A COWBOY'S PROMISE

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  Contents:

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  © 2001

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  Prologue

  ^ »

  They said that hearing was the last sense to go. His hadn't gone. Yet.

  But the light was getting brighter. He could see it, could see shapes in the distance—people—silhouetted in front of it. He tried to move closer.

  "Hold him still, damn it!" The harsh voice came from a long way away.

  "I'm trying! I'm trying!" That voice, too, barely penetrated his consciousness.

  "C'mon! He's losin' a lot of blood. Must've took three bullets at least. Hurry up!"

  "I'm moving as fast as I can!"

  "Well, move faster! We don't get him there soon, he ain't gonna make it."

  The light grew brighter, then dimmed. The voices muttered on, the noises grew harsher. He could hear metal on metal. Clanking. Jostling.

  "Here. Just shove the door open. Give me that!"

  "He's bleeding all over the place!"

  "Press down, damn it!"

  "I am!"

  The light was brighter again. The faces clearer.

  He could make out features. He could see his father.

  Was that his father? That young smiling man? God, it had been years. He'd been three when the old man died. And his vague last memories of his father had not been of a happy man.

  But he was happy now—with Charlie's mother, both of them smiling, their arms around each other and around Lucy, too. His mom had died when he was ten; his sister, five years later.

  Luce, damn it, how could you have got yourself killed like that?

  He moved closer into the light and tried to call out.

  "We're losin' him!"

  "I know! I know! Come on!"

  Charlie barely heard the voices now. They didn't matter. He was trying to reach Lucy.

  He had so much to tell her—about everything that had happened since she'd gone—about Joanna, her teacher, who had taken him on, had kicked his butt, determined not to let him die in the streets the way his sister had, about Chase, Joanna's husband, who had taught him how to be a man.

  But before he could speak, he saw more faces.

  He saw Chase and Joanna. He saw their children, Emerson, Alex and Annie, who had become like little brothers and sister to him.

  Whoa. Wait a sec. They weren't dead! None of them!

  Then what—

  Charlie looked around, puzzled.

  He scanned the faces. He saw his best friend, Herbert, from grammar school and DeShayne and Lopez, the guys he had hung with in high school, all still alive and kicking as far as he knew. He saw Gaby, his agent, who he'd spoken to last week, and his old friends Miles and Susan Cavanaugh and their sons, Patrick and James.

  His gaze swept over them all. And moved on.

  He was looking for one face.

  One woman.

  Where was she?

  Cait!

  He called her name. But no one replied. Cait!

  Everyone—his father, his mother, his sister, his friends—all stood silent and looked back at him blankly.

  He reached them now, and the light was all around him. But he barely noticed. Instead of greeting his family, instead of throwing his arms around them in the joy of reunion, he pushed past them, wildly looking around.

  Cait!

  Silence. Emptiness. She wasn't here.

  He was going to die and she wasn't going to be a part of his eternity?

  Of course she wasn't, he realized.

  How could she be when he hadn't let her be a part of his life?

  * * *

  One

  « ^ »

  Abuk, Western Asia

  The hospital wasn't there.

  There was a pile of rubble instead.

  The taxi driver who had brought him here shook his head. "I told you so."

  At least Charlie guessed that was the meaning of the words the man was saying over and over. He'd given the driver the name of the hospital as soon as he'd limped out of the airport. And the driver had protested then.

  "No, no. Can't go. Not there," he'd said over and over.

  But Charlie had insisted. He hadn't come halfway around the world to be turned back three miles from his goal.

  He hadn't realized then that "not there," meant the hospital itself.

  The heat was suffocating, making him feel even dizzier and weaker than he was. He'd left Los Angeles twenty odd hours ago, had killed time in Amsterdam and more in Istanbul before the long final flight into Abuk.

  He was doing the whole trip against doctors' orders. A whole roomful of white-coated medicos had told him he wasn't ready for anything strenuous.

  "You coded," one of them told him bluntly. "Clinically you were dead. You lost quarts of blood. You can barely walk. You aren't going to get better traipsing halfway around the world."

  Yes, Charlie thought. He was.

  He was doing the one thing that was going to make him really better at last. He was going to make up for lost time. He was going to find Cait.

  The thought of Cait was what had got him through all the rehab he'd done so far.

  "Where are the other hospitals?"

  The driver gestured this way and that, and finally ended up pointing in two directions.

  Charlie tried to remember which would be the more likely choice. He flipped through his pocket dictionary and found the word for near. Then he fished a wad of local notes out of his pocket and said it.

  The driver nodded, pocketed the money happily, and off they jolted once more.

  The city had changed in two years. The war that wasn't called a war had died down. When Charlie had been here last, it had been in full swing—sniping and strafing had been the order of the day.

  No lines had been drawn. There were no clear "sides." You took your life in your hands whenever you ventured out. And you were as likely to have been killed by one faction as another. Misery had been everywhere.

  It pretty much still was.

  Two years ago Charlie had come to photograph it. It was his job, and he did it well. He found pain and heartache and inhumanity wherever it existed, exposed it in black-and-white, then showed it to the world.

  For five years he'd done a spectacular job doing just that. His photos had been hung from Paris to L.A. They'd found their way into private collections and galleries all over the world. His book of photo essays, Inhumanity, which had contained, among other things, two sets of photos taken right here, had become a bestseller this past spring while he was still in the hospital.

  It was what damned near getting killed did for you.

  "Nonsense," he remembered his agent Gabriela del Castillo saying, her green eyes flashing angrily at his deliberate irreverence. "Your book is selling because it touches people. You find the heart of things, Charlie. You challenge the soul."

  "And getting three bullets in me didn't hurt."

  "Didn't hurt? They nearly killed you!" Gaby had been furious about his being in the wrong place at the wrong time when he'd got caught in that Middle-East crossfire. "I worry about you."

  "You should be glad," Charlie had maintained. "It boosted sales."

  "I'm not that mercenary," Gaby retorted. "Truly. I worry. I don't know why you aren't dead."

  Charlie knew.

  Because he couldn't spend eternity without Cait.

  He hadn't said so to Gaby. He hadn't said so to anyone. He hadn't talked about it at all.

  Talking about eternity and near-death experiences wasn't something he did.

  To Gaby and everyone else, Charlie Seeks Elk was a gutsy, earthy, hard-nosed pragmatist, the embodiment of the what-you-see-is
-what-you-get guy. Down-to-earth realism was the name of his game. Charlie was the last man on earth given to out-of-body experiences, to messages from the other side.

  But the day he'd been shot—the day he'd coded—he had seen a bright light. He'd seen his family—all of them dead for years. He'd seen his friends, and knew the promise that they would spend eternity together. And frankly, he'd have been happy to join them.

  But not if Cait wasn't there.

  When he'd left her two years ago, turning his back on the idea of marriage and family, he'd done it for both their sakes. He'd felt strong, noble, independent—a man with a cause who couldn't be tied down.

  But that was before he'd faced eternity—without the prospect of Cait.

  It surprised him how instinctively he'd looked for her. He hadn't known he would. But he hadn't ever died before.

  Since he had, he knew what mattered. And he had to find Cait.

  The driver whipped through semideserted avenues lined with rubble and burned-out buildings, heading back toward a more populated area of town. This part had been heavily populated when he'd been here. They drove right past the building where Charlie had rented a room, where he had taken Cait in his arms, where she had taken him into her body. There was nothing there now but two half walls and a pile of crumbling stucco. Charlie shut his eyes and prayed.

  When he opened them again he saw a section of the street where the rubble had been cleared away. A foundation was being dug for a new building. The taxi driver was saying something, smiling, pointing and nodding.

  Charlie caught a few words. Peace. New. Hope.

  There was nothing there yet but a hole in the ground. But if you dared believe, it was a harbinger of hope, a belief in a future where buildings would be allowed to stand, where families would thrive again, where children would live unmaimed.

  "Yes," he said. "Yes." And he leaned his head back against the sticky plastic upholstery of the car and hoped, too.

  He hoped that at the next hospital, he'd find Cait. But she wasn't there.

  The health organization she worked for had pulled out, the director told him. "They come in during emergencies," the man said in heavily accented English, smiling at Charlie across the counter. "You see we are not emergent anymore."

  Charlie wasn't seeing much of anything. He clung to the countertop to keep himself upright. His head was spinning. His leg throbbed.

  "What about another hospital. She wouldn't be at another hospital here?"

  "Not unless she left her job and stayed." The man shook his head. "You have to have a good reason to stay."

  She might have had a reason. "What about the orphans?" Charlie asked urgently.

  The man looked perplexed. "Orphans?"

  "There were children at that hospital." Charlie's knuckles were white against the counter. "Kids who'd been hurt. Kids without families. Kids abandoned. If she'd wanted to adopt one…"

  She had wanted to adopt one—a four-year-old girl with a shattered arm and the most expressive dark eyes Charlie had ever seen. Resi.

  The director steepled his fingers. "I do not know of orphans." He pulled out a file and consulted it, then gave Charlie three addresses. "You will have to go there and check."

  Clutching the piece of paper, Charlie left. He needed sleep. He needed pain medication. More, he needed to find Cait.

  He found another taxi. He gave the driver the addresses. They went from one orphanage to another. At each one Charlie described the little girl, Resi. At each he asked about the American nurse, Cait Blasingame. At all of them he was met with sad smiles and commiserations.

  "No, I am sorry."

  "No, no one like that here."

  "No. We have never heard of them."

  No Resi. No Cait.

  For three days he stayed in Abuk and he searched. He went to every hospital, every clinic, every doctor's surgery he could find. He went to the consulate. He went to the newspapers. He went everywhere he could think of.

  If Cait was here, he would find her.

  In the end he was sick. In the end he was fevered. In the end he had to admit she was gone.

  It had been a long shot, of course. He hadn't admitted that to himself before.

  All the time he'd been recovering, he'd focused on getting well enough to go back to Abuk to find Cait, to say the words he'd never wanted to say before.

  Marry me.

  For three months he'd hoped and dreamed and planned. He had promised himself he would find her and he hadn't let himself think beyond that.

  Now he was here and Cait wasn't.

  Now what?

  "So," Gaby stared down at him in his hospital bed, her expression a mixture of concern and irritation, "were they worth it?"

  "Were what worth it?" Charlie didn't want company.

  He'd told the nurse that. He had been turning away visitors since he'd ended up here a week ago after returning to L.A.

  But Gaby never listened to nurses. Gaby was convinced she knew better than anyone. Now she loomed over him like a blond-haired avenging angel, ready to do mayhem. "The photos you had to go halfway around the world to take!"

  Charlie turned his head toward the wall. "I didn't take any photos."

  There was complete, stunned silence. Charlie lived to take photos. If he didn't take photos, Gaby used to say, he'd be dead.

  Now, quietly, she asked, "So what did you go for, then?"

  The old Charlie—the self-contained, fiercely independent Charlie—would have said, "Nothing." He would have stonewalled her the way he had stonewalled all attempts to invade his privacy for years.

  But the new Charlie had a whole new perspective on life. Besides, he was so damn weak even now, after a full week of antibiotics and transfusions and hospital bed rest, that the stone wall was crumbling.

  "I was trying to find someone," he muttered. His voice was low, and the words were hard to get out.

  He hadn't said them to anyone. He hadn't even told his best friends, Chase and Joanna Whitelaw—the couple who had more or less become his surrogate parents when he was sixteen years old—about Cait.

  He might have, but Chase and Joanna were gone.

  Two weeks ago they had left for Europe for two months with their kids. It was a trip they'd been planning for a long time. Originally they'd planned to meet him in Alliens. But that was before he'd got shot and sent home.

  Then Joanna had been on the verge of canceling the whole trip. Charlie had argued against it.

  He was home, he assured her. He was on the mend. He was fine! It wasn't merely that he wanted them to have the vacation they'd looked forward to for so long.

  It was also that he'd wanted them gone so Joanna wouldn't fuss when he left to look for Cait.

  They didn't know he had gone. They didn't know he was back. They didn't know he was in the hospital. And he had no intention of telling them.

  But Gaby had caught him with his defenses down. If she'd bullied him, he might not have said any more, but Gaby knew when to bully and when to just wait. Now she waited. She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed.

  "Who matters that much?" Her voice was gentler than he'd ever heard it. She wrapped her fingers around his and gave a gentle squeeze.

  He shook his head vaguely. "A friend," he said. "A woman I knew there. A nurse." He looked away. "Her name was Cait."

  "Was?" There was a worried edge to Gaby's voice.

  Charlie swallowed. "She's not dead. At least I don't think she is." God, he wouldn't let himself think anything like that! "She's just … gone."

  "Gone where?"

  "Don't know." He plucked at the coverlet, worrying it between his fingers. "She worked for one of those global medicine outfits, the ones who send personnel into war zones and disaster areas. It's still pretty much a disaster," he reflected, "but not an active one. So they've pulled out. I don't know where they are. Where she is."

  "Have you asked?"

  "Of course. I called from here. I might have had better luck if I'd s
tormed the headquarters. It was easy enough for them to tell me they don't give out that information. Privacy, you know?" His mouth twisted. He understood their concerns, but it didn't help him.

  "Do you have an address for her family?"

  "No. She was from Montana. She used to talk about it all the time. Used to call it 'the last best place.' I used to tell her that was a slogan, and she said it was truth in advertising." He smiled now at the thought.

  In his mind he could still see Cait's own smile whenever they'd had that teasing exchange: "You should see it, Charlie," she would say. "You'd love it."

  And he'd shake his head in protest. "No way. Not me. I'm a city boy."

  But she'd persist, telling him stories about the ranch where she'd grown up, about herding cattle and branding calves, about seeing bears and coyotes and, once, she thought, a wolf.

  She told him about fishing in the creek and swimming in the swimming hole and training her horse and tagging along after her father or her older brother, Wes. And he let her talk because he liked watching her face whenever she told those stories. Her hazel eyes would get kind of soft and misty, and she would smile a sort of faraway, loving, gentle smile.

  It was a childhood so unlike his own. Her memories were happy ones, so very unlike his.

  "What was it like where you grew up?" she'd asked him time and again.

  But Charlie had just shaken his head and lied. "I don't remember."

  Now he found that he remembered her stories even better than he remembered the things that had really happened to him.

  "I'll look for her," Gaby said. "I'll find out where she is. I'll get her to come and see you."

  "No!"

  Gaby stared at him. "I thought you wanted to find her."

  "I do, but … but I have to go to her." He knew that much. He would wait until hell froze over before Cait would ever come to him.

  Gaby considered that. She considered him.

  After the shooting, Gaby had come from Santa Fe to see him as soon as he'd been well enough to come back to Los Angeles.

  He'd gone to his own apartment, refusing to stay at Chase and Joanna's, making it difficult for everyone, but needing the pretense that he was doing fine on his own.