“We need to be making tracks, beautiful.”
That earned him a scowl. She didn’t feel beautiful. Heck, she didn’t even feel human. And she had certain personal needs that absolutely did not require his presence.
“Don’t you have somewhere else you need to be for a few minutes?” She was careful to add “for a few minutes” to that, because the thought of him disappearing for any longer was enough to give her palpitations.
“I brought you more water. It’s right there.” He nodded at the can before giving her another of those all-seeing looks and then leaving her to her own devices.
Zelda tottered over to the can and started lapping.
“Great,” Maddie said, watching dispiritedly. When Zelda had drunk her fill, she turned and looked at Maddie and whined.
“No food. Sorry.” Maddie held out her empty hands to demonstrate, and Zelda looked disappointed. She flopped down on her belly again, and watched with a moody expression as Maddie washed and dressed in the water the dog left and did what she needed to do.
Sam came back just as she was starting to worry about him. He was carrying a stout stick a little longer than and about the thickness of a baseball bat. It was, Maddie realized with dismay, their only weapon.
“Here,” he said, handing her something. It took her a minute, but she realized that they were his socks.
“You can’t go running around barefoot,” he said impatiently as she looked at the big, semiwhite things with mild revulsion. “Your feet are already all scratched up. I’d give you my shoes, but they’d fall off your feet.”
A glance down at what looked like his size-twelves confirmed that. With a sigh, Maddie surrendered the last of her hygiene standards.
“Did you see anything?” she asked as she pulled the socks on. Now that they were about to leave their little hidey-hole, she felt scared all over again.
He shook his head.
“You don’t think we should just stay here, do you?” she asked in a small voice as she finished pulling on the socks and stood up. “They haven’t found us yet.”
“They will eventually.”
That was so chilling that Maddie shivered. Sam saw, dropped a quick, hard kiss on her mouth and another, gentler, one on her injured hand, then headed out around the edge of the enclosure. With Zelda trailing forlornly behind her, Maddie hurried to keep up with him.
“Tell me we’ve got some kind of plan,” she said as they skirted the base of the cliffs. It was still dark, but dawn was definitely coming. The birds were starting to call to one another. The creek tinkled merrily alongside them. Zelda munched on trash she’d found along the creek bed. There was happiness in the world, Maddie reflected. At the moment, however, she just wasn’t feeling it.
Sam grinned at her, but he must have realized that she was too scared and tired and achy for humor, because he gave her a straight answer.
“The house they took us to yesterday was on the east side of the mountain. The driveway led downhill. We’re still on the east side of the same mountain, so I’m guessing that if we go far enough downhill, we’ll find a road. We can follow it out, or hitchhike, which is a little dicey because we don’t know who’ll stop. Our best bet, probably, is to find a phone. If there was one house up here, there are bound to be more. And there’s always the chance that the cavalry will show up. Believe me, they’re busting their asses right now to find us.”
What he didn’t add, but Maddie knew, was that finding them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. No matter how optimistically she tried to look at it, she didn’t think waiting to be rescued was going to work.
They followed the creek downstream as the sky lightened gradually above them, walking until the cliffs were a distant memory and they were once again in the heart of the piney woods. It was still dark under the trees, but more of a thick gray now than a pitch black. The air smelled of pine and dampness. The humidity was tangible. It was almost as if the ground itself was sweating. Mist hung beneath the trees like fog, making it impossible to see farther than a few feet in every direction. The footing was slippery and treacherous, especially for Maddie in her socks. The sounds of the forest were all around them, but if there were any other humans within shouting distance, Maddie couldn’t tell it. Conversely, this made her jittery. Goose bumps crept over her skin. She kept glancing nervously all around, and every crack of a twig or unexpected sound made her jump.
It was eerie being there among the trees in the foggy gray hush of dawn. Especially knowing as well as she did that a shot could come out of nowhere at any time, or that behind any given bush, or hidden within any shadowy clump of trees, someone could be waiting ...
When Sam stopped, it was so unexpected that she nearly bumped into him.
“What?” she whispered, her heart pounding as she peered around him.
“Bingo,” he said, his voice low, too. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be back at your place in time for breakfast.”
Then she saw it. A small log cabin stood on a slight rise in front of them, its shingled roof rising above the mist. The trees had been cleared around it, and a narrow dirt track led up past it to a shed or barn or garage. Maddie’s heart gave a great, hopeful leap ...
But what if they weren’t lucky? Maddie had a sudden vision of Hansel and Gretel, and the witch’s gingerbread house.
“What if whoever lives there is a bad guy?” Maddie asked, still surveying the house doubtfully from the shelter of Sam’s back.
“Then we’ve got trouble,” Sam said, way more cheerfully than the situation called for. “See the lines leading to the house? There’s a phone in there. You wait here, and I’ll go summon the cavalry.”
“Not in this life.” Maddie grabbed his arm, alarm in every syllable. “No way am I staying here alone. If you go, I go.”
He looked around at her. What he saw in her face must have persuaded him that she meant what she said, because he sighed.
“Will you at least promise me that if there’s trouble, you’ll run for it and leave me to handle it?”
“Sure,” Maddie said. “I promise.”
Meaning she’d wait and evaluate the situation when and if it happened. But right at that moment, the chance of her abandoning him was looking like it was somewhere between slim and none.
Sam looked at Zelda, who was drooping like a wilted flower.
“Could we at least leave the dog tied to a tree?” Sam asked.
“She’ll bark. Anyway, if they find her, they’ll kill her. You heard what they said.”
“I feel like I’m leading a parade,” Sam said. “All right, come on.”
They had just started walking again when a sharp craaak pierced the charcoal-gray dawn. And something smacked hard into the trunk of a pine not six inches from Maddie’s head.
TWENTY-SIX
Shit!” Sam yelled, grabbing her hand. “Run!”
Maddie didn’t need him to tell her a second time. She bolted like a deer from hunters, head low, feet slipping and sliding on the pine needles underfoot. Head spinning, heart pounding, sure she was going to die at any second, she ran as though the hit man was on her heels.
Oh, wait, he was.
Craaak. Another bullet smacked a nearby tree, so close that she felt a blowback of splinters spray her cheek. Maddie almost screamed, but she choked the sound back just in time. It would only help the hit man take better aim. Having lost his stick, Sam pounded along beside her, head down, dodging and weaving among the trees, and somewhere, poor Zelda was lost in the gloom. Maddie had dropped the leash when she started running.
She said a heartfelt little prayer for Zelda—and for herself and Sam.
“Marino, they’re to your left,” a man’s voice yelled. Maddie had just registered that his voice sounded fairly distant and that he was somewhere behind them and to the right when there was another sharp craaak.
A shower of pine needles rained over them. Maddie realized that once again their bullet had been heart-stoppingly close.
The charcoal silhouette of a man stepped out of the mist not thirty feet in front of them, a rifle at his shoulder pointed straight at them.
“Freeze!” he yelled.
“Keep going.” Sam let go of her hand and pushed her hard to her right so that there was a little stand of trees between her and the shooter. Then, to her horror, he ran straight for the man, crouching low, barreling headlong through the trees. He’d made the choice for her. She could only go for it. Heart slamming, stomach churning, gasping for air and trying to watch Sam at the same time, she ran for her life.
“Over here, they’re over here!” someone cried. That voice came from the right, too, and sounded closer than the first.
Craaak. The mouth of the rifle Sam was running toward blazed yellow through the fog. To her horror, Maddie realized that she could no longer see Sam.
Oh, God, is he hit? Maddie’s heart gave a terrified lurch and her stomach dropped clear to her toes. There was no way to know, and nothing she could do. Except run. And pray.
Please, God, please ...
Pulse pounding, sobbing for breath, running for her life, she heard what sounded like thudding footsteps nearby, but she couldn’t be sure; it might have been the beating of her pulse against her eardrums, and the mist was so dense she couldn’t see—and then another man stepped out of the trees directly ahead of her, so close that she almost smacked into him.
He lunged toward Maddie, and she screamed.
“Got her,” he yelled as he grabbed her, catching her by her hair as she tried to dodge and yanking her back against him. With a single terrified glance she saw that it was Fish and that he had a rifle in his other hand. It was pointed toward the ground as he struggled with her. Heart hammering, breath rattling in her throat as though she was dying, she realized that this was her chance, maybe her only chance, to escape. Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, she whirled in his grip and slugged him in the nose as hard as she could.
She felt the impact all the way up her arm to her shoulder. The sound made her think of a melon hitting the floor and splitting open.
Fish howled and she tore free, leaving strands of hair behind in his fist. Almost falling to her knees, she recovered and scrambled away.
“Where? Where are they?” The cry, from multiple voices, echoed through the trees. As panicked as she was, Maddie thought that they came from all around her, everywhere. All she could see was mist and trees. All she could hear, besides the dying echo of the voices, was the frantic thudding of her own heart.
A flying tackle brought her down. It hit her in the small of the back, knocked the breath out of her, knocked her off her feet. She slammed to the ground, then skidded face-forward through the mulch on the forest floor. With a burst of stomach-twisting terror, she realized that it was Fish who was on top of her. She struggled wildly, her nails digging into the ground as she tried to fight her way free.
“You’re dead now, bitch,” Fish howled, straddling her, and slammed his fist hard into the back of her head. Maddie gasped and saw stars.
“Don’t you fucking move,” Sam said, in a deadly voice unlike anything Maddie had ever heard come out of his mouth. “Go on, give me an excuse to blow your head off. I want to.”
For a moment she thought that she must be hallucinating, that the blow was causing her mind to play tricks on her, but Fish, though he still straddled her, went as still as if he’d been turned to stone.
“Get your hands in the air,” Sam ordered, and Maddie felt Fish move and guessed that he had obeyed.
Shaking, breathing like she had been running for miles, she dared a glance around then and saw that her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her, that it was Sam who was standing not six feet away, mist swirling waist-deep around him, stalking closer with a rifle against his shoulder that was pointed at Fish’s head. She felt a wave of thankfulness stronger than anything she had ever known because he was still alive, and a fresh wave of terror, too. Just because he was alive this minute didn’t mean that in the next he might not be dead.
He’d come back for her. He’d saved her life by pushing her away from the shooter, then gone after him and wrested a rifle away from him and come back to save her again....
And then she heard it, echoing through the forest like multiple blasts from a chorus of synchronized bugles.
“Federal Agents! Drop your weapons! Don’t anybody move!”
The cavalry had arrived. They were saved.
She went limp with relief, letting her head fall back down to rest against the cool, damp mulch, breathing hard, heart still pounding as her body tried to absorb the news that the danger had passed.
“Get off her,” Sam said to Fish, still in that deadly voice. “Maddie, are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said, which was the truth because “fine” meant that she was alive and he was alive and it was all over and they would both live to see another day. Fish got off her, moving slowly and carefully, and she rolled onto her side, watching as Sam spread-eagled Fish against a tree and started patting him down. The rifle that Fish had apparently dropped when he dived after her now rested against a tree near Sam’s side.
“McCabe! Maddie!” It was Wynne’s voice, echoing out of the mist.
“Over here,” Sam yelled while Maddie slowly, carefully sat up.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine.” He grinned at her over his shoulder, faintly breathless, and Maddie felt her chest slowly expand, as if she could breathe again. It was over.
“Thank God,” she said. “We’re alive. We made it.”
“You sound like you had doubts.”
“Maybe just a few.”
Sam grinned at her again. “Just for the record, me, too.” He took something from Fish and stepped back, then, as Fish made a restive movement, Sam said to him in an entirely different tone, “You want to live, you don’t move unless I tell you to move.”
It was growing lighter under the trees now, and she could see that he was looking cheerful and pleased with himself and more lighthearted than she had ever seen him. Her heart gave a little lurch. It was over and they were both alive and she loved him. That was what was important. Actually, that was all that mattered.
But now the truth was out. She was going to have to deal with that.
There was general commotion in the surrounding area, voices and thuds and the clink of metal, the sound of many people moving through the trees.
Then Wynne materialized out of the mist.
“What took you?” Sam said to him, his eyes and the rifle still on Fish.
“Think finding this place was easy?” Wynne’s eyes moved over Fish, then slid down to Maddie before returning to Sam. “You can thank Cynthia that we got here at all.”
“Cynthia?” McCabe cast Wynne a sideways glance and then shouted for somebody to come and take Fish away. “What did Cynthia do?”
“I saved your ass, McCabe, that’s what I did,” Cynthia said, appearing through the mist along with another man whom Maddie didn’t know but who was apparently another law-enforcement type, because he slapped cuffs on Fish and hustled him off.
Sam reached a hand down to Maddie, and she let him pull her to her feet. Wynne, meanwhile, was looking at Cynthia like a proud parent might look at a precocious child.
“Cynthia checked Maddie’s ... I mean, uh, Leslie Dolan’s”—this was accompanied by a quick, almost covert glance at Maddie, who was by then leaning against Sam’s side—“cell-phone records, and found that she’d placed a whole bunch of calls to a plastics company in Baltimore over the last few days. Turned out it was a front for a Mob operation, and our guys at that end had been investigating them anyway. With what we told them, they had enough to run ’em in, and then they leaned on them until they gave up Evergreen Waste and Disposal right back here in St. Louis. Seems the Baltimore group had asked the St. Louis group for a favor, and the
St. Louis group had agreed to do it.”
“What kind of favor?” Sam growled. They were walking by that time, slowly, the four of them, moving through the mist toward the voices of the other law-enforcement agents and the sounds that accompanied a gang of thugs being rounded up and placed under arrest. Sam was holding the rifle in one hand and had the other arm wrapped around Maddie’s waist. Weak-kneed and a little shaky as reaction set in, she had an arm around him, too, and was leaning against him as they moved. Wynne and Gardner walked together on her other side, and kept shooting her little sideways glances. Maddie was too drained to care.
“Well, first they wanted, uh, her killed—best we can figure it, that’s when she got shot in her car—and then they changed that to kidnapped and forced to hand over some evidence she’s apparently been trying to blackmail them with and then killed. The guy sneaking up her back stairs and yesterday’s snatch by the garbage truck were apparently part of the kidnapping plan.”
“What about the Carol Walter murder? And the others? We got a handle on the guy who did that, the one who attacked Maddie in her hotel room?” Sam’s tone was urgent. Maddie remembered that another victim had already been designated, and shivered.
Gardner shook her head. “Nobody’s jumped out at us in regards to that yet,” she said regretfully. “But then, we haven’t been talking to them long.”
“Okay.” Sam’s tone was absent, as if he was thinking about something. “We need to keep after it. So what happened when you zeroed in on our friendly neighborhood garbage company?”
“They folded.” Wynne grinned reminiscently. “Once they knew we were on to them, nobody at Evergreen wanted anything to do with the murder of a federal agent. They couldn’t tell us where they’d taken you fast enough. Then, of course, we got out to that house where you’d been held—that was about an hour ago—and nobody was there. But we found Maddie’s—uh, er ...”
“Maddie works,” Sam said as Wynne hesitated over the name again. “I’ll tell you the whole story later. But she’s not a criminal.”
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