Pulling the Trigger

by Julie Miller

  The sky opened up and the rain beat down like the relentless chill in her heart. His words had broken down some indefinable barrier, fracturing her carefully structured world. But she tried to piece together what she could. “What do you want me to say? That I loved you once? I did. Maybe a part of me still does because it…hurts…to know how badly I hurt you.” She swiped the rain from her face, taking with it the tears she didn’t want to cry. “But I have to be the way I am. That’s how I handled my parents and rape and recovery. That’s how I got through Quantico. That’s how I’ll get up this mountain and do my job and get back to my life in D.C.”

  “I’m sure Joanna Rhodes will handle it all just fine.” He nodded toward the rock face that Agent Parrish had climbed. “Go on. You’re next.” He picked up his backpack and waited for her at the base of the wall. “Watch your step. It’ll be slick.”

  “That’s it?” End of discussion? Climb the wall? “You’re not sending me back to base camp?”

  He tested a couple of handholds, and tugged at one protrusion about a foot above his head. “Grab on here. This one’s solid.” When she didn’t immediately move to obey, he circled behind her, planted his hands at her waist and lifted her onto the wall in front of him. “I don’t like the idea of you being alone in the same room with Watts when armed guards and hidden cameras are watching his every move. I sure as hell don’t want you running into him out here in the wild where he has the advantage.”

  Joanna automatically tightened her grip and secured her feet. When she shook the rain from her eyes and pulled herself up to the next handhold, he released her. The warmth of his hands and his unreadable mood remained. “I’m not here to be a burden, Ethan. I would think another set of eyes and another gun up here would be welcome. I never asked you to protect me from Watts.”

  “Get your ass up that mountain. And don’t you leave my sight.”

  While Joanna Rhodes resisted the order, some little part of her that was still Joanna Kuchu warmed at the growly declaration that she was now part of the team. And that Ethan Bia, in some skewed way, still cared.

  She tested the next grip, found a pool of slimy mud and hunted for the next hole or protrusion where she could grab on. The next one wasn’t deep enough. “I don’t see where…”

  Ethan was on the climb beside her now. He reached for her hand and pulled it closer. “Here.”

  He cupped her fingers over a knob of granite. Following his example, Joanna shifted her weight and pulled herself up another foot. But she stopped abruptly. “I forgot my pack down—”

  Boom!

  A deafening noise exploded overhead. With her breath startled from her lungs, Joanna instinctively hugged the rock face. “Was that thunder?”

  Only if lightning had struck the bluff above them.

  Maybe it had. A low hum, like the distant reverberation of running hooves, rumbled overhead. The spatter of raindrops became the clacking of tiny gravel sprinkling down over the face of the rock. Joanna tipped her face up as the hoofbeats crescendoed into a stampede of a thousand buffalo charging straight toward them. The granite itself shook beneath her hands.

  “Ethan?”

  “Move!” Ethan snaked his arm around Joanna’s waist and leaped.

  The first pebble thunked off her scalp as Ethan shoved her beneath the overhang and sandwiched her against the granite wall, shielding her with his body. Joanna grabbed two fistfuls of his vest and shirts and buried her face against his chest as the mountain came down on top of them.

  Chapter Seven

  “Joanna.”

  The voice against her ear was as soothing as the solid thump of the heartbeat beneath her hand. She felt drowsy and warm and content.

  “Joanna.” The voice was slightly more urgent this time, rousing her to the bruising rocks poking into her back and bottom. She tried to squirm away from the discomfort.

  “Nüa-rü. You okay?” Hard hands, running along her body from shoulders to hips and up into her hair, probing for injury, chased away the last of her shocked stupor. The rock slide. They’d survived.

  “Ethan?” She lifted her head and inhaled a deep breath, but wound up with a noseful of dust that triggered a coughing spasm.

  “Easy.” The rough pads of Ethan’s thumbs stroked across her eyes and nose and lips. Moist, tender kisses followed every touch—to an eyelid, the corner of her mouth, the tip of her nose—offering comfort and stirring memories after wiping away the dirt and debris that seemed to cover every part of them. When the coughing passed and her airways had cleared, he framed her jaw between his hands and inspected her with his eyes. “Better?”

  Even with the shadows of rocks and rain and the encroaching night, his eyes seemed to pierce the darkness with a light from within. It was a light she could cling to when the world was literally falling down around her. It was a light that could guide her to safety. If she let it.

  “I’m okay.” She released her death grip on the front of his vest and reached up to brush small chunks of rock off his shoulders. His face needed a wipe of her hands, too. She ran her thumbs along the creases from sun and laughter beside his eyes, and cleared the dirt from the stern line of his mouth. “Are you hurt?”

  “Some bruises, maybe. Nothing serious.”

  “Same here.” The rain beyond Ethan’s back was already tamping down the rising dust as the last few bits of rolling rock settled into their new resting places. “Looks like I did need you. You saved my life. Thank you.”

  “Anytime. See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  She shook her head. Allowing herself to need him, just this once, hadn’t been hard at all.

  His striking black hair had been coated with a mix of ruddy red and gray debris. Even as she combed her fingertips through the short, damp silk, she was imagining a picture of what he might look like forty years from now—or after a can of paint had spilled on his head. The thought of an elegantly aged Ethan, or one who might be klutzy enough to make mistakes like she did, curved her lips into a smile. Her smile seemed to please him, relax him. The hands that had framed her face were suddenly sliding around her waist, pulling her closer. He bent his head, his lips hovering over hers. “That would have crushed us. Sent us over the edge of the mountain. I could have lost you again.”

  The almost moment of shared tenderness vanished in unison. How long had they been standing there? Seconds? Minutes?

  Joanna said it first. “Agent Parrish.”

  “Ben!”

  Ethan was already moving, hauling himself out of the recess where they’d taken shelter, onto the new incline of rubble that had completely wiped away the path to Cougar Fork. As Joanna dug herself a toehold in the crumbled rock, Ethan reached down and clamped his hand around her wrist, pulling her right along with him as he climbed.

  “Ahh!” She winced at the dull ache that throbbed in her arm.

  He set her on her feet beside him and immediately released her. “You are hurt.”

  She brushed aside the hands that probed the scrapes and red marks encircling her wrist and wiggled all her fingers, showing him it was just sore, nothing broken. “It’s from our wrestling match earlier.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have waited to see—”

  “Go.” She tried to turn him, urge him on up the slope ahead of her. “Find Ben. I’ll get there.”

  “We’ll get there.” Moving and making promises all at once, he switched his grip to her other hand. The ground beneath them shifted like a giant pile of sand beneath every step, but he helped her reach the wide ledge of the bluff far more quickly than she could have managed on her own. But once they reached the relatively flat surface high above the river, he released her and went into search mode. “Ben! Can you hear me?”

  “Ben!” she echoed.

  There was less debris here, but still enough loose boulders and larger rock to pick through. Ethan jogged ahead, checking the entrance to one shallow cave and then the next.

  Joanna’s feet followed her gaze to the edge of
the bluff where dusty treetops and other plant life sprouted from the jagged wall that dropped down to the Silverton River. She peered over the rim and visually skimmed small ledges and roots and tree trunks where a strong man might still be clinging to life.

  “Ben!” Though she could hear the river roaring past below her, the rain and darkness prevented her from seeing all the way down to the water. She glanced over her shoulder, following the pyramid of rubble to the next rise above them where the slide had started. Nothing but dark clouds and flashes of lightning and more rock. Could he have gotten up there before the mountain gave way and swept him over the edge into the gorge? A sinking feeling gnawed in her stomach as she looked back to the chasm below her. “You don’t think he…?”

  “Over here!”

  Clinging to a renewed surge of hope, Joanna hurried over to a depression in the bluff wall where Ethan was lifting softball-size rocks and tossing them aside. She joined him in his excavation efforts, scraping aside armloads of mud and gravel until the entire pile of rubble bowed out and sank back in, as if the mountain itself were breathing.

  “Ben?” She called to the man she could hear cursing and grunting and clearing rock from the opposite side.

  Two more rocks. A little more gravel. Then a gritty hand poked through. An arm followed. And then Ethan was pulling her back as the remaining pile collapsed and Ben Parrish emerged from the cave where he’d been buried alive.

  “Oh, man.” On apparently steady legs, he climbed out of his hidey-hole and swatted the dirt from his jeans and fatigue sweater. The white FBI letters on the Kevlar he wore had been dusted a dull, brownish gray. “That was exciting,” he drawled.

  Like Ethan, Joanna checked his light brown eyes for clarity and scanned him from head to toe for any signs of injury beyond the nicks and scrapes on his hands. If she could believe appearances, her fellow agent had survived in one piece. “Good thing you had that cave you could take cover in. Were you injured?”

  Ethan had already completed that assessment and had a very different sort of question for him. “Could you pinpoint the source of the blast?”

  Blast? Joanna’s eyes widened. “You mean that rock slide was man-made?”

  Ben nodded and apologized at the same time. “Almost straight above us. I’m going out on a limb and confirming that Watts stole some C-4 along with that truck.” He summoned them both to follow him back over the pile of rubble into the cave that turned out to be about the size of her apartment’s bedroom back in D.C. “This is a lot deeper than the others, thought I’d found a dry place for the night. I was heading inside when I hit a damn trip wire buried in the dirt across the opening.” The two men squatted beside what was left of a filament that had been partially covered by the slide. “Looks like we don’t just have the weather to contend with anymore. Watts has booby-trapped his trail.”

  Meanwhile, Joanna had pulled out her flashlight and was staring at the roof of the cave. The granite was gray, with bits of quartz and other sediment impurities sparkling with the reflection of her light. But there was one spot that was grayer, duller, than the rest of the cave. Joanna indicated the spot with her light. “Could this have been Watts’s camp last night? There’s evidence of smoke from a fire. I don’t know how to tell if it’s recent, though.”

  “It’s recent,” Ethan stated unequivocally. Joanna turned her light to the spot where he was digging in the dirt. He held up a palmful of dark, gravelly mud for her and Ben to inspect. “This ground has been freshly turned. Ashes from a wood fire have been mixed in.” He squeezed the mud into a clump and tossed it at his feet as he stood. “I’d say Watts is covering his tracks in more ways than one.”

  Her pulse quickened with a jolt of anticipation. “So we’re closing in on him?”

  Ben reminded them that they weren’t the only ones interested in capturing Sherman Watts. “I’ll radio it in. Looks like we may need backup after all.”

  The rain seemed to wash away the dust that coated Ben almost as soon as he pulled the two-way from his pack and stepped outside. “Ute Base—this is Scout One. Ute Base, come in—do you read?” Static crackled. “I need to move farther away from the rocks to see if they can pick me up. “Ute Base—this is Scout One.”

  Joanna turned her attention back to Ethan, and waited for an answer. “Can you still find him? Or has this explosion obliterated any trace of him?”

  His dark eyes didn’t offer the immediate assurance she was used to seeing. “I don’t know. I need to think this through. Maybe in the daylight—”

  A distinctive pop of sound jerked through Joanna’s body. She didn’t have to hear the second shot, or the one after that, to pull her weapon and dive for cover.

  Gunfire.

  And they were the targets.

  “DAMN IT, ETHAN, let go!”

  Ethan had ducked behind the pile of rubble with Joanna, tugging on the back of her belt to hold her down beside him as she crawled to the top to try to pin down the shooter’s position. “The shots are coming from above us.”

  “Exactly. We’re sitting ducks down here.”

  She wiggled out of his protective grasp. “Then let me do my job.” She spotted Agent Parrish first, running toward the edge of the bluff, firing blindly behind him. “Ben?”

  “Under fire. Repeat, we are under fire!” His body jerked and he cursed. The radio smashed to the ground.

  He was an open target.

  When Joanna saw the circle of red blooming on the sleeve of his sweater, she knew she had to help him. “He’s hit!”

  Joanna scrambled down the other side of the rock pile and raised her gun to the flatland above the caves. From this angle, she couldn’t make out the shooter, but that didn’t matter. She could back him away from the edge. Keep him from getting close enough to shoot in this direction. She could protect Ben.

  Steady. Breathe out. Squeeze the trigger.

  Squinting against the rain assaulting her vision, she fired off round after round, emptying her gun into the abyss above them, hopefully laying enough cover fire for Ben to drop down to a ledge or duck behind a boulder for safety. When her clip was spent, she fell back against the rocks and ejected her magazine.

  But when she reached for the spare clip on her belt, Ethan’s hands were already there, pushing the fresh ammo into her hand. “What are you doing? You’re unarmed. Stay put.”

  “Like that command ever worked with you. Ben took one in the chest.”

  Joanna’s heart sank. “No.”

  “It hit him in the Kevlar, but he went over the edge.”

  “Unless he caught a ledge or tree, that’s at least thirty feet to the ground.”

  “Or the river.” To her horror, Ethan wrapped her fingers around the magazine of bullets and squeezed her hand. He pointed out the silence overhead. “He’s reloading. Cover me.”

  “Ethan!”

  As quick as a coiled snake, he bolted behind a nearby boulder, then zigzagged out to a smaller one. The shots overhead started again, changed direction, zeroed in on Ethan’s position. There was nothing more between him and the other side of that ledge big enough to hide behind. Oh, hell.

  “Do it, girl.” Joanna urged herself into action, locking the clip into place and sliding the first bullet into the chamber. “Now!”

  Between the thunder and her gun and the shooter above, it was the loudest thirty seconds of Joanna’s life.

  “Ethan?” She wasn’t the only one who’d stopped firing when her clip was spent, but when she looked out across the outcropping of granite, she saw she was alone. She raised her voice. “Ethan? Where are you? Are you all right?”

  He must have gone over the edge, as well. But on purpose, or…“Don’t go there.”

  What she wouldn’t give for clear skies and daylight. But she couldn’t even risk shining her flashlight out there and giving their attacker—Watts, she presumed—a clear target.

  “Don’t be dead,” she mouthed. “Please, God, don’t be dead.”

  Huddled against
the rocks at the base of the cliff, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to listen to the world the way Ethan did, the way he’d taught her to all those years ago. She heard thunder, wild and deafening, up in the sky and rattling through the air around her. She heard her own crazy heartbeat, hammering in her ears. The wind whooshed past her. The rain pummeled the ground.

  Or were those footsteps? The rustling of movement in the trees beyond the ledge? Or…it was no good. Her ears were still ringing from all the noise of the shoot-out. She couldn’t even tell if the movement was real or imaginary, much less whether or not it came from above or below her.

  “Think this through, Joanna.” She climbed back over the top of the rubble and rolled down the other side into the cave, keeping a low profile until she was certain the danger had passed.

  Her gun was empty; she had no more ammo. Ben was wounded, Ethan was missing and she was alone. That was the way she liked it, right? Alone? She’d built up her strength by learning to think and do for herself. Self-reliance was the only way to keep the Sherman Wattses of the world from having any power over her again.

  But Ethan’s share-your-strength-to-build-your-strength philosophy had gotten into her head and she couldn’t seem to make clear choices and know her own mind the way she did back in D.C. Away from this place. Away from Watts.

  Away from Ethan.

  A purely emotional reaction, gut deep and as true as anything she’d ever known, chased away her logic. She had to go out there. She had to see if Ethan was all right. Ben, too.

  But first, she had to secure the scene. Fears aside, she had to protect both men. To do that, she needed a weapon. Using her gun as a steel club again wouldn’t be her first choice, but…

  Ben Parrish.

  She flipped on her light and searched the cave for Ben’s backpack. “Yes.”