Read Call of the Cougar (Heart of the Cougar Book 2) for Free Online Page B

the cliffs. Dan said that when we were through down here, to join the search."
    Tracey had long since disappeared, but Hal couldn't get his mind off the way she had single-handedly taken on four gunmen, until two disappeared, and how she'd protected her partner with her life. And was a cougar to boot.
    Now that was the kind of woman he wanted in his life.

Chapter 2
    Pacing across the hospital waiting room, Tracey waited to hear the outcome of her partner's surgery. Seeing the blood from Anton's wound after seeing Bill die, forced an icy sweat to cover her skin. She was glad she had taken the other men down, well, with the intervention of Deputy Sheriff Hal Haverton, who helped nail one of the perps.
    But two of the men had escaped and that pissed her off royally.
    That was one of the hazards of having time to think about all of this over and over again, when she wanted to ensure her partner was going to make it, then go after the bastards who might have killed him.
    It would take ballistics a while to see if one of the men who had stayed behind or one of the men who had gotten away had fired the weapon that had wounded her partner.
    A stocky, gray-haired police detective approached her. "We've questioned the man we took into custody. He says he doesn't know the man who hired him. He said he'd never worked for the man before. He'd never taken any jobs that had to do with the killing of animals. He likes animals, he says."
    "Just not humans."
    The detective smiled a little. "He said he'd been paid for this one small job. He didn't know you were Special Agents with FWS. He thought you were buying illegal drugs, except you were holding out on them as far as the agreed upon price was concerned. Anyway, we're still questioning him. He's being held without bail. Several warrants are out for his arrest—attempted murder and armed robbery at the top of the list—so he's not getting out anytime soon. He had no compulsion about killing you or your partner because, according to him, you were the bad guys."
    "Yeah, right. Not paying up on our end of a drug deal." She shook her head. "He really doesn't know who the ringleader is?"
    "Doesn't appear like it. He just needed to get rid of the two of you because you knew too much about the operation, and the guy who hired him would sell the drugs to someone else. I'll update you if I learn anything further."
    "Okay, thanks." She was beginning to wonder if the ringleader had even been at the old saloon as part of the whole setup.
    She couldn't tell the detective that one of the men who had been in this shootout this time had also been at the other. How could she when the only way she knew it for sure was because she'd smelled him?
    When the police officer left, she paced some more across the waiting room. She'd already talked to her boss about what went down before she arrived at the hospital, and she didn't intend to call him again until the doctor came out to speak with her. But when her cell rang, she glanced down to see that it was her boss, a tough, thirty-year-old, Special Forces officer, who was no-nonsense, and totally by the book. She suspected he'd been talking to his boss, and now he had some bad news for her. Like the last time he did when she was involved in a shootout of this magnitude.
    "Here's the deal," Mick Sorenson said. "After you lost your last partner and now Genova was nearly killed this time and this is the second firefight you've been in this year—and damn it, it's only June—you're off the case." Before she could object, he continued, "I'm placing you on administrative leave for two weeks, pending an investigation into what went wrong. This time."
    She swore under her breath, knowing Mick would hear her, but she couldn't help it. She wanted to nail these bastards in the worst way.
    ***
    As soon as Sheriff Dan Steinacker got a call from his good friend Mick Sorenson and—head of one of the branches overseeing Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agents in this