It was finally going to happen. She and Chase. Actual lovemaking. Sex. Anticipation—or was it anxiety?—tingled throughout her body. Did she even remember how to do this? It had been nearly a year since Adam. You never forget, she told herself, like riding a bike. Well, no, not a bike. Riding a horse? Hardly. Well, sort of like riding, anyway…
A couple of clomps thundered against the ladder. “So you’re the guy who usually mans this tower?” Chase said loudly.
What the heck?
More clomps. “She’ll be so glad you’re back.” Chase’s voice rose in volume. “Not to mention—surprised to see you so soon!”
Goddammit! Sam dove for her T-shirt, found the wad of her uniform in the corner. She jammed a splinter into her bare foot as she hopped one-legged into her pants. Damn, damn, damn! She buttoned the waistband just as Perez walked into the room, accompanied by a red-haired, mustachioed fellow. The redhead carried a loaded backpack, which he dumped onto the floor before extending a hand.
“Greg Jordan,” he said. “I’m back.”
The firewatch volunteer. She pumped his hand. “Glad to meet you, Greg,” she lied. “I’m Sam Westin, the temporary bio-study hire. And I guess you’ve already met my friend.”
Behind Greg’s back, Chase pantomimed choking the younger man. Sam pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. By the time Greg turned around, Chase was reaching for his flannel shirt, which dangled from the back of the solitary chair.
“How’s your mother?” she asked Greg.
He swiveled to face her again. “Back to her usual critical self, in spite of the heart attack. I couldn’t wait to get back here, out of range.”
Chase fired an imaginary pistol at the back of Greg’s head. Three shots.
Sam laughed aloud. Greg, assuming her response was due to his wit, chuckled along with her.
While Chase jammed sleeping bags and pillows into stuff sacks, she made a pot of coffee over the small propane two-burner stove. The three of them drank it and chewed granola bars as Sam told Greg about the fire.
“I wish that’d happened on my watch,” he said wistfully.
Sam rolled her eyes at Chase.
“You may still get your chance,” Chase said. “People that get a kick out of starting fires usually do it more than once.”
“I heard about that poor trail worker,” he said. “What happened there?”
“Nobody knows yet,” Sam told him. “So keep an eye out for anything suspicious going on.”
She described her fears about Raider and the illegal hunter. Greg promised to keep a lookout for bears as well as fires, and listen for gunshots. “Call me if you even suspect hunters might be crawling through the woods,” she told him.
He looked happy to have a mission. “You got it.”
Chase frowned. “And then you’ll both call the rangers, right?”
Ignoring his tone, she followed him to the door. “Happy rhymes,” she said over her shoulder.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Greg blurted out. “You’re supposed to check in at headquarters. The main HQ, not the district building.”
“Now? I’m supposed to drive all the way to Port Angeles?” Seemed like she’d been at the hospital there only hours ago. “Why didn’t they call me?” She pulled her radio from its holder on her belt. The power light didn’t show even the faintest glimmer of life. “Well, crap.”
Chase peered over her shoulder. “Looks more like a dead battery to me.”
Not checking her radio: another demerit on her record. Good thing there hadn’t been another fire last night. She’d find her spare battery as soon as they got down to the truck. “Do me a favor, Greg?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t report in for twenty minutes, and…you never saw my friend.”
“Perez? Never heard of him.” He gave them a two-fingered salute.
As they neared town, Chase’s cell phone trilled from his shirt pocket. After answering and listening for a moment, he sighed heavily, then said, “On my way,” before clicking the phone closed.
She was about to ask him if it was the bank robbers when he turned to her, one eyebrow raised, and asked, “Happy rhymes?”
“He won some sort of grant,” she told him. “He’s a poet.”
“Aha. That’s how he stands it up there by himself.”
Chase didn’t appreciate the solitude of the fire tower? A spark of anxiety flared in her gut. “That boring, huh?”
“Not for a short time. And that sunset was certainly worth a verse or two.”
Well, at least he’d enjoyed that. She focused on the road ahead, trying not to think about what he would say if it had rained last night.
His hand crept onto her khaki-covered thigh, his fingers hot. “And then there was your body—”
“Don’t start that again,” she groaned. “Not now.”
She stopped at Mack’s apartment building in Forks, where Chase had left his car.
He kissed her gently as they said good-bye in the parking lot. “Be careful out there in the woods. Call me if there’s any more trouble. Watch out for vampires.”
She laughed.
“And come see me in Salt Lake, okay, Summer?” He pressed her more tightly to him. “Make it soon.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist. “As soon as I can. After my contract is up here.” Pressing her ear to his chest over his heart, she murmured, “I want to see these special-agent magic tricks.”
“I’ll study the manual.”
Putting on a disappointed expression, she looked up into his eyes. “I thought you had it memorized.”
He snorted, licked his index finger, and theatrically marked a point in the air for her, then turned and slid into his car. Her chest pulled tight at the thought of what almost happened between them this morning. So close. She swallowed hard, waved, and watched him drive away before she turned her truck toward Highway 101 and park headquarters.
SAM entered the park’s central administration building forty-five minutes later. Mack Lindstrom was lounging in the dilapidated lobby, shooting the breeze with the park’s geologist, Jodi Ruderman, as they waited for the crowds to gather at the visitor’s center for their afternoon lectures.
“Yow.” Jodi stared at Sam’s lip. “Does that hurt?”
“It looks worse than it feels,” Sam told her. Were the stitches that ugly?
“Sam frequently looks like she’s been in a bar brawl,” Mack said helpfully. Then, to Sam, “Hoyle’s waiting for you.”
Uh-oh. She’d expected to be cross-examined by Tracey Carsen, the superintendent, not Peter Hoyle, the assistant super. This didn’t bode well. Carsen was all about conservation and promoting public appreciation for wilderness; Hoyle was all about rules and regulations. Sam had heard that he’d been an officer in the Army Quartermaster corps before joining NPS, and that seemed to fit his officious personality.
“Joe’s in there now,” Mack added.
This didn’t bode well at all. Joe should have been at home with his family. Sam reluctantly changed course to Hoyle’s office. Mack murmured in a low voice, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, prima donna.”
Joe was slumped in one of Hoyle’s folding metal visitor chairs. Catching her eye, he mouthed the word sorry before focusing again on his lap. Peter Hoyle sat ramrod straight, his hands folded together on top of his immaculate desk. Overhead, the cheap fluorescent light fixture buzzed like a trapped bee.
“How are you, Peter? What’s the word on Lisa Glass?” Sam asked, hoping to head off whatever unpleasantness was planned.
Hoyle waved at the empty chair. “We’ll get to that in a minute. I want to talk about this situation with Lili first. Sit.”
Sam slid into the other chair. “I know I shouldn’t have had her up there.”
“Damn straight, you shouldn’t have. You got the manual, you signed the contract, you know the regs.”
“But the volunteers—”
“Have guests all the time, I know.” H
e leveled a finger at Joe. “And I know that Choi asked you to invite Lili. That was the first mistake. You can go now, Choi. Close the door behind you.”
Joe slunk out of his office.
Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, the assistant superintendent’s eyes were fierce. “The volunteers are beside the point, Westin. They’re volunteers. The park service doesn’t pay for their health care, doesn’t pay for insurance, and doesn’t have to answer for their irresponsible actions. Lili is a dependent of an employee. And you—you may be just a temporary hire, but you still have to obey the regs. What if Lili had been hurt out there? We’ve already got one employee on the critical list.”
Sam squirmed in her chair.
“You had no business tackling that fire on your own. You seem to think that just because you’re a celebrity, you’ve got some sort of special status around here.”
Celebrity? And Mack had called her a prima donna. “What do you mean, celebrity?”
Hoyle stared angrily at her, his lips pressed into a thin line, then shook his head. “You don’t know?” He unclasped his hands, leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms across his chest. “You were on the news last night.”
“The news?” Sam had a sudden fear of a TV news helicopter zeroing in on her and Chase in each other’s arms. No, that was ridiculous—they would have heard the roar of chopper blades, or at least Chase would have. She leaned forward. “That’s impossible. I was at the fire tower all afternoon and evening.”
Hoyle sighed wearily, as if trying to reason with a three-year-old. “They used photos from that Zack Fischer story in Utah last year. You with the boy and you with the cougar.”
No wonder Mack had called her a prima donna. “Why did they dredge that up?”
“I was going to ask you that.” Hoyle selected a black government-issue pen from an Olympic National Park mug on the desk, and then squeezed it between his thumb and index finger as if measuring its thickness. “They flashed a photo of you in uniform, too. Your park service ID photo.”
“My ID photo? How—”
“I’m checking into that. You haven’t loaned your ID to anyone, have you?”
“Of course not.” Sam fervently hoped it was in her daypack right now. “So this report was about the Zack Fischer story?”
“No, it started with the Western Wildlife Conference. It’s in Seattle this year, with the focus on the Endangered Species Act. But you know that.”
None of this made any sense. “Why would I know that?”
“Well, you’re speaking there, aren’t you?”
“What?” Sam raised her chin.
“Cougars, the ESA, and the new addition to Olympic Park—all in the same damned report. The nutcases are crawling out of the woodwork. We had another death threat this morning.”
“Excuse me, but did you say I’m speaking at the Wildlife Conference?”
Hoyle jerked open his desk drawer, pulled out a facsimile page, and handed it over. The message was from Richard Best, marketer at The Edge.
Wilderness Westin is invited to deliver a paper on Environmentalists as Endangered Species at the Western Wildlife Conference in Seattle (August 28–30). Usual rate, contract to follow. Congrats!! Great publicity for your future assignments!!
Environmentalists as Endangered Species. A timely topic. She folded the fax, her brain battered by a flurry of conflicting emotions: she felt honored about the recognition of her expertise, pissed off about Best’s assumption that she’d accept the assignment, pleased that he had promised her future work at the e-zine. Well, sort of pleased. Because he’d only sort of promised. Only four months ago he’d told her they no longer required her services. Now he’d changed his tune? Was it real? The Edge was famous for dangling tidbits only to jerk them away at the last minute. What happened to luxury spas?
She’d never done any sort of public speaking. As she tried to visualize standing in front of a huge audience, her current boss’s last statement registered. She looked up. “Did you say something about a death threat?”
“The newscaster said that you were now a ranger at Olympic Park, so some anti-Endangered Species crackpot called headquarters. Said that for every man sacrificed for an animal, one of us—I presume he meant the park staff—would die.”
Die? Sam leaned back into her chair, crumpling the fax in her fist.
“Don’t take it so seriously,” Hoyle told her. “The locals are upset that the government turned their personal playground into a wildlife sanctuary instead of a hunting refuge. We’ve received at least one threat a week ever since the annexation was announced.”
“Really?” This was getting creepier by the second.
Hoyle jabbed a finger at Sam. “Don’t get off the subject. Just because you’re on Channel 8 doesn’t mean you have special rights around here. You’re not a ranger. You’re just a tech, and a temporary one at that. Don’t meddle in dangerous situations.”
Sam was tired of this refrain. She was responsible for one small area of the park, at least right now. “You hired me to do an environmental survey and write a management plan for the Marmot Lake area, correct?”
“Yes.” A hint of wariness crept into Hoyle’s expression, but he quickly recovered. “That, and only that.”
“Doesn’t that mean that you want me to identify problems there and recommend solutions? So I can develop a plan that truly protects the wildlife and the resources?”
Hoyle hesitated a second as if suspecting a trap, then finally conceded, “Yes.” He leaned forward. “But don’t ever, ever let any guest accompany you when you’re on duty.”
Sam tried to look humble. “Got it.” She prayed that Greg Jordan would stay mum about Chase’s visit.
“Don’t let your publicity stunts interfere with your work here.”
Sam’s mouth opened in protest. She shut it before something spilled out that she’d regret. She couldn’t wait to get back to the woods.
“Now.” Hoyle smiled, but the warmth didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We’re all taking turns sitting with Lisa Glass at the hospital. I’ve put you down for one to five today. Okay?”
Sam peeked at her watch. Five after twelve. It would take her a good forty minutes to drive to the hospital, and she hadn’t even had lunch. Damn, damn, damn. She could hardly say no after she’d just been chewed out, and the assistant super knew it. “Glad to,” she chirped.
“Thanks. You never know when she might come around, and we wouldn’t want her to be alone.”
“I’d better hit the road then.” The folding chair squeaked when Sam stood up. Crap! Four long hours staring at an unconscious girl in a hospital room. If Lisa woke up, what could she say to her? What kind of comfort could she be to a perfect stranger?
She’d already spent too much of her life huddled beside an inert body, inhaling the miasma of chemicals and disease, with only the beeping and whistling and clicking of cardiac monitor and respirator for company. Had her mother appreciated the company? Had she even known Sam was there? But at least she’d had some relationship, however strained, with her mother. She’d never even met Lisa.
Joe was leaning against her truck in the parking lot. “Sorry, Sam.”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. If it hadn’t been the fire, it would have been something else. Hoyle’s never liked me for some reason.”
“You don’t grovel sufficiently.”
“Compared to what? Or whom?”
“He wanted his nephew to get your contract.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Forestry degree, not wildlife biology. Besides, you’re a name.” He grinned.
“Hardly.” She was only well known with the staff of Heritage National Monument in Utah. “Well, maybe within the park service…”
“How did your talk with Lili go?” His deep brown eyes searched hers. “Did she say anything I should know about? She never talks to me or Laura anymore. I don’t even know who her friends are these days.”
Sam thought
back. Seemed like weeks since she’d talked to Joe’s thirteen-year-old daughter. She dragged her mind past Chase and Lisa and fires and explosions back to the evening with Lili at the fire tower. “Lili mentioned some girls. Deborah was one, I think.”
“I know Deborah. Lili’s always wanting something Deborah has. Shoes, bracelets, a smart phone, for heaven’s sake.” Joe snorted. “Only problem is that the Rosemonts own the bank, while the rest of us have to actually work for a living. Did she mention any boys?”
“Some boy—Robbie?” She frowned, trying to remember.
“Rodney? There’s a Rodney who’s her assistant soccer coach.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right, but it was something close to that. Shallow but interesting, she said. But it didn’t sound to me like she really had the hots for him.”
Taking in the dismay on her friend’s face, she said, “You know what I mean. Oh, and she mentioned that she thinks a lot of her science teacher—Martinson?”
Joe appeared surprised. “I’m glad to know Lili likes one of her teachers. She had a hard time after we moved here from Flagstaff. She was embarrassed that she had to go to summer school to move on to eighth grade this year.”
“She said summer school was okay. And she said Martinson was fine, if I’m remembering right.”
“Fine?” Joe’s dark eyes grew worried. “She talks about him a lot, now that I think about it. Thanks, Sam.” He walked away, running a hand through his straight black hair, muttering to himself. “Martinson?”
THE Winner Woodworking shop was quiet, now that they’d finished hammering all five podiums together. The pine structures, one already stained dark, stood scattered about the room, making the huge empty space appear as if it were waiting for a political rally.
Looking at the sad state of his shop tightened the knot between Jack Winner’s shoulder blades. He knew from experience that the pain would only get worse as the day went on. Only a couple of years earlier, he’d been raking in the dough, well known in the business, creating custom home theater setups for rich homeowners and wired desks for high-powered execs. But now business had slowed down to this, one puny contract for five damned podiums and one upcoming bid for a custom restaurant counter. All the money flowed right out of the country these days—to those ragheads in Iraq and Afghanistan or to those poor slobs in Haiti or Africa.
Bear Bait (9781101611548) Page 6