Countdown

Joe barely glanced in Annie’s direction, all too aware of her quiet, gentle presence. “You’re the world-famous tracker. You tell me,” he snapped.

Annie knew better than to fall into that trap. Donnally was a sergeant, she a corporal. She was below rating and, therefore, the assistant, not authorized to make command decisions. “I can’t tell you anything until you give me an idea of the framework of this investigation. You’re in charge,” she reminded him calmly.

Joe stiffened and turned toward her. He saw that her cinnamon eyes had gone hard and challenging again, and it surprised him. But why should it? Belatedly, Joe knew he’d overstepped his bounds with her. “You’re right. I want you to search this half of the area, maybe a quarter of a mile in diameter. I’ll search the other half. If you come up with something, give me a holler.”

Annie gave him a slight nod and pulled the brim of her soft uniform cap, traditionally called a “cover,” farther down over her eyes to shade them from the intense sunlight. “Okay.” She turned and began an automatic perusal of the terrain, still feeling Donnally’s gaze burning into her back. Maybe he needed to be reminded that she wasn’t always going to take his anger. At least he’d backed down and started behaving in a correct manner with her. As Annie moved carefully through the brush, she admitted she didn’t want to fight with anyone. At heart, she considered herself a peaceful warrior, certainly not someone who relished violence.

For more than an hour they searched the area, looking for any kind of evidence of the episode. Finding nothing at all, Joe was disgusted and finally called Annie back with a wave of his hand. As he stood by the HumVee waiting for her, he tried to ignore the delicate way she made her way between the sagebrush and avoided a prickly pear cactus. She moved with such natural grace that she looked more like a deer than a woman, he thought wonderingly. Then, angry at himself for his unbidden interest, he turned away from her approach.

“I didn’t find anything,” Annie told him as she arrived on the road beside him.

Joe nodded and gestured to the HumVee. “Makes two of us. Get in. When I get back to the office I’ll call and tell Captain Ramsey we need more specific directions. It was a wild-goose chase, anyway.”

On the way back to the brig office, Annie remained silent. She wanted to like Joe Donnally—at least as her superior. True, he was gruff and abrupt, but she’d worked with marines like that before. She just hoped that his attacks would stop seeming so personal. If she could figure out why he was like this, she thought, maybe she could understand the basis of the anger aimed at her. Maybe something was causing him a lot of stress right now. She took a deep breath.

“How long have you been here at Camp Reed, Sergeant?” she asked, struggling to keep her tone conversational.

Joe shrugged. “Too long.”

“Are there a lot of transition pressures on you right now?”

He stared at her momentarily, then concentrated on navigating the dirt road. Once again, her astuteness surprised him. “Why would you want to know?”

“I’m just trying to get a feel for what’s going down here. A new base always has its own set of rules.”

“Isn’t that the truth.” Joe gave her an oblique look and was struck again by Annie’s earthy beauty. Her high cheekbones made her eyes look very large. And her mouth… Joe groaned inwardly. Then, disgusted by his unprofessional response to her, he gave himself an internal shake and said, “As I mentioned before, Captain Jacobs, the officer who just transferred out of here, was hell to work under.”

“In what way?” Annie hoped that if she could get Joe to talk, it might ease the tension between them.

“Jacobs was a screwup, as I said. All he was interested in was punching his ticket to get the necessary provost-marshal time on his personnel record and continue his goal toward being a major someday.”

“Oh, that kind of officer….”

“You got it.”

She glanced at him, his profile set and his mouth a hard-looking line. Annie wondered if Joe ever smiled. Probably not often, after working under someone like Jacobs. No wonder he was sour. “A lot of problems?” she probed.

“That doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

“Were you badly understaffed?”

“Very. Captain Ramsey just transferred four new brig marines to our office.” Joe sighed. “It’s going to help. We’ve all been standing twelve-hour duty, five days a week. Finally, we can start getting back to eight-hour shifts.”

“It must have been pretty rough on you. You’re the section leader.”

“I guess.”

Annie decided that Joe Donnally was the master of understatement. She had been in her share of grueling, mismanaged situations, where the officers in charge were less-than-spectacular managers. “Pulling that kind of duty must have been hard on your family,” she ventured softly.

“I’m not married.”

“Oh….”

Joe turned onto the asphalt highway that led back to the brig office, needled by her attempt to talk to him. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to Annie. It would mean dropping his defenses, and he wasn’t about to do that. No, somehow he’d have to get Captain Ramsey to put Annie into someone else’s section—anyone’s but his.

* * *

Joe hung up the phone unhappily. He’d just called Captain Ramsey at home, and Annie sat expectantly at her desk, looking at him. Stifling a curse, he ripped a piece of paper off the yellow legal-size pad and folded it haphazardly.

“Ms. Tyler gave the captain specific information on where the shooting occurred. We have to get back there and check it out.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Annie said with a slight smile, reaching for her cover.

Joe glanced at his watch. It was 1700, quitting time. “No, we’ll do it tomorrow. I know you have to get moved into a new apartment, so I’m going to send you home. We’ll go out at 1400 tomorrow and check out this new area. I’ve got a bunch of work to catch up on for the transfer of a couple of brig prisoners. That has to be gotten out of the way first.”

Annie rose and picked up her purse. Since her return to the office, she’d discovered that Rose had kindly set up her desk with everything she would need. “Okay, I’ll see you at 0800,” she agreed.

Joe nodded and said nothing, watching her move toward the door. Why couldn’t Annie be less pretty? Less graceful? Less everything? Grumpily, he turned back to the demands of the long-overdue paperwork that crowded his desk. Not only did he have to bring Captain Ramsey up to speed, but Private Shaw, a marine in his section, had been discovered to be illiterate, and Joe had been assigned to watch over him and make sure the kid learned to read. On top of everything else, he had Annie. Well, it was too much. At first opportunity, he was going to talk long and hard to Ramsey about getting rid of her. He just didn’t want her around him or his section—the pain, the memories from the past that her presence called up were too great for him to deal with on top of the responsibilities he already shouldered.

* * *

The hot afternoon sun bore down on Annie as she climbed out of the HumVee. This time she had a camera slung over her shoulder, a report in hand, and she was prepared to search the area where Libby Tyler had said she’d fallen. Joe Donnally was no different, however much she’d hoped he would be. No, he was just as gruff and grumpy as ever. Compressing her lips, she moved around to the front of the HumVee where he stood, arms crossed, surveying the terrain.

“This is it,” he said, discouraged by the rough rocks and sparse vegetation. How the hell were they supposed to find the exact spot where Libby Tyler had fallen? Frustrated, he looked over at Annie’s clean profile. He’d thought a day would make a difference in how he felt toward her, but it hadn’t. After a broken night’s sleep, with memories of the past bleeding into the fabric of the present, he was in an even fouler mood than yesterday, if that was possible.

“We need to look for sagebrush or tufts of grass that have been disturbed,” Annie said.

“Yeah? Well, it’s like looking for a needle in a damned haystack, if you ask me.”

Annie smiled a little and set the report on the hood of the HumVee. Waves of heat, like invisible curtains, shimmered in front of them. It was over a hundred degrees, the sky a bright, cloudless blue. Only the refreshing scent of the Pacific Ocean less than ten miles away offered refreshment to Annie’s senses. “Maybe not.” She pointed toward the left. “You see that area?”

“What, that bunch of sagebrush?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“I’ll bet that’s where the horse dumped her.”

“How can you tell?” Joe looked over at her, incredulous.

“I’ll show you.” Annie felt good about this opportunity to demonstrate to Joe that she knew her job as a tracker. As they walked about two hundred feet into the desert, she pointed to several surrounding markers. “She said she fell in a ravine. There are rocks on both sides of this V-shaped area. And the sagebrush down there looks damaged.”

“It doesn’t to me,” Joe said flatly.

Annie said nothing, but gingerly made her way down the steep side of the rocky ravine. Once at the bottom she knelt. Feeling Donnally’s presence, she looked up at him. “The sagebrush is broken here and here. This is where she fell.” Annie turned over several branches to show him they recently had been broken.

Amazed that she could be so bold and sure about her discovery, Joe snorted. “Sure, and the next thing you’ll find is where the bullets hit the rocks.”