Turquoise Guardian. Jenna Kernan

she didn’t. That would have made the necessity of him delivering this message superfluous. He headed out, following the ghastly bloody footprints. His phone supplied an address for a Harvey Ibsen, and his maps program gave him the route.

      Ibsen didn’t live in Lilac. According to Carter’s search engine, he lived in Epitaph, the tourist town fifteen miles north of here. The name, once a joke for the number of murders committed during the mining town’s heyday, now seemed a grim omen.

      Carter swung up behind the wheel of his F-150 pickup. Amber’s boss was out the very day this happened. A coincidence that was just too perfect in timing. Luck. Fate. Or something else?

      He didn’t know, but he had a sour taste in his mouth.

       Chapter Two

      Carter headed out, turning away from the town of Lilac, named not for the color of the rock, but the name of the man who decided to crush the poor-quality copper ore in a stamp mill and make the low-grade ore profitable.

      En route to Epitaph, he phoned his twin brother, Jack, a detective with the tribal police back home on Turquoise Canyon Reservation, and filled him in.

      “We have no jurisdiction outside of the tribe,” said Jack. “You’re practically in Mexico.”

      Actually he was thirty miles from there and heading north.

      “See what you can find out. Tell them that Amber is a member of our tribe.”

      “She left the tribe, Carter.”

      “They don’t know that.” Carter reined himself in. He wouldn’t lose his temper or shout at his brother.

      There was a pause.

      “Ibsen lives in a small housing development in Epitaph. You need the address?”

      “Got it.”

      “Okay. I’ll call border patrol. They might have a checkpoint set up along that stretch. What is the shooter driving?”

      “Don’t know.”

      “Do you want me to call the others?”

      He meant the members of Tribal Thunder, the warriors of the Turquoise Guardian medicine society. The ones charged with protecting their ancestral land and people from all enemies.

      “Call Little Falcon.”

      “I’ll call Tommy, as well. He’s down there somewhere. Maybe he can help,” said Jack.

      Tommy was their brother. At twenty-six he had scored a spot on the elite all–Native American trackers under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as the Shadow Wolves, and had been down there on and off for two years. Carter supposed not all the Bear Dens could be Hot Shots. A Hot Shot was a member of an elite team of firefighters flown into battle forest fires, and the Turquoise Canyon Hot Shot team was one of the most respected and sought after in the nation, a reputation they had earned with hard, dangerous work. He and the other members of his former US Marine outfit all missed the buzz of adrenaline, and so had joined the most dangerous job they could find as a substitute.

      “Great. Gotta go.”

      “Be careful,” said Jack.

      Carter hung up and slipped the phone into his front pocket. Amber still didn’t have a cellular phone. She hadn’t owned one the last time he’d seen her either.

      “Please, don’t let that be the last time,” he whispered and pressed the accelerator.

      * * *

      AMBER HUMMED A tune about being happy as she rolled along. The fifteen mile drive out to Harvey Ibsen’s was uneventful, and the scenery was lovely, so different than Turquoise Canyon. The roads were well maintained and flat as Kansas. She whizzed past dry yellow grass dotted with silver-green yucca and woolly cholla cacti with spines that looked like fur.

      There were no cacti up on Turquoise Canyon. Here the planes stretched out wide-open to the snowcapped Huachuca Mountains to her right and the rockier Dragoon Mountains to her left where Apache warrior, Cochise, once kept a stronghold. The mountain ranges here did not look like those near Black Mountain, but at least the Huachucas got snow.

      She missed home, still, after all this time. The Turquoise Canyon Apache Indian Reservation gleaned its name from the exposed vein of blue stone on Turquoise Ridge. Her tribe was a conglomeration of many Tonto Apache people, the losers in the wars against the Anglos, relocated twice until finally reclaiming a small portion of their lands. And the Turquoise Canyon Apache tribe had timber, turquoise and decorative red sandstone. They also had the best Hot Shots in the world. She supposed the warrior spirit lived on in the men of her tribe who now flew all over the West to battle forest fires.

      Carter was a Hot Shot. Her smile faded, and her heart ached at the thought of the man she’d once loved.

      She caught movement behind her and saw a dark vehicle closing fast. She held her steady pace and frowned as she recognized the van a moment before it swerved to the opposite lane and zoomed past her. It was the same illegally parked van at the loading dock, or so she thought. Her brow wrinkled as the vehicle vanished in the distance. How fast had that van been going to make her look like she was driving backward?

      Amber continued on but now with a sense of disquiet that niggled at her. She signaled her turn, though there was no one behind her.

      She checked the numbers on the houses she passed. She had been here once on a similar mission, but the houses were very alike; her boss’s home had solar panels, so she studied the roofs as she passed. When she arrived at number nineteen, she slowed before the house. Harvey’s hybrid vehicle was parked in the drive. That’s when she saw the familiar blue van was already on the corner. She slipped the car into Park, instead of electing to turn into Harvey’s ample drive. Something felt wrong, and she leaned forward to stare out the passenger window. Something about that van gave her the creeps.

      Amber had to be back soon because the shipment was being unloaded as she sat there dithering. As she turned off the engine, she resisted the urge to start the engine back up again. The last of the air-conditioning dissipated, forcing a decision. She was being ridiculous.

      She grabbed her satchel and then the car’s door handle, stepping out into the street. She took a moment to tug down her cream-colored jacket and smooth her dark slacks. Then she closed the door.

      She’d just made it up the drive when she heard a male voice speaking from inside the house. The tone was so strained that she did not at first recognize it, but then the strangled timbre became familiar, a version of Harvey Ibsen’s speech that she recognized but had never before heard.

      “I told you everything. I reported it, for God’s sake. I told you we had a problem.”

      There was a pause and then Ibsen again, whimpering, begging now.

      “Oh, but I’m one of you. I’m the one who—”

      The sound of a gunshot brought Amber up straight. Her eyes widened, her jaw clamped, and her grip on the shoulder strap of her satchel tightened. Her mind struggled to catch up with her body as her heart rate leaped and a sheen of sweat covered her skin.

      The second shot set her in motion. She spun and ran back to the curb. She dropped her satchel in the street beside her car as she crouched.

      Her breath now came so fast she choked on the dry air. Heat from the pavement radiated up through the soles of her shoes, and her image reflected off the metal of her door panel before her. She could see herself in the white paint—all wide eyes and cowering form.

      She glanced toward the van, perpendicular to her hiding place, and inched back out of sight, dragging her leather bag along the road as she moved away from the house. She ended up behind her rear bumper as she heard the sound of footfalls crunching on the ornamental stone. She peeked up over the trunk.

      He held a long black rifle in his