The Return of Cord Navarro

Chapter 7

Chuck Markham shrugged and then shrugged again to reposition the rifle he carried slung across his shoulders. Finally he made himself face the three men who’d hired him. No one, himself included, had shaved in the past four days. Neither had any of them changed their clothes, and although he was accustomed to forgoing the so-called necessities for days, even weeks at a time if the conditions warranted it, his clients had done so much complaining that he wondered what the hell they thought this hunting trip was going to be, a resort vacation?

The eldest of the trio, Elliott Lewis, was in the best shape, and that wasn’t saying much. Of course they’d all be doing a lot better if they hadn’t insisted on bringing half their worldly possessions with them.

Hell, that wasn’t his problem. What was, was finding them something they could shoot and take back home to mount on a wall, not because he gave a damn about their macho pride but because satisfied customers sent more business his way.

“Wait just a minute,” Elliott insisted when Chuck started walking again. “I’m not taking another miserable step until I know where we’re going.”

“I told you.” Chuck didn’t care whether he kept irritation out of his voice or not. If worse came to worst, he’d already gotten half of his fee up front. “After that little stunt Owen pulled, we’ve got to get to higher elevation.”

“Little stunt!” Owen snapped. “I was freezing, just like everyone else, you included. The fire I-”

“The fire you set could have tipped off someone, like a forest ranger or cop, and you know it. And it’s so far from freezing that it isn’t funny.” Stepping closer to Owen, Chuck jutted his chin at the bank executive and stared until Owen dropped his gaze. “One more stunt like that, and I’m pulling the plug on this adventure of yours. You all said you understood the risks, and the necessity of caution. So far I’ve seen damn little of that. The way you plunge through the woods, it ain’t my fault you’ve scared everything away.”

“The hell you’re backing out!” Elliott looked as if he was going to shake his fist, but wound up scratching under his chin.

“We’re paying you plenty to-”

“I know what you’re paying me, but all the money in the world isn’t going to get me anywhere if I’m in jail, is it?”

No one had a response for that, which suited him just fine. It was his guess, based on more than fifteen years of experience as a hunting guide, that these white collar types had boasted to everyone they could get to listen that they’d come back with a trophy elk, mountain sheep, bear, or all three if possible. And given the circles these men moved in, no one was likely to blow the whistle on their illegal activities, just give them a hard time about being skunked.

Skunked. They shouldn’t be, no way. The game was out there. He’d all but walked them into a black bear’s den a couple of days ago, but no, the fools hadn’t kept their mouths shut and the bear had bolted. Yesterday five, maybe six deer bad done the same. The only thing that could ruin this particularly lucrative expedition was their own stupidity-stupidity that placed a smoking camp fire at the top of the list. Well, he’d let Owen know in no uncertain terms that he’d leave him out in the middle of nowhere if he so much as thought about pulling another stunt like that.

If it wasn’t for the money, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the men and occasional woman who believed that having the money to do whatever they wanted put them above the law. Not that he could think of any other way he’d rather make a living, not by a long shot. It beat being a mechanic all hollow.

What he did for a living was a game. The biggest challenge out there and a lot safer than robbing banks, which he’d never wanted to do anyway. Him and his clients against the bumbling, ineffective cops and rangers who kept trying to put him out of business. What the law would never understand was that all it got out of this cat and mouse chase was years and years of work followed by a measly pension while he was already rich and getting richer.

And all he had to do to keep the money rolling in was give his clients the hunt of their lives.

“You’re sure?” her mother asked as Shannon knew she would. “You really don’t want anyone else up there? I mean, now that you know where he is-”

“Mom, there’s nothing an army can do that Cord and I can’t. Besides, I don’t want to embarrass Matt.”

“Neither do I. But if his tracks were from yesterday-darn it. I want to hold that boy so much I can hardly stand it.”

Shannon felt the same way, maybe even more so. At least the grinding, painful knot in her stomach had eased now that they were on Matt’s trail. It would only be a matter of time, just a matter of time. She told her mother that, and her mother agreed. They both played the game so well.

She and Cord had stopped to rest the horses again, and she’d prided herself on having the presence of mind to check on their condition before getting in touch with her folks. It both helped to hear her mother’s voice and made her ache with the need to hear another voice, this one younger, louder, enthusiastic about everything.

Catching herself in mid-thought, she realized that her mother was saying something about how it had rained like crazy for about fifteen minutes shortly after they got there this morning but that the signs were getting more and more hopeful. “What about where you are?” Elizabeth asked. “Is it cold?”

“No,” she said, Although she’d learned she had to keep moving to stay warm. Belatedly she remembered why her parents were at her place and asked how things were going. She was told that most of her customers had canceled their morning rides but so far those set to come in this afternoon still planned to. She apologized for taking her mother from her job with the Summit County tourism association and her dad from what was supposed to have been a day off work to go golfing.

“Don’t you worry about us, honey,” her dad said, as she knew he would. “I wouldn’t have been able to golf in the rain anyway and helping your mom gives me an excuse not to show up at the office.”

Finally, at her father’s request, she turned the walkie-talkie over to Cord.

Although she tried to let them have as private a conversation as possible, she was aware that Cord’s responses were both brief and formal. Once, Cord and her father had called each other friends, but divorce had ended their relationship. She wondered if either man regretted what had been lost.

For a moment, she felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t her fault, was it? She couldn’t be expected to stay married to a man who locked himself away from her and her need to have someone to listen to her after their infant daughter died. Could she?

As recently as two years ago she could have thrown back a decisive no in answer to her question. She was no longer so sure. Time had blunted the worst of that awful pain, and lately she’d allowed herself to try to see the past through Cord’s eyes, to ask herself what he’d been going through, and whether she’d failed him as much as the other way around.

It didn’t matter. Nothing did, except-A distant rumbling caught her attention. Turning in the same direction as Cord, she scanned the gray sky until the sound was directly overhead. She couldn’t see the plane for the clouds, but she guessed it wasn’t very large, probably belonging to one of several local private pilots.

“What do you suppose he’s doing?” she asked Cord as he put the walkie-talkie away. “If it was me, I’d wait until the visibility was better before going out on a sight-seeing flight. Darn, I wish we could reach him and tell him to keep his eye out for Matt. Do you think-”

“I already talked to the sheriff. He said he’d contact the local pilots and the forest service.”

She should have thought of that. Where had her brain gone? “I’m glad you did. If Dale hears something, he’ll contact you, won’t he?”

“Yes. Of course.” Cord nodded and then muttered something she didn’t catch. She thought to ask him to repeat himself, then decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that kept her from dismissing the plane and its pilot, who probably couldn’t see the ground because of the storm, was the way Cord kept his head cocked toward the sound until it faded into nothing. She wondered if he would look at her, say something, but he didn’t. The sight of his broad back as he returned to work served as the only reminder she needed that leaving him had saved her sanity. At least, she hoped it had.

Cord wondered if Shannon fully understood what he was doing when, occasionally, he stopped and retraced his steps before marking a rectangle left and right, front and back. He could have told her that he’d momentarily lost sight of Matt’s and Pawnee’s tracks and was picking them up again the way Gray Cloud had taught him. Other times when what he wanted eluded him, he went back to the last print and circled it slowly, concentrating. It didn’t matter which method he used as long as he kept picking up the trail. When he did that, Shannon remained where she was so her tracks wouldn’t confuse him.

Had she learned that from him? He couldn’t remember telling her what her role during a search would have to be. He hadn’t often taken her into the wilderness with him, especially not after they’d gotten married and work and school and then a baby took up so much of her time.

Maybe that was when they began losing each other.

Maybe they’d only believed they had something in common because they were so young and in love, so overwhelmed by the exploration of each other’s bodies.

He couldn’t believe that, not after seeing her standing raw and exposed in front of him when he showed her where their son had stood. Knowing how much of himself he’d handed her.

The emotions wouldn’t be so strong if they weren’t in some way tapped into each other, would they?

He wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted by further thoughts of what he and Shannon once had. His self-preservation depended on it.

Suddenly he stopped, leaned over, then indicated the ground. “He rested here.”

“How can you tell?” Shannon asked as she pressed closer.

To him, the signs were as plain as any written message, but he pointed to the broad area of flattened grass that indicated Matt had sat here for a while. Beyond that were a number of heel marks, proof that Matt had scraped his feet over the ground while he rested. Good. There had been energy in his legs.

Shannon squatted in front of the marks and ran her fingers gently over them. “If I touch where he’s been, can he tell? Does he know we’re here, that…that I love him?”

She shouldn’t utter those words. When she did, her whispers dug at him and made it nearly impossible for him to concentrate on what he had to do. Still, insanely, he wanted to hold and comfort her, to erase the lost years.

But he couldn’t. He didn’t know how, and knew better than to try.

“If you believe he can sense you, then maybe he will. Shannon, if you need to cry-”

“Cry? No, Cord. I’ve done all I’m ever going to do of that.”

He tried to touch her because her rough words left him with no choice, but she jerked away. “You don’t understand, do you?” She all but threw the words at him. The tears she’d just denied sounded dangerously close to the surface. “The kind of vulnerability I felt when Summer was born and we knew she wasn’t going to live-I’m never going to cry alone again.”

“Never cry? No one knows what life is going to bring, Shannon. What emotions will build up inside and need release.”

She could have pointed out that her exact words were that she wasn’t going to cry alone, but she didn’t because he was right. Although she might wish with all her heart that life wouldn’t kick her in the gut again the way it had when Summer died and again when their marriage had ended, no one could look into the future. “What kinds of things build up inside you, Cord? Maybe I should know, but I don’t.”

“Nothing anyone else doesn’t experience.”

“I’m not so sure. I’d like to hear about it.” Instead of saying anything more, she simply continued to meet his gaze, challenging him to step away from what they’d begun with this conversation.

He started slowly. “I’ve worked with so many people, seen them go through so much. Sometimes it turns out right, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

“When it doesn’t, who do you talk to about it?”

He didn’t answer her, but then, he didn’t have to. She knew he had no one. He’d had her for a brief while, and he had Matt; he needed more than that. She wished she’d allowed herself to acknowledge that before now, but there’d always been distance between them. “Cord, I was scared to death when I started my business. Sometimes I’m still scared. If I can tell you that, can’t you do the same?”

His body rocked slightly, away from her and then closer again. She heard a rustling in a tree to her left and guessed that there were birds in there. As before, she waited.

“Something happened to me last year,” he said. “Something that…”

“Something that what?”

“I was in northern Idaho teaching advanced life support to a group of paramedics when we got a call about a sports car that had run into a truck. There were kids in the car, two of them the daughters of the man who’d organized the class.”

“Oh, no.”

“I worked beside him for hours cutting those kids out, getting them stabilized and into helicopters to be air-lifted to the nearest trauma center. Doug couldn’t go with his daughters-I drove him the ninety miles.” Cord ran his fingers through his hair, grabbing still-damp chunks and holding on to them. “Doug told me about their births, his divorce from their mother, how he’d finally gotten custody of them. The whole time, we didn’t know whether the youngest one would live or whether his seventeen-year-old would keep her leg.”

Shannon’s heart went out to him.

“By the time we got there, both girls were out of danger. But they had to have surgery that night. It was just Doug and me until morning when his sister got there. The longest night of Doug’s life.”

And one of the longest of yours, too, she suspected. “I’m glad you were there for him, that he wasn’t alone.”

“So am I,” he said on the tail of a long, slow blink. “When it was over and we knew his daughters would come out of it in one piece, I left Doug with his sister, went outside, walked right past my car in the hospital parking lot, and kept on going.”

She held her breath, every piece of her being focused on Cord. “You walked…” she prompted when he simply stood with his eyes now locked on the horizon. Don’t stop now, please! she begged.

“For miles, hours. And I cried. Relief. Exhaustion. Everything that had boiled up inside me. Sometimes, Shannon, there’s nothing to do but cry.”

He had cried, this man who hadn’t shed a tear at their daughter’s death; at least, she hadn’t seen him give way to the grief that had consumed her. “It helps,” she whispered despite the hard, hot knot in her throat.

“Yeah. It does.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say after that. Yes, Cord’s career brought him in constant contact with life-and-death struggles. He’d seen more of what was raw and basic in the world than most people ever would, but he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have some response to those struggles-a response she’d never truly considered before now. Why? Had he been that careful to keep his emotions from her, or hadn’t she known how to read the signs?

Too late, a voice inside her head mocked.

Afternoon.

Cord had known that the storm was dying long before the clouds began breaking up. Shannon had cheered when a weak, brief ray of sunlight touched her, but he couldn’t share her excitement.

He couldn’t sense his son’s presence.

True, the trail Matt and Pawnee had left behind was clear enough that he was in no danger of losing it, but the tracks told him that Matt had been walking with the determination of youth, while Cord was hampered by ground that sometimes briefly held secrets and made the search for answers tedious.

Matt would have to spend at least another night on the mountain. If he’d taken his son with him or given him the knowledge he’d already had at that age-

For maybe the fourth time today, Cord tried to shake himself free of the pounding inside his head. He knew how to be a bloodhound, how to walk and work and sacrifice and think of nothing except his goal.

But this was his son, and his son’s mother was with him and she, too, would have to endure another night of empty arms.

“Cord? Please, wait a minute.”

He straightened and slowly turned around. Because his attention had been focused on the faint road map of Matt’s journey left on the ground, it was several seconds before his eyes focused clearly on her. She stood some five feet away with the horses, which she’d been leading on either side of her. Splotches of color still highlighted her cheeks. Her eyes glistened from the effort of sorting through never – ending patterns of light and shadow-and maybe from unspent tears.

“I should be grateful.” She shook her head slightly as if she was aware of what her eyes had told him. “It doesn’t look as if it’s going to rain anymore. The birds have come out of hiding and I saw a butterfly a few minutes ago. If Matt stands in the open where the breeze can get to him, his clothes ought to dry. If the storm had gotten worse, well…”

“A storm’s nothing to fear.”

“Nothing to fear? Cord, you aren’t ten.”

“No, I’m not. Still, there’s beauty in rain and snow. The forest changes during a storm, becomes one with the wind. If you know to tuck the forest around you, let it absorb you, then a storm surrounds you but doesn’t frighten.”

Shannon ran the back of her hand impatiently over her forehead. “I don’t know who this ‘you’ you’re talking about is, but I didn’t come here to be surrounded by rain and wind and cold. I don’t want it for my son.”

She had an incredible presence. She might say she had no desire to be in the wilderness, but she belonged here. Jeans became her. A cotton blouse fit her as naturally as some women wore silk. And her body-her body with its long, lean limbs, competent hands and slender yet broad shoulders-was made for a life-style beyond walls.

Her breasts and hips and thighs were made for a man. For him.

Despite everything, he had never stopped wanting her.

“I’m trying to make it easier for you,” he said in an effort to place a smoke screen over what he was thinking and feeling. “Some children, especially those who’ve never been told that a storm is something to fear, see one the same way I do.”

“Children don’t like loud, sudden sounds-like thunder. Lightning frightens them. They don’t like being cold and wet and hungry and…and lost.”

She was right, of course. And as she stood up to him, he realized he had no more defenses against her than a leaf caught in the wind.

With an effort, he turned his attention back to the ground. “What you’re following now…” she said, “can you tell whether we’ve made any ground?”

“No.” He hated having to say this. “No. We haven’t.”

She drew in a quick breath and he barely stopped himself from reaching for her. “I’m sorry,” he started to say.

A sound, faint as a midnight whisper, pricked at him. He froze. He forgot where he was, what he’d been saying, even who was with him.

A rifle shot. Several miles away, and distorted by the rocks it was echoing off. So faint, most people wouldn’t hear it.

The sound was repeated.

For two, nearly three minutes, he remained with his senses open and receptive, but nothing else came to him. Finally, reluctantly, he brought himself back to where he was and ignored his heart’s erratic pounding.

“Did you hear something?”

Shannon hadn’t made any attempt to keep the combination of tension and anticipation out of her voice. Maybe she was beyond any pretense. He wanted to tell her about the shots; he didn’t want to carry this burden alone or have to find a way to battle cold fingers of dread alone. But someone with a rifle was on this mountain and, if possible, he wanted to spare her from knowing what she couldn’t do anything about.

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?” When she leveled him a gaze, he wondered if he could keep anything from her.

“There are a million sounds out there, Shannon.” His throat didn’t want to work. “I can’t be sure of all of them.”

“I’ve never heard you say that before.”

Where did she keep those memories of him? “We don’t have much more time. It’s going to get dark-”

“Not for another four or five hours.”

“Five hours isn’t going to get us far enough.”

In the seconds that followed his words, he could hear her breathing. He didn’t need to probe into her to know what she was feeling and battling.

He knew because the same war was raging in his own soul.

This search was different from all the others. Love for a ten-year-old boy had gotten in the way of what he needed and wanted to do. He could fight the emotion, but it would only return, slamming into him just as memories of making love to Shannon did. Because he wasn’t up to the battle, he could only force himself to go on, to acknowledge why his heart felt so heavy.

He cared, truly cared for only two people in this world. He was trying to find one before that distant, deadly sound did. The other-

She looked so brave and determined and trapped.

Without moving, without having any control over what was happening, he reached out with his heart and absorbed her emotions.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“A deer! Didn’t you see-”

Chuck didn’t care what, if anything, Andrew might have been going to say. Cursing, he yanked the rifle out of his client’s hands and trained his binoculars in the direction Andrew had shot. Although he stared for several minutes, he didn’t see anything, but between the clouds and the sun trying to break out from behind them it was no wonder.

“We’ll have to go look,” he grumbled. “But I can guarantee you, you didn’t kill any damn deer.”

“How do you know?”

On the verge of telling Andrew that he couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn if he was standing inside it with the door closed, he hoisted Andrew’s rifle over his shoulder and started walking. Behind him, the three men chattered like drunken schoolchildren over whether Andrew had indeed made a kill and if he had, what the chances were that it was a trophy buck.

He wished they had. That way he could stop baby-sitting these overgrown morons and pick up some clients who understood that being caught hunting out of season would net him a lot more than a simple fine. He’d already been arrested twice, forfeited his hunting license, and been leveled fines that he’d had no intention of paying. Getting nailed again wasn’t what bothered him since bureaucrats were lousy at collecting, but the last thing he wanted was jail time.

Jail time?

He’d shoot all three of these jokers and leave their bodies for the buzzards before he let that happen-them and anyone else who tried to stand in his way.

“Something.”

Something. What in God’s name did that mean? When Shannon turned anguished eyes on him, Cord gave her a shuttered look, then leaned forward in the saddle, a deeply tanned hand on his horse’s neck. His eyes, now trained on their surroundings, grew even darker. His nostrils flared, and she almost thought she could hear him drawing in deep, revealing breaths.

What did he see, smell, hear that others couldn’t? Was it possible that the spirit that moves in all things spoke to him?

She prayed so.

When Cord moved, it was to slide off the mare and land, silently, on rain-soaked earth. He stepped away from the animal and in a matter of seconds disappeared into the dense forest. She tried to listen, but there were so many sounds that she couldn’t begin to sort them out. She thought of how quickly the woods had swallowed Cord and how wonderfully wild he’d looked with evergreens framing him.

Cord hadn’t told her to follow him and she knew better than to infringe on his space. She waited, not knowing enough, and yet trusting that eventually he’d come back and tell her what he’d learned. She’d accept whatever it was, just as she accepted this raw and unwanted physical need for the man who’d turned her from a girl into a woman.

Her horse tried to lower its head to eat. She momentarily argued the point and then let it have its way. Cord’s mount was wandering away as it searched out fresh outcroppings on the pine needle-blanketed rocks. Shannon concentrated on wind, frogs, her limp and still-damp hair, memories of Cord’s faded and body-formed jeans, the wind again. The absence of rain.

How much time had passed? She’d just made up her mind to dismount when Cord’s mount lifted its head and snorted. Her horse followed suit, neck arched in interest.

There was no change in the rhyme of the forest, nothing for her ears to decipher. But the horses knew.

A moment later Cord came out of the woods leading Pawnee. Cord seemed to glide, so sure of his footing that he never once took his eyes off her.

Black eyes, dark as midnight. Forever eyes.

Matt’s horse!

“That fast?” she managed around her heart’s furious beating.

“No,” Cord cautioned. “Nothing’s changed.”

“But you found Pawnee.”

Cord shook his head, his incredible eyes so sober that she couldn’t fight them, couldn’t hold on to her short-lived elation. “Only because Matt either let him loose or didn’t tie him well enough. Or-Shannon, on his own, would Pawnee be able to make his way home?”

With an effort, she pulled herself out of endless depths and wild hope and explained that more than once one of her rental horses had wandered back to the corral after an inexperienced rider fell off. Pawnee, however, was full of himself, not as accustomed to life’s routines, and as such, more likely to be sidetracked even with an empty belly and memories of food and water.

“I’ve got to find where Matt and Pawnee parted compant.”

“How long will that take?”

“As long as it takes.”

She bit her tongue to keep from telling Cord not to be flippant. An instant later she knew it wasn’t that at all because he was explaining that from the number of tracks he’d found around Pawnee, he knew the animal hadn’t been there long. “He’s been on the move, running, which means there’s no easy way of telling where Matt left him, or where he fell off.”

She felt her heart slow, then beat quick and erratic. No easy way… Fell off. “Wh-what do you have to do now?”

“Backtrack Pawnee.”

It was then that she noticed that Pawnee was wearing his saddle and bridle. The loose reins that had been trailing behind the horse were muddy from dragging. “Maybe Matt ground-tied Pawnee and left him for a few minutes, but something spooked Pawnee.”

“Maybe. Look at his legs,” Cord observed. “He’s been deep in the woods for a while, getting scratched up.”

“You said that when you found where the two of them parted company, you’d be able to really start tracking Matt. How are you going to get to that point?”

Cord stepped over to his horse and pulled on the reins, lifting the animal’s head. “I’ll have to go on foot.”

Without another word of explanation, he turned and slipped, silently, into the woods. After a momentary hesitation, she started after him, leading both Pawnee and Cord’s horse. She stretched over the neck of the one she rode so the thick-growing branches wouldn’t knock her off.

Ahead, Cord walked Indian style, his movements starting in his hips, eyes trained on the ground. She tried to make out what he was concentrating on, but for her there was nothing except the generations of pine needles that thickly carpeted the forest floor. Still, she trusted.

This was Cord’s world.

And their son was in it, somewhere.

Safe?