Rocky Mountain Valor

by Jennifer D. Bokal

  “I’m not sure. It could be something—or nothing. Either way, I won’t know until I check it out.”

  Petra’s heart began to pound against her chest. “Now? In the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t want it gone by the morning.”

  “It?”

  “Listen, it’s almost one o’clock. I should get going so I can get back.”

  Before she even thought about what she was doing, Petra was on her feet. “No way. I’m going with you. I can’t stay alone, not now.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Ian. “It’s late.”

  Petra’s hands went icy. For an instant, she was at Joe Owens’s house. Slick tile flooring underfoot, the air cool and dry... She heard gurgling. Was it Joe, struggling to breathe? There was something else. A remembered touch, like breath washing over her shoulder. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and the hair at the nape of her neck stood up. She turned quickly. Aside from Ian, she was alone.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “You went still all of a sudden.”

  “I...” She paused, trying to bring it all back. “I think I remember something about what happened at Joe’s.”

  “What?”

  “I remember being in the hall.”

  “And?” Ian coaxed.

  “And there was something. A noise. Gurgling.”

  “Anything else?”

  Petra shook her head.

  “It’s a good start,” he said. “You’ll remember more as time goes on.”

  “And I may not,” she muttered.

  He remained by the door. Even in the dark, she could sense his urgency—like the electricity of a lightning strike—in his need to leave, to hunt. “Give me two minutes to change,” she said.

  Ian moved farther into the corridor, as though backing away from her. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea that you come.”

  She reached for the lamp on the bedside table and flipped the switch. Light filled the room and she looked to the door. “I have to know what happened, Ian. So if you think you’ve discovered something that has to do with the attack on Joe, by all means, go after the clue. But I’m coming with you.”

  * * *

  Ian followed the directions given by the GPS. Interstate. Frontage road. Finally, he turned onto a dirt track that headed straight toward the horizon. The sky, a velvety black full of diamonds, stretched on forever.

  Their headlights cut through the night as the GPS continued to lead them onward. They crested a rise and began the descent. With the nose of the vehicle slowly tilting down, the headlights cast a wide arc, illuminating a pack of coyotes blocking their route. Petra gasped and reached for Ian at the same moment his foot slammed on the brake. The SUV jerked to a stop, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Slowly, the dirt settled, coating the hood and the windshield. Almost a dozen of the beasts sat on the shoulder of the road, their eyes reflecting the oncoming light. With a loping gait, the alpha male stood and slinked away, disappearing from view. The pack followed, leaving what had attracted the local wildlife in the first place.

  Yuri Kuzntov.

  Even from the driver’s seat, Ian recognized him.

  Petra sucked in a shaking breath. “Is that... Is he dead?”

  Ian slid the gearshift into Park. “Wait here,” he said, but Petra refused to stay back. She jumped out of the car and was at his side, her arms wrapped across her chest. What was her body language saying? That she needed warmth? Protection? Or to contain her emotions?

  “I told you to wait in the car. You’ve seen enough already.” Ian cast a glance at Kuzntov. “This isn’t pretty and it sure as hell won’t help you sleep better at night.”

  She pushed around him. “Is this the guy? Did he attack Joe?” And then she moaned, “Oh, God,” and turned away.

  Ian folded her into his arms. How many nights had he longed to hold her just once more? But not like this—not with a corpse just a few feet away, and not with Petra’s freedom hanging in the balance. “Listen, get back in the car. I need to search this guy.”

  “Search him? He’s dead.”

  “The dead tell the best stories.” He gently pushed Petra toward his SUV. She didn’t budge.

  “I can help. I’m not feeble. You know that.”

  “I know you can take care of yourself. It’s just...” What was it? What it always was, he supposed. “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “From a dead guy?”

  “From whatever might really be going on here, and whatever it is you’re caught up in.”

  “It’ll be worse if I can’t help. At least then I’ll be...distracted a little.”

  Ian began to remind Petra that he worked better alone. But at the look on her face, he stopped. Realized that for two years, he’d been alone...and nothing about that time without her had been better. Not his work, and definitely not his personal life. “Okay, but only if you can handle it.”

  She swallowed. “I can handle it. But you never answered my question. Do you think that this guy attacked Joe?”

  It was an interesting theory and Ian almost wanted to believe it himself—because if it was true, then Petra would be innocent. But he couldn’t, not yet. Shaking his head, he said, “The timing’s not quite right. The raid happened at five thirty this morning. Joe got a visitor around eight o’clock.”

  “That’s two and a half hours,” said Petra. “It’d give this guy time to get to Joe’s place.”

  “In rush hour traffic, while trying to evade the police?” Ian shook his head. “Not bloody likely. No, as far as I’ve been able to see they communicated via text, and the last contact was ten days ago.”

  “He wasn’t involved, then?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Ian. “I think he knew who attacked Joe, and why.”

  “Then who is he?” Petra asked. “And how did you find him?”

  They approached the body and Ian knelt on the hard-packed ground. “This,” he said, bending closer to examine the neck, “is Yuri Kuzntov. He’s a Russian drug dealer who operates in Denver. And I found him because his name and number were on Joe Owens’s contact list.”

  “Joe knew a drug dealer?”

  Petra dropped down next to Ian, her knee brushing his thigh. His flesh sparked from the slight contact. Ian didn’t care. He burned for her touch.

  “Your client was looking for his special juice—provided by Yuri—about a week and a half ago. Any of this sound familiar?”

  Petra shook her head. “Joe was a straight arrow. Until recently, at least.”

  “Maybe the drugs were new.”

  “It would explain the divorce and the erratic behavior. But Joe got randomly tested all the time and came back clean.”

  “Joe’s tests weren’t exactly random.” Ian used air quotes around the word, as the headlights threw his shadow across the empty prairie.

  “Hatch?” Petra guessed.

  He nodded.

  “I’d suspected, but you don’t just accuse the owner of the Colorado Mustangs of tampering with the testing schedule without proof.”

  “I read Hatch’s own words on the subject,” Ian stated.

  “What do you know? You have to tell me everything.”

  “First, I need to see what happened to Yuri here.”

  Petra scooted back, giving Ian as much light as the SUV’s headlights provided. The coyotes had done a number on the throat, but still, the purple bruises around the neck were consistent with strangulation. The chest was bloodied and torn, but all those wounds appeared postmortem.

  “He was choked to death and his body was dumped here.” Ian patted down the front pockets of Yuri’s jeans. Using finger and thumb, he pulled out a phone. With the toe of his boot, he rolled the Russian onto his stomach and checked the back pockets, as well. They were empty.

 
Ian stood and held his hand out to Petra. “I’ve seen all I need to. We can go.”

  She remained crouched on the ground. “Go? You’re just going to leave him here?”

  Ian scratched the side of his face. It was late. He wasn’t in the mood for an argument. “Yuri Kuzntov was an evil man. He sold drugs. He was a human trafficker. I don’t care if he rots or the coyotes come back and gnaw on his bones.” He held up the phone. “This is what I care about.”

  Petra stood. “I’m not going anywhere until you call the police.”

  “No way,” said Ian.

  “You can’t be that cruel.”

  Yes, Ian thought, he could. “Emergency services can track cellular calls. I don’t want to use my phone to contact them about a homicide. They’ll start asking questions that I don’t intend to answer.”

  “Then use Yuri’s phone.”

  It was a bad idea for the same reason, and yet... “If you insist that we call this in...”

  “I insist.”

  “Come with me,” Ian said. Suddenly, he was very tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep. To truly give up on his hunt. But he never would—not when Mateev was still out there somewhere.

  Arms still folded over her chest, Petra stalked to the SUV and slid into the passenger seat. She slammed the door and watched Ian as he took his place behind the wheel. “You never did tell me how you found out all of this background about Yuri and Joe.”

  “Short answer?” Ian turned the vehicle around on the tight dirt track and began to drive. “In the age of the internet, nothing is secret.”

  “Long answer?”

  “Another short answer—it’s best if you don’t know too much.”

  “But you think that this Yuri guy has something to do with the attack on Joe.”

  “Your client was in direct contact with some rough people. The fact that he turned up brutalized doesn’t surprise me.”

  Petra looked out the window and silently watched as the night folded around her.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “That I’m glad I came to you. It seems like everyone believes I’m guilty, except you.”

  “Everyone?” Ian asked. “Including you?”

  “Like I said, I can’t remember anything, so I don’t know. And if I am guilty—”

  “You aren’t,” said Ian, interrupting.

  Petra began again. “And if I am, I want to know. I’ll take full responsibility for my crimes.”

  “That’s very honorable of you.”

  She shrugged. “Too many people get away with too much. I won’t be one of them. It might keep me out of jail, but it would destroy my soul.”

  Ian was sure that jail would do a number on her soul as well, but he kept the comment to himself. Instead, he changed the subject. “I’ll help you, Petra. I’m not sure what happened to Joe Owens, but there’s enough about this scenario that I don’t like,” he said.

  “Is it because my client was involved with the raid from this morning?” She paused. “Or I guess that was yesterday already.”

  The question was, could he really trust her with his ultimate goal—to kill Nikolai Mateev? Would she understand that the only way to stop Mateev was to end his life?

  Those questions weren’t hard to answer at all, and Ian knew that he had to keep Petra ignorant of his true objective.

  “You asked me for help,” he said. “I’m willing to help. Besides, I’d never let you go to jail. Not if there was anything I could do to keep you out, at least.”

  He felt her gaze on him, warming his core and sending a bead of sweat trailing down his back.

  “Because it’s your job,” she said.

  What was it that she wanted him to say? “Because I care about you, Petra. Just because we aren’t lovers anymore doesn’t mean I don’t give a damn.”

  They drove in silence as the endless grassland gave way to the frontage road they had taken earlier.

  “Are you calling the police to report Yuri now?” she finally asked.

  Ian said, “I’m not using my phone—or his phone, either.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  From the darkness rose a light—a truck stop open twenty-four hours a day. “We’ll stop here and buy a burner phone,” Ian said. He quickly spotted the surveillance cameras and avoided driving directly through their vision. After parking at the side of the building, he turned to Petra. “Give me thirty seconds. I’ll be right back.”

  Careful to keep his chin down and his face turned, he found a cheap phone with preprogrammed minutes. He paid with cash and was back in the car in a flash. He drove from the parking lot and pulled off to the side of the road.

  After turning on the speaker function, Ian placed a call.

  “Nine-one-one emergency dispatch. State the nature of your emergency.”

  Ian read off the GPS coordinates. “Go there and you’ll find a body.”

  “Sir?” the dispatcher asked. “Can you repeat that, sir?”

  Ian threw the phone out the window and sped into the night.

  Petra snuggled into the passenger seat. Her jaw wasn’t so tense and her eyes drifted slowly closed, only to be opened with the same languid motion. “Thanks for doing that. Calling in the body. Someone should know that he’s out there.”

  “Someone does,” said Ian. “Whoever strangled Yuri and then dumped his corpse.”

  “You know a lot about him,” said Petra, her voice thick with exhaustion. “How?”

  “He was part of a case I was working on this morning,” said Ian. “We raided a house.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Petra murmured in the darkness. “I heard about that on the radio.”

  “It all goes back to my days with MI5. My first case, in fact.”

  “The one you were knighted for,” she said.

  “There’s that tone again.”

  She gave him a small smile. “What happened?”

  Everything. Nothing. Ian looked out the windshield, his jaw tight. The headlights stretched out in the distance. Denver International Airport rose up from the nothingness as a golden beacon, a lighthouse to a modern-day rocky coast.

  What should he share with Petra? What should he conceal? He hadn’t told his operatives everything about his plan—or really, anything. Then again, he didn’t have feelings for them as he did—No. As he used to, for Petra.

  He glanced in her direction. Her head was to the side, her eyes closed, and her long eyelashes kissed her cheeks. Her breathing was deep and rhythmic, her lips slightly parted. His own mouth burned with the memory of her kisses. He longed to touch her, to kiss her again. Yet he wouldn’t; he’d sworn to himself he would never go down that road again.

  Not even if she asked.

  Chapter 6

  The night had been too short. Once they returned to Ian’s house, Petra had gotten a few hours of sleep and then risen, showered again, dressed in jeans and a wine-colored T-shirt.

  She raked a hand through her still-damp hair and glanced at the blank TV screen. Her reflection stared back, and she turned away. She wanted to know what was being said about her—to find out if Joe was conscious or if the police had other suspects. But did she dare watch the news a second time?

  She picked up the remote and pointed it at the TV. Her hand trembled as she pushed the power button. Immediately, a picture filled the screen. A reporter, microphone in hand, stood in front of a hospital entrance.

  “This is Paul Sanchez,” said the young reporter, “at Denver Area Medical Center. I just spoke to doctors about the most famous patient in the country, Mustangs quarterback Joe Owens.

  “According to his attending physician, there has been no change since yesterday and the championship MVP is still unresponsive. As viewers know, Joe was brutally attacked in his home yesterday morning—stabbed seve
n times. The police have a person of interest.”

  Petra’s face filled the screen. For a moment, she didn’t recognize the woman in the photo—the dark circles around the eyes, the wild hair, the colorless lips, the smudge of blood on her cheek.

  The picture made Petra look guilty—capable of trying to kill another person. She saw that fact herself. She pushed the power button again and the TV went black, and yet—the same face remained on the screen.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock, Petra and Ian were pulling out of his driveway. Ian had also donned a pair of jeans and a tightly fitted black T-shirt that accentuated his well-defined pecs and muscled arms.

  She shivered with the memories of his strong arms encircling her waist, her breasts pressed against his hard chest. It wasn’t just the physicality of their relationship she craved, but the safety of his embrace that she needed.

  In a day that had the potential to be complicated, there was one issue Petra had to address. “How much will I owe you?” She tried to make light of the situation. “I know how much you make, and it’s a lot.”

  Ian didn’t reply, but he’d heard her. The question was impossible to miss.

  His jaw tensed. “Petra, I won’t take a cent from you.”

  She wanted to press, but also knew she’d never change Ian’s mind. “Thanks,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Petra searched for something to fill the silence. She had too much to say, and yet, would any of it matter?

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Last night, my research turned up some interesting facts. First, Arnie Hatch wanted to trade Joe Owens to the Kansas City Cyclones.”

  Even after all that had happened over the past twenty-four hours, that bit of information surprised Petra. “Really? Why would he want to get rid of Joe?”

  “The excuse he gave had to do with a Canadian quarterback and the salary cap, but I don’t buy it.”

  “And what happened to the offer?”

  “The Cyclones weren’t interested because of Joe’s recent scandals, leaving Hatch with a player he didn’t want.”