Edge of Survival (13 page)

He snorted then remembered he was going to have to go back to that godforsaken therapist’s couch if he had any chance of saving his marriage. Sex therapy, even the idea made him wilt.

“I hope you get things sorted out…between you and your wife.” McCoy pinched her brows and lips together, turned away as if embarrassed.

“Yeah, well, either way, Viagra isn’t getting any more of my money.”

“Maybe you should, you know, give it to your wife?” McCoy gave him a soft smile that made her eyes glow in the moonlight. “Maybe she’s the one with the problem.”

He stared at her for a long moment. She looked so young and fresh on this northern night. “Did you just give me a compliment, Constable?” Even in the dim light he could see she was blushing.

She nodded, just slightly. “I think I did, Staff Sergeant.”

Johnny ambled out the door, his eyes moving from one of them to the other. “Yo, boss. Your beer is getting warm.”

“Yeah, I’m coming.”

Leland went back inside.

Before Griff followed, he told McCoy, “I’m relying on you to help me catch this killer, Constable. I made a vow to the victim’s parents, and just because I’m not here doesn’t mean I’m not working on it.”

When she didn’t say anything he started back inside, but she stopped him by touching three fingers to his upper arm.

“I won’t let you down, sir.” She smiled again, less tense than she’d been earlier and prettier, in tight jeans and a white tank top that revealed she really was a grown woman.

And, he realized abruptly, he didn’t have ED. He had MD. Marriage Dysfunction. It should have helped his ego, but instead self-contempt curled in his belly.

He stepped away. A mosquito buzzed his face, looking for blood. “Just don’t let yourself down,” he said slowly. “When you get to my age, you realize that’s all that really counts.”

A thrill of anticipation made his heart lighter as he approached the big old pine tree growing out at an angle halfway up the ridge. He’d climbed it every day for the past week and was familiar with every toehold and branch. He searched for tracks on the ground, but the earth was too dry and he couldn’t tell new spoor from old. Three nights in a row his unwanted visitor had taken the bait, but last night’s offering had contained something a little extra. Strychnine. With any luck, the stinking devil was dead or twisting in agony on the ground. He touched the hilt of his knife and smiled.

Not that he took a half-dead wolverine lightly. The thing had claws to rival a Nanuk’s and teeth as sharp as a shark’s. He’d need to be careful, but joy burst through him and made him feel younger.

Sylvie had been cursed from the day she was born, but without her he might not have known about the wolverine until it was too late. For the first time he felt a tiny pinprick of remorse for taking her life. But his own life wasn’t over yet, and he was determined to follow the sun.

He heard a noise on the track ahead and stilled, slipping the old Enfield rifle from his back and nudging off the safety. The gun was his daddy’s. Fifty years old, and as fine a weapon as ever made. The rustle of leaves and the swish of evergreens in the gusty breeze masked other sounds, so he pushed off the path into the bush. The smell of crushed Labrador tea leaves rose from under his boots. His stomach growled. He was hungry but had been too preoccupied to eat.

Was it the beast?

Sweat soaked his back as the sun beat down. Something tall came into view, but that was no damn skunk-bear. A big buck caribou ambled down the track, and his fingers tightened on the trigger as he sighted the gun. But no matter how tempting the buck was, he couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t afford for someone to hear the shot and come to investigate before he’d gotten rid of that other blighted nuisance sent to torment him. He pushed back onto the trail, and the caribou sprang away into the bush. He walked faster now, determined to get this over with. He rounded the corner and searched but there was nothing dead or dying on the ground. Maybe the animal had run away to die? He looked up into the dazzling blue sky and there was the dead partridge, dangling untouched from a branch.

Fury and frustration rose up inside him so fast he wanted to scream. And fear…

The fear was insidious and unstoppable. Sickness bubbled inside his gullet, and he spewed into nearby bushes as if he’d swallowed the poison. It took five minutes to gather his strength, to muster the energy to drag himself to his feet using the barrel of his rifle. He was tired. Soul weary. He slung the rifle across his back, the metal pressing into his spine. But he wasn’t finished. He couldn’t be finished. He had too much to gain and too little to lose to stop now. This was his test and he would not fail.

***

After nine hours tracking, they were still in the air.

“I don’t understand.” Cam dragged her fingers through hair that had given up any pretense of being under control hours ago. “They were all here three days ago.” Usually by now they would have located the implanted char and be heading back to the ship for dinner. But today there were still ten fish unaccounted for, yet they’d all been found in this slow meandering part of the river just a couple of days ago. They hadn’t jumped the falls into the pond at the top of the brook and they weren’t in the main body of water. “Maybe they swam over to the next river system?”

There was some support for that behavior in the literature. It was possible. “Can we do a quick check?”

Daniel gave her one of those tight lip twists that told her he was running out of patience. The expression in his eyes was hidden because of the dark shades he habitually wore. He checked his watch. “Another hour, then we’re heading back to the ship.”

“Thanks.” Cam turned the receiver off to save battery. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was hot with the sun glaring through the windshield, turning the cockpit into a greenhouse complete with a few stray bugs who’d hitchhiked last time they’d opened the doors.

She and Daniel had developed a wary sort of truce, neither mentioning the kiss, nor the fact he’d saved her life because…well, just because.

There was no banter. No conversations about family or virginity. Just an unnatural sort of tiptoeing around the other, which, alone in a helicopter for nine hours, was pretty damn tough and involved some dynamic tiptoeing.

She missed him.

Tracking fish wasn’t difficult, you just followed the beep until it reached maximum power and then, with a bit of luck, you got a visual on the tagged fish and pinpointed the exact GPS coordinates. But having spent all day cramped in the chopper, she was getting a little stiff and extremely weary. So how must Daniel feel? Flying a helicopter took constant concentration. She glanced at him while he was talking into his radio. He didn’t look tired. As usual he looked annoyingly handsome.

The land spread out before them like a lush emerald carpet. Hard to believe that for three quarters of every year the whole ecosystem was encased in snow.

Frenchmans Bight crouched in the very far distance on the opposite side of the bay. Shudders laddered her spine as Sylvie’s gruesome smile flashed through her mind.

The silence stretched between her and Daniel, making her hyperaware of the tension they both pretended didn’t exist. “What are you going to do when this is over?”

“You mean tonight?” His gaze flicked over her and he gave her a lazy smile.

She scratched at her shoulder where her harness rubbed, wishing he didn’t zap her nerves just by existing. Breathing in his scent all day wasn’t making it any easier to find him unattractive, and her body was remembering that toe-curling kiss on the flight-deck a week ago. She cleared her throat, her brain suddenly jammed with the memory. “I meant after this job is over. What are you going to do then?”

The lines at the sides of his eyes creased. “I’ve been thinking about trying to get into Search and Rescue, but they tend to recruit only military personnel.” There was a note of uncertainty in his voice, something she didn’t usually associate with Daniel.

“You used to be military.”

His lips twisted. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure that’ll count in my favor.” Silence again, but at least he was talking to her.

They raced up the river, following its meandering course. Cam steadied her hands by fiddling with the controls on the receiver. She set it to automatically scan for all ten missing transmitter frequencies. As they reached some braided shallows Cam spotted something silver and shiny glistening in the water, near the edge of the main flow.

“What’s that?” She pointed at the reflected light glittering in the sun.
Dead fish
? “Can you put her down?”

Daniel nodded and finessed pedals and levers as he maneuvered into the wind. As soon as they touched the ground, she was out of her harness and out of the machine, ducking beneath the thunderous downdraft from the rotors and splashing through the shallows. She was wearing rubber boots, not waders. Sitting in a chopper all day in waders was like being in a sauna in a wetsuit.

She squinted into the water and took a few more steps. The change in angle of the sun made the objects difficult to spot on the ground. She went to where she thought she’d seen them and bent over to try and get a closer view.

“Don’t fall in.”

She caught his eye. As if she needed a reminder.

Daniel removed his shades and squatted near a shallow pool at the edge of the river to scoop water over his face and neck. The drips slid over his tanned skin, errant sparkles encrusted his lashes, the front of his shirt becoming damp. Cam didn’t want to think about how beautiful he was. She wanted to ignore the tingles that swept through her body when they accidentally touched, and pretend that all she saw when she looked at him was a coworker. But it was more than that. She found him sexy and attractive, and even though she knew he was a player, even though getting involved with Daniel Fox would be temporary—a fling—well, dammit, it might be worth it.

She’d never had casual sex. In fact, she’d been
engaged
to the two guys she’d had relationships with, before they’d ever got down and dirty. She clenched her fingers as she scanned the water. It didn’t say much for her living-life-to-the-fest philosophy if she was so cautious about getting into relationships that she needed a precious gem set in gold to get naked.

But Daniel wasn’t interested in her.

Apart from those weird flashes of heat that were probably his residual sexuality leaking out, he treated her the same way her brothers treated her. With the exception of that kiss.

She felt blood pouring into her cheeks and scooped up some water to splash over her face. It trickled down her tank top, and the coolness was a relief to her overheated body.

If only she could find these damn fish. Then they could go home and she wouldn’t be forced into such close proximity with the man. She spotted a gleaming edge of metal and stuck her hand into cool water, pulling the object clear of the gravel bed.

She stared at it, puzzled, and twisted it in her fingers. It looked like a mangled fork. What the hell was it?

“What you got?” Daniel asked.

Cam turned to him and dangled a metal object from the tips of her fingers. Her hair was a mass of curls around her face and her cheeks held a pink glow from the effects of the sun.

They were working together okay, but he could tell she was still mad at him. And the irony was she wasn’t pissed because he’d kissed her. Oh, no. She was pissed because she’d kissed him back. And he did not want to be thinking about that kiss. He shifted uncomfortably. He‘d been sweating from that damn kiss every night for the past week, all because he’d sworn off sex and beer.

Big mistake.

He didn’t know why he’d allowed himself to be goaded except he’d been knocked off balance by her scathing opinion of his character.
He
was the honest one. Hadn’t he decided right from the start that he wouldn’t touch her? Hadn’t he’d known from one look at the back of her ugly ball cap that she’d get all pissy and emotional and tangle everything up so it became awkward and ugly? And he’d been right, and that was after just one stupid bloody kiss that had completely floored him.

He turned his attention from the dampness beading her skin to what she was holding.

Shit. As always, she’d found trouble. He walked over to her, jumping from one patch of grass to the next, and held out his hand.

She placed a bent fork carefully in his palm. Her fingers brushed his skin but he ignored the involuntary tightening of his chest that occurred every time they connected. He figured it was some weird electrical short-circuit, a bi-product of latitude and dimples.

“A homemade gaff.” He turned the fork over, noted the sharpened tines.

“A what?” A little crinkle appeared between the Doc’s brows, and her nose scrunched up as she leaned into him to get a better look at the fork. The soft scent of woman filled his lungs.

He stepped away.

Since he gave up sex, since he’d kissed her, he’d wanted her so badly he could barely operate.

It was torture.

Even so, tracking days were his favorite time. How was that for masochism? Tracking itself reminded him of his time in the SAS—having a mission to complete, albeit a simple one. It brought back some of those feelings of being useful that he hadn’t even realized he’d lost until now. And being with Cam? That was the punishment he deserved for being an ass.

“You tie the gaff onto some twine and try to hook yourself a fish.” He demonstrated the action and spotted more gaffs littering the streambed. “The First Nations people often use gaffs for fishing, but something tells me this is a more localized problem.” He raised his eyes to meet the Doc’s blue-green gaze, watched her brows lower and her lips pinch as she realized what he was telling her.

“Poachers from the mine. Goddammit. I need to report this. I’m going to take some photographs.” She ran back to the helicopter and he just watched her move. If he couldn’t have sex he could at least enjoy the female body in a more aesthetic fashion. Even in rubber boots she was nicely put together. Nothing wrong with looking.

And sex wasn’t the real problem, he’d realized over the last few days. Drinking himself into a coma just to get to sleep at night was the real problem, and he’d managed without a sniff of alcohol for the last eight days. He still had nightmares and the occasional flashback. But by working out for hours every night and immersing himself in flying during the day, he was getting as much sleep now as he had with the booze. But with less downside for his liver and career.

The Doc was running back and the front view was a little
too
distracting so he looked off into the black spruce woods that covered ridges while she took some photographs of the riverbed.

Poaching didn’t bother Daniel. In survival situations, he’d fished out of rivers whether it was legal or not. The SAS didn’t apply for permits in covert situations. No big deal. But the Doc had a thing about rules and regulations, and when you orchestrated your life around a deadly condition that needed rigid control, he could respect that.

“Let’s go.” Daniel caught her elbow and urged her back to the chopper. He wanted to get her back to the ship so she was no longer his responsibility, because he could feel himself being sucked into her problems again. On the ship it wouldn’t matter what she did. She’d be safe. “You need your insulin shot and some food.”

She didn’t know it but Daniel had gone into her room and taken spare supplies to store in the helicopter just in case a situation arose.

She didn’t argue. In fact she let him maneuver her through the shallows, stepping over the narrow braided streams, which told him she was busy plotting her revenge on the poachers.

To his surprise, she dug straight into her fanny pack, got out her glucose meter and syringes and stabbed the needle into her side. He flinched, each prick to her skin a tiny depiction of the infinite number of times she’d jabbed a needle into herself in order to survive.