said and took off her hat and dropped her head forward to let me at her neck, which was also in a big knot. I kept going until she said, “Thank you” and stood up. “Ready to go back?” she asked.

“Sure.” If I expected any kind of reciprocity, that clearly wasn’t going to happen. I reached for the binoculars, planning to see what Pick and Tanya were doing now but Laura quickly stuffed the binoculars in her pack. She headed down the hill and I followed her, wondering what it was she didn’t want me to see but pretty sure she wasn’t going to tell me if I asked. So I didn’t. Sometimes, things just have to come out on their own.





11




When we got back to camp, Pick and Tanya hadn’t returned so Laura suggested a snack. I suggested snacks with drinks. When I told her I had the ingredients for a g&t, her eyes lit up. I followed her into the cook tent and to the refrigerator. When she opened the door, she saw my veggies. “I’m a vegetarian,” I said and she stared at me in shock. “No kidding,” I added.

“OK,” she said, stretching out both letters, “I guess now I’ve heard everything. A vegetarian cowboy.” She eyed my other traps, especially the duffel bag which had the logo of the Los Angeles Police Department on it. “I heard you used to be a policeman.”

“I heard the same thing. So did a bad guy who shot me.” When she raised her eyebrows over her lovely baby blues, I told her a condensed version of how I was just standing there minding my own business when some fellow popped me. Actually, I had just beat up his buddy and tossed him through a plate glass window but never mind.

“What brought you to Montana?”

“A truck,” I said. “I sold it to Bill Coulter for one dollar. He sold it for five hundred.”

She let my evasion slide and asked, “Who’s Bill Coulter?”

“Jeanette Coulter’s husband. He died five years ago.”

She nodded, then poked around in the fridge until she found some crackers and cheese spread. “This OK? How about fish? I have some tuna salad.”

“Works for me. Eggs are OK, too.”

“Got it,” she said. “By the way, I tried being a vegetarian once but I kept having strange dreams.”

“What about?”

“That I wanted a steak and couldn’t have one.”

“I have that dream all the time,” I confessed. “Then I go out and help a heifer have a calf and I forget it.”

“You help a heifer have a calf? Cowboys are really that lonely?”

I chuckled. “Maybe I could have put that a better way.”

“How about my drink? Get a cup from that box. Mine is that red one on top of the fridge.”

The indicated box held plastic cups. I used my pocket knife to slice a lime on a folding camp table, added ice from the little freezer compartment, and made two g&t’s with a lot more g than usual. I felt we deserved it. I also hoped it might loosen Laura up so she would provide more information about…well, I didn’t really know but my antenna was starting to go up. Something was going on that wasn’t exactly clear.