Bait (48 page)

“Marino, they're to your left,” a man's voice yelled. Maddie had just registered that his voice sounded fairly distant and that he was somewhere behind them and to the right when there was another sharp
craaak.

A shower of pine needles rained over them. Maddie realized that once again their bullet had been heart-stoppingly close.

“Jesus,” Sam said, and there was something in his voice that scared Maddie almost more than the bullets.

The charcoal silhouette of a man stepped out of the mist not thirty feet in front of them, a rifle at his shoulder pointed straight at them.

“Freeze!” he yelled.

“Keep going.”
Sam let go of her hand and pushed her hard to her right so that there was a little stand of trees between her and the shooter. Then, to her horror, he ran straight for the man, crouching low, barreling headlong through the trees. He'd made the choice for her. She could only go for it. Heart slamming, stomach churning, gasping for air and trying to watch Sam at the same time, she ran for her life.

“Over here, they're over here!” someone cried. That voice came from the right, too, and sounded closer than the first.

Craaak.
The mouth of the rifle Sam was running toward blazed yellow through the fog. To her horror, Maddie realized that she could no longer see Sam.

Oh, God, is he hit?
Maddie's heart gave a terrified lurch and her stomach dropped clear to her toes. There was no way to know, and nothing she could do. Except run. And pray.

Pulse pounding, sobbing for breath, running for her life, she heard what sounded like thudding footsteps nearby, but she couldn't be sure; it might have been the beating of her pulse against her eardrums, and the mist was so dense she couldn't see—and then another man stepped out of the trees directly ahead of her, so close that she almost smacked into him.

He lunged toward Maddie, and she screamed.

“Got her,” he yelled as he grabbed her, catching her by her hair as she tried to dodge and yanking her back against him. With a single terrified glance she saw that it was Fish and that he had a rifle in his other hand. It was pointed toward the ground as he struggled with her. Heart hammering, breath rattling in her throat as though she was dying, she realized that this was her chance, maybe her only chance, to escape. Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, she whirled in his grip and slugged him in the nose as hard as she could.

She felt the impact all the way up her arm to her shoulder. The sound made her think of a melon hitting the floor and splitting open.

Fish howled and she tore free, leaving strands of hair behind in his fist. Almost falling to her knees, she recovered and scrambled away.

“Where? Where are they?” The cry, from multiple voices, echoed through the trees. As panicked as she was, Maddie thought that they came from all around her, everywhere. All she could see was mist and trees. All she could hear, besides the dying echo of the voices, was the frantic thudding of her own heart.

A flying tackle brought her down. It hit her in the small of the back, knocked the breath out of her, knocked her off her feet. She slammed to the ground, then skidded face-forward through the mulch on the forest floor. With a burst of stomach-twisting terror, she realized that it was Fish who was on top of her. She struggled wildly, her nails digging into the ground as she tried to fight her way free.

“You're dead now, bitch,” Fish howled, straddling her, and slammed his fist hard into the back of her head. Maddie gasped and saw stars.

“Don't you fucking move,” Sam said, in a deadly voice unlike anything Maddie had ever heard come out of his mouth. “Go on, give me an excuse to blow your head off. I want to.”

For a moment she thought that she must be hallucinating, that the blow was causing her mind to play tricks on her, but Fish, though he still straddled her, went as still as if he'd been turned to stone.

“Get your hands in the air,” Sam ordered, and Maddie felt Fish move and guessed that he had obeyed.

Shaking, breathing like she had been running for miles, she dared a glance around then and saw that her mind hadn't been playing tricks on her, that it was Sam who was standing not six feet away, mist swirling waist-deep around him, stalking closer with a rifle against his shoulder that was pointed at Fish's head. She felt a wave of thankfulness stronger than anything she had ever known because he was still alive, and a fresh wave of terror, too. Just because he was alive this minute didn't mean that in the next he might not be dead.

He'd come back for her. He'd saved her life by pushing her away from the shooter, then gone after him and wrested a rifle away from him and come back to save her again....

And then she heard it, echoing through the forest like multiple blasts from a chorus of synchronized bugles.

“Federal Agents! Drop your weapons! Don't anybody move!”

The cavalry had arrived. They were saved.

She went limp with relief, letting her head fall back down to rest against the cool, damp mulch, breathing hard, heart still pounding as her body tried to absorb the news that the danger had passed.

“Get off her,” Sam said to Fish, still in that deadly voice. “Maddie, are you okay?”

“Fine,” she said, which was the truth because “fine” meant that she was alive and he was alive and it was all over and they would both live to see another day. Fish got off her, moving slowly and carefully, and she rolled onto her side, watching as Sam spread-eagled Fish against a tree and started patting him down. The rifle that Fish had apparently dropped when he dived after her now rested against a tree near Sam's side.

“McCabe! Maddie!” It was Wynne's voice, echoing out of the mist.

“Over here,” Sam yelled while Maddie slowly, carefully sat up.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine.” He grinned at her over his shoulder, faintly breathless, and Maddie felt her chest slowly expand, as if she could breathe again. It was over.

“Thank God,” she said. “We're alive. We made it.”

“You sound like you had doubts.”

“Maybe just a few.”

Sam grinned at her again. “Just for the record, me, too.” He took something from Fish and stepped back, then, as Fish made a restive movement, Sam said to him in an entirely different tone, “You want to live, you don't move unless I tell you to move.”

It was growing lighter under the trees now, and she could see that he was looking cheerful and pleased with himself and more lighthearted than she had ever seen him. Her heart gave a little lurch. It was over and they were both alive and she loved him. That was what was important. Actually, that was all that mattered.

But now the truth was out. She was going to have to deal with that.

There was general commotion in the surrounding area, voices and thuds and the clink of metal, the sound of many people moving through the trees.

Then Wynne materialized out of the mist.

“What took you?” Sam said to him, his eyes and the rifle still on Fish.

“Think finding this place was easy?” Wynne's eyes moved over Fish, then slid down to Maddie before returning to Sam. “You can thank Cynthia that we got here at all.”

“Cynthia?” McCabe cast Wynne a sideways glance and then shouted for somebody to come and take Fish away. “What did
Cynthia
do?”

“I saved your ass, McCabe, that's what I did,” Cynthia said, appearing through the mist along with another man whom Maddie didn't know but who was apparently another law-enforcement type, because he slapped cuffs on Fish and hustled him off.

Sam reached a hand down to Maddie, and she let him pull her to her feet. Wynne, meanwhile, was looking at Cynthia like a proud parent might look at a precocious child.

“Cynthia checked Maddie's ... I mean, uh, Leslie Dolan's”—this was accompanied by a quick, almost covert glance at Maddie, who was by then leaning against Sam's side—“cell-phone records, and found that she'd placed a whole bunch of calls to a plastics company in Baltimore over the last few days. Turned out it was a front for a Mob operation, and our guys at that end had been investigating them anyway. With what we told them, they had enough to run 'em in, and then they leaned on them until they gave up Evergreen Waste and Disposal right back here in St. Louis. Seems the Baltimore group had asked the St. Louis group for a favor, and the St. Louis group had agreed to do it.”

“What kind of favor?” Sam growled. They were walking by that time, slowly, the four of them, moving through the mist toward the voices of the other law-enforcement agents and the sounds that accompanied a gang of thugs being rounded up and placed under arrest. Sam was holding the rifle in one hand and had the other arm wrapped around Maddie's waist. Weak-kneed and a little shaky as reaction set in, she had an arm around him, too, and was leaning against him as they moved. Wynne and Gardner walked together on her other side, and kept shooting her little sideways glances. Maddie was too drained to care.

“Well, first they wanted, uh,
her
killed—best we can figure it, that's when she got shot in her car—and then they changed that to kidnapped and forced to hand over some evidence she's apparently been trying to blackmail them with and
then
killed. The guy sneaking up her back stairs and yesterday's snatch by the garbage truck were apparently part of the kidnapping plan.”

“What about the Carol Walter murder? And the others? We got a handle on the guy who did that, the one who attacked Maddie in her hotel room?” Sam's tone was urgent. Maddie remembered that another victim had already been designated, and shivered.

Gardner shook her head. “Nobody's jumped out at us in regards to that yet,” she said regretfully. “But then, we haven't been talking to them long.”

“Okay.” Sam's tone was absent, as if he was thinking about something. “We need to keep after it. So what happened when you zeroed in on our friendly neighborhood garbage company?”

“They folded.” Wynne grinned reminiscently. “Once they knew we were on to them, nobody at Evergreen wanted anything to do with the murder of a federal agent. They couldn't tell us where they'd taken you fast enough. Then, of course, we got out to that house where you'd been held—that was about an hour ago—and nobody was there. But we found Maddie's—
uh, er ...
”

“Maddie works,” Sam said as Wynne hesitated over the name again. “I'll tell you the whole story later. But she's not a criminal.”

“Good to know.” Wynne shot Maddie a slightly less uneasy look.

“Yeah,” Cynthia said, giving Maddie a little smile. “We like her. And looks like McCabe
loooves
her.”

“Shut up, Gardner,” Sam said good-naturedly, and the arm around Maddie tightened fractionally.

“I like you, too,” Maddie said to Gardner and Wynne.

Sam made an impatient sound. “Go on, Wynne. You found Maddie's ...?”

“Her jacket. And her vest. Kind of scared us, to tell you the truth. She'd been there—and we were pretty sure you were with her—but when we got there, she wasn't. That kind of thing is enough to give you cold chills.”

“He was picturing you guys buried out in a field somewhere,” Gardner said. “But then we found the wrecked truck, and that gave us something to go on. After that it was easy. A couple of helicopters, a few dozen heat-seeking devices”—Sam smirked at Maddie here—“half the law-enforcement officers in Missouri, and the thing was done.”

“Of course, it helped a lot that they were shooting at you there at the end,” Wynne added. “Made you kind of hard to miss.”

“Yeah.” Sam grinned. “I bet it did.”

The mist was starting to thin now, and Maddie could see the man walking toward them quite clearly. It was Gomez. And at his feet trailed Zelda.

“Lose something?” Gomez called as he got closer.

“Zelda,” Maddie said thankfully, accepting the proffered leash. She was ashamed to realize that she had forgotten about the little dog in the last few hectic minutes.

“You can have french fries when we get home,” she told Zelda, who gave a feeble wag of her tail as if in acknowledgment.

“You guys didn't walk all the way here from the truck, did you?” Sam asked as Gomez fell in beside them.

“If you'd kept on going the way you were going, you would have hit a road in about another quarter-mile,” Wynne said. “That's where we're parked. You almost ran right into us.”

“Way to conduct an investigation,” Sam said and grinned.

Sure enough, in another few minutes they emerged from the piney woods onto the narrow blacktop road that curled around the mountain. The sun was rising directly ahead of them now, painting the horizon in bold shapes of purple and red and gold. A fleet of marked police cruisers, unmarked cars, paddy wagons, and an ambulance were parked partly off the road, strobe lights flashing. Uniformed cops and plainclothes law-enforcement officers of various stripes herded miscreants into the backs of various vehicles. It looked like a cast of hundreds. Probably, Maddie thought, it was a little less.

Given the number of head blows she'd suffered, Sam insisted that she go to the hospital to be checked out, and Maddie didn't feel like arguing, so she agreed. She had half feared being arrested by him or someone else as soon as they were out of danger, but it didn't happen, and she started to relax a little. With Wynne driving, Gardner riding shotgun, and Zelda, pacified by a pit stop through a McDonald's drive-through, on her lap, Sam rode with her back to St. Louis, which was about half an hour away. On the way, he gave Wynne and Gardner the abbreviated version of Maddie's story, and told her that he was fairly certain that, given the circumstances, he could talk to the district attorney's office in Baltimore and get the charges dismissed. That left Maddie feeling a whole lot better than she had in a long time.