Читать книгу Code Name: Baby - Christina Skye - Страница 11
CHAPTER THREE
ОглавлениеSOMEWHERE ON THE HORIZON Kit heard a clap of thunder.
Restless for no reason she could name, she studied the gunmetal sky. The dogs were jumpy, too, interrupting their usual play to shoot wary looks at the high ridges around the ranch. Right now Baby was standing motionless, her nose pointed into the wind.
“Do you smell something up there, honey?”
The puppy whined faintly, but didn’t move.
One by one dark clouds began to billow over the mountains, blotting out the sun. Butch and Sundance sat nearby, panting. Only Diesel moved, his pure black coat streaked with dust as he sniffed furiously at a retreating gecko.
Gravel skipped over the rocks, carried in eddies by the restless wind. After a last glance at the sky, Kit opened her backpack and took out Baby’s red collar. Strapping on the work collar always signaled a transition to focused commands, invaluable reinforcement for service dog training.
Warmed up from a good run across the mesa, the dogs were ready to focus on training. Baby’s dark eyes probed Kit’s face, and the dog quivered with excitement, awaiting the first command. No one could say that these animals didn’t love to learn.
Kit began by reinforcing simple stay commands, then followed up with a variety of heel and halt repetitions, alternating ten minutes of training with five minutes of play and copious amounts of praise. After Baby ran through her moves, Kit slipped collars on Butch and the other dogs in turn. Accustomed to working serially, the dogs seemed to compete for fast command acquisition. Sometimes they even seemed to think as a team.
A family of quail shot out of the brush, making the dogs start. Even then, none moved, still on down command. “Stay,” Kit repeated quietly.
Baby whimpered, bumping against Kit’s leg. Lightning cracked over the ridge, followed by the roll of thunder.
Baby’s ears flattened.
From a cluster of rocks up the slope Kit heard a shrill, rising wail. On a punch of fear, she recognized the cry of a mature cougar. Despite the wild pounding of her heart, she suppressed a primal urge to run.
“Stay,” she ordered, one hand on Baby’s head. If the dogs bolted, the hunting cat would be on them in a second, drawn by their motion.
Across the clearing Kit saw her rifle in its sling next to her backpack, and she cursed herself for not keeping the weapon within reach. Over the last months she had seen a rare cougar track on the higher slopes, but none of the animals had ever come close to the ranch.
Brown fur flashed up the ridge. Kit felt the skin tighten along her neck. She gripped her big oak walking stick, the only weapon at hand against a predator with ten times her strength.
Wind sighed through the cottonwood trees.
Kit heard the big cat cry again, the high wail like a physical assault. Beside her leg, Baby gave a powerful twitch.
“Stay, all of you.” Kit’s voice shook.
She knew she would have to take on the big cat armed with only her stick. Her father had done it once, and he’d told the story in electrifying detail for years afterward.
Staying calm was crucial. Sudden movement would trigger an immediate attack. In the face of a cougar, she also had to stand tall, raising her stick so that the cat would recognize her as an intimidating predator prepared to fight back. Her father had also warned her never to stare into a cougar’s eyes, since this was considered a dominance challenge from one predator to another.
With one hand still on Baby’s neck, Kit raised her big oak stick. “Heel.” She spoke loudly to the Labs as she moved backward. As the wind shook the trees, she took another cautious step, the dogs ranged close beside her.
The low, stubby branches of a mesquite tree shook furiously. Brown fur brushed against shivering leaves, and a mature male cougar stepped onto a boulder, mouth open in a snarl.
Too close.
There was no way Kit could possibly reach the rifle now.
Swinging her heavy stick, she took three running steps forward, answering the cougar’s cry with her own loud shout. Despite her terror, she reached deep and found her strength, shaping it to match the predator’s cry. Cougars ranged by territory, killed by territory, and were famously unpredictable, especially if they were defending their young or a previous kill.
This would be Kit’s only chance to save the dogs and herself.
The cougar stared at her, all hunger and rippling muscles. Her dusty sneakers slipped in a patch of gravel, and she fell to one knee, then lurched up instantly, her hands raised while she shouted hoarse warnings in a voice that sounded like a stranger’s. At the top of the ridge, the narrow path twisted past a huge boulder streaked white with quartz, and there the cougar waited, smudged by sunlight, muscles taut, ready to jump.
Ready to kill Kit and carry away her dogs.
Warm sunlight slanted down. A hawk called far down the slope. Kit felt every detail cut deep into her mind as the dogs tensed beside her, barking wildly.
The big cat took a step closer. Grimly, Kit prepared for the attack she sensed was seconds away. The big predator swung sharply to one side, then circled the boulder, snarling in a mix of anger and pain while its powerful shoulders flexed, almost as if it were wounded.
Then the brown body jumped high and cut through the streaming sunlight past Kit, past the dogs, landing less than four feet away. In an instant, the big cat was gone, swallowed up in the shadows cast by junipers and sage.
The glade fell silent. Even the dogs were still.
Kit spun around, guarding the route where the cougar had vanished. When there was no more sign of movement, she raced back to grab her rifle, racked in a shell and leveled the barrel.
With her rifle on one arm and her walking stick in the other, she issued sharp commands to the dogs, herding them uphill away from the trees where the cougar had left the trail. It was a longer route back to the ranch, but no overhanging rocks would conceal a stalking predator.
Kit wasn’t about to be cornered again.
Her hands shook, wind brushing her face. Dimly she realized her cheeks were wet with tears.
WOLFE COULDN’T BREATHE.
His fingers dug into the dirt as he watched Kit’s shaky progress up the steep slope. He still couldn’t believe she’d gone after the cougar armed with no more than a stick.
Fearless—or just crazy. Maybe both.
He’d been on his way up the ridge even before she’d seen the animal stalking her, but she’d done all the right things to make the cougar back down. Her quick, smart response had prevented him from breaking his orders to remain undercover.
She would never know how he had seen the big cat when it was poised to attack. She would never suspect that the animal’s growl of anger and fear had come from Wolfe’s silent intrusion. He couldn’t control the animal, but he could enhance Kit’s appearance to make her resemble a fearsome predator.
Despite the jagged emotions Kit must be feeling right now, she was doing fine, keeping the dogs close as she set a good pace across the mesa. If he had his way, he’d be up there beside her, close enough for protection should the need arise.
But orders were orders. Right now Ryker wanted only deep cover surveillance on Kit and the dogs. Protection if needed, but no exposure.
Crouched near a juniper tree, he watched her. She was quick and confident, with spare elegance in every long stride. Short and spiky, her hair glinted with hints of copper in the shifting sunlight. When she moved into the shade, the color changed, dark as French wine he’d tasted once in Burgundy. The short, uneven chunks hugging her face made him want to slip his hands deep and feel her warmth. He stifled the unfamiliar longing and forced his thoughts back to his mission.
Thanks to his training, he was adept at burying his emotions and forgetting them. The sight of a woman’s uneven hair wasn’t going to make him backslide.
In Wolfe’s line of work, feelings got a man killed faster than bullets.
He kept that thought in mind as he followed Kit back to the ranch, careful to stay out of sight.
KIT WATCHED SHADOWS pool across the empty courtyard, feeling unbearably tired.
She was still shaken by her encounter with the cougar. Shivering, she stared at the ridge above the ranch and realized how lucky she was to be alive. She wanted to believe that her quick response with voice and motion cues had scared the predator away, but she couldn’t. The animal had looked wounded. Perhaps something else had frightened it and sent it running away into the brush.
Too keyed up to sleep, she paced the living room, unable to forget the cougar’s shrill cry. Silent and smart, the animal could be outside the wall right now, searching for a tree branch with access into the nearby courtyard.
Enough.
Disgusted, Kit grabbed her old sweater from the arm of the couch and strode down the hall. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well tackle the pile of bills that had accumulated over the last week. Food, equipment and medical care for the dogs were just the beginning, yet she refused to stint on materials or food for her animals, even if it meant that she wore threadbare jeans and sneakers with holes in the bottoms.
The ranch was a steady drain on the small legacy that had come to Kit at her parents’ death. With forty acres of high desert stretching between two mountain ranges, the land was unsuited for ranching, and the cost of adding modern irrigation would have been prohibitive. Thanks to Kit’s growing reputation training service dogs, her bank account had finally crept out of the red, but it might be five years before she could actually take a vacation.
Five years….
Frowning, she sank into the old chair behind her wooden desk. It was the same place where her mother had handled the ranch’s account books and budgets. The pitted wood was cool beneath her fingers, smooth from years of use. Closing her eyes, she could imagine her mother lining up pens and stacking bills in neat piles as she calculated new ways to stretch a dollar.
Kit did the stretching now.
A local dog food company was pestering her to endorse a new product. The money would help her buy new tires for her Jeep and install an alarm system at the ranch.
As she reached for her checkbook, she saw the red message button flashing on her telephone and quickly scanned the calls. She would be devastated to miss a call from her brother, who was impossible to reach and always phoned at unpredictable times. If she’d missed Trace today, it might be months before she heard from him again.
Triggering her replay button, she fumed through two mortgage offers. The third message was from her oldest friend.
“Kit, it’s Miki. I just got back from a new project in Santa Fe. You are not going to believe the assignment I landed this time. Let’s go drink double shots of tequila while I tell you about it, okay? I need some advice. Stop spoiling those gorgeous canines and give me a call.”
Kit smiled, wondering what kind of bizarre situation her old friend had gotten into now. A year ago it was making a tour documentary for a punk band that performed with defanged rattlesnakes, and her most recent job had been shooting trailers for indie horror movies. Whatever her new assignment, it was bound to be strange. Miki attracted bizarre like honey attracted flies.
The next message was the crisp, professional voice of Kit’s vet, calling to make an appointment for a vaccination titer, a procedure required to check the immunization status of the four puppies. Liz Merrigold had been the O’Halloran family vet for nearly a decade, as well as the local contact for the breeder who had supplied Kit’s current litter of training dogs. Liz always kept a sharp eye on the animals placed for training under her supervision, gladly providing medical advice and moral support, day or night.
Kit jotted a note on her calendar to call and confirm a time for the visit. While she wrote, she triggered the last message.
“This is Doctor Rivera’s office, Ms. O’Halloran. Doctor Rivera asks that you call the office at your earliest convenience. He’d like to speak with you.”
Kit looked down at her hands. All the energy seemed to bleed out of her body. She sank lower in the chair, staring at the breeding awards that lined the walls of the study. Presidents, generals and movie stars smiled down from mismatched frames, mute records of her family’s contribution to humane and practical training techniques for service and working dogs. In twenty-five years her parents had personally trained over two thousand dogs, and Kit was determined to expand on their legacy.
But her body might have different plans.
After a long day of exercise, she could no longer ignore the deep throb in her right hip. Wincing, she pulled a heavy medical textbook from a nearby shelf. She didn’t expect to find anything new because she had read every relevant page at least fifty times. All of them pointed to the same conclusion: joint deterioration, pure and simple.
Kit wished that Trace would come home. She missed his outrageously bad jokes and his off-key Rolling Stones renditions.
But she never knew when her brother would appear, and she tried not to think about the possibility that he might never come back. Although the details were secret, Kit knew he was part of a highly trained covert operations team, and right now they could be deployed anywhere.
Almost certainly, it would be someplace dangerous. More than once she remembered Trace calmly telling her that hell was their specialty.
Baby gently nudged her leg. Kit sensed that the dog had come to offer reassurance with the warmth of her body and the soft thump of her tail. It was uncanny how pets developed a skill at reading their owners’ moods.
Kit took a deep breath, stretching her legs slowly. Her joints felt stiff, but they were no worse than any other day, and that was something to be thankful for. Leaning down, she slid her hand through Baby’s soft fur. She had cried herself dry months ago, cursing her body, her genes and nameless bad luck. Neither the tears nor the curses had made her feel better.
As she stared at the medical book filled with grim facts and sad pictures, something shook free inside Kit. Slowly it uncurled against her chest, blowing away restless fears and dreary expectations. She wouldn’t plan her future based on old medical files. She was strong. She would make her own future.
She closed the textbook with a snap. No more obsessing about medicine and new discoveries. If you gave in to fear, you’d lost already.
Outside the moon drifted above the mesa. Kit ran a hand through her hair and stretched. “I’m in the mood for a hero tonight. What do you guys say? Gary Cooper or John Wayne?”
Diesel stared at her, cocking his head in the half-listening, half-baffled pose that always made her smile.
Baby turned in a slow circle, stretching out on the floor.
“Bogie it is, then.” Shaking her head, Kit went out to find Casablanca.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER the Germans were storming Paris, Bogie was fighting a broken heart, and Kit couldn’t have been happier.
Curled up on the couch, she watched black-and-white images play across the wide-screen TV that had been her father’s single vice. She smiled as the story wrapped around her, pulling her in and making her forget her own troubles. Ilsa and Rick would always have Paris, and she would always have Casablanca.
Claude Rains leered at her. Kit fought a yawn as the day finally took its toll. She fell into dreams of black and white and a world filled with weary heroes.
MOONLIGHT SHIMMERED across the floor. Baby stretched out at Kit’s feet, gnawing on a rubber chew toy.
As Kit slept, the four dogs moved closer. At a look from Baby, Diesel vanished to patrol the courtyard while Butch and Sundance moved to check the backyard and rear doors.
In silence, Baby lifted her paws to the windows that overlooked the mesa. There in the moonlight the dog’s ears pricked forward.
A family of quail scurried for cover, routed from sleep by the shadow of a passing hawk. Wind hissed through the juniper branches that tossed in the moonlight.
Baby absorbed all of these movements, assessing them as unimportant. But something else moved in the darkness, and it was a thing the dog had never sensed before.
The other three dogs appeared from the shadows, drawn by the force of Baby’s uneasiness. As one, they sank down before the window, alert to the night.
While the moon rose higher and war waged across North Africa, Kit slept on, caught in restless dreams. Ranged around her, the dogs kept a wary vigil, sensing new predators afoot beneath the desert moon.