by Diana Palmer
She felt empty. Hollow. Sick at heart. Everyone had tried to protect her from this man. She’d asked them to. She had no idea of the real situation. Now that she knew it, she hated realizing she’d cut her own throat three years ago. He hadn’t turned away out of disinterest. Circumstances had unfolded to keep him away.
He stood up abruptly, frowning. Then he strode back to the car, to Phoebe’s surprise, and drew out what he’d taken from her desk drawer. He walked back and handed her the charm. “Put this, and the pesos, in your right slacks pocket.”
She knew it would do no good to argue. He trusted his father’s mystic powers too much. “Okay, okay.” She slid the two pieces together and inserted them in her pocket. Then she turned back to follow the track when she felt a sudden thrust that knocked her completely off her feet. A fraction of a second later, there was a sharp crack like thunder.
“Phoebe!”
Cortez had his gun out and was firing from a kneeling position toward the direction the shot had come from. There was another crack and dust flew up near Cortez, but seconds later, there was a loud thud and the sound of an engine firing. It was followed by a vehicle spraying gravel in the near distance.
Cortez didn’t wait for it to fade. He was already kneeling beside Phoebe, his hands quick and deft on her body. “Are you hit? Tell me!”
She groaned, rolled up into a ball. “Oh, it hurts!” she ground out.
“Phoebe, are you hit?!” he demanded, each word deliberate.
She managed to uncurl her legs with an effort. Her hand went to the right side of her stomach. “I don’t…feel blood,” she whispered.
He unzipped her jeans and stripped them down over her hips before she had time to protest. There was no wound, but there was the beginning of a terrible bruise near where her appendix should be. He felt just above it and his knuckles brushed the heavy pesos he’d just made her put in her pocket. He felt sick.
They exchanged a stunned look. He slid his hand into the pocket and pulled out the charm and the coins. There was a hole through the center of one peso and a bullet was embedded in the second one behind it. His father’s foresight had spared her life.
“It would have hit the femoral artery,” he said in a ghostly tone. “You’d have bled to death before I could have gotten you to a hospital.”
She shivered. “He knew…your father knew!”
He gathered her close and sat down in the dirt, holding her tight. He rocked her, mindless at the thought of what could have happened.
“The shooter got away,” she whispered into his throat.
His arms tightened. “First things first.” He kissed her temple and took a long, heavy breath. He jerked up the cell phone he wore on his belt and pressed in numbers with one hand.
“I need an ambulance and Yonah County deputy sheriff Drake Stewart to come immediately to the back of the Benning construction site. It’s located at the end of Deal Street at a cave in a stand of fir trees. It’s just outside the city limits of Chenocetah,” he said. “We’re about a hundred yards from the boundary of the Yonah Indian Reservation on a dirt road.”
“Who is this?” a bored voice replied.
“Special Agent Jeremiah Cortez, FBI,” he replied tersely. “There’s been a shooting. Tell Stewart to come to the dead end and look in the woods on the right.”
“Just a sec!” the 911 operator said. “I’ll dispatch him. Stay on the line.”
“No time,” Cortez said. “The perp’s getting away.”
He hung up and pressed in more numbers while Phoebe lay against him, still in pain. “I need an evidence team out here in Jones’s van,” he said. “I’ll give you directions.”
“That was my unit,” he told Phoebe when he completed the call. He ground his teeth together. “Listen, I’m going to have to put you in the ambulance. I can’t go with you.” It seemed to be killing him that he couldn’t. “I have to wait for my unit to get here to gather evidence. With any luck, there may be a shell casing.”
“It’s all right,” she said huskily. “I’m a big girl. I can ride in an ambulance all alone.”
He didn’t smile, as he might have once. “You could have been killed,” he growled.
She met his tormented eyes evenly and forced herself to smile through the pain. “His mistake. He slipped up. We’ll get him.”
“I never expected danger out here,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it. “I’d never have asked you to come with me if I’d had any idea this could happen!”
She reached up a hand and touched it to his mouth. “This is much better than explaining myself to an angry grammar school teacher. Trust me.”
He caught the hand and kissed the palm hungrily.
His concern unsettled her. She hadn’t expected that strong a reaction. “I’m going to be fine. Then we’re going to catch this fool and put him away. Right?”
“Right,” he said in a strangled voice.
“You just keep that in mind and stop flogging yourself. Who would have expected somebody to start shooting the minute we got out of the car?”
“I spooked somebody,” he said coldly.
“How?”
He started to answer her, but the sirens drowned him out. Drake slid to a stop just behind the ambulance. The paramedics were beside Phoebe in less than three minutes with a gurney.
Cortez explained what had happened while they worked on Phoebe. Drake was furious.
“One of us needs to go with her,” Drake said flatly.
“My unit’s on the way,” Cortez said through his teeth, having reluctantly released Phoebe to the paramedics. “I can’t leave.”
Drake turned to him. The other man’s face was rigid with frustrated concern. “Don’t worry. I’ll go with her. She’ll be all right…I promise.”
That seemed to calm Cortez, but only on the surface. He couldn’t get the image of seeing Phoebe dead out of his mind.
“She’s all right,” Drake said firmly, looking stern. “You just catch the perp, okay? I’ll take care of her.”
Cortez took a steadying breath. “When I find him,” he said through his teeth, “he’s going to wish he lived on another continent.”
“Good man. I’ll get you some more bullets for your gun,” Drake promised, clapping him on the shoulder and smiling forcefully. “Now go to work. Phoebe’s going to be fine.”
Cortez paused by the gurney when the paramedics had loaded Phoebe up and voiced the opinion that it wasn’t going to be serious.
He caught her hand in his and held on tight. “I’ll be along when I get through here. Drake’s going with you.”
“Ah,” she surmised. “The indigenous people closing ranks.”
He smiled gently. “Something like that.” He kissed her fingers and laid them back at her waist. “Do what the doctor says.”
“Where’s my charm?” she asked at once.
Cortez grimaced. “Material evidence.”
“The coins are. The charm isn’t. Give it here,” she added.
With a sigh, he produced it and laid it in her hand.
“Your father,” she says, “really knows his business.”
“I told you so. Be safe.”
“You, too. You’re not bulletproof and you don’t have one of these.” She held up the charm.
He pursed his lips, reached into his pocket and produced a charm identical to hers. “He said I wouldn’t need the coins.”
She made a face, and then she smiled to reassure him. He did look so worried.
Drake climbed into the back of the ambulance with her after radioing for another deputy to pick him up at the hospital emergency room later and take him back to his car. The paramedics closed their back door on a somber-faced Cortez, still holding his charm.
“What’s with the charm?” Drake asked.
“Cortez’s father made it for me three years ago,” she said, wincing. The bruising was really starting to hurt. “He added two Mexican pesos to it today. Jeremiah had just told me to put them
in my pocket, exactly where his father said to keep it, when someone shot me. If I hadn’t had them there, I’d be dead. It hit just beside my femoral artery.”
Drake whistled. “That’s heavy medicine.”
“Tell me about it. Jeremiah’s father is a shaman. He also has some sort of precognition. I’m not sure I believed in all that before—I do now.”
“No wonder. What were you and Cortez doing out there?”
“Investigating some caves the murdered anthropologist had visited. The caves were behind the Bennett construction site. We got shot at almost as soon as we arrived.” Phoebe closed her eyes, then opened them wide.
“I just want to get patched up and help you find the person who fired that shot. Then I want five minutes alone with them!”
“I’ll give you some lessons in martial arts first,” Drake teased.
She let out a tautly held breath. “This really hurts. It didn’t break the skin, but it bruised me really bad.” Her hand pressed gingerly against the point of impact.
Drake changed the subject, trying not to think how much damage a traumatic blow could do to flesh, even without penetration. He’d seen a blow to the ribs produce bruising in the lung which led to internal bleeding, even to death.
Later, at the hospital, they did all sorts of tests before the doctor, a young, dark-haired woman, holding a chart, walked into the room they’d given Phoebe.
She glanced over the clipboard and raised her eyebrows at the slight young blond woman in the bed.
“If somebody had shot me,” the doctor pondered aloud, “I’d be screaming my head off. You’re calm for a woman in your condition.”
Phoebe sighed. “I’m an anthropologist. Indiana Jones?” she prompted. “Fedora hat, long black whip, attitude problem…?”
The doctor chuckled. “Okay, I get the point.”
Drake stuck his head in the door. “I have to leave,” he told Phoebe. “Another deputy’s picking me up out front. They need me to help interview people near the construction site—even the part-timers have been called in. Is she going to be okay, Doc?” he asked the physician.
“Yes,” the doctor said.
Drake gave her a thumbs-up. “I’ll call you later,” he told Phoebe, and then he was gone.
“Now,” the doctor said, leaning against the wall near Phoebe’s headboard to thumb through the lab work. “You’ve got some bad bruising in your groin, in an area substantially larger than where a bullet would have hit you. Which brings to mind another question, why didn’t it penetrate?”
“I was carrying two thick Mexican pesos in the pocket where the bullet hit,” Phoebe said matter-of-factly. “It went through one and was imbedded in the second.”
The doctor’s thin eyebrows arched. “You expected to be shot and prepared ahead?”
Phoebe grimaced. “Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.”
“I’m a doctor. I’ve seen a man shot at point-blank range with both barrels of a shotgun walk a mile to get help and survive,” the doctor said, holding out her hand palm-up. “Let’s have it.”
Phoebe told her.
The doctor didn’t say anything for a minute. Her eyes went back to the lab reports. “I’d send that shaman a birthday present for the rest of his life.”
“I intend to. He saved me.”
“Why were you shot, do you know?”
“I was helping an FBI agent track a suspicious vehicle in a homicide investigation,” Phoebe replied calmly.
The doctor blinked. “The FBI?”
She nodded. “He’s part of the new Indian Country FBI Crime Unit. He came here to investigate a homicide on the Yonah Reservation.”
“And you can track.”
“Assist,” she clarified.
“Was there some particular reason you went with him?”
“Yes. He’d just kissed me half to death in the museum where I work. A grammar school class stopped by to watch. It was either go tracking or explain myself to a very angry teacher.” She grimaced. “I picked the lesser of the two evils. I like to think of it as exercising the better part of valor.”
The doctor burst out laughing. “Well, you’re lucky. Or blessed. Or you have a guardian among the little people.”
“Leprechauns?” Phoebe asked.
“Nunnehi,” the doctor corrected. “The Cherokee say the little people protect travelers in the woods. They can hear them singing sometimes in the distance. Lovely legend, isn’t it?”
Singing. In the distance. In Cherokee. Phoebe didn’t say a word, but her mind was busy recalling the melody she’d heard in the wee hours of the morning a few days ago.
SIX HOURS LATER, a weary Drake, who had returned to the hospital, drove her home. The staff had wanted to keep her overnight, but they couldn’t find anything severe enough to warrant it. Phoebe had good insurance, but she didn’t want to have to use it on something non-life-threatening.
When they got back to her house, Cortez was pacing on the front porch.
“He phoned me every hour on the hour,” Drake confessed. “I had to tell him we were on the way, or he was going to storm the hospital.”
She smiled wearily. “No problem.” In fact, it touched her that Cortez was that concerned, but she wasn’t admitting it.
Drake pulled up in front of her house and cut off the engine. He got out to open her door, but Cortez was there first. He slid an arm around her waist and helped her into the house.
“I was expecting you to pick her up and carry her in,” Drake teased.
“He can’t lift,” Phoebe said simply. “He caught some shrapnel in the shoulder when he was in Vietnam during the last days our troops were stationed there.”
Drake pursed his lips.
Cortez’s eyes softened. “I’d forgotten that I told you that,” he said.
Phoebe cleared her throat, embarrassed.
“Sometimes we get second chances,” Drake said to nobody in particular.
“Like Phoebe just did,” Cortez replied. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. His long hair was loose, but untidy, as if restless hands had mussed it. “And that’s why I’m not leaving her out here alone in the wilderness all night.”
Phoebe hesitated. Then she realized that something was missing. “Jock!” she exclaimed, immediately fearful that her would-be assassin had gotten to her dog.
“He’s being boarded at the local animal hospital,” Cortez replied at once. “They’re going to spoil him rotten.”
“But, you can’t do that!” she exclaimed.
“I just did. Pack a bag, Phoebe,” Cortez said quietly. “You’re moving in with Tina and me at the motel for the duration.”
“Duration?”
“Until we catch the guy who’s doing this,” Cortez said. “And you’d better remember that he was aiming to kill. If it hadn’t been for my dad’s foresight, you’d be in the morgue.”
Phoebe felt the blood leave her face. She sat down heavily on the arm of her sofa.
“Sorry,” Cortez bit off. “I didn’t mean to put it like that.”
“He’s right, though,” Drake jumped in. “You can’t stay out here alone. He won’t stop. Next time, he won’t rest on one good shot, either.”
“Exactly,” Cortez replied.
Phoebe ground her teeth together. “It will look like I’m running!”
The two men exchanged a complicated look. “Think of it as advancing to the rear,” Cortez said after a minute. “Even Quanah Parker, one of our greatest Comanche warriors, did that from time to time. Nobody would ever call him a coward. Right?” he asked Drake.
Drake nodded. “Right.”
She gnawed her lower lip worriedly. “It won’t look right…”
“You’ll be in Tina’s room, with Joseph,” Cortez said patiently. “I’ll be right next door. You’ll be safe.”
In the room with the baby. The baby was the reason Cortez had deserted Phoebe and married a woman he didn’t even love. It wasn’t the child’s fault, but it would re
vive a painful memory. She hated the whole idea of it. But staying here alone was terrifying, especially now that he’d removed her only protection—Jock.
“You’ll like Tina,” Drake coaxed. “She’s really nice.”
“Yes, she is,” Cortez assured her.
“Is she kin to your late wife?” she asked Cortez.
“She’s my cousin,” he said slowly.
Sometimes people married their cousins, she was thinking…although she didn’t say it aloud. It didn’t exactly put the mysterious Tina out of the running as a romantic rival. She glanced from Drake to Cortez. That was when she noticed that they both looked as exhausted as she felt. It had been a very long day.
“I’m sorry,” she said at once, struggling to her feet. Her belly was terribly sore. “I’m making waves, when you’re both dead on your feet, too. I’ll pack what I have to have. Did you find anything out there?” she asked Cortez.
He relaxed a little, shoving his hands into his pockets as he moved to the window to look out. “Not much. A shell casing. Garden variety .45 caliber. Could have been fired from a handgun or a rifle.” He turned. “But judging from the velocity,” he added, staring at her, “it was a handgun. A rifle shot would have most likely penetrated the silver and gone right into your body.”
“Then the shooter was close by,” she guessed.
He nodded. “We found the shell casing about two hundred feet from where you and I were standing. But the shooter had to be a marksman, just the same. It isn’t that easy to bring someone down at that distance without a scope.”
“You’ve got ballistics on it?” Drake asked.
Cortez nodded. “I overnighted the bullet to our FBI lab in D.C.,” he added. “If we get lucky, they may be able to tell us where it was purchased, even the sort of handgun that fired it.”
“Were there any latent prints?” Drake persisted.
“One,” Cortez said with a smile. “A partial, but it might be enough. We found one other thing—a cigarette butt.”
“So the shooter smokes,” Phoebe guessed.
He nodded. “If it was his,” he added. “There’s no way of knowing when it was left there.”
“It rained night before last,” Drake pointed out.