Free - Hard Fall by James Buchanan Page B

hair hung in damp tangles against his neck and forehead. We'd been up, down, around and over this part of the mountain all day. So far, we'd found a whole lotta nothing.
    Huffing out a breath, I dropped down on a bare patch of ground opposite him. "Until we find something." Easy and slow, I stretched out my legs and hooked my elbows behind my back, not quite lying down. Sorta like an easy chair, but not as comfortable.
    "We may never find anything," he grumbled and shook his head. Little beads of sweat spun off. "You know that."
    "It's got to be here." If it was out here I had to find it. One of those threads I couldn't let loose until I'd followed it to the end.
    He rolled his head back and stared at the sky. Then he grumbled, "Unless Gunter was completely full of shit."
    I let the obscenity slide without comment. "You said it yourself. That little gal was all about her pictures. She wouldn't have gone anywhere without that camera."
    "What if it's with Gunter's stuff?"
    I pulled out my own water bottle and thought for a moment before knocking the drink back. How much should I 75

    Hard Fall
    by James Buchanan
    tell Kabe? Pretty much everything that had been said about the case had been said in front of him. "It wasn't."
    With a snort, Kabe's head came up. He glared at me. The hinges of Hell couldn't be hotter. "How do you know?"
    "Called Fred." I tucked the bottle between my knees and fished for a bit of jerky. As I ground it between my teeth, I finished up the thought, "Asked him if he found it when he was helping Gunter pack up. Not there."
    "So it's out here?" Arm swinging wide, Kabe included the world in his question. "Somewhere?"
    "Yep."
    Another sigh sounded before Kabe pushed off the log and stumbled toward me. He landed heavy in the dirt at my side.
    "And you're going to keep looking for it until you find it?"
    If'n I thought it was more than him playing at exhaustion, I'd have been worried. Instead I just confirmed, "Yep." We'd hit the area just before noon. Nothing never got started when I wanted, and we'd been searching ever since. My bones were work-weary, too.
    "Look." He reached up and snagged the last of the jerky from my fingers. That took a lot of pluck. I'd arrested men for less. "It's getting toward dark." Shading his eyes with one hand, Kabe popped the bit between his teeth and studied the sky. "We've been out here six, seven hours." A bump on my thigh with the back of his fist said he wanted my attention.
    Lord knew he didn't need to try and get it. "Why don't we pack it in?"
    I'd done darn near everything 'cept lasso and hogtie Kabe into the back of my pickup to get him up here. Then I'd spent 76

    Hard Fall
    by James Buchanan
    the rest of the day doing my best to avoid him, sending him off in different directions to search. "We got a little more light left." I hedged. The little ways I tortured myself ... one of these days I'd drive myself nuts.
    "Right," he huffed, shifting until he could prop his back against my shoulder, "and we should use it to drive out."
    "You got any place better to be?" I certainly couldn't think of a finer place to be at that moment. Touching him like that, sharing a huge blue sky. The wind got the trees whispering and the ground squirrels romanced each other. Near perfect afternoon with just us together. And I loved the mountains, loved 'em like my own life. Nothing in the world could compare to a huge sky miles from any hint of civilization.
    Reminded me of sex ... the openness of it, the forgetting yourself in the moment of it, losing your soul to something bigger and touching creation for just a second. Closet romantic, me.
    A lot of silence passed between us. Not the hard, uncomfortable sort, but the kind that a couple of guys out doing not much of anything could share. Finally he answered,
    "No."
    "Then let's keep looking." I sat up, pulling my knees up and slinging my arms over them. It meant Kabe had to move, which meant he wasn't touching me no more, but my arms were