Heart of the Jaguar. Katie Reus

      CHAPTER THREE

      Three years later, the present…

      LEWIS WIPED his face. Or attempted to wipe his face. His sleeve was as muddy as the rest of him. The roar of machinery and the dull sound of the diamond bit far below the earth’s surface, coupled with the shouts and curses of tired, overworked men, filled the early-morning air. There was no time to appreciate the full richness of midsummer, the cries of the black-capped chickadees with their nesting songs from the willows. Or to notice the sharp scent of the poplar trees, white and black, gorged and green with summer sap.

      All Lewis smelled was drilling mud, male sweat and the sudden stench of fear in the hot summer sunshine.

      Men were shouting. They’d lost pipe! Disconnected steel shafts and rogue chains whipping across the base of the drilling tower could be lethal. Slippery drill mud made for treacherous footing, even in steel-toed, caulk-soled Grizzlies. Last night’s rain hadn’t helped.

      But the crew was seasoned. Lewis knew they could handle anything that came up on the site, including this kind of setback, which had happened just as they approached their target depth.

      Drilling for oil and gas was a twenty-four-hour-a-day business with big money at stake. The Calgary syndicate that had put together the cash for this venture expected returns, and they expected them fast. Anything Lewis’s crew wanted, they got. Whether it was racy movies or porterhouse steak served twice a day. Lewis’s employer, F&B Drilling, drew the line at bringing in women, but everything else was possible. Nothing mattered except getting the job done.

      The job? To get in and get out as soon as possible with the kind of drill samples that could send a syndicate’s shares soaring on the exchange or crashing through the basement. If the news wasn’t good, it wasn’t unusual for the principals or the good friends and wives of the principals to bail out before the news spread. It was illegal, of course—insider trading, or the nearest thing to it—but that couldn’t always be proved. Nothing grabbed an oilman’s blood like the fever for black gold.

      A tight hole meant approved personnel only on the site. Other companies, competitors, were not above sending in spies. A tight hole meant a security check on each and every pickup that drove in. Every delivery. Every visitor. The big sign out front at the secondary road, where the raw, freshly bulldozed and graveled rig road led to the site, meant exactly what it said: Tight hole. No admittance. That means YOU.

      Tight holes and the security that went with them were Lewis Hardin’s particular specialty. No one got into a site, drilled and got out faster than Lewis Hardin’s crews. He’d begun as a roughneck on the drilling platform, the roughest, meanest, dirtiest job in the business. He’d moved his way up to tool-push, the captain of the project. His rise had been spectacular, and he had men on his crew—men who respected him—who were nearly twice his age. The partners who owned F&B were urging him to join them as a full partner, sweat-equity. Other companies had been courting him, too, incessantly, annoying him more than anything.

      But Lewis wasn’t sure that partnership—or switching to another drilling outfit—was a move he wanted to make.

      He was twenty-seven and getting restless. He’d never stayed at one job as long as he had this time with F&B, which was the hottest medium-size drilling company in the province. He sure wasn’t going back to ranching—not until he had the stake to set up his own place—but he was getting tired of the oilfield. Two, sometimes three weeks on the job, twenty-four hours on call, then a week or two off, if you had an assistant push. If not, you stayed until the job was done. It was a cowboy, Dodge City kind of life: work your guts out, then spend your paycheck in town and start all over again, broke. For most single guys, the money made it all worthwhile.

      But after a while, even the toys began to pall—the brand-new four-wheel-drive vehicles, the snowmobiles in winter, the prize shotguns and the best dogs in duck season, the dirt bikes and ATVs in summer. Lewis used to enjoy it, but the last few times he’d taken time off, he’d driven five straight hours to do some fishing by himself down in Glory country, back where he’d been born and brought up. He spent a few days helping Billy and Ma, fixed a squeaky door, spaded a new garden patch, tacked down some roof shingles. Keeping up the fence alone was a mammoth task, and he’d almost decided not to bother. What was the point? The Hardins had no animals but the few sheep they kept in the derelict orchard. A dozen or so scrawny chickens in the henhouse. There was no haying or farming going on. Never had been, in Lewis’s memory. But the two women who’d raised him, his mother and his sister, wouldn’t hear of giving up the homestead. Last time he’d been home he’d convinced them to lease some of their grown-over pasture to a neighbor. At least that meant a little money coming in monthly, besides what Lewis sent them.

      How did they live? Lewis really had no idea. Of course, they had no mortgage. No debts.

      No expectations. No hope.

      They kept a garden and had a few eggs from their chickens. The only cash they needed was to pay their electric bill each month and their taxes once a year. Mercy sold the quilts she made, several a winter, to a craft store in town. Billy sold garden produce at a roadside stand, but mostly, she just gave it away. They bought tea and flour and sugar. Dog food. Feed for the sheep. Ma and Billy both wore secondhand clothes, and their Ford pickup was ancient. It shouldn’t have been running at all, but somehow Ma kept the old wreck going with a little haywire and a lot of luck.

      Glory.

      The town was like a great big bad dream. He’d thought he’d left the place behind him for good when he’d quit Adam Garrick’s place that first terrible summer after he’d gotten out of jail. But maybe he hadn’t. Something always seemed to pull him back like an invisible line, especially lately. A thin, taut line, a strand of twisted steel that never let him go. A yoke. The farm itself, he supposed, was one thing. It had been in Ma’s family forever. The Rockies, the foothills? Maybe. He loved the wide-open country. It was a place where you could breathe. Something pulled him back.

      Phoebe Longquist? Ha. He’d never forgotten her, but she wasn’t much more than a fuzzy memory now, just a kid dressed in shorts and a home-knit sweater. Some hot kisses. A few quick gropes in her uncle’s hay field. The kind of heart-to-heart midnight talk that had embarrassed him the next day, in the hard light of noon. Girl talk.

      He’d had half a dozen girlfriends—maybe a dozen—in the years since he’d last seen Phoebe, the late-summer night she’d come out of nowhere to spend her hard-earned money on him in a charity auction. What a disaster that had been. He hoped the experience had cured her of any romantic notions, if she’d needed curing. She didn’t need a guy like him in her life, and he was pretty sure she’d got the message that night.

      He’d balked at joining the other cowboys in the auction right from the start. Publicity of any kind was the last thing he wanted, either to remind the town of him and his prison record or of his long-suffering crazy family living out there on Bearberry Hill. Adam Garrick, who’d hired him when he got out of jail, had told him the auction was for a good cause. Not that a good cause normally would have pulled any weight with Lewis, but he owed Adam and this was as good a way as any of repaying him. Adam had taken him on at the Double O, albeit reluctantly,