She hit the edge of the hole, still rolling, and dropped in. Tracie dived in after her, landing on the woman and knocking the wind out of her with an audible “Ooof.”
Still Carranco fought, kicking her legs and punching at Tracie’s throat with her left hand while feeling desperately around the hole for the gun with her right.
Tracie lifted Carranco’s head and smashed it against the ground, trying to knock her out or at least disorient her. But the soft ground cushioned the blow, and the terrorist grunted in pain but continued to struggle.
Carranco located the gun and she lifted it and fired wildly. A searing pain creased Tracie’s left leg and she nearly blacked out, the world caroming wildly in her vision.
She jabbed at Carranco’s injured face and then dove left, desperate to wrench the gun away before the woman could get off a kill shot. She wrapped two hands around the butt of the Beretta and yanked, twisting viciously, and the gun barrel veered toward Carranco’s bleeding, mutilated face.
The terrorist’s finger snapped like a dry twig, caught between the trigger and the trigger guard, and as it did it engaged the trigger, and the gun roared and spit fire, and Maria Carranco’s head exploded in a spray of tissue, shattered bone and even more blood.
And Tracie felt the darkness closing in even though the sun was still shining.
And the buzzing in her ears became a screaming, and she realized the screaming was coming from her.
And then the world disappeared and the pain was gone.
42
Tracie’s head hurt.
And her leg hurt.
Every part of her body hurt.
But unlike a little while ago, when she awoke duct-taped to Maria Carranco’s homemade bamboo chair, she knew the moment she regained consciousness exactly where she was and exactly what had happened.
The terrorist lay unmoving at the bottom of the gravesite, her body partially covered by Tracie’s. The left side of her face was a ruined, pulpy mess. Blood covered the dirt under and around her head, most of it having soaked into the ground thanks to the loose, sandy turf.
Instinctively Tracie reached up and placed two shaking fingers against Carranco’s carotid artery. They slipped in the blood and she tried again. Felt for the pulse she knew she would not find.
The woman was dead.
Tracie realized she would suffer the same fate if she didn’t get moving. The buzzing in her head was gone for the moment, but she had no doubt it would soon return if she didn’t take care of the gunshot wound in her leg and begin to rehydrate.
The sun had dipped below the horizon and night was approaching like an onrushing train. The predators Carranco had talked about were undoubtedly close by. If she didn’t get to the shelter of the cabin—soon—she would probably wish she had been shot.
She rolled off the dead terrorist and reached for her gun. She had lost her grip on it when she lost consciousness, but it was still firmly in Maria Carranco’s grasp, the trigger guard caught on her hideously misshapen finger.
Tracie pried it out of Carranco’s hand and heard/felt another bone break in the dead woman’s finger, not that it mattered now. Then she shoved it into the waistband of her jeans where she had so recently hidden the makeshift bamboo dagger.
She breathed in deeply and took her first look at the gunshot wound in her leg. The slug had struck the meaty outer portion of her thigh, and while it looked as though a lot of blood had soaked into her jeans, she guessed the bullet had passed through without causing any major damage.
Hopefully.
She flexed the leg experimentally, bending her knee. A searing flash of pain blossomed where she had been shot and a gush of blood jetted out the entry wound. The pain was intense but manageable. If she could get to the cabin and patch up the wound, she wouldn’t be in any danger of bleeding to death.
She wondered whether Carranco kept any first-aid supplies inside her cabin, but realized the answer was mostly irrelevant. She could use her duct tape to seal the bullet wound, and then use her combat knife to cut the wooden handles off some of the tools lined up behind Carranco’s shack to fashion a makeshift splint.
It would take some time, and would seriously limit her mobility in hiking back to her rental truck, but with Carranco dead, time had ceased to be an issue. And with nightfall nearly complete in Big Cypress National Preserve, she wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight, anyway.
But all her plans depended upon making it to the shelter of the cabin. She was completely exposed at the moment in a wilderness vaster and more untamed than almost anywhere else in North America. Getting her hands on her gun had made her feel immensely better, but the fact remained that she was easy prey in her current condition, injured and almost immobile.
Tracie gritted her teeth and struggled to a sitting position, jostling her left leg and forcing more blood out the bullet’s entry wound. She wouldn’t be certain until she reached the cabin and had the chance to examine the wound, but she thought she felt the sticky wetness of blood on the back of the thigh as well.
If true, that would mean the slug had indeed passed through her leg, which was mostly good news, but which would also mean she had just dragged the open wound through the damp, mucky earth. Infection would become a near-certainty.
It was too late to worry about that now. All she could do was keep moving. She leaned forward and braced her forearms on the soil next to the hole. Then she dragged herself up and out of the gravesite, using her good leg to push off and propelling herself forward with her arms. She crashed down face-first into the clearing, moaning from the pain in her leg and the pain in her skull and the raging thirst that losing consciousness had done nothing to assuage.
She lay face down, breathing heavily, wanting nothing more than to rest.
To take a break.
She had earned a break, goddammit. But she wasn’t going to get one, not unless she wanted to die trapped between the jaws of a crocodile, screaming and wishing she had been murdered by Maria Carranco instead.
Remotivated if not refreshed, Tracie used her arms to raise her upper body off the ground like she was doing a pushup. Then she flexed her good leg underneath and lifted, doing her best to raise herself to a standing position while bending her injured leg as little as possible.
It worked. She stood, swaying precariously, and tried desperately not to drop back to the ground. It wasn’t easy. The earth tilted and yawed as she tried to remain balanced. Nausea bloomed in her belly and she clamped her mouth shut and swallowed heavily. There was no way she would be able to remain standing if she puked, and no way she would be able to rise again if she fell.
After a moment she began working her way toward the shack, taking little bunny hops on her good leg, gasping as the effort jarred the bullet wound and her injured skull. The pain in her leg had leveled off, but her headache had returned and her vision seemed to be narrowing. She focused her gaze on her goal—the front door of the cabin—and a frightening blackness that had nothing to do with sunset began to appear around the edges of it.
The buzzing had started up again, returning with a vengeance inside her head. Her good leg felt like jelly and she had resumed sweating, although she felt suddenly freezing cold.
She gritted her teeth and continued moving grimly forward, telling herself she had to be getting closer to the shack even though it didn’t feel like it. She thought about Marshall Fulton, picturing him as he looked at the Congressional Steakhouse, big and muscular and handsome, confident enough in his masculinity to let his tiny redheaded date handle the two Neanderthals who had taken it upon themselves to register their disapproval of interracial dating.
She liked Marshall a lot, had known immediately she wanted to see him again but had committed to nothing because of the dangers inherent in her career, and even more because of what had happened to the last man she had allowed herself to fall in love with.
The vision of Shane Rowley appeared unbidden in her memory, Shane falling backward in slow motion off
the roof of the Minuteman Mutual Insurance Building in DC, his eyes locked onto hers as he sacrificed his own life to save her, doing so after knowing her for only a few days.
She kept moving, tiny hop after tiny hop, dimly aware that she was crying now, for sacrifices she had made as well as for the ones that had been made on her behalf, suddenly desperate to survive if only to make that second date with Marshall, to visit the Congressional Steakhouse again, or a fast food restaurant, or anywhere at all, and to look into that ruggedly handsome face and tell a joke so she could see that dazzling smile again and this time maybe see if Marshall wanted to stay with her at the end of the night.
And then she discovered she had arrived at the concrete block steps leading to the doorway of Maria Carranco’s unlikely cabin in the middle of nowhere. She turned and slumped down on the cement block stairway, exhausted and shaky, too tired even to try to climb the three steps.
Night had fully fallen during her short trek from the improvised gravesite to the old hermit’s shack, the inky blackness tempered by the light of millions of stars beginning to appear in the vast, cloudless Everglades sky. A faint rustling sound in the distance told Tracie the jungle of Big Cypress was giving itself over to the nighttime predators, and she breathed a sigh of relief she had regained consciousness in time to make it to the shelter of the cabin while there had still been sufficient daylight to see it.
The blood leaking from her bullet wound seemed to have slowed almost to a stop, but there was no real way of knowing how much blood she had already lost, and the awful lightning bolts of pain in her injured skull were getting worse, not better.
And she was still thirsty. Maddeningly, distractingly thirsty.
Tracie lifted her butt off the bottom step and sat back down on the next.
Rested for a moment.
Moved one more step up and sat again.
One more time and she found herself seated on the small landing. She reached inside for one last reserve of strength and forced herself to her feet. The nausea that had receded for the last few blessed minutes came rushing back and she wished she had never stopped moving.
She leaned against the side of the shack to avoid losing her balance and tumbling back to the ground, and waited for the nausea and the blackness that had again begun blossoming in her peripheral vision to disappear.
Thirty seconds later it hadn’t disappeared and she knew it wasn’t going to disappear until she had taken care of herself. She twisted the tarnished brass doorknob and shoved on the wooden door and tumbled into Maria Carranco’s cabin, dropping onto the floor with a bone-jarring thud.
The darkness inside the cabin was even more complete than outside. Tracie struggled not to lose consciousness, fearing she might never awaken if she passed out again.
She took deep breaths and blew the air out forcefully. Began crawling toward where she remembered seeing a Coleman gas lantern. Treating her bullet wound would not wait until morning, and doing so would be impossible without artificial light. A heavy Maglite flashlight had been among the supplies inside her backpack, but Carranco had taken the pack after slugging Tracie with the shotgun and Tracie didn’t know where the terrorist might have hidden it.
Her progress across the little cabin’s interior felt agonizingly slow, but eventually she bumped up against what she hoped was the kitchen counter—which was nothing more than a roughly-constructed shelf, really—upon which she had seen Maria Carranco’s supplies and the lantern.
She felt around in the dark until banging her knuckles against one of the counter’s wooden legs, and then she wrapped both hands around the leg and began dragging herself painfully upward.
When she reached the countertop, she grabbed onto it with both hands and lifted, using her good leg to brace herself, until somehow she had gotten into a standing position one last time. Her head pounded and the nausea bloomed and her leg throbbed and she did her best to ignore all of it.
She thought she remembered seeing a box of waterproof matches next to the lantern and she felt around blindly, banging into gallon jugs of water and scattering food and other supplies across the counter. At last her fingertips brushed what she thought might be the matchbox and she wrapped her hands around it with all the fervor of a miner who has just struck gold.
She was weak and sweating and freezing cold again, but she managed to open the box and pull out a match. Somehow she even managed to strike the match without it falling from her shaking fingers and setting fire to the tinderbox of a shack.
The tip of the match flared and Tracie smiled with delight. That tiny yellow glow was the sweetest sight in the world. She set about lighting the gas lantern, saying a prayer that the reservoir contained at least enough fuel to allow time to treat herself and to figure out where the lunatic terrorist had hidden more fuel.
A moment later the twin mantles flared inside the glass globe. Tracie breathed a sigh of relief and realized she was crying again.
43
Sunrise came early in the Everglades, and with it, oppressive heat and humidity.
Tracie didn’t care. She was anxious to get moving.
After rehydrating last night with fresh, sweet water from one of the gallon jugs on the counter, she had stripped her clothes off and prepared to begin cleaning her bullet wound. She swallowed a handful of aspirin and gritted her teeth against the pain she already felt and the pain she knew was to come.
She searched until finding her backpack—one advantage to the cabin’s minimal interior square-footage was that there weren’t many places to hide anything—and then pulled out her trusty duct tape. The roll was getting a little thin after all it had been used for, but she thought there would be enough left for what she needed to do.
She sat on Maria Carranco’s cot and began wrapping the tape as tightly as she could stand around her thigh. If cleaning the wounds with soapy water had been painful, this was agonizing, and she gasped as she worked, squeezing her eyes shut and moaning through clenched teeth when the pain became almost unbearable.
The hike would be long and difficult, and she knew she could not afford to take the chance of the bullet wounds beginning to gush blood when she was halfway between the cabin and her truck.
By the time she finished with the makeshift bandage, her hands were shaking so badly she almost could not keep hold of the roll of tape. Her plan had been to get some food in her stomach before trying to sleep, but the prospect of fighting her way one more time to the other side of the cabin was more than she could bear.
Instead, she lifted her backpack onto the cot and adjusted it until she could use it to elevate her injured leg. Then she closed her eyes and was asleep—or perhaps unconscious—almost before she had any idea what was happening.
Now, with the sun rising and the jungle predators banished—more or less—for the next fourteen hours or so, Tracie was ready to move. She still needed to fashion a splint to immobilize her left leg, so the first order of business would be to cut the handles off two of the shovels or other gardening tools Carranco had lined up behind the shed.
Tracie’s backup gun and combat knife had been hidden among the weapons Carranco had squirreled away in the cabin. There was no doubt her knife could handle the job of hacking the handles off the tools. It might destroy the blade, but that seemed like a small price to pay.
She struggled to the door and then opened it. Stepped out of the shack. Looked at the hole in the ground where a life-and-death struggle had taken place last night.
And gasped, this time in surprise rather than pain.
Maria Carranco’s corpse was gone.
Just gone.
If Tracie didn’t know the full story of what had happened in and around that hole, she would never have known Carranco was even there. The blood from her fatal head wound—at least, the small amount of blood that hadn’t soaked into the sandy ground—was still there, but it was the only remaining evidence of the life-and-death struggle that had taken place last night.
She shivered.
It seemed unlikely the alligator or crocodile or whatever monster had dragged Carranco’s body away would have differentiated between a dead human and a live one, and she wondered how long it had taken after nightfall for the corpse to disappear.
She thought about the dead black eyes of the croc she had encountered in the truck on the way here and shivered again.
Then she did her best to put it out of her mind. There was a lot left to do and she had a long way to go; it was important she get a grip. Without the proper focus, even with Carranco out of the picture it would still be very easy to die out here in Big Cypress National preserve, especially given the extent of her injuries.
She forced her gaze away from the now-empty gravesite and moved carefully down the concrete block steps, using Maria Carranco’s Mossberg as a cane and holding her Beretta firmly in her right hand. The omnipresent horde of mosquitoes found her almost immediately upon stepping outside, and she waved at them out of habit, knowing the action would do nothing to disperse them but trying anyway.
She sighed deeply.
She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here.
44
Tracie entered CIA Director Aaron Stallings’s home on crutches and clumped down the hallway toward his office. As always, Stallings’s wife was nowhere to be seen, although it was entirely possible she was elsewhere in the massive home.
She had reported straight to Langley, as instructed by Stallings, after her flight touched down at DCA, more than a little concerned about what would happen at the front gate. Since her employment had been officially terminated shortly after the kidnapping of U.S. Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries, she had become persona non grata at the agency.
Even after recovering Humphries and returning him to DC unharmed—more or less—she had been refused entry into agency headquarters and then steadfastly ignored when she had delivered the secretary of state.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 72