Anna Felina Cardenas stood at the bow rail of the yacht that bore her name. She was laughing delightedly at the antics of a pod of playful porpoises that matched the leisurely pace of the big yacht as it cut through the calm blue-green water. The yacht was making about ten knots in the Bay of Limón, headed for the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.
Felina felt Raul's presence as he quietly walked up behind her. He spanned her narrow waist with his hands and pulled her back against him. She tilted her head to the side so he could kiss her swan-graceful neck.
"I had a wonderful time in Costa Rica. I wish we didn't have to return to Puerto Vallarta so soon," she said wistfully.
Raul stopped nuzzling her neck and sighed theatrically.
"I wish that also, mi amor, but it can't be helped. One of my holdings in Texas has fallen on misfortune, and I must be close so I can help my leadership team address the problem," he replied.
"Are you going to Texas?" she asked. "I have family in El Paso and could visit them while you are tending to your emergency."
Raul chuckled and pulled her a little tighter against him.
"It just so happens that the troubled operation is in El Paso, but I have people who specialize in such things, so unless I need to personally become involved, I will probably stay home."
Felina teasingly flexed her butt cheeks against his arousal. Raul was the best lover she'd ever had, and he was insatiable to boot. He inflamed her beyond her experience and brought her ecstasy she had never imagined in her wildest dreams. That he was handsome and rich were just icing on the cake.
"It's just as well, I guess. I was supposed to visit there before I came to see you, but the day before I was to fly out, the aunt I was to visit was killed by burglars. If the robbery had happened one day later, I'd have been raped and murdered like Gran Tia Isabel and her assistant," Felina said with a shudder.
Raul was glad she was facing away from him, as the surprise of her revelation flitted across his face. The serious troubles he had in El Paso were a direct result of the incident to which she'd just referred. According to the reports he'd received, it was pressure from the old woman's grandsons that led the Texas Rangers to taking down his surrogates across the border.
The loss of the El Paso operation was a large blow. For one, it temporarily closed the gateway through which a third of their product was smuggled. It had taken years to put that operation in place. For another, the US attorney was seizing assets nominally owned by members of the Barrio Azteca, but in reality, they were his. And lastly, he had lost a large and effective money laundering operation, as he'd cleansed millions of dollars annually through the businesses run by the Barrio Azteca. Everything considered, he stood to lose over a hundred million dollars.
It was an amazing coincidence that his lover and Tyler McGuinn, the root cause of his problem, were related. That McGuinn was still alive rankled him, but there wasn't much he could do about it with the man being located in El Paso, where Raul's soldiers had been neutralized. Then he had a thought. What if McGuinn were in Mexico, specifically Jalisco, where Raul had unlimited resources, and what better way to lure him there than an invitation from his beautiful cousin Felina?
"If you can't visit there, why not invite your family down to spend time with us at the resort?" he casually asked.
Early Saturday afternoon, Ty and Stella arrived at Ty's ranch from their trip to Gunny Hayes's sniper training. The ranch was unusually quiet, and for the first time in a long while, Ty had to use his key to enter the hacienda. When Ty mentioned that fact to Stella, she gave him a saucy grin.
"Goodie, that means we can play Richie and Brittany," she said as she grabbed his hand and started dragging him towards the bedroom.
Ty laughed and pulled her up short.
"I'd like that, but I'll need my glasses first," he quipped in his Richie voice.
Stella attended Mass with Ty on Sunday morning. Although she had never been one for organized religion, Stella knew that Ty's faith was an important part of her man's life. Although Ty kept his faith to himself, it was deep, strong and abiding. His family had been members of the Saint Leo's Parrish for more than a hundred and fifty years. Six generations of the family were buried in the Parrish cemetery.
After Mass, the couple rode out to check the progress of the fence. It was coming along nicely, as Amar's crew was moving even faster than they had anticipated. Almost two thousand feet of chain link fence was standing, and almost half as much tangle-foot. In addition, the crew had set three of the thirty foot flag poles that would support the day/night cameras installed every thousand feet. The cameras were activated by a sensor wire buried a few inches deep in the ground between the original cattle fence and the tangle-foot.
They dismounted to walk around and checked the fence from the other side. Stella was impressed at seeing the actual finished product.
"You know, I think this is going to work at least as well as the fence in San Diego. It might not stop every illegal, but I'm betting ninety-nine percent of the ones facing it will find somewhere else to sneak into the country. I'll bet after seeing it, the coyotes won't even come this direction anymore. Do you mind if I call Daddy and show it to him? He is working on a bill that would allow Texas to supplement the fed's fence, and this might be the answer," she remarked.
Ty liked that idea a lot. To his way of thinking, Texans building their own barrier against the illegal flood was the best solution anyway. It seemed to Ty that every time the federal government got involved in anything, it automatically became expensive, complicated and inefficient. He was still chuckling over the House of Representatives raking the auto industry executives over the coals for mismanagement, when the government was still buying hundred dollar hammers and two hundred dollar toilet seats.
"Call him as soon as we get back to the hacienda and invite him and your mother to be our guests for a few days, preferably during the week, so Jon Roy can see first-hand the actual construction of a section," he replied.
Monday morning, Ty and Stella met up with Pete Colon to prepare for their trip south of the border. Pete was in a very happy mood for it being a Monday, so Ty called him on it.
"What are you so happy about, Petey? You get lucky this weekend?" Ty asked.
The foreman actually blushed and looked down at his boots instead of answering. Which of course answered the question. Ty grinned and slapped his old friend on the back.
'You did, didn't you? Who is the lucky girl?"
Pete's blush deepened, but he looked up at Ty anyway.
"It was Veronica," he stammered, "and I think I'm in love."
Both Ty and Stella congratulated him, then they got down to business. Ty figured they'd do it up right and travel down to Chihuahua in the ranch's thirty-four foot Class 'A' RV, and pull the fancy two-horse trailer they used for the Sun Bowl parade. Both the RV and horse trailer prominently displayed the ranch's name and their angel astride a quarter horse logo.
Ty hauled the trailer over to the maintenance barn where he and Petey made a modification to it by installing a hidden compartment under the floor. The compartment was boxed between the frame rails and from below, appeared to be part of the trailers undercarriage. A spray can of flat-black rubberized undercoating blended their work with the factory's original finish. The compartment was accessed by lifting the rubber floor mat that made the trailer easy to wash out, unscrewing six screws and removing three of the two by six treated floorboards.
The sniper rifle went into the compartment, along with the silenced Beretta, a Car-15 that had been modified to fire three round bursts, Stella's Glock, and some carefully bundled ammunition for each weapon. They used the ghillie capes to fill the void between the weapons and the wood floor.
By Tuesday at noon, they were loaded for bear. The trouble was that no one knew where the bear was hiding. Stella was using their backdoor into the DEA's computer system twice a day, but there wasn't even a rumor about Jorge Medina Morales' whereabouts. Petey was also having the same lack of luck with his contacts and extended family in Juarez.
Since they were stymied until they received some clue to Morales' whereabouts, Ty and Stella had some time on their hands. Stella took the opportunity to catch up on her e-mail with her friends. Her whirlwind romance with Ty gave her plenty of news to dispense. For his part, Ty retrieved the cardboard box from Abuela that was under his bed, and pulled out his great-great grandfather's journal titled 'El Paso'. Ty flipped open the journal and started reading.
From minute one, he was both fascinated and confused as hell by what he was reading. His highly respected namesake was either as crazy as a loon, or someone was pulling an elaborate practical joke. Ty Ringo McGuinn started his narration by casually stating that he'd been born as Tyler Lopez McGuinn in 1940, and had been warped back in time from 1977 to 1877. While the time travel part was hard to swallow, Ty understood exactly what the man meant when he said he'd felt out of place in the twentieth century. That was because the present day Ty felt the same way about the twenty-first.
Ty had been slightly out of step with his surrounds from an early age, coping only because of his Abuela and later his wife Cora Leigh. Those feelings of not belonging had grown since Cora Leigh's death, and the events of the last three and a half months had made them worse. Only when he stepped outside of his normal life as when he assumed his Richie identity, did Ty feel more connected to the world around him.
After the mention of traveling in time on the first page or two, the story started recounting his ancestor's amazing life story. Except for the time travel bit, the story gave an inside look at events detailed in family legend and documented history. Ty Ringo had led a life that was beyond extraordinary.
Ty was thirty minutes into the journal when Stella finished her e-mail correspondence. She sauntered over to where he was sitting in a burgundy leather button-tufted Chesterfield club chair. She sat on the arm of the chair and played with his hair.
"What are you reading so intently?" she asked.
Ty held up the unadorned green oversized journal.
"This is a diary my great-great grandfather supposedly wrote. Abuela had it since the old man died in 1940. I received it after she was murdered. I was named after him, by the way. He was a fascinating and talented man, and by all accounts, he was something of a recluse, even though he had five wives."
Stella grinned and shook her head.
"He must have been hard to live with if he went through so many wives," she observed.
"You might be wrong about that, because he was married to them all at the same time, and all of them remained married to him until they or he died. My great-great grandmother was a half Tejano, half Comanche woman he married when he ran a saloon, and she was a dancer there," Ty replied.
Stella's eyes got big then narrowed down in thought.
"You say he 'supposedly' wrote the diary. What makes you doubt it being real?"
Ty frowned and flipped back to the first page.
"Whoever wrote this claimed that Ty Ringo McGuinn started life in the twentieth century and was time warped back to the nineteenth. Of course, if it was true, it would certainly explain all his successes in so many different areas."
Stella, who knew hardly anything about Ty's ancestor, gave him another bewildered look, so Ty gave her a couple of examples.
"My great grandfather pointed the way towards and funded the development of penicillin in 1898. Then he funded the search for a way to mass produce it in time for World War I. He also bought up thousands of acres of mineral rights in the late 1800s, and ninety percent of that land had oil under it. When the automobile was invented, he owned eighty percent of the known oil reserves in the US. Oh, and the McGuinn foundation still receives millions of dollars a year from songs that he wrote, including most of Elvis Pressley's big hits," he explained.
"Wow, he was into everything. I definitely want to read that when you finish it. As far as it being real, seems to me a museum could find that out in a couple of days, if you gave them a few pages with which to work. I know for a fact they do that sort of thing all the time, because the Santa Fe PD uses the Museum of New Mexico to verify documents."
Ty mentally slapped himself upside the head. Of course they could. Why hadn't he thought of that?
Ty finished the journal right before noon on Wednesday and passed the amazing tome on to Stella without telling her anything he read. He wanted to see if Ty Ringo's incredible year showcased in the journal grabbed her attention as it had his.
The tome was full of revelations that stunned him, not the least of which was the mention of Cora Leigh. His ancestor's story of his marriage to Cora Leigh, her mental illness and his efforts to change the future so she'd not be afflicted in this life, were what convinced the present day Ty that the story was true. How could it be otherwise when Cora Leigh was born twenty-five years after the old man died?
Stella spent the rest of Wednesday until ten at night transfixed by the book. Ty had shared the comfortable family room with her, first doing a little ranch business on his new laptop that Cassie talked him into buying, then perusing a Reed Arvin novel.
Stella flipped the last page, closed the journal and sat it on the end table. When Ty looked over at her, she was staring at him intently, her eyes shiny and her pupils dilated. She spoke as soon as they made eye contact.
"We don't need an expert, do we? As unbelievable as it sounds, I'd bet my last dollar it is all true."
Ty nodded in agreement so she continued.
"I see him in you now, Baby. You are in the same boat he was in when he was in modern times. I'll bet when you are Richie you are just like he was once he went backwards in time."
Ty's eyes widened when he saw the rightness of her insight; he bobbed his head again. She came over and sat on the arm of his chair and pulled his head to her substantial bosom.
"Baby, you could be Richie most of the time, you know that don't you? You don't have to live your life based on the expectations of others. Everything you own, including this ranch, can get along without you, so why not live the life that makes you happy?"
Ty knew it wouldn't be quite that easy for him, but it certainly gave him lots to think about.
"I don't know if I can change that quickly, Sunshine, but it sure sounds appealing. But what about you, I mean, suppose what I want to do doesn't make you happy?"
Stella hugged him and kissed him softly.
"Baby, I have a feeling whatever you decide will make us both happy. I wake up every morning thinking of what I can do to make you happier anyway. If I have a problem with it, you can bet we'll talk and renegotiate, okay?"
Ty thought it was very okay and pulled her down into his lap to seal the deal with a kiss.
Jon Roy and Louise Woodson flew into El Paso Friday morning for a three day visit. The first order of business when they arrived at the ranch was a visit to the fence. Jon Roy was amazed at the design, and could tell with a glance that it would be devastatingly effective. Jon Roy spent twenty minutes picking the brain of Ricky Amar, the owner of the fence company, on how the project could be accomplished using state workers. Amar reckoned it would cost the state about twenty-five dollars a foot for materials, or about one hundred thirty-two thousand dollars per mile.
Jon Roy smiled at that, because if the estimate held up, it would only cost on the order of a hundred million dollars to fill in all the gaps between the fed's pedestrian fence sections. That was much better news than homeland Security's estimate of two billion and his own experts' lower one point two billion estimate. He had a few doubts about the lower figure though.
"Mister Amar, this fence is impressive, but will it be as effective as the Federal effort? After all, their fence is much heavier and taller than yours."
Homeland security's pedestrian fence was built of closely-spaced steel bars and stood eighteen feet tall. Amar smiled and pointed to the area in front of the chain link fencing.
"Actually, our fence design is much more effective than the government's fence. Those ten yards of tangle-foot make up the difference. The way we laid it out, it is impossible to run through, and even at a slow walk, it constantly snags your feet. With the camera system and sensor wires, even a crew cutting a path through it would have company waiting on the other side by the time they reached the chain link fence," Amar replied.
After the tour of the fence, the two couples went back to the hacienda to change for dinner. They were meeting RJ and Tiffany at the country club. Ty signed the Woodsons in as his guests and led them towards the club's excellent restaurant.
"You play much golf?" Jon Roy asked Ty.
Ty shook his head and grinned ruefully.
"I play at it three or four times a year, but I'm a hopeless duffer, I'm afraid," he replied.
Jon Roy laughed and slapped him on the back.
"Glad to hear it, son. I'd hate like hell if everyone in the family could drub me. I've never been able to beat Louise, even with both of us playing off the men's tees, and Stella passed me when she was thirteen."
Dinner was very nice, as the three couples got along famously. The conversation around the table was lively, and covered everything from the Cowboy's chances of making the Super Bowl, to Texas politics, to Ty and Stella's plans for the future. No one was surprised that the engaged couple planned on working the ranch together, but they were all agog when Louise asked about their plans for a family.
Ty looked at Stella and smiled as she answered the question.
"You and Daddy better be ready to become grandparents, because we plan on filling up the house with children as soon as we say I do."
Stella's parents returned to Dallas on Sunday after a terrific visit. The senior Woodsons were tickled to death that Stella had finally found the man of her dreams, and it eased their minds greatly that Ty was such a good man to boot. The only difficulty they had was Ty and Stella's desire to keep the engagement a family secret for a couple of months.
Ty and Stella saw the Woodsons off at the airport then rushed home to make up for lost time. Stella had been too embarrassed to make love with her parents just down the hall, fearing she might lose control and make too much noise. Ty thought that was hilarious, because it was obvious that Jon Roy and Louise didn't share her embarrassment, as they lustily and loudly romped in the guest suite.
The Monday after the Woodsons departed, Ty and Stella decided that they would go ahead with their plans to visit Chihuahua, despite the lack of recent intelligence on Jorge Morales. Ty thought they were bound to hear something soon, and being in Chihuahua already would allow them to react more quickly. Also, there was still the matter of his cousins and their families to deal with.
They spent Monday packing and setting up the horse trailer. The horse trailer would carry Lola and Stella's horse, Skeeter. Skeeter was one of the ranch's Melosa line of American Quarter Horse. Skeeter was one of the most beautiful horses anyone had ever seen, but he had a stubborn streak a mile wide. Skeeter's coat was a gorgeous chestnut, his tail and mane were a blue-black, and he had four perfect socks the same color as his mane.
Because Skeeter was so stubborn, no one wanted to work him until Stella hired on. Stella took Skeeter as a project, and Mister Skeeter quickly discovered that she was even more ornery and stubborn than he ever hoped to be. Since Stella was the only cowboy on the ranch who could do anything with Skeeter, when she offered to buy him at a fair price, Pete Colon worked out a deal with her for the three year old gelding.
On the surface, taking the horses might seem as if it were a bad idea, because the animals would limit their movement. That was not the case, however, as Pete had already made arrangements with a couple of stables down in Chihuahua to board the horses when necessary. The horses provided a needed cover for the trip, as Ty had mapped out a couple of horse shows happening south of the border during the following two weeks. They would actually be showing the horses as examples of the stock raised on the Rancho de Los Angeles. As part of their plan, one of the shows was in the town that Jorge Modena Morales called home.
Also on Monday, Mister Ricardo Salazar was contracted by the Rancho de Los Angeles to drive the RV to Mexico. Veronica O'Dell did the contract paperwork, being careful to fully document Richie as a citizen and filling out the appropriate tax documents. Having Richie drive the RV into Mexico was Stella's idea. It was a smart move because it freed them from any attention or suspicion that Ty going south of the border might cause.