Rescue Me(8)

His kisses to light her on fire. He’d settle for a spark. Just a hint of smoke.

And now that the entire team, or maybe just Jess, had dubbed them boyfriend-girlfriend, Sam longed to make it work.

Sierra was a great gal. Pretty, organized, domestic. Everything a guy could want.

Jess closed the wound in his palm with a couple butterfly bandages, added some antibacterial cream, and covered it with a gauze pad and some tape.

“Sheesh, are you going to cast it next?”

“Maybe. But only if you give me trouble about dressing that scrape on your chin.” She nudged his jaw up with her finger.

“I’m fine, Jess.”

“My brother can handle a few little scrapes, Speedy.”

Sam looked up and spotted Pete sauntering over. He had sustained the least amount of injury. The tree had manhandled his shirt, left a few tears along the body, but a scrape along the bridge of his nose was the only evidence that he’d scrambled up an old black spruce trying to escape a grizzly.

Pete looked every inch the guy who’d thrown an ax at death and walked away smiling.

Sam, on the other hand, had shredded his nice no-iron shirt, scraped up his only pair of decent shoes, and put a hole in his dress pants. He was soggy and sore.

“Enough fussing.” Sam got up.

Jess frowned at him. “Fine. But I don’t know if you two know how lucky you are. That’s the second bear attack—or near attack—in three days,” she said. “I was talking with the nurses, and a man and his daughter came in a couple days ago. She had broken her ankle running from a bear up near Grace Lake.”

“I saw a bear there a couple days ago,” Pete said quietly.

Sam glanced at him. “What?”

“My buddy Tucker and I were out hiking back from Vulture Peak, not far from Grace Lake, and we came across a grizzly.”

Sam didn’t ask, but he knew in his gut exactly what Pete was doing at Vulture Peak. BASE jumping was still illegal in the park, and really, he simply didn’t want to know if his brother was throwing himself off a mountain peak like Superman, wearing only a squirrel suit.

“We weren’t far from Grace Lake campground—maybe closer to Logging Lake—and we came across this silver-tipped sow. She was just standing in the middle of the trail, shaking her head back and forth, as if in warning. We had bear bells and stood on the path and yelled. But the bear didn’t run off like usual. It stood there staring at us, and then suddenly it just started walking toward us. Unfazed. I didn’t see any cubs, so I don’t think it was our grizzly from tonight. I was carrying food in my pack, but I’d wrapped it up. There was no normal reason to attack.”

Jess was staring at him, eyes big.

Good grief, all Pete needed to do now was to put his arm around her, whisper in her ear that he might have died . . .

It was simply too easy for him.

“I backed up,” Pete was saying, “but Tucker totally freaked out. He pulled out his gun and shot at it.”

Sam stiffened. “Are you kidding me?” His voice rose, and the rest of the team looked his direction.

“A lot of people bring guns into the park—”

He cut his voice down. “No, I mean, did he hit it?”

“I don’t think so. But it did shock it. The animal stopped then, like it was startled. Then it took off into the woods.”

“Did you call it in? Report it to a ranger? Anything?”

“We didn’t hit it!”

“You think. Seriously, bro. One bullet is not going to bring down a bear—you know that. More likely is that you nicked it, and now it’s in pain, and angry. And if it’s wounded, it needs food—which means terrorizing stupid kids for their Hershey bars. Maybe even killing them.”

Killing him.

“Nice work, Pete, as usual.”

Sam hadn’t realized how close he’d come to shouting, and now silence fell throughout the lobby.

Perfect. Never mind the voice of reason, he knew how the team saw him. Always riding his brother.

“I need coffee. Tell Sierra when she gets here that I’m in the snack area.”

Sam pushed past them and headed toward the vending machine area, a room at the end of the hallway with coffee, snacks, and drinks. The space included two small tables, chairs, and a coffee machine with fixings on a counter. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights—the vending machines glowed with their selections. The late hour pressed through the window.

He fished a buck from his wallet, approached the machine, and put the dollar in the feeder.

It spit the money back at him.

He pressed down the edges, fed the money back in.

The dollar slid back out.

He smoothed it on his pants leg, turned it over and fed it back in.