How do you survive being shot and left for dead in the Chihuahuan Desert? By being found by a beautiful wildlife photographer willing to risk her life to save yours.
A bitter ex-cop fights for his life after he runs to the sound of gunfire on the Ri...
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Character Designs by Dana Nicole Joiner
A hospital patient was in the crosshairs of a high-powered scope mounted on a hunting rifle; the rifle was concealed behind tinted windows on the second floor of an office building a few hundred yards from the hospital.
"My God, boy!" A gruff voice boomed behind him. "What the hell are you doing?"
The man holding the rifle didn't flinch. He replied calmly, holding steady, "There's a guy over there. May have killed two people. He's talking to someone, but I can't see clearly. Too damned much sand."
"You pull that trigger, boy, they'd follow the trajectory right back to my office! You can't do that here!"
The gunman lowered his weapon as he turned. "What the hell, Pops? What makes you think I'd shoot someone?"
He was looking at himself in thirty-five years. Both were big, broad-shouldered, hard-bodied, straight-backed men with bronzed, angular faces. The older man's thick, wavy white hair was receding at the temples. Keen blue eyes and a hawkish nose. The younger man had his father's electric blue eyes but thick, sand-colored hair, neither the nose nor chin as sharp as the elder's. Each man clean shaven. Father and son. Hank and Bobby Watson.
"You've got your rifle to your shoulder looking through the scope." Hank nodded at the weapon. "Most men pull the trigger when it's there."
"I'm not shooting anyone." Bobby set the rifle in an armchair by the office window. "I couldn't find your field glasses. I needed the scope to see. It's what, three hundred yards?"
"Why are you in my office, not yours?"
"You've got the line of sight." Bobby sat in a matching armchair beside the one with the rifle, his gaze narrow, reading his father. "Why are you here on a Sunday?"
"Your mother's out of town. I came in to catch up on business." Hank spoke with a gravelly, slower-than-normal West Texas drawl. People joked Hank Watson grawled. "How'd you know about this guy?" He closed the heavy wooden door to his private office, heading straight for the massive hand-carved antique bar and liquor cabinet.
"April. Last night, April told me she ran into Patty, shopping for men's pajamas. April asked her if Tommy was back in town, but Patty said, 'No, she was helping one of her hospital patients who'd been shot in Big Bend,' and he was in the hospital with no clothes and no family to help. April asked if I'd heard anything about it and I said, 'No.' But when I saw the newspaper this morning it came together."
"How'd you get his room number?"
"Friend. Inside. Said police put a guard on his door. Makes me think maybe he's tied up in these killings."
"Maybe. Maybe not." Hank wrapped a big, gnarly hand around a Waterford crystal decanter sitting on his well-stocked bar, pouring two fingers of Glenlivet into a crystal highball glass. He threw it back. Room temperature.
