Chase the Lightning

by Madeline Baker

  She gathered an armful of dried branches. She layered some of them on the most level patch of ground she could find and then spread their blankets over them. She dragged the saddles over for pillows and then, after a quick look around, she hurriedly changed out of her dress and petticoat and into her tank top and jeans, wondering why she hadn’t done it sooner.

  She rolled the dress and petticoats into a ball and shoved them inside one of the saddlebags. She spent a few minutes brushing the dust and tangles out of her hair and then, with a weary sigh, sank down on the impromptu bed, her head resting on the saddle. She pulled a corner of the top blanket up over her and lay there, shivering, partly from the chill creeping into the air and partly from nerves as she relived their close escape from town. Trey could have been killed. She could have been killed.

  “I don’t belong here,” she whispered. “Please, just let me get back home.”

  “You say something?” Trey asked, startling her. He had materialized as quietly as he had disappeared.

  She signed tremulously, determined not to cry. “No.”

  But Trey heard the unshed tears that made her voice tremble. “Amanda?”

  She sniffed.

  He knelt down beside her and pulled her into his arms. “What’s wrong?”

  “I want to go home,” she wailed softly.

  “Yeah, you said that before.”

  “Well, it’s still true.” She sniffed again, wishing she had a Kleenex.

  All her misery seemed to evaporate as Trey’s hand stroked her back, making her forget everything but how good it felt to be in his arms. His chest was solid, comforting, his touch light, soothing, his breath warm against her cheek. Only a moment before, she had been feeling afraid and alone, but no more. She relaxed against him, content to be in the past, for the moment, if it meant she could be in his arms.

  She closed her eyes as he continued to rub her back, massaging away her tension, easing muscles that ached from spending a long night on the ground the night before, and a longer day in the saddle.

  Trey’s arm tightened around her as sleep claimed her. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to go home. For a woman accustomed to fancy cars and indoor plumbing, life in his time must seem primitive indeed. If it wasn’t for the woman in his arms, he might have thought he’d dreamed all of it: the electric lights, the indoor privies, hot running water, machines that washed and dried clothes, machines that made ice and kept food cold, pictures that moved and talked. He had never imagined such things.

  He should have left her in Canyon Creek. It was a good-sized town. She would likely have been happier there, staying in a decent hotel, than tagging along with him. At least there she would have had three hot meals a day and a warm bed to sleep in. If he couldn’t hunt up some game, they’d have to make do with jerky and beans, and she would have to get used to sleeping on the ground until they reached Diablo Springs.

  He shook his head ruefully. How could he take her there? The place was populated by whores, horse thieves, murderers and…he swore softly. Bank robbers.

  He stared into the darkness. Why hadn’t he left her behind? She stirred in his arms, and he knew why he hadn’t left her. Her breasts were warm and soft against his chest. Every time he inhaled, her scent filled his nostrils. Lowering his head, he brushed a kiss across her cheek. Her skin was soft and warm, her hair still carried the faint scent of fresh peaches, even after all this time on the trail. Looking at her, holding her, made him ache with desire, filled him with the need to protect her, even if it meant protecting her from men like himself.

  She felt good in his arms, and he held her for a long while before he lowered her onto the blanket. Awake or asleep, in a pretty blue dress or tight fittin’ jeans and a shirt like she was wearing now, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And yet, it wasn’t just her beauty that attracted him. He recalled the tenderness of her touch when she had tended his wound, her willingness to take in a stranger, the mischievous light in her eyes when she had insisted on buying him a hat and new jeans. She made him feel good, he thought, inside and out, made him think about settling down—damn! Where had that thought come from? As if he could settle down now, with Wolf Langley on his trail and his stake a hundred and two years in the future.

  A sigh escaped Amanda’s lips and she smiled in her sleep. Trey stared at her mouth, remembered the taste of her, the way she fit into his arms. His new jeans felt suddenly tight in the crotch and he stood up, restless and aching.

  Relámpago whinnied softly as Trey approached. “Hey, boy,” he murmured. “What the devil are we going to do about her?”

  * * * * *

  Amanda awoke with a groan. The sky was pale with a new dawn, and it still hadn’t rained. Her neck ached, her back ached, and she was hungry enough to eat her Nikes, dirt and all. Cracking one eye open, she glanced around. There was no sign of Trey, but she saw Relámpago and the gelding standing head to tail a little ways off, so she figured Trey hadn’t gone far.

  She sat up slowly, stretched her arms and legs and then stood up.

  Where was he?

  And even as the thought crossed her mind, she saw him walking toward her. He moved with a lithe grace, supple and silent. Just looking at him made her heart do a little dance, sent a warmth spreading through her that had nothing to do with the heat of the sun.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning. Where’d you go?”

  He lifted his arm. A rabbit dangled from his hand.

  Amanda grimaced. “What’s that for?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Breakfast. Something to go with a can of those store-bought beans. Let’s saddle up. I found a waterhole not far from here. The horses can graze while we eat.”

  “Eat? The rabbit?” She shuddered. “Raw?”

  He laughed softly, amused by her horrified expression. “Guess you’ve never cooked rabbit over an open fire.”

  “No.”

  “Good eating,” he said. “You'll see. There's plenty of firewood around the waterhole. We can heat the beans, too.” He thrust the carcass into her hand and began to saddle Relámpago.

  She felt dampness under her hand. Blood, already congealing. She swallowed a gasp and held the rabbit the way she might hold a live snake. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”

  “Shot it.” He reached under the stallion’s belly for the cinch and drew it up tight.

  “You’re a regular Daniel Boone, aren’t you? Where’d you learn to hunt like that?”

  “My grandfather taught me.”

  “The Indian one, I guess.”

  He chuckled as he smoothed the blanket over the gelding’s back. “Sure as hell wasn’t the other one.”

  “You didn’t like him?”

  “I never met him.” He cinched the saddle in place, took the rabbit from her hand, and draped it over Relámpago’s withers. “Ready?”

  She wiped her hand against her pant leg. “I guess so.”

  “Need a leg up?”

  “No, I can manage.”

  The waterhole was less than a mile away. Several patches of yellow-green grass grew nearby. Dismounting, Trey tethered the horses to a sturdy bush. Amanda knelt at the waterhole. Dipping her hands in the water, she took a drink, swallowing just enough to quench her thirst. She watched Trey gather tinder and some dry wood from beneath a stunted mesquite tree and started a small fire. She grimaced when he skinned the rabbit.

  “Aren’t you supposed to take out its…its innards before we eat it?”

  “I already did that.”

  He cut the carcass into pieces, tossed the skin away from their camp, “for the coyotes”, he said, and then put the meat on a stick. Hunkering down on his heels, he held the stick over the fire. Sort of like roasting marshmallows, she thought.

  “Open up a can of those beans and set it here, in the edge of the coals,” he told her.

  She did so, having a little trouble with the manual can opener. She dragged one of the saddle blankets over for a table,
and put out the two enamel plates and the flatware. She wasn’t keen on the idea of eating a freshly killed creature, but her stomach began to growl as the air filled with the aroma of warming beans and roasting meat.

  “Won’t be long now,” Trey said, grinning as her stomach growled loudly.

  She glared at him. Even though she liked living in the country, she was, by no stretch of the imagination, a country girl. She had gone on one camp out when she was nine or ten years old but when she found out she had to sleep on the ground, she had called her mother to come and get her.

  Oh, Mama, she thought. If you could only come and get your little girl now.

  * * * * *

  Amanda arched her back, then stood in the stirrups for a moment. Who would have thought horseback riding could be so tiring? She didn’t remember getting so stiff and sore when she rode on the farm. Of course, she had been a lot younger then. And she had only ridden for a couple of hours at a time, not all day and into the night.

  The land stretched ahead of them, seemingly endless, flat in every direction save for the mountain that loomed in the distance. For all that the country seemed to be populated by little more than salt scrub and cactus, roadrunners and beady-eyed lizards, Trey managed to find food enough to stretch out the meager supplies in their saddlebags. Another rabbit, a prairie chicken, a cute little squirrel she refused to eat, a small deer. He’d also found some wild onions and cabbage to break up the constant diet of meat and beans.

  The black coffee he brewed was indeed strong enough to float a bullet, which was apparently just the way he liked it. Her only recourse was to dilute it with water from her canteen.

  By the third day, she was dying for a Caesar salad, a cappuccino, and a big bowl of chocolate ice cream

  She urged her horse up alongside of Trey’s mount. “How much longer until we get to Diablo Springs?”

  “We’re not going there.”

  “We’re not? Why not? Where are we going?”

  “Bonita Canyon.”

  “Where the heck is that? Why are we going there?”

  “It’s about a two-day ride from Diablo Springs, and we’re going there because it’s the only place I can think of where Langley won’t follow us.”

  “What’s in Bonita Canyon, I’m afraid to ask.”

  “My people.”

  She stared at him a moment. His people…

  “You don’t mean…you can’t mean…Indians?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at him, speechless. Going to an Old West town had been bad enough, but this… She reined her horse to a halt. She’d had enough.

  “’Pago, whoa.” Trey reined the stallion around to face her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Everything!”

  He leaned forward, his forearms braced on the pommel. “Well, I can’t argue with that.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “No, I reckon not.”

  “Let me take Relámpago and go back. You can take my horse.”

  “Have you taken leave of your senses, woman? You can’t go traipsing around out here by yourself.”

  He was right, and she knew it. But she didn’t have to like it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rob Langley parked his big Ford Expedition in front Amanda’s porch. Switching off the engine, he climbed down and stood listening to the engine tick in the silence. Instincts honed by years of bounty hunting were at once alert; something wasn’t right. Not by a damn sight.

  Opening the driver's door, he reached under the seat for his 9mm Beretta. He never wore a gun around Amanda because she seemed finicky about it. But something wasn’t right, he could feel it in his gut.

  He stood by the fender of the Expedition, which reached halfway up his chest. Good cover in a firefight. He kept the Beretta down along his leg, thumb on the safety.

  Amanda and he hadn’t parted on the best terms the last time he had been here. Since then, she hadn’t answered her phone or returned his calls. Despite the tension that had come up between them, that just wasn't like her. At first, he'd felt an unfamiliar jealousy take hold, thinking she was spending all her time with that odd cowboy with the three-thousand-dollar six-gun. But his annoyance had quickly turned to concern. What did she really know about that half-breed, anyway? Knowing Amanda, she would have taken the cowboy at his word without a second thought.

  What if the half-breed was some kind of predator who knew how to get next to lonely women? He’d certainly had the looks for it. That hadn't been Rob's first impression of the man, but he had been man-hunting long enough to know that appearances could be deceiving.

  Eyes narrowed, he scanned the yard, focusing on details. Days-old hoofprints left the yard, and returned—and then left again, deep-dug and wide spaced. Running. That big white horse? There were also strange tire tracks, a mud-and-snow tread, typical of trucks and SUVs like his Expedition. Though several days old, the tracks were relatively easy to read: the truck had come into the yard, parked over there, near the barn, and then left in a jackrabbit start, digging deep furrows, slinging dirt far and wide.

  The tire tracks overlay the running hoofprints.

  Rob strode along beside the tire tracks, careful not to disturb the scene. He was some distance from the house when he found where the truck had skidded to a halt, going almost sideways. Sunlight glinted off a scatter of bright fragments. Squatting down, he turned one over with his finger. Safety glass from a shattered car window. Probably the truck window.

  He saw where the truck had turned around, and then arced off across the desert to go behind Amanda's house. He followed the tire tracks back. The truck had stopped on the far side of the house, and one set of boot tracks led away from the driver’s door—and back, followed by a pair of uneven furrows which smeared the footprints. Irregular blotches glazed the dust here and there between the furrows… Rob swore and backtracked the furrows to just in front of the barn. A large blot of dried blood there had turned brown in the sun’s heat.

  Going around to the front of the house, he saw that the door stood open. He didn’t like the looks of that. He pressed against the doorjamb and peered through the screen door. Whatever had happened in the yard had happened a day or more ago. Where was Amanda?

  The house was quiet. Too quiet. She usually had the radio or the TV on, sometimes both at the same time. To his straining senses, it felt empty.

  He slipped through the door way in one smooth move, and put his back to the wall inside, his Beretta up, held rock solid in both hands.

  Nothing moved.

  With the caution born of too many close calls, he went from room to room, always keeping the staircase in the periphery of his vision.

  In the guest bedroom he found where the cowboy had been sleeping. Well, that answered one thing he’d wondered about. There was a ratty pair of clean jeans folded on a chair, and a rough flannel shirt hanging over its back. That was it for clothing. The man clearly traveled light.

  Going back down the hallway, Rob moved quietly up the stairs and went through the rooms on the second floor.

  Amanda's bedroom smelled of her perfumes and shampoos, peaceful, ordinary, as if she had just stepped out for a moment.

  Returning to the first floor, he called her name.

  “Amanda? Amanda?”

  Silence answered.

  Leaving the house, he headed for the barn. Her Jag was in the garage. She never left this place except in her car.

  The doors to the barn were open, but there was no one inside. The horse was gone, too. He grunted softly.

  He could be overreacting. It could be that she had just gone riding with the cowboy. Riding double. Cozy. His jealousy returned at the image, but it was forced out by everything he’d seen in the yard. Violence had been done here. He could read that much. And he could read enough to know experts were called for.

  He went back into the house and picked up the phone, dialing the county sheriff’s number from memory. Wh
en dispatch came on the line, he mentioned the name of a detective in Crimes Against Persons that he had worked with on several occasions. He was patched through, identified himself, and told the deputy what he’d found.

  The deputy promised a car shortly. And a crime-scene team.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Trey found himself looking forward to seeing his grandfather again, though he wondered if he would still be welcomed by the People. He had been away a long time; he was afraid he had forgotten much of what he had learned as a child. He had promised he would return to the People when he had avenged his father’s death. How could he face Walker on the Wind and tell him he had failed? And yet, everything within him urged him to go home.

  He was aware of Amanda riding behind him, could almost feel her scowl on his back. He should have left her behind, but he felt responsible for her being here, in his time. But, more than that, he wanted her here, with him, even though he was pretty sure she wouldn’t like living with his people. She was used to the ease and comfort of her own time. By her standards, Walker’s Well had been primitive. What would she think of the People’s lifestyle? He shook his head. Maybe it was a mistake, bringing her here. The threat of war was something the Apache lived with constantly, war with the Comanche, war with the Army. Not long ago, he had been in a saloon in California where he had overheard a couple of troopers talking about orders issued by General Ord, who had succeeded General McDowell as Commander of the Department of California. Ord’s instructions had been to destroy the Apaches by any means, to hunt them down like he would any wild animal. According to the troopers, those orders had been carried out vigorously. Over two hundred Apaches had been killed by soldiers who had trailed them for days and weeks, burning villages, clothing and provisions. Twenty-eight women, two men, and twenty-four children were reported captured. The troopers had noted that the Indians had killed more than fifty whites.

  Things hadn’t been much better in Arizona. Under the direction of General Thomas C. Devin, the cavalry had invaded the very heart of the Apache homeland, scouting south of the Mogollons, north of the Gila, where they were now, and throughout the region of the Salt River. Devin had broken new trails and made maps leading to some of the Apache’s almost inaccessible strongholds. Trey frowned, wondering if his grandfather’s band had been one of those attacked.