Jake! Thank God for Jake! He was reeling her in. Her head broke the surface, and she gulped in sweet, blessed, lung-filling air as he pulled her toward him. Kicking for all she was worth, still maintaining her death grip on Sadie, she wrapped her fingers around the reassuringly thick bones of Jake's wrist and then, when she was close enough, practically swarmed atop him, locking her free arm around his neck. He felt reassuringly big and solid, her own private rock, and she was never, ever going to let him go again this side of dry land.
"You almost got us killed! Over a damned dog!" With one arm hooked over the branch, he kept them both afloat as she pressed her shaking body to his. He was as wet and cold as she was, and in as precarious a position, too, but his shoulders were broad and his chest was wide and his arms were strong, and, reasonably or not, Charlie felt safe in his hold. She pressed her cheek to his wet bristly one and clung, coughing and sputtering, as she fought to clear her lungs. Sadie, dear Sadie, scrambled free of her grip and up over her arm and shoulder to stand, trembling, completely clear of the water, on the uprooted tree which had saved them.
"She would have drowned if I hadn't grabbed her."
Each word was punctuated by a choking cough. She was numb with cold and boneless with exhaustion, and if he hadn't been holding her up she feared she would have just slithered down into the water like not-quite-set gelatin.
"Better the dog than us. For your information, when you grabbed her, I almost lost my grip on this tree. If I had, we would have gone over the falls." His voice was grim, but his breath fluttering past her ear was surprisingly warm and comforting.
"I'm sorry, okay?" Charlie coughed some more, pressing her cheek closer to his, greedy for even the meager warmth generated by this small area of skin-to-skin contact. Sadie, secure in the knowledge that the worst of the ordeal was now behind them, chose that moment to shake the water from her coat. Unfortunately, Jake got the brunt of the shower right in the face. When he opened his eyes again, he was scowling.
"I think that's called adding insult to injury. You're pushing your luck, dog."
This was addressed to Sadie, uttered half under his breath and on such a sour note that Charlie, feeling safer than she had for some minutes, almost smiled.
And why not? The situation wasn't good, but it was at least stable. The man she clutched was reassuringly solid, the thugs were off on a wild-goose chase somewhere downstream, and suddenly the odds of surviving the night appeared to have improved to something at least a little better than zero. As ridiculous as it seemed, that combination of factors made her suddenly feel almost euphoric.
The thought that she might actually be going to live was intoxicating. Maybe she would get a chance to wear that new dress and sing with Marisol at the Yellow Rose after all.
Or maybe not. Reality hit right along with a cold splash of water in the face. Charlie was reminded that her nonswimming self was still trapped in the middle of a rushing river only a few hundred yards above a deadly falls, hanging on for dear life to a stranger whom a pair of really bad guys were doing their best to kill.
If her odds of survival had increased, it was only because they had been so low to begin with. They were still so bad that no gambler worth his salt would touch them with a ten-foot pole.
"What now?" she asked, pulling her head back so that she could look at him. She couldn't see much of him in the darkness, but what she could see—and feel—gave her a tiny spurt of hope. He was exactly the kind of hard-muscled man's man who would know what to do in all manly situations. She bet he knew how to fix car engines and repair roofs and grill steaks outdoors. She knew for a fact that already tonight he'd jumped out of a plane, dodged a hail of bullets and swum more than halfway across a river with her dead weight attached. Right at this very moment, he was probably formulating a plan for their salvation.
"Got me," her hero answered.
"Great." Her bubble of burgeoning hope deflated like a pricked balloon.
"If you've got any suggestions, I'm all ears."
Charlie glanced around. The utter impossibility of remedying their situation was clear. "I don't."
"Look on the bright side: We're not dead yet."
"Yet is the key word here, I think."
"Regular little optimist, aren't you? All right, let go of my neck and hold onto the tree instead. I want to see what's on the other side of this rock, and to do that we have to move."
8
CHARLIE WASN'T HAPPY about letting go, but it was beginning to occur to her that hypothermia could probably be added to the list of ways she might reasonably expect to die tonight, right up there along with being shot and drowning. They had to get out of the water soon. She wasn't even shivering much any longer, and that, she knew, was a bad sign. With Jake's support she turned, hooked the arm that had been around his neck over the branch, then inched herself along in his wake. The tree seemed to be solidly wedged, she noted gratefully. It didn't budge despite their shifting grip, or the force of the water pushing against it. Sadie trotted along above their heads, careful to stay well clear of the water while keeping pace.
"Are you really a cop?" Charlie asked, grasping at any straw of hope she could think of as they made it to the other side of the pile of trapped debris. Jake was looking toward the bank as if he were contemplating the possibility of swimming for it. Not in this life, Charlie thought, and definitely not with her attached. No way. No how. In her opinion, dying of exposure was better than drowning. Anything was better than drowning.
"DEA." His tone was absent. He was still looking in a measuring way toward shore.
"Then don't you have any little DEA buddies around here somewhere who might come charging to the rescue about now?"
"Nope." He glanced around at her then, and grinned suddenly. She could see the faint gleam of his teeth through the darkness. "Sorry, Charlie."
"Oh, funny." She had heard that one so often that it had ceased to amuse about ten years back. "Why not?"
"Because none of my little DEA buddies, as you call 'em, has any idea that anything's gone wrong here. As for as my guys know, this operation is going down exactly as planned."
"Fantastic," Charlie said. "Were you supposed to be undercover or something? What were you going to do if something went wrong—as it obviously has? Didn't you have a Plan B?"
"Working on it."
"Care to share your thoughts?"
"You ever hear that old saying about curiosity killing the cat?"
Charlie snorted, and glanced meaningfully around. "Curiosity's going to have to get in line."
He grinned again. "Yeah, well, being in the wrong place at the wrong time works, too. Do you always drive alone through remote areas of the country in the middle of the night, by the way? It's just a suggestion, but you might want to rethink that."
"I was working," Charlie said through lips that were starting to feel alarmingly stiff.
"What do you do, run a traveling animal act? Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but driving around with a snake and a skunk—to say nothing of that pitiful excuse for a dog—doesn't sound like any job I ever heard of."
"I was releasing animals into the wild." That sounded commendably noble. It was also the literal truth. But Charlie had been brought up to tell the whole truth, so she reluctantly continued. "My sister just bought a company called County-wide Critter Ridders. People hire them to rid their houses, or barns, or whatever, of wild animals that have somehow managed to get in. Tonight Marisol—my sister—had something else to do, so she asked me if I'd drive the animals to Cheatham Wildlife Management Area and let them go. That's what I was doing. Getting involved with this—with you—was just bad luck."
"Yeah, well, your luck doesn't seem to be getting any better." Surprisingly, his voice was grim again. "Look upriver."
Charlie did, and her eyes widened. A bright light, the same kind of light that had first attracted her attention on the road, was just visible through the trees. It obviously came from some kind of aircraft, and
it was just as obviously scanning the river.
"Could somebody have called the police?" she asked on a last, forlorn hope.
" 'Fraid not. Woz must have called for reinforcements. That's a helicopter."
"Looking for us?"
"Yep. They can't afford to let us get away, you know. We know too much, and they'll do whatever it takes to make sure we don't live to tell the tale. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a boat coming, too."
Charlie glanced wildly all around. Where they were, the river was about a quarter of a mile wide. The light seemed to be moving methodically from side to side. There was no way it wasn't going to see the rock jutting up from the glossy black surface of the water—and if it found the rock, it would find them.
"Oh, my God, what do we do?" Panic sharpened her voice.
"Only one thing to do: Swim for it."
"No! Oh, no!" She shook her head vigorously. "You know we can't make it to shore. The waterfall's too close and..."
Her voice broke off abruptly as Jake took a deep breath and disappeared underwater. For a moment Charlie could only stare in horror at the place where he had been. At any second she expected him to yank her down, too. There were several tugs on her handcuffed arm, but they were relatively benign, as though he was moving around. After the first one, she stopped paying attention anyway. She hung onto the branch like a monkey in a hurricane while her gaze fastened on the spotlight which was drawing ever closer. As she watched, wide-eyed, the helicopter itself appeared around a bend in the river. It was flying low, perhaps only a few hundred feet above the surface, and the whirr of the blades could now be heard distinctly even above the rushing water. The spotlight moved from side to side like a great all-seeing eye. In minutes it would be upon them. With her heart pounding so fiercely that she could feel each slamming beat, Charlie gave a sharp tug on the chain linking her to Jake. Seconds later he popped back into view, shaking water from his head and sucking in air.
"Jake, Jake, look! They're getting really close. There's no way they're going to miss us. We're out of time."
"Yeah, I see." He barely glanced at the oncoming helicopter. Instead, his gaze fixed on her face. "Charlie, listen: There's a tree wedged against this one that stretches out toward the bank. We're going to go underwater and hang on to it as far as we can, and then we're going to shove off hard with our feet and hope that the little extra boost that gives us brings us close enough to the bank so that we can make it. We're going to stay under until the helicopter passes, and we're going to have to take the dog under with us. If we leave it here, they'll spot it and it will give us away. All I want you to do is hang on to the dog, and leave everything else to me."
"I really don't want to do this." The prospect of leaving their safe haven terrified her. The shore was close, but the falls were closer, and the current was strong and swift.
"We don't have any choice."
He was already scooping Sadie up and handing her over. Charlie accepted her blissfully ignorant pet because there was nothing else she could do, and cradled the shivering dog close. A glance upriver and the increasing volume of the roaring in her ears confirmed that the helicopter was still there, its spotlight sweeping pitilessly from side to side.
Clearly, somebody upstairs was having a huge laugh at her expense.
"Here we go. Take a deep breath, hang onto the dog, and trust me, baby. We're going to make it."
With that he submerged. Charlie only had time to take a terrified breath that wasn't nearly as deep as she'd meant for it to be before he was pulling her under after him. The icy depths claimed her once again. Her heart was pumping so fast that a heart attack seemed like a foregone conclusion. She could feel Sadie's heart thudding, too. She had the little dog tucked under her arm like a football with her hand clamped over her muzzle. Did dogs know to hold their breath? Sadie seemed to. Caught up by the current, Charlie's hair wrapped seaweedlike around her face, covering her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Not that there was any need to use any of those organs. She could neither see, nor breathe, nor speak. She could only hang onto Sadie and trust in God and Jake as he pulled her with surprising speed through the water. She kicked, and gripped the slippery wood of the submerged log with the hand that was chained to his, but on her own she would have been swept away, she knew. The river was just too powerful. The current sucked at her feet, her legs, her body, drawing her toward the falls and certain death.
A sudden brightening of the depths made her eyes widen. It was only then that she realized they were open, and had been all along. The water around her was lit from above, turning a clear golden brown that was aswirl with twigs and clumps of mud. She could see Sadie's bug-eyed and terrified expression as her tiny paws paddled frantically, and Jake's big black shape in front of her, his hair standing on end as he pulled them along the log, and the solid gray cylinder of the fallen tree itself. All that she glimpsed in an instant, as if a camera had flashed, illuminating the scene. Then the light was gone, moving on, and she realized that the spotlight, and the helicopter with it, had just passed them by.
Without warning, Jake pulled her close, and his arm locked around her waist. An instant later she felt his legs bunch and then give a powerful thrust as, having reached the root of the tree, he abandoned their protector and launched them defenseless into the maelstrom. Hanging grimly onto Sadie, she kicked, but there was no doubt that Jake was propelling them both. Not that he seemed to be accomplishing much. They were being swept sideways despite everything he could do. The river had them at its mercy now; their best efforts were puny against its strength. Any minute, any second, she feared to feel the world dropping away beneath her, and herself going with it, shooting out into space, falling, falling, to drown or be crushed at the foot of the falls.
In seconds fear took a backseat to a more immediate need. Her lungs were bursting. She needed air. She had to breathe or die. Sadie, obviously in like distress, was struggling in her arms. Thrashing her legs, tugging frantically on her shackled wrist in an attempt to signal Jake, Charlie fought to surface. Her side crashed into something hard, and then her head was above water and she was gasping, coughing, drinking in air, lifting Sadie so that the little dog, too, might breathe. They had fetched up against another rock, she saw, blinking, and saw too that Jake stood—stood!—no more than chest deep in front of her. He grabbed the back of her jacket and hauled her to her feet. Knees shaking, still clutching Sadie, Charlie threw herself against him, clutching the soaking front of his coat in both hands as if she never meant to let go again.
"Hey, we made it." His arm came around her waist, hugging her close. Charlie's head was bent, and her forehead rested against his broad shoulder. It was a luxury, a wonderful, unimaginable luxury, to feel solid ground beneath her feet, and be able to breathe. A sideways glance showed her that the rock she had hit jutted like a finger about three feet out from the bank, and that without it they probably would have been swept over the fells, which were now no more than a hundred yards away. The helicopter with its spotlight was still visible, but it was moving away from them, continuing the search downriver. For the moment, at least, they were safe.
"Thank you, God," she muttered devoutly.
"Come on, let's get out of here." Taking Sadie from her, gripping her hand tightly, he started sloshing toward shore, pulling her behind him. Even with the rock to lean against, the current was strong and the footing was uneven. Her knees were still unreliable, and her stocking feet slithered and slid. It was hard to keep from falling, but Charlie managed it. If she could help it, she was never going to be submerged in water again, not even in the bath.
"Did we time that right or what?" Jake was climbing the rocky bank now toward the thick pine woods beyond, hanging onto Sadie and pulling Charlie behind him. He paused to nod upriver. Charlie looked, and felt her heart give a great leap of fear. Just as he had predicted, a boat was on the river. Its running lights and the powerful hum of its motor were unmistakable. It was small, an aluminum fishing boat pe
rhaps, and coming downstream fast. Undoubtedly it was looking for them.
"They're better equipped than an army." Despair almost dropped her to her knees. She had no strength left to struggle on. Her muscles were as limp as wet shoelaces. Her bones seemed nonexistent. Her soaked jacket and jeans were unbelievably heavy and cumbersome. She was so wet water poured from her in streams, so cold goose bumps were racing along every square inch of her skin, and suddenly totally devoid of willpower. Jake the indefatigable dragged her on, hauling her up the slippery bank in his wake until the scent of pine replaced the muddy smell of the river and the first few feet of a thick growth of old forest stood between them and the unseen eyes of those on the boat.
Then he pulled her to him, and let her rest against his strength while she caught her breath.
"They are an army. A renegade army with one purpose: to make money. We're talking billions and billions of dollars here. This group is just one small branch of an enormous tree. And with what I know, we can start chopping that tree down."
"Always hoping you live to tell it."
He grinned. "Yeah, well, there is that. If we can keep alive until morning, though, we've got a shot. Come six A.M., my guys are staging a raid on the farm where the stuff we dropped tonight was supposed to end up. When they find out I'm not there, they'll come looking. I figure it'll take 'em maybe two, three hours after that to get out here, tops."
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