Bear Claw Bodyguard. Jessica Andersen
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do herself a favor and remember that. Focus. She needed to focus, darn it. Forcing herself not to watch him as he walked an ever-widening spiral away from the vehicle, scanning the territory as he went, she pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. When she did, the world spun slowly, warning her that she was more tired and jet-lagged than she’d even realized. Which explained her overactive libido but warned her that she needed to pay attention to her surroundings, not her escort. The Colorado backcountry could be seriously unforgiving, as could a mishandled investigation.
The scuff of a footstep had her straightening and turning to face him, hoping that he couldn’t see anything in her face—not the fatigue, not the knowledge that she wasn’t at her best and certainly not the buzz that entered her bloodstream as he drew close, eyes still scanning their surroundings, then going to the sky as he said, “You’ll have about three hours before we need to turn back, and even at that time we’re going to be getting in later than I like.”
His voice sounded strange to her after so much quiet between them. He didn’t offer an explanation or apology, but then again, he didn’t owe her either of those things. Regardless of what her hormones thought, they were nothing more than temporary business acquaintances. And if he could keep it professional despite not wanting to be there, she could do the same despite wanting … Well, better not go there.
Dredging up a professional smile and keeping a tight rein on both her thought process and her tendency to blurt the first thing that came to mind, especially when she felt a little out of her depth, she nodded. “Like I said before, I’ll take what I can get. Are we at the edge of the infected area?” The trees around them appeared normal, with none of the ghostly white filaments she’d seen in the photographs that had been sent to her by the prior Park Service investigator.
“Yeah. The white stuff starts about fifty feet from here and stretches all the way to the river, which is a few miles away. We can walk it or drive it, your call.”
She didn’t make the mistake of thinking the “your call” would extend one iota beyond when it suited him, but had to give him credit for trying. “It’ll take me a couple of hours to take preliminary samples and measurements, so parking here and hiking works for me. Then tomorrow I’d like to start from the river and spiral in from there.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
It didn’t take her long to select the gear she wanted to carry with her and load it into her knapsack, then jettison a few of the less crucial pieces so she wouldn’t kill herself trying to carry it. Jack stood nearby the whole time, keeping watch. With the shotgun slung across his back and a 9 mm in a hip holster, and his eyes scanning the trees with practiced intensity, he didn’t look like any cop she’d dealt with before. There was no badge or polyester, no subtle twitch that said he was more comfortable with civilization than out in the backcountry. Instead, there was the deep stillness she associated with hunters and spiritualists, though he didn’t strike her as either of those things, or at least not entirely. He was … different, she decided. Unexpected.
And she really needed to stop trying to figure out her chaperone and do her darned job. “Ready?” she said too brightly.
He gave her a look that said they weren’t headed off to a picnic and she didn’t need to sound so happy about it, but aloud, he said only, “You take point and I’ll watch our backs. You see anything suspicious, yell out, okay? I don’t care how small or silly it might seem—let me make that call.”
Sobering, she nodded. “Got it.” Even though given how thoroughly he was scanning their surroundings, she had a feeling he would pick up on anything suspicious way before she even had a clue. She wasn’t sure why that made her nerves worse rather than better, but she was definitely on edge as they headed off along the continuation of the tire-beaten track. She was hyperaware of his walking slightly behind and off to the side of her like a big, bristling guard dog at heel. Only he was so much more than that … which made him far too distracting.
Then she saw the first thready tendrils hanging from a strangely gnarled branch, and her attention sharpened between one heartbeat and the next. She paused on the track and said softly, “Oh. Hello there.” And in that instant, she felt like herself for the first time since she’d stepped through the final airport security checkpoint and into Jack Williams’s world.
She was aware of his watching her and keeping close as she moved off the track and circled from one infected tree to the next, following where the tendrils grew thicker and thicker, along a wandering line that angled away from the roadway. She dragged her fingertips along the trunks but didn’t touch the tendrils yet. Instead, she cataloged her impressions of the desert-dry backcountry, where the sun beat down even at its fading angle and the dust had a faint tang she couldn’t quite place. What are you? she thought, looking up at the white strands and seeing the way the branches curled inward where they attached, becoming bent, until the most infected of the trees came to look like ancient gnomes, stooped and gnarled, with wispy white hair that trailed nearly to the ground.
“Anything I can help with?” Jack asked.
She looked back at him, startled, both because for a moment she’d almost forgotten he was there and because he actually seemed to mean it. “Actually, there is. Give me the local-level dirt on this place.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How’d you figure me for a local?”
“You mentioned your father and uncle being detectives here, too. I made the leap.”
That earned her a considering look before he nodded and said, “Good leap. Yep, umpteenth-generation local here. My great-something-grandparents helped found the city, and there have been Williamses policing Bear Claw pretty much ever since.”
“Which makes you the perfect person to fill me in on the Forgotten,” she said, turning her attention back to the trees and telling herself there was no reason for her to feel a pang at the confirmation that his roots went deep.
“What do you already know?”
“Pretend I just walked in here with no advance info. You never know what’s going to spark a connection.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I know how that goes. Okay, the Forgotten … Well, it’s a federal buffer zone beyond the state park, too far away from civilization to interest regular campers and not challenging enough to interest the hard-core mountaineers. Doesn’t have anything really in the way of natural resources or any real reason for anybody to pay attention to it, although it recently changed hands, going from federal to the city, and then almost to a public sale.”
“I saw that in the file,” she said, reaching up to sift her fingers through the dry, wispy strands of the parasitic fungus that was gnoming the trees, killing them. What are you? she asked inside. Aloud, she said, “What happened with the sale?”
“Mayor Proudfoot was pushing to sell the land to a private investor who, not surprisingly, dropped the negotiations when things broke.”
“I assume you’ve taken a good, hard look at the investor? It would seem to me that buying the property would be to the militia’s benefit.”
He shot her another sidelong look. “Thought you were a plant … whatever it was.”
“I’ve got a couple of cops in my family. You learn the thought process.” Among other things.
“Well, it’s not a bad theory, but the investor was legit, if an idiot. He had some geologist swearing to him that there’s gold in the area, and thought he was going to put one over on the government by buying the Forgotten and striking it rich.”
“I didn’t think there was gold around here,” she commented as they moved into a clearer area, where infected trees were more sparsely distributed among clusters of huge boulders. These trees were more severely affected than the surrounding clusters, though, which had her antenna quivering. Was there some environmental component at work?
Jack shook his head. “There isn’t any gold. Just some played-out copper mines.”
“Right.”