The Nightmare Thief by Meg Gardiner Read Free Book Online

right?”
    “Correct.”
    “So why are there seven of them there on the sand?”

6
    J o paused at the crest of the ridge. The sun was a gold needle in a deep blue sky. She leaned back against a boulder spackled red with lichen. A moment later, Gabe joined her.
    She swept back curls that had escaped her ponytail. “Thirty seconds. Gotta catch my breath.”
    Gabe shrugged off his backpack and got out a canteen. He took a swig and handed it to her.
    “Thanks.” She drank and wiped her lips. “You have an altimeter?”
    He shook his head. But the rise and fall of his chest told her they were at significant altitude.
    Her truck was parked two miles back and probably a thousand feet below them on a narrow logging road. She and Gabe had been hiking for ninety minutes. According to her Stanislaus National Forest trail guide and the map Evan Delaney had given her, they were still a mile from the abandoned gold mine where Phelps Wylie had been found dead.
    Gabe scanned the crown of the forest. All around, covering the mountainside, were lodgepole pine, white fir, and dogwoods turning crimson. He pointed at a soaring conifer whose dusty green boughs spread above them.
    “That’s Jeffrey pine. It only grows above six thousand feet.” He smiled at her, a challenge. “Still way too low to worry about supplemental oxygen.”
    “Yeah, sure—you could have HALO jumped and beaten me here. No need to brag.”
    “Nah. The government gets annoyed when a PJ uses Air National Guard resources to meet his girlfriend for a date.”
    He set his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. He looked like he was in fighting trim, and he was talking like it too, as a deflective mechanism. But he couldn’t keep Jo from surreptitiously doing a visual sweep of his vital signs.
    His skin tone was good: bronze, with a ruddy glow from the hike. Respirations were rapid, but that could be expected because of the altitude. His pulse was strong. She could see it beating in his neck, where it met the line of his jaw. His eyes were clear, dark, and focused. On her.
    She slid her arms around him and kissed that beating pulse point. Wordlessly he pulled her tight against him and held her. She felt him breathing. He kissed the top of her head and then she tilted her face up and he kissed her right, on the lips. Twice.
    Then he smiled, patted her backside, and picked up his pack again. “Wasting daylight, campers.”
    Jo saluted. Don’t make a big deal out of it.
    But she couldn’t stop herself from keeping an eye on him. Tough cookie didn’t begin to describe Gabe, even on his worst day. And today was far from his worst.
    He was strong and young and resilient. But he hadn’t fully recuperated from being shot in the chest with a 9 mm bullet.
    He had only recently returned to work with the California Air National Guard, and to grad school at the University of San Francisco. He had not yet received medical clearance to return to active military duty. He hadn’t put back on all the weight he’d lost in the hospital or recovered his stamina. A patch of sweat darkened his USF T-shirt between the shoulder blades. He still had a considerable amount of pain, which he refused to dampen with medication.
    That, Jo knew, stemmed from pride and machismo and the determination to provide a clean and sober example to Sophie. And it stemmed from being a PJ, a pararescueman, with the Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. Gabe worked search and rescue on land, sea, and air. And when on active duty, he performed CSAR, combat search and rescue, sometimes leaping into firefights from thirty thousand feet, using HALO parachute jumps—high altitude, low opening—designed to maximize stealth and speed and a PJ’s chances of reaching the scene of the rescue alive.
    Jo followed him along the crest of the ridge, through slices of sunlight in the cool air. The terrain was dry and spare and wild, beautiful and incredibly quiet. Looking up, past the green tops of the pines, she