The pleasure of the beauty of the moment lasted about as long as it took him to notice footprints being rapidly filled in by those relentless flakes. Some of them were coming toward the house. But others led away. Purdy had come but he had not left. Who did the others belong to?
Kye grabbed back the leashes as his K-9s would have charged forward to relieve themselves. “Lily, come.” The toller bounded back toward him, yipping for the sheer pleasure of being out-of-doors. Oleg glanced back, curious about the toller’s actions. Kye reached down and petted his partner. He did not want to give away the fact he was on to their secret visitor. But sweat popped out on his upper lip and trickled down his back. Whoever was out there was probably watching him. And the big white cross on his back might as well have been a bull’s-eye. His main hope, since he hadn’t been shot yet, was that the man was waiting out there to see if his cover was blown. “Search.” He didn’t know the Czech word for search but hoped that Oleg would pick up on Lily’s posture and follow suit.
The toller lifted her head and sniffed the air. She turned her face slowly one way and then the other. Oleg, at the far end of his long lead, paused, looked back, and then his whole body came to attention. At the moment Lily caught a scent, Oleg seemed to fix on something in the distant line of trees.
Kye pulled in a careful breath as Lily yipped in delight and bounded toward Yardley’s vehicle. Oleg on the other hand continued to stare off toward the distant line of trees, where shadows blacked out Kye’s vision of what lay beyond.
Every cell in his body moved to high alert as Kye followed Lily to Yardley’s Jeep. The aching of his face had faded away in the cold. His skin was suddenly an all-surface sensory organ as he strained for sights, the touch of the wind, anything that would give him a whisper of anticipation before disaster struck.
Oleg remained still, his head swiveling in 180-degree angles, as if completely confused by the information he was taking in. Refusing to budge, even when called, Oleg’s rigid stance made Kye feed out leash to the end as Lily bounded toward the Jeep and reared up, pressing her paws against the driver’s-side door.
Dammit. They weren’t alone. And he had no idea who or what or how many.
Then he noticed the tires. They were flat. All four of them.
Oh shit.
Hoping not to give his new knowledge away, he called to Lily in a voice louder than necessary. “Stop farting around and go potty, Lily. Now.”
She glanced at him, her eyebrows doing semaphore signals. He knew she was trying not to let him pull her off a legitimate find.
He pulled out a bit of kibble and held it out. “Here. Good girl, Lily.”
Satisfied that her point had been made, she bounded toward him and took her reward. Then she moved several feet away, circled twice, and took care of business.
All the while Oleg examined the periphery with his back to Kye, silent but alert as any sentry.
It took everything in him to turn his back toward the house. He wondered as he had many times in Afghanistan if that would be his last move, having turned a back on an enemy he could not guess at. But this was the good ol’ U.S. of A. Even a hired gun would want to make a kill look like an accident, not an assassination.
That wishful thought propelled him all the way up the stairs to the front door. But he was definitely in perspiration fail as the door opened and Yardley appeared.
She took one look at him and her gaze said she knew everything. Yet she waited for him to say the words.
Kye looked at Yardley, his heart thumping. His voice was a rough urgent whisper as he reached down to unleash Oleg. “Get back inside. Purdy didn’t come alone.”
As if he’d gotten a signal from some great canine handler in the sky, Oleg turned, grazed Kye’s hand with his teeth, and then bolted away.
Yardley gasped. “He bit you?”
Kye examined his offended hand. “He barely broke the skin. I think he just needed to get away in the worst way.”
“He’s trained to self-deploy when there’s danger.”
By the time he turned to the night, Oleg was nothing more than a smoky phantom blending into the white night as he sped away toward the tree line. He looked back at her grim-faced. “You’re going to have to explain that dog’s skill set when there’s time.”
He had hoped not to give away the fact that he knew they had company. But Oleg’s defection probably blew that hope to smithereens. Whoever was out there was about to find himself at the business end of one very touchy canine.
Self-deploy. Unless Oleg could take their enemy down alone, they were worse off than before, with Yardley now unprotected by K-9 power.
Heart hammering, Kye remembered that though he was trying to behave in a way that didn’t alert their intruder, they were sitting ducks. He shifted his body protectively in front of hers as he grabbed her by the arm to push her back inside the safety of the house.
Bristling at his treatment she waited until he had locked and bolted the door before she got up in his face. “Tell me what’s going on?”
Before he could answer the lights went out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO