Total Exposure

Mocha? He shoved the Jeep into gear before realizing he’d decided to do so. Her eyes were brown. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Spike’s head poked between the seats. He whined softly, looking first at Dan, then at Natalie.

“I know what you mean, buddy,” Dan said between clenched teeth. “I know what you mean.”

NATALIE HAD LISTENED as Dan spoke on his radio to dispatch during the ride to the site, but had understood little of the codes and commands. She had witnessed many gut-wrenching scenes while on duty at the hospital’s burn unit, and inwardly prepared herself now for the worst. Dan pulled to a stop behind the ladder truck, the rain pounding on the windshield so heavily she only had a split second to see what lay outside before sheets of water again blocked her view.

“What…what’s going on?” she asked, the sound of her heartbeat loud in her ears.

“Mudslide,” Dan said, bounding from the car, his dog following after him. Natalie craned her neck to watch him, noticing the way both dog and master stood in the onslaught, neither seeming aware of the rain as they took in the situation.

Natalie fastened her rain slicker tightly, then grabbed her umbrella. The instant she opened the door she was hit by a wall of rain and wind that stole her breath from her. She sputtered, tightly gripping the molding of the door as she climbed out, fighting to hold on to the umbrella she was trying to open.

“Stay in the car!” Dan shouted, striding purposely toward the spot where his men were gathering their gear.

Natalie squinted after him as she pulled the umbrella as close to her head as she could. Stay in the car? What did he think she was, some kind of unruly child? She was a physician used to responding to emergency situations. Okay, so they usually involved burn victims who had already been transported to the hospital. But she wasn’t stupid. She started to step around the ladder truck, her foot plopping into a particularly nasty puddle with spongy mud beneath. Maybe she’d have to be a little more careful, but she wasn’t stupid.

Spike’s bark drew her closer to the front of the truck. Exercising caution, she stepped clear of the vehicle, then stopped dead in her tracks. She hadn’t realized where they were until that very moment. Before her towered Courage Bay Mountain, looking like an ominous monster in the dim purple light. The city of Courage Bay spread out along a ten-mile stretch of clean, white-sand beaches bordering the Pacific Ocean north of Los Angeles. Steep, forested mountains surrounded the crescent of lush coastal land. But after a particularly brutal drought last summer, the mountains were vulnerable to mudslides in this year’s rainy season.

Wealthier residents of the city had built expensive homes that jutted out of the side of Courage Bay Mountain facing the bay—on a steep slope the rain had turned into an unstable mound of mud. Natalie shielded her eyes and watched as a house halfway up the hill slid a couple feet sideways, its front pilings collapsing under the shifting weight.

Oh, God.

That something so seemingly solid could be easily swept off its foundations gave her pause.

“Over there!” one of Dan’s men shouted, indicating a man waving frantically at them from where he stood near the side of his house. An ominous crack sounded. Natalie watched the man slip and slide away from the structure toward a stand of trees where a woman and two young kids huddled.

It all looked so…overwhelming. So hopeless. How could the firefighters possibly reach them? There was no way they could get up there. And how would the family get down? Given the steady pounding of the rain and the already treacherous slopes, the situation could only get worse.

“Go!”

Natalie blinked and turned her head to find Dan shouting the order to four men wearing rappelling gear. Two by two, connected together by ropes, they headed for the foot of the mountain and began climbing the sturdiest-looking part of the hill.

“Team south, go!” Dan shouted again, and four more men headed down the road to the other side of the slide, carefully maneuvering their way through mud and debris flowing over the two-lane coastal highway toward the sea.

Standing pole still, strangely immune to the rain pelting her despite her slicker and umbrella, Natalie stared at the bear of a man she’d been trying to bully into letting her examine him such a short time ago. He looked so powerful, so capable. And his mere presence made the situation seem less desperate. More than a natural disaster, the mudslide was a challenge to be met. A job to be done. And she sensed that Dan Egan was exactly the man to do it.

Spike barked. Natalie jumped, surprised to find the dalmatian standing next to her. She glanced over to see Dan looking her way. Their gazes met across the twenty-foot expanse, neither of them blinking despite the rain streaming down their faces. As if they were joined in some odd, reassuring way.

One of Dan’s men held out something for him to look at, forcing him to break eye contact. Natalie let go of the breath she was holding, then turned her head and briefly closed her eyes.

Please, she prayed, please don’t let me fall for this man….

TWENTY MINUTES LATER the rain began to let up a bit, though not enough to make a significant difference. Dan stared up at the angry winter sky, asking for any kind of break he could get. While the lessening rain had little impact on the severity of the situation, it did create a better working environment for his men.

He scanned the mountainside, searching for the two rescue squads. The north team had already anchored a lead rope and was harnessing up the family of four to come down one by one. The south team was having a harder time finding a solid foothold from which to operate.

The civil engineer he’d ordered dispatch to contact held out the plastic-covered schematic of the houses on the hill. Of the more than a dozen homes, two were almost completely swallowed by the cascading mud, either buried outright or in pieces, and four more were about to give way. The bridge spanning the pass had been washed out, making those houses inaccessible. The rescue team had to move quickly.

He pulled his two-way to his mouth. “South team, status report.”

“Surface unstable. No foothold, sir. Repeat, we can’t get a foothold. Over.”

Dan eyed the terrain around the team. “Go fifteen paces southeast, Captain, and see if you can get a lock on the rock there by the trees.”

“Roger that.”

He watched the leader of the south team secure his radio, then point out the route to his men. On the other side, the stranded mother was cautiously sliding down the taut rope, a firefighter from the north team at her back to ease the way.

Dan caught himself rubbing the back of his damp neck, awareness crawling over his skin. While the doc hadn’t stayed in the car as he’d asked, she had stayed out of the way, staring at the mudslide, her eyes wide, looking particularly vulnerable.

Now that was a word he wouldn’t have used to describe Natalie Giroux only an hour ago. As he recalled, pushy was the adjective he’d chosen. She stood at the foot of the hill, appearing to want to do something, but aware that she wasn’t qualified.

He grudgingly gave her credit. He knew what it was like to be stuck on the sidelines. At forty-five, he’d had to trade an active role for that of coordinator. But the urge to rush into the fray was something he wasn’t good at quelling. Not yet. And, he was coming to fear, not ever. As it was, he now fisted and unfisted his hands, his pulse pounding with the impulse to climb up the shifting mountainside and help those in need.

“Doesn’t look good.”

Dan turned to address the man at his side. K-9 Patrol Officer Cole Winslow’s rain gear wasn’t much protection against the storm blasting them, but he seemed oblivious to it. He held the lead to Braveheart, his black-and-tan German shepherd.

“What brings you out to this neck of the woods?” Dan asked after he directed team members on the ground to help the rescued mother from her harness and to safety.

“Actually, I was already here. You’ve heard about the series of break-ins in the area recently? Well, the prowler was spotted in one of the houses. Braveheart and I were called in to track his scent.”

“Which house?”

Cole nodded toward the northeast and a house that a river of mud was claiming even as they watched. “Dylan Deeb’s place. You know, that producer who was brought up on sexual assault charges six months ago?”

Dan was familiar with the case. Deeb was a slimebag with a capital S. He was accused of coercing underage actresses into having sex with him in exchange for parts in his movies. The charges were dropped when the actresses refused to testify against him. Likely Deeb had convinced them their careers would do better with him on this side of prison bars.

“You get the prowler?” Dan asked.

The officer shook his head. “Lost his scent at the marina. A small boat was reported stolen an hour ago, so my guess is he borrowed it and headed out onto the bay.”

Glancing at the churning waters in the distance, Dan wondered if the prowler would have been better off facing Cole and prison than the storm-tossed sea.

A car raced up behind him and ground to a screeching stop on the wet asphalt. It had obviously passed the barriers his men had placed a quarter of a mile up the road. Like a river of brown lava, the debris path had sheared the highway in two, blocking traffic on both sides. He glanced at the older model vehicle and the young blond woman who stumbled out of it. She stared at the mountain in horror. A resident? Possibly. He motioned toward a junior firefighter to stop her from advancing, then concentrated on controlling his own overactive adrenaline.

BRITTNEY MACKENZIE COULDN’T believe her eyes. She stumbled forward, staring at the disintegrating mountain in front of her. She’d been there only an hour before and everything had been fine. Now the road she had taken to drive up to film producer Dylan Deeb’s house was indistinguishable from the rest of the oozing mud eating the highway.

Fine? Had she really just used the word fine to describe what had happened in Dylan Deeb’s house only sixty minutes ago?

“Miss, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step back.”

She blinked unseeingly into the face of a young firefighter in yellow waterproof overalls and black boots. “What…How…” The words came out of her mouth but she couldn’t seem to form a coherent sentence as she desperately sought out the producer’s house. Her heart beat an uneven rhythm in her chest.

It’s gone.

Along with any chance of her ever becoming a working actress.