Code Name: Baby

“Hell if I believe this,” Wolfe muttered, muting the volume.

Kit stirred restlessly, and he dragged a hand through his hair, then switched off the television and waited—not sure what he was waiting for.

The silence stretched out, deep as the New Mexico night. He stared at the dogs, and they stared right back at him. A branch scraped the window. Baby draped her head across Diesel’s neck, looked at the television and wagged her tail. Coincidence?

Wolfe shook his head, returning the batteries to the remote and placing it next to Kit so she’d assume that she had turned off the movie in her sleep. Baby yawned. The previous phenomena with the television appeared to have stopped. Though Wolfe waited, nothing else happened.

Time to go.

But at the door he paused, unable to resist one last look at Kit. She was striking even in her sleep. In a dozen ways she reminded him of her mother, who’d still turned heads at sixty. Wolfe remembered the night Amanda O’Halloran had found him sleeping in the old barn, desperate and exhausted, still bleeding from his father’s drunken beating.

She had cleaned him up without a word, fed him without a word, then opened her heart as well as her house to him. When his father had come looking for him, she’d run him off with a shotgun.

He hadn’t thought of that night for years. It was this unnerving house, the dogs on the old Mexican rug and the fire that crackled happily.

He rubbed his thigh as he walked down the shadowed hallway. The wound had torn open again and was throbbing—a minor discomfort after the abuse Wolfe’s body had suffered over the years. He had a full supply of medicine in his field pack to deal with exactly this problem.

Something moved at the end of the corridor. Quickly Wolfe slid against the wall, listening to a shuffling noise in the hall.

The sounds came closer and then Baby appeared a few feet in front of him. Her ears perked up as she stared at the spot where Wolfe was standing, hidden in the shadows. Moments later Butch and Sundance moved to face the kitchen entrance, while Diesel prowled the house, going from window to window, alert and wary.

Baby let out a low growl and trotted to the kitchen door, staring at the window. She was soon joined by the other two dogs. When Diesel finished his circuit, he joined them in front of the kitchen doorway.

A noise brought Wolfe around, low and fast. Kit stood in the shadows, looking sleepy and mussed. The rifle she held was dead level. Then Diesel began to bark, and the other dogs joined in.

“Baby? Diesel? What’s wrong?”

She hadn’t seen him yet, Wolfe realized. She must have heard the dogs prowling around earlier.

But something else was moving in the darkness. Wolfe heard the faint crunch of feet on gravel outside.

Grabbing Kit, he pulled her out of sight, his hand clamped over her mouth. Seconds later the kitchen window shattered in a noisy explosion, glass flying over the tile floor.

She fought his grip as he pinned her against the wall with his body, feeling her panic in the wild rise and fall of her chest. She tried to kick him, but he nudged her leg aside and blocked her clawing fingers.

He brushed her breast, soft and warm beneath thin cotton, and the contact made him jerk as if he’d been burned; his hand locked over her mouth when she tried to protest.

Glass crunched.

Across the kitchen a man climbed in over the windowsill, his knife glinting in the cold moonlight.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHAT ELSE COULD GO WRONG?

He pushed Kit down the hall, fighting her every step of the way. When she tried to scream, Wolfe cut her off with fast, focused images of herself floating in bubbling hot springs until he felt her body relax and slump against his chest, arms askew.

Grimly, he called up the floor plan of her house, memorized during mission prep.

Four steps left. One step right and then around the corner. She was still slumped as he carried her inside a closet and left her sitting against the wall, snoring faintly.

One problem solved.

Quickly Wolfe closed the door and wedged a chair under the knob.

There was a bang in the kitchen, followed by a muffled curse.

Silently, he crossed the room and waited beside the door as Kit’s intruder inched through the darkness. Moonlight touched the blade of a saw-edged hunting knife.

Wolfe’s lips twitched. Bad move, pal. You just used up all your chances.

With one sharp movement, he captured the man’s wrists and smiled coldly as he felt the bones begin to snap. Within two seconds the man was on his knees, begging to be released.

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody.”

“Try again, peanut brain.” Wolfe increased the pressure on his wrists.

“No more. It was just me and the boys, looking for—for that Apache gold that’s hid up here.”

He was whimpering now, and Wolfe was inclined to believe him. The man didn’t look like a professional who could lie in the face of pain. As he pulled the man around into the muted light from the window, Wolfe recognized the troublemaker who had assaulted Kit that morning. Apparently he’d decided to return by night and complete the job.

“Give me a name,” Wolfe repeated as he twisted the man’s hands, grinding bone against bone.

“Nobody—I already told you. That’s the truth, damn it!”

Wolfe considered the quickest way to tie up loose ends. He could kill the man without leaving any marks, then dump him off a ridge. After the body had dropped sixty feet and rolled down a wash, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a simple hiking accident. For a second, the urge for murder pounded through his veins.

He pulled himself back from the edge, and in one quick movement of his foot sent the man flying to the floor. Ignoring Kit’s muffled curses from the closet, Wolfe pulled up an image of the toughest, most frightening Apache warrior he could remember from his reading as a boy. Then he sharpened the image, adding streaks of color at face and chest along with a honed hunting knife.

This was the exact image that the man on the floor saw bearing down on him. No amount of thought or argument would change the force of that vision later.

“If you come back here, ever again, we will find you.” Wolfe figured that the words should fit the image, and he chose them carefully. “There are four of us here. Together we guard the ranch and this family. If you come back, we will find you. Then we will kill you. But first we will skin you slowly while you scream.”

The man’s body trembled at Wolfe’s feet. He was crying openly now, consumed by Wolfe’s terrible vision. “I won’t. I swear it. Lemme go.”

Growling, Baby and the other three dogs lined up around the intruder. Kit’s cursing from the closet was turning shrill.

Time to dispense with Einstein here.

“Go back to your town. Tell your friends what I have told you tonight. Know that if any one of you returns, we will be here waiting.”

“We won’t come back,” the man blurted. “None of us will, I promise.”

Wolfe wasn’t going to take any chances. He focused the man’s fear, shaped it. Then he drove it deep inside his head to fester and grow.

The intruder’s face was slack with terror when Wolfe finished. As the man staggered to his feet, something fell out of the front pocket of his shirt.