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“Maybe you lost it in the fall.” She leaned against the same tree, a smooth-barked aspen, and tried to catch her breath.
He looked around, then began making his way across the slope, in the general direction of their original landing place. “Help me look,” he said. “I’ve got to call the team and let them know to wait for us.”
She followed him, scanning the ground around them, then dropping to her knees to feel about in the dried leaves and loose rocks. “It’s not here,” she said.
“It has to be here,” He glared at the ground, as if the force of his anger could summon the phone. He turned to her. “Give me yours, then.”
“I don’t have a phone,”
“Don’t lie to me. You always have your phone with you.”
The woman he had known had always carried her phone with her, but she was a different person now. “Duane didn’t allow me to have a phone,” she said.
His brow furrowed, as if he hadn’t understood her words, but before he could reply, a shout disturbed the woodland peace. “They’re down here!” a man yelled, and a bullet sent splinters flying from a tree beside her head.
Travis launched himself at her, pushing her aside and rolling with her, down the slope toward the creek. He managed to stop them before they hit the water, then pulled her upright and began running along the creek bank. “Is the road this way?” he asked.
“I think so.” She had a dim memory of a bridge over the creek a mile or so from the house.
Crashing noises and falling rock telegraphed their pursuer’s approach. Travis took cover behind a broad-trunked juniper and drew his weapon, but after a moment he lowered the gun. “I can’t get a clear shot and there’s no sense letting them know for sure where we are. Come on.” He tugged her after him once more.
“How do you know your friends will be waiting for us?” she asked as she struggled to keep up with him.
“If they aren’t, we can flag down someone else to help,” he said.
No sense pointing out that the road leading into the private neighborhood of mostly vacation homes didn’t receive a lot of traffic, especially on a fall weekday. If they could avoid Duane and his men, the road did seem the best route for escape. Maybe the only route.
She didn’t know how long they ran, climbing over rocks and skirting thick groves of aspens and scrub oak. They splashed through the icy water of the creek, soaking her shoes and her jeans to the knees, and crawled up the muddy creek bank. Her shoulder ached with every movement and she panted from the exertion, but still the road eluded them. She needed to stop and rest, but they couldn’t afford to give their pursuers any opportunity to overtake them.
“There’s the bridge, up ahead,” Travis said, and she wanted to weep with relief.
“Are your friends waiting for us?” she asked.
“I can’t see yet.” He stopped, bent over with his hands on his knees, panting. Mud streaked his face and arms, and his pants, like hers, were wet almost to the knees. Blood matted his hair and had dried on his face, yet he was still the handsomest man she had ever known. She had been attracted to the tall, broad-shouldered Texan from the moment they met, in the halls of the San Antonio high school where she was a new student. Though they had gone their separate ways in college, they had stayed in touch, and when they both ended up living and working in Washington, DC, they had begun dating. She had been sure they had been on their way to a happily-ever-after, but Duane’s arrival in her life had changed all that.
“I’m going up to take a look,” Travis said, straightening. “When I give you the signal, come on up. And don’t try anything. I’ll have my gun on you.”
He had added that last warning to deliberately hurt her, she was sure. “I told you, I won’t try to run away,” she said.
“Yeah, well, you’ve lied to me before.”
He began climbing the bank. When he was halfway up, the roar of a powerful engine and the crunch of tires on gravel announced a vehicle’s arrival. It stopped on the bridge and car doors slammed. Travis moved faster, probably eager to greet his friends.
She saw the danger before he did, the familiar pale face with the hawk nose and the thinning dark hair combed over, dark eyes peering out from beneath heavy brows. Duane didn’t see her, focused instead on the man scaling the bank. Fear strangling her, she watched as he pulled a gun from inside his coat and took aim.
“Travis, run!” The scream ripped from her throat, and she lunged toward him as the blast of the gun shattered the woodland stillness.
Chapter Four (#ulink_88d62483-7d22-5ee2-aeb8-5d4cc8729dbd)
Leah’s scream propelled Travis to one side, so that the bullet tore through his shirt, grazing his ribs. Pain momentarily blinded him as he rolled toward the creek, landing with a splash in the icy water. More shots hit the water around him until he reached the shelter of the bridge. Plastered against the concrete piling, he waited for more gunfire or for the shooter to climb down after him.
The expected hail of bullets came, but this time the shots weren’t intended for him. The shooter had turned his attention to Leah, who huddled behind the thick-trunked juniper as the gunfire tore at the bark. The sight of her trapped that way drove Travis to act on raw instinct. He pushed himself away from the bridge piling, deliberately exposing himself to the shooter above. “Over here!” he shouted, and fired three shots in rapid succession.
When the shooter turned his attention to Travis, Leah ran. But not, as he had hoped, away from danger, but toward it. She catapulted toward him, slamming into him and driving him farther under the bridge. He wrapped his free arm around her and sheltered her between his body and the bridge piling. “Why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” he muttered.
“I told you I wouldn’t leave.” She touched his torn shirt. “You’re hit. You’re bleeding.”
He pushed her hand away. “Nothing serious.” Though he could feel blood seeping from the wound. “How many of them are there?” he asked.
“It depends if Duane left someone back at the house,” she said. “There are four altogether—Duane, Eddie and two who just arrived yesterday, Buck and Sam. I never heard their last names. But I don’t think Duane would have wanted to leave the house unguarded, so he probably left Sam there.”
“Why Sam?”
“I overheard Eddie teasing him about not being a good shot. His specialty is technology.” She glanced over her shoulder. “They’ll come down the bank in a minute,” she said.
“I’ll kill them when they do.” He readied the gun to fire.
“They’ll wait until you run out of ammunition. They won’t give up.”
A rock tumbled down from the road, gathering momentum as it rolled, landing with a splash in the water. “They’re coming down,” she said, and buried her face against his chest.
He inhaled deeply, making himself go still. He had to shove aside the fear and call on all his strength. He had no control over what Duane and his thugs did, but he was in charge of his own actions. He raised the Glock and lined up the sights on where he thought the shooter would show himself, then took another breath and let it out slowly.
The echo of the gunshot against the concrete of the bridge made his ears ring, but the sight of the shooter staggering backward let him know he had done some damage. He had no time to bask in this victory, as a second man followed the first, this one armed with a shotgun capable of gutting them both with one shot. Travis retreated farther behind the bridge support, pulling Leah with him.
“We’re going to have to run for it,” he whispered, his mouth so close he was almost kissing her ear.
She stiffened. “That’s crazy.”
“Crazy enough to work. And it’s our only chance.” Already, he could hear someone moving down the other side of the bridge. “Climb onto my back and hang on tight,” he said. “If I go down, keep running on your own, but until then, don’t let go.”
“I’ll slow you down,” she said. “Leave me here. I’m the one they want, anyway.”
He was no longer certain of her relationship to Duane, but he wasn’t going to let her go back to that killer. “You’re still my prisoner,” he said. “I’m not going to give you up to him.” He slipped the revolver from the ankle holster, then turned his back to her. “Climb on. Keep your head down.”
She jumped onto his back, her arms around his neck, her legs wrapped around his waist. The weight was awkward, but not impossible. “When I give the word, scream as loud as you can,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just do it. Scream as if you just saw the biggest, nastiest-looking spider you can imagine.” She had always been terrified of spiders.
“All right.”
The revolver in one hand, the Glock in the other, he watched the bank to his left. When a second shooter dropped into position there, Travis said, “Now!” and charged forward.
The keening wail she let loose echoed beneath the bridge, a high, sharp note that pierced his ears, but as he had hoped, the sound startled the two shooters as well. They hesitated a fraction of a second, long enough for Travis to gain the advantage. He charged toward the downstream shooter, both guns blazing. The man fell back. At the same time, the upstream man couldn’t risk firing, for fear of hitting his boss.
He stuck to the bank at the edge of the water, feet sinking deep in the gravel and mud, staggering as if fighting his way through molasses. Leah had fallen silent, her face pressed against his neck, her fingers digging into his shoulder. He turned to fire at the men, then pulled at her legs. “Can you run?” he asked.
“Yes.” She nodded, her hair falling forward to obscure her face.
“Then we’re going to run, as fast and as far as we can.”
She was swifter than he would have expected, keeping pace with him as they zigzagged through the trees. He led the way up a slope away from the creek, deeper into the area she had identified as wilderness. The shooters had run after them, but they were slower and clumsier, stopping from time to time to fire in Travis and Leah’s general direction. After what could have been a half an hour or only ten minutes, the sounds of the gunfire and their pursuers’ shouted curses faded away.
Travis risked stopping near a downed pine tree. Leah collapsed onto the fallen trunk, holding her side and gasping for breath. Several moments passed before either of them spoke. “I’ve never been so terrified in my life,” she said.
He holstered his weapon and sank down beside her. “I think we’ve lost them for now.”
She shook her head. “Maybe. But they’ll be back. They’ll hunt us down.”
“How can you be so sure?” She talked as if she knew these men so well, but how could that be, when she had only been with them a few months? He had known her for years and would have sworn he knew everything about her, and yet he had never seen her betrayal coming.
“They’re ruthless,” she said. “When Duane decides he wants something, he’ll stop at nothing to get it. He’ll steal, kill and use people every way you can imagine. He’s an expert at it.” The grief that transformed her face as she spoke made him want to pull her to him, to comfort her. But he held back.
Instead, he looked around them, at the trees crowded so close together there was scarcely room to walk. The sky showed only in scattered puzzle pieces of pale blue between the treetops. He thought the creek was somewhere to their right, but he couldn’t be sure, having lost his bearings in their frantic flight. “Do you have any idea where we are?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve never had much of a sense of direction, remember?”
He almost smiled, remembering. Her propensity for getting turned around and lost had been one of their private jokes. At the entrance to a mall department store she would address him with mock seriousness. “I’m going in, but if I don’t come out in an hour, you’ll have to come in after me.”
That particular trait of hers wasn’t so funny right now. “Let’s hope Duane and his gang don’t know where we are, either.” He stood and offered her his hand. “It’s going to be dark in a few hours. We need to find a safe place to spend the night, but before that, we need to get back to the creek. Without water, we won’t make it out here very long.”
“Then what?” she asked.
“Then we have to find our way out of here, back to civilization and a phone.” And they had to do it while avoiding the men who were out to kill them.
* * *
WITH NO WATCH or phone to consult for the time, Leah had no idea how long it took them to locate the creek. But by the time they stumbled and slid down the bank to the narrow stream, she was exhausted and thirsty enough that she was tempted to simply stretch out in the icy water and let it wash into her mouth.
But common sense—or maybe simply an overwhelming desire to stay strong enough to get out of here alive—stopped her. She grabbed hold of Travis’s arm to stop him as he knelt at the water’s edge. “We have to boil the water before we drink it,” she said.
Hair tousled, face streaked with mud and blood, he looked like a man who had survived a street brawl. “How are we supposed to do that? And why?” He looked around. “I don’t see any factories or even houses around here.”
“The water is full of giardia—a little bug that will make you very, very sick. I had it once at summer camp and I know I never want to be that ill again. If we boil the water or treat it somehow, it will kill the parasite.”
He sat back on his heels and scanned the bank around them. “There’s plenty of fuel. I don’t suppose you’ve taken up smoking since we last met?”
“No.” She scanned the area, then looked back at him. “What kind of supplies do you have on you, besides your gun and ammunition and that multi-tool you used to cut off my flex-cuff?”
He hesitated, then emptied his pockets onto the ground between them—a wallet with his ID, a few credit cards and some cash; badge; the multi-tool; and the Glock and a magazine with ten bullets, plus an empty magazine. The revolver and half a dozen bullets for it. A Mini Maglite, a small notebook and the binoculars. Her mood lifted when she spotted the Maglite. “We can use this,” she said. “Now all we need is something to boil the water in. Look around for a tin can.”
“We’re in the wilderness,” he reminded her, as he refilled his pockets.
“Trash washes downstream from other places,” she said. “And it lasts a long time in this dry climate.” Already, she was headed upstream, studying the bank.
Fifteen minutes later, she had almost given up when she spotted the soda can wedged in the roots of a wild plum growing along the banks. She crawled down and retrieved the can, then stopped to pick the few withered and spotted fruits left in the almost-leafless branches. She hurried with her finds downstream, where Travis was studying a deep pool. “There’s fish in here, if I could figure out how to catch them,” he said.
“Good idea.” She held up the soda can. “If you cut the top off of this with your multi-tool, we can use it to heat water.”
“Did you find matches, too?” he asked, taking the can.
She grinned. “I still remember a few lessons from playing around in the woods as a kid,” she said.
While he cut the top from the soda can and straightened out the dents, she gathered dry pine needles and twigs. Atop these, she added shredded paper from his notebook. Then she pulled a pack of gum from her pocket. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
“You’ll see.” She unwrapped the gum and offered him the stick. He took it and popped it into his mouth, then she carefully tore the wrapper in half lengthwise, then pinched off bits out of the middle until only a thin sliver of paper-backed foil connected the two wider halves. “Now I need the battery from the Maglite,” she said.
He unscrewed the bottom from the Maglite and shook out the battery. “I see where you’re going with this, I think,” he said. “You’re going to make a spark.”
“You got it.” Gingerly, she pressed one end of the gum wrapper, foil side down, against the negative end of the battery. “This is the tricky part,” she said. “I don’t want to get burned.” Holding her breath, she touched the other end of the foil to the positive end of the battery. Immediately the center of the foil began to brown and char, then burst into flame. She dropped the burning wrapper onto the tinder she had prepared, and it flared also. As the twigs caught, she began feeding larger pieces of wood onto it.
“Where did you learn that?” Travis asked.
“My best friend’s older brother showed us when we were kids. He accidentally set the woods behind his house on fire doing that one time, but mostly we just thought it was a neat way to start campfires. I haven’t thought of it in years.” She looked around. “I think we’re ready for the water now.”
“I’ll get it.” He returned a few minutes later, carrying the first can, along with a second. “I found this,” he said. “We can heat twice as much water.”
He nestled the water-filled cans among the flames. The metal blackened and the water began to steam. Several minutes later, it was boiling. “It needs to boil ten minutes,” she said. “We’ll have to guess how long that is.” She took one of the dried plums from her pockets. “I found these. If we cut off the bad spots, they should be okay to eat.”
“I have to have water before I can eat anything,” he said. “But we’ll try them later. I had no idea you were so resourceful in the wilderness.”
“I told you my family spent a lot of time camping when I was a kid. We lived not that far from here before we moved to Texas.”
“Where you acted like just another music-listening, mall-going city kid,” he said.
“I was a teenager. I wanted to fit in.” Most of all, she had wanted to impress him—and he had seemed so sophisticated and cool. Or at least, as sophisticated and cool as a sixteen-year-old could be. Back then, she wouldn’t have admitted to knowing how to start a campfire or forage for wild food for anything.
“Did Braeswood know you were from around here?”
She focused on the boiling water, though she could feel his gaze burning into her. No matter how she tried to explain her relationship with Duane to Travis, he would never believe her. He had made up his mind about her the day she betrayed him. She didn’t blame him for his anger, but she wasn’t going to waste her breath defending herself. “He knew,” she said. She had been shocked to discover how much Duane already knew about her when they met. But that was how he worked. He mined information the way some men mine gold or diamonds, and then he used that information to buy what he wanted.
Travis shifted and winced. Guilt rushed over her. “I forgot all about your wound,” she said. “How is it?”
“It’s no big deal.” He started to turn away, but she leaned over to touch his wrist.
“Let me look,” she said. “Now that we have water, I can at least clean it up.”
He hesitated, then lifted his shirt to show an angry red graze along the side of his ribs. Now it was her turn to wince. “That must hurt,” she said.
“I’ve felt better.”
She glanced back at the water. “Where’s that handkerchief you were using to gag me?” she asked.
He pulled it from the pocket of the cargo pants.
Carefully, she dipped one corner of the cloth into the boiling water, took it out and let it cool slightly, then began sponging at the wound. “It doesn’t look too deep,” she said. She tried not to apply too much pressure, but she felt him tense when she hit a sensitive spot. As she cleared away the blood and dirt, she became aware of the smooth, taut skin beneath her hand. He had the muscular abs and chest of a man who worked out—abs and chest she had fond memories of feeling against her own naked body.
