Manhunt in the Wild West

by Jessica Andersen

  Lee caught the dead guard and nearly went down. “Watch it!” he snapped, glaring at Fax.

  “Sorry,” Fax said with little remorse, having already figured out that al-Jihad and Muhammad liked the fact that he didn’t let the lemming push him around. Jerking his chin in the direction of the trailhead, he said, “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Lee muttered something under his breath, but slung the body bag over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and headed off into the woods, struggling only slightly under his burden.

  Hyperaware of the scrutiny he was receiving from the two men in the front of the van, Fax reached down for the woman, his mind spinning as he desperately tried to figure out a way to keep her alive while protecting his cover.

  He didn’t know her name, but somehow she’d become the symbol of all the warm, civilized things he’d dreamed of from the confines of his cell, all the beauty and laughter he lived in the darkness to protect.

  Jane might be his boss and sometimes lover, but the pretty medical examiner was a real person, one who belonged in the sunlight, not the shadows.

  Hefting her over his shoulder, he turned and headed into the forest in Lee’s wake. Once he was out of earshot, he said under his breath, “I know you’re awake. Don’t do anything stupid and you might live to see our backs.”

  CHELSEA STIFFENED at the sound of his voice, but was too terrified to process his words. The only reason she wasn’t already screaming was because she was too damn scared to breathe. That, and she was pretty sure there was nobody nearby to hear except the escaped convicts, who would probably enjoy her terror. So she kept the panic inside, save for the tears that leaked from beneath her screwed-shut eyelids.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been kidnapped, couldn’t believe that the blue-eyed guard—or rather, the blue-eyed escaped convict—she’d been ogling on the loading dock was carrying her into the state forest, acting on a terrorist’s orders to kill her and dump her in Bear Claw Canyon.

  Things like that just didn’t happen to small-scale people like her.

  She would’ve thought it was all a dream, a nightmare, except that the sensations were too real: her head pounded from the blow that’d knocked her unconscious, her tears were cool on her cheeks, and the man’s shoulder dug into her belly as he carried her along the path. Opening her eyes, she saw that what she’d figured were signs of recent muscle gain were actually places where his uniform didn’t fit; the material gapped at the small of his back, where he’d tucked the guard’s weapon into his belt.

  WWJBD? She knew she should struggle, she should try to escape, but when? Now or after they reached their destination? What were the chances she could grab that gun and turn the tables?

  “Don’t,” he warned in a low voice.

  Before she could respond, or act, or do anything, really, she heard another man’s voice from up ahead, saying, “I found a cave. Dump her and put a bullet in her. I’ll go get another load.”

  The man’s voice was casual, careless, like he was talking about things rather than people. But to him she and the others were things, she realized. They were Americans. The enemy. Yet the speaker was blond, and his voice carried a trace of a Boston accent. She would’ve passed him on the street and never once thought to wonder about him.

  Vaguely, she remembered a snippet of newscast that’d said one of the three escapees, Lee Mawadi, was a homegrown terrorist who’d hooked up with al-Jihad for the Santa Bombings.

  Back then, sitting safe in her living room, terrorism had been an abstract concept, something she saw on TV and exclaimed over while secretly thinking that such things would never happen to her. She hadn’t even been in Colorado during the Santa Bombings; she’d been finishing a nice, safe rotation in a private practice outside Chicago, reveling in the early stages of a relationship she’d thought was The One, but had turned out to be another Not Quite.

  Now, though, she was all alone, with terror her only companion.

  “Sounds good to me,” the man carrying her said, his voice easy as he agreed to the plan of shooting her and dumping her in the cave.

  But his touch, while firm, was disconcertingly gentle and he’d hinted at the possibility that she might live. Did that mean he had a soft spot for her because of their shared look out by the loading dock? Would he somehow prove to be an ally?

  Get a grip, her inner voice of practicality snapped. He’s a murderer.

  If the other speaker was Lee Mawadi, then the blue-eyed man she’d shared a long look with must be Jonah Fairfax. That meant he hadn’t been part of the Santa Bombings, but it didn’t make him innocent or safe. The ARX Supermax didn’t cater to white-collar criminals, and Fairfax had been jailed for torturing and murdering two of the FBI agents sent to infiltrate the anarchist camp he’d been a member of.

  Yet he’d made it sound like he wanted to save her somehow. It made no sense.

  When footsteps warned that the other man—Lee Mawadi—was passing them on the trail, Chelsea screwed her eyes shut. Moments later, the sunlight beyond her eyelids cut to black and the echoes told her that they’d entered the cave he’d spoken of.

  The blue-eyed man—Fairfax—flipped her off his shoulder without warning, then caught her before she could slam to the ground. She kept her eyes shut as he lowered her so she was half propped up against a rock wall. She could feel him crouch over her, leaning close and blocking any hope of escape.

  “I need you to stop playing dead and listen very carefully,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I think I can get you out of this, but you’re going to have to trust me.”

  She opened her eyes at that, and nearly screamed when she saw that he’d put her down right next to one of the body bags. Worse, it was open, revealing one of the dead guards, shirtless, his eyes open and staring in death.

  She held in the scream, but plastered herself against the rock wall, her quick, panicked breaths rattling in her lungs.

  “Look at me.” The blue-eyed man touched her chin and turned her head toward him. “Don’t scream and don’t move. Lee is going to be back in a minute, so we’ve got to work fast.” He paused as though gauging her. “I need to get something out of my shoe. Can I trust you not to try to run?”

  She nodded quickly, though she didn’t mean it. The second an opportunity presented, she was so out of there.

  He gave her another, longer look. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” As though he’d read her mind, he stayed between her and the mouth of the cave, which was little more than a crevice in the rock, probably part of the canyon that’d been pushed up and over ground level by a long-ago glacier or earth shift, or maybe even one of the recent landslides.

  Fairfax worked at his right shoe for a moment and came up with a small ampoule of pale yellow liquid. He crowded close to her, leaving no room for retreat or escape. “This is going to knock you out and depress your vitals so far that it’ll look like you’re dead, but you won’t be. You’ll come around in twelve hours or so, and we’ll be long gone.”

  Then, before she could react, before she could protest, or scream, or any of the other things she knew she damn well ought to do, he’d broken off the tip of the ampoule, jammed the needle-point end into her upper arm, and squeezed the yellow liquid into her.

  Pain flared at the injection site, hard and hot.

  She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. She struggled to stand up and run, but her legs wouldn’t obey. Her muscles turned to gelatin and she started sliding sideways, and this time Fairfax didn’t catch her or break her fall.

  She heard him stand, heard a weapon’s action being racked in preparation for firing. Then there was a single gunshot.

  Then nothing.

  FAX KNEW HE didn’t have much time, if any. He went to his knees beside the body bag containing the dead guard, whom he’d just shot. Pressing his hand against the wound, he got as much cool blood as he could from the dead man, and slathered it across the unconscious woman’s face, concentrating on the hair above her
temple.

  When he heard footsteps at the entrance to the cave, he readjusted the body bag and wiped off his hands on part of the woman’s coat, then tucked the stained section beneath her before he stood.

  Feigning nonchalance, he put the safety on his gun and stuck the weapon in his waistband before he turned toward Lee, hoping like hell the lemming wouldn’t notice that the blood on the woman wasn’t exactly fresh.

  Only the newcomer wasn’t Lee. It was al-Jihad himself.

  The terrorist leader stood silhouetted at the cave mouth, a lean, dark figure whose presence was significantly larger than his physical self.

  A shiver tried to crawl down the back of Fax’s neck but he held it off, determined to brazen out the situation and keep himself in the killer’s good graces. Gesturing casually toward the woman, he said, “She’s all set. Want me to go help Lee with the other guards?”

  Al-Jihad moved past him without a word, gliding almost silently, seeming incorporeal, like the demon he was. Crouching down beside the woman’s motionless, blood-spattered body, he touched her cheek, then her throat, checking for a pulse.

  Fax forced himself not to tense up, reminded himself to breathe, to act like the cold, jaded killer Abby’s betrayal had made him into. Only the thing was, something had changed inside him. He’d been playing the role of convict for so long it’d become second nature to hold the persona within the prison, but he found he was in danger of slipping now that they were outside those too-familiar walls.

  Hell, face it; he’d already slipped. There was no rational reason for him to jeopardize his position by faking the woman’s murder. The ampoule of the death-mimicking meds he’d tucked into a false, X-ray-safe compartment inside one of his not-quite-prison-issue shoes was supposed to be a safety net, a way for him to fake his own death if the need arose. Similarly, the GPS homing device he’d activated and placed in her coat pocket was supposed to be used only if he thought he was in imminent danger of being killed, and wanted to make sure Jane could find his body.

  Sure, he’d also planted a message on the woman, information he needed to get to Jane. But he could’ve gotten the info to her in other ways, ones that wouldn’t have used up so much of his dwindling bag of tricks.

  So why had he gone all out to save a woman whose name he knew only because he’d palmed the ID tag off her scrubs?

  Reaching into his pocket to touch the plastic tag, which read Chelsea Swan—a lovely name for a lovely woman—he thought he knew why he’d endangered himself and his mission for her. It was the freckles. Abby had had freckles like that, back when they’d been high-school sweethearts, before he’d done his stint in the military, blithely assuming things would stay the same while he was gone.

  Back when Abby’d had freckles, their biggest problems had been arguments over which movie to see, or which radio station to play as they’d tooled around town in his beat-up Wrangler with the soft top down. Eventually, though, she’d outgrown her freckles…and him.

  Chelsea Swan reminded him of those earlier times. Good times. Times that might as well have happened to someone else. But because they hadn’t, and because she looked like the sort of person who ought to have more good times ahead of her, he’d dabbed blood over her scalp and face to simulate a head wound, and he’d used his meds to make her body play dead.

  Question was, would it be enough to save her?

  Al-Jihad stood without a word, and gestured for Fax to return to the vehicle. “Go help Lee.”

  Fax stayed tense as he followed orders, fearing that al-Jihad was playing him, that the bastard knew what he’d done and was teasing him with the illusion of success. But the terrorist leader returned to the van a few minutes later, and on Fax’s next trip into the cave, he saw that Chelsea remained just as he’d left her.

  He and Lee finished unloading the other bodies, opening up each of the bags so the scent would attract scavengers, in hopes that they’d deface the bodies, further complicating forensic analysis when the dump site was eventually found. At least that was the terrorists’ theory. In reality, the homing beacon would have Jane’s people on-site in a few hours.

  Once the job was done, Fax hung back in the cave.

  “Move it,” Lee snapped when they both heard an impatient horn beep from the direction of the road. “The cops’ll get the roadblocks up soon.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Fax said. But as the other man hustled down the trail, Fax stayed put.

  Moving fast, he pulled the jacket and heavy sweatshirt off the dead morgue attendant, and packed them around Chelsea’s limp body. When that didn’t look like it’d be enough, he whispered, “Sorry,” and pulled the attendant’s still-warm corpse over her as added insulation. It was too cold and her vitals were too depressed for him to worry about niceties. If Jane took too long to respond, Chelsea could freeze to death.

  Hopefully, though, Jane would send someone right away. The responding agent could then administer the counteragent to the death-mimicking drug, collect the GPS beacon and info pellet Fax had planted on Chelsea, and phone in an untraceable tip that would lead the locals to the location. The agent would undoubtedly also reset the scene, making it look as though her survival had been accidental rather than intentional.

  With no way of knowing where al-Jihad had eyes and ears, they had to be careful not to make it obvious that the terrorist had a traitor among his small crew.

  “Just hang on for a few hours, Chelsea,” Fax said quietly, his words echoing in the cave. “Help should be on its way soon.”

  Then, knowing he’d done the best he could for her, he paused at the cave mouth and looked back at the six bloodied bodies, five of which weren’t going to wake up ever again.

  “Collateral damage,” he murmured. Uncharacteristically, he found himself regretting that he couldn’t have saved the others, hadn’t even tried. And, as he walked into the sunlight, he found himself wishing that he believed he was going to live long enough to see pretty Chelsea Swan again, under better circumstances.

  But as soon as he caught himself thinking along those lines, he squelched the emotions.

  There was no room for softness around men like al-Jihad, and Fax had a job to do. That took priority, period.

  Chapter Three

  “She’s coming around.” Chelsea felt a couple of light taps on her face, and heard a babble of voices close by, but she couldn’t quite grasp what any of it meant.

  Reality and recognition were distant strangers. Cocooned in a warm lassitude, she felt too lazy to move, too tired to care that moving was impossible.

  “Are you sure none of this is her blood?” a second voice asked, this one female.

  “Positive,” the first voice answered. “She doesn’t have a single laceration on her, just the bump on the back of her head.”

  “Then where’d the blood come from?”

  “From one of the others, looks like.” Another series of taps on her face. “Chelsea? Can you hear me?”

  She moaned and swatted at the hand that was gently slapping her. At least she tried to swat. She failed, though, because her arms didn’t move.

  “Here she comes,” the first voice said, sounding pleased. “Okay, kiddo. I need you to open your eyes now. Can you do that for me?”

  Chelsea did as she was told, squinting into the fading light of dusk, which showed that she was inside a cave of sorts. The details were lost to the shadows and the glare of handheld lights, but she was aware of numerous people inside the small space, most of them cops.

  A paramedic was crouched over her. Behind a plastic face shield, his brown eyes were dark with concern. It wasn’t the concern that confused her though; it was her sudden, utter conviction that his eyes were the wrong color. They weren’t supposed to be brown; they were supposed to be…

  Blue, she remembered. Ice-cold blue.

  The memory of the man’s eyes unlocked a flood of other recollections. She gasped as the memories swamped her, slapping her with terror and confusion, and the unbelieva
ble realization that Jonah Fairfax, double murderer, had done exactly as he’d promised. He’d saved her.

  But as the pieces lined up in her brain—sort of—they didn’t click. He’d said the drug would take twelve hours to wear off, and she’d been abducted near lunchtime, yet she could see dusk outside.

  “What day is it?” she asked, her voice cracking from disuse and whatever drug he’d stuck in her system.

  The paramedic said, “Tuesday. Why?”

  Which meant she’d only been out for a few hours. “How did you find me?”

  “Anonymous tip,” he said, looking past her to confer with someone outside her line of vision.

  Her brain jammed on the information, which didn’t make sense. Fairfax had said something about the escapees being well away by the time she came around, but she’d only been out for a few hours. Had he changed his mind and made the call himself? Had—

  The spiraling questions bounced off each other inside her throbbing skull and logjammed, and a sudden shiver wracked her body. “I’m f-freezing,” she managed between chattering teeth.

  “We’re working on that,” the paramedic replied. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiff.”

  It wasn’t until he and his partner lifted her that she realized she was on a stretcher, swathed in blankets and strapped down, which explained the feeling of immobility.

  She was aware of commotion around her as she was carried out of the cave and back along the wooded trail. She caught glimpses of concerned faces, many of them belonging to cops she saw in the ME’s office on a regular basis. She wanted to stop and talk to them, wanted to tell them what had happened to her, but her lips didn’t work right and the light was all funny, going from the blue of dusk to a strange grayish-brown and back again.

  When they reached the ambulance, Sara was there waiting, tears coursing down her cheeks when she saw Chelsea. Her lips moved; the words didn’t make any sense but Chelsea knew her friend well enough to guess Sara was apologizing for leaving her out on the loading dock.