The Last Track: A Mike Brody Novel by Sam Hilliard

Author:Sam Hilliard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780984203512
Publisher: Buddhapuss Ink, LLC
Published: 2010-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Jessica,

May you never thirst at the Pine Woods Ranch.

Erich

Red roses suggested passion, white ones, purity. Now a yellow rose, that was clever. That said just what she could handle: friendship. Nothing untoward about that sentiment. And the gift of water made her laugh. Erich broke through her defenses without being pushy. For Jessica, such subtlety was a lost art.

At the front desk she requested a slender vase. They did not have one, so she used a water bottle. A quick clip with her pocketknife made the stem the proper length. She added an inch of water and placed the rose at the corner of the makeshift desk.

“Why did he send you flowers anyway?” Andy asked.

“He just wanted to be nice,” Jessica said.

“Dad is nice.” Andy sounded defensive, almost hostile.

“Ready for lunch?”

Since she planned on tackling the Better Days, LLC situation before the afternoon ride, she decided to leave the laptop in the room instead of walking it back to the main building and storing it in the safe. After all, the machine was useless without her password and she would only be gone thirty minutes.

Jessica locked the door.

She checked it twice.

01:13:26 PM

A man could learn much about survival and self-reliance from a few days in the desert. That’s what Mike thought about as he and Dagget trudged to the crest, watching for the sign. Given a choice between warm and cold-weather searches, Mike preferred winter. Tracking was simpler over a layer of fine, fresh snow. White powder made spotting marks easier, and a shallow dusting supported cutting the tracks over great distances. Also, during winter the lines dividing a day became less pronounced. With the right combination of moonlight and snow, searchers might continue from dusk through dawn, uninterrupted by the cycling of the sun. Mike relished rundowns like that.

There were technical advantages to the cold, too. Thermal-imaging equipment, like FLIR, functioned best in searches where gaps between body heat and the temperature of whatever surrounded that body existed. The more pronounced the gap, the more striking the image appeared on the screen, and the easier identifying an out-of-place heat source became.

And he believed in one more advantage of the winter without a doubt: low temperatures boosted his visual acuity. Though he could not prove it, Mike was certain that in the cold, he saw farther, clearer.

Yes, the summer had definite benefits to others: vacations, beaches, and glistening hard bodies in the sun—all pleasures unknown to Mike. The lion’s share of his sports-outfitting business landed squarely in the summer. Thanks to a stable North American and Western European customer base, the priciest and most sought-after packages launched in July. While others vacationed, he worked.

A sudden shift in the wind unsettled him.

The choppy breeze hinted of a possible storm. A thin ring around the moon toward the latter half of the last evening was another warning. That might have meant nothing at all, but the old superstition about a ringed moon forecasting bad weather was often true. What the phenomena proved to Mike was the existence of ice in the atmosphere.

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