Page 69 of South of Nowhere

Colter understood too that this could have been the reason for the attack that morning. Bear was worried he was investigating the sabotage.

He nodded and rose. “I’ll get out there now.”

As he was walking down the hill to where his Yamaha was parked, a voice from behind him asked, “Hey, Colter.”

He turned. It was Tamara Olsen. He now realized there was something different about her. Ah, right. She had taken her hair down from the bun.

In his experience this was occasionally a message.

She walked up. A bit into his space. He didn’t mind. He offered, “Hey.”

He received one of her great smiles right back.

She said, “Look, I don’t mean to be out of line, but can I ask a question?”

He gave her a smile too. “That’s an intriguing opening.”

She was hesitating. “I mean here I am, a U.S. soldier, but, with some things, I get kind of shy.”

“Understood.”

“Well, what I wanted to know…”

“Go ahead.” Colter’s eyes swept from her hair to her taut figure, then to her cheeks, dusted with freckles. Colter Shaw had always liked freckles. His eyes seated on hers, the curious green.

“Your sister? Is she married or seeing anybody?” She looked down.

Oh.

So those meaningful looks were aimedpast, not at, him, toward nearby Dorion.

A faint laugh. “She’d be flattered, but she’s married.” He’d almost added, “To a man.” But that was, he assessed, both unnecessary and politically fraught. “She doesn’t wear a ring on the job.”

“Ah.” A tightened smile of disappointment. “He’s a lucky man, her husband. That’s all I can say. All right, go get ’em, Jack Ryan.”

Who? Colter wondered. And continued on to the Yamaha.

30.

She wasn’t hard to spot.

A determined look on her face, the blond woman was driving a thirty-six-inch black-and-orange Ditch Witch trencher north to south along the front of Coyne Farm, which was about a mile from downtown Hinowah.

In a transparent rain slicker over blue jeans and a brown leather jacket, she was pushing the implement as fast as it could go, dirt flying out and joining its muddy kin.

She was on her third trench and the interconnected ditches were well placed. They would divert floodwaters to the south, around much of the farm. Another line of defense were hundreds of sandbags. Three workers wearing similar gear to hers were filling and stacking the bags.

How much water would these defenses divert? Hard to say, but not enough to stop the farm from getting some damage, he assessed. Maybe a lot. The flood would have the full snowpack melt of the mountains within it.

But that wasn’t Colter Shaw’s concern. The only question he had to answer here was: When had the work begun?

After six-fifteen that morning, when the explosion sheared off the top of the levee?

Or before? Because, like an inside trader, she knew what was coming?

Vultures…

She had dug one trench at the gate but had laid planks to make a six-foot access bridge.

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