Chapter Two
“Leave me alone.” Dozing in the hammock that stretched between two birch trees in his back yard, Tyler waved off the moist muzzle panting in his face. The damn dog wouldn’t leave him alone. Plus, it sounded like he was chewing something he shouldn’t be.
Tyler cracked an eye. A tennis ball had escaped the tennis court at the back of the yard and Bronson had found it. It dropped from his mouth and rolled into Tyler’s face.
“Yuck.” He sat up, annoyed, and hurled the ball across the yard. The dog took off after it, and Tyler lay back down.
The sultry afternoon made him drowsy. One of these days, he was going to have to stop being a useless, lazy son of a bitch and figure out what the hell he would do with his life. But for now, he didn’t care enough to try.
He had barely closed his eyes when the ball landed on his shoulder.
“Seriously?” He glared up at the muzzle peering over the edge of the hammock. Bright blue eyes were fixed on the ball in anticipation of its being thrown again.
Tyler gripped the wet ball, thought about hiding it under his arm, and changed his mind. There was something about the dog’s eyes and the playful way they sparkled that struck him as familiar. And then it came to him. Chief “Bronco” Adams, one of Tyler’s closest teammates had eyes exactly like Bronson’s—bluer than the sky and glinting with devilry.
“I’m going to call you Bronco,” Tyler decided, pulling back his arm and giving another throw.
The dog wheeled and tore after it. Damn, he’s fast, Tyler thought with a prick of envy.
The ball rolled into a bed of ivy climbing up the five-foot fence. The dog sniffed frantically and looked back at him. “To the right.” Tyler pointed toward the ivy. Amazingly, the dog followed his directions and dove into the tangle of leaves, coming up with the ball. “Atta boy. Bring it here, Bronco.”
The name felt good coming out of his mouth. It made Tyler feel like his teammates were still a part of his life. Bronco galloped proudly up to him and tossed the ball down into his lap in what nearly resembled a throw.
Tyler tossed it back testing the dog’s reflexes.
Snap. Bronco caught it in his jaws and flung it immediately back at Tyler, right into his hands.
“No way,” Tyler marveled. He lobbed it back at the dog, who caught it again.
“You’ll never get tired this way,” Tyler realized. He struggled to his foot, hopped to the tree where his crutch was propped, and moved into the yard with the ball. Then he pulled back his arm, the way he had playing quarterback for the Lions and forgetting that his follow-through required a left foot. His crutch stabbed the ground, but it couldn’t halt his momentum. Down he went, shoulder first into the grass.
Ooph. He lay there for a while, humiliated and confounded by the extent of his handicap. Losing his foot had utterly wrecked his life. A single sob escaped him before he wrestled his self-pity under a lid of self-discipline.
Bronco had trotted back with the ball, but instead of dropping it on Tyler’s head and compounding his defeat, the dog lay down beside him, touching the length of Tyler’s side and heaving a great big sigh.
Tyler reached back absently to pat the dog’s head. The position wasn’t very comfortable, so he squirmed onto his other side to stroke him. The fur between Bronco’s ears was especially soft.
“What’s the matter, buddy?” he murmured, his thoughts a mile away. “You think I can’t throw a ball anymore? Think I’m a useless cripple, huh?”
The dog licked his wrist as if to deny the allegation, and the SEAL motto, The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, flashed through Tyler’s head.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t give up.” He reached for the ball between Bronco’s front paws, and the dog sprang up, eager to resume their game.
Tyler rolled to his knees. “Who needs feet?” he muttered. Staying on his knees, he hurled the ball clear to the fence with Bronco streaking along in its wake like a comet.
Katie’s eyelids sprang open. The sound that had wakened her wasn’t one that she heard very often. Her pregnant golden doodle, Goldie, growled low in her throat. Not only that, but the dogs in the kennel at the back of her house emitted strident punctuations of sound reserved to announce a threat. Katie had been working with dogs long enough to distinguish between the sounds they made.
Something or someone had whipped her dogs into a frenzy.
She craned her neck, peering through the shadows at the digital clock by the bed. It was 2 AM. The cause for the ruckus might just be a lost hunting dog, drawn in by the scent of other dogs to her property. That had happened before, but it was usually in the fall during hunting season, not in early May, and rarely at night when dogs tended to bed down, even when lost.
A more sinister explanation lodged uncomfortably in her mind, causing adrenaline to flood her arteries. Katie sat up slowly, swinging her feet to the floor and reaching for the cell phone charging on her nightstand. Then she groped inside the drawer pulling out the pepper spray she’d kept close at hand since the attack in college.
The memory of the man’s ugly grimace when he tried running her off the road yesterday kept her heart thudding erratically. What if it was him out there, and he tried to break in again?
Why do these things only happen to me? she asked herself. First the episode in college and now this.
At least her uncle had taken yesterday’s incident semi-seriously. “Do you know any reason why anyone would want to hurt you? Have you upset any of your clients lately?” He hadn’t bothered to ask if some jilted lover felt the need to harass her. It wasn’t any secret that Katie didn’t date.
But he hadn’t believed that the road incident was in any way related to the attempted break-in.
“We caught that boy who’s been stealin’ jewelry out of people’s houses, so you won’t have any more break-ins, I can almost guarantee you. You know, this ain’t the city, Katie. What happened to you back in college won’t happen out here. Besides, you got your dogs to protect you.”
Katie had ended that conversation mortified and discouraged. Of course her parents would have told her uncle about the incident in college. And now he probably thought her paranoid, an opinion that would only be confirmed if she called him now and the intruder turned out to have four legs, and not two.
“Come on, girl,” she whispered, gesturing for Goldie to accompany her out of her bedroom onto the dark second-story landing.
The motion-sensor floodlight mounted to the kennels out back beamed brightly through her many window panes downstairs, casting geometric patterns on her furniture and walls. But all seemed undisturbed inside her house.
Holding Goldie’s collar, Katie descended one step, then another. She was halfway down the stairs when the silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders filled the glass pane inset into her door. With a gasp, Katie started to retreat. Someone was standing on her porch!
But Goldie had spotted him, too. Tearing free of Katie’s grasp, she thundered down the stairs, rushing toward the door with a rumbling in her throat that intensified to a barrage of barking. The intruder’s silhouette abruptly disappeared.
Scuttling back up to the landing, Katie dialed her uncle’s number with hands that quaked. As his phone rang in her ear, she turned her senses to Goldie’s pacing. With a rash of angry barks, the retriever-poodle mix planted her front paws on the window seat built into the bay window in the parlor.
“Uncle Bill, he’s back,” she whispered when her uncle finally answered.
“Who’s back?” he asked, clearly resurfacing from sleep.
“The intruder who was here the other day. A man just looked through the glass in my front door, the same pane that was shattered last time.” A shiver coursed her spine.
“Did you see him?” He sounded more awake now.
“Yes. Well, I saw his shadow.”
“I can hear your dogs barking,” he noted. “Hang tight. I’ll be right over.”
The phone went dead in Katie’s ear. She
kept it firmly in one hand, the pepper spray in the other. A clammy sweat enveloped her, compounded by the first hint of summer humidity and the fact that she’d yet to turn on her air-conditioning.
Goldie ceased to bark, and the ruckus from the kennel was also dying down. Encouraged, Katie started creeping down the stairs. Maybe the intruder had caught sight of her and fled. Down the stairs she crept without anything happening to discourage her.
She was just stepping off the last step onto the varnished hardwood of her foyer when the floodlight on the kennel gate went out. Her adrenaline spiked. But the light going out was a good thing. It meant the intruder was likely gone, right?
Still the darkness ambushed her along with the memory of waking from her sleep to a stranger slicing the soft skin of her neck with his knife. Terror overwhelmed Katie suddenly, causing her knees to fold. She collapsed by the wall in a protective ball battling the fear that it would happen all over again.
Am I always going to be a victim?
Goldie padded over, panted in her ear, then curled beside her, dropping her head in Katie’s lap as she’d been trained to do. Katie hugged the service dog and focused on breathing. The episode would eventually pass. Since Goldie first came into her life, episodes like this were rare. That this one had had happened at all made her furious. How dare the intruder reawaken her nightmares when she’d finally moved past them?
Tyler paced the rooms and hallways of his childhood home the same way he had paced the perimeter of the temporary camp near the Pensiangan in Malaysia. The remote village had provided a hideout for the notorious arms dealer Haji Telemong, a virtual ghost had who funneled weapons from North Korea to Al Qaida.
Tyler hadn’t been able to sleep that night, any more than he could now. The hours prior to a precision attack never failed to arouse his adrenals, making sleep impossible. The whine of mosquitos and the chirping of tree frogs had kept him company as he’d contemplated the mission ahead. The perfume of frangipani flowers haunted him still, as did the taste of dread sitting on his tongue.
Untold hours of contingency planning and drilling had gone into preparing the SEALs for that strike. He should not have been so nervous. But doubts percolated—no doubt because Haji was purported to have more spies than even Hitler had, and Tyler was responsible for the welfare of fifteen men. If Haji had caught wind of their strike, who knew what could happen?
The prospect of losing any one of his men had filled him with dread. Hence, he had opted to be the first man across the roof to the entry point. Except he’d never even made it close to the window leading to Haji’s private quarters before the building imploded.
The accident had resulted in the task units’ emergency extraction form Pensiangan. With a shake of his head, Tyler cast off the painful memory of his recuperation and glared out of his parents’ living room window. Echo Platoon was headed to Malaysia any day now to finish what Charlie Platoon had failed to do. Sam had promised to avenge Tyler’s injury personally.
More than anything in the world, Tyler wished he could join Sam. Instead, he was stuck here. His parents’ overgrown lawn stretched to the white picket fence which ran along a country road. Unlike Pensingan, Louisa was a relatively safe, all-American town. Domestic violence and the occasional meth lab posed the biggest problems, along with teen vandalism. The rolling fields and forests were home to farmers and commuters who drove to neighboring cities for work but liked to get away at the end of the day.
Fireflies flickered here and there like tiny beacons of hope. But hope refused to flare in Tyler’s breast. From his present vantage, the future looked as bleak and dark as the night he’d lost his foot.
If only he’d died that night. Then he wouldn’t be so miserable now.
Grief swelled in his throat, making it hard to swallow. The psychologist he’d been seeing at Walter Reed had advised him not to suppress it. Let it out, he’d said. He’d told Tyler to picture his devastation flying out of him like a winged black beast. He willed himself to do just that. The pain tripled, but his eyes remained bone-dry.
“Fuck,” he whispered. Suddenly, he was so tired that he turned and sprawled face-down on the sofa where his mother’s garden club ladies used to perch like birds on a telephone wire.
“Mama.” He gazed across the dark luster of the coffee table at the pink wing-back chair reserved for the club president. It faced him, empty and ugly without her smiling presence.
The furtive approach of an interloper made Tyler tense and jerk his attention toward the door. The pointy-eared silhouette of the dog he’d taken on sucked the anxiety right out of him.
“Go away,” he groaned. The dog had become his shadow, never more than a couple of yards away, regarding him with those steady blue eyes that looked more human than dog-like.
As usual, Bronco ignored him. He padded closer and whined.
“Go back to sleep,” Tyler said. The dog had cried in his crate until Tyler had made him a nest by his bed.
Bronco ignored him. He lay down right next to the couch, within petting distance of Tyler’s hand. Tyler found his fingers in the dog’s soft fur. Bronco’s rumble of contentment brought a ghost of a smile to Tyler’s face. He thought about the woman who’d brought the dog over and whether she might let him pet her, too.
Whoa. Where had that thought come from?
Curiosity had made him look her up in his old year book. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but even at sixteen, Katie Crowley had the makings of a beautiful woman. Plump cheeks, wild hair, and railroad tracks on her teeth hadn’t disguised her potential, at least not to a mature eye. She’d made friends with the school nerds, and while intelligence wasn’t an attribute he’d valued in girls back then, it sure was now.
A hankering to see her face again niggled inside him. Hadn’t she promised him a date? Why should he wait for his ten days of dog-sitting to be over before he got his reward? Hell, he needed all the distractions he could get, and he was curious to see what she’d done with the old Roberts house.
Tomorrow, he decided, I’ll just drop by.
By the time the blue lights of her uncle’s cruiser dappled Katie’s walls, she had regained sufficient composure to answer the door and flick on the porch light. From now on, she wouldn’t forget to keep the porch light on at night.
“You all right?” he asked her with a searching look.
“Yeah.”
She told him what had happened. Then he searched outside while Katie paced her wrap-around porch watching his flashlight strafe the exterior of her home. If he didn’t find anything, he might tell her that her fears were unfounded. Maybe her house was haunted. In a way, she would prefer that to his confirming that her fears were real?
“Found some footprints in your flower bed,” he announced, mounting the porch to stand beside her.
Katie swallowed hard. Relief vied with terror.
“Why don’t I come in so I can ask you some questions?”
“Sure,” she said leading the way inside.
They sat at her dinette table in her cozy kitchen where he asked about her past and whether anyone might have a reason to stalk her.
Katie shook her head no.
“What about the man who attacked you in college? Whatever happened to him?”
An icepick of fear pierced her heart. “He served three years in jail,” she answered. “Why…why would he come after me now after all these years?”
“I’m not sayin’ it’s him,” her uncle soothed. “Just researching my options. What ever happened with those ghost hunters who wanted to film a show here?”
“I told them they’d be wasting their time.”
“And they haven’t bugged you about it since?”
She shook her head, wondering if he were on to something. “No.”
He tapped his fingertips on her tabletop. “Would you like me to track down your folks for you, hon? You look pretty shaken up.”
“No!” She threw both hands up. “No way. I’m not going to ruin their v
acation.” Her hardworking parents had been saving up for their world cruise for as long as she could remember.
Her uncle grimaced and pushed his chair back. “All right then, we’ll handle this ourselves. You feel free to call me any time.”
“Thank you, Uncle Bill.”
She trailed him to the door on leaden feet. A real-live stalker was definitely worse than having ghosts. It was going to take all of her coping skills and the help of her therapy dog to keep PTSD from wrecking her life again.