Countdown

What was he going to do with Annie? Joe sat for a long time, hoping that his gut would unclench, that his heart would stop aching. It was the first time he’d told anyone here about Jenny. He’d come to Camp Reed shortly after that tragic situation, and no one here knew what had happened. Joe didn’t want them to know. It was too personal, too gut wrenching, to have the story talked about over lunch or at the NCO, the non-commissioned officer’s, Club.

Slowly rubbing his face, Joe was startled to see Annie’s features appear before him. Lowering his hands and opening his eyes, he cursed. Somehow, he was going to have to keep her at bay, keep her from ever bonding with him the way most brig partners did over time. But how the hell was he going to accomplish that? Already his protective instincts were working overtime. Annie’s face was vulnerable—not the tough marine facade he had expected. How had she lasted six years in the corps? Even her voice was soft. He could see nothing hard about her; she had remained entrancingly feminine despite the responsibilities she carried on her shoulders.

Frustrated as never before, Joe slowly eased off the bench, immune to the beauty that surrounded him as he slowly trudged back into the building toward his office. He had no answers to his questions. And right now, he was angry. Angry at Annie Yellow Horse for stepping squarely and unexpectedly into the turmoil of his life. He needed her the way he needed rocks in his head, Joe thought, disgruntled.

“Sergeant Donnally?”

Annie’s husky voice, low with concern, intruded on his spinning thoughts and torn emotions. He snapped a look to the left. Annie was standing there, extending his hat to him. Her face looked serene, although her eyes reflected concern—for him. Swallowing hard, Joe rasped, “What is it?”

“Captain Ramsey just ordered us to get to the stables as soon as possible.” She shrugged a little and ventured a small smile. “Here’s your cover. I already put everything else we’ll need in the HumVee.”

Taking his hat and settling it on his head, Joe stood there, filled with anguish. Somehow, he had to ignore Annie’s ethereal beauty. Somehow. “Yeah,” he croaked, “let’s get going.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“No, I will.” Joe saw the question in her eyes, but refused to offer an explanation. He knew by the way she was reacting to him that he must look like hell. He certainly felt like hell.

Annie tried to ignore the hurt of their confrontation yesterday at Captain Ramsey’s home, when Joe had tried to discredit her hoofprint clue. Luckily, the captain, who had grown up on the same reservation she had, understood that hoofprints were as unique as fingerprints. But it had been a minor incident, so Annie let it go. As she fell into step with Donnally, she tried to ignore new hurt that sprang from her heart as they moved into the passageway. It was impossible for Donnally to disguise the fact that he didn’t like her.

Casting around for some way to defuse the unhappiness radiating from him, Annie said, “I grew up on the New Mexico desert and my folks raised sheep for a living. My mother is a medicine woman, but she weaves rugs, too. I guess I was kind of a tomboy for a Navajo girl, because I liked herding the sheep better than learning to weave. One of the things I had to learn in a hurry, though, was how to track strays from the main flock. Sometimes a ewe that was ready to birth would leave the herd to have her baby. Out there, coyotes were just waiting for strays, because it meant a meal to them.”

Joe opened the door that led out to the parking lot. He was trying desperately not to listen to Annie’s soft, enthusiastic voice. Heat from the morning sunlight was overcoming the previous night’s coolness, and he inhaled the salt-laden air deeply.

Annie hurried to keep step with Joe, determined to break the ice with him. “I had to learn to track those ewes before the coyotes got to them and their new babies. That’s when I realized that no sheep’s hooves were the same.” She laughed a little as he slowed down to get into the waiting HumVee. “Can you imagine me, as a nine-year-old, following ten or fifteen sheep trails, trying to sort out which one belonged to the pregnant mother?”

Annie climbed in and sensed a bit of a thaw in Joe’s jutting jaw. Closing the door, she continued, “No one taught me about the differences in the way a hoof looked. I just kind of learned out of desperation, if you want to know the truth. I knew if I lost a mother and baby, I’d be blamed by my family for not taking care of something more helpless than I was.”

Joe turned the HumVee down the street that led to the main boulevard, which would take them to the west-gate area where the stable facility was located. The warmth of Annie’s laughter, the intimacy of the way she confided in him, unstrung him. “Did you ever lose any sheep?” he found himself asking, against his will.

Thrilled, Annie tried to keep her hopes from getting too high. At least Joe was talking to her. “Almost. I must have run down about ten sets of tracks on the red desert where we lived, and all of them came back to where the flock was grazing. My brother Tom kept watching the flock, and I’d take off running again. My lungs hurt, my legs hurt, and I was crying on top of everything else. I didn’t want to shame myself. You see, I’d begged my parents to let me be a herder. They told me that if I couldn’t do the job my brothers did, I’d have to learn the things women are taught and stay out of a man’s world.”

Joe nodded, the pain around his heart miraculously easing beneath Annie’s spontaneous warmth. A large part of him wanted to know about Annie—as a person as well as a marine, but it was a dangerous area to tread. The better he got to know her, the more risk there was to both of them.

The look on Joe’s face encouraged Annie as they drove down the busy boulevard. The line of his mouth had eased, if only a bit, and she could feel him listening with interest to her story, so she continued. “It was near evening, and a lot of the ewes lamb at night. On about the twelfth trail, I noticed that this sheep had a chip out of the left side of one hoof. I found her at twilight.” Annie smiled fondly in remembrance. “She was just birthing, and a pack of coyotes was stalking her. I ran at them, yelling and shouting to scatter them.”

“You did?” Joe turned briefly. It was a mistake. The joy in Annie’s eyes was his undoing. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she were breathless, and that radiance that always seemed to be in her face was pronounced, her eyes dancing with memories.

“Coyotes aren’t like wolves—they run,” she explained.

“What did you have to chase them off with? A gun?”

Chortling, Annie relaxed. “No, just the wooden staff all herders carry.”

Shaking his head, Joe muttered, “And I thought my growing-up years in National City were dangerous.”

“Where is National City?” Annie responded, praying that he’d open up to her, if just a little. Instantly, she saw his brows dip and she felt his defenses rise.

“It’s a hole,” he growled, making it clear he didn’t want to discuss it. Ahead, he saw the road leading to the stables. “We’re going to have to talk to Stuart Garwood,” he continued gruffly, changing the subject. “He’s the base stables manager. We’ll let him know we’re going to be checking the horses.”

Disappointed but careful not to show it, Annie nodded. Still, as the HumVee moved down the paved road to where the stables were situated, in a pocket among four large hills, she felt hope. At least Joe had responded to her. Perhaps she’d have to open up more of herself, become more personal so he’d realize that she wasn’t a threat to him. Then maybe he’d become more friendly—or, if not friendly, at least not so angry all the time.

As she climbed out of the HumVee, Annie automatically switched her internal sensing abilities to the case at hand. A man dressed in canary yellow riding breeches, highly polished black boots and a red polo shirt stood on the porch of the stables’ front office, observing their approach. Instantly, Annie felt an instinctive warning that he wasn’t to be trusted. She wasn’t sure what was behind the subtle feeling, but it was there nonetheless. She followed Joe as he quickly climbed the steps toward the man, who remained on the porch, hands on his hips, frowning at them.

“Mr. Garwood?” Joe queried, halting before him.

“Yes?”

“Sir, we’re here from the provost marshal’s office. We’d like to examine the horses stabled here for a possible identification.”

Garwood scowled. “What identification?”

Joe pointed to the plaster cast that Annie held. “We found hoofprints at the location of a possible sniper. We think they’re from the mount of whoever fired at Ms. Tyler.”

Garwood snorted violently and glared at Annie and the plaster cast. “Why, that’s preposterous!”

Joe held his temper. “No, sir, it isn’t. With your permission, we’ll check the stable horses as well as the privately owned ones.”

Though it wasn’t obvious, Annie caught the flare of anger in Garwood’s dark eyes and sensed a quiet fury radiating from the stable manager.

“Oh, go ahead! I think it’s ridiculous, but I guess you have to justify this stupid investigation of Ms. Tyler’s allegations.” Garwood turned on his heel and walked back into his office.

As the door slammed behind him, Annie winced. “Ouch,” she whispered to Joe. “He’s a little prickly about this, don’t you think?”

Joe rubbed his jaw and looked around. “I suppose. I don’t know why, though. It’s no skin off his nose. We’re the ones who’ll be looking at horses’ hooves all day,” he griped.

Annie smarted under his cynicism. “You think this is a wild-goose chase, too, don’t you?”

“I think I made that clear yesterday at the captain’s house. Come on, let’s get going.”

Sighing, but controlling her temper, Annie followed Joe off the porch toward the first huge corral, filled with about forty stable horses that were regularly used for trail rides. It would take both of them, working as a team, to complete the investigation, she knew. As they slipped between the pipe rails, she suggested, “I’ll check the hooves if you’ll hold the horses by their halters.”

“Fine with me. I don’t have any experience with horses,” Joe said gruffly.

Annie set the plastic-wrapped plaster cast on the ground outside the fence. It would be fairly easy to lift the various hooves. If she found one with a chip out of it, she could bring the cast over for a positive identification. Inwardly, she prayed they would find that horse. Otherwise, she knew, Donnally would hold this over her head as a “waste” of his day.

As Joe grasped the first horse’s halter, he glared around at their pastoral surroundings. The scent of hay and horses wafted on a warm breeze. Silver-barked eucalyptus trees encircled the stables area, making it look more like a farm than part of a Marine Corps base. He watched with a scowl as Annie quickly lifted each of the horse’s feet in succession. She was fast and thorough. He moved to the next horse. And the next. After about an hour, he decided to talk.

“Garwood seemed testy.”

Annie looked up from her crouched position, the raised hoof of the current horse in her grasp and nodded. Then, she straightened and brushed off her hands. Joe stood on the opposite side of the animal. “If you won’t laugh at me, I’ll tell you the readout I got on him,” she offered.

Joe stared at her. Annie had removed her soft cover and stuck it in the rear pocket of her utilities. Her shiny black hair was gently mussed around her face, giving her the look of a woman who thoroughly relished being outdoors. If she’d been labeled a tomboy, it was only from the standpoint of the culture that had raised her. Annie loved nature, Joe realized, and she wasn’t trying to imitate a man in any way. As she ran her long, expressive fingers across the sleek back of the horse, he felt his pulse leap through him, hard and strong. Everything about her was feminine and graceful. Making an effort to derail that line of thinking, he said, “I won’t laugh at you.”

With a shrug, she said, “I have a kind of internal radar, if you will.” She smiled a little, glad to straighten up and work the kinks out of her shoulders. “I call it my ‘all-terrain radar.’ I get a sense about a person or a situation—and I’m rarely wrong. It has saved my life a couple of times in the past with transporting brig prisoners—or tracking them when they’ve escaped.”

Fear bolted through Joe as he stared across the horse at her solemn expression. “What do you mean?” he croaked, his fingers tightening around the horse’s leather halter.

“Over the past five years, I’ve been flown in whenever brig prisoners escape. Various bases have used my skills to find the escapees. I’ve tracked through swamps, forests and about any kind of rough terrain you want to mention. I use these—” she pointed to her head and then her heart “—like radar. I can’t really explain it except to say that I can literally sense if danger is near. Then I’m really careful and make sure my backup is in position.”