Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless Page B

wind had backed off, and the sky shook loose a light and steady fall of snow. The snow tossed the dying sunlight back into the air, a secondhand radiance filled with the ancient scents of musk and sage and fallow soil. Far away, a herd of pronghorn stood with their heads up, alert, like a series of exclamation points against the swollen clouds, alarmed probably by the approaching storm.
    Or maybe by a man, walking nearby.
    After its first harsh breath, the storm had retreated. But the promise of violence twined like razor wire into the silence. When the storm let go again—probably when the sun dropped behind the distant mountains—it would be a full-on Colorado fury.
    “And so what if it is Rhodes? He wants to die, Clyde. It’s why he was trying to get home.” I was sure of that now. It wasn’t asylum in Canada that Rhodes sought. It was the kind of sanctuary found only in death. Probably he’d wanted a final meeting with his dad, maybe to say farewell to a beloved pet or an old girlfriend. Then . . . peace.
    “And if he killed Elise, and now he wants to die, too, well, maybe it’s what he deserves. Did you think about that?”
    Clyde, of course, said nothing. He kept his ears and tail high, the perfect picture of confidence as he nosed for his Kong.
    The wind ticked up, sharp with threat. The pronghorn quivered and bolted. The sky lowered, and a thick, clotting snow began to fall in earnest. I was shivering hard now and couldn’t seem to stop.
    “ I don’t want to die, Clyde. You’ve got a fur coat, in case you hadn’t noticed. If he’s out there, we’ll find him in the morning.”
    Clyde abandoned his search for his Kong and sat quietly, looking west, waiting for me to get my act together and do what I needed to do.
    Military working dogs, especially ones like Clyde, train differently from K9 units. In wilderness police pursuits, you back off if your target becomes all but impossible to find and your men might get killed due to poor conditions—usually bad weather or darkness. You wait for conditions to improve, knowing that your bad guy is going to have to wait it out, too. The sheriff had been following protocol when he called us in before we’d finished searching the train. Especially after hearing from Fort Collins.
    But in war, a dog is tracking enemy soldiers or terrorists. Men who, if they aren’t caught, disappear into their rat holes and spend their free hours planting IEDs or taking sniper shots at your men. Military dogs and their handlers don’t call it a day when the going gets tough.
    For Clyde, the game wasn’t over until he found his man.
    I puffed out a long breath of air. Could it really be Rhodes? He would have heard us searching the train, then the announcement over the radio that we’d found our guy in Fort Collins, and finally the sound of everyone leaving. He must have known he was safe in the coal car, at least for the moment. But maybe he figured that as soon as we realized Fort Collins had the wrong guy, we’d be waiting for him in Cheyenne. So he’d used whatever method he’d devised to get out of that car, a rope or a grappling hook, and—as Grams would say—gone while the getting was good. Maybe he was heading toward the ruined homesteader cabin that sat on railroad property a few miles west. Tramps sometimes squatted there. Maybe he figured he could wait out the night and the storm in that dubious shelter.
    My mind went to those silver scratches on the coal car.
    So maybe Clyde was right. But if we waited until morning, we’d be hunting a dead man. Much as I didn’t want to admit it, I knew from listening to Corpsmen in Iraq that with the kind of injuries Rhodes had sustained in the war, even if he made it to the cabin, he wouldn’t last the night. Severe burns make a person hypersensitive to extremes in temperature, particularly the cold. Rhodes might have underlying muscle or organ damage as well.
    And the cabin wasn’t much more than three walls and half a