Survival Instinct

by Doranna Durgin

  This one would be so easy to play. But…she didn’t want to. “Do I look serious?”

  “You look…” He paused. “Flexible.”

  “Ohh,” she said, a purr of a word, “I am.”

  Dewey, his timing impeccable, stuck his head through the hinged chicken door. Foamy white liquid lined his lips. “Oh my God,” Karin said, all one word, “You didn’t. You’re not coming into the house for a week, Dewey Lake!” A great big glut of goat’s milk and adult dog digestion. She’d need a gas mask.

  But that’s right. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to be here. It didn’t matter that she intended to back this man into a tight corner at the first opportunity, the first moment they were safe enough so she could lose herself in what waited between them. Because at the first opportunity, she also intended to be out of here. Gone. Running. Being someone else for a while. Not likely ever to see Dave Hunter again.

  And wasn’t that just perfect.

  Chapter 6

  Dave’s feet encroached upon the end of the twin bed, a constant reminder of his unfamiliar surroundings. His mind raced toward morning, eager to get Ellen to the safe house. She’d made all the arrangements; she’d seemed resigned as she set her suitcase at the back door, but thoroughly convinced.

  For Barret’s errand geek would be back. Whether Ellen recovered her memories or not, for now she needed to hide. He didn’t blame her for her anger. She was losing a year’s worth of crops, and losing her tidy little life as well.

  Even if she no longer struck him as someone who was well-suited to a tidy little life.

  He tried to imagine the Ellen he knew kissing him as she’d done him today—holding nothing back, not embarrassed or ashamed or reluctant—and couldn’t. Of course, thinking about the kiss at all was a big mistake. A huge mistake. Growing bigger by the moment. And the way she’d looked at him as they’d parted ways for the evening—no, don’t think about that, either. Not how she’d dropped her head and watched him with those smoky blue-gray eyes under those strong and expressive brows, licking the taste of their whiskey nightcap from the corner of her mouth.

  I am an idiot.

  Too true.

  Think of the whiskey. It still warmed his throat, an intense, peaty twelve-year-old single malt. He hadn’t expected that of her, either—that they could small-talk the evening away with whiskey-tasting memories, or that they’d both been to that unexpected little shop in northern California, walking away with single malts neither could afford. Her voice matched the whiskey, he’d realized. It had that same slow burn.

  She’d never inspired those thoughts before.

  Of course, the last time he’d talked to Ellen Sommers, she’d been dating Barret Longsford. He just didn’t remember thinking he wished it were otherwise.

  Okay, so thinking about the whiskey didn’t do any good. Thinking about the close calls they’d had today didn’t do him any good, either. His mind’s eye had a perfect view of Ellen facing those two men, no hint of her concern in her voice and then no hesitation when push literally came to shove.

  He supposed he should be lucky she’d kissed him instead of wielding some other gardening implement at his head. Because she was right. He had brought this on her.

  Then he’d just have to fix it. And while he was at it, they’d find Rashawn Little and put good old Barret Longsford behind bars. Perhaps he’d work on world peace next.

  A pipe dinged somewhere below. She’d warned him that the house would settle, creaking and banging and knocking in its own little musical composition. “Don’t pay any attention unless you hear Dewey bark,” she told him, lingering at the bottom of the stairs, whiskey glasses in hand and her hair still damp from her shower. The regret in her eyes as they separated had been palpable.

  Certainly it had become instantly palpable to Dave, who retreated up a few steps. “Be ready,” he’d told her, already turning away. “We’ll get an early start.”

  “Oh, I’m ready.” She’d said it in that low voice she sometimes used, the one he hadn’t heard over a year earlier. She’d said it in a way that made her double meaning clear. And then she’d walked away, glasses clinking in her fingers.

  I am an idiot.

  But sleep was coming anyway. And even though he wanted to linger a bit on his plans for the morning, sleep claimed him, two modest fingers of whiskey hitting home at the end of a long day.

  Hitting home…too hard…

  Baseball bat. Check. Forged ID. Check. Clothes to match. Check. Amy Lynn, ready to feed tomorrow and for as many tomorrows as it would take, well compensated. Check. And there went a chunk of her hard-earned savings, too.

  Karin leaned her forehead against the steering wheel of the truck, careful not to bump the horn. The darkness of the old cinder-block garage—set at the end of the driveway a hundred yards from the house—enfolded her. Made her doubt her decision.

  She’d chosen this midsize cab-and-a-half Dakota to replace Ellen’s car—one of the few things that were now hers, and not Ellen’s. Most of her belongings had been ruined in the crash. Her new identity had come at a high price.

  And that was what leaving was all about, wasn’t it? Protecting what Ellen had given her. It wasn’t as if she could help Dave’s quest in any event. She’d been through Ellen’s things when she first arrived, and hadn’t seen a thing about Barret Longsford.

  She ignored the whispered mental suggestion that she might have missed something in her hurry to assimilate Ellen’s life. Or that with new context, she might see the importance of notes or photos or bills that had once been meaningless. It wasn’t a convenient suggestion. Not at all.

  Get an early start, Dave had said, but the poor man had had no idea. She’d gone to her bedroom to wait for him to fall asleep upstairs. Between the whiskey and the drugs she’d added, he hadn’t stood a chance. Within the hour, she’d crept through the dark house, grabbing her things by the door. She’d had some things waiting in the garage—always waiting, her Just In Case kits—and though the truck was full of junk, she wouldn’t take the time to dump it. Rusty leg-hold trap, an old mattock, a roll of electric fence wire…no big deal.

  At the garage, she pressed her lips together on another wave of regret. Sorry, Dave. What stood between them was potent…but it was all about possibilities. Karin knew to take the sure thing. And there was nothing she could do for the missing boy but offer rusty prayers. Saint Arthelais, indeed. If ever there was a kidnap victim in need…

  She started the engine and hit the automatic door opener. But she didn’t turn on the headlights when she backed out onto the road. She put the truck into Drive and hesitated just long enough to give the house one last look. I can’t help you, Dave Hunter.

  And then she drove away.

  Karin headed west, through Jefferson National Forest and toward Bluefield, West Virginia. She’d been to Pipestem State Park a couple of times…she thought she could find some work around there. Not enough to live on, but better than just spending down what she had with her.

  The terrain gradually changed around her, starting as long, folded ridges of earth with plenty of valley—graceful formations, in harmony with each other. But slowly the mountains took on a different flavor—craggy, the formations harsher and struggling for apparent dominance, one over the other. The valleys started to narrow into hollows, and humans took themselves to live upon the sides and tops of the ridges instead of down in the bottom. And every now and then…the roadside view turned spectacular, offering long, uninterrupted vistas of the mountains fighting with one another to be king of the hill. Sometimes there was even enough shoulder available to form an official scenic viewpoint.

  Karin drove for three hours, crossed I-77 on Route 61, and found herself one of those spots. She’d made some distance. Unless Dave—or the persistent geek—had tied themselves to her bumper, they weren’t going to find her. By the time she settled in somewhere with her hair dyed, her eyebrows plucked into bare existence, and a horrible home perm…


  “The sacrifices we make,” she grumbled, cutting the engine after her bumper tapped the guardrail.

  Come daylight, she’d want to get moving again. But finding a place to settle wouldn’t happen in the wee hours of the morning, and she needed sleep as much as the next refugee.

  Temporary refugee.

  Out of habit, she reached for her courier bag, pulling out the journal. Until now the leather-bound book had had an easy existence, sitting in one spot on the same desk in the same room. Now it was about to take some dings. “You’ll have character,” she told it, rummaging for the pen.

  Dear Ellen,

  Boy, has your life gotten adventurous in the last twenty-four hours. How could you have failed to mention Dave Hunter? I can understand why you might have left Barret out of the picture. But Dave…okay, I would have talked about him if I were you. I wish you were here so we could talk about him now.

  Too bad I can’t give him what he needs, and there’s no way I’m staying in a safe house with him. He’s no dummy. He’s an investigator, and he’s already noticed I’m not quite you. Put us in the same house for more than a few days and he’s going to start investigating who I am—and he’ll figure it out, too. I have the feeling he’s damned good. And then he’s going to put my name in the system just to see what it spits out, and why I’m pretending to be you.

  On the other hand…it might be nice to know what my lovely little warrant is for. Here I am on the run, and I don’t even know why.

  Well, except that here in your life—the one that’s gotten adventurous—there’s a very big man who’s looking for me. And Dave is going to look, too—and even if his reasons are totally admirable and all that stuff, I don’t need the attention.

  So I’ll make sure neither of them finds me. But stayed tuned. The next couple of days aren’t going to be about chores.

  Karin rolled the truck window down a crack for the fresh air, but only a crack. She’d driven up to a higher elevation, where the nights still regularly nudged freezing. She pulled on a thick knit cap, wrapped a scarf round her neck and pulled an old wool army blanket over her legs. Oversize mittens on top of her insulated work gloves, a good wiggle to scratch her back against the truck seat, and she was ready for napping.

  But oh. She added that one final touch—she reached for the rifle. If anyone came tapping around her windows, they’d be in for a surprise.

  She warmed herself with decadent thoughts about that moment in the henhouse with Dave, and fell asleep.

  Something shattered, raining shards down upon her. Karin barely had her eyes open when the truck door pulled out away from her, and fingers clamped down on her arm through her old army surplus coat. She was yanked up and out; something in her hand tangled with the steering wheel. Only after it was torn from her grip did she realize she’d lost the rife; only then did she remember why she’d been sleeping in the car at all. Sleeping deeply, after a long, hard day and gone straight through to the wee hours of the morning.

  How—?

  How didn’t matter, not when she was flying through the air to land on the hard grit of the one-vehicle parking area. Another car jammed in beside her truck, engine still running, lights still on. Karin threw her hand up against the light, blinded, but it wasn’t a good move—it only gave her still-unseen assailant a convenient handle. He snatched her up and gave her a little shake. “You’re a real pain in the ass,” he growled.

  Errand goon with gangster mullet. Oh crap.

  “If Barret told you I’d be easy, that was his mistake,” she gasped, her feet barely touching the ground. She’d lost her oversize mittens and her scarf skewed to cover one eye; her world whipped back and forth as he shook her. She had to get to the truck, to the rifle or the baseball bat or even her keys….

  “You’re done running now,” he said.

  She squirmed, still breathless. “Tell him you couldn’t find me. I can make it worth your—”

  He shook her again. Hard. “I’m not being paid enough to listen to you.”

  “Ohhh,” she groaned. “I’m going to…” And she gave a convincing heave. He thrust her away, slamming her against the side of the truck. She floundered, reaching into the bed of the truck, hand groping for…for anything, any tool small or large, any hard object….

  She came up with a handful of hay detritus—dusty, prickly little bits of dried grass stems. What the hell. What you’ve got, you use. She flung the dust into his eyes and dove for the open truck door.

  He snarled—the real thing, a nasty, animalistic sound—and blindly scooped her up on the run, a hand clutching the material between her shoulder blades and another hand grabbing her jeans at the hip and he flung her—

  Right over the guardrail.

  Right over the effing guardrail….

  Flashes of the night Ellen died hit Karin head-on, tangling with reality as she bashed into a small outcrop, smashed up against the windshield, scraped against a verticle of dirt and vine and stone, tumbled in the rolling car, cold air on her face, cold rain on her face—

  Impact.

  At first she couldn’t breathe. Diaphragm frozen, lungs empty of air and burning, straining—I’ll never breathe again and I’ll die right here and now—and then the air rushed back into her lungs with a great whoop. The outrage began to sink in. How the hell had he found her? How fair was this, to find herself thrown over another embankment?

  From above—far above—came a nasty string of words.

  “How do you think I feel?” she muttered. But she got the idea. He hadn’t meant to throw her over the edge of anything. He probably still needed to return her to Barret. “Cree-ap.”

  A moment of silence passed, during which the errand geek was presumably contemplating his options. Karin took the moment to assess her situation, carefully not moving, not until she had a feel for the width of this uneven little outcrop. She stared up into the night sky, glad enough to see the waning moon. Slowly, she picked out vague details of her surroundings, allowing her peripheral vision—the best night vision—to feed her the details. The stunted rhododendron above her, the thick fall of foliage beside it that could only be invasive kudzu, the occasional glimpse of treetop in the otherwise open space to her left.

  But mostly, just that open space.

  Using only her fingers, she felt out toward the left and found gritty, sloping rock. She allowed her hand to creep over, and then her whole lower arm. She had about a foot before the ground rounded off and fell away.

  A pure luxury of space. Ha.

  Still, she thought she’d just stay as she was for a moment longer. A moment to get her breath and to listen in on the man who’d put her here.

  “Mr. Longsford—”

  The man’s voice rang out clearly, all deference and apology. Karin could picture him on his cell phone, leaning over the guardrail. There came a few ingratiating phrases of apology, and then he spelled out the situation.

  Actually, he fibbed. “She ran right at the guard rail,” he said. “She musta lost her bearings.”

  Well, she couldn’t blame him at that. Why take the heat? Parts of her, formerly numb from shock, started to hurt. All of her, actually, except the middle of her back, which just itched. She did a quiet inventory of fingers and toes, only then considering the ramifications of serious injury.

  Everything wiggled. She sighed with relief and found a few new aches in her ribs. Cold from the ground seeped through her jeans.

  “I can’t see where she is. But it’s pretty steep.” A pause, and then his voice grew louder. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

  She shouted some anatomically improbable suggestions.

  “Yeah, she’s down there.” His voice faded slightly as he stepped away from the guardrail. “She’s pretty far down. Nah, there’s no other traffic—hasn’t been anyone by since I got here. No problem, it’s a pull-off…people park here all the time.” As if he knew. The creep. Just trying to cover his own ass, now. “She might last a day, I guess. It’s awfully cold here.”
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  You can say that again. Karin eased her knees up and left her feet flat on the rock, getting her legs off the cold ground.

  The man’s next few comments were just a murmur, and then he stuck his head back over the guardrail to say clearly, “You should have just come with us in the first place, you stupid bitch. Maybe in a day or two they’ll find your body.”

  “You’re leaving me here?” she said, more startled than she expected. She sat up, one hand gripping the roots closest to her—and in the process discovered shooting pains in her wrist. She vaguely remembered landing on the heel of that hand sometime during her fall.

  “Like I said, you should have come with us in the first place.” He didn’t sound the least bit sorry. Great. He’d not only thrown her down a gorge, he was being mean about it.

  Left on the ledge? Alone? With no one the wiser? Karin shuddered. Time to get to work. “Don’t go!” she said, and fought back on edge of panic. “You need me.”

  He snorted.

  “You think I’m kidding? You’ve been exposed to a deadly disease.” Her mind slid right into scam mode, forgetting for the moment her precarious physical situation.

  “I don’t think so.” But he was a little closer now; she’d hooked him.

  Karin smiled into the darkness. “It’s new. The CDC has been keeping a lid on it. Mad Sheep disease. Why do you think my one goat has a bell collar on? She’s over it, but she’s still contagious—that part of the property is in quarantine. I’ve been vaccinated, of course.”

  “I’m leaving.” The disinterest in his voice wasn’t feigned. She was losing him.

  “What about the rash?” she said, talking fast and trying not to sound desperate. “It’s a little early for it to be a true rash, but I bet it itches.” Maybe not. He’d have to be terribly sensitive to the poison ivy oils to show symptoms this soon. Be sensitive, she thought at him. Be really, really sensitive.