by Jenna Night
They crouched down together and she watched him dial 9-1-1. He turned the volume low on his phone, and when the dispatcher answered he explained what had happened, described their current location and told her where they were headed. While he was doing that, Daisy listened intently for sounds that anyone had tracked them this far.
She heard something, like dirt and rocks moving downslope toward them. She reached over to touch Martin and get his attention. He immediately stopped talking and tapped a button to silence his phone.
Leaden fear settled in the pit of Daisy’s stomach as she tried to determine if the sound came from someone who was tracking them or if it was just the movement of ground she and Martin had disturbed themselves while they were running. The sounds grew louder and it sounded like the unsettled earth sliding toward them was moving faster.
Panic could lead to bad decisions and create significant danger in a life-and-death situation, so before they started blindly running again, Daisy wanted to get a better assessment of their situation. For all she knew, the small rockslide could be part of a trap meant to send her and Martin running directly toward someone armed and waiting to finish them off.
She gestured at Martin, indicating that she wanted to peek around their tree barricade and take a look in the direction they’d just come from and see if anyone was there.
Martin nodded and pulled his pistol from his holster and held it near his face, ready to sight any potential target. “I’ll cover you,” he said, moving so that he was behind her and slightly to her right.
“Stay behind me and look over my shoulder,” she said.
From that position, if anyone took a shot at her, Martin would see it and be ready to shoot back.
“Got it,” he said.
“All right,” she said, “now.”
She leaned around the tree trunk and felt her heart fall to her feet when she realized Martin had ignored her directions and stepped out into the open, effectively drawing fire to himself while she stayed almost completely protected behind the tree.
The sound of gunshots rent the air. A single long gun by the sound of it. A rifle, its bullets hitting with frightening accuracy as they struck the side of the tree, eye level with Daisy, before she’d even been able to discern any human figure in the shadowy forest. She dived back behind the tree and heard more bullets hitting the trunk and the ground.
Martin returned fire, though he had only a handgun and the rifle sounded like it was some distance away, so it wasn’t very likely that he’d hit his target. But his shooting stopped the rifle fire, for the moment.
When he dived to the ground behind Daisy, she turned and saw a swath of blood blooming red across the left side of his face.
“You’re hurt!” She crawled toward him but he wiped his forearm across his cheek before she could reach him. When she got closer, she could see three jagged cuts on his face. They were small, but they looked deep.
“It’s nothing. A bullet hit something that broke apart and flew at me. A rock or tree bark, maybe. Could have been a pine cone.” He wiped his face again with his sleeve and gave her a half smile. “I’m still handsome, right?”
She didn’t want to laugh. She wanted to be mad. But this was Martin; this was simply how he was. And he had a strong hold on her heart.
“I don’t know how the shooter missed taking your head completely off with you just walking out into the open like that.” Daisy was fighting back tears of fear and frustration because she knew that Martin had intentionally put himself in danger to protect her. “Do you not know how to follow directions?”
He looked at her, his eyes appearing a little darker than usual. “Sometimes it’s a challenge.”
She sighed deeply and shook her head. “We need to start moving again.”
“If whoever is shooting at us has any brains at all, it’s got to be obvious to them that we’re heading toward the river,” Martin said. “We’ve got to change plans. Maybe head east and then circle back closer to the parking lot. The cops should be there any minute. We’ve just got to stay alive until they show up.”
Daisy heard a voice in the direction the rifle shots had come from. And it sounded familiar. Daltrey or Bunker, she wasn’t sure which one. Was he talking to a second person who was there in the forest, or was he talking on the phone? She couldn’t tell. Was he coordinating his position with someone else? Getting ready to surround her and Martin?
The voice sounded close and it was getting closer. The person was walking toward them.
Martin stood, reached for Daisy’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “We’ve got to go, now.”
As soon as they started to move, shots rang out. Fear sent Daisy’s heart leaping up into her throat. She didn’t dare look back. That could slow her down. She nearly lost her balance a couple of times as she ran over rocks and pine cones and tree roots, but she kept moving. Martin was faster and surer-footed than she was in the forest, she knew that, but he stayed by her side instead of running ahead.
To her left she heard the voice call out again—she still couldn’t tell whether it was Daltrey or Bunker—and she turned to see which one it was. Not looking where she was going, she ran too close to the edge of a ravine. Her body fell through the air for the span of a couple of heartbeats, landing with a hard thump that knocked the air out of her and then beginning its spiral downward. The soft, loamy soil slid with her as she rolled and tumbled through tall yellowed wild grass and prickly bushes and shrubs, finally coming to a stop against the base of a tree.
Her head was still spinning when she pushed herself to a seated position. She knew she was in danger, but at first all she could do was just sit there.
And then she heard a laugh. Not a teasing, lighthearted, Martin-type laugh. But a darker, ill-willed one, filled with malice.
Her eyes finally focused on the figure of a man standing in the shadows under the trees. It took Daisy a moment to realize who was in front of her. It was Ivan Bunker, but he looked different. His mustache was gone and his reddish hair had been dyed blond.
He had something in his hand. Given the shape of it, she assumed it was a rifle. He must have been the person shooting at her and Martin a couple of minutes ago.
“I can’t believe you ended up coming right to me,” he said, shaking his head. “So much for the hotshot bounty hunter. You really are dumb.”
Daisy tried to get to her feet, but Bunker moved quickly. Before she could stand, he backhanded her across the face, sending her chin snapping toward her shoulder and throwing her off balance. Before she could right herself, he’d snatched away her gun.
She drew in a ragged breath, but she couldn’t quite lift her head. Couldn’t get her thoughts together other than to whisper a short prayer. “Dear Lord, help me.”
Bunker laughed again. This time it was an icy-cold chuckle. “Oh, if I only had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that right before I pulled the trigger, I’d be a rich man.”
How many times had this creep terrorized someone? How many times had his been the last face someone saw before their life was over? Bunker and Daltrey had been charged with two counts of murder in Miami. They’d killed Jimmy Nestor and presumably Tony Valens, too. The hit man in front of her wouldn’t hesitate to add a bounty hunter to the list.
She heard her own harsh breathing, made uneven by her physical pain and her fear. Then she heard another sound. Something that didn’t sound natural in the forest.
Car engines. The strangely robotic sound of voices being carried over radio transmissions. The police. Martin’s plan must have worked. During their final sprint before she’d fallen, they’d made their way back closer to the parking lot.
“If you shoot me, those cops will hear it and they’ll find you,” Daisy said without looking up. Despite her usual bravado, the truth was, if she was going to get shot, she didn’t really want to see it coming.
“No, they won’t,” Bunker said. “I’ll barely make a sound. They won’t know what happened until they find you dead.”
Her head felt heavy, but she forced herself to lift it so she could look at him. Slowly, she focused on the long object he held in his hand. He wasn’t carrying a rifle, after all. Instead, he held a hunting bow.
“Daltrey’s got the rifle,” Bunker said. “Me, I came to Montana because I wanted to do some sport hunting.” He glanced at his bow as he lifted it to his shoulder. “These things are great. And you don’t attract attention the same way you do when you buy a gun.”
Daisy somehow managed to shove herself to her feet and started shakily backing away.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Waste your energy running if you want to. That will make it more fun for me. And even if you yell, even if the cops do hear you—which I doubt will happen—it won’t matter. I’ve got steel-tipped arrows. Lots of them. You’ll bleed out before help arrives.”
Daisy wrenched her body around and started to run, her training kicking in as she remembered to move in a zigzag pattern. But in the end, that didn’t help. She heard a twanging sound, and then felt a searing pain in her upper right arm that sent her spinning. She stumbled and fell, her forehead smacking hard on the ground.
She opened her eyes. Saw Bunker over her and notching another arrow. And then she heard the crack of gunfire.
Daltrey, with his rifle, had arrived to join forces with his partner.
NINE
When Martin finally spotted Daisy it took every bit of self-discipline he had to not immediately run straight toward her. It had already taken much of his self-control not to call out her name as he searched for her after she’d stumbled into the ravine, but he hadn’t wanted to make it easy for the person tracking them with the rifle to find her if she answered his call.
Now Martin was standing partially hidden by a tree trunk, horrified to see Daisy crouched on the ground with a hunting arrow sticking out of her arm.
He stared at the stranger who had an arrow notched in a bow. He was not yet pointing it anywhere other than at the ground. The moment the blond man raised the bow and pointed the arrow at Daisy, Martin would fire a couple of rounds and drop him. But Martin was hesitating for the moment, not wanting to alert the rifle shooter to his location. With Daisy lying there out of commission, so vulnerable, he didn’t want to have to deal with two assailants at once. At least two. Maybe there were more.
Daisy’s hunch must have been right. Daltrey and Bunker must have been hiding somewhere around here. And somehow they’d been alerted to Daisy’s presence.
The man with the bow stepped forward into the sunlight, closer to Daisy. Now Martin could see that it was Ivan Bunker, that he’d changed his appearance. Daltrey had probably done so, too. And Daltrey was likely the shooter with the rifle. Maybe he was nearby, watching and waiting for Martin to reveal himself as he tried to rescue Daisy so he could finish off the two of them at once.
As he’d intended to do, Martin had led himself and Daisy back closer to the parking lot. It was still some distance away, but in the quiet of the forest sound carried, and he could hear the movement of cars, voices on radios. Moments ago he’d heard the sounds of arriving sirens.
Martin’s hand itched to reach for his phone, to call the cops and get them over here to help. But he was afraid to look away from the scene in front of him for even a second. And from the distance where he now stood, he needed both hands on his pistol for sure aim so the bullets would hit their target.
He held his breath and listened for any sound of the rifleman possibly hiding nearby. He didn’t hear anything.
But then Bunker—who was either talking to himself or talking to Daisy, it was hard to tell—looked up, shook his head and laughed. Then he pulled back on the bow and aimed the arrow at Daisy, all while stepping closer toward her. Plenty of things could end a life besides a gun. If an arrow hit a vital organ while they were out here in the wilderness, Daisy could be dead before they were anywhere near a hospital.
Martin had no choice. He stood clear of the tree trunk, stepped forward and took the shots. But his movement away from the tree caught Bunker’s attention. Bunker saw or heard something. Whatever it was, it was enough warning for the hit man to drop to the ground and let the bullets strike the dirt beside him.
Martin had moved into a clearing to shoot, and now he was committed to taking more aggressive action. He had no choice other than to keep moving through the open space and bring down Bunker. The cops would have heard gunfire by now, but it would take them a few minutes to get oriented and figure out where the shots were coming from. And Martin could not afford to waste that time, not when Daisy was still in danger.
Crouched down and moving quickly, he’d covered about a third of the distance between himself and Bunker when the assassin threw aside the bow and pulled out a handgun, now returning fire at Martin.
Daisy was on the ground between the two men. She moved around on her hands and knees, favoring the injured arm and trying to get to her feet but not quite able to do it. She was looking in every direction, clearly bewildered and apparently unarmed.
Martin kept moving forward, firing again at Bunker, hitting him in the shoulder. The killer spun halfway around, tripping over something and nearly falling, before taking several stumbling steps into a cluster of nearby trees.
Martin heard a rifle shot behind him and saw a puff of dirt by his boot where the bullet struck the ground. He dropped to his knees and crawled through the yellowing, late-season wild grasses toward Daisy, terrified at the thought that he might get himself killed and leave her alone and unprotected.
The rifleman behind him fired at him again. The bullet nicked the heel of his boot before smacking into the dirt. Bunker, who was in front of him, began shooting at him from his hiding spot under the trees. Martin kept moving toward Daisy.
“Martin?” Daisy called out uncertainly as he moved almost within reach. There were marks on her face that would turn to bruises soon. Grass and leaves and pine straw in her hair. That tumble down the ravine had taken a lot out of her.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he said, finally crawling up to her and then positioning his body as best he could to protect her from any flying bullets.
She reached for his free hand and gripped it tightly. “Bunker took my gun,” she said.
“It’s okay.” Martin forced a calm smile on his face when what he wanted to do was roar in frustration at all the violence and evil and injustice in the world. And at the same time he wanted to give in to heartbroken tears at seeing Daisy once again injured and in pain. This was too much. All that had happened to her in such a short amount of time was too much.
He wanted to keep holding her hand, but Martin made himself release his grip and reached for his phone to call 9-1-1. “We’re being fired at about a mile northeast of the parking lot at Pearce Park,” he said as soon as the operator answered, certain she would be aware of the situation. “There are two shooters.”
“We are relaying your location to law enforcement on scene,” the operator answered back. “Stay on the line.”
Martin heard the sound of Ivan Bunker shooting again at him. He didn’t dare return fire for fear of hitting one of the cops coming to help.
It seemed like it took forever, but it was probably really only a couple of minutes later when Bunker stopped shooting. And then in the quiet he heard a voice calling out his and Daisy’s names.
He dared to raise his head above the grass and saw five uniformed officers fanned out and partially hidden amid the trees. They were coming from the direction of the parking lot.
Martin stood up. Daisy was determined to get to her feet, too, so he helped her up, grimacing at the sight of the arrow still lodged in her arm. “We need a medic,” he called out to the police. The officer spoke into a radio collar mic.
Daisy leaned into Martin, resting her
head against his chest. He ran his hand over her dark hair, stroking it gently, and then kissed the top of her head.
When he looked up, the cops were continuing their search of the area and a pair of medics headed toward Martin and Daisy.
Thank You, Lord, he prayed silently. Daisy was safe. For now.
* * *
At the conclusion of the church service, Martin stole a quick glance at Daisy, seated beside him. Yesterday’s attack in Pearce Park had left its mark, literally. Although she’d tried to cover the bruising that had shown up on her face this morning with makeup, he could still see the purplish marks on her forehead and chin.
“Lord, please protect her,” he whispered, his voice so quiet that he could barely hear it above the shuffling sounds of congregants standing and the increasing volume of voices as people began to greet and talk to one another.
Daisy glanced at him, offering a beleaguered smile as she reached down to pick up her purse from the floor. When she’d said she wanted to come to church this morning, he hadn’t been sure that was a good idea. The men who were after her were ruthless. They could potentially launch a violent attack on her anywhere. Even in a church. Daisy had called the pastor, asking if he wanted her to stay away. He told her she was absolutely welcome, asked her which service she would attend and assured her that they’d be ready for her.
Martin had spotted what appeared to be a plainclothes cop standing inside the church entrance when he and Daisy had arrived. Another apparent plainclothes cop stood inside the sanctuary. It was sad to know that such a situation was necessary. But the world was a broken, dangerous place. Being a person of faith didn’t mean you ignored that truth.
Martin followed Daisy as she exited their row. She stopped at the end of the aisle and let several concerned friends come over and gingerly give her a hug. The arrow that struck her yesterday had lodged in the fleshy part of her arm without causing major blood loss. She’d gotten a few stitches and had a thick wrapping of gauze over the wound.