Bulldookie

VALEDICTORIAN PRINCETON Royal had a headache the size of a diesel engine, and its name was Dean.

"Goddammit, little brother, you promised ," he snapped into the phone. "I asked you this a month ago ."

"I know, Val. I'm sorry. If it's any help, I asked Laure if she could find someone to help. I gave her a list of my old contacts. She's running someone down."

Val stalked the lot of his independent long-haul business and made careful note of which units were out and which ones were due back. Unlike many other long-haul businesses, Val had built his reputation on safe practices and paying his employees a living wage without forcing them to work overtime or keep double logs. It was tough—the competition cheated—but one of Val's signatures was offering a security caveat on his clients' most valuable cargo. A month ago, he'd accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar bond on the promise to get this shipment from Elite Cattle Incorporated in Bakersfield to Conti & Sons Cattle Ranch in Texas, and it had to be timed and shipped perfectly, without incident, and with speed.

Dammit, Dean had been perfect. He knew how to drive a rig, he had his fancy FBI badge, and Val could stand his company, mostly. Together, they could take turns driving and make the twenty-hour trip from Bakersfield to Austin in twenty-four hours or less travel time, thus ensuring that Vinnie's in-season, rare, longhorn-hybrid cows could be inseminated and gestating at optimum speed.

And for the return trip, they'd be bringing Vinnie's prize bull to Elite Cattle Incorporated so he could spend a week fucking his balls out on the collection dummy before returning the poor guy, replete and probably just a little bit dizzy, back to Vinnie's ranch. The whole dance and cow-jizz exchange had taken months to negotiate. Geneticists had been consulted to make sure that Elite Cattle Incorporated's "right stuff" would mesh well with Vinnie's prize cows' "right stuff" without contaminating the bloodline at Vinnie's ranch, while invigorating and adding to the stock at Elite Cattle Incorporated.

Before his high school buddy Vinnie had called him, banking his entire family's stock and future on Vinnie's memory of the kid who didn't lie, wouldn't back down, and always had a buddy's back—coupled with the solid business reputation Val had built since—Val had no idea that bull jizz could be such a serious business.

But it was , and not only serious , but serious enough to be dangerous .

"You don't get it," Val said now to Dean. "Vinnie's had two shipments already that have been stolen and abandoned. By the time the authorities tracked down the trucks, the refrigerator units had been turned off and hundreds of thousands of dollars of bull sperm had gone bad."

"Ew," Dean said, and Val grunted. Dean was usually pretty stoic, but, well, yeah.

"The ew isn't the point," Val persevered. "This is Vinnie's family ranch, Dean. And he's got a narrow window. The cows hit their cycle, he calls Elite, they transfer the straws of sperm into the refrigerator car that night, and we move out the next morning. We're heading to Austin in two days, tops. Vinnie's getting his straws retested at the geneticists again, so I've really got to hustle. We have to get optimum fecundity. This is a big fucking deal, and I need somebody to literally ride shotgun in case somebody tries to steal the shipment. Do you understand?"

"Did you just say ‘fecundity'?" Dean asked suspiciously, and Val actually snarled at his little brother.

" This is a big deal !" he roared, and before Dean could defend himself—or better yet, promise Val he'd get the time off like he promised—Val's phone beeped.

"It's Laure," he said, still irritated. "What's Laure doing on my phone?"

"Probably calling with my replacement," Dean said. "Text me if it's suitable. Love ya big brother. Bye!"

And Dean was gone, and Laure was there.

"Laureate, this had better be good," Val snapped when she'd connected.

"I run the best headhunting firm in central California," Laure told him evenly. "I'm not good, I'm great. So you apologize."

Val grunted. She really was good. The fact that Dean had called her when he'd been assigned somewhere in Texas instead of Sacramento during what should have been some accrued time off meant that Dean was as dependable as he'd always been, but being part of a bureaucracy had taught him to delegate.

"Can he drive a rig?" Val asked, because his plan depended on one of them driving and the other sleeping.

"He can. And he's good with a weapon. In fact he was Dean's shooting instructor, and he's been part of several joint FBI/ATF stings for transporting goods over state lines. He's retired now and does the odd security gig. He's bonded, fingerprinted, and I've got three people vouching for him, including Dean and Dean's SAC, so, you know, he's as pedigreed as your bull jizz, okay?"

Val grunted. "Dean told you, didn't he?"

Laure's chuckle was a direct result of being raised with six boys and now the mother of two of her own. She appreciated a dirty joke and could tell them with the best.

"Of course he did," she said, and he could picture her, long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, cat-shaped brown eyes glancing sideways. Laure had been the second oldest of the seven of them, and if she couldn't laugh at all the assholes around her, she never would have survived. "I have so little in my life, Val. Did you think he'd deprive me of knowing you were making a living as a cow pimp?"

"I hate you," Val muttered, but that was family code for "I love you so much I'd kill you in your sleep."

"I hate you too. You're looking for Rory McCauley, retired FBI—"

"He'd better not be too old to hold a rifle," Val muttered.

"Age forty-eight," she continued, as though he hadn't spoken.

"That's young. What happened?" he asked suspiciously.

"He got injured and took medical leave," she said. "Dean tells me he enjoyed contracting as security so much, he took the early out. Runs a gun range when he's not out on jobs, has a son who works it for him when he is. I'm saying, Val, the guy's creds are solid."

"Married?" Val asked. Sometimes married guys were the best, like his brother Proctor. A happy homelife tended to make people more even-keeled, better-tempered. Val, who had always been grumpy at best, might not have been able to act mellow, but that didn't mean he didn't appreciate it when somebody else did.

"Divorced," Laure replied mildly. "Amicably by everything Dean tells me. Look, I know this is last minute, Val, but all my sources say this guy's a keeper."

Val grunted. "Great. Tell him to meet me—"

"At your business office in five minutes," she said, her voice a wicked purr.

Val narrowed his eyes. "How do you even know—"

"I knew you'd be at the lot today," she said, sounding innocent. "I figure you need today to outline the job for him because you'll get called in the next few days, right?"

"Tomorrow or the day after," Val conceded. God, he really had been counting on Dean.

"Well, meet this guy, shake his hand, establish that you won't kill him during the haul, and you can get a good night's sleep before you start. That way if you don't leave tomorrow, I can be by early afternoon to drop off some supplies for your drive the next day. How's that?"

Val had reached the end of the fence line for the truck lot, and in the distance he could see a battered pickup truck turning down the road that would lead past the hurricane fencing and eel wire to the business office itself.

"Apparently it's peachy," he grumbled, "although you know I'm a grown man and can shop for myself—"

"Yeah, but the boys will both be gone tomorrow night and I'm making lasagna tonight. I can bring you dinner too."

He sucked in a breath. His sister's lasagna was decadent heaven. He knew it was probably a ploy to get him to soften up toward this new development, but he was suddenly salivating and didn't care if he didn't get lasagna until the next day. "Fine," he agreed, knowing he was weak even as he watched an unfamiliar vehicle pulling around the eel-wire and chain-link fence to the entrance to the lot. "But I gotta go now because he's here and I gotta go meet him."

"Play nice," Laure warned.

"Oh sure," Val told her. "I'm a sweetheart. "

She started cackling in his ear then, and he hung up on her, saving his wind for the trot back to the double-wide that served as his office.

As he jogged, he put together a mental picture of his new work partner. Probably short, he thought sourly. Dean was the shortest of his siblings, with a slender build that made his classic G-man suit look good on his neat frame, so this guy, this Rory McCauley, would probably be short too—but not slim like Dean. He'd worked at the bureau for what? Twenty years? Dean claimed that he did a lot of paper pushing, so this guy had probably gotten pudgy, or at least a little stolid. He'd been injured, too, and that was hard to come back from. So injured and slow. Graying, pudgy, saggy jowls probably—he was pushing fifty, right? Not that Val was that much younger. Val could own it. If he didn't keep his diet like God's watch, he'd be saggy and jowly too. It also helped that he ran or swam as often as possible and stayed on his feet and walked the yard when he wasn't the one running cargo. He liked to stay fit. His frame was heavier, stockier than Dean's, and he knew he had to work that much harder to not fall into unhealthy habits.

Proctor, his married brother—his one heterosexual brother, for that matter—had put on twenty pounds in his first year of marriage, and he and his wife had become absolute health-food fanatics ever since she'd given birth to their third child, in an attempt to lose that weight.

The girls, cherubic little hellions that they were, loathed anything organic or flavored with applesauce. Prock had been a picky little shit when he'd been in grade school, and Val firmly believed God had a sense of humor in these matters. It sort of helped that Val and Sal fed them things like Lucky Charms and Pop-Tarts whenever the girls were at their parents' because while Val was dour and growly and Sal was campy, bitchy goodness, they were both dicks who would mess with "sweet little Proctor" every chance they got.

Ah, sibling politics , Val thought with satisfaction. Best hobby known to man. His mental image of McCauley was coming along nicely. Squat, jowly, maybe some broken blood vessels from a little too much scotch, and a graying buzz cut rounded it out. He wasn't sure why. Someone with experience, with a "Don't worry, son, I got this" swagger but few personal complications. Someone Val could play poker with but who wouldn't expect the conversation to get too personal.

Oh yeah! This guy would be great . Val was looking forward to meeting him already.

With a little whoof of breath, he hit the ramp up to his portable office and stood for a moment, checking his wind to make sure the job hadn't taken too much out of him. He got there in time to see the battered pickup that he'd assumed belonged to Rory McCauley pull into one of the office parking spaces and turn off.

The man who got out of the pickup could not possibly be Rory McCauley.

For one thing he was tall. Tall and lanky in jeans and a western-cut plaid shirt and cowboy boots, swaggering across the parking lot, cowboy hat in hand. The jeans and boots were worn, and the boots were dusty—although the jeans were clean—and Val noticed he had the slightest hitch in his step as he strode toward the ramp.

This man was not short, he was not fat, and he was not gray.

Sure, he had some threads of silver in his shaggy brown hair, but they went with the crow's feet and those grooves in his lean cheeks, near his mouth, that indicated this was a man who smiled a lot and even knew how to laugh.

He grinned up at Val from the bottom of the ramp.

"This the office for Royal Trucking and Transport?" he asked, thumping his hat against his thigh.

Val fought not to get lost in those squinty brown eyes because… whew. Damn. He did not need this now.

"Sure is," he said, proud of how he kept his voice clipped.

"You Val Royal?"

"Yessir, what can I do for you?" Please don't say you're—

"I'm Rory McCauley. I got a phone call from Lori Royal—"

"Laure," Val corrected him. "No e sound at the end. You cannot possibly be Rory McCauley."

"Beg your pardon." The man's grin amped up at the corners. "And I most certainly am."

"But you're… you're… you are not fat, retired, and ugly," Val burst out, so incredibly offended by this man's good looks he wanted to go hit something. Divorced. With a son. Oh fuck, why would his sister, knowing he was hard up, pair him with somebody this… this tall , this rangy , this goddamned handsome when Val had to keep his head on business. It was no goddamned fair!

The man's expression altered subtly. He'd been smiling up at Val in obvious good humor, but at Val's blunt words he gave a bark of laughter. His good humor was still there, but it went… lazier. Coiled, like a bullwhip. His eyes, a bright nut brown, went from being wicked and intelligent to hot and assessing, and he raked those eyes up and down Val's muscular body like a touch, leaving Val sweaty and very uncomfortable.

"Nossir," Rory McCauley all but purred. "I am not fat, I work hard to not be ugly, and I do not work for law enforcement anymore, but I am not, strictly speaking, retired. Were you looking forward to someone like that?"

Val closed his eyes, took a breath, and tried to still his suddenly galloping heartbeat.

"I was hoping for a professional who was not a distraction," he said, hoping for dignity.

He was not prepared for Rory McCauley's low rumble of a laugh, the kind that seemed to vibrate right up the ramp of the office, through the soles of Val's shoes, and straight into his thighs.

"I am the soul of professionalism," McCauley promised, although Val's libido was waking up and saying things that were by no means about work. Then McCauley winked, and Val had to grip the handrail to keep his knees from going weak. "Don't worry, son," he added. "I got this."

Oh no, Val thought faintly. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

Odds were very good he was in so much trouble. This was his business. This was his friend's business. This was his reputation that was at stake.

From far away, he heard himself say, "Do you have your paperwork?"

Rory waggled his eyebrows and produced a sealed manila envelope that had been folded in half lengthwise and stuffed in the back pocket of those worn, tight jeans.

"I do. Does that mean I can come in now?"

Oh God.

But Val was in need. So very many kinds of need, and he wasn't sure if it was common sense or self-destruction that made him say, "Sure. Let's get your paperwork filed, and I can fill you in on the job."