Thief's Mark

by Carla Neggers

  She picked out the largest trees, a mix of evergreens and hardwoods, their leaves shed for the season, between her boulder and the ridgeline. The hillside was strewn with glacial boulders. It was New Hampshire. The Granite State.

  Inhaling, visualizing her exact route, she crouched down racer-style, and, on an exhale, bolted up the hill. She ducked behind a hemlock straight up from her boulder, then ran diagonally to a maple, zigzagged to another hemlock, then hurled herself over the ridge crest. She scrambled downhill through a patch of switchlike bare saplings as three more quick shots boomed in the ravine on the other side of the ridge.

  A whir, a cracking sound over her head.

  Jesus!

  They were shooting at her.

  A crouched figure jumped out from behind a gnarled pine tree to her left, catching her around the middle with a thick arm, covering her mouth with a bare hand, then lunging with her back behind the tree.

  “Carine—babe, it’s me. Tyler North. Don’t scream.”

  He removed his hand, settling in next to her on the ground, and she jerked herself away, although not entirely out of his grasp. “Was that you shooting at me? You jackass.”

  “Shh. It wasn’t me.”

  She blinked, as if he might not be real, but she was sprawled against him, his body warm, solid. Tyler... Tyler North. He was at his most intense and focused. Combat ready, she thought, feeling a fresh jolt of fear. He was a PJ, an air force pararescueman. PJs were search-and-rescue specialists, the ones who went after pilots downed behind enemy lines. Carine had known Ty since they were tots. She’d heard he was home in Cold Ridge on leave—maybe the shooters were firing at him.

  She tried to push back her fear and confusion. She’d been taking pictures, minding her own business. Then someone started shooting at her. Now she was here, behind a tree with Ty North. “Where—where did you come from?”

  “I’m hiking with a couple of buddies. We saw your car and thought we’d join you for lunch. Figured you’d have better food.” He frowned at her, peeling hair off her forehead to reveal her cut, and she remembered his search-and-rescue skills included medical training above the level of a paramedic. “Piece of flying rock hit you?”

  “I think so. Ty, I don’t know if they were aiming at you—”

  “Let’s not worry about that right now. The cut doesn’t look too bad. Want to get out of here?”

  She nodded, thinking she had to look like a maniac. Bloodied, twigs in her hair. Pant legs soaked and muddy. She was cold, but a long way from hypothermia.

  Ty eased her day pack off and slung it over his shoulder. “We’re going to zigzag down the hill, just like you came up. That was good work. Hank Callahan and Manny Carrera are out here, so don’t panic if you see them.”

  Hank Callahan was a retired air force pilot, and Manny Carrera was another pararescueman, a master sergeant like North. Carine knew them from their previous visits to Cold Ridge. “Okay.”

  “All right. You got everything? If you’re woozy, I can carry you—”

  “I’ll keep up.”

  North grinned at her suddenly. “You’ve got the prettiest eyes. Why haven’t we ever dated?”

  “What?”

  As much as his question surprised her, he’d managed to penetrate the fear that seemed to saturate her, and when he took her hand, she ran with him without hesitation, using trees and boulders as cover, zigzagging down the hill, up another small, rounded hill. They ducked behind a stone wall above the leaf-covered stream she’d photographed earlier. Carine was breathing hard, her head pounding from fear and pain, the cut on her forehead bothering her now. They were getting closer to the main road. Her car. A place where she could call the police. She had a cell phone in her pack, but there was no service out here.

  Leaves crunched nearby, and Hank Callahan joined them, exchanging a quick smile with Carine. He was square-jawed and blue-eyed, distinguished-looking, his dark hair streaked with gray. He had none of the compact, pitbull scrappiness of tawny-haired Tyler North.

  “Christ, Ty,” Hank said in a low voice, “she’s hurt—”

  “She’s fine.”

  “I’m scared shitless! Those bastards were shooting at me!” Carine didn’t raise her voice, but she wasn’t calm. “Yahoos. Hunters—”

  Hank shook his head, and Ty said, “Not hunters. A hunter doesn’t take a three-shot burst into a boulder, even if he’s using a semiautomatic rifle. These assholes knew you were there, Carine.”

  “Me? But I didn’t do anything—”

  “Did you see anyone?” Hank asked. “Any idea how many are out there?”

  “No, no idea.” Her teeth were chattering, but she blamed the cold, not what Ty had said. “There’s an old hunting shack not far from where the bullets started flying. It looked abandoned to me. I took pictures of it. Maybe somebody didn’t like that.”

  “I thought you took pictures of birds,” North said with a wry smile.

  “I’m just most known for birds.” As a child, she’d believed she could see her parents as angels, soaring above Cold Ridge with a lone hawk or eagle. Ty used to tease her for it. “I was just trying out my digital camera.”

  But she was breathing rapidly—too rapidly—and Ty put his hand over her mouth briefly. “Stop. Hold your breath a second before you hyperventilate.”

  Already feeling a little light-headed, she did as he suggested. She noticed the green color of his eyes. That wasn’t a good sign. She’d never noticed anything about him before. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen him last. Fourth of July fireworks? They were neighbors, but seldom saw each other. His mother had moved to the valley just before Ty was born and bought the 1817 brick house that Abraham Winter, the first of the Cold Ridge Winters, had built as a tavern. She’d called herself Saskia, but no one believed that was her real name. If she had a husband, she’d never said. She was a weaver and a painter, but not the most attentive of mothers. Ty had pretty much grown up on his own. Even as a little boy, he’d wander up on the ridge trail for hours before his mother would even realize he was gone. She died four years ago, leaving him the house and fifty acres of woods and meadow. Everyone expected him to sell it, but he didn’t, although, given the demands of his military career, he wasn’t around much.

  Hank Callahan shifted. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to put some serious mileage between me and the guys with guns.”

  Carine steadied her breathing. “What about your other friend Manny—”

  “Don’t worry about Carrera,” Ty said. “He can take care of himself. What’s the best route out of here?”

  “We could follow the stone wall. There’s an old logging road not far from the shack—”

  He shook his head. “If the shooters are using the shack, that’s the road they’d take. They’ll have vehicles.”

  She thought a moment. “Then we should follow the stream. It’s not as direct, but it’ll take us to where we parked.”

  “How exposed will we be?”

  “From a shooter’s perspective? I can’t make that judgment. I just know it’s the fastest route out of here.”

  “Fast is good,” Callahan said.

  Ty nodded, then winked at Carine. “Okay, babe, we’ll go your way.”

  She didn’t remember him ever having called her “babe” before today.

  Thirty minutes later, as they came to the gravel parking area, they heard an explosion back in the woods, from the direction of the shack and the shooters. Black smoke rose up over the trees.

  Hank whistled. “I wonder who the hell these guys are.”

  Manny Carrera emerged from behind a half-dead white pine. He couldn’t have been that far behind them, but Carine hadn’t heard a thing. He was another PJ, a dark-haired, dark-eyed bull of a Texan.

  “Good,” Ty said. “That wasn�
�t you blowing up. The shack?”

  “That’s my guess.” Manny spoke calmly, explosions and shots fired in the woods apparently not enough to ruffle him—or North and Callahan. “There are two shooters, at least one back at the shack. I couldn’t get close enough to any of them for a good description.”

  “I have binoculars you could have borrowed,” Carine said.

  He grinned at her. “But they were shooting at you, kiddo.”

  “Not necessarily at me—”

  “Yes. At you. They just didn’t want you dead. Scared, paralyzed, maybe. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have missed, not that many times. They were using scoped, semiautomatic rifles.” His tone was objective, just stating the facts, but his eyes settled on her, his gaze softening slightly. “Sorry. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t target practice gone awry. They didn’t mistake you for a deer.”

  “I get it.” She tried to be as clinical about her near-death experience as the three men were, but she kept seeing herself crouched behind the boulder, hearing the shots, feeling the rock shard hit her head. The bullets had been flying at her, not them. “Maybe they saw me taking pictures, but—” she took a breath “—to me it was just a hunting shack.”

  “That’s enough for now,” Ty said. “We can speculate later. You have a cell phone on you?”

  Carine nodded. “I doubt there’s any coverage out here.”

  She took her day pack from him and dug out her phone, but she was totally spent from dodging bullets, diving behind trees and boulders, charging through the woods with two military types, all after tramping around on her own with her camera. She hit the wrong button and almost threw the phone onto the ground.

  North quietly took it and shook his head. “No service. Hank and Manny, you take my truck. I’ll go with Carine.” He turned to her, eyeing her pragmatically. “Can you drive, or do you want me to?”

  “I can do it.”

  There was no cell coverage—there were no houses—until they came to a small lake on the notch road north of the village of Cold Ridge. Even then, Ty barely got the words out to the dispatcher before service dropped out on him.

  He clicked off the phone and looked over at Carine. “I’m serious,” he said. “Why haven’t we ever dated?”

  She managed a smile. “Because I’ve always hated you.”

  He grinned at her. “No, you haven’t.”

  And she was lost. Then and there.

  * * *

  By the time state and local police arrived on scene, the shack was burned to the ground and the shooters were gone. According to various law enforcement officers, Carine had likely stumbled on to a smuggling operation they’d had their eye on but couldn’t pinpoint. They smuggled drugs, weapons and people into and out of Canada and were, without a doubt, very dangerous.

  Everyone agreed she was lucky indeed she hadn’t been killed.

  Even if the pictures she took of the shack were the reason the shooters came after her, they didn’t tell her anything. She’d printed them out in her tiny log cabin while she and her military trio had waited for the police to get there. They’d been and gone, taking the memory disk with them. She still had the prints. A shack in the woods with a crooked metal chimney. It looked innocent enough to her.

  Ty cleaned and treated the cut on her forehead. She kept avoiding his eye, aware of her reaction to him, aware that, somehow, everything had changed between them. She’d known him forever. He’d always been a thorn in her side. He’d pushed her out of trees. He’d cut the rope on her tire swing. Now, he was making her tingle. It had to be adrenaline—a post-traumatic reaction of some sort, she decided.

  Hank and Manny built a fire in her woodstove. Hank, she learned, was a newly announced, dark horse candidate to become the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He was a former air force rescue helicopter pilot, a retired major who’d received national attention on his last mission a year ago to recover fishermen whose boat had capsized.

  As unflappable as he’d been in the woods, Hank Callahan was rendered virtually speechless when Antonia Winter walked into her sister’s cabin. It made Carine smile. Her sister was a trauma physician in Boston, but she’d been drawn to Cold Ridge for the thirtieth anniversary of the deaths of their parents. She was a couple of inches shorter than Carine, her auburn hair a tone lighter, but Gus said both his nieces had their mother’s blue eyes.

  Antonia inspected Ty’s medical handiwork, pronouncing it satisfactory. Ty just rolled his eyes. She was focused, hardworking and brilliant, but if she noticed Hank’s reaction to her, she gave no indication of it.

  Gus arrived a few minutes later and shooed out all the air force guys, glowering when North winked at Carine and promised he’d see her later. Gus let Antonia stay.

  Their uncle was fifty, his dark hair mostly gray now, but he was as rangy and fit as ever. In addition to outfitting and leading hiking trips into the White Mountains, he conducted workshops in mountaineering, winter camping and mountain rescue. His goal, Carine knew, was to reduce the chances that anyone would ever again die the way his brother and sister-in-law had. But they did. People died in the mountains almost every year.

  He brought in more wood for the woodstove and insisted Carine sit in front of the fire and tell him and her sister everything.

  She did, except for the part about Ty saying she had pretty eyes.

  Gus wanted her to head back to town with him, but Antonia offered to stay with Carine in her small cabin. Their brother, a U.S. marshal in New York, called and agreed with the general assessment that the shooters hadn’t “missed” her. If they’d wanted her dead, she’d be dead. “Lay low for a few days, will you?”

  Out of Antonia’s earshot, Carine asked Nate what he’d think if she dated Tyler North.

  “Has he asked you out?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  The next day, Ty and his friends ended up rescuing a Massachusetts couple who got trapped on Cold Ridge. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had recently bought a house off the notch road and set out on their first hike on the ridge, for what they’d intended to be a simple afternoon excursion. Instead, they encountered higher winds, colder temperatures and rougher terrain than they’d anticipated. Ty, Hank and Manny, prepared for the conditions, helped transport them below the treeline, where they were met by a local volunteer rescue team.

  Jodie Rancourt had sprained her ankle, and both she and her husband were in the early stages of hypothermia, in danger of spending the night on the ridge. Given their lack of experience and the harsh conditions, they could easily have died if the three air force guys hadn’t come along when they had.

  An eventful weekend in the White Mountains.

  After Manny went back to his air force base and Hank to his senate campaign, Ty and Carine were alone on their quiet road in the shadows of Cold Ridge.

  Gus sensed what was happening and stopped by to tell Carine she’d be out of her damn mind to get involved with Tyler North.

  She didn’t listen.

  Her uncle’s warning was too late. Way too late. She was in love.

  She and Ty set their wedding date for Valentine’s Day.

  A week before she was to walk down the aisle, he showed up at her cabin and called it off.

  He couldn’t go through with it.

  Enter Tyler North into her life.

  Exit Tyler North.

  As quick as that.

  Copyright © 2003 by Carla Neggers

  ISBN-13: 9781460398807

  Thief’s Mark

  Copyright © 2017 by Carla Neggers

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