The Return of Cord Navarro

Chapter 11

Feeling more peaceful than she had since the ordeal had begun, Shannon watched the early morning sun touch the sky and turn it from black to a soft gold. It was going to be warm, summer’s promise seeping through deeply shaded valleys and touching them with life-heating their son’s body.

“He’s all right,” she said, her voice still filled with sleep. “I’d know it if he wasn’t.”

She fully expected Cord to tell her she couldn’t possibly be sure about what she’d just said. If he did, she wouldn’t argue with him because it was nothing except her mother’s heart speaking. Instead, he nodded, stretched, and began rolling up his sleeping bag. He’d worn only briefs to sleep in. Although they’d settled down some ten feet from each other, she plainly saw the dark dusting of hair that covered his thighs and calves. Once she’d run her fingers, toes, lips over his legs, lost in wonder at the belief that he loved her.

Now all she could do was look and remember.

When he stepped into his jeans and sat to put on his boots, she tried to eat a few bites of dried apple, but her stomach seemed to have lost all interest in food. Maybe she was becoming more and more like Cord. As long as she searched for their son, she wouldn’t be aware of her body.

Only, that wasn’t it. At least, not all of it. She didn’t even have to be near Cord for her body to pick up signals from him.

He seemed unnaturally quiet this morning. Maybe it was only her need to be diverted from the disjointed and disturbing thoughts flitting through her that made her ache for conversation, but she didn’t think so. Giving up on her breakfast, she reached for her own jeans. She wondered if his attention might be drawn to her legs, but he’d stopped what he was doing and was sitting with his head cocked to one side, his fingers clamped tightly over his knees. She felt as if she could reach out and touch the tension in him, and struggled to hear anything except the stiff breeze, the way the birds welcomed the morning. Cord had exceptional hearing; she’d been impressed by it from the beginning. She longed to ask if he might be able to hear Matt, but if that had been the case, he surely would have told her.

When the radio squawked to life, she momentarily resented the intrusion, then watched intently as Cord picked it up. It was Kevin’s dad reporting that he’d been in contact with the sheriff during the night and that Dale, who was off doing something Hallem didn’t explain, wanted Cord to know that he would be getting in touch with him as soon as possible.

“What is that about?” she asked after Hallem and Cord had. spoken for several minutes. “What’s Dale up to? Are you thinking about bringing in more help? I thought-”

Cord barely glanced at her, making her wonder if he was really aware of her presence. “Even if they could be of assistance, it’d take them too long to get here. Damn. I wish Dale had been there.”

“Why? Was there something the two of you needed to talk about?” She rolled her bag into a tight bundle and secured it, then stuffed it into her pack.

“What? Nothing important.”

“If it isn’t important, why are you so upset?”

By way of answer, not that it was one, he pushed himself to his feet and stared out at his surroundings. She wanted to concentrate on the conversation and try to force him to tell her everything, but high above the tops of the trees she spotted an eagle silhouetted against the morning sky. For reasons she couldn’t pretend to understand, the eagle distracted her from the need for confrontation. “What do we do now?” she asked. “Where do we go?”

Still taking in his quiet, clean world, he pointed in the direction they’d been heading when it got too dark to travel last night. She waited for him to say something, but he seemed caught within his own thoughts, as far from her as if he’d been in another state. She’d seen that look on him before and felt helpless to transcend it. In the past she’d believed he was deliberately holding himself apart from her. Now she knew it was more complicated than that.

“Are you ready to start?” he asked after nearly a minute of silence.

By way of answer, she walked over to him and gave her pack a final shrug. She supposed she could have asked him for help in getting into it, but then she’d feel compelled to do the same for him and right now touching him wasn’t wise; maybe it never would be. He hadn’t asked whether she was up to another long day of walking and looking, but then he didn’t need to. Surely he knew that as long as there was life in her, she’d search for Matt.

His pace bothered her. She’d picked up enough from watching him in the past few days to know how much work it took to find a faint mark in the dirt. She admired his patience and tenacity, but today there seemed to be a new sense of urgency to what he was doing. As she concentrated on both keeping up with him and not distracting him, she fought off the persistent question of whether he knew something about Matt’s condition he wasn’t willing to tell her. Again and again she teetered on the brink of asking him what he was thinking, demand he leave nothing locked up inside him, but each time she held back. If he gave weight to her worst fears, she might panic.

And she didn’t dare. If she did, she would be no good to him. Or to their son.

Shannon stepped on a loose section of shale. When the rock broke apart and skittered down the slope away from them, Cord stopped long enough to assure himself that she hadn’t injured herself.

From the sun’s position, he knew they’d been traveling, without rest, for nearly four hours. Heat pressed down on him and taunted him to surrender to lethargy, but he fought it just as he fought the distraction of elk sign, floating hawks, the song of insects. With each step they were getting closer to Matt, but that gave him scant comfort. Matt’s prints had begun to smear, proof that he was occasionally dragging his feet. Still, there was a fierce determination to the way his son walked that said overtaking him wouldn’t be easy.

He was proud of Matt, so proud that his heart ached with the need to tell the boy that. Matt hadn’t given up, hadn’t let weariness or hunger or fear, if he was afraid, get the upper hand. Obviously he was determined to prove he didn’t need rescuing; maybe it hadn’t so much as occurred to him that he couldn’t get back home, eventually, without help. But if Matt went without listening to his body’s needs for much longer, he could set himself up for injury or accident.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Just after he woke up this morning and looked across the space that separated him from Shannon, he had once again heard the one sound capable of chilling him. He’d listened again a little later, unsuccessfully this time, which had only drawn Shannon’s attention to him.

The hunters were still out there, still engaged in their deadly sport. And with the way the rifle shot bounced off the peaks, he could only guess at where they were. For all he knew, they could have found their prey-or Matt.

Ignoring the sun that beat down on the back of his neck, he leaned forward, briefly confused. Part of his confusion came, he knew, because he couldn’t dismiss the father in him who wanted nothing more in life than to have his son back again. But it was more complex than that. For the past half hour Matt had been traveling as directly northeast as the terrain would allow. Now, suddenly, he’d changed directions. To make sure he hadn’t misinterpreted the sign, he made a slow circle while Shannon waited off to one side.

“I don’t know what he’s doing,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?”

Her question startled him. He didn’t remember speaking out loud. “The way he was going, I thought he’d made a decision. But he’s lost confidence in himself again.”

“Oh, no. The poor boy.”

“It happens,” he told her without risking the distraction of looking at her. He’d seen her in her undershirt this morning, and although he’d already gone four hours trying to shake off the memory of her long, tanned legs, it hadn’t been enough. “Lost people sometimes convince themselves that they know what they’re doing. Then they see or don’t see something and it throws them off balance.”

“Does he know he’s lost? Can you tell?”

“No, I don’t think he does.”

“How… how do you know?”

“Most lost children stay where they are, especially if they’ve been going as long as he has.”

“In other words, Matt’s trying to convince himself that he knows what he’s doing.”

“Yes.”

“Because…” Even when her voice trailed off, he didn’t look at her. Still, because of the years they’d spent together, he knew what he’d see in her eyes. “Because he’s Cord Navarro’s son and any son of his couldn’t possibly be in this much trouble.”

“I can’t help it, Shannon! Don’t you think I’d change this if I could?”

She didn’t say anything, and although he regretted his outburst, maybe it was better that they’d gotten this out in the open even if it drove yet another wedge between them. Still, as he reassured himself that he’d properly read his son’s tracks, he made a vow not to react to anything else she said. She needed him to find their son, nothing more. He’d done this before, and he could do it again.

“I hate this. absolutely hate this.”

He’d glanced over his shoulder at her before he’d had time to warn himself of the folly of such a move. Her cheeks looked slightly wind-chapped, her shirt wrinkled. He wanted to wrap her in silk and give her a rainbow. “The walking?”

“No. Of course not. If I thought it would help, I’d walk until I came to the end of the world. It’s the damn stuff that keeps going through my head. I know you know what I’m talking about. You’re going through the same thing.”

“Yes. I am,” be said, although his thoughts, compounded by past experiences of failed rescues and his knowledge of who else they shared the mountain with, made it even harder. “There’s only one thing we can do, Shannon. Follow him until we find him.”

“We’ve been looking for days. What the hell good has it done us?”

Shannon never swore. Now she’d done it twice in less than a minute. The words were enough to swing him back around toward her.

Her eyes said it all. They were sunken deeper into their sockets and the flesh there was now shadowed almost as if she’d bruised herself. There were lines at the corners of her mouth he’d never noticed before and her shoulders seemed to sag a little.

Still, determination ruled her.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she apologized. “I’m just giving in to frustration, that’s all. Please don’t stop for me. No matter where you go or how fast, I’ll keep up.”

“This isn’t a race.”

“Yes, it is. A race to save our son. I lost one child, Cord. I can’t do it again.”

She’d spoken the words as if they meant no more to her than a million other words had, but her eyes gave her away. She wasn’t crying. He sensed how fiercely she’d guarded against letting that happen. But for reasons she might not fully understand, everything had boiled over for her and the only thing she could do was fight her way around a mother’s worst fears, a father’s nightmare.

“He’s all right,” he told her.

“You don’t know that. Don’t fill me with false hope.”

“I’m telling you the truth.” At least it was when he walked this way. “It’s in his signs.”

That took the fight out of her; he didn’t know he was capable of hurting her so deeply with a few words. Anger-at her tears, at the wilderness that defied them-had whipped through her and met head-on with fear and defeat.

“Shannon, listen to me, please. The Taos Indians have a saying, a prayer. There’s a lot of wisdom in it. Maybe it’ll help you. I know it does me.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” he said, although he knew she was simply going through the gestures of keeping the conversation going. “They believe that the Mother of us all is earth, the Father is the sun, the Grandfather, the creator who bathed us with his mind and gave life to all things. Our Brother is the beasts and trees, Sister is that with wings.”

She stared, blinked, stared.

“We, the Taos believe, are the children of earth. That’s what Matt is. A, child of the earth.” And so is Summer.

“Of the earth? Safe?”

“Safe,” he told her, believing, at least for the moment.

She held out a trembling hand, and he took it, pulled her to him, embraced both her and her pack. She’d again attempted to braid her hair this morning but hadn’t been able to capture all the strands. Now one teased the corner of his mouth. Barely aware of what he was doing, he gave her his chest to cry into if that’s what she needed, fought the thousand emotions that had built and then splintered inside him. Fought more than that.

“It’s all right to be afraid,” he whispered.

“Is it? Fighting fear so it won’t take over everything is so hard, takes so damn much energy.”

She was right; he knew that better than she. “Pretending it doesn’t exist is even worse.”

He felt more than heard a deep sob tear through her. Clutching her to him, he thought to shield her from the worst of her pain. If only he could think of the words to say, but if he wasn’t careful, his own fear would spill out.

She needed him to be strong, to be there for her when she couldn’t do it on her own.

He clamped down on his anxiety and denied it. Buried it. Hid from it.

“It’s all right,” he whispered while she fought to gain control over her tears. “It’s all right to cry.”

She didn’t argue with him this time. In fact, if he was correctly reading her body’s silent messages, she was grateful he’d given her license to acknowledge what she’d been holding inside her.

Shannon worked with her fear, accepted it with tears that dampened his shirt and again made him long to spirit her away from this place, this journey. This nightmare. Feeling awkward and inadequate, he held on.

Still, a quiet, insistent part of his brain continued to listen, to assess their world.

Her loss of control didn’t last long. After half a dozen shuddering breaths and a raw sound deep in her throat, her body found its strength again.

“What else do the Taos believe?” she asked. “I think I need to hear it all.”

He kissed her forehead, wondering if that simple gesture might convey everything he felt at this moment and whether exposing his vulnerability, his need for her, was dangerous. It didn’t matter because he was past holding himself in. “That everyone-man, beasts, trees, birds, earth, all share the same breath.”

Her chest heaved with the effort of a deep breath. “It sounds so simple, too simple of course, but I want to believe that. Oh, God, how I want to believe.”

“You will. If you listen to what nature has to say.”

“Maybe-will you help me do that?”

Overwhelmed by her need for him, at least at this moment, he nodded.

“I’m sorry I caved in like that,” she whispered. “I-I didn’t know I was going to.”

“It’s all right.”

“That’s what you already said. Cord? I want you to tell me…to tell me I can trust you, that you’ll make it all come out the way we want and need it to. We’ve been through hell once-surely we won’t be asked to survive a child’s loss again.”

He brushed her hair away from her throat, came within a whisper of covering her trembling lips with his own and letting her feel his-everything.

“But you can’t, can you?” she whispered.

“No.”

Despite his hard truth, she held on with fingers that bit into his forearms. “I don’t want to hear you say that. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” More than you could possibly understand.

“No. Yes.” She echoed him while still holding on. “That’s all you’re going to say, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He winced at the word but it was too late.

“It’s all right,” she said, surprising him. “There really aren’t any other words.”

Because he felt the need to be doing something and remembered that the gesture used to calm her at the end of a long day, he slid his fingers around to the back of her neck and began massaging the top of her spine.

She rolled her shoulders backward and sighed. “You’re so good at that. I’d forgotten.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Oh, Cord, where did it all fall apart for us? Was it because of what happened to Summer and the way I isolated myself, the way we both did? Or was there more to it than that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do. More than we’ve talked about, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Darn it, nothing does except getting our son back.”

No, he thought. Maybe nothing did except Matt’s safety. And yet… And yet he wanted affirmation that life would go on and he would hold on if… He couldn’t make himself finish.

As her tears dried, she continued to look at him and he had to tell himself she had no idea what was going on inside him. The strong lines of her mouth softened and he again fought the desire to take her-both of them-to places that once had been so easy to reach. Places that would take him away from the reality of today.

“Why do I keep beating myself up trying to reinvent the past?” she moaned before he’d ended his battle. “The past doesn’t matter-I just want it buried”

Can you? Can either of us?

“I’m trying to remember something,” she said after a silence that had become uncomfortable. “Matt came across it at school and brought it home to me. How does it go? ‘The earth does not belong to man-man belongs to the earth. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life-he is merely a strand in it.’ Yes. That’s it.”

Cord smiled, feeling incredibly close to her again and knowing how fragile it was. “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people,” he continued for her. “Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. Those were Chief Seattle’s words. At least, I’d like to believe they were. He was trying to explain to President Pierce why his people would never understand the concept of selling land. Matt told you about that?”

“Yes.” Her voice trembled slightly. “He said that’s the way you feel. He knows you very well, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does.”

“Better than I do.”

Because he couldn’t let her go, he pressed her close to him and hoped that his body would say what he didn’t have words for. After a long minute of holding, rocking, giving, he caught the softest of sounds escape her lips, a sound far different from the sobs that had claimed her a few minutes ago.

The whisper told him everything, let him believe what he wanted. She’d let him place his arms around her because she was weary of carrying her burden alone. He’d been able to assume enough of that weight that she could now listen to what else was going on inside her. He struggled to find the words to tell her that everything and anything she felt was right, but no matter how he worked them, they seemed inadequate and half formed.

Maybe the truth was that with her pressed against him, no words would come.

Without regret, he gave up the fight and, beyond that, the need to learn whether hunters had found their son. Her mouth had once belonged to him; she’d given it to him freely. He’d lost any claim to her years ago, but for this moment, time had been stripped away and he could bury himself in what her body offered.

She couldn’t close her mouth. He sensed the tiny tremble that signaled her effort. Then she gave up and accepted. Invited.

So long-he’d waited so long for this. He had his arms firmly on her so that her arms were half trapped between their bodies. She pulled them free and wrapped them around his neck in an incredibly graceful gesture that made him hungry for something he hadn’t allowed himself to think about for too long-maybe forever. He felt her fingertips on his sunburned flesh. Somehow they cooled and heated at the same time.

Twisting slightly to the side, he eased her cheek against his shoulder and began stroking her hair. His groin pulsed in need, but the rest of him-heart and head-needed more than sex.

Needed to love this woman.

Shannon. Shannon. Slight, strong, built for climbing mountains and making love and raising children and watching eagles and-and loving me. Making me feel whole, no longer alone.

She repeated her chest-deep whimpering sound. He pulled it into him through his pores. Physical need grew, and he knew the folly of fighting that. He’d been sleeping by himself for a long time and no matter what he demanded of his body through his work, it wasn’t enough to still that primitive need.

If-they could-she would-

He opened his eyes, only dimly comprehending that he’d shut out the world. A desperate need to lay himself open to her surged through him and for a. few beats of his heart separated him from years of work and training. After what they’d gone through and still had to weather, self-preservation didn’t matter. With Shannon he would be vulnerable, more open than-

No.

His heart and body screamed at him to close his eyes again and lose himself in the sensual, equally needful woman who waited for him, but the father part of him, the scared father part had just seen something that turned him cold.

The sun glinting off something in the distance-a rifle barrel?

“Cord?” Shannon clutched at him with insistent fingers. “Cord, what is it?”

“What?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the horizon. Again that deadly dancing shaft.

“What? You-you’re like steel.”

He felt tension radiating throughout his body and knew he couldn’t do anything about it. How could she not be aware of it? What should he say, that he’d just seen something that scared the hell out of him and was going to do the same to her?

Instead he said, “We have to get going. Now.”

“Now? You’re- Without lunch?”

She’d already pulled out of his embrace and was staring up at him, her need-hazed eyes filled with question, doubt, a return to fear, distrust of everything about him. She didn’t care any more about food than he did.

“Go ahead. Eat. I’ve got-”

“You’ve got to what? Damn it, Cord! For once in your life be honest with me! I can’t take any more of this!”

It could be a hiker, a ranger. The human or humans out there weren’t necessarily killers. “Don’t you want to find him?”

Her look, hard and cold and hot all at the same time sliced into him. He already regretted what he’d said, but the words had spewed from him in a knee-jerk attempt to distance himself from her outburst. Although he readied himself for more of het anger, she whirled away and stood with her back to him, fists knotted at her side. “Do it, Cord,” she snapped. “Find him so I can get away from you.”

Although her head pounded, Shannon gave no thought to asking Cord to stop and allow her to rest. Something had happened to him, changed him, just as they were on the brink of-On the brink of what? If only she could think beyond her own emotions, but she should know better than to even try. Cord brought out so much in her, made her crazy.

Maybe, she thought without seeing any humor in it, she was already crazy and had been since the day he walked into her life.

There was incredible danger in thinking back to what had nearly happened between them earlier today, but putting their embrace and what went with it, and the words she’d thrown at him, behind her was impossible. She should know that by now.

They’d come close, so close that it scared her. She’d needed his understanding and compassion and love, needed it desperately. She no more could have kept that from him than she could have once not told him she loved him.

When he’d trusted her with what he carried inside him of the wisdom of the Taos Indians, he’d given her a precious gift she’d just begun to understand. She’d acknowledged his offer in the only way her heart had known, by showing him that she, too, believed in the wisdom of his people.

And then something had happened. He’d heard, or seen, or remembered, and something had ripped him from her and she’d lashed out.

Only something to do with Matt could have done that.

She’d thought his pace relentless earlier but his determination now frightened her so much that she couldn’t remember what she’d said to him, just that those words had been the last they’d spoken to each other. His forward progress was only slightly faster than it had been before because every few feet he had to search and reassess.

During those times when his entire attention was focused on the ground and his hands knotted and his knuckles turned white, she almost begged him to tell her the truth. But every time the words pushed their way to the surface, she held them back.

She didn’t want to know.

Instead she watched Cord and wondered when she’d have the words to ask his forgiveness. Not until he could concentrate on her. He moved so quietly that if she hadn’t been directly behind him, she wouldn’t know he was here. Because he said nothing, he left her free to listen to the voice of the earth around her. Its sound reached her as an ebbing and flowing wave, notes both high and shrill from a scolding chipmunk or deep and low as the wind worked its ageless way through the trees. Her world smelled of hot bark and dirt. They’d recently gone through a burned area and she’d been struck by the earth’s ability to repair and renew itself. She could spend her life here surrounded by the colors of the wilderness-finding herself.

What had Cord said, that the Grandfather is the creator who bathed everyone with his mind and gave life to all things? What incredibly eloquent words.

“He’s still limping”

Cord hadn’t said anything for so long. Instantly she lost her sense of peace. “You’re sure?”

He pointed at something on the littered ground that made little sense to her. Then in a tone so controlled that she could nearly touch the effort of his keeping it so, he explained that Matt was putting more weight on one leg than the other and occasionally dragging that leg.

“It’ll slow him down, won’t it?” she made herself ask.

“Yes.”

Yes. There was that single eloquent word again. “Cord, when do you think we’ll overtake him?”

“Soon.”

Soon meant in a few minutes or tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. He had to give her more to cling to than that. As weakness hit her, she fought to brace herself. “If we called to him-”

“No.”

He’d been talking with his body angled away from her. She grabbed his arm and pulled him around; he let her. “Why not?”

Although the silence that trailed after her question nearly drove her crazy, she refused to push. Finally, “He’s trying to get home on his own. If he hears us, he might try to hide. In fact, I can guarantee it. He could get careless and hurt himself.”

“Oh.”

“One time-” He glanced away and then met her gaze again. “Once early in my career I went after an older woman who’d gotten separated from a group of senior citizens. She was out there for two nights. Everyone was calling, me included. Finally we found her down a ravine with a broken leg. She’d heard us, gotten disoriented, convinced herself she had to hurry or we’d leave. She didn’t see the drop-off.”

“She panicked. Matt wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t he?”

She freed herself from Cord’s gaze long enough to focus on their son’s footprint. Matt was hopelessly lost, now with an injured leg or foot. What would it do to him to hear his parents’ voices echoing off a hundred boulders? She also didn’t dare let herself forget his damnable pride, his determination to complete what he’d set out to accomplish. “So…so, what do we do?”

“Come to him gently.”

He shouldn’t have pushed her the way he had, Cord admonished himself as he watched Shannon sink onto her knees when night stopped them. Without saying a word, he helped her out of her backpack and then knelt in front of her so he could untie her boots. She was watching his hands, maybe seeing something in the way they worked that he should be keeping from her.

All afternoon he’d waited for a rifle shot, and when it hadn’t come, he’d asked himself if he maybe shouldn’t have taken a chance on trying to call out to the hunters, if that’s what they were, and let them know that a little boy was out there. But they were too far away and if they were poaching, they might hide from him. Besides, Shannon would hear-would realize that he’d already heard sounds that might have spelled their son’s death.

“We’re close,” he told her. The words were more for himself than her. “Much closer to him than we were last night.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” He finished pulling off her boots and began massaging her right instep. She continued to watch him through half-closed eyes, her body rocking slightly as if she could barely keep it erect. After the way she’d snapped at him earlier today, he hadn’t known what to expect from her tonight, but she seemed to have put her outburst behind her.

Maybe. And maybe he’d been given a sample of her true feelings toward him. It didn’t matter, not with why they were here and how it might play out. He didn’t dare forget that-as if he could.

Five minutes later he was still kneading, only now he’d pushed her pant leg as high as it would go and had pressed fingers and thumb against her calf. She’d braced herself with her hands behind her. Her eyes were closed and she breathed lightly through slightly parted lips and he managed to quiet the hammering questions about Matt’s safety, the boy’s life even.

He’d surrendered to those lips twice already. He knew how hard resisting now, and later tonight, would be. Earlier, he’d been distracted from making love to the mother of his son first by a flash of light and then by her anger, but it was dark now and they were locked within nature’s dark world.

Only, first he had to make contact with another world.

Without trying to explain why he was leaving her when that was the last thing he wanted to do, he removed the walkie-talkie from his pack. She didn’t open her eyes when he told her he needed to climb to a higher elevation where natural obstructions would be less likely to interfere with transmission. She told him to tell her parents she was going to take a quick nap, and then stretched out on the ground.

Still he didn’t attempt to make contact with her family until he was sure he was out of Shannon’s earshot in case the sheriff was with them. Her father answered. The first words out of his mouth were to ask if they’d found Matt. No, he had to tell his former father-in-law, but tomorrow-

“I hope to God you’re right. If that boy has any idea how hard this is on all of us… What does that matter? It’s got to be much harder on him.”

His throat tight, Cord agreed and then explained what they’d accomplished today. He could only pray they were still talking about a living child. Halfway through the conversation, Shannon’s father told him the sheriff wanted to talk to him.

“It’s not good,” Dale Vollrath said when Cord reached him at his house. “I figured I’d better wait until you contacted me. I take it Shannon still isn’t part of this?”

“No.”

“You ready? Hell, what choice do you have? I’ve finally learned the identity of who owns a plane that’s been at the airport for about a week.”

“Tell me.”

“The guy’s name is Chuck Markham. It probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this joker. He gets around all right, anywhere there’s game.”

“Game?”

“Sorry, Cord. Markham has a record-the proverbial mile-long rap sheet, starting with hunting out of season, as a teenager. Since then he’s pretty much made a career of flaunting the law. He’s been stopped a number of times, even served time twice. Mostly be gets a slap on the wrist and, I’m assuming, goes right back to work the next day.”

“Work?” Cord asked, although he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

“He’s graduated to the big time, at least that’s what he’s done in the past and I have no reason to believe he’s turned over a new leaf and is here simply to commune with nature. Hell, why should he take up a different line of work when this one has been so profitable?”

“He’s poaching, right?”

“Yeah, not that that’s what he tells the IRS. And he has three other men with him, which means-”

“Which means be’s probably acting as their guide.”

“Bingo. Damn. If I had more time, I might be able to learn who’s with him, but at this point it doesn’t particu larly matter.”

No, it didn’t. This wasn’t the first time he’d been involved with hunters who believed that money gave them the right to bring down whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Men like that didn’t have a conscience, at least not the kind that made any kind of sense to him. This morning they’d shot at something-maybe a child, his child.

“I’ve alerted all the rangers in the area,” Dale was saying. “Not that there are that many of them on Copper right now. One thing I can promise you, Markham and his employers won’t get back to their plane without our knowing it.”

That was some consolation, although by the time those men tried to leave the mountains, they might have already accomplished what they’d set out to, namely illegally killed one or more wild animals. And, if they shot without first getting a good look at their so-called prey, they might put a bullet into an innocent boy.

Holding that thought at bay with all the willpower in him, he told Dale about the early morning shot and the glint of sunlight he’d seen this afternoon. His throat still tight, he asked Dale to keep him informed.

“You better believe it. The thing is, these jokers are going to do everything they can to stay out of sight of any rangers or deputies. They might be carrying radios. If they are, they could be listening to us right now and getting the message, but I wouldn’t count on that.”

“I’m not.”

“I’m sorry as hell about this, Cord. Damn it, you’ve already got enough to worry about.”

“It’s all right.”

“Hmm. You haven’t told her yet, have you?”

“No.”

“Look, man, she’s-”

“I can’t!” he blurted. “She’s already going through hell.”

“No more than you are. What happens if-when-she hears a rifle shot or comes face-to-face with those jokers-or with what they’ve already done? She’s going to take one look at you and know you were anticipating this. What’s she going to do then?”

He didn’t know.