At Close Range

by Laura Griffin

  She sprinted.

  Crack.

  The noise reverberated through her brain as she dived to the ground. He’d missed.

  He’d missed missed missed.

  But what if he’d been aiming for Scott? She gripped her useless pistol and hazarded a glimpse around the tree, desperate for a sign of Scott, but she saw nothing besides smoke.

  She glanced up the hillside. Beyond a row of trees she caught a glimpse of their canary-yellow car.

  Crouching low, she dashed for the next tree. And the next. And the next, barely stopping behind each thick trunk for fear she might panic and loose her ability to keep going.

  Crack.

  She yelped at the noise as she lunged behind a flimsy cedar tree. Was he aiming at her or Scott? She couldn’t tell, and she wished desperately that he hadn’t convinced her to split up. She wanted him beside her, but she knew this plan was better from a tactical perspective.

  In her left hand she clutched the key fob. She trained her gaze on the little yellow car, staring at it with all her might, as if staring could somehow bring it closer. Twenty feet away. Twenty-five, max. She could do it.

  Her heart was pounding so fast, it felt like it might jump right out of her chest. She was gasping, desperate for air. A minute ago she hadn’t been able to breathe at all, and now she couldn’t seem to stop.

  She murmured a prayer. And then she made a run for it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Dani raced for the car and ducked behind it. Thank God. She leaned her head against the wheel well for a moment as she caught her breath.

  Then she crawled to the back bumper and looked around.

  Scott, where are you?

  She made her way to the front and opened the passenger door. Should she climb behind the wheel and start the engine? She could be ready to go the instant Scott appeared. Where was he?

  Dani searched the surrounding brush, but saw no sign of him. Smoke stung her eyes. Her lungs itched from it. She coughed and looked around.

  Her gaze landed on the cabin at the top of the hill, and her stomach plummeted.

  Flames licked up from the deck. The smoke wasn’t just coming from the truck wreckage—the cabin was on fire now, too.

  She blinked at the house, trying to get her head around everything. Someone was nearby, someone besides that shooter on a distant ridge. Dani glanced around, clutching her Glock, searching for any sign of movement.

  She made a snap decision and climbed into the car, hunching down as she slid across the console and into the driver’s seat. She kept her head as low as possible while she switched her Glock to her left hand and managed to start the engine.

  Where the hell was he?

  She looked at the cabin and saw flames dancing behind the windows. Black smoke poured from the door, the very door she’d walked through just a few minutes ago. What was happening here?

  She caught a flash of movement in her side mirror as Scott lunged for the car and yanked open the door.

  “Move over,” he yelled, and she was already sliding to make room for him. He glanced at her. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Snap that seat belt and stay low. This is going to be a rough ride.”

  • • •

  Scott tore onto the road, spraying gravel behind him as he made a U-turn.

  Dani lifted her head to peek above the dash. “What—”

  “Stay down!” He pressed her head against his thigh.

  He sped past the fiery truck, hardly glancing at it as he raced through the billowing black cloud. The wind had changed directions, sending smoke right along the exfil route. Visibility was for shit, so he navigated by feel, using the ruts to guide him as he waited for the turnoff. It came sooner than he expected and he slammed on the brakes and swung right. The car skidded as they burst from the cloud of smoke into the brightness.

  Damn it, they were out in the open now, a long, paved straightaway that went on for at least a mile. Scott searched for another turn.

  Ping.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, jabbing the gas. He had to get off this road.

  He glanced down. Dani was tapping frantically at the navigation system, seeming to read his mind. Or maybe she’d noticed the car was taking fire. She had her head in his lap, so at least it wasn’t a target.

  “There’s a left turn up ahead,” she said.

  “Dead end or no?”

  He’d take it either way, but he hoped to hell it was a through street. He barely tapped the brakes as he swung into the turn. The car fishtailed.

  “Looks like . . . it links back up with a highway in a little ways.”

  Scott scanned the surroundings. It was flat here, a road that snaked through the valley, still within range of the shooter. But some trees lined the west side, so maybe they’d get lucky.

  He wished for his truck, with its V-8 engine and all-terrain tires. He’d be out of here in no time. But off-roading it wasn’t an option in this sardine can, not unless he wanted a blowout. Scott floored the accelerator, and the overworked engine reached a fever pitch.

  “Where’s this thing lead?” he asked.

  “About two miles southwest, then hooks north to the highway.”

  Dani started to sit up, and he pressed her head back against his thigh.

  “Scott, I can’t see!”

  “That’s good. Then he can’t see you.”

  Ping.

  God damn it. Scott was getting pissed now.

  “Please get your head down,” Dani said, and he heard the plea in her voice.

  He slid lower in the seat, but there wasn’t much room. Up ahead was a solid bank of trees. He glanced at the speedometer. He was pushing eighty in a car built to top out at sixty-five.

  “There’s a turn up ahead here. Looks like a shortcut,” Dani told him.

  “Left or right?”

  “Right.”

  Up ahead on the right was tree cover, lots of it. Scott braked. The tires squealed. He smelled burning rubber as he whipped into the turn, fishtailing once again as Dani gripped his knee.

  “Scott. Oh my God.”

  He glanced down at her head in his lap and couldn’t help but smile. How many times had he fantasized about this? But in his fantasies she’d always been naked and into it. She hadn’t been shaking and terrified, looking like she was about to hurl.

  And, holy hell, he was getting hard right now. Now, when Dani’s life was in his hands and some fuckhead with a rifle was taking shots at them. It had to be the adrenaline.

  “Scott, let me sit up.”

  He glanced around. The road was shaded with fir trees now, and a low ridge rose up to their west. They were still within rifle range, but they weren’t sitting ducks like they’d been in the middle of the valley.

  She squeezed his thigh. “Scott, come on.”

  “Looks clear.” At least for now.

  Slowly, she lifted her head from his leg, and the pinch of regret he felt told him exactly what a sick bastard he was. She brushed the hair from her eyes and glanced around.

  Then she looked at him. “What the hell just happened?”

  He heard the anger in her voice. Anger was good. It meant the shock was wearing off, and she was getting back into the game here. Which was good, timing-wise. He needed her alert and lucid because the shock was wearing off for him, too, and his shoulder was starting to hurt like a motherfucker.

  “Scott?”

  As he looked around for somewhere it might be safe to pull over, he heard sirens in the distance. Dani seemed to hear them, too, and she glanced around.

  “Someone called it in,” she said.

  “Was it you?”

  “No.” She pulled Scott’s phone from her pocket and stared down at it like it was some alien object she’d never before seen. “I was about to make the call when the shooting started.” She looked up at him, and he could see the disbelief on her face.

  “Someone rigged his truck with a bomb,” Scott said.

&n
bsp; “A bomb,” she repeated, as if saying it might make it more believable. “Are you sure it wasn’t, I don’t know, maybe whoever was shooting at us hit the gas tank and made the truck fireball?”

  “That only happens in movies.”

  “But . . . are you sure?”

  “Trust me. I’ve seen my share of car bombs.”

  She shook her head. “Well, we have to go back.”

  Scott checked his speed. He pressed his hand against his shoulder and winced at the burn.

  “Scott?”

  “Not happening.”

  “But we have to report it! We have to talk to the first responders. We have to turn around.”

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  Never, if it were up to him. But he knew she couldn’t do that. She was a cop.

  “Stop the car.”

  He glanced at her.

  “Stop the car, damn it!”

  He looked around before pulling onto the shoulder and putting the car into park. The engine sputtered, and he darted a look at the dashboard.

  He looked at Dani, really looked at her for the first time since she’d been underneath him in that ditch. She had dirt on her face and leaves in her hair. Her eyes looked wild, but they also looked alert, and he saw the outrage there. She had that look that guys got right after a firefight, right after their position had come under enemy attack and they’d somehow managed to squeak out alive.

  She was starting to get it.

  “We’re not turning around,” he said. “My objective right now is to keep you alive, and I’ll be damned if we’re going back into the kill zone.”

  “But I have to give a statement. I have to help the sheriff or whoever’s responding to the scene right now.” She paused and looked around, and the distant wail of sirens filled the silence. It sounded like at least two emergency vehicles, maybe three. Dani was a cop, through and through, and he knew he was asking her to go against every instinct she had.

  “Help all you want, but you can do it later and from a distance.” He reached over and cupped the side of her head. “Daniele, look at me.”

  She met his gaze.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Because I need you to drive.”

  Alarm flared in her eyes. “What happened? Oh my God.” She was leaning over him, searching him for injuries, before he could even respond. “Scott, you’re hit! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s just a scratch. Fuck!” He flinched as she touched his shoulder.

  “Are you crazy? We have to get you to a hospital!”

  She was practically on top of him now, and it was all he could do not to curse her out as he wrapped his good arm around her waist and lifted her away from him.

  “Calm down, all right? It’s a scratch.”

  “It’s not a scratch, it’s a bullet wound!”

  “I’ve had bullet wounds before, and this is a scratch.” He was pretty sure. “But I’d like to take a look at it, so if you don’t mind driving . . . ?”

  She sat back in her seat. “You’re a lunatic, you know that? I swear to God.”

  “Switch places with me.”

  She gaped at him a moment. Then she shook her head and shifted position. He eased himself over the console and she climbed over him, giving him a nice glimpse down the T-shirt she wore under her jacket.

  That he was noticing her breasts was a good sign, because that meant it really was a scratch even though it burned like a cattle brand.

  He got into her seat and glanced at her.

  “You need help with your jacket?”

  “No.” To prove it, he carefully pulled it off and checked his shoulder. Blood had saturated his T-shirt and dripped down his arm, but he peeled the fabric away and found just what he’d expected: a short, shallow trench where a bullet had grazed his skin.

  “Oh my God, Scott.” Her eyes widened.

  “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”

  “It’s not nothing.”

  “I mean it, Dani. We need to get out of here.”

  • • •

  She drove in a haze. They’d been out of the smoke for miles, but still she felt like it was following them, gaining ground. She kept glancing in the rearview mirror expecting a roiling black cloud to catch up with them and overtake the car.

  Don’t lose it.

  Dani gripped the wheel and tried to hold herself together as she sped down the two-lane highway headed God only knew where.

  Where was she even going?

  She glanced at Scott, who was dousing water over his shoulder and dabbing at his bullet wound with a T-shirt he’d dug out of his backpack.

  Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it.

  He glanced at her. “You okay?”

  “Fine.” She focused on the highway. She wanted to go back. Needed to. No matter what Scott said, she needed to turn the car around this second and return to that crime scene.

  “Not happening, Daniele.”

  She glanced at him. Had she said it out loud?

  “I can see what you’re thinking, and we’re not going back.”

  “But—”

  “How wide is that valley?”

  She blinked at him. “The valley? I have no idea.”

  “Take a guess.”

  She stared at the road ahead, trying to picture the valley. “I don’t know. Five hundred yards.”

  “More like six. And that first cold-bore shot came within an inch of taking your head off.”

  Her stomach knotted at the words, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Someone planted an IED and killed the witness you just interviewed. Someone set fire to the house you just visited. Someone just tried to take us both out with a sniper rifle. We’re talking about multiple bad guys in multiple locations. Think about that.”

  “I am thinking about it!”

  “I am, too. And I can tell you whoever is doing this is trained in long-range weaponry. And explosives. This is someone with combat experience. And the first rule of combat is, never go where the enemy expects you to be.”

  She stared ahead at the road, but she didn’t respond. Her heart was still racing, and she was afraid if she tried to talk, she’d lose it.

  “We are not going back there right now.”

  For a while they drove in silence. Dusk had fallen, and the landscape looked purple and shadowy. They were on a state highway headed north. A green sign told her she was two miles from a rest stop and twenty-two miles from some town she’d never heard of.

  She looked at Scott. A sheen of sweat covered his face, but that was the only sign of stress as he settled back against the seat. He wasn’t even breathing heavily. They’d just fled bullets and bombs and death by incineration, and he looked totally calm.

  Meanwhile, she was about to have a heart attack. Or a panic attack. Her hands gripped the steering wheel but her palms felt slippery, and her stomach was doing a queasy somersault as though she’d just stepped off a roller coaster.

  She stared ahead at the yellow lines of the highway.

  Don’t lose it.

  She pictured Nathan Collins with his stringy hair and his plaid shirt. She pictured his intelligent brown eyes and his look of surprise when she told him his friend was dead. She pictured his dusty white truck. And then she pictured the blazing wreckage.

  Her stomach pitched and she clutched her hand to it. A sign came into view and she swerved for the exit.

  “What’s wrong?” Scott asked.

  “I have to stop.”

  She had to puke. She slowed the car and swung into the rest stop. A minivan was pulled over near the concrete restrooms. She drove past it and whipped into a space, then shoved the car into park.

  She flung the door open. But then . . . nothing. The nausea passed. She felt dizzy.

  Scott gripped her knee. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just . . . I need to use the bathroom.”

  She walked briskly down the
sidewalk, barely glancing at the minivan as a woman buckled a little girl into a car seat and slid shut the door. Dani went straight into the restroom, one of those indoor-outdoor places. She could still hear the highway noise through big gaps between the wall and the ceiling. She walked up to the sink and leaned over it.

  She closed her eyes and all she saw was Nathan Collins holding that teakettle. Just minutes before he’d been blown to pieces.

  A sob burst from her chest. Then the tears came, hot and wet and streaming down her face. She clutched the sink and dipped her head down and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to hold everything back.

  The man was dead. She’d come inches away from being dead, too. Scott had been shot.

  Just thinking about all that blood on him made the tears come back again, and she gripped the sink and tried to force them to stop. She had to pull it together. She was a cop. She couldn’t do this.

  She took a deep, ragged breath and turned on the faucet. Her palms were scraped and bloody, and she rinsed them and washed out the gravel. She splashed water on her face, then straightened and looked in the mirror.

  Scott stood in the doorway, watching her.

  She turned around. “Sorry.”

  “You all right?”

  “Fine.” She grabbed some paper towels and blotted her face. “I just needed a minute. How’s your shoulder?”

  He was wearing the jacket again, and she couldn’t see the wound. She stepped toward him but he stepped back.

  “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  The minivan had left, and the rest stop was empty as they walked back to the car. Scott approached the driver’s side.

  “I should drive,” she told him.

  He didn’t reply, just opened the door and slid his huge body behind the wheel. Dani went around to the passenger side.

  She was still shaking and her heart was still beating too fast and she didn’t want to argue with him. She pulled the door shut and stared straight ahead through the windshield.

  “It’s twenty miles to Big Rock,” Scott said matter-of-factly. “We can stop there and regroup.”

  “That’s not too far from Santa Fe. It’ll probably be crowded with festival people.”

  “Crowded is good. We can blend in. Go off radar for a while till we sort this out.” He started the car. “Sound good?”