The Valley Walker

"Yeah, though I walk through the valley... "

Special Investigator Teri Altro is a hard-case member of the Drug Interdiction Task Force. Cold and aloof, there is no room in her life for personal entanglements. No one is allowed to call her by her first name. No form of physical contact is acceptable. Altro is a driven woman, and people who work with her learn to keep up or stay out of her way. She carries a gun in her shoulder bag.

When Altro first notices the man staring at her, he doesn't seem like anything special... just some guy in the drugstore. But when three men walk in the door to assassinate her, he kills them all with fluid ease, so quickly that she doesn't even have time to pull her own gun. The confrontation is so eerily violent that it leaves Altro wondering just who... or what... the man is.

Over the next four days she learns that the man is John Walker Michaels, a man known to the Hmong of Laos as the Valley Walker, a man the army has classified as a deserter. He is an openly emotional man who draws her out of her shell and into the world of Hmong mysticism. At the end of this time... even after talking to him, learning his history and meeting his family... Altro can only shake her head when asked about him.

She had touched him and felt his warmth. She knew he was real.

Or was he?