The construction site was muddy from recent spring rains. They slogged across a thick road to a temporary construction trailer. Mandy climbed the steps. She stamped then scraped the mud off her boots as best she could. “George?” she called as she opened the trailer door and leaned inside.
“Right here. What can I do for you?” A slim man in his early fifties stood in the muddy road behind them. Rocco turned, taking a good look at Mandy’s construction manager. His face was lean and gray. Shadows darkened his eyes, making him appear tired and haggard.
“George, this is Rocco Silas, a friend of my brother’s. Rocco, this is George Bateman, the construction foreman. Rocco’s going to be helping me up top.”
George held out his hand. “Nice to meet you. Glad to see Mandy’s rounded up some help.”
Rocco glanced at the foreman’s hand as his turned sweaty in his pocket.
“He doesn’t shake hands. War injury,” Mandy answered for him.
“Ah.” George dropped his hand. “Iraq or Afghanistan?”
“Afghanistan.”
“You boys did us proud over there. Thank you. So how can I help you?”
“Mandy mentioned some problems you’ve been having,” Rocco said. “Mind if I look around, talk to your crew?”
“Not at all. I did a background check on every single one of my men. Besides a few traffic violations and some spotty credit scores, they had clean records. No drugs. No felonies. Maybe you can find something the cops and I couldn’t.”
“Credit problems bad enough to make them want to steal?”
“Nope. Just good men living through some bad times. Hasn’t been as much work as we’d like lately. Some of their wives have been unemployed. Their families have been suffering. This job was a godsend.”
“Where were the tools taken from?”
George nodded at a utility trailer. “We lock anything valuable up in the trailer every night. Found it busted wide open one morning when we came to work.”
“You got some enemies, George? Disgruntled former employees? Angry competitors?”
A muscle worked at the edge of the foreman’s jaw. “I treat my employees fairly. Pay them top wages. Hell, I’m barely making any profit on this job. I’m paying most of it to the men just so I can keep them. I would hate to get through these lean times and have no workers available for new projects. So, yeah. This job was competed, and I won it ‘cause I bid it low. Maybe that was unfair, but it’s survival.”
“You didn’t win on price alone, George. You have a stellar reputation and you’re local,” Mandy added. “Those were important factors.” She looked at Rocco. “The other companies were in different states. I doubt this job would have stirred much of an angry response from the losing bidders.”
George gave them a tour of the buildings under construction, including an indoor arena, a pole barn, and a long stable with space for an office, a meeting room, and a small apartment at one end. Another crew was working on fencing for three pastures and a couple of smallish, round corrals in the lower terrace. It was an impressive setup.
When they finished the tour, Rocco asked to see the rest of the property. Mandy led him north toward a deer trail that led up a steep hill. The trail made a couple of switchback turns behind her house. At the top of the ridge, they could see all the way down to the town. To the west, the Snowy Range Mountains rose in jagged peaks of granite, hostile and forbidding like the steep ranges of the Hindu Kush, stirring an unexpected wave of homesickness in Rocco.
The wind that was merely a breeze below was blistering where they stood, clearing out the heavy clouds. The vista was breathtaking. Rocco filled his lungs with the crisp air. Twice. It smelled of snow and dust and sunshine.
He looked at Mandy, watched her peer across the view, her expression softening as she gazed at the land that she loved. The wind brought him a whiff of her soft scent. He pulled it into his lungs, secretly savoring it until a wave of guilt hit him. He didn’t deserve to stand here in the warm sun and cold breeze, safe in the heart of America, enjoying the company of a woman. The ache he felt for what he’d left behind wasn’t only skin-deep, it was bone deep. Soul deep, a MRSA infection in his spirit, consuming what was left of him.
Mandy made a quick braid of her hair so that it wouldn’t blow, but her fiery mane defied restraint. She caught his gaze. He forced himself to look away and was relieved when she started down the other side.
He was about to follow her when a patch of white in the dirt caught his attention. He stepped over to it. Cigarettes.
“Mandy, do you smoke?”
She came to his side and looked at the ground. “No, but my grandfather used to.”
“These are fresh. Have you had visitors up here?”
“No.”
Rocco crouched down and looked at what he could see of the ranch the below. Some of the construction. The long drive up to the equestrian center. A similar drive into the residential section of the ranch. The back of the house. The toolshed blocked sight of the bunkhouse and the pastures beyond it.
“Do you ever see anyone up here?”
“No.” Mandy crossed her arms and frowned as she looked around. “Maybe someone from the construction site comes up here.”
Rocco doubted that. It would take a good ten minutes or more to get up here. It wasn’t a convenient place to spend a quick lunch or smoke break. And if someone was coming up after hours, well, he had no business loitering up here, watching the ranch. Judging from the tension in Mandy’s face, she’d come to the same conclusion.
“Let’s move on,” Rocco told her. “I want to see the rest of the ranch.” They stepped down across a steep incline filled with boulders, sage, and scrub pines. Eventually the terrain leveled out and a path became visible.
Mandy waited for him to catch up to her. “We’ll be widening some of these trails for our advanced students who are able to handle a trail ride. We’ve a thousand acres-plenty of space to provide an enjoyable experience for our riders.”
He focused on the network of paths while she spoke. In Afghanistan, trails like these led to weapon and food caches, Taliban hideouts, and sniper nests. Standing here, unarmed and sheltered neither by body armor nor by the native garb of his undercover disguise, Rocco felt critically exposed.
The path they’d moved onto was well used-more than the others. “How often do you walk these trails?”
“Not very often. I made a couple of treks through here last month, picking the paths I wanted to have widened for our riders. Why?”
He shrugged. They were too established to have been used only a couple of times this spring. “Your land backs to Ty Bladen’s property, doesn’t it?” Rocco knew a skeleton crew was managing Blade’s property. They wouldn’t be tracking through these woods-he’d sold off his herd when his father had died years earlier. His people would have no reason to come this way very often.
“It does. The Bureau of Land Management borders the other part. I don’t know who leases it. We’ve never had problems with them. I don’t pay much attention to it.”
He’d followed too many goat trails in Afghanistan that led to insurgent hidey-holes to feel a warm fuzzy that these paths were just making themselves.
“Rocco, what are you seeing? You’re making me nervous. Do you think someone has been coming through here?”
Hell. He lifted his hat and shoved a hand through his hair. Maybe he was seeing ghosts where there were none. The land here was arid. It needed irrigation to grow anything more than sage once the spring rains dried up and the summer heat came in. A little traffic now and then in this ravine would probably stress the vegetation enough to form semipermanent paths like these.
“No.” He sighed. “I’m too used to looking for things that I’ll never see here. Forget it.” All the same, he decided to make a daily pass over the area, at different times, just to see what he might stir up.
When they returned to the ranch, they came out on the far side of the old barn. There was an old circular corral with a single occupant-an edgy, black-and-white Paint. The beast lifted his head, scenting them. He moved to the far side of the ring, watching them with white-rimmed eyes.
