Hot on the Trail

by Vicki Tharp

  “You looking for that Kurt guy?” the man said.

  “You know him?” Quinn asked.

  “Some.” He stepped closer, a little too close for someone they didn’t know.

  Quinn stepped forward, so Jenna did, too. Quinn’s grip tightened on her arm, but she ignored it. Standing that close, as if a drug deal were going down, she caught the whiff of alcohol on the guy’s breath. Or maybe it was on his clothes.

  Again, the guy looked all around. Was it the booze making him paranoid, or did he have a reason to be scared?

  “I’ve been looking for him, too.”

  “Why is that?” Jenna asked.

  “He’s the last one seen with Crystal.”

  Quinn stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  The man shifted, and when more light shone on his face, it was easier to read his expression—he’d probably had a drink. But somewhere beneath that, Jenna thought she saw genuine concern.

  When the door to the VFW hall opened, the guy startled, until he realized it was Russ.

  Again, the cautious look over one shoulder, then the other. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?”

  “Where to?” Quinn asked.

  “Joe’s Diner, a couple blocks up.”

  Quinn pulled his keys from his pocket. “Meet you there.”

  He escorted Jenna to her door and unlocked it as the man quick-shuffled his way to the truck, his head swiveling from side to side, scanning the area around him.

  * * * *

  Even as early as nine at night, the streets of a mountain town like Murdock rolled up. The front windows of the tourist shops glowed with their interior security lights. Others lay dark, their clothed mannequins shadowed and imprisoned behind the thick glass.

  Quinn followed in the wake of black exhaust belching from the pickup truck’s rusted-out muffler. The vehicle’s rumble was so loud it made Kurt’s Mustang sound like a Prius.

  They angled into a parking spot in front of the empty diner and followed the man inside. He chose a table near the rear exit in the back corner, away from the windows, away from the kitchen, away from the service counter where the two waitresses hung out, chattering about nothing.

  The man chose a seat with his back to the exit, tossing glances toward the entrance. Quinn ushered Jenna to a seat, and Quinn sat between them, with his own decent view of the front.

  “Hey, Frank,” a bland waitress said to the man, coffeepot in hand. “Coffee?”

  The man overturned the mug in front of him in answer. Quinn nodded. Jenna said, “Yes, please.”

  She poured the coffee and started to pass out menus. Quinn waved her off. “Just coffee, for now.”

  Jenna blew on her mug and took a sip. When the waitress was out of earshot, Quinn said, “What’s this all about, Frank?”

  Frank scanned the front of the diner for the three hundred and fifteenth time, as if he expected the walking dead to break through the front windows. There was nothing there, but Frank’s paranoia had Quinn checking again.

  Frank leaned forward. “Where’s Kurt?” His voice was a near-whisper even though there was no one remotely within hearing distance. Despite his inebriation, apprehension wafted off him thicker than the booze on his breath.

  Should they tell him the truth? That Kurt was dead? Quinn raised a brow at Jenna.

  She smoothed a piece of hair behind her left ear and shrugged, in a what-have-we-got-to-lose? kind of way.

  Possibly, the advantage. Quinn decided the truth might not be in their best interest. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Frank slumped in his seat. “You don’t know.”

  “No,” Jenna said, playing along. “That’s why we came to the meeting. Friday night he was supposed to go to the late meeting, but apparently, he never showed up.”

  “I was at those meetings all week. He wasn’t at any of them.”

  “That’s what Russ said,” Quinn added.

  “I thought they’d gone off together. Then I saw Kurt’s car out front tonight. I thought…” His words slurred and Frank shrugged.

  Jenna laid a hand on his forearm. “Thought who’d gone off together?”

  “Crystal, and that Kurt guy.”

  “How do you know Kurt?” Quinn asked at the same time that Jenna said, “Who’s Crystal?”

  Frank ran his hands through his greasy hair, then downed his coffee like it was three fingers of cheap Scotch. He waved a hand at the waitress, and she came back with a refill. Jenna and Quinn held their hands over their cups.

  They waited Frank out. The waitress left, and Frank stared at the steam rolling off the cup as if it held all the answers to the world’s greatest mysteries, like the meaning of life and where all the matching socks went in the dryer.

  “Frank, who is Crystal?” Jenna asked again. Her words were soft, a lion soothing the rabbit.

  Frank didn’t make eye contact, but his rheumy eyes filled with moisture and his nose turned red. “She’s my daughter.” Though it came out sounding like, “’Smy dotter.”

  Quinn sat back. Daughter?

  “Were she and Kurt seeing each other?” Jenna readjusted one of her spaghetti straps, which had slipped off one shoulder. Quinn’s gaze followed the finger.

  Wished it was his own finger.

  Quinn refocused. A dark huff of laughter escaped Frank, and he looked at them both in turn. “I don’t know. Crystal’s not a bad girl. But between me and her mother, she never knew a life without drinking or drugs. She’s…typically not the type of woman that men choose to date. She’s the kind that men use for drugs…for sex…” Frank flushed, and the alcohol-dilated vessels pinked the end of his nose.

  Quinn shook his head. “Kurt wasn’t like th—” He cut the thought short, not liking his combative tone. Frank wasn’t the enemy.

  Frank said, “This guy was different. I didn’t know him. Saw her in his car and with him around town a few times. Last time I talked to her, she wasn’t herself.”

  Quinn swallowed the last of his lukewarm coffee. “How so?”

  “She sounded scared—”

  “Kurt would never hurt her,” Quinn said.

  “It wasn’t like that. She was scared, but excited, too.” Frank glanced over at the front door. Quinn did, too. “She wouldn’t say why. But last Monday she sent me this.” Frank reached into his pocket, withdrew a battered cell phone, and pulled up a text. He showed it to Jenna. She inhaled sharply and her eyes rimmed in red. Without a word, she passed it to Quinn.

  Through the cracked screen, he read, I’m gonna make you proud.

  Frank flipped to a picture of Crystal and showed it to Quinn. “That’s my girl.”

  Quinn knew Kurt’s type. Crystal wasn’t it. Not even fucking close. Big and busty. Painted-on face and skintight clothes. Then again, Kurt might have changed more than Quinn had thought. “Mind if I send this picture to my phone?”

  “Go ’head.”

  “She hasn’t been at home?” Quinn asked.

  “She doesn’t have one. Not really. She couch-surfs most nights. If the weather’s not too cold, sometimes she sleeps at one of the local parks.”

  The cowbell on the diner’s door clanged against the glass with a hollow tone. Quinn glanced up, Jenna turned around, and Frank snatched the phone back from Quinn’s fingers.

  A sheriff’s deputy strode in and headed straight for the coffee counter. Behind Quinn came the distinct click of a door latch. A cool wind blew on the back of his neck, then the exit door closed.

  Jenna raised a brow at him. “Allergic to authority?”

  * * * *

  “I know Kurt was your friend, that you want to think the best of him,” Jenna said as Quinn drove them back to the ranch, “but maybe it was like Frank said. Maybe Kurt was using her for the drugs, for the sex.”

  Turning unde
r the arch with the Lazy S carved in metal, Quinn stopped and killed the engine. Jenna’s eardrums rang in the silence.

  Quinn draped a hand over the steering wheel, his other absently maneuvering the gearshift from first to third and back again. Beyond the windshield, the world was pitch black; the headlights, two tunnels of light that glanced off the dirt road, then were swallowed whole by the hungry night.

  “Before the crash…” Quinn shrugged—not a shrug of indifference, but more like he’d decided to share something he normally wouldn’t—“Kurt didn’t drink, not even on the rare occasion we had enough time between missions or training runs to throw a few back. Drugs? No way. Women? He dated. He wasn’t dead, but he avoided the dog tag chasers like the clap, so prostitutes were definitely in his ‘no fly’ zone. After…”

  His voice faded out, and he stared through the windshield, lost in his head. The car got stuffy, and Jenna rolled her window down a few inches to let in some fresh air. In the distance, coyotes yipped and howled, like a rowdy bunch of teenagers going off to a barnyard kegger.

  “After the crash, with our crew dead”—Quinn’s lips pulled back, as if the memory left a tainted oil slick on his tongue—“Kurt changed. Because of the damage to my arm, he was the only one still flying. He was assigned to a new crew. He hit the bars hard, the drugs hard, the women even harder. Managed to hold it together for a time, but you can’t skate that slippery slope and not expect to fall on your ass. Uncle Sam caught him. Kicked him out.”

  “The accident. What happened?” Her words came out thin, reedy. He’d never told her anything about the helicopter crash. Why would he? After she’d turned his proposal down, he’d dropped all contact. It wasn’t as if he’d just deleted her from the favorites list on his phone.

  As if he’d deleted her from his life.

  “What happened isn’t important.” He flicked her a glance, the caustic glare of the dashboard lights stripping away the lie to reveal the unvarnished truth—in the faint hollow of his cheeks, in the harsh brackets around his mouth, the fine lines etched around the corners of his eyes—the accident mattered in more ways than he let on, in more ways than perhaps he even knew himself.

  He restarted the engine and Jenna rolled up her window to combat the noise. Didn’t help much. Throwing the car into gear, he drove up the road. “What’s important is how much Kurt had changed. Could he have been using Crystal?”

  His jaw sawed back and forth as if he were chewing on an answer that was too big, too difficult to swallow all at once. “Yeah, I think so.” Quinn’s voice dropped, but the rumble of the engine didn’t mask his disappointment. “Want me to drop you at the house?”

  She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to lie in her bed and not sleep. Most of all, she didn’t want to fall asleep, because that’s when the nightmares came—Kurt’s lifeless body, the vacant stare in his eyes. “Nah, I’m not tired, and I could use the walk.”

  A beat, two, three of silence. “Want company?”

  “Sure,” she said, too fast, too desperate. For camouflage, she tacked on a nonchalant, “If you want.”

  They drove past the big house, where her grandmother had left the kitchen porch light on. Moths circled the light, in crazy, awkward flight paths, hitting the screen, the wall, the bulb. That’s how she’d felt since she’d found Kurt. Like she was bumping blindly along, blistered by the light. No direction, with a vacant numbness that had started in her chest and now leached out into her bones.

  At his cabin, Quinn killed the engine and placed his hand on hers. His thumb absently traced the ridges of her knuckles. “It doesn’t matter what I want. Is it what you want?”

  Jenna laughed. Disappointed. Disillusioned. Disbelieving laughter. “Seriously? Now you ask me what I want? You couldn’t have asked me what I wanted four years ago? Before you took a ring out of your pocket?”

  She tried to pull her hand away, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “What did you want?”

  “You.” She didn’t have to think about it. Didn’t care anymore if it made her sound desperate or lonely.

  “That’s what I thought I was offering. Isn’t that what a marriage proposal is?”

  “On your terms. Not ours.”

  She tugged her hand free at the same time he let go. Popping the door latch, she hopped out, and he met her at the rear of the car and fell into step beside her as she started walking toward the barn and the corrals. Toward the one thing that could always make her feel better—the horses.

  Clouds blocked the moonlight. They stuck to the two-track road, the dirt and gravel crunching beneath their boots, their shoulders bumping, their hands brushing.

  Along the way, Quinn slipped his hand into hers, linking their fingers in that trying-to-be-so-subtle-it’s-obvious kind of way, like a boy stretching to put his arm around his girl at the movies.

  Her brain told her to shake him off. Her heart vetoed the thought. Not because she’d missed him, but because she needed something to ground her, to keep her out of her own head, to stop her from going to that dark part of her brain that told her she was a failure, that all her schooling, all her hard work, had been for nothing.

  That dark part that told her if she’d only kept a closer eye on Kurt, had been better trained, more observant more…more…everything, he would still be alive.

  Quinn stopped walking and tugged her around to face him. He was little more than a shadow in front of her. “You’re right.”

  Words every woman loves to hear and wants to record, so she can play them back over and over and over again. She smiled, even though he wouldn’t be able to see it well. “How so?”

  “I was stupid to ask you to marry me that way. I wanted to surprise you. I thought us being together, not having to live that long-distance relationship, would make you happy.”

  “You were shipping out a few days later. How did you expect me to drop everything—my school, my plans for this program, my friends, my family? No notice, no nothing.”

  “I know. I know. I should have discussed it with you, but I saw the married status posting and I was so excited that I’d found a way for us to be together…I didn’t think…”

  “You didn’t think about me?”

  He took her other hand, rubbing his thumbs in the center of her palms. “I didn’t believe that you would say no. And to be fair, you never told me you’d planned on changing majors, on staying here and starting this program.”

  Hearing the pinch in his voice, she glanced down, unable to look him in the eye, even though he was barely visible. So much time had passed, that now hurt and disbelief had replaced her anger. “You vanished. You wouldn’t answer my calls, my texts—”

  He dropped one of her hands and started walking again, tugging her along with him. “I shipped out. I—”

  “To Japan. Not the dark side of the moon. Last I heard, they had Internet and cell service.”

  “I was young and stupid and hurt and…so in love with you.” He squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.

  The immature, cowardly part of Jenna was thankful for the darkness. It made it easier to talk when you couldn’t see the other person. “You saying you want me back?”

  They were close to the corrals, and the wild horses startled. A few snorted: one or two trotted their way. Boomer’s donkey, in the pen with the wild horses, he-hawed.

  Quinn laughed as if Jenna was funny enough to host Saturday Night Live. Heat rushed up her neck, her chin, her cheeks. Her palm went slick in his hand. She hadn’t been entirely joking.

  “No. I’m trying to say I want to get past this.” They stopped at the corrals, and he pulled her closer. “I’m trying to apologize.”

  In the darkness, his sincerity burned bright as she met his eyes. Her heart beat a rapid double tap against the sudden tightness in her chest. Something gave way, and her heart beat faster, more freely than it had in
a very long time, as if a piece of scar tissue, a portion of the tight web of hurt and anger and regret and guilt that had locked down her heart these past few years, had snapped. “I-I’m sorry, too.”

  Whether she walked into his arms or he pulled her in, she didn’t know. But she was there, her cheek against his chest, her head tucked under his chin, her nose in the crook of his neck, where she caught the whiff of Kurt’s cologne and that high, soaring scent of aviation fuel that was so much a part of him.

  He kissed the side of her head and let her go. “I have a proposal for you.”

  “I hope this one doesn’t come with a ring.”

  “No ring.” He chuckled like she’d hoped he would. “I would like to propose that from now on, we say what we want, say what we mean, and say what we’re thinking, because not doing that didn’t help us in the past.”

  With her hand outstretched to shake his, she said, “I do.”

  He stuck out his hand, missed hers, found it. White flashed where his mouth should be. “I do, too.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The earth thundered beneath Quinn’s feet as if Godzilla were after them. But it wasn’t Godzilla who trotted their way. It was a black horse. A recently gelded stallion, he assumed, by the way he was acting with all the snorting, head tossing, and tail flagging.

  The moon glinted off his glossy coat, and Quinn caught snippets of a raised tail, a magnificent head held high. In a fantasy world, the horse would be breathing fire.

  Quinn held his hand out through the rail as the horse got closer.

  “Careful,” Jenna said. “He’s liable to take a finger or two or four.”

  “You wouldn’t do that, now, would you?” he said to the horse.

  The horse stopped out of reach and trumpeted a dragon-sized lungful of air through his nose, blasting him with moist heat and hay breath. The horse stretched out his neck, pawed the ground, sniffed near Quinn’s hand, and stepped back.