“Hey!”
Ignoring her protest, he shoved the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “I prefer to keep track of all the weapons myself. Call me paranoid.”
“That’s not the first adjective that springs to mind.”
He gave her a hard look, but said only, “I won’t be long. Don’t wander off.”
His orders were starting to wear thin. “Maybe you’d like to tether me to one of the rocks,” she suggested politely. But when he disappeared into the cave without responding, she sighed, scanned the ground carefully and then sat down. She’d known spending any amount of time in his presence was going to be a strain, but it was probably better this way. When she was thinking of how much he annoyed her she wasn’t considering the way his jeans hugged his narrow hips, or the inverted V made by shoulders tapering to waist.
Much.
He’d been inside about five minutes when he called out, “Delaney. Come in here a minute, will you?”
She looked up from the drawing she’d been making with her index finger on the sandy ground. “What?”
His voice was more impatient now. Imagine that. “I need you to come hold this light.”
Staring blankly at the entrance of the cave, she swallowed hard. “In…there?”
No way. Though her body remained frozen in place, her mind was scrambling for safety. Absolutely not. A cave was closed. Confined. The walls would press in. The air would get scarce.
As if oxygen were already in short supply, she hauled a greedy gulp of it into her lungs as she struggled to her feet. Her brain shouted Run! Still she didn’t move. Couldn’t.
Joe reappeared in the cave’s entrance. “What’s the matter? You aren’t afraid of bats, are you? Because there aren’t that many of them. The activity scared them off.”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“Well then, come on.”
It was worse, ten times worse with him standing there staring at her. Delaney struggled to keep her face expressionless. To keep the panic that was sprinting up her spine from showing. A man like him could never understand. Had Joe Youngblood ever been afraid of anything? Doubtful. Fear made you weak, and she couldn’t imagine him ever feeling weakness.
Which made her doubly reluctant to show it in front of him.
She took a step forward, half-surprised when her foot moved. Another step. Then another. She was even with the entrance of the cave now, and its opening threatened, like a toothless mouth ready to swallow her whole. She stopped next to him, took the flashlight he handed her, then watched him retreat into the near darkness.
Don’t think about it. Just do it.
Some post-traumatic stress therapists recommended just this sort of thing, she recalled as she inched farther and farther into the cave. A desensitization experience, under safe conditions, could lay fears to rest for good. And this was safe. Perfectly safe.
She looked over her shoulder. The entrance was still there, the low dusk light spilling inside. There was an escape route. It was all right. She’d be all right.
“I need the light over here.”
Delaney followed his voice, trying to ignore the shadows crowding in, surrounding her. She concentrated on the beam of the flashlight before her. The darkness couldn’t engulf her as long as the light held out. Surely they wouldn’t be in here long enough for the flashlight battery to die.
Joe gripped her shoulders and guided her to the position he wanted, seeming not to notice the stiffness in her limbs. “Point the light at the center of the floor here.” He crouched down, began stacking up empty cartons then moving them quickly out of the way. “The guy on the ATV must have cleared all those boxes out of here, but I have to wonder why. At some point they had a truck out there. Why couldn’t they have used it to haul stuff?”
“A truck?” Since his words offered a distraction, she seized on them. “Maybe there was something large stored in here that they took away.”
Joe finished stacking all the bigger empty cartons and bent to sift through the remaining litter on the floor. “More than likely it would have needed to be dismantled before hauling it out of here. You couldn’t manipulate something of any size around those rocks out front.”
There was a chill in the air, she was almost certain of it. Surely it came from the cool rocks and not from her sweat-slicked skin. She could feel the blood pounding in her veins, and realized with a start that she was panting. The thin tether she had on her control was slipping.
Joe was saying something, his usual expressionless voice holding a note of excitement, but she couldn’t concentrate on his words. The inner chamber of the cave was shrinking, the walls moving in on them with sly sliding movements. The beam highlighting Joe shook in her fingers. She gripped it more tightly, but couldn’t hold it steady.
The entrance is still there. There’s a way out. I can just walk out.
But she couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder, just to be sure. All she could see was the pile of rubbish Joe had stacked.
Delaney stumbled back, straining to see around the pile. In the dim recesses of her mind she knew the entrance was present. It was only feet away. But the path to escape was blocked. It was blocked.
Emotion abruptly overcame reason. She bolted. The flashlight released from her numbed fingers, bounced on the hard cave floor and switched off, throwing the interior into complete darkness. She crashed through the makeshift barricade, stumbling over a carton, nearly falling. But she didn’t stop her forward motion toward the entrance. Toward air. Toward freedom.
She burst out of the cave with dizzying speed, tripped over a rock, went sprawling. Her fall drove the breath from her chest and she lay there, lungs heaving, feeling the still-warm air chase the chill from her skin.
It was long moments before she could drag herself upright, draw up her knees and rest her forehead against them. Slowly, panic receded, to be replaced by all-too-familiar symptoms. Her head was pounding in the aftermath of the episode, her body weak. Dizzy. It was the height of irony that only hours earlier she’d been congratulating herself for having conquered the panic. For having found her strength again.
Had she really thought the fears had been driven away? They had only been hiding, waiting until she let her guard down before rushing in to ambush her again. The realization was bitter.
But more bitter by far was finally raising her head, looking up to see Joe Youngblood gazing down at her, with something suspiciously close to pity on his face.
Chapter 4
Captain Tapahe stared at the used syringe in the plastic evidence bag Joe held, his face creased in thought. “It might have been a lucky break for us that Carson stumbled upon the area. If it’s as remote as you say, chances are we never would have known anything was going on there.”
“Once we get this syringe back from the lab we’ll have a better idea just what kind of operation it was.” Meaningfully he waved the bag at his captain. “Just how long do you think we’ll have to wait for results?”
At Tapahe’s hesitation, Joe felt a familiar frustration. The Navajo Tribal Police was hopelessly underfunded. There wasn’t enough money to regularly update basic equipment, much less purchase new expensive lab facilities. Most of their forensic evidence was sent off the reservation, to languish at the state crime lab for weeks or longer.
“It’s not like this ties in with any of our open cases,” the captain began.
“We can’t know that until the tests are completed,” Joe argued. He hooked a chair with a backward swipe of his ankle and dragged it over to sink into it. The late nights spent on the drug case were beginning to wear on him, coupled as they were by lack of sleep, which had begun to elude him at precisely the same time his ex had decided to run off to Window Rock with his son. “They might find traces of crystal ice in the syringe.”