Bear Claw Bodyguard (4 page)

“Yeah. The white stuff starts about fifty feet from here and stretches all the way to the river, which is a few miles away. We can walk it or drive it, your call.”

She didn’t make the mistake of thinking the “your call” would extend one iota beyond when it suited him, but had to give him credit for trying. “It’ll take me a couple of hours to take preliminary samples and measurements, so parking here and hiking works for me. Then tomorrow I’d like to start from the river and spiral in from there.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

It didn’t take her long to select the gear she wanted to carry with her and load it into her knapsack, then jettison a few of the less crucial pieces so she wouldn’t kill herself trying to carry it. Jack stood nearby the whole time, keeping watch. With the shotgun slung across his back and a 9 mm in a hip holster, and his eyes scanning the trees with practiced intensity, he didn’t look like any cop she’d dealt with before. There was no badge or polyester, no subtle twitch that said he was more comfortable with civilization than out in the backcountry. Instead, there was the deep stillness she associated with hunters and spiritualists, though he didn’t strike her as either of those things, or at least not entirely. He was…different, she decided. Unexpected.

And she really needed to stop trying to figure out her chaperone and do her darned job. “Ready?” she said too brightly.

He gave her a look that said they weren’t headed off to a picnic and she didn’t need to sound so happy about it, but aloud, he said only, “You take point and I’ll watch
our backs. You see anything suspicious, yell out, okay? I don’t care how small or silly it might seem—let me make that call.”

Sobering, she nodded. “Got it.” Even though given how thoroughly he was scanning their surroundings, she had a feeling he would pick up on anything suspicious way before she even had a clue. She wasn’t sure why that made her nerves worse rather than better, but she was definitely on edge as they headed off along the continuation of the tire-beaten track. She was hyperaware of his walking slightly behind and off to the side of her like a big, bristling guard dog at heel. Only he was so much more than that…which made him far too distracting.

Then she saw the first thready tendrils hanging from a strangely gnarled branch, and her attention sharpened between one heartbeat and the next. She paused on the track and said softly, “Oh. Hello there.” And in that instant, she felt like herself for the first time since she’d stepped through the final airport security checkpoint and into Jack Williams’s world.

She was aware of his watching her and keeping close as she moved off the track and circled from one infected tree to the next, following where the tendrils grew thicker and thicker, along a wandering line that angled away from the roadway. She dragged her fingertips along the trunks but didn’t touch the tendrils yet. Instead, she cataloged her impressions of the desert-dry backcountry, where the sun beat down even at its fading angle and the dust had a faint tang she couldn’t quite place.
What are you?
she thought, looking up at the white strands and seeing the way the branches curled inward where they attached, becoming bent, until the most infected of the trees came to look like
ancient gnomes, stooped and gnarled, with wispy white hair that trailed nearly to the ground.

“Anything I can help with?” Jack asked.

She looked back at him, startled, both because for a moment she’d almost forgotten he was there and because he actually seemed to mean it. “Actually, there is. Give me the local-level dirt on this place.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How’d you figure me for a local?”

“You mentioned your father and uncle being detectives here, too. I made the leap.”

That earned her a considering look before he nodded and said, “Good leap. Yep, umpteenth-generation local here. My great-something-grandparents helped found the city, and there have been Williamses policing Bear Claw pretty much ever since.”

“Which makes you the perfect person to fill me in on the Forgotten,” she said, turning her attention back to the trees and telling herself there was no reason for her to feel a pang at the confirmation that his roots went deep.

“What do you already know?”

“Pretend I just walked in here with no advance info. You never know what’s going to spark a connection.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I know how that goes. Okay, the Forgotten… Well, it’s a federal buffer zone beyond the state park, too far away from civilization to interest regular campers and not challenging enough to interest the hard-core mountaineers. Doesn’t have anything really in the way of natural resources or any real reason for anybody to pay attention to it, although it recently changed hands, going from federal to the city, and then almost to a public sale.”

“I saw that in the file,” she said, reaching up to sift her fingers through the dry, wispy strands of the parasitic fungus that was gnoming the trees, killing them.
What are you?
she asked inside. Aloud, she said, “What happened with the sale?”

“Mayor Proudfoot was pushing to sell the land to a private investor who, not surprisingly, dropped the negotiations when things broke.”

“I assume you’ve taken a good, hard look at the investor? It would seem to me that buying the property would be to the militia’s benefit.”

He shot her another sidelong look. “Thought you were a plant…whatever it was.”

“I’ve got a couple of cops in my family. You learn the thought process.” Among other things.

“Well, it’s not a bad theory, but the investor was legit, if an idiot. He had some geologist swearing to him that there’s gold in the area, and thought he was going to put one over on the government by buying the Forgotten and striking it rich.”

“I didn’t think there was gold around here,” she commented as they moved into a clearer area, where infected trees were more sparsely distributed among clusters of huge boulders. These trees were more severely affected than the surrounding clusters, though, which had her antenna quivering. Was there some environmental component at work?

Jack shook his head. “There isn’t any gold. Just some played-out copper mines.”

“Right.” She had seen that from the photos, just as she had learned about the land deal from the dossier. She needed something else, something more. So, as she went
into her pack for the first of the sampling kits, she said, “What about rumors, old campfire stories, that sort of thing?”

“You want to use old legends to figure out a tree disease?”

“Like I said, you never know what’s going to make a connection.” And, yeah, maybe she liked the sound of his voice when he wasn’t being condescending, and she liked being back on her professional footing where things made sense and she didn’t feel nearly so off balance, even with him only a few feet away.

“Local legends, huh? Well, depending on which story you believe, the Forgotten was either considered cursed by the native tribes in the area, or the story of the curse was whipped up later to scare people away from what was actually a hideout for the toughest of the Wild West outlaws in the decades after the Civil War.”

She made a “bring it on” finger wiggle with her free hand as she tweezed fibers into a series of sterile sampling units, sealing them shut and tucking them away.

“Okay, here’s how the story goes. There was once a young brave named Bear Tooth, who was smaller and weaker than his friends, and always came in last when they raced. But then one day—”

Sudden gunfire split the air, cutting him off. They were under attack!

Jack reacted instantly, tackling Tori and hurling them both into the lee of the nearest boulder. His arms went around her and he muffled her scream in his chest, protecting her from the impact as they collapsed together against the stone.

Moments earlier, the fallen slab had seemed huge. Now it felt small and thin as shots rang off the far side and he anticipated the burn of a bullet crease, or worse. There was just the one shooter, but his weapon was high-powered; he was shooting from the concealment of a trio of larger rocks on higher ground; and he wasn’t missing by much.

Body going into automatic mode, Jack shouldered his shotgun and snapped off two return shots that blasted off the rocks and got the guy’s head down even as his mind revved with the sickening realization that the damned Shadow Militia hadn’t ghosted after all…and he had led his protectee straight into an ambush.

Worse, if the guy moved and Jack didn’t notice, the only thing between her and a bullet was his body. He had her crowded up against the rock. Their legs were tangled, his chest was pressed to her back and he could feel the pound of her heart and the heave of her ribs as she gasped for air.

“Don’t panic,” he said, bracketing the words with two
more shots and a reload. “I’ve got you.” His hand was itching to reach for his phone, but he didn’t make the grab because they were out of cell range and far away from backup. Which meant he needed her to stay calm and help him out. “Keep breathing. In and out. You got it?”

She whipped her head around and stared wildly up at him, her eyes huge and dark in her face. But he could see her struggling against the fear, see the growing determination as she nodded. “I got—”

Crack—crack—crack!
The trio of shots hammered into the stone, breaking off a piece and sending something burning across Jack’s upper arm. “Son of a—” he hissed.

Tori’s face went stricken and she choked off a scream as she grabbed him and tried to drag him away from the point of impact. “You’re hurt!”

“Barely.” It was little more than a scratch really, and there would be far worse in store if he didn’t do something drastic, because they were pinned down in a weaker position. Catching Tori’s hands, he eased her back against the rock. “Stay,” he growled, “and I mean it. Don’t move. Just keep your head down.”

“Where—” She clamped her lips together, pale but resolute as she followed his gaze to the track he would need to take to reach the gunman, and winced. He could get to the rocks the guy was hiding behind—he would have to get there—but it meant crossing nearly a hundred yards of open space. “You’ll be a sitting duck.”

“You’re right.” And the fact that she recognized it argued for some basic proficiency with a gun. He hoped. “Take this.” He yanked his pistol, thumbed off the safety and handed it over. “When I say the word, put four bullets into those rocks up there. Space them out a little and don’t
worry about aiming, it’s just cover fire. Just don’t point it at me, okay?”

She took the weapon, surprised the hell out of him by checking it with practiced ease, though her hands shook, and looked back up at him. “Only four?”

“Save the others in case I’m not the one who comes back for you.” He didn’t have time to sugarcoat it, punctuated by the
crack-crack
of two more shots.

The last of the color drained from her face, but she nodded and tightened her grip on the pistol. “Make sure you are, okay?”

He slid his hand up her arm to the back of her neck and squeezed in a gesture that suddenly felt more intimate than he’d intended it to. “Will do.”

Then, before he could think about all the ways this could go very wrong very fast, he popped his head around the stone, pounded two more shots into the rocks where the bastard was hiding, and then took off, staying low, moving fast, and keeping as much cover between him and the shooter as he could.

A bullet slammed into a nearby tree trunk with a fleshy, splintering noise. He ducked, dodged, snapped off a shot, saw that he was about to hit open ground and shouted, “Tori, now!”

The first shot rang out almost immediately from behind him and kicked up the gravel below the gunman’s position. He didn’t look to see where the second and third hit, just took off running in a jackrabbit zigzag across the open ground. His feet skidded on the loose, sandy gravel, his body burned with the anticipation of the next shot, and the rocky cover up ahead looked farther away with every step he took. But Tori’s third shot came when he was halfway
across, her fourth at the three-quarter’s mark, and then he was there!

Breath rattling in his lungs, he dived behind the bigger boulders that led the way up to where the bastard was hiding, slammed back against the cool stone surface and made himself take the time to reload, even though his heart was slamming with the rhythm of
get him, get him, get him!

Determination gripped him—anger, even. It wasn’t coming just from the drive for justice that was part of the Williams DNA either, wasn’t because of the troubles that had been hammering at Bear Claw and its overworked, understaffed P.D. either. It was bubbling straight up from deep inside him: a raw and atavistic need to make sure nothing happened to Tori.

Growling low in his throat, he charged up the hill, staying low and moving fast, sacrificing some stealth and cover for speed because he was all too aware that the gunman hadn’t gotten off a shot in nearly a minute.

He led with his shotgun, swung around the last outcropping—and stopped dead at the sight of an empty, scuffed-up spot where the shooter had been.

Tori!
He shouted the word in his skull but didn’t let it out as he spun in a quick three-sixty, not sure if the guy had gone after her or taken off.
Please, let him have taken off.

There was no sign of the gunman save for the scuff marks leading down, a single line where the guy had retraced his trail and then branched off—straight onto a wide, rocky ledge that didn’t hold any tracks and was headed straight for Tori.

Pulse thudding in ears that strained for the sound of
gunfire, Jack charged along the ridge of stone, and then crept to within a few boulders of where he’d left Tori, hoping to hell that the silence meant she was hiding, not taken hostage. The last few seconds were the worst, as he got to within a single stone of her position, straining to see if he could detect the sounds of one or two people on the other side. Then, knowing it was better to risk his position than take friendly fire, he called softly, “Tori, it’s Jack. I—”

A blur came at him from the side. He wheeled with his gun up and ready, then jerked it to the side as his brain registered petite curves and huge brown eyes. There wasn’t time to notice much else before she flung herself against him and hung on tight, all warmth and curves and slightness against him.

Even as he told himself to detach and go after the guy, his arms closed around her with equal force.

“You’re okay!” Her words were muffled in his shirt and her body vibrated with tension. “I thought…” As if suddenly realizing what she’d done, she pushed away from him, blushing. “Here, take this.” She shoved the pistol into his free hand, leaving him standing there with a gun in each hand and the imprint of her body on his as she took a couple more steps back, holding her hands out to her sides as if to say “Sorry, don’t know what got into me.”

And even though he knew the moment had come from fear and relief, part of him was dying to close the gap between them and touch her for real.

Bad timing,
he told himself.
And a really, really bad idea.
So instead of reaching for her, he safetied and holstered the pistol, then turned away from her to scan the scene. “Did you see him?”

“He’s gone?”

“Looks like it.” And sure enough, a quick but thorough search of the immediate area said that the gunman had left. Jack wasn’t willing to bet on how far he’d gone, though, or that he wasn’t coming back with reinforcements, so he turned them back the way they had come, feeling the prickle of unseen—maybe imagined, maybe not—eyes on the back of his neck. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Hang on.” Tori dug in. “I need my bag.”

He might have argued—his gut said they had to get out of there fast—but the sudden gleam in her eyes told him that he’d be wasting his time. Besides, it wasn’t much of a detour over to where her knapsack had fallen…and he wasn’t sure how much of his disquiet came from the gunman and how much from feeling that he and Tori were skirting the edge of dangerous territory…especially given that her stay in Bear Claw had a guaranteed expiration date, and he wasn’t wired for “casual.”

Still, though, as he led her back to the SUV using a different track than the one they’d taken before, just in case, he was acutely aware not just of their surroundings and the unusually quiet tension in the air, but also of her. The practiced moves of her body said she was used to moving silently through the woods, but the slight hitch in her breathing said she was terrified and doing her best to hold it together.

On the drive earlier, he had been thinking that she was too slight to handle the Forgotten, skilled or not. Now, his respect notched up—she could handle herself and then some. Still, he wished like hell that he’d talked her out of the trip. She shouldn’t have been in the line of fire, period.

That was fixable, though. He would get her back down
to civilization, load her onto a plane, and get back to work. There was no way Tucker could keep him off this investigation now, not when—

“Oh, hell.” He stopped dead at the sight of the SUV. It was still sitting where he’d parked it, but the hood was popped. “Stay put,” he ordered grimly, “and get ready with that pistol.”

“Shouldn’t we stick together?”

“Not if… Not right now.” If the damn thing was wired to blow, he didn’t want her anywhere near it—and the militia had done worse. Without taking his eyes off their surroundings, he dug into his jacket for a canteen and his pocketknife. “Hold on to these for me, will you? If we get separated, I want you to head back down. Stay off the road but keep it in sight.”

“You…” She trailed off, then caught his hand for a moment, squeezed it. “Don’t do that to me, okay?”

“I’ll do my best.” They shared a look that lasted a beat too long to be for simple luck, and then he pulled away. “Cover me. If something that’s not me moves, shoot it. I’d rather lose a deer than our lives.”

Without another word, he slipped out into the open and headed for the SUV. To his surprise, Tori melted almost immediately into the trees; he couldn’t see her even though he knew exactly where to look. Damn. His respect notched up another bit, and along with it his determination not to let her down.

Steady,
he told himself as he got to within a few feet of the SUV.
Don’t rush it.
But he was also very aware of the first blush of pink on the horizon, heralding the too-quick autumn dusk. He had the equipment for them to camp out,
sure, but not in the face of a potential armed standoff, or worse.

Forcing himself to focus, he scanned the vehicle. He didn’t see a tripwire or evidence of explosives, although with today’s miniaturization, that was no guarantee. But he was losing light and his gut said they had to get moving. So, holding his breath, he opened the hood.

“Son of a—” He bit off the curse, then ran the hood the rest of the way open, staring dismayed at the mess of wires and hoses that had taken the sharp end of a knife. Which made sense, he realized after the fact: assuming that the gunman had stumbled over them, he wouldn’t have been carrying explosives or tripwires. But he’d obviously had a knife with him, and he’d probably be coming back with the other stuff.

Lifting his hand, he beckoned Tori in from the tree line. She looked at him hopefully as she approached, but must have seen something in his eyes, because her face was grim by the time she joined him at the SUV.

“I think I can cobble things back together with the supplies I’ve got on hand,” he said. Hopefully his patches would last long enough to get them back down to the station, or at least into radio range of help. “I need you to keep watch from the trees while I work on this.”

“Not from here?”

He thought about sugar coating it, but went with the bald truth instead. “Matt and Gigi were nearly killed when the militia nailed their Jeep with a rocket-propelled grenade.”

Her eyes whipped back to him. “In other words, we’re sitting ducks.”

“Which is why I need you in the trees.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then snapped it shut once more. Nodded. “Of course.” Then she surprised him by catching his hand and tugging him down, to brush a kiss across his cheek. “Thank you.”

“It’s my job,” he said automatically, as he had done pretty much since his first days as a rook when someone wanted to thank him. This time, though, his skin heated and he found himself wanting to say something more even though he didn’t have a clue what that might be. Then she pulled away and headed for the trees, walking almost silently and keeping her eyes moving.

Damn, she impressed him.

No distractions,
he reminded himself, and rummaged in the SUV for the wire stripper and a fat roll of electrical tape before he turned back to the slashed hoses and wires. This time, though, he focused wholly on the job, trusting that his partner—or, rather, his protectee—had his back. And given the list of rooks he’d been working with over the past couple of years thanks to Mayor Skinflint, it had been a long time since he’d had anyone watching his six for real. It should’ve rubbed wrong that it was a scientist he could practically blow over…but it didn’t.

He’d think about that later, though. Like after they were the hell out of there and she was on a plane headed home.

“This one goes to this one…” He talked himself through the patches, working too quickly to really be methodical, but not letting himself make any mistakes because there wasn’t any time for a do-over. He was barely two-thirds of the way through when he realized he was squinting to see, and had to click on a small flashlight and hold it between his teeth.

All the while, the back of his neck was strung tight
waiting for the sound of a footstep or the crack of a gunshot. He was sweating by the time he taped the last connection into place. Then, sending up a wordless prayer, he leaned across the driver’s seat and tried the key.