Maddie caught just a glimpse of Fish shaking his head groggily and sitting up as she steered in a wide reverse doughnut that barely missed the garbage truck.
“Forward! Go forward!” Sam screamed in her ear. She had the impression that if he hadn’t been afraid of making them wreck, he would have shifted for her. No duh, she thought, but this was definitely not the time for conversation. With her heart pounding so hard that it felt as though it was going to beat clear out of her chest, she slammed on the brakes, throwing all three of them forward, then shoved the transmission into drive.
The rear window exploded. Maddie screamed, ducked, and stepped on the gas so hard that the truck catapulted forward like a rock out of a slingshot.
TWENTY-THREE
Keep your head down!” Sam yelled, hanging on to the dashboard as another bullet whistled past Maddie’s ear, shattering the windshield. Glass blew out over the front of the pickup, rattling like hail. More glass from the rear window littered the seat like spilled popcorn, bouncing and sliding onto the floor as the truck shot away from the house. Zelda, bag and all, had been thrown down into the passenger’s footwell when Maddie hit the brakes, and she stayed down there, clearly smart enough to recognize that she had found the safest place in the vehicle. A place where she could devour her booty undisturbed.
“I’m trying!” Crouched as low as she could get and still see where they were going, Maddie hung grimly onto the steering wheel and kept her foot mashed down on the gas.
The road was a winding gravel track with thick piney woods on one side and a brush-covered ravine ending in more thick piney woods on the other. A hunted glance into the rearview mirror showed her a one-story lodge-looking house in a clearing behind them. Hills covered with more piney woods rose behind it, and the sun in all its orange and purple and pink glory was just getting ready to sink behind the hills. The garage they’d just exited was to the side of the house. Lunkhead stood in two-handed firing stance on the paved area in front of the garage, while Fish and two other men ran for the cars.
“Keep your eyes on the road!”
Maddie looked forward again just in time to see that they were coming up on a curve. She swung the wheel hard, and gravel spurted up around them, hitting the side of the truck. In seconds they were around the curve, out of sight of the house—and still on the road.
His face grim, Sam reached around her, grabbed her seat belt, pulled it across her body, and clicked it into place. Maddie barely noticed.
“They were in the garbage truck.” She was still having trouble getting her mind around that. Something about the garbage truck bothered her ...
“I figured that out about the time I woke up in the back of it and that fat dude hit me with a stun gun. Just be glad there wasn’t any garbage in it.” Sam’s voice was wry. He was fastening his own seat belt as he spoke.
“There was a garbage truck near my apartment the morning I got shot,” Maddie gasped as her mind hit on the elusive memory. She glanced back reflexively to see if the bad guys had rounded the curve yet.
“Shit. We got trouble,” Sam said. At first Maddie thought he was talking about something she was missing behind them. Then she looked forward.
A small yellow car had just rounded the next bend, and was hurtling up the track toward them. It was smack-dab in the middle of the road. Clearly it wasn’t intending to let them get by.
Maddie did some quick mental calculations. Big truck, little car—could anyone say “Let’s play chicken”?
“Yee-haw,” she said grimly, and charged toward it without giving an inch. Beside her, Sam sucked in air. His eyes widened as they stayed glued to the oncoming car.
“Maybe you want to ... swerve right!”
Maddie did, at the last possible second, just as the car, in the same desperate attempt to avoid a head-on collision, swerved the other way. They zoomed past each other with inches to spare.
“Jesus.” Sam looked sideways at her. “And I thought Wynne was a scary-ass driver.”
Maddie laughed.
And then something hit the back of the truck with all the force of an exploding grenade. The truck’s rear end slewed sideways as if in an insane attempt to pass the front. And the truck slid off the road and plunged down the ravine.
Maddie screamed and stomped the brake. Sam yelled and held on. The truck hurtled downward, bouncing over the ground like a kid on a trampoline. Bushes and scrub trees flashed past. As the bottom rushed up at them, Maddie could clearly see what looked like a solid wall of trees ...
She was steering hard to the left when they hit with a bang.
She must have blacked out, because the next thing she was aware of was that she was being dragged out from behind the wheel. Hard hands under her armpits. Her left ankle thumping down painfully on the running board. Someone locking an arm around her waist, dragging her upright.
“What?” She tried to resist. Her eyes blinked open.
“It’s okay; it’s me,” Sam said. Blood ran from his nose. Before Maddie could register more than that, he said, “Hold on,” and heaved her over his shoulder.
Then he took off at what felt like a dead run.
Maddie clutched the back of his shirt and hung on. His shoulder dug into her stomach, making breathing an effort. With her head bouncing against his back like a basketball being dribbled, it was hard to think, let alone see. But she knew that they were in the woods because she could see the brown carpet of fallen needles and the thin, gray trunks with their stubby, denuded branches like small arms as they flashed past. It was already a deep purple twilight there, where the last rays of the sun couldn’t reach. The air was cooler and smelled strongly of pine. The high-pitched chorus of insects was almost drowned out by the thud of Sam’s feet on the ground and the harsh rasp of his breathing.
Zelda was with them: Maddie could see her bounding along behind, her leash slithering like a lavender snake over the pine needles.
Whatever else she was, Zelda was no fool. She clearly knew the bad guys from the good.
As she gradually became aware enough to take inventory, Maddie realized that she had the mother of all headaches; her stomach was being pounded to smithereens; and the little finger of her left hand throbbed horribly.
She also realized that Sam was tiring. His breathing was growing more labored, and his steps were slowing. His shirt felt damp, and she realized that he was sweating.
As Lunkhead had said, she wasn’t any feather.
“Sam.” She tugged on his shirt, then poked his ribs to get his attention. When he flinched, she knew she’d succeeded.
“Sam.” She poked him again.
He slowed, then stopped as she poked him once more, and leaned forward so that she spilled off his shoulder. To her surprise, her knees refused to support her. They buckled, and, with his hands on her waist to keep her from collapsing completely, she maneuvered into a sitting position on the ground. The scent of pine rose all around her. The needles were as thick as good carpet, and felt smooth beneath her. Zelda came limping over and collapsed beside her, panting. Her top-knot hung down over her left eye again, and Maddie, performing an act of mercy, pulled the bow off.
“What?” Sam was leaning over as he looked at her, his hands on his thighs, gasping for breath.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t any feather. But she wasn’t all that heavy.
“Are you all right?”
“Just ... winded.”
“You don’t have to carry me any farther. I can walk.”
His eyes slid over her skeptically. “Looks like it.”
“I can. Just give me a minute.”
“That’s about all we have: a minute.” His nose was still bleeding, but only a trickle now, and he must have felt it because he dashed it away with the back of his hand. His face was liberally smeared with blood. His shirt was splotched with it, ugly dark flowers against a white background.
“They’re chasing us, right?” Maddie felt a clutch of fear. Not a really strong clutch, because
she was now so battered and sore and shell-shocked that her sensory processing center was about out of room. But a clutch nonetheless.
“By now? Oh, yeah. But I don’t think they saw us go off the road. At least, I saw their cars shoot past as I was dragging you out of the truck. But it wouldn’t take them long to figure out we weren’t ahead of them, and then they’ll back-track. We have to assume that by now they’ve found the truck.” His voice was grim.
Fear elbowed everything else out of the way and made itself some room.
“So what happened? It felt like we got rear-ended, but when I glanced back, there wasn’t anything there.”
“I think they shot out a tire. Whoever was in the yellow car. That’s what it felt like, anyway.” He straightened, took a deep breath, and leaned against a tree.
Maddie grimaced. The reality of the situation was starting to set in again. They were, it seemed clear, still somewhere in Missouri—at a guess, not that far from St. Louis. But from the quick look around that she’d gotten as they’d driven away from the house, they were on one of the many small mountains that ridged the countryside west of the city. It was a sparsely settled area, and she hadn’t seen any other houses or buildings. Though, admittedly, she’d had only a brief glimpse.
On a positive note—the only time in her life that she had ever considered this a positive note, come to think of it—she was with an FBI agent. A highly trained, highly skilled, highly competent law-enforcement professional who would certainly know what to do in a situation like this.
“Okay, Mr. Special Agent, so what’s the plan?”
He laughed. The sound was short, unamused. “We walk. We hide. We try to stay alive.”
“Well, shoot, I could’ve come up with that,” she said, disappointed.
“They took my gun, they took my cell phone. We got no wheels. Sorry, darlin’, but that kind of leaves us fresh out of options.”
That drawled darlin’ did something to her insides. Her stomach went all fluttery and her heart skipped a beat. For the briefest of moments, she simply looked at him and remembered that this time last night, they’d been falling in love.
“Maddie ...” He must have seen something of what she was feeling in her eyes, or felt something of the same himself, because his voice was suddenly low and deep, achingly intimate. Then his face hardened abruptly, and his voice went flat. “Leslie, I mean. I take it that you know what that was all about back there?”
Suddenly her past and the rift it had created between them hung in the air, as tangible as the scent of pine.
Her heart ached, and the taste of regret for what they’d had and lost was bitter on her tongue. But there was no changing what was, and now that the truth was out in the open, she was not going to shrink from it. She’d lost everything else. Pride was just about all she had left.
“Maddie works. I left Leslie behind a long time ago.”
“Maddie, then.” It was dark under the trees now, she realized, because she could no longer read what was in his eyes. “So?”
She realized that he was prompting her to answer his question.
“They’re Mob,” she said. “The guy who’s been trying to kill me, who killed Carol Walter and all those other people—I’m pretty sure he’s a professional hit man.”
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t sound as though that was some big news flash. “Either of those guys back there, you think?”
Maddie shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The man who was in my hotel room—they didn’t seem to fit with what I remembered. But the guy in the doorway—the third guy—maybe. He looked about the right size and everything but, like I told you before, I didn’t see the guy who attacked me.”
“Okay. I heard you say something about some plastics company—and a strongbox full of evidence?”
Maddie sighed. “A-One Plastics is one of the names they use as a front in Baltimore. When I realized that they’d found me—that would be when I was attacked in New Orleans—I called them up and made some threats about some stuff my dad, who used to do some jobs for them, kept in case he ever had to use it as leverage. The thing is, I left the strongbox behind when I left Baltimore, but they don’t know that. I thought maybe I could get them to back off.”
“You called them up?” There was a curious note in his voice. He was watching her closely, but she couldn’t read anything in his expression.
Her chin came up. “Yeah. If you want their number, I’ll give it to you when—if—we get home.”
“I definitely want their number.” She could see him frowning. “You made threats to the Mob?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I thought about running, but I figured if they found me once, they could do it again. Especially now that they know I’m alive.”
A beat passed.
“You ever think about telling me? I was right there. Convenient.”
The hint of sarcasm in his voice stung.
“I thought you’d probably react just exactly the way you’re reacting.”
“How the hell else am I supposed to react? You ...”
But she’d stopped listening. Zelda’s head had come up. The little dog was looking at something back in the direction from which they’d come, and Maddie, following her gaze, caught her breath. At first glance she’d thought the bobbing yellow spheres in the distance were lightning bugs, so tiny were they. But then they’d grown a little larger, and she’d recognized them for what they were: flashlights. Distant, but headed their way.
She felt an icy thrust of pure terror.
“Sam ...” she breathed, pointing.
He looked, stiffened, turned back to her. “Shit. Let’s go.”
Then he reached down to grab her elbows, and she let him pull her up.
“Give me the damned leash. Why the hell you didn’t leave her—too late now. If they find her, they’ll know which way we came.”
Maddie had been holding on to Zelda’s leash for dear life since she’d seen the flashlights—Zelda was a dog, after all; counting on her continued good sense could be a bad thing—but she handed it over without protest. She felt shaky, weak, ill. Her head hurt, her finger throbbed. Her thigh ached where Lunkhead had kicked her.
Her heart hurt, too. It felt bruised and battered and sore just like the rest of her. Because despite everything, she’d discovered, to her dismay, she was still in love with Sam.
And, considering who he was and who she was, that was a bad thing.
“No,” she said, shaking her head when he made a move to swing her back over his shoulder again. “I can make it on my own.”
“Fine.” There was a clipped quality to his voice. “Come on, then.”
Grabbing her uninjured hand, Sam took off through the trees at a steady jog. Gritting her teeth and calling on reserves of determination she’d forgotten she had, Maddie managed to stay with him. Zelda scuttled along silently beside them, seeming to realize their danger. They ran at a right angle to the path the flashlights seemed to be taking, and after a while they couldn’t see them anymore. The woods were so dark now that the trees were no more than grayish blurs as they flashed by. The insect chorus grew louder. An owl hooted. Here and there the eyes of a nocturnal animal glowed at them. Ordinarily, Maddie would have shivered at the thought of the creatures that might be roaming the woods, but tonight she was just too darned tired, and, anyway, nothing was as scary as the two-legged predators on their trail. The pine needles were cool and slippery underfoot, and would have made a decent running surface if it hadn’t been for the things hidden beneath them. Having lost her shoes, Maddie had no protection from the roots and rocks and pinecones and other mushy things she preferred not to even think about, with which the ground was littered. They found a creek and ran parallel to it, turning downhill. Head pounding, stomach churning, her knees feeling like they might give out at any second, Maddie concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. And ran. And ran. And ran.
Until, finally, she stopped.
&
nbsp; “That’s it,” she said, wheezing and bending double, brought low by a stitch in her side. Sam had stopped, too—she’d pulled her hand from his—and loomed over her, Zelda now tucked like a football beneath his arm.
“Okay, I think we can walk now.”
At least he had the decency to be breathing hard. She would have felt better about that, except she could scarcely breathe at all.
“No. No walk.”
“Just a little farther.”
“No.”
“So I’ll carry you.”
“No.”
“Just as far as the rocks up there. See them?”
Maddie looked up. Maybe it was just her, because her head was pounding so hard that it was making her eyes all blurry, but all she saw was a whole lot of dark.
“I don’t want to scare you, but they may be looking for us with night-vision goggles by now. I was getting ready to stop because of that anyway, but we need to find some shelter so they can’t see us if they scan this patch of trees.”
Crap.
She straightened, both hands on her hips as she sucked in air, and narrowed her eyes at him. He was no more than a big charcoal-gray silhouette in the dark.
“Fine,” she said.
She thought he grinned, but her eyes were too blurry and it was too dark to be sure. Anyway, she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was rest.
Which she eventually got to do, after scrambling over a lot of big rocks and edging around what felt like a wall of solid stone cliffs that rose straight up from the creek bed and, finally, collapsing in the squishy depression carved out of the bottom of yet another cliff that he deemed safe.
TWENTY-FOUR
Wednesday, August 20
The ground was covered with pine needles. Whatever was beneath the needles was spongy, soft. Maddie preferred to think that it was grass. Or moss. Yes, moss. Velvety green moss as thick as a mattress.
And if it wasn’t moss, she didn’t want to know.
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