by Elle James
She stopped and let the three officers move past.
She watched from a distance as they surveyed the body. Carmen took a number of photographs, then they fanned out, searching the ground—for clues, she supposed. She stood in the shade of the piñon, wishing she were anywhere else. She’d thought she’d put killing and bodies behind her when she left Afghanistan. The wilderness was supposed to be a place of peace, not violence.
Michael returned to her side. “You doing okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
She felt his gaze on her, but he didn’t press, for which she was grateful. “Which direction did the men you saw come from?” he asked after a moment.
“From over there, near that wash.” She nodded in the direction of the shallow depression in the terrain.
Graham joined them. “We’ll need to seal off this area and send a team out to collect evidence.”
“We need to figure out where he came from,” Michael said. “There might be a camp somewhere nearby.”
“Where are you camped, Ms. Stewart?” Graham asked.
“I’m in the South Rim Campground.”
“Let us know if you decide to move into town or return to your home, in case we have questions,” Graham said.
“I’d planned to stay here for another week to ten days,” she said. “I’ve only just begun collecting the specimens I need.”
“This part of the park will be off-limits to the public for most of that time, I’m afraid,” Graham said. “Until we determine it’s safe.”
He was going to close the backcountry? “That really isn’t acceptable,” she said. “I’m not some naive tourist, stumbling around, but I really need to collect these specimens to complete my research.”
“You’ll have to find them somewhere else. Until I decide it’s safe, this section of the park is closed.”
The three officers studied her, expressions impassive, implacable. She turned away, and her gaze fell on the body on the ground. All she could see was the feet, but they lay there with the stillness of a mannequin. Lifeless, a cruel joke played out in the desert.
She hated having her plans thwarted, but she knew Graham and the others were right. Until they knew who had killed this man and why, they had to err on the side of caution. “Fine. There are other places in the backcountry where I can look for specimens.”
“Let us know...”
But Graham never finished the sentence. Bark exploded from the trunk of a tree beside her. “Get down!” Michael yelled, and shoved her to the ground as bullets whistled over their heads.
Chapter Four
In the silence that followed the burst of gunfire, the drum of Michael’s pulse in his ears was so loud he was sure everyone could hear it. He slowed his breathing and strained his ears, alert for any clue about the shooter. Beneath him, Abby shifted, and he became aware of her ragged breathing. She shoved and he realized he was crushing her. Better crushed than shot, he thought, but he eased up a fraction of an inch, putting more of his weight on his hands, braced on the ground beneath his shoulders, and his knees, straddled on either side of her.
They lay in a depression in the ground, a shallow wash pocked with rocks and low scrub and a few stunted piñons. Turning his head, Michael spotted Graham and Carmen about five feet away. His eyes met Graham’s. The supervisor looked angry enough to chew nails.
“Who’s shooting at us?” Abby whispered, her voice so low he wondered at first if he’d imagined the question.
“Sniper,” Graham answered. “I make his hide site about three hundred yards to the south, on that slight rise.”
Michael turned his head, but he couldn’t see anything except grass and dirt and the trunk of a piñon. They were too exposed here for him to even lift his head.
“He must be wearing a ghillie suit,” Carmen said. “I can’t see a thing.” Michael turned back to look at her and realized she was half sitting behind a boulder. She’d pulled binoculars from her pack and was scanning the area.
“What’s someone out here doing with a ghillie suit?” Abby asked.
Michael had been wondering the same thing. In a training course he’d taken, he’d seen men in the cumbersome camouflage suits covered with twigs and leaves so that when the wearer froze, he blended in completely with the surrounding landscape. It wasn’t something you could pick up at your local outdoor supplier.
“They could have stolen one from the military, or made their own,” Graham said. “These drug operations spare no expense to protect their business. That sniper rifle he’s got is probably military issue, or close to it.”
Graham shifted, reaching for his radio; the movement was enough to draw another blast of gunfire, bullets spitting into the dirt in front of them. Abby flinched, jolting against Michael. “Are you okay?” he whispered.
“Just a rock on my cheek. It’s nothing.”
More gunfire exploded, this time to their right. From her vantage point behind the boulder, Carmen had returned fire. “He’s too far away,” she said, lowering the weapon.
“Ranger Two, this is Ranger One, do you copy?” Graham had used the distraction to retrieve the radio from his utility belt and key the mike.
“Ranger Two. I copy.” Simon’s voice crackled through the static.
“We’re pinned down by a sniper in the backcountry.” He recited the GPS coordinates Abby had given them for her plant find. “Looks like one shooter. His hide site is approximately three hundred yards south of our position. He’s on a small rise, maybe wearing a ghillie suit.”
“We’re on it. We’ll try to come in behind him.”
“Roger that. Over.” Graham laid the radio on the ground beside his head. “Now we wait,” he said.
Michael tried to ignore the cramping in his arms. If he let up, he’d crush Abby again, but any movement was liable to draw the sniper’s fire. “Sorry,” he said to her. “I know this isn’t the most comfortable position.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she started to tremble, tremors running through her body into his. She made a muffled sound, almost like...sobbing.
The sound tore at him. The sight of the dead man hadn’t moved him, and while the sniper’s fire got his adrenaline pumping, it didn’t shake him the way Abby’s sorrow did. “Hey.” He slid one hand to her shoulder and turned his head so that his mouth was next to her ear. He spoke softly, not wanting the others to hear. “It’s okay,” he said. “Our team is good. They’ll nail this guy.”
She tensed, her fingers digging into the dirt beneath them. Her breathing was ragged, and he could sense panic rising off her in waves. Was she having some kind of flashback? How could he help her—comfort her?
He’d been shot at plenty of times as a PJ, but they always had the Pave Hawks to swoop them out of danger. He’d always been too focused on the mission, on saving lives, to worry much about his own. It must have been worse for troops on the ground, like her.
He tried to lift more of his weight off her. “Hey,” he said again. “Abby, talk to me. You’re going to be okay.”
She sucked in a ragged breath, her body rising and falling beneath him. “I hate this,” she said after a minute.
“I hate it, too.” The words sounded lame, even to him, but he’d say anything to keep her talking. “But you’ll be okay. The cavalry is on its way.”
The muscles of her cheek against his shifted; he hoped she was smiling at his lame joke. “This is probably the last thing you expected when you came out here to dig plants,” he said.
“Yeah.” The shaking wasn’t as violent now—only a tremor shuddering through her every now and then. Her hands had relaxed, no longer gripping the dirt. He resisted the urge to smooth his hand along her back; she might take it the wrong way. As it was, he was becoming all too aware of the feel of her body benea
th his, the side of her breast nestled beside his arm, the soft curve of her backside against his groin.
“This is just a little too familiar,” she said.
He realized she wasn’t talking about the feel of their bodies pressed together. “You’ve been pinned down by a sniper before?”
“Oh, yeah. That was the thing about being over there—the unpredictability of it all—not knowing when an IED would explode or a sniper would fire, not knowing who you could trust.”
You can trust me, he wanted to say. But he didn’t. Trusting him didn’t change the fact that there was somebody they couldn’t see determined to kill them if they so much as lifted their heads. He hadn’t done a very good job so far of protecting her. The best he could hope for was to provide a distraction. “Have you always been interested in plants?” he asked. “Did you always plan to study biology?”
“I was going to be a television news anchor,” she said. “Or a model. This scar on my face put an end to that.”
Only a deaf man would miss the bitterness in her words. She was certainly pretty enough to be a model—but she probably didn’t want to hear that, either. He tried once more to get the conversation back on track. “What you’re doing now—finding plants that could cure cancer. That sounds a lot more rewarding.”
“Yeah.” She fell silent again. Okay, so she didn’t want to talk. At least she’d stopped shaking.
“Mostly, I like the solitude,” she said after a moment. “It’s so peaceful out here. Usually.”
“Yeah. Usually it is. You just got lucky.”
She actually chuckled then—the sound made him feel about ten feet tall, as if he’d done something a lot more heroic than make lame jokes.
“Why do you think he’s shooting at us?” she asked. “Is it because we found the dead man?”
“I doubt it’s that. My guess is the dead guy’s an illegal. He won’t have any ID on him, or anything to tie him to anyone or anything. Most likely the sniper is protecting something. A meth lab or something like that.”
“But doesn’t firing at us give away the fact that there’s something out here worth protecting?”
“Yeah, but it keeps us from getting too close and buys them time to move the operation. When we finally make it out to investigate, whatever is going on will be long gone.”
“What happens after that?”
“We have a starting place for our search. From there we try to track them to their new location.”
“Like in the war,” she said.
“Yeah. A lot like in the war.”
“Just my dumb luck that I come out here to get away from all that and end up in the middle of it. Do you ever feel that way?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought my job would mostly be inspecting shipments and checking passports—looking for drugs and illegals, for sure. I knew I’d carry a weapon, but I didn’t expect to ever have to use it. But then I think, maybe I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe my military training can help me put an end to some of the violence, at least.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked. “That things happen for a reason?”
“Yeah. I mean, don’t you think it’s more than coincidence that we met up again after all this time?” Five years in which he’d never really forgotten about her. “I mean, what are the odds?”
“That’s why it’s called a coincidence,” she said. “It’s random. Just like me ending up out here in the middle of your little drug war. It’s the way life works, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
* * *
MICHAEL DIDN’T SAY anything after Abby shot down his theory that the two of them were meant to meet up again. Well, sorry, but she didn’t believe in fate. She wasn’t meant to be flat on her stomach, squashed by some big guy in fatigues while another guy took potshots at her, any more than she was meant to disappoint her family by becoming a recluse who wandered the desert in search of rare plants. Life was life. Things happened and you rolled with the punches. She liked looking for plants in the desert, and she hoped the work she did now would help somebody else someday. But that didn’t mean she’d been guided by fate. She made her own choices and accepted the consequences.
She closed her eyes, thinking she might as well catch a nap while she waited for whatever Michael’s partners were doing out there. But closing her eyes was a mistake. As soon as her eyelids descended, she was back in Kandahar, pinned down by a sniper, her face in the dirt just like it was now. Only back then, there had been no cavalry to come to the rescue—the rest of her unit had been pinned down by enemy fire or already wiped out. For six hours she’d lain there with her face in the dirt while the guy next to her silently bled out and the guy on her other side freaked out, sobbing like a baby until every nerve in her was raw. In the end, the shooter must have decided they were all dead and moved on. Her own company thought the same thing—she woke up with two men slinging her onto a stretcher and someone shouting, “Hey, we’ve got a live one here!”
She opened her eyes again. Time to think about something else. Mariposa. Where were she and Angelique right now? Was she safe? Was she somehow mixed up in whatever illegal operation the sniper was protecting? What was she—somebody’s wife or girlfriend, along for the ride, in over her head now? Was she as surprised by the violence that intruded on such peaceful surroundings as Abby was?
“When you were out here before, collecting your plants, did you see anybody else?” Michael asked. “Besides the men who were after our dead guy?”
What was he, a mind reader or something? “No, I didn’t see anybody,” she lied.
“No other hikers or campers?”
“I saw two hikers three days ago. They were tourists from Australia. And I pass people on the roads and see campers in the campground.”
“That’s it?”
“Why? Don’t you believe me?”
“In interrogation training, they tell you that if you ask the same question in several different ways, you sometimes get different answers.”
“So now you’re interrogating me?” What she wouldn’t give to be able to look him in the eye when she spoke. Instead, she was forced to address the ground while he lay on top of her. She appreciated that he was doing his best to hold himself off her, but still, the guy was big and solid. An easy one hundred and eighty pounds.
“It’s a harsh word for questioning,” he said. “A lot of law enforcement is just asking the right questions, of victims, or witnesses, or suspects.”
“Well, you’re not going to get different answers from me.” She saw no reason to betray Mariposa to him. “Do you think you could just slide off me?” she asked.
“I don’t think we’d better risk it. Movement seems to set off our shooter.”
“Why did you throw yourself on top of me in the first place?”
“I’m trained to protect civilians. And I don’t care how politically incorrect it is, my instincts are to keep women and children out of harm’s way.”
“How chivalrous of you.” She hesitated, then added, “But thanks, all the same.” The one thing she’d missed about the military was that sense that her buddies had her back.
“You’re welcome. Sorry we couldn’t have gotten reacquainted under better circumstances.”
“Now that he’s not actually shooting at us and we’re just waiting, it’s pretty boring,” she said. “Like most of the time in the war.”
“Are all our conversations going to come back to that?” he asked.
“Does it bother you, talking about the war?”
“Not really. I thought it bothered you.”
“Sometimes it does,” she admitted. When other people asked about her experiences in Afghanistan, she deflected the questions or changed the subject. “It’s easier with you. You were over there. You understand.”
The radio’s crackle made them both flinch. Abby turned her head toward the sound. Graham keyed the mike. “What have you got?” he asked.
“All clear here.” One of the team members—maybe the sour-faced guy, Simon—said.
“No sign of the shooter?” Graham asked.
“Somebody was here, all right. There’s broken brush and we found some shell casings. Looks like a .300 Win Mag. The dirt’s a little scuffed up, but the ground’s too hard to leave much of an impression.”
“Get Randall and Lotte on it.”
“They’re here. The dog picked up a scent, but it died at the road. We found some tire tracks that look like a truck. We figure someone was waiting to pick up our guy. We never saw signs of a vehicle, so he probably left not long after he fired the last shots at y’all.”
Graham swore under his breath and shoved up onto his knees. No gunshots split the air. Abby let out the breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding.
Michael rolled off her and popped to his feet, then reached out a hand to help her up. She let him pull her up, her limbs stiff and sore from so long being prone. Clearly, she wasn’t in as good a shape as she’d thought. “You’re bleeding,” he said, and gently touched the side of her face.
She flinched as his fingers brushed against the scar, but then she felt the stickiness of already drying blood. “A rock ricocheted off the ground,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Here.” He handed her a black bandanna, then offered a bottle of water. “You should clean it up.”
Head down, she accepted the water and dampened the bandanna. The square of cloth was clean and crisp, like something a businessman would carry tucked into his pocket. She turned her back to the others as she cleaned off the blood and dirt from the side of her face.
“Let me have a look.” Michael moved around in front of her. “You may need stitches.”
