Look Again: A Novella (Echo Platoon Book 1) Read online

  “Yep. One of my dogs is graduating and then I’ll have room for Bronson to come back.” She reached down to pat the dog’s head.

  “I’d better not be stuck with him,” Tyler warned.

  She looked back up. “Oh, you won’t be.”

  Well, that was sincere enough. And she was so strangely appealing with her curly brown hair and cat-like eyes that he dared to ask, “Am I going to get something in return for this?”

  Those same green eyes widened with surprise. “Well…I can’t exactly afford to pay you,” she demurred.

  A wave of resentment tempered his interest in her. “Forget it. I wasn’t asking for a handout.”

  “Tell you what,” she said, overlooking his surly reply. “I’ll treat you to dinner at Tim’s,” she said brightly.

  “Where’s that?” The promise of a date occupied a spot on his utterly empty calendar.

  “Oh, it’s fairly new, so you don’t know,” she realized out loud. “It’s next to the campground, right on the water.” She beamed at him as she handed him the leash.

  The nylon tether tempered his anticipation.

  “I’ll go fetch his food and crate,” she offered. “Stay, Bronson.” She dashed back to her vehicle, and to Tyler’s surprise, the dog actually stayed, though he whined pathetically. Katie swept a big bag of food out of the back, put it on the ground, and reached for the heavy-looking wire crate.

  “Damn it,” Tyler muttered, watching her struggle to lower it. “Just leave it by the car,” he groused. “I’ll get it later.”

  She shot him an uncertain look. “You sure?”

  So she did know about his injury even though she hadn’t looked at it. “Positive.”

  “Okay then.” With a shrug, she closed up the back of her vehicle. Clang! “Truth is,” she said walking toward him again and rubbing her hands on her hips in a way that warmed his blood, “he’d prefer you didn’t lock him up too much. Bronson doesn’t like to be confined.” She stopped at the bottom of the stoop to pet the dog as he strained at the leash to get near her. She stretched out a hand to pat him. “Do you, buddy?”

  Then she squinted up at Tyler. “Being a shepherd, he’d prefer to case the perimeter at night. It’s an instinctive thing. I’m sure you understand.”

  Her gold-green gaze peered deep into his soul.

  “You’ll be back in ten days?” he reiterated, ignoring her insinuation.

  “Ten days,” she promised. “Here, you can call me if there’s a problem.” She pulled a card from her back pocket and bounded one more time up the steps to hand it to him.

  As their fingers brushed, he caught a whiff of gardenia. Glancing down, he read the card’s bold lettering: CANINE COMPANIONS. Boarding. Training. Therapy.

  “Number 4 Old Pine Road,” he recited. “Where’s that?” It sounded familiar.

  “It’s the old Roberts place where you and your friends used to drink.”

  He pictured the dilapidated Victorian house with its rotten floorboards and dripping spider webs and frowned. “You live there?”

  “I bought it and renovated it,” she explained. “Been running my business there for about five years.”

  “I thought the place was haunted. Didn’t the previous owner murder his wife or something?”

  She grimaced. “Not exactly. He was an investment banker who stole his client’s money. When he went to jail, his wife hung herself on Day’s Bridge.”

  Tyler flinched. “Damn.”

  “Sad story,” Katie agreed. “And, yes, there’s a rumor that the house is haunted. Some ghost hunters even asked if they could film a show there, but I persuaded them that they’d be wasting their time. Anyway, I can’t leave my dogs for long so I need to get back.” She started down the steps. “Thanks again, Tyler. I owe you.”

  As his gaze slid to her cut-off jeans and the legs that testified to an active lifestyle, he thought of several ways she could pay him back.

  She hopped nimbly behind the wheel, started up the engine, and rolled down the window to wave. Tendrils of her chestnut hair drifted across her cheek as she turned her car around, tearing her gaze from him to look into the rearview mirror.

  He and the dog stood watching until she disappeared. A whimper from the dog shook Tyler out of his trance. “She’ll be back,” he said, counting on it.

  Basking in the warmth of her accomplishment, Katie neared her home with a dreamy smile. The wind whistling through her open window smelled of young leaves and freshly cut grass. Life was good! In all the years that she and Tyler had grown up together, she had never exchanged as many words with him as she had just then.

  The encounter had left her giddy with euphoria.

  He’d been terse, yes, but still polite. His grudging acceptance of the dog betrayed a strong moral character and willingness to lend a hand if he thought it was needed. Add to that his devastatingly handsome looks and she couldn’t wait to see him again. Ten days was an awfully long time.

  Perhaps she could take him to dinner before then. Had he taken her up on the offer? She couldn’t recall. She’d been too enamored of his intense, brooding gaze and the way it affected her skin.

  In ten days, Bronson would have surely won Tyler over, making it easier for Katie to say, “Oh, by the way, he’s a certified therapy dog.” She would have to admit it eventually and teach Tyler the commands to elicit specific behaviors. Otherwise, Bronson’s hard work in learning them would go to waste.

  Sunlight dappled the winding country road, brightening the shadows under the tall trees on either side and keeping her spirits lifted. But then the sun glanced off the roof of the dark car behind her, and Katie’s contentment fled. It was him, her stalker—not following at a distance this time but accelerating until he rode practically on her bumper.

  She tightened her grip on the steering wheel, heart thumping as he surged closer still. My God, is he trying to hit me? She searched the older man’s pinched expression, trying to guess his intent. Suddenly, with a roar of his engine, he swung into the oncoming lane, hemming her between his oversized sedan and the narrow ditch. The deadly tree trunks flashed in her peripheral vision.

  She glanced over at him as he gained on her. But with her SUV higher than his vehicle, all she could make out was the lower half of his face. He bared his teeth in a determined, ghastly grin as he edged his car ever closer.

  Oh, no you don’t. Katie stepped on the brakes to keep his car from bumping into hers. The Chrysler barreled past, leaving her with a clear view of its missing license plate and broken taillight. As it continued to distance itself, she eased her foot toward the gas again only to pull off the road into the nearest driveway.

  A clammy sweat enveloped her. Her stalker had tried to push her off the road, or at the very least intimidate her.

  With a shaky hand, she fumbled inside her purse for her cellphone and dialed her uncle’s number directly.

  “The intruder’s not a teenager,” she announced when he answered her call.

  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 o
ver, 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.