by LENA DIAZ,
If he’d even survived the crash.
Outsiders would need guides through the swamp. Guides meant hiring locals, most likely from Mystic Glades, which meant soon the place would be crawling with people who would recognize her.
She ran to the canoe. Grasping the sides, she put one foot on the bottom, ready to shove off with the other.
What if he survived the crash? What if he’s hurt? What if he’s hurt so badly that he needs immediate care?
She couldn’t help him. That wasn’t something she did anymore. She’d learned that lesson the most painful way possible. A familiar stab of grief and guilt threatened to overwhelm her. But she ruthlessly locked those useless emotions away.
Okay, assume he’s not hurt. He can find his own way to Mystic Glades. But he could just as easily wander into the swamp and get lost. He could stumble into a nest of alligators or step on a snake. The Glades might be beautiful but they were dangerous, teeming with wildlife, emphasis on wild. Only those who understood its dangers—and respected them—could avoid them and thrive out here.
He’s not your responsibility.
But he’s still a human being.
Her shoulders slumped. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there. She had to at least check on him.
She stepped out of the canoe and tugged it up onto a muddy rise beneath some trees. Too bad he’d gone down in one of the areas unreachable by boat. She had a good, long hike ahead of her. She grabbed her walking stick, double-checked that her hunting knife was sheathed at her waist and then headed out. She hoped she wasn’t making a horrible mistake. But, then again, no mistake could be worse than the one she’d already made.
Chapter Two
Dex drew a shaky breath. He was still breathing— definitely a plus. His heart was still beating, adrenaline making it pound so hard it seemed to be slamming against his rib cage. And the plane wasn’t on fire—yet. Two more pluses. But the big minus was that he was hanging upside down, strapped to what was left of his seat, with jet fuel dripping down the ruined fuselage onto his shirt. And he was pretty sure he’d cut his right leg, since sharp pain shot up his calf every time he tried to maneuver his foot out of the tangled mass of metal above him.
His main concern was the jet fuel. The noxious smell made it difficult to breathe. But more worrisome was that if any of the fuel made contact with the hot engine, he was going to go up like a human torch. He had to get out of the plane and out of his fuel-soaked shirt.
Without taking off his seat belt, he couldn’t reach his trapped leg to free it. But he didn’t want to unclip the belt and fall to the ground. No telling what damage that might do to his leg or what he might land on. He tilted his head up—or down, depending on how he looked at it—to see what was beneath him.
The plane had gone sideways and then turned over as it went down. A massive tree had peeled the top back like a can of tuna before dumping him and the Cessna onto the ground below. He supposed he should be grateful to that tree, since it had slowed his descent and saved him from diving nose first into the mud. The thick, now-broken branches had cushioned the fall and were now suspending the cockpit a few feet above the mud. All in all it was a miracle that he’d survived.
The muddy grass a few feet beneath his head appeared to be clear of debris. If he could work his leg free he could drop down without doing too much more damage. He used his free leg to kick at the metal trapping his right foot. Once, twice, three times. Another sharp pain in his calf was the price of freedom as the metal snapped and broke away. He pulled his knees up to his chest, put his left hand over his head to protect himself, then released his seat belt. He dropped and rolled, coming to rest on his backside.
He hurriedly shed his shirt and tossed it toward the plane as he shoved himself to his feet. After a quick look around to assess his surroundings, which basically consisted of cypress trees and saw grass, he clopped through the semi-firm ground to the one body of water he could see—a large puddle. Whenever it rained he imagined this whole area would probably be underwater. Right now it was a mixture of soft dirt and soggy bog. He dropped to his knees and sniffed the water to make sure it wasn’t jet fuel. The putrid smell wasn’t pleasant but at least it was biological, not man-made.
Hating the necessity of it, he cupped the water and used it to scrub his arms and chest and as much of his back as he could reach, ridding himself of the dangerous jet fuel that had coated his torso. Then he sat and yanked his pant leg up to see what, if anything, he could do about his injuries. Blood smeared his skin, but after washing it away he wasn’t all that worried. The bleeding had mostly stopped and the cuts didn’t look too deep. Except for one small puncture wound, mostly his leg had just been scraped, no worse than skinning a knee.
He dropped his pant leg into place. Now that he was out of danger of being roasted alive, time for his second priority. Getting the heck out of Dodge. He pulled his cell phone out of the clip on his waistband and sent up a silent prayer that the phone wasn’t broken as he typed his pass code to unlock it. But a few minutes later, after turning in every direction, holding the phone up above his head, then down toward the ground, the screen still showed the same thing.
Zero bars. No service. Useless.
He shoved it in the holder. Might as well face what he’d so far been avoiding. He drew his gaze up to his plane and groaned. Even though he’d known it was beyond being salvaged from what he’d glimpsed while hanging from the pilot’s seat, seeing the whole thing now was devastating.
The fixed landing gear pointed up at the sky. One wing was completely sheared off. He didn’t see it anywhere. The other, still attached, was snared in a pile of broken branches. The tail had snapped off and had landed in the mud behind the fuselage. He shook his head in disgust. Not because of the money this would cost him. He could easily absorb the loss. But to see a piece of beautiful machinery destroyed like that was akin to a Monet being wadded up and tossed in the trash. It was a damn shame, a waste.
He shaded his eyes and looked up at the sky, a beautiful, bright blue unmarred by clouds, with no sign of the mysterious mist that had engulfed the plane right before the engine died. Even if his Mayday call hadn’t gone through, that sky would still soon be dotted with other planes, or helicopters, searching the marsh for him. Because even though he was often lazy about filing flight plans, his assistant religiously checked behind him and would have insured the plan was submitted.
Yes, instead of heading straight to the Naples airport and then driving from there to Mystic Glades, he’d made a slight detour to get an aerial view of Mystic Glades first. But that had only taken him a few miles out of his planned flight path. As long as the transponder in his plane was working, a rescue crew would be able to zero in on his location.
Transponder. Was it working? It was part of the instrument panel that had gone on the fritz. But the system had built-in redundancies to insure it could survive most crashes and send out a signal if it received a ping from a transmitter, like the kind a rescue plane would send. He studied the wreckage, looking for any telltale signs of smoke. There were none. After waiting a few more minutes, he decided to chance a closer look. It should be safe, as long as he kept an eye out for any warning signs of an impending fire—and stayed away from the jet fuel.
He worked his way to the cockpit, approaching from the far side this time since it seemed fuel-free there. The instrument panel was a disaster. No way to tell if the transponder was working or not. If it wasn’t, that was more of an inconvenience than a concern. It wasn’t like he was in an uninhabited area. Mystic Glades couldn’t be more than two, three miles away.
Of course, the trick was making sure he headed in the right direction. But he could use the sun to figure out which way to go. Navigating by sun or stars was a rusty skill, but one that had been ingrained in him during his pilot training in the navy. Still, there was no point in riski
ng getting lost if a rescue effort was under way. Which, based on the anticipated arrival time in his flight plan, should be soon.
Knowing the National Transportation Safety Board would immediately take possession of the plane and site for their investigation into the cause of the crash, he figured he might as well take advantage of his time alone to do some of his own investigating.
Getting to the engine compartment wasn’t as difficult as he’d anticipated, since the access panels had been peeled back like the top of the plane. Since the plane was upside down, he ducked down and looked for anything obvious. Most of the engine was intact. Only a few parts had been ripped away or crushed on impact. Everything looked normal.
Except for the electrical tape.
What the...? There were two long pieces of tape, or rather, one long piece that had been burned in two. He pulled out his cell phone and took some pictures, then zoomed the screen. Wait, no, that couldn’t be. He shoved the phone in its holder.
Bracing himself on a twisted piece of metal, he followed the piece of tape. One end was attached to the edge of the engine compartment. The other was wrapped around a bundle of wires—a crucial bundle that provided power to instrument panels, including the transponder and the engine. Someone had pulled those wires free of their normal harness and used the tape to hold them in place. Which pretty much guaranteed that during flight, with the heat and vibration from the engine, the tape would fail. The wires would have dropped down onto the hot manifold. If the heat seared through their protective coating, that would have caused a catastrophic failure. Judging by the burn spots on the wires, that’s exactly what had happened.
Since electrical tape wasn’t standard equipment in any engine compartment, especially a brand-new plane, he could only reach one logical conclusion.
Someone had tried to kill him.
* * *
AMBER CROUCHED BEHIND a large fern that protected her from the sharp ends of a massive saw palmetto, totally mesmerized by the way the sun slanted off the golden skin of the impressive male specimen thirty feet away. She didn’t know why he’d taken off his shirt, but she certainly wasn’t complaining. The way his muscles rippled beneath his skin as he walked was fascinating, and an amusing contrast to his dark blue dress pants and expensive-looking but thoroughly ruined dress shoes. Since his footprints were the only ones she’d found after she’d reached the plane crash site, he must be the pilot. And the lack of bodies in and around the plane reassured her that no one else had been onboard. No one had died.
But based on how he was limping, she wasn’t sure that would hold true for long.
His right leg seemed to be the one that he was favoring. From the rips in his pants, she assumed he’d been hurt during the crash and wasn’t just suffering from some kind of disability. Unfortunately, the smears of mud on his back and chest meant that he may have washed himself in one of the brackish pools of water near the plane. If he’d done the same to his injuries, he might have introduced some nasty bacteria into his system. People who got lost in the Glades tended to succumb to exposure or infection just as often as other causes. If he didn’t get medical attention soon, he might become one of those statistics.
So far he was heading in the right direction, toward Mystic Glades. As long as he continued that way, he’d reach town before nightfall. Her former townspeople might not exactly welcome strangers, but they would never turn away someone in need. Whoever was running The Moon these days would have some kind of medicine or potion to treat him. Or maybe Freddie would drive him to the nearest hospital in her ancient Cadillac, assuming the thing was still running. Either way, the pilot would get the help he needed. There was no reason for Amber to let him see her. All she had to do was keep following him, and somehow steer him if he went off course.
* * *
SOMEONE WAS FOLLOWING HIM.
Normally, Dex would have called out to whoever was hiding in the bushes, padding after him in the mud, keeping a good thirty or forty feet back, from what he could figure. But that was before he’d realized someone was trying to kill him. Knowing that had changed his perspective a hundred-eighty degrees.
He couldn’t imagine his nemesis—whoever that might be—calculating the exact location where he might be when the wires in his Cessna burned through. There were too many variables for that. But it hadn’t exactly been a secret at the office that he was flying to Naples, and that he was going to then drive up to Mystic Glades. Maybe whoever wanted him six feet under had planted someone near Mystic Glades to finish him off if their plan failed and he didn’t crash. Or, in this case, if he did crash and the impact didn’t kill him.
A faint crackling noise sounded behind him, like a twig breaking in half. He pretended not to notice and kept going. He needed to wait until he was near a larger clump of trees instead of just the small groupings he was passing now as he slogged through the marshy grasses. Then he’d catch his pursuer.
Just thinking about someone hiding out here like a coward to attack him was pissing him off. That and this awful heat. He wiped sweat from his brow, surprised to find his hand wet enough to shake off droplets. When had it gotten this hot? Yeah, it was probably around noon, but still, the cooling marsh breezes had been comfortable an hour ago when he’d started on this trek. Now it was as if someone had turned the sun up twenty degrees and was trying to cook him.
His shirt. That had to be it. Without his shirt to protect him from the sun, he was baking out here. Maybe he should sit in the shade for a few minutes and cool off. No, not with someone following him. He had to take care of that problem first. Then he’d sit and cool off.
A group of trees about thirty feet ahead looked like the perfect place to catch his follower unaware. The trees suddenly wavered and shifted. What the...? He stopped, wiped more sweat from his brow and shook his head. He blinked a few times until the trees stopped dancing around. The heat. It had to be the heat. He idly leaned down and rubbed the growing ache in his right leg, then wobbled forward.
He reached the trees and ducked behind the largest one and then crouched down to wait. He pulled out his cell phone, ready to snap a picture when his pursuer came into view, figuring that if he lost this upcoming battle at least there’d be a picture of his attacker for police to find later. It would be a small victory to hold on to as he breathed his last breath. For some reason, that seemed funny—in addition to being pathetic—and he almost laughed out loud, just barely keeping it together, reminding himself he couldn’t risk alerting his prey.
His prey? Right. When had he ever been a hunter? This time he couldn’t contain his laughter. He clamped his hand over his mouth but changed his mind when he started to lose his balance. He grabbed a low-hanging branch on the tree beside him and kept his phone in his right hand, poised to snap his all-important picture.
Good grief, it was hotter than Hades. His friend Jake was a fool to want to live here.
Half-dried mud crunched like sand beneath someone’s feet. Dex leaped out from behind the tree, snapping pictures.
No one was there.
He shifted and heard the crunching sound again. He looked down, wiggled his toes in his shoes. Crunch. Wiggle. Crunch. Wait. Was that him making that noise?
A shadow shifted beside him. He whirled around, snapping pictures as he fell to the ground. The shadow became a beautiful woman standing over him, her face mirroring concern. As she reached out a delicate-looking hand, he snapped another picture, then let his hands fall to his sides. All his strength had strangely drained away.
Her blessedly cool hand touched his brow. It felt so good he pushed his head against her palm.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
He blinked until he could focus on her face. His breath caught. “Canoe Girl! I waved at you.” He frowned and waggled his finger. “You didn’t wave back.”
“I...must not have seen you. Sorry.”
/>
“No worries. I’m Dex. But you can just call me Dex.”
“O...kay. Dex. Let’s take a look at that leg of yours.”
He grinned up at her. “Honey, you can look at anything you want.”
She rolled her eyes and moved to his right leg. He lifted his head to watch, but it felt so heavy he dropped it back down.
“Ouch.” He rubbed his head, wondering why it suddenly hurt.
Cool air rushed against his heated skin as she pulled his pant leg up.
“Hey, Canoe Girl. What’s your name?”
“Canoe Girl works.” She drew in a sharp breath. “I’m guessing you didn’t have these red lines going up and down your calf before the crash.”
“Nope.” He dropped his phone and used both hands to lift his heavy head to look at her. “I’m guessing that’s a bad thing?”
She nodded. “Could be. If not treated right away.” She looked past him. “No one in Mystic Glades knows how to treat something like this, unless things have changed.”
“Unless things have changed? You don’t live there, Canoe Girl?”
“Um, no.” She pushed his pant leg down.
“But you’re familiar with it. You used to live there?”
She shot him a look. He should have known what that look meant, but her face went out of focus and he closed his eyes.
“Do you have any medicine in your plane?” she asked.
“Nope. Fresh out. Where do you live, beautiful?”
“That must be one bad fever.” She brushed her hands on her shorts and stood. “We’ve got to get you to Mystic Glades. Someone there will take you to the hospital. Come on.” She held her hand out to him.
He frowned, not at all pleased. “Do I have to get up? It’s kind of comfy down here. It would be even more comfy if you lay down with me.”
“No, thanks. We need to get moving. Come on.” She grasped his hand.
He sighed heavily and tugged his hand out of hers. “I’ll do it by myself. You’re a tiny little thing. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.” He rolled over and forced himself up on his knees. A pair of surprisingly strong arms grabbed him around his waist and helped him stand. He staggered and she pulled his right arm around her shoulders, keeping her other arm around his waist.