Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless Page A

then clapped his hands together, a single, harsh sound in the cold-chapped air. “Let’s get this show on the road. Agent Parnell, I assume you want a ride up to where the engine will stop.”
    “We’ll jog up there, sir.”
    Another narrow look. I grinned at him, baring my teeth. The sheriff spun on his heel and disappeared into the building.
    “You be careful, Sydney Rose,” Nik said to me. “And watch that temper of yours. The sheriff is on our side.”
    Some of the wildness had gone out of his eyes, replaced by bone-tired.
    “And you stay on the roof,” I told him.
    He nodded. “Yeah.”
    He followed the sheriff inside, and I was left facing Cohen.
    The detective stared past me at the prairie, his eyes slitted against the wind. “That hold you up much at work, that temper of yours?”
    “Stupid, eh? Zero to pissed off in, what, twenty seconds?”
    “Seven.” His eyes came back to me, amused. “For that, maybe we’ll call the whole crime scene ownership thing a wash.”
    I mustered a smile. “Good.”
    “Yeah.” He ran a hand over his cropped hair, needlessly smoothing it, another gesture that reminded me of Dougie. Was this detective what Dougie would have looked like ten years down the road, if he’d made it home? The same lines around kind eyes, the same weariness in the set of his mouth? Would Dougie, always larger than life, have become this worn down and cynical?
    “I wondered if . . .” he started.
    “What?”
    But he shook himself. “Be careful, Parnell.”
    “You too, Detective.”
    He followed the other men inside.
    I unsnapped Clyde’s lead and coiled up its length. He looked at me expectantly.
    “Let’s go, boy.”
    Away from the shelter of the building, the wind was biting; it felt good on my face as we took off. Clyde and I jogged lightly north next to the tracks, heading upwind toward the bridge, our breaths puffing in front of us. The winter sun threw faint, flat shadows over the ground. Two miles away, pale sunlight glinted off cars and trucks on the interstate.
    A jackrabbit with comically large ears darted across our path. Clyde cut sharply after it, his head down and intent. I called him back.
    “Clyde, you know better,” I scolded. “We’re on a job.”
    Clyde looked longingly after the rabbit bounding away across the prairie.
    “C’mon, boy.”
    Clyde had once been the canine equivalent of a Navy SEAL. His training had gone beyond even the rigorous preparation given a normal military multipurpose dog and made him worth a small fortune. I’d only been able to adopt him because Dougie’s death had so destabilized him that he’d been declared unworkable. Now as a railroad K9, he had decent training. But I had not kept his skills to the level he’d once known. It had never seemed necessary. Nor did he enjoy the work anymore.
    Something was broken inside of Clyde. I doubted he’d ever be the dog he’d been with Dougie. Any more than I would again be the bright, fearless woman whom Dougie had loved.
    Chasing rabbits, though. That was a new low for us both.
    At the suspension bridge, we picked up our pace. The viaduct hung over a sand-choked gully that had been carved out by flash floods. Clyde and I fell into a rhythm as our feet hit the ties.
    Half a mile on the other side, we cut right. Twenty feet from the tracks, I gestured Clyde down and then lay flat on the ground next to him. The earth was still damp from the last snow. The Kevlar vest ground into the soft flesh under my chin, and Dougie’s ring dug into my breastbone. I wriggled around, trying to get comfortable.
    Clyde settled himself companionably next to me, tongue lolling, happier than I’d seen him in a long time. His Kevlar vest didn’t bother him at all. Business as usual for a military dog.
    “This is like a vacation for you, isn’t it, Clyde?”
    He yawned.
    “That rabbit means we’re losing our edge. Getting soft. We need to start training again.”
    He paid me no attention whatsoever.
    We