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I get maybe ten feet before Bruno says, “I don’t care. You—”
A twig cracks to my left. A blur of red-brown at ground level. A young fox. It must have caught a whiff of Storm. It’s running, and the crackle of undergrowth has a flashlight beam slashing across me.
Bruno lets out a curse in Spanish. A pause. Then a cry of pain, and the thump of someone hitting the ground.
“Stay where you are!” I call. “I have a gun, and I am not alone.”
“Detective Butler?” Bruno calls. “Is that you? Help me, please.”
A crashing through the forest. Someone running away.
“Please!” Bruno says. “I’m hurt!”
I approach with caution, as Dalton circles up beside me.
Bruno kneels, clutching the wounded spot on his torso. “Please. I think I…” He collapses face-first to the ground. It’s a fake collapse. I can tell by the way he throws himself down, but when he lands, he lets out a genuine shriek of pain.
“Goddamn it,” Dalton snaps, and we run to Bruno.
Bruno faked his stagger and his collapse to distract us from seeing whoever he’d been meeting with. Except now he’s in genuine distress, meaning we can’t say “screw this” and chase down whoever is fleeing.
“You go,” I say as I drop beside Bruno. “I’ve got this.”
“Yeah, and meanwhile, they can circle back and club you over the head,” he mutters. He glares down at Bruno. “Thought you were being smart, huh? Joke’s on you, asshole. You think you’re leaving in an hour. Oh, hell, no. You’re…” He trails off. “Oh,fuck.”
Bruno isn’t hearing Dalton. He’s curled on his side, his eyes wide with shock. The front of his shirt is wet with blood, as if his bindings soaked through, but that stain is spreading fast… because in his fake fall, he landed on the broken trunk ofa sapling, the sharp end of it sticking up six inches from the ground and glistening with blood.
Dalton doesn’t want to leave me with Bruno, but that’s exactly what he needs to do. I stay on alert, gun ready, Storm at my side as I strain for sounds from the forest. When those sounds finally come, they’re the crashing of Dalton bringing April from town.
Dalton leaves my sister with me, and then he has to run back to town for the stretcher and for help carrying it. I stand on guard as April stabilizes Bruno. Dalton returns in less than ten minutes with a stretcher and Anders. We load Bruno onto it and the guys carry him back to town while I jog ahead to get the clinic open and ready.
Once we’re back, I help April and Anders get Bruno situated, but after that, I’d just be hovering, waiting for answers and stressing out my sister. Also, there is something else I need to be doing.
I head out back. Dalton’s there with Storm, waiting for me.
“Done,” I say. “Let’s go.”
We return to the spot where we found Bruno in his meeting. I don’t have an exemplar scent for Storm, but fortunately, she knows everyone else who was at that spot, so when I ask her to pick up the scent of a stranger, she finds it.
Storm only finds the one trail, which means either one person or more than one person taking that same route in their escape. Dalton’s search finds multiple signs of passage, but that’s because multiple people showed up at this site—Bruno, me, Dalton, Anders, April, and whoever met Bruno.
The trail goes in as close to a straight line as possible, skirting fallen branches and wending past trees. Where does it go?
Straight back to Haven’s Rock.
That’s where Storm loses it. Once the trail is in town, where thirty people have been working, she can no longer parse it out from the endless network of scents.
In a movie, the next step would be to line everyone up and have Storm go from person to person, bursting into barks of alarm when she finds the right one. Is that possible? Maybe with a true scent hound. Storm is a part-time tracker and full-time companion dog, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Storm has told us that whoever met with Bruno came back here. To Haven’s Rock. It’s up to me to find them.
The first thing I do is return to the clinic to check on Bruno’s condition. My sister drives me out. As I’m retreating, Anders catches my eye and shakes his head.
The prognosis is not good. Not good at all.
“Have someone wait outside,” Anders says. “We’ll send them to find you if we need you back here in a hurry.”
If it looks as if Bruno’s not going to make it.
