The Edge of Courage (Red Team) (3 page)

“Well, if you can fix the tractor, I need to get those two pastures mowed. Then take down the old barbed wire and posts. I have new fencing being delivered in a couple of weeks. I’m going to be using these pastures as a quarantine area for new horses so that I can work with them before I move them down to the stable to be used in therapy. Several folks have horses to donate, but they’ll need a fair amount of training before I can put a special-needs child or a disabled adult on any of them.”

Rocco listened to her, feeling apart from her, from himself. Her words became muddled. It was too much talking. He could feel his mind shutting down, insulating him from being pulled out of himself and into her world. He had to stay separate, keep focused on his healing. While he was here, he would keep her safe, and he’d throw himself into the work, but he wouldn’t let himself get caught up in the sweetness of her voice or the beauty of her eyes or the strange, melting sensation that being near her spawned inside him.

“Show me around your spread,” he blurted before she elaborated further on a future he wouldn’t be here to see. “And give me a run down of the problems Kit said you’ve been experiencing. Then I’ll decide where I start working.”

Chapter 3

Mandy stepped off the bunkhouse porch. “I shouldn’t have told Kit,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I wouldn’t have except he caught me at an off moment and wouldn’t let it go. There’s nothing going on. Not really. Every construction project has problems. It’s only that I’m up against a tight deadline, and nothing is falling into place. I wanted to open in August, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when I’ll be able to open. And if I can’t start earning an income, this whole project is in jeopardy.”

“Talk to me while we walk. I’ll see for myself.”

Mandy faced him, her hands on her hips. “I don’t need a soldier, Mr. Silas. I need a handyman. Please don’t look for trouble that isn’t there.”

“My name’s Rocco. You’ve had to call the cops, true? How many times?”

“Twice. Several tools were taken from the construction site. Another time someone soaked the newly poured foundation in the stable. It froze overnight. Ruined it. Delayed work a week while the old concrete was removed and a fresh foundation was poured.”

“Are your neighbors complaining of troubles? Burglaries? Vandalism? Stuff like this happening to others around here as well?”

“No.”

“Kit said you’ve had a hard time keeping a handyman on staff. What happened with them?”

“You’re the fourth I’ve hired. One needed extended time off to go help his daughter on her ranch. The next worked for a week, then never came back. The third went on a drinking bender. He kept coming to work either drunk or hungover, so I fired him—just this morning.”

Rocco looked around the property. He wanted a handle on the trouble Kit was worried about. He would deal with the work piling up once the situation was secured. “Let’s take that tour.”

Mandy’s property was on the upper slope of a steep ravine overlooking the town of Wolf Creek Bend far to the southeast. The terrain’s natural terraces had been excavated to make the land useable.

Her home, the upper pastures, and the miscellaneous farm buildings that comprised the private ranch area were on the top level. The wide middle tier held the equestrian center buildings that were under construction. And the lower plateau contained several pastures. Mandy led him down the long driveway from the private residence to the first of two lower steppes.

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.
Take it
, he urged himself.
It’s a goddamned handshake. Take it
.

“He doesn’t shake hands. War injury,” Mandy answered for him.

Fuck.
Now he was hiding behind a girl.

“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.

“That’s Kitano.”

Rocco watched the Paint’s skittish behavior. “What’s wrong with him?”

Mandy shook her head. “They say he’s gone loco.”

Rocco didn’t miss the look she flashed at him. He wondered if they were still talking about the horse. Damn Kit, anyway. Had he told her about Rocco’s stay at Walter Reed? He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Has he?”

“I think so.” She nodded. “I’m fostering him. I hope I can rehabilitate him. I don’t know that I will ever be able to use him in the center’s work, but I would be happy to settle him with a family who will love him.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was part of a herd of horses used by a tourist’s riding stable down in Colorado. His owners fell on hard times and couldn’t feed their horses. They were put in a pasture where they slowly starved. Kitano didn’t take a liking to that. He fought back, fought to free the herd. His owners beat him, then locked him up in a stall and forgot about him. I can’t get him to go inside a building at all now. That’s why I’ve got him in this corral.”

Rocco cursed low under this breath. Kitano’s hell was like the pit he’d been a guest in. The wind curled around the buildings, making a plaintive whine.

“How are you going to fix him?”

“I don’t know. Time maybe. And patience. Plenty of food and water. Consistent handling. Basically starting over like he’s unbroke.”

She stepped on the bottom rung of the corral and pushed herself up to brace her folded arms on the top board. “My grandfather had a persistent belief that there was nothing sunshine, rest, good nutrition, exercise, and laughter couldn’t cure.”

“Horses don’t laugh.”

She looked at him. Her sharp, green gaze pierced the haze of his mind, the clutter of memories and heartache that rode him with razor-edged spurs. “I wasn’t talking about Kitano.”

He gave her a cold stare. She didn’t fucking want to get into his head. It wasn’t a safe place for any of them. “Thanks for the tour. I’m going to talk to George’s crew.” He touched the brim of his hat and headed back to the construction site.

Hours later, after meeting the guys working the construction site below, his gut told him George’s assessment of his men was accurate. None seemed to be hiding anything. No one had seen any strangers around the site or up at the ridge.

Rocco sighed as he stepped into the steel toolshed. The building was an oversized workshop that had long ago been taken over as a storage area. Various farm equipment and household artifacts littered the space—mowers, tillers, attachments for the tractor, extra tires, tools, shovels, rakes, brooms, boxes, trunks, discarded furniture—all of it covered with a thick layer of dust, none of it in any order. The clutter and confusion of the space amplified the noise in his head, hitting him like a wall he couldn’t pass through.