Passion to Protect

by Colleen Thompson

  Chills shot up his neck as he considered the idea that whatever had killed Deke was no animal but instead some depraved individual who had used the isolation of the mountains as cover for dark deeds. Because aside from some random lunatic, who would want to kill Deke Mason? Or could Cody and Kenzie have been the real targets, with their grandfather nothing but an obstacle to be disposed of?

  The longer Jake thought about the possibility of a child predator, the sicker he felt. Now that he’d allowed himself to consider the chance that the attacker had been human, he was pretty sure that either a blade or a bullet could have caused the wound to Deke’s throat. And he and Liane had come out here without a gun.

  “Let’s go,” he said grimly. “We’re almost to the top, but first, put on your jacket.”

  He waited, prepared to offer his own jacket to cover Deke’s face if she balked. Instead, after one last glance in the direction of her father, she said, “C’mon, Misty,” slipped on the jacket and started walking, her shoulders shaking with her quiet sobs.

  As she turned away, a practical thought cut through Jake’s shock, prompting him to squat down to check his old friend’s pockets in the hope that he might have been carrying Kenzie’s inhaler. Finding nothing—not even a wallet—he caught up to Liane and reached for her again, as much because he needed to receive comfort as to offer it.

  She didn’t pull away when he put his arm around her.

  Liane paused, looking behind them. “Misty, come.”

  Whining in agitation, the dog swung her attention back and forth between Liane and the man she’d worked with, lived with and followed nearly everywhere since she’d been a pup. With her tail tucked between her legs and her head lowered, she finally made the decision to obey.

  The hike was steeper and longer than Jake had thought, so by the time they reached the ridge a leaden smudge had lightened the eastern horizon. But the brightest illumination they saw lay to the west, where a hellish orange flickered, reflecting off the low gray bellies of thick banks of smoke.

  Elk Creek Canyon was ablaze in half a dozen places, with thousands of towering trees going up like matchsticks. Jake knew that before help could arrive the fires would unite, then run rampant, destroying the forest and the thick carpeting of branches and leaf litter, and blackening every rock.

  A part of the life cycle of this land, such purges were considered vital to the forest’s health, especially after a long drought. But priorities changed when they put human life—particularly the lives of a pair of children—at risk.

  Letting go of him, Liane cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Kenzie! Cody! Can you hear me?”

  When she paused, her own voice echoed back. But there was another sound, as well, a breeze rattling through dry foliage and blowing toward them. Hot and thick with ash, it might have been a breath straight out of Hell.

  “Cody! Kenzie!” Jake yelled, his deep voice rolling like thunder. Neither of the children answered.

  “Try your phone,” he told Liane, hoping that with the higher elevation they might be able to get a signal and make contact with the authorities. “I’ll try mine, too, and the radio.”

  Pulling the phone out of his pocket, he winced when he saw that the battery had died. The radio was still working, if anyone was close enough to pick up his signal.

  He tried channel after channel, broadcasting their names and approximate location, along with a request that any listener call for emergency assistance. For a few minutes he thought someone might be attempting to respond, but then he realized he was hearing one side of a conversation regarding another search and rescue operation on the north slope of Bear Mountain.

  “Jake,” Liane said, “I couldn’t get a call through, but I sent a text to my boss.”

  “You reached Em?” Jake had known the lodge owner for years, had even dated the tall blonde a couple of times before he’d figured out that she was a firefighter groupie, a bored rich woman intent on sleeping her way through the ranks. Though for years his relationships with women had been no better, he had finally come to a point when the futility of that approach had put him off.

  But as shallow as Emma was when it came to relationships, he was confident she would act on Liane’s message if she received it.

  Liane nodded. “She texted back, said she’s calling the sheriff right now so he can send help. I gave her our location and told her the kids are out here somewhere.”

  “That’s great,” he said, and he meant it. But as he looked back toward the fires, he was disturbed to see how much closer the nearest blaze was. Since fire always traveled faster uphill, it would only pick up speed as it moved toward them. “But the bad news is, we can’t wait around for help to get here or we’ll be overtaken. We’re safest heading back down the way we came.”

  She turned a panicked look back to the forested canyon below them. “What if my kids are down in there, Jake? How can I—they’ll be burned alive.”

  He knew she was right. If they were still alive, those two small children—the adorable kids he’d grown so attached to—would almost certainly burn, or succumb to smoke and heat. But he had no way of knowing whether they were there at all, much less where, much less any way of knowing if they were even still alive.

  All he could say for certain was that he and Liane were both still breathing. And that they wouldn’t be for very long if they failed to retreat.

  * * *

  Sheriff Harry Wallace had spent half his night on the phone, calling in every off-duty deputy, badgering search and rescue to get a copter in the air as soon as possible, and coordinating possible evacuations with the new captain of the local hotshot fire crew.

  To no one’s surprise, blazes had sprung up all over the damn place, but crews were being sent to fight only those that threatened human habitations. To make matters worse, the Masons and Jake Whittaker weren’t the only people who’d gone missing. The list included a pair of backpackers who’d chosen the worst time possible to take their first hiking trip into the backcountry.

  He was still on the phone, arguing that the Masons needed to be top priority, when Camille burst into his office. Two red splotches, bright as hand slaps, stained her freckled cheeks.

  Though he knew she had to be exhausted, her green eyes sparkled with excitement. Dancing from one foot to the other, she couldn’t even contain herself until he finished with his phone call and burst out, “It can’t be him! McCleary’s not here! So none of this was my fault after all.”

  “What the devil? No, not you, Jerry, but I’d better go see what this girl’s carrying on about.” Hanging up the phone, he stared at Camille and barked, “Explain yourself.”

  “Fred Richards emailed you.”

  “He didn’t call?” Harry had been trying half the night to reach the man from the Nevada Department of Corrections who was coordinating the search for Stephen “Mac” McCleary, and Richards had responded with an email? Harry loathed computers, which never seemed to do anything he wanted. He especially hated being blown off with some newfangled memo when what he really wanted was an old-fashioned conversation—and an explanation for how an attempted murderer had managed to escape custody with three other felons and elude pursuit for days.

  “I printed it out for you,” Camille said defensively.

  After fishing his glasses from his shirt pocket, he snatched the paper from her hand and skimmed the message, which stated that McCleary and his coconspirators had stolen a cell phone and credit cards from an elderly homeowner they’d burst in on only hours after their escape.

  Unfortunately for the escapees, their victim had managed to crawl to another phone before succumbing to injuries from a brutal pistol-whipping. Since that time, Richards wrote, a multi-agency task force had been hot on the heels of the convicts, who had been using both the credit cards and the cell phone—until those items were finally f
ound discarded to the southeast, just over the Arizona border.

  Since one of the fugitives, Juan Carlos Guzman, had family in Mexico, Richards and his task force were acting on the theory that the group was making a beeline for the border.

  “So where’s the proof,” Harry muttered to himself, “that the four of them are still together?” In his experience, alliances among criminals were about as stable as the weather, and just as dangerous for everyone involved.

  “Didn’t you see that last part?” Camille chirped, clearly convinced she was off the hook for her incompetence. “The part where he says he’s absolutely confident they’ll have all four in custody in no time?”

  “Spoken like a true bureaucrat,” Harry grumbled, not believing a word of it. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that McCleary had to be here. Nothing else made sense, especially considering what Harry knew about Mac’s motives. “Email him back, why don’t you, Camille? See if Mr. Computer Expert can be convinced to pick up the damned phone.”

  “But what do you need to talk to him for?” she asked.

  “I want him to pull whatever strings he needs to get some manpower out here and help me find the Masons—” furious at being questioned, he pounded his fist down on top of his desk hard enough to topple a messy stack of unfiled paperwork “—while there are still any living Masons left to find.”

  Chapter 5

  With all the billowing smoke, Mac had no way of knowing where Smash and Goose were, but they had to be mad as hell that he had managed to steal the rifle from their sporting-goods haul and then leave them in the dark of night. He only knew he’d lost them for the moment, and that they would kill him for certain if they ever managed to catch him.

  As far as he was concerned, if the cons who’d come with him became hopelessly lost and burned to death in this unfamiliar territory, so much the better. From the moment he’d felt the shallow bite of Guzman’s knife at his throat, every lie he’d ever told himself had fallen from his eyes like scales.

  What was left was cold reality. The high cost of his stolen fortune. The pointlessness of his struggle to reclaim it. The legacy he would leave behind: a son who had grabbed his sister, then screamed and run from him as if he were a monster.

  Without his help, they would undoubtedly die out here. Worse, would die hating and fearing him, never understanding that their grandfather had forced his hand by reaching for a weapon—not to mention that the old bastard had stolen the money Mac had skimmed off the top of his own boss’s far more extensive fraud in order to secure his family’s future. But maybe if he found and saved his children now, he might still have time to explain things.

  There might even come a day when they would be proud to claim him as their father.

  The idea took hold in his imagination, giving him the strength he needed to push forward, along with the determination to destroy anything or anyone who got in his way.

  * * *

  Glowing cinders rode the wind at least a half mile ahead of the flames, tiny fireflies that ignited grass and foliage wherever they alighted. Liane stared at their approach, horror hollowing out her heart.

  A huge pine caught fire not fifty yards away, its branches going up with a loud whoosh, followed by the crackling of flames feasting on dry bark.

  Time was almost up. She cried her children’s names again, desperation breaking her voice. And as a crimson dawn touched the horizon, she saw the gleam of moisture in Jake’s eyes.

  “We have to go now,” he said. “I’m sorry, Liane.”

  “Wait!” she cried, freezing at another sound, carried by the wind.

  A voice. A child shrieking, “Mommy!”

  There. She heard it again. It was Cody. She would swear to it.

  “Cody! Kenzie!” she shouted, racing downhill in the direction of the sound, with Misty racing just ahead. They were racing straight downhill, toward the fire.

  “Wait!” Jake called after her. “Not that way. Over here.”

  Drawn by the sound of her son’s voice, she didn’t stop to look where he was pointing.

  She was shocked when he caught up moments later, grabbing her arm and physically turning her to her left, toward an as yet untouched section of woods.

  “This way!” he shouted above the crackling of dry tinder. “They’re over there. You see that?”

  She jerked her gaze toward the spot he was indicating and made out movement in the shadows. But from this distance she couldn’t even be certain it was a person, much less one of her kids. “Cody?” she called.

  Though there was no answer, she broke loose from Jake’s grip and started to run. Jumping fallen limbs and scrambling over rocky outcrops, she picked up speed with the downhill incline.

  She heard Jake not far behind her, but his progress over the rough terrain was slower as he picked his way among the debris. Though he urged her to wait for him, she pulled farther ahead....

  Only to come to an abrupt stop when Misty planted her feet and started barking, the hair along her spine bristling in a stiff ridge. That was when Liane realized that the person trotting toward her wasn’t Cody but a grown man, his features hazed by smoke and distance.

  Before her mind could fully grasp what she was seeing, nausea seized her and she screamed in horror. It was impossible, unthinkable, that he could be a part of this. But the broad shoulders, the loping gait—the certainty ripped through her that this was the same figure that had rushed at her out of a thousand other nightmares, except this time he was real.

  “Mac!” What was he doing out of prison?

  “They ran from me. Hid out here,” he called, his voice strained and gravelly. “Help me find the kids. I heard their voices—over this way.”

  How could he have gotten here, much less tracked her family to the canyon and—with a horrifying jolt of insight, she realized that he must have been the predator that had surprised her father. That had killed her father, who never would have let Mac within a mile of the children. In fact, he probably would have shot him on sight if he hadn’t been taken unaware.

  Now Mac meant to kill her, too. Kill her and take the children, or maybe murder them, too, unless she could get away from him and save them.

  From behind her, Jake shouted her name, but her attention remained riveted on Mac. Though she still couldn’t make out his face, his intent was clear as he charged toward her like a maddened bull, a rifle in his hands.

  Her instincts screamed that he was about to take aim at her, that he’d come all this way to finish what he’d started in that hotel room in Las Vegas.

  “No!” she shrieked, changing course abruptly, zigzagging back toward the fire in the desperate hope that the smoke might hide her.

  In moments she was picking her way among burning trees, her lungs rebelling and eyes watering, her skin stinging with the heat.

  Behind her, she heard yelling and then the boom of gunfire, followed by a shout. Jake! She swallowed a sob, sickened that Mac might have killed again to keep Jake from rushing to her aid.

  A closer cry came from her right. “Mommy!”

  Startled, Liane slid to a stop so quickly that her own momentum nearly toppled her. “Cody? Cody, is that you, baby?”

  She held her breath, praying for an answer. Praying that her child’s voice was more than a dream-come-true trapped inside a nightmare.

  * * *

  Bullets flying past him, Jake shouted and dropped to the ground and landed facedown, then held himself motionless. His brain was racing, though, factoring the progress of the deadly wall of fire with the appearance of the man—and Liane’s terrified reaction.

  The stranger she’d called Mac had used her name, then talked about the children, who still bore the last name McCleary. Which meant this must be the ex-husband, the man she’d met after leaving him behind and heading
off to find a new life.

  But whatever else he was, the bastard had to be Deke Mason’s killer. And Liane clearly considered him more dangerous than the inferno.

  Jake looked around before climbing to his feet, the canister of bear spray in his right hand. Apparently Mac had resumed chasing Liane after deciding Jake was no threat.

  “We’ll see about that, you son of a bitch,” he ground out, then took off running, praying he could catch McCleary before Liane became his next victim.

  Plunging into the thick smoke, Jake was immediately forced to leap a patch of burning weeds as the fire chewed its way closer to him. With a grunt of pain, he landed but somehow managed to avoid falling on the blackened, smoking ground.

  All around him, he heard crackling as falling cinders made huge torches of the scattered clumps of bushes. The heat pushed him back several times, forcing him to alter course.

  From somewhere nearby came the echo of Misty’s frantic barking. Was Liane trapped ahead?

  Wiping soot from his watering eyes, he spotted movement, a figure silhouetted against flame. A split second later a buck bearing a huge rack of antlers came bounding past him, leaping over rocks and paying him no heed. Though both training and instinct urged Jake to follow the animal to safety, he was too committed to his course to turn back now. Continuing into the maelstrom, he made out something else, something moving on two legs this time, and he quickly saw it was Mac.

  A dark-haired man armed with a rifle, he moved in the direction of Misty’s barking. He never noticed as Jake braved blistering heat to cut between two burning spruces in an attempt to head him off. But unlike him, Mac had two good legs, and he was moving at a clip Jake couldn’t match. As his quarry pulled away, Jake spotted Liane in the distance, leading her children by the hand.

  Torn between relief that she had found them alive and fear for their safety, he continued moving toward Mac as quickly as he could manage.

  “This way!” Mac stopped as he shouted at Liane. “Come this way or you’ll get us all killed.”