Free Renegade Man by Parris Afton Bonds Page B

that the potato halves were put back together and wrapped
with wire. The potato was baked in a campfire, and the gold nugget was removed,
free of mercury. Then the old-timers squeezed the potato and recovered a large
part of the mercury for using again. Of course, the potatoes hadn’t come
cheaply in those days, either. And from the looks of the tailings, he wasn’t
getting exactly rich himself.
    He began to
separate what he had, carefully sorting the lead from the flakes of gold. Years
of rigging and disarming bombs had made his fingers as highly sensitized as a
watchmaker’s.
    Not even a
nugget. His dark brows slanted down over eyes that had gone a flat green. Flour
gold. At this rate, not even enough to pay for the dredger. Maybe he should
move on, look for richer ground elsewhere. But no, his gut instinct told him
that he would eventually hit pay dirt in the Renegade.
    At his feet,
Magnum suddenly whined. Jonah heard the purr of a car engine. Through the
trees, he caught a glimpse of a late-model blue Lincoln, heading for Ritz’s
campsite. Didn’t take too much calculating to figure out what was going on.
Magnum only came over when his mistress was absent. Twenty bucks said Ritz had
gone somewhere with Soren Gunnerson.
    Magnum was off—a
greyhound after a mechanical rabbit—streaking across the fiats toward the two
tents a quarter mile away. Jonah continued his tedious work, wishing all the
while that he was swinging an ax or cleaning a hull or something just as
arduous. Something arduous enough to take the kinks out of his muscles and his
thoughts off Rita-lou Randall.
    Vietnam had done
that. The Navy had been all too glad to get recruits and hadn’t asked questions
about their age. Chu Lai and Da Nang, death and war, years and a parade of
women, had wiped out Ritz’S face.
    Used to be he’d
think of a woman and he’d wonder what she’d be like in bed. Receptive,
innovative, giving, tigerish? With Ritz, his thoughts never got that far,
because they got mixed up by his sensory cells. Just watching her walk fouled
up his thought processes. Maybe it was all that outdoor working, but she moved
freely, with easy strides. And then there was the way she smelled, as if
sunshine had a smell.
    If that wasn’t
enough, his usually acute sense of hearing was thrown out of whack whenever she
was around by all those old Orbison songs spinning through his brain. 
    Hell, he wasn’t
getting any work done, and the sun was already setting. He flicked off the
mercury burner and started putting away jars and vials in an old tackle box. With
fleeting satisfaction, he heard what he had been waiting for – Soren’s car
headed back along the dirt road for Silver City.  Then, a moment later, he
heard a short scream. He shot up from the bench and then sprinted across the
clearing and downriver as fast as Magnum had done fifteen minutes earlier.
    Jonah broke into
the open where Ritz’s tents were pitched. She was wearing some kind of sexy
spaghetti-stringed dress and was facing away from him, toward the tent. Her
arms were wrapped around herself, and she was trembling. She appeared unhurt,
although he couldn’t see her face. He observed all this in the few seconds it
took him to race across the graveled flat that separated them.
    At his approach
she whirled and threw herself into his arms. He was too astonished to do more
than just hold her. Absently he stroked the sleek of her hair. “What is it,
Ritz?” he murmured inanely, thinking all the while that he could eat that pink
sundress off her in three easy bites.
    She shuddered.
“A bat! In my tent. Hanging from the ridgepole.”
    He liked the
feeling of her in his arms, so he said nothing. After a minute she tilted her
head back and stared up at him. “Well, aren’t you going to do any¬thing?”
    Exasperated with
himself and his foolish fancies, he said, “It’s only a bat, Ritz. Get a broom
or something and chase it out.”
    Her lips
compressed in a straight line of