Unexpected Protector

by Justine Davis

  He keyed the mic. “Anybody tell if they’ve got the head?”

  “Got a guy gesturing a lot,” Teague answered.

  “Cool and quiet lot,” Rafer said.

  That decided Quinn. The guy doing all the waving likely thought of himself as the leader, maybe even had the title. But the other, smaller group could be the bigger threat; cool and quiet indicated experience, professionalism or training.

  “Attack assessment?” he asked.

  “Looks like straight ahead,” Liam said.

  “Ditto,” Teague said. “They’re making some effort to stay hidden, but I don’t think they realize how far you can see out here.”

  City boys? Quinn wondered. “So we have two fronts confirmed?” he said into the handheld.

  He got two responses in agreement, then a pause. He waited for the assessment that would mean the most.

  “My gut says three.”

  The certainty in Rafer’s voice came through the small speaker. And if Rafe was certain, Quinn knew better than to doubt him; the man’s gut was as legendary as his sniper skills.

  “Direction?”

  “It was me, I’d come in over the mesa behind the house while we’re fighting head-on.”

  Exactly what he’d do if he were trying to take this place. If it were true, they weren’t dealing with complete amateurs.

  “Want me to change position?” Liam asked; he was the only one who apparently had an empty field of fire in front of him.

  Quinn turned to look at Hayley. “Can you set that dog to guarding something specific?”

  She frowned. “Yes, but—”

  “Hold your location, Liam, you’ve got the best view of the mesa from up there,” Quinn said, ignoring whatever her “but” would have been. “Who’s got the dog?”

  “He just left me,” Rafer said.

  “Headed for me,” Teague said. “I can see his tail.”

  “See if you can send him back here.”

  “And just how do I do that? You know what they say about giving somebody else’s dog orders.”

  “Tell him to find Hayley,” Quinn said.

  “He’d probably have better luck,” Hayley said, her tone sour, “if he told him to find Quinn.”

  Quinn flicked a glance at her. By her expression, he guessed that his amusement was beginning to irritate her.

  “Jealous?”

  “Just trying to figure out a usually reliable dog who’s lost his ability to judge good character.”

  She had said the words before, but the heat in her voice was gone now. Quinn turned then, to face her straight on. She was looking up at him, her face so readable to him, the fear, the doubt, the annoyance, it was all there, so clearly. There was even hope there. It had to be hope that he hadn’t lied when he’d told her they weren’t the bad guys, he thought.

  And underneath it all, buried by that tangle of emotions, was something else, something he’d been trying desperately not to acknowledge. Some hyperalertness in the way she looked at him, and in the way her gaze shifted over him in the quick, darting way of someone making sure they were really seeing what they thought they were seeing.

  The same way he caught himself too often looking at her.

  “He hasn’t lost it,” he said quietly.

  For an instant she didn’t react, and he wondered but didn’t dare speculate where her mind had wandered. But then she clearly remembered her own words about Cutter’s judgment. Her eyes widened slightly, the barest stretching of the muscles of expression.

  And then the sound of racing paws sounded across the wooden porch. Cutter was here.

  Quinn opened the door and let the dog in. For once the uncannily smart animal ignored him and went straight to Hayley. Teague had told him to find her, and find her he had. He sniffed her up and down, nudging her hand with his nose, not settling until she patted his head, assuring him she was fine. As if he’d understood, the moment she said the word “fine” the dog spun around to look at Quinn. Questioningly, for all the world like one of his team awaiting orders.

  He was definitely going to have to think about adding a canine to this team. Although he wasn’t sure dogs like Cutter came along often.

  “Can you help me guard the back, boy?”

  Quinn knew he wasn’t imagining the change that came over the dog at the word guard. The tail-wagging stopped, the ears stopped swiveling and focused—if that was the word—on him. Every line of the dog’s square, lithe body drew up, suddenly tensed and ready. His dark eyes were fastened on Quinn’s face, and so intense that for a moment he understood how those hapless sheep felt.

  And then, in the next moment, Cutter blew Quinn’s expectations and everything he assumed about dogs in general to pieces. He pivoted on his hind paws and headed for the back of the cabin.

  Quinn stared after him. That the dog understood the word “guard” was no surprise, really. He supposed many dogs did. But “back”? How had he understood that?

  His gaze flicked to Hayley. “How did he know that? How did he even know what I meant by ‘the back’?”

  “He knew.”

  “Obviously. But how did he know I didn’t mean my back, or yours, or the back of just this room?”

  “Because he’s Cutter. He’s not...” She hesitated, then continued. “He’s not just a dog. Not an ordinary one, anyway. Sometimes I think he’s a bit...”

  Again she trailed off. Quinn knew he needed to get moving, but somehow this answer seemed crucial. “A bit what?” he prompted.

  “Magical. Fey, at least.”

  The whimsy was unexpected, silly even, but she said it so hesitantly he knew she knew how it sounded.

  And now was certainly not the time to have a discussion about potential supernatural qualities of a dog who was no doubt simply very, very smart.

  “I’ve got range.”

  Rafer’s voice crackled over the radio. Quinn thought quickly. If Rafer said he had range, that meant that group was down to two, maybe one as soon as he gave the order. The man simply didn’t miss. Teague wasn’t quite as good at that distance, but he could take out one for sure, maybe two of his larger group.

  But once shots were fired, the force that was counting on surprise would know they were no surprise at all. So what would they do, learning they’d lost that advantage?

  Depends on what that knowledge costs them, Quinn thought.

  It was up to them to make that knowledge very, very expensive.

  He headed for the back of the cabin.

  Chapter 21

  Hayley’s heart was hammering in her chest, and she tried to breath deeper, slower. Her brain, however, wasn’t racing. It was stuck in a silly, stupid rut as she watched man and dog meld into an efficient working team. As he always had with her, the dog seemed to respond not just to what Quinn said, but sometimes even before he said it. It was as if they’d been together for years.

  Quinn stopped at the door of the bedroom, calling Vicente’s name. And for only about the third time since they’d been here, Hayley saw her neighbor step out of the bedroom where he’d retreated for seemingly the duration.

  “We have been found?” he asked.

  “Looks that way.” Then Quinn did something that once more shook her entire perception of everything that had happened; he handed the man one of the deadly looking pistols he held. “You know these men even better than I do. If they get this far, use it.”

  Vicente took it, handling it with familiarity, she noticed. “But...you will not let that happen?”

  “If they get to you,” Quinn said flatly, “I’ll be dead.”

  Hayley’s breath caught anew in her throat.

  “And this will all have been for nothing,” Vicente said sadly. “The murderers will go unpunished, and my head will make the journey back to my home, to be displayed on a post as a warning.”


  Hayley’s breath caught. Murderers? The men after him were murderers? Quinn said nothing. Vicente glanced at her. She stared back. His head? As in, beheaded? She gave herself a mental shake, willing her brain to start functioning again.

  “And an innocent woman will die, as well.” Vicente was looking at Hayley with a sadness that made her feel, for a moment, bad for the man, even though it was obviously her own death he was prematurely regretting. Then the stark reality of it all began to set in, and fear kicked through her. She’d been better off, she thought, when her brain had been numb.

  “I should have listened to you, written it all out,” Vicente said.

  The memory of what she’d overheard the other day flashed through her mind. She didn’t know what Quinn had wanted Vicente to write out, but she knew now he’d wanted him to do it because he’d foreseen this possibility. Then the man had naturally been focused on his own well-being, but now he was obviously realizing Quinn may have been right.

  She had the feeling Quinn was often right, at least about such things as this.

  “Just keep the gun with you and ready.”

  The radio crackled. “They’re closing in on my position,” Teague said. “Less than a half mile now.”

  “Copy,” Quinn snapped. “Hold for a couple more. Liam?”

  “Thought I saw a bit of dust kicked up on top of the mesa, but there’s a bit of wind, could be nothing.”

  “Assume it’s not,” Quinn ordered.

  “Copy that.”

  Quinn turned back to Vicente. “If anybody gets through, it won’t be many. Two, maybe three at most. I can promise you that.”

  “These are ruthless killers,” Vicente warned. “Your men are that good?”

  “They are,” Quinn said.

  He turned then, clearly intent on finishing his preparations. Cutter, obviously on high alert, paced near the back door while Quinn moved equipment from the weapons locker to various places in the cabin. It took her a moment to realize he was placing the items so they would be at hand if he had to retreat through the house from the back.

  In a few moments he appeared to be satisfied, and headed toward the back of the house. And Cutter.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he reached for the lever-style handle on the door.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “What I told Liam. Assuming that dust wasn’t just the wind.”

  “You’re not going out there?”

  She hadn’t meant to yelp, but it came out that way anyway. He just kept going.

  “Let me amend that,” she snapped. “You’re not taking my dog out there.”

  He stopped. Turned. “What would Cutter do if someone threatened you?”

  “He’d protect me, get between me and them,” she admitted. She’d seen it, that day a drunk had stumbled out of the restaurant next to the post office right into her, and Cutter had done exactly that. That he had failed to get between her and Quinn was an anomaly she wasn’t thinking about at the moment.

  “That’s what he’s doing. Just a little earlier.”

  “But these men have guns.”

  “Yes. So do we.”

  She couldn’t help glancing at Vicente; her quiet former neighbor hardly seemed like the gun-wielding type. Yet he was handling the weapon with an easy familiarity.

  “Oh, he can shoot,” Quinn said, with a grim undertone in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “If they get in here, both of you get into the bedroom. Vicente, you know what to do.”

  The man nodded. Oddly, Hayley thought, he didn’t look frightened, only regretful.

  “What good will that do?” she asked.

  “The room’s armored, and there’s a special lock.”

  Hayley barely had time to absorb that.

  “Now or never!” Rafer’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “Time to start this party,” Quinn said. The grimness, oddly, was gone from his voice. It took Hayley a moment to realize it had been replaced with...not excitement, or exhilaration, but some kind of adrenaline-pushed energy. Men at war, she thought inanely.

  “Rafe, take out who you can. Other positions, hold and watch their reactions. When you see what they’ve got, what they do, respond appropriately.”

  Whatever appropriately means, Hayley thought, not able to think much past if they shoot, shoot back. Obviously the men knew, because no questions crackled back over the radio.

  The reality of it just wouldn’t sink in. That men were likely going to die here, in the next few minutes. Maybe even one of the men she’d come to know. Liam with his drawl, Teague with his charming smile, Rafer with his slower, more precious smile. Or even Quinn, standing as the last barrier between those men and what they wanted.

  She shivered involuntarily. Not at the thought of Quinn going down, not any more than anyone else, anyway, she told herself. It was simply that the idea of gunfire tearing into this remote, isolated, extremely quiet place that had been her home for days now seemed utterly unimaginable, it was too—

  As if her own thoughts had brought it on she heard three shots in succession. Big, loud shots. Then a rapid volley of several from two different directions, on top of each other so she couldn’t tell what came from where.

  “Three down, two terminally.”

  Rafer’s voice was impossibly calm as it came through the small speaker. He’d taken out three of the four men who’d been approaching him, and announced it as calmly as he would say he’d picked up apples at the store. And she suddenly realized their job, those three men out there, was to whittle down the odds for Quinn. Her stomach knotted.

  Another transmission came over the radio, Teague’s voice, but Hayley missed what he said. Cutter’s trumpeting, booming warning bark drowned it out. The dog was clawing at the back door, looking back at them, begging them to let him out.

  They were coming.

  “I’m counting on him to tell me exactly where they are. Then I’ll send him back,” Quinn said to her.

  “But—”

  “Don’t argue. No time.”

  He started quickly down the hallway toward the dog. Hayley followed, unable to really think of doing anything else.

  “But what—”

  He cut her off again, this time with his hand on the dancingly eager Cutter’s collar. “I’ll look out for him as best I can. I don’t think they’ll do anything to him, since it’s obvious we already know they’re here.”

  “My question was what are you going to do?”

  For a split second he gave her a startled look. “My job,” he said simply.

  And his job was to go out there alone, maybe die?

  She walked to him, unable to stop herself. He was reaching for the handle of the back door. Cutter went still, his nose jammed up against where the door would open. Quinn elbowed the handle down and, oddly it seemed at that moment, she heard the small click as it opened. For an instant he looked at her.

  “He’ll be back shortly,” he said. She wasn’t at all sure the dog would desert him out there, even if ordered, but before she could speak he took her breath away yet again by pressing his lips to her forehead and adding softly, “Stay safe, Hayley.”

  Something in his voice made the words he’d said to Vicente flash through her mind.

  If they get to you, I’ll be dead....

  And then they were gone.

  Chapter 22

  More gunfire came from the front, rapid fire that could be anyone, and the slower, inexorable crack that was Rafer’s M24. But it sounded as though he’d shifted position, and Quinn smiled, the barest hint of a smile, in satisfaction. Rafer had taken care of his first group, and was now helping Teague whittle away at his, at a distance that would seem impossible to anyone who hadn’t seen the Hathcock trophy at Camp Perry, where the name Rafer Crawford appeared three years in succession
as the best marksman the marines had.

  He was amazed that the dog wasn’t going berserk, with all these hostile strangers approaching from all directions. Yet the dog seemed to understand that their mission was here, on the back side, in these few feet between the back of the cabin and the base of the bluff.

  At one time it had been the perfect protection, a near-vertical, rocky, nearly impossible drop. But over the years parts of it had crumbled, slipping down and accumulating into a slightly milder slope at the bottom. As a result, the bottom section was easier to traverse. But it was also loose, and thus more treacherous underfoot. And for his purposes, also conveniently noisy; it was hard to travel more than a few yards without knocking something loose that rattled down the slope.

  Cutter was trotting along the base of that toed-out slope, his head up, tail out straight, looking for all the world like a dog on a mission. Quinn watched as he himself worked his way slowly west.

  Cutter stopped suddenly.

  The slightest of breezes cooled his skin, and Quinn wondered what scents it had brought the alert animal. The dog took several steps up the crumbling slope, then stopped staring upward, stock-still. For the briefest second the dog’s ears swiveled back, and Quinn guessed he was making sure the somewhat-slow-on-the-uptake human was properly reading his signals.

  “I got you, boy,” Quinn whispered as he edged quietly nearer. He wasn’t sure just how keen the dog’s hearing was, hadn’t really said it expecting the dog to hear, but the ears swiveled back. And all the while his nose was working, his sides going in and out like a bellows, searching, sorting.

  It wasn’t the spot he’d expected. This was in plain view of the cabin, once they came over the edge.

  “Wish you could tell me how many,” he said as he got to the dog’s position.

  The dog’s head moved back and forth, describing a short arc that, up top, would include a distance of perhaps ten feet. Oddly, it was similar to the hand signal they used to indicate the danger zone, the spread of the enemy, how much ground they needed to focus on. If it was one of his men, the movement would indicate a small team, two, maybe three.