Bait (44 page)

“What?” Sam was leaning over as he looked at her, his hands on his thighs, gasping for breath.

Okay, so maybe she wasn't any feather. But she wasn't all
that
heavy.

“Are you all right?”

“Just ... winded.”

“You don't have to carry me any farther. I can walk.”

His eyes slid over her skeptically. “Looks like it.”

“I can. Just give me a minute.”

“That's about all we have: a minute.” His nose was still bleeding, but only a trickle now, and he must have felt it because he dashed it away with the back of his hand. His face was liberally smeared with blood. His shirt was splotched with it, ugly dark flowers against a white background.

“They're chasing us, right?” Maddie felt a clutch of fear. Not a really strong clutch, because she was now so battered and sore and shell-shocked that her sensory processing center was about out of room. But a clutch nonetheless.

“By now? Oh, yeah. But I don't think they saw us go off the road. At least, I saw their cars shoot past as I was dragging you out of the truck. But it wouldn't take them long to figure out we weren't ahead of them, and then they'll back-track. We have to assume that by now they've found the truck.” His voice was grim.

Fear elbowed everything else out of the way and made itself some room.

“So what happened? It felt like we got rear-ended, but when I glanced back, there wasn't anything there.”

“I think they shot out a tire. Whoever was in the yellow car. That's what it felt like, anyway.” He straightened, took a deep breath, and leaned against a tree.

Maddie grimaced. The reality of the situation was starting to set in again. They were, it seemed clear, still somewhere in Missouri—at a guess, not that far from St. Louis. But from the quick look around that she'd gotten as they'd driven away from the house, they were on one of the many small mountains that ridged the countryside west of the city. It was a sparsely settled area, and she hadn't seen any other houses or buildings. Though, admittedly, she'd had only a brief glimpse.

On a positive note—the only time in her life that she had ever considered this a positive note, come to think of it—she was with an FBI agent. A highly trained, highly skilled, highly competent law-enforcement professional who would certainly know what to do in a situation like this.

“Okay, Mr. Special Agent, so what's the plan?”

He laughed. The sound was short, unamused. “We walk. We hide. We try to stay alive.”

“Well, shoot,
I
could've come up with that,” she said, disappointed.

“They took my gun, they took my cell phone. We got no wheels. Sorry, darlin', but that kind of leaves us fresh out of options.”

That drawled
darlin'
did something to her insides. Her stomach went all fluttery and her heart skipped a beat. For the briefest of moments, she simply looked at him and remembered that this time last night, they'd been falling in love.

“Maddie ...” He must have seen something of what she was feeling in her eyes, or felt something of the same himself, because his voice was suddenly low and deep, achingly intimate. Then his face hardened abruptly, and his voice went flat. “Leslie, I mean. I take it that you know what that was all about back there?”

Suddenly her past and the rift it had created between them hung in the air, as tangible as the scent of pine.

Her heart ached, and the taste of regret for what they'd had and lost was bitter on her tongue. But there was no changing what was, and now that the truth was out in the open, she was not going to shrink from it. She'd lost everything else. Pride was just about all she had left.

“Maddie works. I left Leslie behind a long time ago.”

“Maddie, then.” It was dark under the trees now, she realized, because she could no longer read what was in his eyes. “So?”

She realized that he was prompting her to answer his question.

“They're Mob,” she said. “The guy who's been trying to kill me, who killed Carol Walter and all those other people—I'm pretty sure he's a professional hit man.”

“Yeah.” Sam didn't sound as though that was some big news flash. “Either of those guys back there, you think?”

Maddie shook her head. “I don't know. I don't think so. The man who was in my hotel room—they didn't seem to fit with what I remembered. But the guy in the doorway—the third guy—maybe. He looked about the right size and everything but, like I told you before, I didn't see the guy who attacked me.”

“Okay. I heard you say something about some plastics company—and a strongbox full of evidence?”

Maddie sighed. “A-One Plastics is one of the names they use as a front in Baltimore. When I realized that they'd found me—that would be when I was attacked in New Orleans—I called them up and made some threats about some stuff my dad, who used to do some jobs for them, kept in case he ever had to use it as leverage. The thing is, I left the strongbox behind when I left Baltimore, but they don't know that. I thought maybe I could get them to back off.”

“You called them up?” There was a curious note in his voice. He was watching her closely, but she couldn't read anything in his expression.

Her chin came up. “Yeah. If you want their number, I'll give it to you when—if—we get home.”

“I definitely want their number.” She could see him frowning. “You
made threats
to the Mob?”

“I didn't know what else to do. I thought about running, but I figured if they found me once, they could do it again. Especially now that they know I'm alive.”

A beat passed.

“You ever think about telling
me
? I was right there. Convenient.”

The hint of sarcasm in his voice stung.

“I thought you'd probably react just exactly the way you're reacting.”

“How the hell else am I supposed to react? You ...”

But she'd stopped listening. Zelda's head had come up. The little dog was looking at something back in the direction from which they'd come, and Maddie, following her gaze, caught her breath. At first glance she'd thought the bobbing yellow spheres in the distance were lightning bugs, so tiny were they. But then they'd grown a little larger, and she'd recognized them for what they were: flashlights. Distant, but headed their way.

She felt an icy thrust of pure terror.

“Sam ...” she breathed, pointing.

He looked, stiffened, turned back to her. “Shit. Let's go.”

Then he reached down to grab her elbows, and she let him pull her up.

“Give me the damned leash. Why the hell you didn't leave her—too late now. If they find her, they'll know which way we came.”

Maddie had been holding on to Zelda's leash for dear life since she'd seen the flashlights—Zelda was a dog, after all; counting on her continued good sense could be a bad thing—but she handed it over without protest. She felt shaky, weak, ill. Her head hurt, her finger throbbed. Her thigh ached where Lunkhead had kicked her.

Her heart hurt, too. It felt bruised and battered and sore just like the rest of her. Because despite everything, she'd discovered, to her dismay, she was still in love with Sam.

And, considering who he was and who she was, that was a bad thing.

“No,” she said, shaking her head when he made a move to swing her back over his shoulder again. “I can make it on my own.”

“Fine.” There was a clipped quality to his voice. “Come on, then.”

Grabbing her uninjured hand, Sam took off through the trees at a steady jog. Gritting her teeth and calling on reserves of determination she'd forgotten she had, Maddie managed to stay with him. Zelda scuttled along silently beside them, seeming to realize their danger. They ran at a right angle to the path the flashlights seemed to be taking, and after a while they couldn't see them anymore. The woods were so dark now that the trees were no more than grayish blurs as they flashed by. The insect chorus grew louder. An owl hooted. Here and there the eyes of a nocturnal animal glowed at them. Ordinarily, Maddie would have shivered at the thought of the creatures that might be roaming the woods, but tonight she was just too darned tired, and, anyway, nothing was as scary as the two-legged predators on their trail. The pine needles were cool and slippery underfoot, and would have made a decent running surface if it hadn't been for the things hidden beneath them. Having lost her shoes, Maddie had no protection from the roots and rocks and pinecones and other mushy things she preferred not to even think about, with which the ground was littered. They found a creek and ran parallel to it, turning downhill. Head pounding, stomach churning, her knees feeling like they might give out at any second, Maddie concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. And ran. And ran. And ran.

Until, finally, she stopped.

“That's it,” she said, wheezing and bending double, brought low by a stitch in her side. Sam had stopped, too—she'd pulled her hand from his—and loomed over her, Zelda now tucked like a football beneath his arm.

“Okay, I think we can walk now.”

At least he had the decency to be breathing hard. She would have felt better about that, except she could scarcely breathe at all.

“No. No walk.”

“Just a little farther.”

“No.”

“So I'll carry you.”

“Just as far as the rocks up there. See them?”

Maddie looked up. Maybe it was just her, because her head was pounding so hard that it was making her eyes all blurry, but all she saw was a whole lot of dark.

“I don't want to scare you, but they may be looking for us with night-vision goggles by now. I was getting ready to stop because of that anyway, but we need to find some shelter so they can't see us if they scan this patch of trees.”

She straightened, both hands on her hips as she sucked in air, and narrowed her eyes at him. He was no more than a big charcoal-gray silhouette in the dark.

“Fine,” she said.

She thought he grinned, but her eyes were too blurry and it was too dark to be sure. Anyway, she didn't care. All she wanted to do was rest.

Which she eventually got to do, after scrambling over a lot of big rocks and edging around what felt like a wall of solid stone cliffs that rose straight up from the creek bed and, finally, collapsing in the squishy depression carved out of the bottom of yet another cliff that he deemed safe.

TWENTY-FOUR

Wednesday, August 20

 

 

The ground was covered with pine needles. Whatever was beneath the needles was spongy, soft. Maddie preferred to think that it was grass. Or moss. Yes, moss. Velvety green moss as thick as a mattress.

And if it wasn't moss, she didn't want to know.

She flopped down on her back, closed her eyes, and breathed. The scent of pine combined with a tinge of earthy dampness from the
moss
filled her nostrils. The pine needles slithered beneath her outstretched arms. After a moment, she opened her eyes, inhaled, and found herself looking up into a whole heaven's worth of stars. They were sprinkled like glitter across the satin midnight sky, twinkling down at her. The moon wasn't visible—what she was seeing was basically a cutout circle of sky framed by jagged-edged cliffs—but it wasn't needed. The universe wheeled above her, perfect and whole.

“Sam,” she breathed, forgetting that they had issues in her eagerness to share the vision overhead.

No answer. She cut her eyes around their little hideaway, which basically looked like a giant had taken a bite out of the base of a rocky cliff. No Sam. Groaning, she sat up and took a better look around. The space wasn't that big, a semicircle maybe ten feet deep by eight feet wide at its widest point. Certainly not big enough to conceal a full-grown man, even in the dark.

Maddie looked carefully around at the rock walls one more time, and reached the inescapable conclusion: Sam was not there. Neither, now that she thought about it, was Zelda.

Panic was starting to feel like her natural state.

Clambering to her feet, she took a couple steps forward and stopped. What was she going to do? Hunting around a dark forest populated by night-vision-goggle-wearing mobsters who wanted to do her harm was clearly not a good idea. Likewise, yelling was out.

Sam came around the edge of the opening just then, making Maddie jump. He was carrying a small bundle under one arm, and Zelda trailed him wearily.

“You scared the life out of me,” she said through her teeth. The fact that she was whispering did not in any way take away from the vehemence of her tone. “Where did you go?”

“I backtracked a little. I thought that was an old campsite we passed back there, and sure enough, it was. Look, we hit the mother lode. A blanket”—he held up a tattered scrap of cloth about the size of a beach towel—“and a jacket”—it looked like a man's long-abandoned windbreaker, and Maddie thought that she'd have to be naked in Siberia before she wore it—“and a can. I even filled it at the creek and brought you back some water. You've got blood on your face, and I thought you might want to wash it off before you start attracting bears. They're drawn to the smell of blood, you know.”

Maddie's eyes widened as she took what looked and felt like a battered tin can out of his hand. “You're kidding.”

With the sky open above them, there was just enough light to see him smile.

“Maybe about the bears. Not about the blood on your face. You've got a tiny little cut just ... here.” He reached out a forefinger to feather a touch across her cheekbone just below her eye, almost exactly as he'd done once before.