Rocky Mountain Lawman (10 page)

But she knew she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she had said she would never abandon a fellow soldier, and she meant it. She couldn’t leave now. She got the feeling Craig didn’t have a whole lot of help, so unless they found a reason to call in the Feds or ATF or something, she would do what she could to help. She was going to have his back.

No escaping that. It was a kind of loyalty that was rooted deeply in her, and it didn’t require a personal relationship to validate it.

So here she was, sick of thinking about Buddy and company, not wanting to think about her attraction to Craig and just clean wiped out of conversation and other thoughts.

Lovely.

She heard Craig draw a breath, as if he were about to say something, when she suddenly realized that the edginess running along her nerve endings no longer solely had to do with him.

“Sh,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “We’re being watched.”

He grew so still he might have been stone. He murmured, “I was just going to say that.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know. Sh. Eyes and ears.”

She imagined that with Craig’s arm around her, they must look like an ordinary couple just enjoying a starry night. On the other hand, they’d been talking about Buddy. Had they been overheard?

The thought stretched her nerves even tighter. A mistake so basic even a newbie should have known better. But who thought one of them would come to the cabin?

On the other hand, it should have occurred to them.

She tried to think back to when the sense of being watched had struck her, and how long before that they had fallen silent. She didn’t know because she hadn’t been paying attention.

Which made her mad, because she knew better than that. As long as there was any possibility that they needed to be cautious, she should never have dropped her guard. Never.

Worse, she had been the one to use exactly the wrong topic as a distraction. They had moved on to other things long before she started to feel watched, but no, she’d had to divert the subject back to Buddy.

She wanted to pound her head on something.

The feeling didn’t last long. After a minute or two, the sense of being watched vanished.

“It could have been a bear or some other animal,” Craig said quietly.

“Maybe. I wish I believed it. Me and my big mouth.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said firmly.

This time she didn’t argue. The night had lost its charm, and she was fairly angry with herself.

“I’ll pick things up,” he said as he pulled her to her feet. Then, tugging her close, he said quietly in her ear, “You keep watch.”

At once she felt better. At least he trusted her that much. Right now she wasn’t feeling all that trustworthy.

He folded her tarp as if he were in no hurry, and picked up the coffee mugs he had brought out for them.

Then he lead the way inside, taking his time about it, and let her open the door since his hands were full. Only when they were inside did she say another word.

“I can’t believe I was stupid enough to talk about that outside.”

“We both talked about it. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“But I brought it up a second time.” Annoyed, she kicked her foot at the floor. “Operational security. I can’t believe I forgot it so fast.”

“You’re out in a national forest, for heaven’s sake,” he said mildly. “Not a war zone. Why should you even be thinking of things like that? I know I’m having trouble with it.”

“I felt like I was being watched this afternoon. I shouldn’t have forgotten that possibility so quickly.”

“Consider where you are. There are lots of things with eyes out here that could watch you.”

“Well, that’s a creepy thought.” Still, it settled her a bit. He was right. She had no reason to think Buddy’s militia was watching them this closely. Why would they? Anyway, they hadn’t been talking all that loudly, and the latter part of the conversation had been more generalized, about militias. “Okay,” she said finally. “But I won’t be so careless again.”

“Fair enough. I won’t either.”

She looked at him from beneath her eyebrows, smiling faintly. “So the woods have eyes, huh? Sounds like a sci-fi film.”

“So don’t go out alone,” he joshed back. “It’s always the girl who goes out alone who meets the monster.”

“Good point. Isolated cabin, nobody around, dark woods, yeah, I wouldn’t last very long. I’d be lucky to be listed in the credits as ‘girl number three.’”

“Which means you lasted longer than one and two.”

The last of the tension seeped out of her and she laughed. “Sorry, I just got mad at myself for being careless.”

“I was careless, too, like I said. So, okay, we’ll follow reasonable OPSEC rules and REDCON procedures, but right now there isn’t a whole lot of reason to be frightened of anything. I think Buddy and Cap would be happy if they thought we’d forgotten all about them, and that’s the impression I intend to create.”

“What about the sheriff?”

“I doubt he wants to stir the pot without some additional proof that something’s going on. Mostly we’re just going to have to keep an eye out and see what develops.”

Then he pulled the zipper up on his jacket. “I’m going out to look around, check on Dusty.”

A thought struck her. “Wouldn’t Dusty have made some kind of ruckus if something was out there?”

He shook his head. “Dusty doesn’t react to much except bears, wolves and snakes.”

“I guess we know what wasn’t out there, then. I’ll come with?”

He shook his head. “We don’t want to appear too alert if someone is out there. Let me just take an ordinary look-see, the kind I often do. I won’t be long.”

Of course he didn’t find anything. She suspected that neither of them had expected him to, not in the dark. Probably an animal. It had to be an animal.

Because surely they were making too much of this Buddy character?

But then she remembered how he had accused her of spying, and warned herself not to go into a state of denial. Spying was something that worried a person only if they had something to conceal. Especially spying from so far away.

She was glad, though, that Craig didn’t decide to sleep outside. He spread his sleeping blanket on the floor near hers and that simple choice meant more than it probably should have.

Oh, to hell with it, she thought. Just let it go. Nothing would come of this, and thus she had nothing to be worried about. In a few weeks, or sooner if she got the urge, she’d move on. The way she’d been moving on for a long time now.

Chapter 7

T
hree days later, Sky was convinced the problem, whatever it had been, was over. Craig patrolled but didn’t find anything untoward. She went out and painted and no one bothered her. She wandered in the woods sometimes, enjoying the way light and shadow danced beneath the trees. She even found an absolutely perfect ravine, narrow and deep, full of large boulders, some of them still sharp in comparison to those worn by the water that raced through it almost but not quite like a waterfall.

The place was so full of power, the power of rocks, water and trees, that she fell in love with it. Ideas for paintings buzzed around in her mind, demanding expression.

This was what she had come all the way out here for, to find the essential creativity, to feel again the energy trying to burst out through her paintbrushes.

Enthralled, she snapped photos even though the light was dim in this tree-sheltered space, filtered and green for the most part although here and there the sun broke through to sparkle almost blindingly on water.

Moss covered a lot of the rocks, but the ones that interested her most were the ones that were bare. Rocks had always appealed to her in some way, the larger the better, and she thought these were gorgeous.

She was definitely bringing her gear back here.

She sat for a while on a flat-top rock with water rushing along one side of it, feeling as if she had fallen into a magical world. Well, these mountains seemed magical everywhere she went, but this place heightened that sense.

It was the kind of place that made her think a faerie could pop out from behind a tree, or even that a tree could slowly stir and talk to her. Fanciful thoughts, but they added to her pleasure. If humans had ever passed by here before, they had left no trace at all. It would have been easy to believe that she was the first person who had ever set foot here.

Part of the charm, she supposed, was that everything in the larger world seemed so far away. As if it were all the stuff of dreams, and the only reality surrounded her right now. Her thirsty soul reached for the beauty and soaked it up until she felt filled with it.

Hypnotized by the rushing water, she lost track of time. She didn’t even notice that the light seemed to be lessening, deepening the secrets of the ravine and woods until that snaking, icy, breath-freezing sense of being watched crept up her spine to the base of her skull.

Damn, she was getting sick of that. It destroyed her mood as surely as if someone had fired a gun, and it made her mad. But mad at what? An owl? A raccoon? A mountain lion?

She muttered a cuss word under her breath, not that anything could have heard it over the crashing, rushing water. Hell, she couldn’t even hear it herself.

But long training and honed instincts wouldn’t let her ignore it. Grabbing her camera, she rose and started climbing out of the gorge. She half hoped she’d meet some idiot human so she would have someone to yell at.

But of course she didn’t. Even if there was a person out here, there were too many places to provide concealment, even unintentional concealment. She’d forgotten her most basic training about keeping open sight lines, and she didn’t care.

She was just mad, and dang it, she
would
come back here tomorrow to paint.

Near the top of the gorge wall, she caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. At once she froze and slowly turned her head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe a leaf had fluttered.

Except that the movement had left her with an impression of something considerably bigger. She resumed climbing again, but her senses were on heightened alert now. Anger had been forgotten in the possibility that whatever was watching her
didn’t
want to be seen. There
were
predators out here, not all of them human, although she feared the human ones the most.

She needed her hands to climb this wall, and right now she didn’t like not having them free. She quickened her pace to the top, and finally reached a point where she could stand without hanging on to rocks. Turning, she looked back.

The trees seemed to have closed in over the gorge, hiding it from sight once more. She could tell it was there only by the muffled sound of the racing, tumbling water. It was as if an invisible door had sealed behind her.

But standing there and looking back at the canopy of trees gave her the opportunity to look around. Nothing moved except gently swaying tree branches as the afternoon cooled and the evening breeze began to pick up.

But she was still in the woods, though they weren’t as thick here, above the life-giving water. She began to trudge back to where she had left her painting supplies, sweeping the ground with her eyes, seeking any obvious disturbance among the carpet of pine needles and leaves. Nothing.

Maybe she was beginning to lose her mind in a whole new way.

Twenty minutes later she emerged onto the sunny hilltop where she usually painted in time to see the sun sink below the western peaks. Still so early, but she loved the way this premature twilight settled in. It would last a long time, but from her artist’s perspective the light had lost its magic, growing flat, diminishing perspective.

She reached her supplies, which she hadn’t fully unpacked yet since she had decided to hunt up a new place to paint, and bent to start picking them up.

She froze again. She knew how she’d laid things out. It was darn near an unbreakable habit to put everything in exactly the same place so she wouldn’t have to hunt for things when she was working.

But something had moved. All of it had moved, she thought, but there was one thing she was absolutely certain had. She would have bet every last dime in her bank account that she hadn’t left her palette on top of her paint box. The first place she always put that was right in front of her portable easel.

She had caught her hair up in a bun for walking through the woods. A few hairs at the nape had escaped, and now the breeze blew them about. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but right now they felt like the caress of icy fingers.

Somebody had touched her things. Probably gone through them. Her reaction to that was immediate and intense, and it wasn’t fear she felt. She reached into her paint box and pulled out a couple of palette knives. They didn’t look dangerous, but in the right hands, used the right way, they could be deadly.

She stuffed them in her pockets, then straightened, looking around the clearing. Then she saw bent grasses leading toward the woods she had just come from, but they weren’t her path. So someone had come here and followed her to the ravine? And it was clear they had tried not to leave an obvious trail, otherwise she would have seen it upon emerging from the woods.

In fact, it could easily have been an animal that crossed the clearing, except for her palette. No animal would have done that.

What were the chances, she wondered, that whoever had followed her into the woods was still there somewhere? And if he was, how smart would it be to let him know what she had realized?

Slim and not at all, she decided, squashing down the anger that made her want to take off after the guy. He’d be long gone. Hell, even if he wasn’t, he could see her coming. Finding someone in those woods wouldn’t be easy.

Nor would it be smart to let him know he’d been found out. Damn it. Frustrated that her only smart move seemed to be to sit here for a while, then pack up and leave, she had to battle an innate need to act. She always wanted to act, and talking herself out of it wasn’t easy.

But it was a lesson she had learned: sometimes no action was the best action.

That first day when Buddy had accused her of spying, the wise course had been to leave. She wasn’t looking for trouble, the guy appeared to be a nut and standing her ground could have become costly at the time. It was one of those times she was grateful for her instinctive slowness to react in non-life-threatening situations, because a reaction at that time would have only caused trouble and solved nothing.

But the situation had shifted, and wisdom no longer advised her to cede ground. Well, maybe wisdom would but sometimes wisdom was wrong. If someone was taking this much interest in her activities, then there was very definitely something going on down there that wasn’t entirely copacetic. Something they didn’t want anybody to know about, even an artist who was just passing through.

That sounded like something a whole lot more serious than simply storing up food against some hypothetical Armageddon.

The suspicion swept her past simply being concerned about Craig needing backup. She had taken an oath long ago when she had donned an army uniform, and to her way of thinking, leaving the army didn’t void that oath. If these guys were up to something bad, she still had a duty to protect her fellow citizens and the Constitution. That, too, had been woven into the fabric of her being.

A lot had become part of her during her years of service, like duty and honor and responsibility. Things like supporting her fellow soldiers no matter what, never shirking a job for any reason... Well, she didn’t need to run through the whole list as she sat there listening for any unnatural sound. The point was, enough had happened to make this her fight, too. Quite enough. And unless those nuts in their compound across the valley turned out to be total innocents, it would remain her fight.

Finally she felt she had sat there long enough to make it seem like she hadn’t noticed anything—assuming she was still being watched, but that feeling had gone away back at the gorge. Regardless, it wouldn’t look hurried or worried now for her to gather her gear and head for the car.

She hoped Craig didn’t stay in the field tonight. She needed to talk to him. She thought about calling him on the radio but decided against it. Radio silence right now might be wise. There was no guarantee the guys across the valley weren’t monitoring the forest service frequencies, and given how paranoid they were beginning to appear, she thought it entirely possible.

She made her way through the woods and back to her car. For a few minutes she considered driving down to the headquarters building, or even going into town, but she really didn’t need anything yet, and for some reason either option felt entirely too much like flight at the moment. She didn’t like running, no matter what specious reason she might be able to come up with.

So she headed back to the cabin, hoping that Craig wouldn’t suddenly decide to take it into his head to sleep under the stars. Considering he had said how much he enjoyed that, she was surprised he’d been joining her at the cabin every night. Summer, and the opportunity to sleep under the stars, wouldn’t last forever.

* * *

Craig didn’t like what he was finding as he poked around the streams in the vicinity of Buddy’s property. Nothing was blocked by so much as a beaver dam, but that wasn’t what got his attention.

No, it was the damn trip wires. They ringed Buddy’s property, but at no time did he have an excuse to get close enough to find out what they were connected to. He was going to have to come over here after dark.

It was late afternoon, and he meandered along the valley stream, still wondering why it was so low. He’d expected to find a fallen boulder here and there, blocking one of the bigger streams, or even several blocking smaller streams, although as a rule the water soon overtopped such hindrances and found its way down.

He began to think somebody had dammed some rivers that he couldn’t get to, and there was only one place around here that could happen: on Buddy’s property.

Water was scarce enough around here. Water rights could be fiercely fought over, sometimes reaching a level a person might almost call a war. But Buddy didn’t have anybody downstream of him to get riled, which left the forest service.

Damned if he could prove the diminished flow in the valley arose from a dam or anything except maybe, just possibly, part of the mountains hadn’t had their usual snowfall. He took a few flow measurements to compare to the past few years, but they wouldn’t prove anything either.

If Buddy had dammed a stream, he had violated his agreement with the service. He was damaging the ecology. Proving it, and figuring out how much right he had to intervene anyway, wasn’t going to be easy.

Troubling him equally was that Buddy had never done such a thing in the past. Assuming he felt he needed to hang on to more water for the late summer and early fall when it would get really dry, what had changed from past years? The addition of Cap and his friends? Some so-called strategic thinking? Was he anticipating imminent apocalypse? If so, why?

Feeling frustrated and more than a little annoyed, Craig turned Dusty and headed back up the valley, intending to go to the cabin to meet Sky. Amazing how fast she had captivated him. He couldn’t imagine not spending the evenings with her, and wondered if he was going to be able to go back to his solitary existence without pining for her company.

She was great company. Quiet, funny when she wanted to be and just plain comfortable to be with. The only time he got edgy around her was when he noticed she was an attractive woman. He’d been working on not noticing—unsuccessfully. It was sort of like telling himself not to think about the elephant in the room.

A quiet chuckle escaped him. He turned Dusty up the hillside, an unmistakable anticipation growing in him as he drew nearer to the cabin.

A movement to the side caught his eye, and he turned to look. He immediately recognized one of his fellow rangers, Don Capehart, riding toward him on Dusty’s twin. He waved and waited for Don to reach him.

Don drew up alongside him, a blond man of about thirty whose skin didn’t take kindly to the high-altitude summer sun. He was looking a little red and probably wouldn’t tan, but he didn’t seem to care. “Big doings?” Don said as they shook hands. “Lucy kind of filled me in.”

“There’s not a whole lot to fill in yet. Let’s keep riding. There’s a definite sense lately that everything we do around here is being watched.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I don’t think it is. Buddy Jackson has trip wires around his entire property, and I can’t get close enough to tell what they’re hooked up to. If it’s not just some kind of alert, getting close could be dangerous anyway.”