grabbed their carry-on duffels and rushed out of their seats so fast they stumbled upon the car attendant coming up the aisle. Startled, one of them dropped his tattered black bag, causing it to rip open.
Several colorful bundles covered in shrink-wrap crashed onto the floor. Everything after that happened so fast—David’s blood pressure spiked, and he felt himself slipping back into the arid mountains of Afghanistan.
The attendant’s surprise turned to realization, his gaze moving from the two men to the packages spilling from the duffel.
“Keep moving, old man,” one of the men told the attendant. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?”
The attendant stared at the bag. “No, can’t do that. I’m afraid I’ll have to report this immediately.”
“Wrong answer.” One of them pulled a knife on the frightened older attendant, stabbing him in the stomach. The attendant went down on his knees, shock and fear evident in his wide-eyed stare.
David saw the whole thing from his seat a few feet up the aisle. While the two argued about leaving without the packages they’d dropped, David hurried to help the injured man.
But one of the men pulled out a gun and pointed it at David, his expression hard-edged while his trigger finger twitched. “Get out of here. Now.”
David glanced up at the man holding a gun on him and then down at the bleeding man lying on the floor of the passenger train. “I’m not leaving. I’m a medic, and this man needs help.”
He braced himself and knelt down beside the attendant, fully expecting to be shot. Which was kind of ironic since he’d just returned from Afghanistan. He’d managed to survive the front lines, and now he might be killed while trying to honor the promise he’d made to a dying soldier.
Before the standoff could continue, voices outside caused the gunman’s friend to whirl in a nervous dance. “I didn’t agree to this,” he said in a growling whisper, his oversize red baseball cap covering most of his face. “Man, if you shoot him, the DEA and every cop around here will be on us. We need to leave.”
The man holding the gun glanced around, the sweat of panic radiating off him like hot steam. Then he spouted off to his short but wise buddy, his words as brittle as desert sand. “Get all that up and let’s go. Now!”
He kept the gun on David while his nervous helper shoved the packages back inside the gaping duffel. “You better keep traveling, mister, if you want to live.” Then he pointed to the moaning attendant. “I’ll finish off both of you if either of you talks.”
David held his breath and stayed on his knees near the injured attendant while the two men rushed off the train, baseball caps pulled low over their faces and sunglasses hiding their eyes. But the minute he saw them heading for a black SUV in the small parking lot near the square Tudor-style train station, he pulled out his cell and called 911. Straining to see, he memorized only part of the license plate and quickly glanced at what looked like some sort of Aztec emblem centered over the plates.
“I’m a medic,” he told the shocked older man after giving the dispatcher the needed information. “I’m going to help you, okay?” He checked the man’s vitals and found a weak pulse.
The pale-faced man nodded, his expression full of fright, his pupils dilating as he went into shock. “He stabbed me.”
“I saw,” David said. Taking off the button-up shirt over his old T-shirt, he quickly used it to stanch the blood oozing from the gash in the man’s abdomen. “Lie still while I examine you. Help should be on the way.”
The man moaned and closed his eyes. “My wife is gonna be so mad.”
David sank down beside the man, hoping to keep him talking. “Hey, buddy, what’s your name?”
“Herman,” the man said. “Herman Gallagher.” Then he grabbed David’s arm. “You need to report this to our conductor, too. Drugs. I think they had drugs in those bags.”
David did as he asked, and soon the conductor and several attendants were moving up and down the aisles.
David put up a hand to hold them away and kept talking to the man after handing his phone to a young assistant, who stayed on the line with 911. When he heard sirens, he breathed a sigh of relief. Though he was concerned because of Mr. Gallagher’s age and still disoriented himself, he’d seen much worse than this in the heat of battle. But right now, he was struggling to fight his own flashbacks.
This trip had sure ended with a bang.
And he hadn’t even stepped off the train to his final destination.
He’d come here searching for a woman he didn’t really know, except in his imagination. But a promise was a promise. He wasn’t leaving Desert Valley without finding her.
When he looked up a few minutes later to see a pretty female officer with long blond hair coming toward him, a sleek tan-and-white canine pulling on a leash in front of her, David thought he surely must be dreaming. Either that or his flashbacks were taking a new turn.
He knew that face. Had seen it in his dreams many times over.
While he sat on the cold train floor holding a bloody shirt to a man who was about to pass out, he looked up and into the vivid blue eyes of the woman he’d traveled here to find. The woman who’d colored his dreams during the brutality of war and made him wish he could finally settle down. Thinking of the worn picture in his pocket that her brother, Lucas, had given him right before he died, David couldn’t believe this was really happening.
Whitney Godwin was coming to his aid.
* * *
Whitney took one look at the two men on the train floor and went into action. Turning to her partner, a white-and-tan pointer appropriately named Hunter, she commanded, “Stay.”
Hunter whimpered, his shiny nose sniffing the air, his dark eyes lifting to her in a definite alert. Did the big dog sense something else around here? Hunter was trained in drug detection, so it was possible. They’d both recently finished an intense twelve-week session in town, so Whitney knew they were up to the task. Yet her heart beat with a burst of adrenaline that shouted, This is the real deal.
She took a good look at the injured train attendant and the man helping him. They’d both have to be questioned and cleared. “We’ll get to our search later, Hunter.”
Turning from Hunter, she spoke into the radio attached to her shoulder. “James, need that bus, stat. We have one injured and one who doesn’t look so hot.” Then she added, “We need to clear the train, too. Hunter’s a little antsy.”
“Bus is en route. ETA three minutes,” James Harrison, fellow rookie, responded. “I’ll take Hawk and have a look around, question some of the bystanders. Ellen’s on the way. She and Carly can help with a sweep.”
Ellen Foxcroft was also a rookie, and her golden retriever, Carly, was trained in tracking. Her mother, the formidable Marian Foxcroft, who’d always been supportive of the K9 training program in Desert Valley, had recently made an offer to Chief Jones that he couldn’t ignore. They’d all been asked to stay here after graduation from the training course to help investigate the high-profile murder of their master trainer, Veronica Earnshaw.
Marian had offered to underwrite their salaries since she wanted Veronica’s murder solved right away. Not to mention, she wanted the two suspicious deaths of two former rookies to be declared accidents once and for all. Marian didn’t like any black marks on the Desert Valley Police Department’s record. But someone seemed to have a beef with Marian, too, since she’d been found unconscious in her home a few weeks ago and was still in a coma at the Canyon County Regional Medical Center located twenty miles west of Desert Valley. Ellen had requested round-the-clock security for her mother’s room. They were all on high alert.
“Roger that,” Whitney responded to James. While the rookies were still in Desert Valley, they took whatever calls they could to gain