by Dana Marton
Her mouth felt dry.
In another few seconds, her brain began working better. Clearly, she’d been drugged, but the sedative was wearing off, thank God.
The burly shape of a man stood across the small room from her, looking out, into the woods.
Dan. Dan had come for her, drugged her, then brought her here.
Why?
She didn’t move, tried not to make any noise, closed her eyes again. If Dan turned around, she didn’t want him to know that she had regained consciousness.
Whatever his goal was and whatever his reasons were for kidnapping her, she was pretty sure the adventure wasn’t going to have a good ending.
He had drugged her and kidnapped her. He hadn’t bothered covering his face. Because he was counting on her being unable to tell the police what he’d done?
Because she’d be dead?
Her mind still addled, she couldn’t come up with another reason. She couldn’t see how Dan’s plans—no matter what they were—would end well for her.
She eased one eye open to a narrow crack. Dan still had his back to her, peering into the rain as if waiting for something. Lightning flashed, and for a second she could see better—see the gun he held by his side, a glint of black metal.
A shiver ran down her spine, and not just from the sight of the weapon. She was freezing. He had on his big puffy coat. His tendency to overdress for cold because of his poor circulation was paying off.
The coat . . .
He looked so much bigger in that coat than he really was.
Suspicion dawned. Bundled up, he could have been the man in her kitchen. And the man in the SUV that had run her off the road. Dan drove a deep-green 4Runner. His car could definitely look black in the dark.
Why hadn’t she thought of that before?
Because in a million years, she would not have suspected Dan. He was supposed to be a healer, like her!
And yet . . . he’d asked her out, and she’d rejected him. She wouldn’t be the first woman to be killed for saying no.
Despair clawed at her. God, this was so insane.
OK, no. No despair. No panic. She couldn’t let him win. She was in her woods. This was her turf.
Think! Rush him and ram him over the side?
Under different circumstances, she probably could have. But her legs were still half-numb. The drug wasn’t fully out of her system yet.
She shifted to test just how wobbly she was.
He caught the small movement and spun toward her to watch her with disdain, a sneer on his thin lips. “You shouldn’t get involved with patients,” he said, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation. “It’s a breach of ethics.”
Because kidnapping wasn’t? She didn’t ask him that. But she did ask, “Why did you bring me here?”
“To draw out your boyfriend. I sent him a text to let him know where to find us.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He stepped over, crouched down in front of her, and slapped her so hard, her ears rang. “No lying.”
His voice was as calm as if they were having a professional discussion in his office.
OK. She didn’t want to be hit again. She didn’t want to be hurt. She needed to be as whole as possible to make her escape.
“Why do you want Cole?”
“He’s starting to remember. When they start to remember, the game has to end. Most don’t. Ninety percent.” He sounded as thoughtful and caring as ever. “But one in ten aren’t as susceptible to the drug as the rest. I’ve had a pretty long run of good luck. Hard to believe now I have three failures back-to-back.”
She stared at him.
Three failures back-to-back. Was he talking about patients? Her mind jumped to a horrific possibility. “Trev?” And then, “Mitch?”
“Can’t predict these things.”
Her mind swirled. “What did Cole remember?”
“Giving me confidential information during a session, under some medical influence. As it turns out, US military information is a hot commodity in the international market.”
So that had been Cole’s investigation. Dan had turned traitor, and Cole had been sent to root him out. But then why was he leaving? A ruse?
She shrugged off the dozen questions that crowded into her brain. She’d ponder those later.
“I drug them, they blab, they don’t remember,” Dan went on, sounding pleased, as if he considered himself a genius.
“Except one in ten,” she said, so stunned she could barely think.
“No plan is ever perfect. But I’m in the right position for damage control. I can take care of the exceptions.”
Cole wasn’t an exception, she wanted to scream; he wasn’t an aberration that needed to be fixed. “Why? You’re not political. You’re not—”
“For the money. In another few months, I can retire. I’m tired of the same old shit. New day, new people, but always the same problems. I want to focus full-time on taking care of my mother.”
“You did this because you were bored?”
“You’re in no condition to judge me,” he snapped. “Did you spread your legs for a patient because you were bored?” Contempt dripped from every word. “Too good for me, but not too good for him?”
Dan seemed to have no regrets, no scruples. A sociopath?
How had she not noticed? But they hadn’t been close friends, hadn’t spent much time together outside her weekly sessions with him. And in those there had always been a certain professional distance between them.
Until that dinner when he’d kissed her.
Had she become some kind of obsession for him without even knowing it?
“I’m sorry.” She did her best to sound contrite. She would say anything that might help. “I didn’t understand how you felt.”
He stood. “Too late.” Anger hardened his voice as he said, “We could have been family. You have no idea of all the wonderful plans I had for us. I was going to introduce you to my mother.”
This was the second time he referred to his mother. “I don’t understand. I thought she skipped out when you were a kid. I thought you barely even remembered her.”
“I found her in Alzheimer’s care a couple of months ago. I’ve been searching for a while. I brought her home.” He shot Annie a cold look of hate. “I don’t want to talk about her. You don’t deserve to know her.”
He walked to the other end of the space and looked out, toward the path.
Waiting for Cole.
Annie’s heart raced. “You can’t shoot him. You’ll be caught.”
He turned. “Murder-suicide. Nobody will be surprised, considering his family history. Everybody will think Trevor’s death pushed him over the edge. If anything, it’ll be blamed on you for having an affair with a patient. Cole snapped, he killed you, then he killed himself.” Disappointment crept into his voice, as if she were a slow student.
He added, “Technically, I’ll shoot him first. Then we’re going to finish our date. No more teasing. You are going to give me everything you’ve given to him. Then I’m going to take whatever else I need.”
Fear roiled in Annie’s stomach. She needed to get away from here. If she ran, Dan would come after her. He wouldn’t be here to kill Cole when Cole arrived. And she might be able to get away from Dan. She knew these woods.
She considered the sheets of rain outside—limited visibility. That was in her favor, if she ran. But to run, she’d have to reach the ground first. If she was too slow on the ladder, Dan would catch her before she was halfway down the tree.
Could she jump? The blind was fifteen feet or so up.
The ground below is soft mud.
Her choices were either to jump out of the blind and maybe break something, or stay and face certain death. And if she didn’t do anything, Cole would be killed too.
Annie went for it, pushing herself up then over the half wall in one uncoordinated vault.
She slammed into a puddle, the air knocked out of her,
rain beating on her face.
“Annie!” Dan roared above.
She didn’t stay down long enough to determine if she’d broken anything. She pushed to her shaking hands and knees and scrambled toward the nearest stand of bushes, then through them, ignoring the skin she scraped off in the process.
She tripped. She sprang up and ran bent over for another few feet before she straightened. When she glanced back, she could barely make out the blind. She didn’t see Dan.
She ran in lurching, sliding strides toward Hope Hill.
“Annie!”
If she wasn’t so scared, she would have smiled. Dan was still behind her.
Good.
She wanted him to think that he could catch her. She didn’t want him to give up and go back to lie in wait for Cole.
She ran, but not too fast, to lure Dan farther away.
Cole spent way too much time locating the deer blind. Empty.
Somebody had been here, though—muddy footprints covered the floorboards, and there were more footprints at the base of the tree.
He pulled out his LED light and examined the prints close-up, squatting down and dragging his fingers in the indentations. The churned-up mud betrayed a lot of slipping and sliding. Had they been struggling? Had Annie escaped Ambrose?
Cole took off, following the prints.
He couldn’t hear the rain, but he could hear some of the thunder when lightning crackled across the sky. He used every second of that light to scan the forest in front of him. How far ahead of him were they?
Where Cole saw prints, he followed them, and where puddles covered the tracks, he chose the easiest path. Annie would want to get away from Ambrose as fast as she could. She’d be running for the openings in the vegetation, probably back toward the main track, back toward Hope Hill.
When he wasn’t scanning the ground, he was scanning the bushes for a scrap of fabric, hair, blood—any indication that he was on the right path.
A full ten minutes passed before he finally had to admit that he’d lost their track.
He roared his frustration into the storm.
Then he backtracked and tried again.
Annie ran forward in the dark, so wet and cold her teeth chattered. She’d run far enough now, she thought, so that Dan wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the blind if he gave up and turned around. Cole was safe.
Time to get away from the madman before he caught up with her.
“Annie!” The call came out of the darkness from way too near. And, before she could turn around, Dan barreled into her.
They crashed to the muddy ground. She had the presence of mind to roll away. A second later they were both on their feet again.
In a flash of lightning, she could see the gun in Dan’s hand. Now or never. She flowed into the one good self-defense move she knew, her one kick.
Pain shot up her leg, but Dan went down again, sprawled at her feet.
She kicked his hand with everything she had. He lost hold of the gun, but the weapon didn’t slide away nearly far enough. And he was scrambling up. Annie ran.
Her body hurt from the fall from the deer blind, and from Dan’s tackle. Branches smacked her face. She slipped and, once again, nearly twisted her ankle. She didn’t stop. She didn’t slow.
“Annie!”
She hoped the storm helped her blend in. Dan couldn’t just look for movement. Everything moved in the gale-force winds.
In the end, that became Annie’s downfall.
She knew the woods. She navigated by landmarks—a fallen log, an odd-shaped tree. But all the trees were twisting, presenting different shapes. She could barely see shapes. She could barely see anything.
She thought she’d been cutting back to the walking path, but the walking path was nowhere to be seen. Not daring to stop, in case Dan was close behind, she kept moving in the general direction she thought the buildings should be.
Soon she was gasping for air from the effort, not sure how much farther she’d be able to run, but she still hadn’t reached Hope Hill.
“Annie!”
She shuddered at the shout. She was lost in the woods. And the madman chasing her was closing in.
Could she find cover? Could she shelter in place until morning? Hide?
Except, she could only see for seconds at a time when lightning crackled across the sky. She hadn’t seen any suitable shelter so far. At least running kept her warm. Temperatures were steadily dropping. If she stopped, she’d be exposed to hypothermia.
She stumbled, ignored the pain in her ankle, and kept going. Who was she kidding? She couldn’t stop moving if she wanted. Nerves and fear pushed her forward. Panic was making her decisions.
She cut through some bushes and realized the ground was tilting slightly downhill. Did that mean she was heading toward the facilities at last?
She slipped, tried to catch herself, and failed. Don’t break anything. But instead of hard ground, she hit water and immediately went under.
She touched bottom pretty fast, then kicked herself back up to the surface. No way she was at the pond. A natural pond stood at the northern edge of the Hope Hill property, but she knew she hadn’t been moving in that direction.
She gasped for air, the water too cold. Then lightning flashed, showing her where she was. A giant tree, blown over by the storm, had twisted out of the ground. An enormous root ball towered above her, a huge, thick spiderweb. She was trapped in the rain-filled root-ball crater. The hole was no more than six feet in diameter and probably not much deeper than that. Just enough to drown in.
In the dark again, Annie reached blindly for the edge.
The muddy bank crumbled under her panicked fingers.
She was chilled through to the bone. Even her insides shivered as she tried to claw herself out. She was not going to drown in what amounted to an oversize puddle.
Except that, try as she might, she couldn’t get a firm grasp. Every time she grabbed for a handhold, she came away with a handful of mud and slipped back into the cold water.
Cole had his eyes on a stand of yews when Ambrose stepped out from behind them with his gun aimed at Cole’s head.
Cole dove to the side, hit the ground, and rolled in mud until he was behind the cover of a log large enough to hide him. He regretted few things as much as he regretted not being able to bring a gun to Hope Hill, although he understood their strict no-weapons policy.
He heard a shot, but so muted, as if through a silencer. It missed him. If Ambrose was moving around to get a better angle, Cole heard none of that.
He rolled to the left into an indentation in the ground deep enough to hide him, hoping he was rolling away from the man instead of toward him. The hole was filling with water. The muck helped cover him.
He peeked out into the darkness, everything wild and violent movement around him, yet the storm, silent. He stayed still and looked for other still forms. Tree, tree, tree . . . there. Ambrose huddled behind a stand of bushes, sticking his head out to see better.
Several seconds passed before the man edged to the right. He was going toward better cover too, an old maple. He’d be out in the open for six feet or so, looking away from Cole.
Cole would have to cross twelve feet to bring down Ambrose. It would all come down to how fast Ambrose could bring his gun around.
Ambrose pushed forward.
Cole lunged.
He missed his mark by an inch.
Ambrose didn’t.
Blood pulsed from Cole’s right shoulder, running into the mud under him. Freaking Ambrose had winged him.
The man stood over Cole, gun pointed at Cole’s head, from a lot closer this time. He might have been talking, but Cole couldn’t make anything out in the dark. His shoulder pulsed with pain.
The guy wasn’t a half-bad shot. A hunter?
But good shot or not, he knew nothing about close combat.
“You never stand this close to the enemy unless you’re sure they’re dead,” Cole said as he swept t
he man’s legs from under him.
He heard the faint pop of the shot Ambrose squeezed off before he hit the mud. This bullet missed. Then Cole was on top of the man, wrestling for the weapon.
Under better circumstances, disarming the bastard would have taken seconds. But Cole didn’t have use of his right arm. And he was leaking too much blood.
He wasn’t sure how much time he had before his blood pressure would drop so low he’d lose consciousness. He knocked out Ambrose by driving the man’s nose into his face. Ambrose didn’t move again.
Then Cole rolled away, pulled off his belt with his left hand, and made a tourniquet for his shoulder. That’d slow the blood loss. His head swam as he pushed himself to his knees. He’d bled too much already.
He tugged off Ambrose’s belt next. After considerable struggle, he managed to tie the man to a thick branch above his head, both arms looped high, only the toes of Ambrose’s shoes touching the ground.
The pain in his contorted shoulders brought Ambrose around, and he groaned, spitting out some of the blood that had run from his nose into his mouth.
Cole had some serious questions for the guy, but not now. He had to find Annie. Even if Ambrose decided to talk, Cole couldn’t read his lips in the dark and the driving rain.
He took the gun and counted the bullets. Only two were missing—the two Ambrose had fired at him. Some of the tension eased in Cole’s chest at the thought that Ambrose hadn’t shot Annie.
Had he hurt her in other ways?
Cole stumbled forward to find her, ignoring the buzzing in his head, the pain in his shoulder, and the weakness in his knees.
“Annie!” he roared at the top of his lungs.
He wouldn’t be able to hear her if she answered, but she would hear him and know that he was coming.
He refused to think that he might be too late.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
ANNIE SWALLOWED ANOTHER mouthful of muddy water and choked. She’d slipped under again, dammit. The side of the hole was too slippery, too crumbly for her to climb out.
Thunder shook the ground, and then a different kind of clap sounded. A gunshot?
Then shortly, another one.