Chapter 13
The next morning felt like déjà vu as Sheri and Slade snuggled together. It was so nice waking up next to him and she didn’t want to leave the bed—again. She was never like that. Once she was awake, she was ready to do something, anything. But man, with Slade in her life, she felt totally different. This was heavenly—listening to Slade’s relaxed heartbeat, breathing in his male wolf scent, enjoying his warmth.
“Do you want to run as wolves first thing?” she asked, stroking his bare chest.
It was still dark out, but Slade didn’t seem to want to leave the bed either—like the last time. He kissed her breast. “Yeah, sure.”
“After we return, we could go look for whatever Andy and his friends had found out in the woods, just for curiosity’s sake,” she said, eager to check it out. She’d been thinking of it on and off and wondered what had piqued the campers’ interest enough to share the find with them.
“Yeah, I was thinking of that too.”
They dressed, went downstairs, and made Christmas cinnamon pancakes for breakfast, swirling the cinnamon in the batter before cooking it, then sat down to eat, and afterward cleaned up. They hugged and kissed before they left on their wolf run, each of them tasting the cinnamon on the other’s lips and licking them clean, smiling and laughing.
She was thinking how nice it would be to have a wolf door at the cabin. All the wolves’ homes had them. Since she, Slade, and her brother had apartments, they didn’t have that luxury. But then they didn’t run from their apartments as wolves. They would go to the lake where the white wolf pack’s members had their homes.
They had been running for some time in the wintry woods when they heard voices off in the distance and then saw something that was about two feet tall by three feet wide, painted white but scratched to bare metal on places sticking out of the snow. She frowned.
Slade shifted. “It’s part of a plane. The main cabin door, buried about a foot in the snow.” Then he shifted back into his wolf.
Ohmigod, was it a new wreck? Were the people whose voices they heard looking for anyone who had been injured or was dead? But she and Slade would have been alerted if the plane had crashed while they were here, she figured. Unless it had happened the night of the storm when the trees were falling all around them. The blowing snow and thirty-five-mile-per-hour howling winds could have masked the sound of the crash.
Sheri and Slade kept moving closer to where the men were talking. What if they had been aboard the plane and had been injured? She and Slade needed to return to the cabin and call it into the police, but before that, they really needed to learn what they could about the situation. Maybe the police and aviation investigators were the ones who were already there.
Then she saw the illumination of flashlights poking into the woods. Two men were gathering items in the snow, but they were dressed in winter camouflage clothes and didn’t look like police or aviation investigators. The plane wasn’t old and rusted, so it hadn’t been here for a long time either.
Sheri and Slade stayed hidden in the woods watching them. That’s when she saw part of the plane ID and thought it might have been Gerard Connolly’s plane. She needed to verify the numbers. But Sheri would have heard if his plane had gone down, and if it had been found or had been reported. It would have been all over the local news in the surrounding areas. What had happened to Gerard? Had he returned home and then taken another trip and this time crashed? Or had he crashed when he went missing? Unless the plane hadn’t been his.
What if he hadn’t made it home and his brother and his wife were covering up his disappearance? Then who were these men? Just hikers who had run across the broken-up plane, or had they known it was here and they were looking for whatever the plane had been carrying? She wondered if she and Slade had happened across the coordinates of the item that Andy and his friends had found.
If Gerard had been carrying drugs, like Slade and Sheri had considered, these men could be dangerous.
Then they saw Gerard’s brother, Fitz, join the men, which surprised her. She had suspected he didn’t have anything to do with his brother, given the way he had acted about Gerard’s return after having been missing for two weeks. “Keep looking. Hurry it up. If my damn cousin hadn’t had his untimely heart attack and I hadn’t had to deal with his shit, we would have been finished with this by now.”
“Yeah, and if Gerard’s plane hadn’t crashed, we wouldn’t be here either.”
Ohmigod. That’s why Fitz had been in a rush to take care of other “business” and hadn’t shown any concern about Mr. Lincoln’s heart condition. He was involved in this.
“Do you think any of the merchandise survived the crash?” a blond, bearded man asked. He was poking around under pieces of plane wreckage.
“Maybe not, but we need to get rid of the evidence even if nothing is salvageable,” Fitz said.
Evidence? Of what? Sheri wished they would say. She sniffed the air, but she couldn’t smell any drugs. She hadn’t liked Fitz as soon as she had met him at the cabin. She hadn’t believed he’d cared about either his cousin’s or his brother’s welfare.
Slade was also smelling the air. She knew he was trying to determine what the cargo was, and probably the other men’s scents too so they could identify them later. She wanted to report the plane wreckage to law enforcement so they could take over and learn what was going on. Maybe they could even catch these guys in the act of trying to salvage things from the plane. It made her wonder if Gerard had made it home, or if he had died in the crash and was buried in the snow. Or maybe they had already removed Gerard’s body. If they had found him, why not just report that he’d died in the crash? Because they had to get rid of whatever the cargo had been first? Possibly because they were all implicated?
She wanted to remain glued to the spot in case they said something more incriminating. She was afraid if she and Slade left, they could miss seeing some evidence of a crime. Slade appeared to feel the same way, not moving an inch, just observing the men searching for stuff. Of course, she or Slade could return to the cabin to contact the police while the other remained there, watching the whole thing, a witness to whatever they might dig up. But she didn’t want to leave Slade alone, and she was certain he wouldn’t want to leave her here alone if she stayed to observe the men.
Now she figured that’s why Fitz hadn’t wanted to talk to them about his brother. She knew something hadn’t been right about the whole affair.
Was the wife involved too? Or had she not known what her husband was up to, but Fitz had learned she’d gone to the police and then a private investigator and told her to say Gerard had returned home after all. Sheri suspected the wife hadn’t known what her husband was doing.
Maybe Gerard had returned after the crash, and he was just fine or had suffered only minor injuries that hadn’t required seeing medical personnel or any hospitalization. Now, more than ever, Sheri wanted to check out his story.
“Hell,” Fitz said. “I can’t find anything here.”
“We might have to wait until the snow melts off,” the blond guy said, kicking at a pile of snow. Sheri realized he looked familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen him before.
“Anybody could run across the wreckage by then,” Fitz said. “We can’t let that happen. You know that, Danbury.”
Danbury nodded. “I still want to know how in the hell the plane managed to crash.”
“Yeah, well, we all do.” Fitz walked off into the woods, out of Sheri and Slade’s sight.
Danbury went off in a different direction. A dark-haired man with a scrubby beard headed Sheri and Slade’s way. Slade nuzzled Sheri and they moved away from the path the man was taking.
“Shit!” The man saw them, pulled out a gun, and aimed it in the wolves’ direction, and they took off running, heading back to the cabin. He fired off a couple of shots, but they hit nearby trees. He wouldn’t be able to shoot them, as fast as they moved.
The fact he was carrying a handgun was bad news. She had wondered if Slade wanted to turn and head back to the crash site, keeping out of the shooter’s view, but he kept on the path they had made to reach the cabin. Slade was probably afraid the other men would be alerted by the gunfire and join the shooter. Then they could have three men shooting at them if they were all armed.
“What the hell were you shooting at?” Fitz yelled.
But then Slade stopped, and Sheri had to backtrack to stand next to him as he listened to the conversation. They were far enough away from the crash site to be safe, but close enough to hear the men’s conversations with their enhanced wolf hearing.
“There were two wolves out here.”
“Then just throw a damn branch or rock or hell, a piece of the plane to scare them off, Otis. They would have run off. Firing our guns could alert campers in the area that we’re trouble, and they could notify the police,” Fitz said. “Nobody’s supposed to be shooting with a handgun, and we don’t have a permit to hunt on top of that. Use your damn head.”
“Well, you weren’t looking eye to eye with two hungry damn wolves,” Otis said.
“If you were so close to them, how did you miss hitting one?” Fitz asked.
“I wasn’t that close to them,” Otis admitted. “It was just damn scary. I didn’t even know we had Arctic wolves out here.”
“We don’t, you clown. They were probably white German shepherds. Hell, shooting dogs isn’t allowed either. And if they were wolves, the same thing. Get back to work. Look for whatever we can find. And whatever you do, don’t do anymore damn shooting.”
Slade began searching around the area farther out from the plane’s crash site, sniffing at the snow, pawing at it. He was exploring for whatever had been on the plane. Sheri hurried to help him look.
Then he began really digging and she joined him, smelling the scent of cardboard, Styrofoam, and metal underneath the snow. That was the thing about being a wolf. They could smell things buried deep in the snow. She was certain this wasn’t something abandoned from someone’s earlier campsite, but something new that was from the plane’s wreckage.