Wolf Tracker (4 page)

After the sun was fully down she slowed the horse to a walk. The plains were giving way to badlands. Rocks of various sizes thrust up through the dead grass, some knee high, others twenty feet high. If she were better rested and had daylight enough to not risk Freedom’s legs, she would keep riding to put as much distance as possible between her and Blondie. But Blondie would have to stop for the night, too. She needed a good place to camp, somewhere sheltered and hidden, where she could get a little rest. Without rest she’d never be sharp enough to get away from Blondie.

This place here, between a tall rock and a jumble of smaller rocks, was a good place to hide. She dismounted and loosened the saddle girth. Every movement was an effort. She leaned against her horse’s side.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, Freedom,” she whispered to the gelding. “Why’s he following us? What if Blondie found our tracks and only wants to help?” She straightened with a groan and dug through the sadly empty saddlebag for a crumb of bread. Any little crumb at all would be welcome. There was none. Tami made herself close the bag. “But maybe he wants to find me because I’m a woman and he’s a man ‘with needs,’ like those assholes in Greasy Butte.” Cold sliced through her like a knife at that thought. “Or maybe those guys back in Greasy Butte sent him to find me.”

Would they have done that? Tami wrapped one of the blankets around her shoulders and the other over her lap, and wedged herself into a crevice between two rocks to doze. She drifted off in spite of the little rock digging itself into her hip, thinking of roast turkey and stuffing.

Maybe that was why she woke smelling meat roasting over an open fire? It took a few seconds for Tami to realize the scent was real. A night breeze was wafting it right into her face. Mouthwatering. Tremor inducing. She shouldn’t move. Blondie had probably set up camp and built a fire to cook his supper. How unfair was that? She should not go and scope his camp out. If he had trailed her over thirty miles of empty country, then he knew what he was doing. Why would he have a fire unless he was using it to lure her out? She should either stay put, get some rest, and then head away from him when he settled down to sleep, or get the hell out of Dodge right now. Yeah. So why was she leaving her hidey hole and creeping toward the smell of cooking meat?

Well, because she was starving. It had been a day and a half since she’d eaten, and for a week before that she had eaten only bread, dried fruit, and a rabbit she’d caught in a snare. He had certainly picked a fine way to trap her.

She crept noiselessly until she was only yards from the edge of his camp. The fire was very low, hardly more than coals, with a blob of something that smelled heavenly hanging close above it. Aside from the fire there was nothing obvious to indicate it was a camp. Tami looked around carefully. The horse was barely visible past the fire. Blondie’s gear must be tucked away out of sight. She saw no sign of even a saddlebag. But Blondie was nowhere to be seen. She waited. If he were off taking a piss he’d be back any time. Minutes crawled by. Nothing. This was a trap. It had to be a trap. But how she wanted that meat!

In a burst of either steel nerves or utter idiocy, she skimmed into the camp, grabbed the half-cooked bird and skimmed back out. The bird was hot enough to burn her fingers, but she didn’t care. With every step she expected the guy with the blond braids to tackle her, but she made it back to Freedom, tightened the girth and mounted, juggling the bird all the while. She let the horse walk quietly, to avoid alerting Blondie, while she tore into the bird. It was tough, gamy, and half raw. It tasted like heaven. A month ago the idea of eating it would have turned her stomach. Right now it was the best meal she could ever remember eating. Blondie might catch her, but at least she’d have something in her stomach when he did.

* * * *

He had lost her. After setting up camp and spitting the pheasant he’d killed this morning to cook over a fire, Tracker left camp to meditate. He didn’t go far, just about a hundred yards away from his small camp. It was something his stepfather had taught him to do when his mind got so stuffed with questions he couldn’t quite think straight. Right this minute he had so many questions without clear answers that he felt half crazy. It might be that the scent of Tami’s shirt was distracting him, but he didn’t leave it behind. The pleasure he felt from wearing it against his bare skin was a guilty one, but who would ever know?

Away from his camp, he settled himself on a cold rock and took even breaths to clear his mind and put his questions in some sort of order. Was she alone as the tracks indicated? Tracker didn’t know many women, but he’d never heard of a female who could survive on her own like this. Not even the women of the Clan, who lived in tune with the rhythms of Mother Earth, could survive on their own. Tami seemed to be trying to hide from him. Made sense, if she’d gotten away from the woman stealers and she thought he was one, too. But she had been riding away from Greasy Butte, not toward it, like he’d expect a wife anxious to get back to her husband to do. He didn’t think it was because she was lost. Her trail was so well hidden he doubted even his cousins could follow it. She was heading west for a reason. If she’d gotten away from women stealers, where were they? Tracker would have seen some sign of them. She was alone. The question was: had she been alone from the start? Had she run away from Leach instead of being stolen as he claimed?

If she’d run away from her husband, why had she done it? Tracker had taken money to return her to her husband, and he’d never failed to complete a job. But if she didn’t want to go back, what should he do? Tie her up and haul her back anyway? Taye’s parting words had stuck with him. If Leach had done something to make her run off, something mean… Running alone across the prairie and into the hills was a pretty stupid thing for a woman to do over a little marital spat. No one who could hide this well from the Tracker was stupid. If Tami had run off it must be on account of a pretty bad thing.

Leach might be her husband, but Tracker would never force Tami back if she was mistreated. So what, then? Take her to Taye’s? She seemed to have a destination, though, somewhere west, into the mountains that could kill with a sudden snowstorm. He touched fingers to the familiar scrap of gray fabric at his waist. The tantalizing scent of it was now as familiar as his own. Maybe she was running to a lover? That thought rubbed him the wrong way. Or maybe she was from out west and she was heading home to her folks. That idea was a damn sight more palatable to him. But if she was from the Times Before, her folks wouldn’t be there anymore. Did she know that?

Tracker pondered these questions, wishing he could talk to Kills Bears. His mother’s husband was wise. He could help Tracker see things clearly. Tracker concluded, after taking time to think each question through, he would have to talk to Tami. He had questions, she had answers. Her answers would tell him whether he should take her back to Greasy Butte. If he decided to not take her back he would have to repay the money to Leach. Not a problem. He hadn’t spent any of it. And if her husband had treated her badly and raised a fuss about wanting her back, well, Tracker would kill him. Problem solved. No muss, no fuss.

With his spirit settled into a sense of serenity, he headed back to his camp. But when he got there, serenity fled. The first thing that struck him was the rich enticing scent of one particular woman. The second thing was that the damn woman had made off with his dinner.

Chapter Five

Every hoof hitting the ground sent a tremor of dull pain up Tami’s back. The mid-morning sun was finally beginning to thaw her out, but clouds were moving sullenly to block the warm rays. Maybe it was her tiredness that made that one cloud look like her ex-husband’s nose. After her divorce Tami had been relieved. Hurt, too, of course, but really, just glad it was over. It hadn’t been a bad marriage. She and Brad didn’t have screaming matches. They hadn’t come to hate each other. Neither one of them was having an affair. They simply stopped being a couple. Couples shared things: a common goal, a common interest, something valuable to each of them separately and valuable to them as a pair. Sadly, she and Brad no longer had anything in common between them.

“Freedom, it’s not unusual for a husband to be fixated on his career,” she confided to her current best friend. “Brad always said once he had a little more experience as a property attorney we would move to a smaller town. Then I could follow my dream of having a mountain ranch, where I could teach wilderness survival classes and he could practice law for the ranchers in the area. We were so much in love back then.”

She and Brad dated all through high school in Denver. Their love had survived summer separations when he had worked in Denver and she had worked on her uncles’ dude ranch. They kept things together when Brad was going to college and she had joined the Army. Brad was so good about staying in touch every week. After she was out of the Army she had gone to work at the ranch that had been in her father’s family since the 1880s, but she and Brad had gotten together several times each month. They married as soon as Brad graduated and passed the bar exam. He told her he just wanted to get more experience before they left Denver to live at the ranch her uncles still ran. To have more experience under his belt would give him a better chance of earning a partnership in their new town.

“That worked out okay at first, but after six years of hearing ‘just another year’ I started to get impatient. My uncle Roy had passed on and uncle Bud was ready to retire. He was willing to hold the ranch for only so long.”

There were other buyers ready to take over the ranch. The money from her father’s estate was just about enough to buy the ranch he had grown up on. Her uncle Bud told her over and over he’d be willing to take a lesser amount to keep the 2Cs in the family. So she decided to not wait. She bought the ranch and began making plans to set up her wilderness survival training school. Her uncle’s men could run the day-to-day things while she spent the weekdays in Denver and some weekends out at the ranch. Brad got busier and busier with the firm he worked for, and less willing to accompany her out to the ranch.

Tami leaned down to scratch under Freedom’s ragged mane. “You know, I ended up spending more time in the mountains on my own or tracking for the sheriff than in the townhouse in Denver. It was a good thing to do. When skiers or hikers were lost in the mountains, the sheriff called me.”

She loved being called on to help with a fierceness Brad couldn’t seem to understand.

“Of course I’m glad you were able to find that girl who was lost,” he’d say patiently. “Of course I’m glad she’s safe. But you can’t be the only one they can call. Can’t someone else go?”

They didn’t fight about it, exactly. He never yelled or told her he didn’t want her to do it. He was just disappointed when he had to go alone, again, to another charity dinner or social thing. He reveled in putting on a tux and going to those kinds of events. She hated putting on any kind of formal clothes. They’d ended up spending so few hours together it was almost like not being married at all. She and Brad went from spending all their nights together in hot passion to the occasional lovemaking session.

“The first three or four years we were married we couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” Tami told the horse in a confidential tone. “We tried just about every position you can think of, and some that you, being a horse, can’t imagine.” Okay, she really was crazy, telling her horse this stuff. “Never mind the details, boy. The important thing is we were crazy in love, and we made crazy love to each other every chance we got. I don’t know what happened. We were apart so much that last year I don’t think we even slept in the same house more than ten times. We sure didn’t make love. We were friends, not lovers. I missed that.”

Now, after Greasy Butte, the thought of a man even getting too close to her made her want to throw up. When she tried to imagine making love, she shuddered. A tsunami of hatred welled up in her. How she would laugh when Tom, Steve, and Dwight were arrested. She remembered reading that some rape victims hesitated to take the stand at rape trials. She wouldn’t hesitate. She would look those men in the eye and spit in their faces.

Nothing had been good since she’d gotten on the plane. The plane crashed, which had been the most terrifying experience of her life. Not having any help come had been horrible, with people dead and dying all around. Being captured by a dozen dirty men on horses had been galling. Being sold to a group of men who had “married” her and then raped her had been … Tami couldn‘t find words to describe her helpless fury. Tom Leach kept saying he only wanted her to love him. Asshole. Running away with little food and inadequate clothing was necessary. Being forced to admit she might really be in the future was crazy. All the emotions she’d bottled up inside churned in her empty stomach, making her want to retch, or scream, or kill something. But she couldn’t afford to lose control out here. A breakdown would have to wait until she was safe.

Tami continued riding west, but she wondered why? Where would she be safe? Was there such a place? If the apocalypse had really happened, then was her ranch even still there? That crazy blond-haired Indian was still hot on her heels, so she kept going, trying to shake him. For the past five years she had been teaching people how to survive these very situations. Even though most of her clients were soft, businesspeople sent by their employers to learn self-reliance, she had treated them as if they might someday have to actually survive in the wilderness. Now she was getting to find out firsthand how effective her training was. Pitting her wits against her pursuer’s in this kind of a chase might have been fun, if it had been a game. But this was deadly real. She needed rest and food to keep going. Getting that bird last night had been a stroke of luck, but it was long gone and her stomach was aching again. And the dark clouds now crowding the sky promised rain any time.

By sunset, the rain had sheathed her bones in ice, and she was so tired she wondered if she should just let Blondie catch her. If she didn’t have to keep hiding from him, she could build a fire and take time to catch something to eat. The thought of the warmth of a fire almost made her cry. Let him rape her, if only he would do it close to a fire and feed her afterward.