Ahead of its July 28 release (pre-order now), I will preview Blood Track for my readers as part of my ongoing #SaturdayScenes initiative. Make sure you join my Reader’s Club to get the other free stories I offer to my subscribers, and to get further notifications regarding the release of Blood Track and future stories!

From his easy chair, Dan reaches across the round-top side table that separates us. He lays his hand there, palm up. Instead of getting a hold of me to keep me from sinking, he makes an invitation. I accept it, and the warmth of his hand wraps around mine.

I wait for him to ask, “Are you OK?” To his credit, he leaves it unsaid. He doesn’t as much as look in my direction. Keeps his gaze on the TV. His hand squeezes tighter, that’s all.

“Another flashback inside a flashback,” I tell him. “For once this one ain’t so bad,” I rush to add.

Sitting in our living room, watching myself on TV, I switch between being here and being in there, inside that screen, recapping the “Blood Track in LA” adventure.

There, thirty minutes after finding our Army boy, I stand on Hollywood Boulevard with remarkable composure. I still smell all those scents that unsettled me during the chase. But my stomach isn’t turning and churning, maybe because the scent of the makeup they’ve caked on my face trumps every other odor.

The camera view switches to Bridget an instant before she asks, “This is the very skill you used to track those two American girls in Mexico.” Her voice sounds so cheery, almost like she’s talking about an outing to Disneyland. Let’s everybody sing, it’s a small world after all.

“Yup,” I reply, not about to admit that we found those girls along a bloody trail, and left a bloody wake to get them home, but we never found them that way.

She allows a pause to ensue. Ain’t too worried about it. They can always edit it out, make the interview look peppy and dynamic. But she waits, probably weighing whether to bring up all those kids I insisted on bringing home. Same kids I housed in my ranch for a month before I was satisfied they had good homes to go to—most of them around the Fort Collins area. Though we’ve covered all that before, we did so in a semi-boring sit-down interview, and I suspect she wants to rehash it right now, right here in this City of the Angels where many immigrants make their home after trekking through deserts no less hot than the one me and my kids crossed to grab their piece of the American Dream.

She smiles, and I can tell she won’t go there. “Isn’t the ability to track blood something blood hounds are bred for?”

The camera switches to me. My lips show a smile of their own. But my eyes go blank—distant. Because I’m not there. I go back to Louisville, Colorado, where Shady traced her first live blood track to find a girl and her brother. I drop back further, to my first in-theater blood track, that time with Shadow going down a dark side street to find Joe Brenner seconds after an IED took his legs.

Flashbacks inside flashbacks inside flashbacks. Like facing mirrors they produce endless, ever diminishing versions of me and my life.

I freeze in part because of Joe Brenner’s memory, but also because, in light of all the play the Joe Brenner story is getting on TV, for this interview I insisted on one condition. No talk about Joe. No questions about what he did or might have done. No going into how he and I go back. Not even what I think of him, good, bad, or indifferent. Nothing. He did what he did. He’s gone and disappeared. Leave me out of it.

Not even if the very act of going into that Hollywood alley reminded me of how I found him. I ain’t talking about it.

So far, during her “embedded” coverage of my latest investigation, Bridget’s kept her side of the bargain. Right now, though, with the talk about blood tracking, it feels like she isn’t. Why? In her eyes and tone of voice, I detect it. She knows more about how I found Joe than the public record tells. I bet she even knows about the mission that brought us to the Iran-Iraq border—what we were doing there with dogs, and how it amounted to a whole different set of skills beyond tracking, blood or otherwise.

“Yeah, it’s quite the skill,” I say after a long pause some video jockey will no doubt need to edit away. Or not. I don’t much care.

She nods, no doubt considering how far to push her questioning. I’m betting she knows that part, too. How would a German Shepherd track blood like a blood hound? They’re not bred for it, she could press. How then? Can you teach such a skill?

If she were to pursue that line of inquiry, I’d have to answer that yeah, you teach them through training. That’s all I know. That’s all I want to know. That’s all I want to admit to myself I know. Which means my answers won’t sound too convincing.

Thankfully, Bridget makes a motion, like she’s cutting her throat, and the cameras stop rolling.

Two days later, after we all fly back to Colorado, we continue the interview at my ranch. A few minutes before noon, we break, and I walk her to the house for lunch. Only she and I, and Dan, too. He’s helped put it together. It amounts to nothing more than Panini sandwiches he makes using the gadget I bought him for his birthday. We add homemade potato chips I deep fried the night before, along with a fruit salad, so as to not offend Bridget’s health sensibilities.

Then it’s off for another walk back to the barn. There, director style chairs await us more or less smack in the center of the wide, high ranging space. We’ve propped open all of the high windows to let in natural light. A few man-made lamps bouncing off umbrellas and reflectors augment the overall illumination.

A makeup artist pats my face some, while Bridget gets similar treatment. We don’t take long after that to get things going—the “meat of the piece” as Bridget calls it.

From her chair she gestures at the surroundings. “This barn has come a long way since I last interviewed you outside those doors.”

“Yes, I reckon it has.”

“Business is going good?”

“It’s picking up some.”

“Tell us a little about what you do.”

“We raise and train specialized dogs for law enforcement agencies.” I could stop there. I very much want to. But Candice, my publicist, told me a question like this would come—she insisted on it—and this stands as my one chance to get in my mini infomercial, the whole reason I agreed to play doggy master inside Bridget’s investigative report.

“By now we have ten Shepherds in the Tahoe line,” I rush to add. “Not counting Tahoe-1, that is.”

“He’s the one that hiked the Sierras with you, a little less than a year ago, right?”

“He was plenty big by then. But yeah, he did. He and Shady.”

“Now, you had Shady do the tracking back in Los Angeles. Can Tahoe do the same thing?”

There we go, back to the blood track thing. “I figured I’d show what a more mature gal can do.”

Bridget allows a few seconds for a little fake-smiling contest.

“Is Shady the mother of the Tahoe line?” she asks.

“For one of the litters, yeah. We have another gal to help us. Five pups per litter.”

“And then you also have some Dutch Shepherds. Beautiful animals, as you showed us earlier.”

“Very capable, too. Some agencies prefer the females on account of their smaller size, but when it comes to working, males do about as well. It comes down to preference. Many handlers swear Dutchies do better on the workability front. I always say, it comes down to the individual dog, how you train them, and how you partner with them.”

“They don’t track blood.”

Back to that again. I smile. “Not yet, I suppose.”

She nods. Her eyes twinkle to let me know she knows: not ever.

She lets the pause linger, like she wants me to realize she’s got the power to push into uncomfortable territory.

“People continue to be very impressed with your physical recovery,” she says.

I shrug, like it’s so old news. “It’s a process, like they say. Some days better than others.”

“Not a day without pain.”

“Is there such a thing? A day without pain? For anybody?”

“Still, it’s good to see how your prosthetic legs are making this life possible for you.” She waves at our surroundings again. Yeah, let’s not dwell on the pain. Not that great for ratings. Let’s chat about prosperity instead, how I’m pulling myself up into success, bootstraps and all, even if they cover mechanical legs.

But that’s alright. I ain’t much in the mood to get sappy on-camera, so I play along with, “I’m thankful for that.”

“What do you think it would’ve been like without them?”

I demur. “The dogs or the legs?”

“The legs.”

“Harder.”

She chuckles. “Yes, definitely. Harder. What about now? Can you envision a life without them?”

“Back to a wheelchair, you mean?”

“Yeah, sure. Not on your feet.”

I shrug again. “I don’t know that I have enough imagination to answer that.” Except I can imagine it, in full living color. But I don’t want to. I refuse to let the thought take hold.

Dan gives my hand another warm, tight squeeze before letting it go. “Well, she kept her word.”

Back in our living room, my latest interview with Bridget Suarez has stopped rolling. Before going to commercial, the station promised to get into the Joe Brenner story after the break. Part of me wonders. Are they going to connect the dots, especially the two big ones that involve Joe and me?

“Let’s turn it off.” I swat at the TV.

Dan heeds me, though with unveiled reluctance. “What do you think of that whole thing?”

I pause for a moment. Though he knows about me and Joe Brenner, this is the first time Dan brings him up. Has he up to now avoided asking about a past fling I may or may not have had with Joe? Or does Dan sense something more?

“Do you mean, do I think he gone off and killed his wife and kids?” I say.

Now Dan hesitates. “Yeah.”

“The trial hasn’t gotten started, and I ain’t sitting on the jury.”

Dan shakes his head. Then he goes to biting on the inside of his lip, like he does when I’m not “open to full communication,” as our marriage therapist put it right before we quit going.

I stand up. “We best get dinner ready. You got packing to do, and we got us an early morning tomorrow.”

He follows me in the kitchen and helps with the chopping of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions for the salad. We work in silence, only broken with “excuse me,” when one of us needs to get around the other to grab a utensil or pan. Halfway through my sautéing of mushrooms and sausage to set over reheated, leftover rice, he turns to me.

“You gonna be OK going back to Energetix?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be going back.” I shrug. “It’s just a meeting.”

“You know the topic?”

I shrug again. “I reckon I do.”

He leaves the follow-up question unasked. Does my trip to Energetix have anything to do with Joe Brenner, AWOL Vice President of Business Development? Does it have to do with what they say he’s done, the way he’s gone missing? If so, how do they want me to figure in all that, whatever effort they’re carrying forth to find him?

Dan doesn’t ask it, but I hear it nonetheless. In my head I give him the answer. Yeah, maybe.

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