by Trish Morey; Day Leclaire; Natalie Anderson; Brenda Jackson; Ann Voss Peterson
He climbed to his feet, Callie rising beside him. The light moved in their direction. In the stillness, he could hear horses’ hooves clatter across rocky terrain, buckles jingling, leather creaking. “Give me the Glock.” He held out his hand.
“It’s my family. They’re looking for me.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
He wasn’t sure he was prepared to trust she was right. “Give it to me anyway.”
Her eyebrows dipped low. She shook her head.
He wasn’t sure if she thought he was going to take his measure of justice from her family or what. After all he’d said, he guessed he couldn’t blame her. “They’ll help?”
“Of course they’ll help. We’ll go to the ranch. We can call the sheriff from there.”
He still wasn’t convinced he trusted her plan, but he probably didn’t need to point that out to Callie again. “Fine.”
The sounds drew closer. The light wound along the creek toward them. It focused upward, pinning them in its beam. Efraim couldn’t see a thing except blinding white light. Hoofbeats spread in a circle around them.
Efraim squinted against the glare. Blue splotches bloomed wherever he looked, like twenty spotlights bearing down. One man held the light. The others were merely dark. Efraim focused on the ground, trying to see the men around him in his peripheral vision. There were three, no, four mounted men. He glanced at Callie.
“Put your hands up where I can see them.” The voice boomed from behind the spotlight, the accent no-nonsense Wyoming rancher.
Efraim raised his hands.
“Now on your knees.”
Efraim shook his head. Had Callie been wrong? Was this her family, or some kind of vigilante mob like the one Stefan said had been protesting in Dumont? “I’m Efraim Aziz. I—”
Rounds slid into rifle chambers. “I said on your knees.”
CALLIE COULDN’T believe it. She glanced around the circle of shadows on horseback. Never in a million years would she imagine her family drawing down on her. She’d told Efraim all these pie-in-the-sky things about justice in America, and here her own family seemed to be taking the law into their own hands. She wanted to hang her head in shame. “Daddy, put the gun down. Brent? Russ? Timmy?” she said, taking a guess at which brothers had accompanied her father.
“Move behind us, Callie.”
“Behind you?” Now she was getting angry. “What are you? Thick? Efraim and I, we’re together.”
One of her brothers sputtered out a cough.
“Callie, you don’t understand what’s going on here,” her father said in a gruff voice. “Move behind your brothers.”
Callie didn’t move from Efraim’s side. “I understand perfectly what’s going on. My family is causing an international incident. That’s what’s going on.”
The light her father was shining on Efraim flicked down to the ground, highlighting Fahad’s still body. “Who is that man?”
“Fahad Bahir,” Efraim said. “My head security man. My cousin.”
“He dead?”
“Shot,” Efraim said. “Murdered.”
Callie’s stomach tightened at the dark tone in his voice. His words about vengeance scuttled through the back of her mind. Between Efraim’s anger and her family’s obvious defensiveness, this situation could get bad fast. She couldn’t let things spin out of control. “He was wounded. We were trying to get him back to the ranch, but he died on the way. We have to call the sheriff.”
“How’d he get shot?”
“A sniper in Rattlesnake Badlands.”
“The question is, why did he get shot? What was he doing?” Brent’s voice.
Already tight, Callie’s stomach dropped. Her oldest brother had done four tours in Afghanistan until a head injury ended his military career. Since then he’d had a hard time of it. Seizures. Paranoia. Trying to get used to returning to life on the ranch, a life he hadn’t much cared for.
Callie felt bad for him. She would feel worse, except that every horror he’d seen and every hardship he lived through, he blamed squarely on any person of Middle Eastern descent who crossed his path. Luckily in Wyoming, there weren’t a lot of people on which to focus his anger over what had happened to him. Until now.
“Mr. Bahir was protecting Sheik Efraim.”
“Protecting him from what?”
Efraim had to hear the sneer in her brother’s voice. Callie just prayed he didn’t lash back.
“There are people who want me and my people dead.” Efraim’s voice was steady.
Callie gave him a grateful look she hoped he could read despite the glaring light.
“I’ll bet there are lots of people who want you and yours dead. And I’ll bet you’ve done a few things to them to cause it.”
Callie swung a much less charitable glare on her brother. “Brent, stop it.”
“One of these people shot Fahad. He followed us from the badlands and attacked me.”
“And what were you doing wandering around those badlands?”
“Searching for a friend.”
“On foot? How did you get out there?”
“My horse ran. He was afraid of gunfire.”
“That horse—” Joe’s voice. At least one of her sane brothers was on this trip. A schoolteacher, husband and new father, Joe helped out on the ranch in the summer and some weekends. Apparently he’d stopped by today after Callie had ridden out.
“We need to get to the ranch, Dad,” Callie repeated, feeling a bit bolstered by Joe’s presence and Efraim’s continued calm. “We need to call the sheriff.”
“How do we know he isn’t going to try to pull something?” Russ’s voice. Second to youngest in age, Russ idolized Brent, even planning to go into military service himself after he got his degree and could enter as an officer. His plans had changed after Brent’s injury.
Unlike his big brother, Russ had always taken to ranch work. Callie’s father called Russ his natural cowboy. Unfortunately his unshakable hero worship of Brent caused him to absorb everything his oldest brother said like a sponge. He tended to follow Brent’s lead in all things, unless Callie could get to him first.
Unfortunately her job had her traveling all over the world, and she hadn’t been able to spend much time on the ranch the last couple of years. She had the feeling that this time she might be too late to influence Russ. “He’s with me, Russ.”
“That better not mean what I think it means,” Brent grumbled.
Callie’s cheeks heated as the sensations of her kiss with Efraim flitted through the back of her mind.
“Callie is working with me through her office.”
Efraim again. He’d just lost his cousin, one of the closest men in his administration, not to mention his friend going missing, and yet he was steadier and calmer than the men in her family. Men who before this, she would have sworn were steady and calm.
“Her office, yeah. Foreign Affairs,” Russ drawled out, putting emphasis on the word affairs.
“Grow up, Russell,” she snapped. For a boy almost out of college, he was more immature than their high school-aged youngest brother.
“What do you mean, grow up? I’m not the one messing around with a damn Arab. Hell, he’s probably a terrorist.”
She blew a frustrated stream of air through tight lips and focused on her father. She wished she could peer past the light and see his eyes. Better yet, she wished her father would stop shining the damn thing on Efraim like he was a subject in some kind of interrogation. “Efraim is one of the good guys. The leader of a country.”
“A country that is an enemy of the United States?”
Brent again. It seemed like she’d spent most of her life smoothing things over between her big brother and the rest of the world. Callie wanted to belt him. “Efraim is not an enemy. He’s not a terrorist. Get it? He’s the leader of a country named Nadar, and he’s here to negotiate a contract brokered by the United States.” Her voice shook with the effort to keep it
even when she really wanted to scream.
They answered her with silence. The spotlight still glared in Efraim’s eyes.
“Please, Daddy. Why would I tell you something that’s not true?”
Her father didn’t answer, but Russ did. “Because you’re hot for him. Don’t lie, sis. You’re pretty obvious.”
She closed her eyes. Of course, Russ was closer than she wanted to admit. At least she should be grateful the spotlight’s beam prevented Efraim from seeing her blush.
“Admit it,” Russ continued, clearly encouraged by hitting on the truth. “You’re covering for him.”
“I don’t need to cover for him. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Her father flashed the light back down to the ground for a second. “Someone killed this man.”
“Fahad is my blood. My head security man. I didn’t kill him.”
“The person who did tried to kill Efraim, too,” Callie added quickly. “That someone is still out there. We need to get to the ranch. We need to make sure Efraim’s safe.”
“I’m more concerned about you.”
Of course he was. He was her dad after all. And maybe she could use that fact to break this stalemate. “Then get me to the ranch. And call the sheriff.”
“You,” he said, bobbing the light to indicate Efraim. “Pick up that body. Throw him on the horse we caught.”
“The horse you caught?” Callie hadn’t noticed the horse behind Russ, but as her brother led it into the spotlight, she recognized Efraim’s gelding.
“You found him.”
“Him?” Russ tilted his head.
“The horse. It’s Efraim’s.” She’d told Efraim the horse would find his way to safety. She was relieved to be proven right.
Efraim lifted Fahad. Joe dismounted and helped Efraim slump the dead man over the saddle. Using his lariat, Joe tied him securely.
“Good to go,” Brent said to his father, and Joe swung back on his horse.
“You,” her father barked, obviously meaning Efraim. “Walk ahead. And remember we got rifles pointed at your back.”
“Daddy—”
He held up a hand, blocking her complaint. “I’m doing the rest of what you asked, Callie. I trust you, honey, but that doesn’t mean I trust this boy.”
Efraim glanced back at her. “It’s all right.”
It wasn’t all right. Her family was behaving horribly. She’d told him they would help, and technically, she supposed, they were. But she didn’t know if Efraim would see it that way. She felt she needed to apologize.
She just hoped that after all this, he’d give her the chance.
Her father nodded, as if it was settled, and motioned to Brent and Joe. “The two of you keep looking. Russ and I will see Callie and the sheik here back to the ranch.”
“Looking?” A frisson of fear fanned over Callie’s skin. The thought of her brothers out on the dark BLM searching for a murderer scared the breath out of her. “Don’t be ridiculous. We need to call the sheriff. He can look for the man who shot Fahad. It’s his job. Not yours.”
“We’re not looking for some terrorist killer,” Brent said. “We’re looking for Timmy’s ATV.”
“Timmy’s ATV?” Callie had been so wrapped up in defending Efraim, she hadn’t thought there might be a reason her fourth brother, the youngest in the family at only seventeen, wasn’t riding with them. “Why? What happened? Where’s Timmy?”
“Timmy’s home. He crashed his ATV.”
“Is he okay?” The thought of her baby brother hurt…She wanted to race Sasha home as fast as she could.
“He’s banged up. A little worse for wear,” Joe said. “But you know Timmy. He’ll be okay.”
“What happened to his ATV?”
“He flipped the damn thing.” Her dad lowered the light enough for her to see him shaking his head. Then he brought the beam back to Efraim’s face. “Wasn’t Tim’s fault, though. He said someone shot out a tire.”
Chapter Five
If Efraim had thought Callie’s family interrogating him like he was some kind of criminal was humiliating, this was worse. He marched in front of the group of horsemen, guns pointed at his back as if he was a prisoner.
He supposed he was.
At least he could see where he was walking. Spotlight shining on his back instead of his face, the land in front of him was lit nearly as bright as day, save for his long shadow stretching across sage and rock and the ruts of a dirt utility road.
The long trudge gave him some time to think. His mind was still reeling from Fahad’s death. If only he had listened and not gone out on his own searching for signs of Amir. Fahad’s death was his fault. Pure and simple. And it was up to him to make sure the man who killed his cousin paid the price.
And then there was Callie. Before today, he’d been powerfully attracted to her. Kissing her had brought a flood of emotion for which he wasn’t prepared. The feelings she’d awakened swirled and mixed with his guilt and grief and anger until he couldn’t sort one from the other. He needed to get some distance from her, from all of this. Sort things out. He needed to do what was right for his country, for Fahad’s memory, for himself. Most of all, he had to get back to the resort, regroup and figure out what to do next.
The McGuire ranch seemed to encompass more square miles than Nadar’s capital city. Efraim didn’t know how many head of cattle the McGuires ran, but judging from the herds he saw, it was an impressive number. Wire fence glistened in the spotlight’s glare, stretching for what looked like forever. Finally they could see the lighted ranch yard. The hulking shape of a barn came into view followed by the outline of a white clapboard house the size of a small hotel. They followed the dirt tracks. Lights shone down from two utility poles and illuminated the yard.
Callie’s father switched off his spotlight. He circled Efraim on a tall, chestnut gelding and stopped in front of him. “Russ?”
Callie’s brother gathered all the horses’ reins in one hand and braced his rifle on the fork of his saddle, covering Efraim. “Got him.”
Callie’s father dismounted and took over the vigil.
“Dad, this is ridiculous,” Callie said, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Sheik Efraim is a foreign dignitary. He did not shoot out the tires on Timmy’s ATV.”
“Callie, hitch Sasha to the post.”
Callie didn’t move. “He was also with me.”
“Really? How long was he with you? Every moment?”
Callie didn’t answer.
“Just as I thought.”
“Dad, a man has been murdered.”
“And we’re lucky your brother wasn’t murdered, too.”
“We need to call the sheriff,” she prodded. “And Sheik Efraim’s people at the Wind River Ranch.”
“We will.” Her father’s tone softened, giving in. He offered his daughter a nod. “But we’ll do it in the house…where the phone is, all right?”
Callie glanced at Efraim and pressed her lips together in a grim smile. “The sheriff, he’ll find Fahad’s murderer. I promise.”
How she could promise something over which she had no control, he couldn’t understand, but he returned her press of the lips just the same.
“Russ,” Callie’s father said, turning to the remaining brother. “Put up the horses.”
Russ put his own rifle away and gathered the reins from his father, a horse on either side of his own. “What do you want me to do with the dead guy?”
A wave of emotion swept over Efraim. He closed his eyes against it.
He felt closer to Fahad than to his own brother or to his sisters whom he barely knew. Losing Fahad was more than losing his security man; it was like losing a leg, a part of him. And he had no close family, no strong beliefs, nothing to use as a crutch.
“Tie the horse in a stall,” Callie’s father directed. “Just leave him on the saddle. We’ll let the sheriff deal with him.”
Deal with him. Hours tied to a horse. Then being shunted off
on a gurney. Poking and prodding. An autopsy.
Efraim tried to block thoughts of the indignities to Fahad’s remains that would doubtlessly follow. There was little he could do to restore his cousin’s dignity until he learned who his murder was. Only then could he right a small portion of the wrong.
The McGuire home was surprisingly warm and inviting inside. He would never guess that it was the home of men. In one of the few times Callie and he had talked, she’d mentioned her mother’s death. No doubt she had been quite a woman, just like her only daughter. Even though she was now gone, Efraim could see her mark on everything from the flower beds outside to the cheery yellow wall color inside. While Callie made phone calls, he sat at a large kitchen table made of sturdy oak, drank glass after glass of cold water and waited for the sheriff to arrive.
The sheriff was nothing like what he expected. During his wait, he’d gotten a look at Callie’s father and brother Russ in the bright kitchen light. They looked very much like Callie. Freckled, blond, maybe a hint of red in Russ’s hair, average height, average build, what he thought of as the average American. He’d expected the same from the sheriff.
He’d been wrong.
With the black hair, black eyes and dark skin, Jake Wolf resembled no one in the McGuire house as much as Efraim himself. Obviously he wasn’t of Middle Eastern descent, but Native American. However, Efraim had to admit the resemblance in coloring made him feel a little more at ease. A little less the enemy.
Efraim stood, his chair skidding backward, screeching on the floor. “Sheriff, I’m glad you’re here.”
Callie’s father invited the sheriff into the kitchen with a wave of his arm. “Take a load off, Jake. Want some coffee?”
The sheriff held up a hand. “Thanks anyway, Clay. I’m good.”
Efraim suppressed a groan. So much for fantasizing that he had an ally. Apparently the sheriff and Callie’s father were on a first name basis. He couldn’t fool himself into thinking his version of events would be considered as seriously as Clay McGuire’s.
“Suit yourself. Like I told you on the phone, Mr. Aziz here knows the dead man.”
“He’s my head of security, my countryman and my cousin. His name is Fahad Bahir.”
