Dani didn’t answer. It took all her energy to haul her “body by New Orleans” up the steep incline against gravity and her own fear. Spook’s drug was wearing off. Now she could feel the dread lodged in her throat making it even harder for thin air to get into her straining lungs.
She was alone in the mountains with the ultimate Jekyl and Hyde. As they climbed, Spook smiled and talked, helped her when she slipped on the rough, loose surface, his quick reflexes keeping her from taking a nasty tumble more than once. He pointed out landmarks, identified flora and fauna and told her how glad he was to be with her. None of it made her forget he had just cut a man’s throat as easily as she sliced bread.
There were rocks aplenty and she considered using one on the back of his head. Two things stopped her. She could barely lift herself, let alone a rock. If she missed, the nature of their interaction might change in a way she would like less than his devotion. Even if she did rally her resources to the task, she had a feeling that Spook wouldn’t be easy to take by surprise. Peg was trained to take on killers. Peg had the drop on him at the safe house. Peg was dead.
Even if she did manage to knock him out, they were in the middle of nowhere. Instead of being alone in the wilderness with a Loony Toon, she would be alone in the wilderness. The only thing she knew how to do in the wilderness was roll down a ninety-degree hill.
Dani didn’t look back as she climbed. She didn’t dare. Fear was only a motivator if living looked better than dying. Right now life and death were in a dead heat—no pun intended. After several more yards of crawling and slipping and pulling herself up using scrubby bushes that scratched her hands raw, death started to pull ahead. If the incline hadn’t leveled abruptly, death would have won the prize. She rolled over onto her back, her chest heaving with the double whammy of gravity and thin air.
“Was that great or what?” Spook, barely winded by the climb, sat by her grinning like the village idiot.
“Or what,” Dani said. It had been about as fun as a fun run, an oxymoron if she had ever heard one, with heavy emphasis on the moron part.
He shed his pack and jumped up. “We can see the parking lot from that outcrop.” He took her hand and pulled her up, then led her over and pointed down to the parking lot below. His truck looked like a Matchbox toy, an improvement since it kept her from seeing the dead guy in the back.
“It’s almost time. I wish we could be closer. It’s not the same when you can’t feel the heat, when you can’t see the blood sizzle as fire licks it up. But I promise you, next time you can experience it all.”
Next time? Maybe she should just do a nose dive off this outcrop and end it now. Even better if he did the nose dive. She took a cautious look. Darn, it only looked high enough to piss him off.
“Here,” he handed her binoculars, “you watch. I’ve seen it before.”
It took her a minute to adjust the focus and find the truck, but her timing was perfect. She didn’t know how he managed it, but the fire started on the man’s chest. Looked like it burst right out of his heart, flowing across his body in both directions. In the time it took for her to take several unsteady breaths, the whole truck was ablaze, sending black smoke to paint doom across the blue sky.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Spook whispered, his mouth close to her ear. Dani studied the dark column for a moment longer then lowered the glasses.
“I need to pee again.” Spook’s eyes looked the way her dad’s used to when she said that. She shrugged. “Hey, it’s a scientific reality that a woman’s bladder is smaller than a guy’s.”
He sighed. “This could take longer than I planned.” He bent and dug a roll of toilet paper out of a pack. “Hurry.”
She fingered the paper. How did she know he was the type to use the sandpaper variety? “I’ll squeeze as fast as I can.”
When she got back, Spook was fitting a tiny microphone in his ear. The wire from it followed his neck down, then disappeared inside his jacket.
“What’s that?” she asked, suddenly uneasy.
“A scanner. So I can listen in when the Feds talk on their radios. So we’ll know what they’re doing.”
“Oh.” Dani swallowed, but the tiny bit of spit she managed to suck off the sides of her mouth turned to dust before disappearing in the hollow pit of her stomach.
* * * *
Matt, his face wiped clean of expression, stood watching water flood over the burning truck. The fire had been spotted when the smoke topped the trees. They got there before the gas tank could blow. When the flames died away, Henry and a couple of forest service firefighters moved in.
“Nothing in the front,” one man called. Matt saw Henry ignore a warning from a firefighter and jump on the tailgate. He looked at Matt over a sea of heads. “We got a body.”
Alice rubbed a smoke-smudged cheek with the back of her flawlessly manicured hand, her shoulders slumping. “I thought—”
“I want a sweep of this area.” Matt shoved his hands into his pockets, the fingers clenched so tight his shoulders ached. “He can’t be that far. Even if he used some kind of timer, he didn’t have that much time to play with. And let’s keep radio traffic to a minimum. The guy was a Spook. Assume he got a scanning device with him.”
Did this feel wrong, or did he just want it to feel wrong because he didn’t want to accept the fact that Dani was dead? Just because he found Dani hard to resist, didn’t mean Hayes would risk life and business for her. Didn’t mean he would choose her over his reputation for always finishing a job. Logic said that Hayes would move to reestablish his reputation. Others would be happy to buy his killing skills in the absence of Bates.
“Somebody lost their breakfast over here,” Luke said, looking at the other side of a big boulder. “I wonder if someone came on this before the fire?”
With a frown, Matt went to look. “Sign said it was closed and no hiking trails head in here.”
Riggs slouched over to join them. “Yuck.”
Matt crouched down. Yuck was right. It also showed signs of everything he had fed Dani for breakfast a few hours ago. It didn’t mean it wasn’t her body in the truck. Lots of people probably had a country breakfast this morning. Or she could have lost her cookies before Hayes killed her. Hayes had to have drugged her to get her out of the cabin so quick and quiet. It was his MO. That would make her sick.
It all came down to the timing.
He stood up. “Give me your binoculars, Riggs.”
He ignored the look Luke and Riggs exchanged when he took the glasses and started scanning the hillside. A guy who liked blood, who liked fire, wouldn’t like to miss the finale. If he had wanted to watch from a safe distance he’d choose…that outcrop up there. He lowered the glasses and asked the ranger, “You got a tracker?”
“I got a man who’s pretty good.”
“Get him here. Have him see if he can find a trail to that outcrop up there. And don’t say why on the radio. Just assume everything you say is being listened to, okay?”
“Okay.” He turned away. Luke looked at Matt.
“Why would he head up there? He’d be ridged against the mountains. Not a smart move when he must know half the state will be looking for him.”
“It doesn’t seem smart, does it?” Matt started to turn away, then stopped and reapplied the glasses to his eyes. What had caught his attention? There. What—white, something white wrapped around a tree limb. He frowned, handed the glasses to his brother. “Look at the piece of white at nine o’clock from the ridge. Tell me what you think it is.”
Luke did as he was asked, then lowered the glasses, his frown a mirror to Matt’s. “It looks like toilet paper. Tied into a bow.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And the significance would be…”
“Not sure.” He spun around. “How long until our tracker gets here?”
The ranger looked up. “ETA in fifteen. He’s coming in on a chopper.”
“Good.” He could wait fifteen minutes. He can fee
l me, Dani had said. Matt quit fighting his feeling she was alive. Instead he closed his eyes and took out the logic and the reasons why it couldn’t be so. Dani, are you out there?
He didn’t feel any different. No warm rush. No voice in his head. Just a certainty deep in his gut telling him she still lived and breathed and was counting on him to find her.
* * * *
“I’ve got to rest.” Dani stopped on the trail and bent over, resting her hands on her knees as she labored for more air. They had kept a steady pace in the hours since leaving the ridge, a pace he had only interrupted once when a helicopter flew over. If the stretch was particularly steep, he had let her stop and catch her breath, not easy to do in thin air. He never let her sit down. He said she would stiffen up if she sat down. What he didn’t seem to get was that she had never been loose. Stiff was her way, her reality. She wasn’t Amazon woman. She was a romance writer. Sitting down was what she did best. Sometime during their hike the effects of the drug, with an ironic sense of timing, had worn away, leaving her in full possession of her senses and with all her nervous pain centers functioning. Didn’t have to be a scientist to know there were a ton of the little suckers, all clamoring loudly. She glared at Spook’s back.
“I have to stop. Now.”
Spook spun around, impatience flaring. She was going to have to do better than this if they were to make it. Then he saw her swaying with exhaustion, her face drawn and pale in the waning light. If only they had more time. If only the world would leave them alone to do what had to be done. It wouldn’t. He smiled at her.
“I keep forgetting you’re not used to hiking.”
“That’s why I keep reminding you.”
He looked at his watch, then their surroundings. “The Feds don’t have a clue where we are. I think we can take a short break.” He added encouragingly, “Then it’s only about five miles until we stop for the night.”
Dani didn’t feel encouraged or wait for him to tell her she couldn’t sit down. With the sun almost behind the mountains, it was getting cold, not that she had felt warm since getting snatched by Spook, even when sweating buckets from the climb. Her middle felt as hollow as a politician’s promises. Matt’s breakfast may have sat heavily on her stomach, but at least it had sat. Now there was nothing but acid churning away in there, keeping the nasty taste going in her mouth. The up side was, she would soon be able to take him out with her bad breath. He still had the ear piece in, but hadn’t told her what, if anything, he had heard.
“So, did the Feds fall for your decoy?”
“Looks good so far. Even if they figure out you’re not dead, they won’t figure on us heading into the mountains.”
He dropped his pack, knelt and opened the top.
“I suppose not.” So Matt hadn’t found her bow. What did she expect? She wrote romance, not mystery. They would be looking in all the wrong places for Spook, leaving her on her own in this unnatural environment with Mr. Over-the-top Mountain Man. Great.
“You look cold.” He tossed her a jacket. “And I’ll bet you’re hungry and thirsty. I wasn’t going to eat until we got to Eugenia Mine, but there’s time for a snack.”
Dani wrapped the coat around. “I don’t suppose you’ve got M&M’s in there?”
“I have something better.”
Better than M&M’s? Maybe he wasn’t such a bad killer after all.
He pulled out a foil packet and tossed it to her. Her hands shook as ripped it open and dumped the contents into her waiting palm. “Trail mix?”
“You’d rather have a power bar?” He held out a water bottle.
“No.” Dani stared at the emaciated bits of fruit. How like a man. When he’s courting, he promises you chocolate chip cookies and the moon, but once he thinks he has you, its trail mix and hauling ass up a mountain. “How—healthy.”
Spook grinned. “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, Willow. But chocolate and caffeine only give you temporary energy. You need real energy if you’re going to make this climb.”
Still hadn’t gotten that motivation thing down. It reminded her of a movie she’d watched with Kelly where a whacked out terrorist kept trying to influence the hero by blowing up her own relatives. “Please tell me you’ll have some nice, unhealthy energy food waiting for us at your cabin?”
He frowned. “My cabin? I don’t have a cabin.”
Dani had a bad feeling about this. “But…where will we stay tonight?”
“I told you. We’re camping at Eugenia Mine.” He stood up. “We should get moving again.”
Dani got up, aware that Spook was right about one thing. It was possible for her body to get stiffer. “Define camp.”
His pale brows arched. “Surely you’ve gone camping?”
“Surely I haven’t. New Orleans. Swamp. Alligators. Snakes. Mosquitoes. Why would I camp?”
He chuckled. “Okay, what about the characters in your books? Don’t they ever camp?”
Dani crossed her arms over her chest. He may be amused. She wasn’t. “My imagination isn’t that good.”
“Well, then think of it as copy.” He took her arm. “Let’s move out.”
Dani dug in her heels. “This camping thing. Does this mean if I have to pee…”
“You find a tree.”
“But it’s dark. And there’s already a moon.”
He sighed. By the time they got up Long’s Peak, she will have fertilized half the vegetation. “Is this your way of telling me you need to go again?”
She took the roll he held out and began gingerly edging her way through the underbrush, trying not to hear the rustling the preceded her. “I don’t suppose any of these trees have a shower?”
Spook laughed, like she was making a joke. The joke would be on him if she bolted. She would have, if she could figure out where to bolt to. There was only one bright spot, aside from her bare butt mooning the wildlife. Kelly wasn’t here to see her reduced to penis envy.
* * * *
Sorely in need of some fresh air, Matt stepped outside the ranger station they were using as their command center, searching the sky for signs of a dawn that couldn’t come fast enough. Now that he was alone, he let himself feel the relief of knowing his gut was right. Dani wasn’t dead. The tracker had found their trail, with its two sets of footprints, heading straight up the hillside to the outcrop. One set matched the shoes Dani had been wearing. That same set had been easy to follow from the outcrop to the toilet paper bow. In the dirt under the tree, he had also found a simple drawing of mountains and arrow pointing toward them. At that point, the shadows were too long for the guy to keep on the trail. The risk was too high he would miss any other markers she might leave in the dark. He would be starting again at first light.
The area had been sealed as good as a mountain range could be sealed. Matt, Luke and the team had withdrawn to their command center and spent the next few hours bouncing theories off each other about what Hayes might be up.
“It’s possible he has back up transport stashed somewhere inside the Park,” Luke had suggested. “But it doesn’t make sense. He should have gone for the quick getaway. Instead, he’s boxed himself in. Let’s face it, Dani will only slow him down. Unless he’s figuring on them doing a Rocky Mountain version of Tarzan and Jane?”
Matt cut off thoughts like that before they formed. He had to. It made him want to rip up the countryside to think of Dani in the control of that whacko. Hayes had a goal that only he could see. Dani had tried to tip them off about what it was, but it was obvious she had been interrupted or wasn’t entirely sure what it involved. He almost grinned, thinking about her tying that bow to the tree. She was keeping her head, keeping her cool. If there was a way to leave other clues, she would find it.
“He has to have transport laid on. Hayes doesn’t go any place without a way out. He torched the truck to slow us down, convince us Dani was dead. Had to know that at the most, it would buy him twenty-four hours, probably less. Best case scenario, traveling at 4 mile
s per hour on foot, where would that put them?” Matt asked.
“This isn’t best case,” the ranger put in. “The terrain is rough, not easy even when you’re heading downhill.”
“Let’s work with best case anyway. I don’t want them to slip through because we didn’t figure wide enough.” Matt looked at his watch. “It’s midnight now. First light is around 5:30. We’re looking at a radius of about 100 miles fanning out from where he torched the truck. I want to know every highway, road, foot or mule track in that area. Every possible route they could take, no matter how far-fetched. And then we’ll need men available to cover them.”
“What about some guys to leap tall buildings and out run locomotives?” Alice had asked, wryly.
Matt had looked up, a grin firmly under wraps. It would only encourage her. “If they’ve got ’em, let’s get ’em out there.”
TWENTY-SIX
Spook woke Dani just after midnight. It was the first time in a long time she didn’t want to leave her dreams.
“Why?” It came out half whine, half wail. “I’ve only been asleep for two hours.”
“It’s taking us longer than I planned on and we have to be on top by noon at the latest.”
“I’ll bet the sunset is lovely up there.”
“Have you ever been in a thunderstorm on a mountain top?”
She lowered her brows. “I’ve never been on a mountain top, period.”
“Well, you sure don’t want to be on one in a storm. Lightning is a bitch.” He handed her a wet wipe. “Use this to wash. We’ll have to start being careful with our water from here on out.”
Dani looked at the wipe. It was smaller than the sheet gynecologists’ nurses handed out. She sat up and washed until the scrap went dry, then crawled out, shivering as the chill air hit the few inches of damp skin.
It was at this point she realized that not only had she been seized by a crazed killer who claimed to be in love with her and was forcing her climb up a fourteen thousand foot mountain into a possible lightning storm, but he was making her do it without her Diet Dr. Pepper.
The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy Page 27
