Sam glanced at Ukiah through the open door. "You're shitting me. He's been hit by a car. He needs to go to the hospital."

"He's okay, just a little bruised."

She gave a disbelieving laugh. "Bruised? I saw him take that hit! If he dies, it's manslaughter through negligence."

"Trust me as much as I'm trusting you. The only danger he's in is from these bastards that shot him two days ago and just tried to kill you and Kraynak. He'll be okay."

Sam stared at Max with laser intensity, her eyes flicking over the set of his mouth, the sweat on his brow, and the open pleading in his eyes. She looked then to Ukiah, curled in the rental car's back seat.

"How do you feel?"

"I'm fine, Sam. I just want to go to sleep."

Sam let out her breath in a long sigh. "When am I going to stop trusting men? Okay. Fine. I'll do it."

She took the keys. "How do I get hold of you?"

"Ukiah has my phone number on his speed dial." Max leaned into the car, pulled out Ukiah's phone, and made sure it worked. He slipped the phone back into Ukiah's pocket, rumpled Ukiah's hair, and closed the door. "Go on, before the police start looking for him."

Sam swung into the driver's seat. "This makes us even."

"As long as you keep him safe."

Sam took him to a small A-frame cabin, tucked someplace in the mountains. Night pressed in close as she helped him out of the car. Pines veiled the sky. No lights shone inside the cabin. He followed her to the door and waited while she unlocked it.

The door opened into a large room that smelled of old fires, trout dinners, and Sam herself. Sam paused beyond the door, seeking with a blind hand to orient herself. Ukiah's eyes had already adjusted to the dark and he made his way to a kitchen chair. He felt hollow, the pain dull and banging in time with his heart, filling up the emptiness. He sat carefully, trying not to jar himself.

"I'm renting this place from an old client." Sam walked through the darkness, hand gliding along the butcher block countertop of the L-shaped kitchen. "After I broke up with my ex, I had a place in town, but it was too easy to find. All my mail goes to my office. The taxes and utilities are in my client's name. I check to make sure I'm not followed every time I drive out, and you can't see the car in the driveway from the main road."

She flipped on a recessed light over the sink. Dishes from her last meal sat clean in the drying rack.

A bowl. A spoon. A cup. "The only people that know where I live are in Portland."

"None of your friends know?" Sitting up, he felt his blood pressure dropping. Cold seeped in.

"All my friends live in Portland. Everyone I know here were his friends first and last."

He wondered why she didn't return to Portland. Money, probably. It seemed to control most people's lives. "How long have you been here?"

"Too long." She considered Ukiah. "How long, total, have you worked with Max?"

"Five years. Two years doing tracking part-time before going full time three years ago."

"And you trust him?" She repeated Max's question, only the pronoun changed, with the same tone of voice. Like they trusted one another, but not themselves for doing so."There's no one I trust more." He started to shiver.

She came to press a hot hand to his forehead. "Damn, I told him you should be in a hospital. You're going into shock."

"It's just because I'm sitting up."

"It's just because you were hit by a car."

"I just need to lie down. Cover up. Stay warm."

She swore softly, just like Max would. "The bed's upstairs. You don't need to pee first, do you?"

"It probably would be best if I did." At the thought of flushing his system, his body made sudden demands for him to urinate. "Definitely."

"Hold on." She went to switch on lamps, lighting the way.

The downstairs was sectioned off into a large kitchen/living area and a full bathroom. Opposite the kitchen, four wing chairs stood guard about an oriental rug. Each chair was slightly different in height, width, and style of feet, but they'd been reupholstered in deep green damask in an attempt to make them match. A beveled-glass tabletop resting on four large river rocks made a coffee table island in the center of the rag. The lamps sat on mismatched but stylish side tables.

The bathroom was tiled up to the ceiling in large squares of smoky pink, with smaller accents of deep green and silvery gray. Sam apologized for the color scheme, saying that the original owner ran a flooring business and had used overstock to do that bathroom.

"Come up to the loft when you're done."

Ukiah used the toilet and then drank deeply from the faucet.

The steps up to the loft, he noticed, were done in hardwood, but they didn't match the floors downstairs. Upstairs, no attempt had been made to disguise a jumbled selection of wood flooring.

"Overstock?" He pointed out abutting cherry and white oak boards.

"Overstock." She held out a blue-flannel shirt. "I got this for my ex, but we broke up before I gave it to him." When he only blinked at her in confusion, she draped it over the bed's footboard. "Put it on.

You're not wearing that dirty thing into my bed."

The ceiling slanted up to a peak. Low, mirrorless dressers and cedar chests lined the short walls.

While Ukiah gingerly pulled off his torn, bloody T-shirt, Sam stripped the king-sized bed, took clean sheets from one of the cedar chests, and remade the bed. She seemed to make it a point not to look at him while he changed. He fumbled with the buttons, shivering too hard to do them up. She came and pushed away his hands, frowning as she did the buttons.

"Do you need help with your boots?"

He eyed his feet, suddenly so far away. "Probably." She caught him before he could sit on the bed with his dirty pants, undid his pants and stripped them down to his knees, and sat him on the bed. She frowned at him as she crouched at his feet, undoing his laces and pulling off his boots, as if she expected him to do something she didn't like. "Not a word.. ."

Word about what? Perhaps something sexual in nature, but he couldn't guess what. After she pulled his pants the rest of the way off, the frown eased to a more worried look.

"You're not going to die in my bed, are you?"

"No." At least, he didn't think so.

"Well, get in."

He crawled wearily into the bed as she collected her pajamas, turned off the light and wentdownstairs. The place was too new, too unfamiliar for him to fall asleep. He heard her use the toilet, wash her face, and brush her teeth. She turned off the lights downstairs, returning the house to full darkness. She padded barefoot up the stairs, went to the far side of the bed, and slipped in beside him. She smelled of damp soap, mint toothpaste, leather, cold steel, and gun oil.

"Just so you know," she whispered in the dark, "I sleep with my gun."

Good. They'd be safe if someone had followed them.

After several minutes of silence and stillness, she reached over to lay a warm hand on his cheek.

Finding him shivering, she slid across the bed and carefully curled around him. Her warmth muted the thudding pain.

CHAPTER TEN.

Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon.

Saturday, August 28, 2004.

Ukiah woke when Sam slipped out of the bed, disturbing his background filter. He leaned over the edge of the bed, found his clothes, pulled out his phone, and called Max.

Max answered on the third ring. "Hey, kid, how are you?"

Ukiah considered himself as the shower turned on downstairs. "After the last few days, I kind of feel like a kite: thin sticks and paper held together with string."

Max laughed, sounding tired.

"How's Kraynak?" Ukiah asked.

"They don't want him roaming the countryside, looking for Alicia." Max said. "But they're making noises that all he needs is time to heal."

"You still at the hospital?"

"No. They kicked me out around two. It took me a while, but I managed to find a motel with a room available. I signed in under my cover name." Which meant Max was running in full paranoia mode.

"Where are you?"

"Sam's house. It's about half an hour out of town, up in the mountains. She says she's taken a lot of effort to keep people from knowing where she lives."

"Ah, she says. Finally, you're learning paranoia."

"I have a good teacher."

"You up to a full day's work?"

"Probably."

"You dressed?"

"No. Sam just got out of the bed and it woke me. She's in the shower now."

"So you'll need at least an hour to get into town. The bed? As in same bed as you?""It's a little house. I think your bedroom is bigger than this whole cabin."

"No couch? No recliner?"

"No."

"Big bed?"

"King-sized."

"Good." Max changed the subject. "Did you have a chance to look at Alicia's daily planner?"

"I flipped through it."

"Great! I'm going to see if we can get rooms at the Red Lion again, or another real hotel. This motel is too open. I also need to deal with the rental-car people. They're not going to be happy with us, but shit happens. Hopefully they'll have a replacement car this morning."

"Do you want to go with just one rental car? Sam has a Jeep, as well as the Harley."

"Nah. I like having a car for each of us. We would have been sunk last night without the second car."

Ukiah had to agree with that. "So, what's the plan?"

"Take your time getting back to Pendleton. I'll pick up a new rental car and check in on Kraynak. If you saw Alicia's daily planner, we can take a stab at recreating it. Maybe there was something in the planner that the kidnappers knew would lead us to them, which is why they took it."

"It's worth a try." Certainly his photographic memory would make it an easy task. He described Alicia's planner in detail. "I'm going to call Indigo, let her know what's going on."

"That's a good idea. She might be able to give us a heads-up if the local office starts digging into our background."

Ukiah winced at the idea.

Once Indigo learned of Ukiah's alien parentage, she had risked her career to protect him. She destroyed her copy of the tracking contract Max had drawn up for the FBI, and erased all mentions of hiring Ukiah to find the missing FBI agent, Wil Trace, which ended with Ukiah's kidnapping by the Pack.

She never documented the connection between the Pack and the Ontongard. She treated Dr. Janet Haze's fall into insanity, the coroner's murder, the burning of Haze's body, and the kidnapping of all the various FBI agents, herself included, as separate, unrelated, and mostly unsolved cases.

Ukiah was not sure how she explained her raids on the Ontongard dens and the eventual shoot-out at the airport. He knew, though, that she made no mention of the Mars Rover hijacking equipment, and the Pack reduced it to burnt rubble by the end of the same week Indigo justified her actions by saying she couldn't blindly hand anyone the means to destroy Ukiah and his family's life. Still, it made Ukiah nervous. He didn't want to get her involved now unless they had to.

"Why would the local FBI offices check into our background? We're the victims here."

"Alicia's ring, a set of tire tracks, a few footprints, and your testimony is all they have on her kidnapping," Max said. "If it had stayed at that, they might have dug into your background just out of lack of anything else to do. The only good thing about last night's fun and games is that the FBI now has well-described bad guys to find, and you've once again demonstrated that you're an innocent bystander with a hero streak. I want to keep moving, see if we can find anything else to preoccupy them."

"Okay. I'll let Indigo know that they might be looking into us."

"Call me back when you hit town and we'll go from there. Oh, and Ukiah, when you call Indigo, don't mention anything about the bed.""Why?"

"Trust me. Just don't."

Indigo was at her family's restaurant, judging by the background chatter of Chinese and the whisper of Hawaiian music. He felt a moment of disorientation-he expected to catch Indigo at work-then realized that it was Saturday, and she was doing her normal family breakfast.

"What happened yesterday?" Indigo asked. "You didn't call."