Rocky Mountain Lawman

chapter 7



Three days later, Sky was convinced the problem, whatever it had been, was over. Craig patrolled but didn’t find anything untoward. She went out and painted and no one bothered her. She wandered in the woods sometimes, enjoying the way light and shadow danced beneath the trees. She even found an absolutely perfect ravine, narrow and deep, full of large boulders, some of them still sharp in comparison to those worn by the water that raced through it almost but not quite like a waterfall.

The place was so full of power, the power of rocks, water and trees, that she fell in love with it. Ideas for paintings buzzed around in her mind, demanding expression.

This was what she had come all the way out here for, to find the essential creativity, to feel again the energy trying to burst out through her paintbrushes.

Enthralled, she snapped photos even though the light was dim in this tree-sheltered space, filtered and green for the most part although here and there the sun broke through to sparkle almost blindingly on water.

Moss covered a lot of the rocks, but the ones that interested her most were the ones that were bare. Rocks had always appealed to her in some way, the larger the better, and she thought these were gorgeous.

She was definitely bringing her gear back here.

She sat for a while on a flat-top rock with water rushing along one side of it, feeling as if she had fallen into a magical world. Well, these mountains seemed magical everywhere she went, but this place heightened that sense.

It was the kind of place that made her think a faerie could pop out from behind a tree, or even that a tree could slowly stir and talk to her. Fanciful thoughts, but they added to her pleasure. If humans had ever passed by here before, they had left no trace at all. It would have been easy to believe that she was the first person who had ever set foot here.

Part of the charm, she supposed, was that everything in the larger world seemed so far away. As if it were all the stuff of dreams, and the only reality surrounded her right now. Her thirsty soul reached for the beauty and soaked it up until she felt filled with it.

Hypnotized by the rushing water, she lost track of time. She didn’t even notice that the light seemed to be lessening, deepening the secrets of the ravine and woods until that snaking, icy, breath-freezing sense of being watched crept up her spine to the base of her skull.

Damn, she was getting sick of that. It destroyed her mood as surely as if someone had fired a gun, and it made her mad. But mad at what? An owl? A raccoon? A mountain lion?

She muttered a cuss word under her breath, not that anything could have heard it over the crashing, rushing water. Hell, she couldn’t even hear it herself.

But long training and honed instincts wouldn’t let her ignore it. Grabbing her camera, she rose and started climbing out of the gorge. She half hoped she’d meet some idiot human so she would have someone to yell at.

But of course she didn’t. Even if there was a person out here, there were too many places to provide concealment, even unintentional concealment. She’d forgotten her most basic training about keeping open sight lines, and she didn’t care.

She was just mad, and dang it, she would come back here tomorrow to paint.

Near the top of the gorge wall, she caught a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. At once she froze and slowly turned her head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe a leaf had fluttered.

Except that the movement had left her with an impression of something considerably bigger. She resumed climbing again, but her senses were on heightened alert now. Anger had been forgotten in the possibility that whatever was watching her didn’t want to be seen. There were predators out here, not all of them human, although she feared the human ones the most.

She needed her hands to climb this wall, and right now she didn’t like not having them free. She quickened her pace to the top, and finally reached a point where she could stand without hanging on to rocks. Turning, she looked back.

The trees seemed to have closed in over the gorge, hiding it from sight once more. She could tell it was there only by the muffled sound of the racing, tumbling water. It was as if an invisible door had sealed behind her.

But standing there and looking back at the canopy of trees gave her the opportunity to look around. Nothing moved except gently swaying tree branches as the afternoon cooled and the evening breeze began to pick up.

But she was still in the woods, though they weren’t as thick here, above the life-giving water. She began to trudge back to where she had left her painting supplies, sweeping the ground with her eyes, seeking any obvious disturbance among the carpet of pine needles and leaves. Nothing.

Maybe she was beginning to lose her mind in a whole new way.

Twenty minutes later she emerged onto the sunny hilltop where she usually painted in time to see the sun sink below the western peaks. Still so early, but she loved the way this premature twilight settled in. It would last a long time, but from her artist’s perspective the light had lost its magic, growing flat, diminishing perspective.

She reached her supplies, which she hadn’t fully unpacked yet since she had decided to hunt up a new place to paint, and bent to start picking them up.

She froze again. She knew how she’d laid things out. It was darn near an unbreakable habit to put everything in exactly the same place so she wouldn’t have to hunt for things when she was working.

But something had moved. All of it had moved, she thought, but there was one thing she was absolutely certain had. She would have bet every last dime in her bank account that she hadn’t left her palette on top of her paint box. The first place she always put that was right in front of her portable easel.

She had caught her hair up in a bun for walking through the woods. A few hairs at the nape had escaped, and now the breeze blew them about. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have noticed, but right now they felt like the caress of icy fingers.

Somebody had touched her things. Probably gone through them. Her reaction to that was immediate and intense, and it wasn’t fear she felt. She reached into her paint box and pulled out a couple of palette knives. They didn’t look dangerous, but in the right hands, used the right way, they could be deadly.

She stuffed them in her pockets, then straightened, looking around the clearing. Then she saw bent grasses leading toward the woods she had just come from, but they weren’t her path. So someone had come here and followed her to the ravine? And it was clear they had tried not to leave an obvious trail, otherwise she would have seen it upon emerging from the woods.

In fact, it could easily have been an animal that crossed the clearing, except for her palette. No animal would have done that.

What were the chances, she wondered, that whoever had followed her into the woods was still there somewhere? And if he was, how smart would it be to let him know what she had realized?

Slim and not at all, she decided, squashing down the anger that made her want to take off after the guy. He’d be long gone. Hell, even if he wasn’t, he could see her coming. Finding someone in those woods wouldn’t be easy.

Nor would it be smart to let him know he’d been found out. Damn it. Frustrated that her only smart move seemed to be to sit here for a while, then pack up and leave, she had to battle an innate need to act. She always wanted to act, and talking herself out of it wasn’t easy.

But it was a lesson she had learned: sometimes no action was the best action.

That first day when Buddy had accused her of spying, the wise course had been to leave. She wasn’t looking for trouble, the guy appeared to be a nut and standing her ground could have become costly at the time. It was one of those times she was grateful for her instinctive slowness to react in non-life-threatening situations, because a reaction at that time would have only caused trouble and solved nothing.

But the situation had shifted, and wisdom no longer advised her to cede ground. Well, maybe wisdom would but sometimes wisdom was wrong. If someone was taking this much interest in her activities, then there was very definitely something going on down there that wasn’t entirely copacetic. Something they didn’t want anybody to know about, even an artist who was just passing through.

That sounded like something a whole lot more serious than simply storing up food against some hypothetical Armageddon.

The suspicion swept her past simply being concerned about Craig needing backup. She had taken an oath long ago when she had donned an army uniform, and to her way of thinking, leaving the army didn’t void that oath. If these guys were up to something bad, she still had a duty to protect her fellow citizens and the Constitution. That, too, had been woven into the fabric of her being.

A lot had become part of her during her years of service, like duty and honor and responsibility. Things like supporting her fellow soldiers no matter what, never shirking a job for any reason... Well, she didn’t need to run through the whole list as she sat there listening for any unnatural sound. The point was, enough had happened to make this her fight, too. Quite enough. And unless those nuts in their compound across the valley turned out to be total innocents, it would remain her fight.

Finally she felt she had sat there long enough to make it seem like she hadn’t noticed anything—assuming she was still being watched, but that feeling had gone away back at the gorge. Regardless, it wouldn’t look hurried or worried now for her to gather her gear and head for the car.

She hoped Craig didn’t stay in the field tonight. She needed to talk to him. She thought about calling him on the radio but decided against it. Radio silence right now might be wise. There was no guarantee the guys across the valley weren’t monitoring the forest service frequencies, and given how paranoid they were beginning to appear, she thought it entirely possible.

She made her way through the woods and back to her car. For a few minutes she considered driving down to the headquarters building, or even going into town, but she really didn’t need anything yet, and for some reason either option felt entirely too much like flight at the moment. She didn’t like running, no matter what specious reason she might be able to come up with.

So she headed back to the cabin, hoping that Craig wouldn’t suddenly decide to take it into his head to sleep under the stars. Considering he had said how much he enjoyed that, she was surprised he’d been joining her at the cabin every night. Summer, and the opportunity to sleep under the stars, wouldn’t last forever.

* * *

Craig didn’t like what he was finding as he poked around the streams in the vicinity of Buddy’s property. Nothing was blocked by so much as a beaver dam, but that wasn’t what got his attention.

No, it was the damn trip wires. They ringed Buddy’s property, but at no time did he have an excuse to get close enough to find out what they were connected to. He was going to have to come over here after dark.

It was late afternoon, and he meandered along the valley stream, still wondering why it was so low. He’d expected to find a fallen boulder here and there, blocking one of the bigger streams, or even several blocking smaller streams, although as a rule the water soon overtopped such hindrances and found its way down.

He began to think somebody had dammed some rivers that he couldn’t get to, and there was only one place around here that could happen: on Buddy’s property.

Water was scarce enough around here. Water rights could be fiercely fought over, sometimes reaching a level a person might almost call a war. But Buddy didn’t have anybody downstream of him to get riled, which left the forest service.

Damned if he could prove the diminished flow in the valley arose from a dam or anything except maybe, just possibly, part of the mountains hadn’t had their usual snowfall. He took a few flow measurements to compare to the past few years, but they wouldn’t prove anything either.

If Buddy had dammed a stream, he had violated his agreement with the service. He was damaging the ecology. Proving it, and figuring out how much right he had to intervene anyway, wasn’t going to be easy.

Troubling him equally was that Buddy had never done such a thing in the past. Assuming he felt he needed to hang on to more water for the late summer and early fall when it would get really dry, what had changed from past years? The addition of Cap and his friends? Some so-called strategic thinking? Was he anticipating imminent apocalypse? If so, why?

Feeling frustrated and more than a little annoyed, Craig turned Dusty and headed back up the valley, intending to go to the cabin to meet Sky. Amazing how fast she had captivated him. He couldn’t imagine not spending the evenings with her, and wondered if he was going to be able to go back to his solitary existence without pining for her company.

She was great company. Quiet, funny when she wanted to be and just plain comfortable to be with. The only time he got edgy around her was when he noticed she was an attractive woman. He’d been working on not noticing—unsuccessfully. It was sort of like telling himself not to think about the elephant in the room.

A quiet chuckle escaped him. He turned Dusty up the hillside, an unmistakable anticipation growing in him as he drew nearer to the cabin.

A movement to the side caught his eye, and he turned to look. He immediately recognized one of his fellow rangers, Don Capehart, riding toward him on Dusty’s twin. He waved and waited for Don to reach him.

Don drew up alongside him, a blond man of about thirty whose skin didn’t take kindly to the high-altitude summer sun. He was looking a little red and probably wouldn’t tan, but he didn’t seem to care. “Big doings?” Don said as they shook hands. “Lucy kind of filled me in.”

“There’s not a whole lot to fill in yet. Let’s keep riding. There’s a definite sense lately that everything we do around here is being watched.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I don’t think it is. Buddy Jackson has trip wires around his entire property, and I can’t get close enough to tell what they’re hooked up to. If it’s not just some kind of alert, getting close could be dangerous anyway.”

“So you’re thinking about looking after dark?”

Craig looked at him again. “You know me too well.”

“Well, it’s your job. Kind of my job, too.”

“You’re not law enforcement.”

“So? You’re not a firefighter either. That didn’t keep you out of Spruce Valley last summer. Where are you headed?”

“To the cabin. My artist friend is probably already there. You should probably hear us both out.”

Don nodded. “Fair enough. Some of the others are hanging out around here now. I wish we had more manpower.”

“Take it up with Congress.”

Don laughed. “Yeah, that works so well. I think we’re at the bottom of the list anyway with the department.”

“Can’t blame ’em. We’re not the busiest of forests, and we’re relatively new.”

“Keeping an eye on the loggers is practically a full-time job. I caught them trying to cut some untagged trees yesterday. It’s always fun to have a shouting match with a bunch of guys armed with chain saws.”

Now Craig laughed. “How’d it go?”

“Well, the threat of losing their contract had to come up. But they got to spew and cuss, and just generally vent. They calmed down, but I’m going to need to check on them again soon.”

“Gotta love it. We spend months figuring out which trees need to go, and how many to preserve for the health of the ecology, and they still want to clear-cut.”

“Hey, those are publically owned trees. Surely you’ve heard that.”

“More times than I can count. They seem to forget they’re not the entire public.”

Don laughed, too. “I’m sure they’re cutting more than they should. They always do.”

“That’s what happens when you go with the lowest bidder.”

“You mean like us?”

They were still laughing and joking when they reached the cabin, acting like they hadn’t a care in the world. When Craig saw that Sky’s car was already there, parked beside his forest service truck, he felt his spirits rise.

Damn, he shouldn’t let a woman who was passing through make him feel this way. He didn’t want to feel loss when she left, didn’t want his love of the forest’s solitude to be dimmed by the transition of a single person through his life. But already it was feeling too late.

He sighed as he and Don took their mounts to the corral and cared for them. All too soon he heard a voice that he had become attached to.

“Hi,” Sky called.

Saddle in his hands, he turned. Don, who had been checking his horse’s hooves, straightened and looked around.

“You’ve been keeping a secret,” Don said under his breath. “She’s gorgeous.”

“I’m surprised Lucy didn’t tell you.”

Don cracked a laugh as the two of them walked over to the fence rail. Craig balanced his saddle on it and brushed his hands on his pants.

“Sky, this is Don Capehart. Don, Sky Jamison, the artist you’ve been hearing about.”

Sky put out her hand across the rail. “Nice to meet you. Will you stay for dinner?”

Don’s smile was a bit too wide and warm for Craig’s comfort. Yet he had no right to be bothered by it. That might have galled him most of all.

“I’d be delighted,” Don answered. “In fact, I’ll even help if you can wait to start until after I finish taking care of Tragic over there.”

Sky’s brow lifted. “Tragic? What a name!”

“He’s Dusty’s twin and I guess he got the name because he was so small as a foal that nobody expected him to survive. At least that’s the story they gave me.”

“You couldn’t guess that now,” Sky said.

“Not every runt is lost.”

Feeling slightly disgruntled, knowing he had no right and that it was therefore stupid, Craig headed back to continue caring for Dusty. “How was your day?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Very interesting. I almost radioed you, then thought better of it.”

He paused midstride and turned to face her. “What happened?”

“Nothing serious, but enough. Let’s talk about it when you fellows are done out here.”

He expected her to head back inside, but instead she put a hiking-boot-encased foot on the lower rail, leaned her elbows on the upper rail and watched them finish. Don didn’t unsaddle Tragic, however, so at least he didn’t intend to spend the night here. Small blessings, Craig thought sourly.

Then he wondered why he should care. If Don took her attention, his problems were over, right?

At last the horses were fed and watered. Stopping at the outside pump, the two men rinsed quickly in icy water, then accompanied Sky inside.

She had lit enough oil lamps to make the interior feel cozy as twilight deepened, and the fire was going strong. She had made coffee, too, and poured some for them. Then they gathered at the small table, the only place to sit other than the single armchair.

“So what happened?” Craig asked.

“It wasn’t exactly a happening,” she said. “I found this great ravine I want to paint, but while I was sitting there I got the distinct feeling I was being watched. So I headed back to the place where I’ve been painting, and found that someone had been through my stuff. I could even see where they had followed me from there to the ravine.”

Don spoke. “Sure it wasn’t an animal?”

“An animal would have knocked my things around, not simply moved my palette to a different place. Everything was disturbed, but only a little. If I weren’t such a creature of habit in how I lay out my painting gear, I’d never have noticed.”

Craig nodded. “I take it you drew a conclusion?”

She nodded. “If they’re paranoid enough to follow a mere artist, those guys are up to something not good.”

Craig looked at Don, whose eyes had narrowed. “I agree,” he said.

Craig nodded. “I agree.” He turned his attention back to Sky. “You shouldn’t be out there alone.”

“I doubt they’ve got more than one guy looking, and trust me, they don’t know what they’re bargaining for if they bother me. I went through advanced infantry training and I had the opportunity to use a lot of it in Iraq.”

He watched her eyes grow distant, and felt his chest tighten. He hoped she wasn’t about to pull back into that place inside her, but then her gaze cleared. “They don’t want to know what I can do with a simple palette knife.”

He felt Don shift a little beside him, probably with discomfort. Don had never been in the military. But Craig looked at Sky with perfect understanding. These were the things that set combat vets apart: they knew what they were capable of. It wasn’t always easy to live with, but they knew.

“Anyway,” she said, brushing it aside, “I’m not worried about one of them.”

“Probably no reason to be,” Craig said. “They think you’re out there just painting.”

“They should believe it now that they looked through my gear.”

He left it at that, although he wasn’t as sanguine about it as he appeared. The whole idea that they were following her this way was problematic. Too much interest in someone they thought was just painting. Maybe having her stay at the cabin wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe hanging out with her so much wasn’t a good idea. What if he’d put her at risk?

He didn’t say any more about it, but instead got busy with dinner. Sky wanted to help, but he and Don made a big show of waiting on her, which at least made her laugh at their foolishness. It was good to hear her laugh.

All the while he wrestled with telling her to clear out. Go to town, paint somewhere else. He doubted she’d listen, but he had to be able to live with his conscience.

That moment when she had made the remark about the palette knife troubled him, though. Not because it wasn’t true, but because this situation had cast her back to a time she probably didn’t want to relive anymore than he did.

There were times in life when you did what you had to, but you didn’t have to feel good about it. You made some kind of peace, if you could, and moved on. And now she was moving back because of that jackass and his prepper fantasies about standing alone against a world gone mad. A man who’d been relatively quiet and harmless about it until this new crowd showed up.

Who was Cap and how many men had he brought with him? It sure didn’t look as if another family had joined Buddy, but rather a small—very small—army. In which case there might well be trouble of some kind.

Problem was, as the man had said, when the only tool you had was a hammer, everything looked like a nail. Some militia types could easily have that problem. All that firepower and paranoia induced a built-in response. Even to solitary artists on the wrong hillside. Had it gone that far?

He ruminated about ways he could approach Buddy again without setting off alarms, but didn’t immediately come up with one. Gage had been out there just a few days ago. Another visit so soon would ring alarm bells.

“You going out tonight?” Don suddenly asked.

They were done with dinner now and having coffee at the table. “Not tonight,” Craig said. “Tomorrow. Maybe. I’m still trying to think of a reason to approach Buddy again without making him nervous.”

“Better to talk if we can. Did you ever find why the river is so low?”

“No, damn it, not yet. And I can’t exactly prove it’s too dry.”

“It’s too dry,” Don said flatly. “We know that. But you’re right, proving it is tough.”

“I’ve used the flow meter a few times, in a couple of different places, but I need to compare it with past readings.”

“It would be interesting to know if there’s some place where the flow is normal.”

Craig shrugged. “That’s just as hard as anything else. It seems normal upstream from Buddy’s place, but there’s always a whole lot less water there anyway. Nothing yet I can pin on him.”

“He might not even be responsible.” Don shook his head. “How about I go over there. I can act like we haven’t even discussed it and ask him if he’s noticed anything. Tell him I’ve been traveling from downstream because the water volume appears to be down.”

“I did that already. He claimed he didn’t know anything about it. But it made a good excuse for looking over a lot of streams around his place. I don’t think he’d go for it a second time. Would you?”

“Probably not. Okay, I’ll think on it and see you here tomorrow night. If you’re going over there, you’re not going alone.”

After Don said good-night and rode away, Craig found himself facing Sky, who appeared quite annoyed. “You’re absolutely not proposing a solo night recon over there.”

“Solo is the best way to go.”

She cussed a word he’d never heard pass her lips before and stormed into the cabin. Wow, that was some reaction. He kinda liked the fire in her eyes. Almost as if an invisible cord pulled him, he followed her inside. He found her tossing another split log on the fire, which really didn’t require it, but apparently she needed something to do.

He stood just inside the door, waiting for the thunder and lightning. He suspected she wasn’t the type to keep silent if she didn’t have to, and right now she didn’t have to.

“Are you an idiot?” she asked him eventually, her voice far too calm.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he answered easily, wondering where this was going and rather curious about it.

“You have the training to know better.”

“I also have the training. Don doesn’t. Good as he may be, I might as well take a rhinoceros over there with me.”

He caught the corner of her mouth twitching, as if humor had almost overcome her, but then it thinned out again. He realized he was enjoying this.

“Craig...you don’t know what those trip wires are attached to.”

“I need to find out.”

“For all you know they’re patrolling the boundary every night. You don’t even know how many of them there are.”

“I need to find that out, too.”

She slammed the stove door shut and twisted the lock. “Solo recon is a suicide mission. You know that. I shouldn’t even have to remind you.”

“Remind away.”

Her eyes sparked as she glared at him. “What if those trip wires are hooked up to explosives? Have you considered that?”

“Absolutely. That’s why I need to get close enough to look, and I can’t do that in broad daylight.”

“Doing it at night will get you turned into hamburger. What if those guys have C-4?”

“They could have dynamite for all the difference it will make. But I’ve got to find out more about what’s going on.”

“What made it so important? Water?”

“No. The fact they’re watching you. You said it yourself, if they’re worried about a painter, they’ve got something to hide, and people with something to hide are generally up to no good. Somebody has to find out.”

“Then call the damn ATF. That’s their job.”

“I would if I had any evidence for them. What have we got, Sky? A lot of supposition, and some guys who are apparently creeping around in the woods and just generally acting like people who creep. Creeping and being a creep aren’t illegal.”

She glared for another moment, then a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “That’s a lot of creep.”

He had to smile back. “I’m not a writer. So, okay, seriously, what do we really know? Not enough to call the ATF. A few guys running around in camouflage with apparently legal AR-15s isn’t going to make a case. Since I can hardly go up to them and ask if they’ve rigged those guns for automatic fire instead of semi-automatic, I’ve got to find something else. Or find out that they’re not doing anything wrong at all and we can just ignore them.”

“Ignoring them isn’t at the top of my list,” she admitted. “Not after today. Okay, I’ll go with you on recon.”

“No. You stay here.”

Her chin set visibly. “If I were standing here in uniform, would you say that? Cut the chauvinist protective stuff. I’m trained, too.”

He folded his arms. “You know, it was so much easier in the old days.”

“These aren’t the old days.”

“No kidding. I’m not trying to be chauvinistic. I know better. The thing is, protection is my job. It’s not yours. I’ve got no business dragging a visitor into any of this.”

“If I recall correctly, Buddy dragged me into this.”

Right then he had an overwhelming urge to drag her into his arms and kiss her until her lips were swollen, her body limp in his arms and her eyes hazy with desire. He didn’t need a neon sign, though, to warn him this was exactly the wrong time to play caveman.

But she was something else, standing her ground like this, giving him what-for. He’d seen her in a time of weakness, and now he was seeing the steel core at her center. She was magnificent.

He suspected that wouldn’t be a good thing to say right now either. So he waited.

When she spoke, her tone had moderated, but remained forceful. “If those guys aren’t just playing, if they’re up to something that could hurt someone, then it’s my business, too. I took an oath and it didn’t end the day I ditched my uniform.”

She was boxing him in with arguments he couldn’t dismiss. He knew exactly what she meant, just as he’d understood when she had insisted she wouldn’t abandon a buddy. Some things just ran too deep.

But damn, it was frustrating when all he wanted to do was settle this issue without dragging her into trouble. Hell, there might not be any trouble, but at the moment he wouldn’t bet on it.

She poured coffee and settled in the one padded chair. He poured himself some more, too, and took a bench. Staring into his mug, he thought it all over one more time. Each little piece and how they kept adding up. Any way he looked at it, a certainty gnawed at him that those guys were up to no good. He could not ignore it.

And glancing at Sky, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to keep her out of it. He couldn’t order her to leave, and as long as she remained she might be at risk. Today had pretty much made that clear.

He thought about asking her if she’d go somewhere else but he already knew what her answer would be. No doubt of it.

Sky was loaded for bear.