“That guy thought he was such hot shit. Had a TV show and that somehow made him important. What about the people who do this all day every day? He gets all the glory for smiling at a camera while real outdoorsmen actually do what he only claims to.”
It didn’t look as if Cargill did the outdoorsmen thing all day long, either. He was like an aging rock star who wouldn’t accept that his sex-object days were over. They still knew the music, but the shoulder shimmies and hip thrusts just didn’t play to the crowd anymore.
And if Joss continued the way she’d been going with her career, compromising true artistry for applause, she’d be just as washed-up and angry as this man was.
Cargill caught her in the lower back and shoved her toward the first set of steps. “Start climbing.”
“I don’t think so.” Already shaking from the tension in her stomach, Joss went even colder and her limbs felt like cinderblocks. But she managed to turn sideways and land a kick. Unfortunately, it caught the guy’s shin, instead of his knee as she’d intended.
“Fuck!”
Joss cut left, but he grabbed her shoulder and squeezed to the point Joss was sure her arm would pop out of socket and fall to the ground. “I don’t give a good crap if other people bow and scrape to you, Miss Rock Star. I think your music sucks ass and that you’re a selfish little bitch. Didn’t give a shit that the rest of your band ended up as splattered body parts all over some Los Angeles freeway, did you?”
Oh, God, she’d cared so much that she’d been punishing herself ever since. Maybe that was what this was—her ultimate punishment for being careless with people she loved.
He snorted. “You’re not worth the energy it would take to kill you.”
“Then why bother with me?”
“Because Weirdo Kingston thought enough of you to put his dick in you. That’s not something he does with a lot of women. Hell, from what I hear, most women won’t go on a second date with him, much less sleep with him. You must have a thing for weirdos.”
Joss’s fists curled against her stomach. She wanted to punch Cargill in the dick for the weirdo comment alone. “He isn’t weird. He’s special.” So special.
Cargill snorted a laugh and dropped her arm to make air quotes. “Special. That’s just another word for freak.”
Yeah, this guy was definitely getting a right hook to the cock as soon as she could manage it. “I’ve found that people make fun of what scares them. I was wrong about how you feel about Shep. You’re not intimidated. You’re terrified.”
He pushed her in the center of the back, sending her sprawling face-first into the wooden stairs. A splinter sliced her cheek and slipped under the skin. “You’re almost more trouble than you’re worth.”
Joss was able to steady herself and get her feet beneath her. Her cheek throbbed and her stomach was sloshing with acid. But she would keep calm. Panic would do nothing to help this situation, and she needed all her wits about her to somehow warn Shep that he was walking into some type of trap.
The whippoorwill call. If he heard her flub the call, he would know something was wrong.
They were one flight of stairs away from the platform when a vibration rippled through the air, lifting the hair on the back of Joss’s neck.
“Hurry!” Cargill grabbed her by the shirt and half carried her up the remainder of the stairs.
She hadn’t noticed it as they climbed, but dark clouds were gathering, shifting over each other like a nest of restless snakes. The wind was stronger and angrier up here, pressing against Joss and forcing her to brace her legs to keep her balance.
If I fall, this son-of-a-bitch is going with me.
Cargill busied himself with some equipment—ropes and large carabiners. He gathered up a handful of stuff and turned to Joss. “Step into this.”
“No.” Willingly go to her death. Nuh-uh.
He grabbed her by the hair and yanked so she was forced to look into his face. “If you don’t put on this harness, I’ll just shove your skinny little ass off this platform. Do you know how many feet up in the air we are?”
She didn’t, but it looked like a million.
Her breath was so shallow that it felt as if air was making it no farther than her throat.
Cargill rotated his fist to catch more of her hair and pulled hard, making tears gather at the corner of Joss’s eyes. “Step into the damn harness,” he said.
Harness sounded good. Safe. Regardless, she had a better chance of survival with ropes around some part of her body. Maybe. She maneuvered a foot inside each loop, and Cargill hitched the rig up hard, wedging it between Joss’s butt cheeks like a sweaty thong.
She could do this. It was just a zip line. How hard could it be?
She didn’t know because she’d never zip-lined before. But zip. Sounded easy. Fast. She’d seen videos of smiling people flying through the air.
Unfortunately, Cargill didn’t offer her gloves or any type of head protection. He yanked on the loop attached to her waist and clipped it into the sliding piece attached to the cable above, almost jerking Joss off her feet. “Aren’t you going to untie my hands?”
“Now what fun would that be?”
If she didn’t have use of her hands, she would probably zoom down that wire, across the expanse of grass, and crash into the support pole in the middle of the opposite platform. Then again, ramming into something was so much better than falling.
Cargill grabbed her by the harness, pulled her back, and let her go.
Joss had been right. With no way to slow her speed, she was whizzing through the air like an arrow.
No arrows.
However, her speed began to throttle back, degree by degree, and Joss realized her low bodyweight was working against her. The momentum she needed to get to the other tower required more bulk than she had. She thought crashing into the other platform would be bad. But this was worse, much worse. With every bit she slowed, it became clearer that she would never make it to the other side. As she feared, she finally stopped and found herself dangling halfway between the two platforms with no way to move herself.
Was he planning to just leave her out here?
No, that didn’t make any sense. He said Shep would come here looking for him. Looking for her.
The vibration that she’d felt became more pronounced, shaking the air around her. Was a storm blowing in? Joss craned her neck, trying to get a three-sixty view around her. The trees waved, bowing away from her as if executing simultaneous backbends.
Whomp. Whomp. Whomp.
A helicopter.
Nooooo!
Joss didn’t know what was worse—swinging here high above the ground, or the possibility that Shep might be on that helicopter.
* * *
“He’s here somewhere,” Shep said through the headset Maggie had shoved onto his head when they boarded the helicopter. “I know it.”
“But how?”
“Because this has something to do with him threatening to fire me. He wanted me to fail out there. He wanted to get rid of me.”
“Shep, I think we’ve already established he wanted to do more than that. And I’m pretty sure Moody was just a pawn in Cargill’s game with you.”
“Which means he would be willing to hurt Joss. Even kill her”—he swallowed hard around the words, to push down the guilt chewing up his gut—“if it moved his agenda forward. She’s in danger.”
Maggie leaned toward the helicopter’s small side window and pointed. “Out there. Look at that zip line.”
A person was dangling midline, almost reclining in the harness. No way in hell was Joss that relaxed about being on a zip line. Maybe her body was limp because she’d passed out from sheer terror. “I need to get to her.”
“Cargill couldn’t make it any more obvious that he’s baiting you if he’d rigged a big-ass fishing pole and hung Joss on the hook.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.”
“And I know you’re not, Shep. But you’re also stubborn.
” Still, she signaled the pilot and spoke into her mic. “Can you set us down behind some cover? I don’t like what I’m seeing here, and we don’t have a bead on the suspect.”
The helicopter swung around, and the pilot swooped back over a clearing about a quarter mile from the zip line course. It had barely touched down when Shep bulleted out of the chopper, with Maggie on his tail.
“I’m calling for backup,” she hollered. “We’ll wait until—”
“Mags, it’s going to get dark before too long and a storm is blowing in,” he yelled over the noise of the rotors as they ducked and ran from the landing spot. “You can pull out your gun and shoot me, but I am still going out there.”
“Then I’m going with you.”
He swung his head around to give her a hard look. “Do not try to insert yourself into the middle of this. I know it’s your job, but this is my turf. Dan wants me.”
“Well, he’s not going to get you.”
Shep didn’t plan to let Cargill get away with any of this, but first he had to get Joss off that zip line. Dan was either on tower one or two. If Shep had to guess, he’d parked in the Prime Climb parking lot, which meant he’d probably forced Joss to climb the closest tower. He cut at an angle toward it. “We’re going up this one.”
He took a close look at the ground around the tower and the first few steps leading up. No recent footprints. “Shit, he’s on the other tower.”
He’d deal with Cargill after he got his hands on Joss and had her on the ground again. Shep had never climbed stairs as fast as he took these. With his longer stride, he ate up the stairs two and three at a time. Maggie had to run to stay abreast, but she never let up.
They were almost to the top when Shep got a clear view of Joss hanging out there on the line. Her lips were pursed, and the faint sound of a slightly altered whippoorwill call drifted toward him. She was trying to warn him away. That was never going to happen. He’d discovered he didn’t like being away from her. “She doesn’t have a helmet on,” he told Maggie.
“And it looks like she might not have full use of her arms.” She got on her radio to relay the information to her officers.
Shep had hoped to talk Joss in, explaining how to use a hand-over-hand maneuver so she could pull herself toward the tower. But that wasn’t an option. He would have to go out there after her.
Now on the platform, he stepped into a harness and found a single helmet. He pulled on a pair of heavyweight gloves and then clipped in to the zip line trolley.
“He could shoot you the minute you push off this platform,” Maggie warned. “I don’t like anything about this.”
“If he hasn’t used a gun up to this point, it isn’t his plan.”
“He shot Puck with an arrow!”
He couldn’t even think about that right now. Joss first. Then Puck. “With the wind kicking up, Cargill would have to be a better shot than I know he is to hit me.” And with that, he lifted his legs and flew off the platform. His weight was a benefit, rushing him toward Joss with a speed that would have been enjoyable if Shep’s stomach hadn’t been one big ball of writhing muscles.
He raced toward Joss, and she lifted her head. As he approached, he reached up and slowed his descent, braking at the last second so he didn’t mow over her.
“Oh my God, Shep. What are you doing? He wants to kill you because he’s jealous of your skill as a guide. And he hates himself for it, and he wanted you to come out here and —”
“Hold out your hands.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, I heard you.” He grabbed her hands and used a pocket knife to cut through the rope binding them. “Hold on to me.”
She wrapped her arms and legs around him. Hand over hand, he started the laborious task of pulling them back up the line to the tower where Maggie was waiting.
“Is he still on the other tower?” he asked Joss.
“I… I don’t know.” Her voice was thready, and she turned her head to look down.
“Close your eyes.”
“Can’t… can’t unsee what I’ve already seen.”
Shep scanned the ground below them, but there was no sign of Cargill. If he had half the brains Shep had ever given him credit for, he was hiding somewhere. Or had decided he didn’t want to do something that was sure to get him killed.
Shep and Joss were probably twenty feet from the tower when a tremor rippled through the line, something Shep had never felt in his many years of zip-lining. Surely Cargill couldn’t mess with a cable tested to hold over twenty thousand pounds.
But if he had a big cable cutter, he could—fuck! Shep grabbed for the line itself.
“Wha…” Joss didn’t complete a single word before the sickening feeling of slack in the line hit Shep’s midsection.
And gravity took over.
29
Ohshitohshitohholyshit.
They were falling. Any second now, they would hit the ground just like the helicopter she’d put the band on and—
“Shep,” she screamed. “We’re going to die!”
With their combined weight, they were sliding toward the ground so fast that Joss saw dark spots.
“I’ve got you,” he yelled back. She was clinging to him so tightly that she could barely draw breath. That was okay. She’d rather suffocate to death than go out by French-kissing the ground.
Or maybe they were about to spontaneously combust because she smelled animal hide burning. The line jerked taut again, whiplashing Joss’s neck. The impact slid them down a few more feet.
She and Shep swung like a human pendulum. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Then wham, they knocked against something hard. Joss felt it to the roots of her teeth even though Shep was protecting most of her body.
They hung there—losing an inch here, six inches there—as Shep tried to reach out and control the arc of the line. Somehow, he was able to swing them around a tower support pole. “Grab it!”
“What?”
“Reach for that pole!”
The first pass, Joss stretched out one hand and missed by inches. In a miraculous feat, Shep swung them around again, and this time Joss used her feet to catch a wooden crosspiece. She spotted Cargill, now standing between the two towers. And if she could see him, he could see them.
Still, some cover was better than none.
“Can you climb down the rest of the way?” Shep asked her.
“What?”
“Are you strong enough to unclip yourself and get away from here? Maggie saw us fall and will meet you down there. She’ll help you once you’re on the ground.”
“No!” They were still ten feet above the ground. If she unclipped herself from this line, she would fall. She would fall and be weak and helpless.
No, they were only ten feet above the ground. She could do this, but she wouldn’t. “I’m not going down there.”
“You are stronger than you think, Joss.” He stripped off his leather gloves to brush her hair away from her face and touch her chin. She turned to find him looking straight into her eyes. He gently pushed her away from him body. “Just hang on and go slowly.”
“That’s not what I meant. No, I’m not leaving you up here.” Everything inside her compelled her to cling like a barnacle. But he’d just offloaded her weight and definitely didn’t need her burdening the line again. “You’re planning something.”
“Hold on,” he instructed and unclipped her from the cable.
She hung on to the wood like a spider monkey. “What are you going to do?”
“We don’t have time for this.” Shep pushed off the support beam and arced around the tower again. He released his hold on the zip line and landed on his feet. He pointed toward some trees that Joss saw Cargill disappear into.
Shep hollered, “I think he’s headed for the gorge!”
From below Joss, Maggie yelled back at him, “Wait for me—”
But Shep didn’t hesitate. He ran directly for the forest. Damn him.
“Joss! Can you climb down on your own?” Maggie called out to her.
“Yes. No. Yes.” Joss wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth or not. Her thighs protested the slightest movement and shook like two detoxing junkies. “You can do this,” she whispered to herself.
Her descent took every smidge of her concentration and some muscles that—even after the Do or Die debacle—she hadn’t been aware she had. Finally, her feet touched the lovely earth, and her knees karaoke’d a shaky version of ’NSync’s “Bye Bye Bye.”
They hit the ground, and she caught herself with her hands to keep from face-planting in the dirt.
“You stay here,” Maggie commanded. “Backup is just minutes away.”
But when Maggie took off after her brother, Joss was right behind her.
* * *
As he’d done more than a few times in his life, Shep ignored his sister and ran into the woods. She’d already called for backup, but Shep couldn’t risk that Dan might change directions and slip away from them.
As Shep had expected, Dan’s tracks led toward Rasputin gorge. Formed by a fast-moving river, it dropped a good thousand feet right off the bat.
For several years, Dan had been yapping about rebuilding the old wood and rope bridge spanning the gorge. Of course, it was off-limits to any Prime Climb Tour customers. The liability was enormous. Dan had also been bitching about that for years.
But when Shep made it to the clearing at the edge of the gorge, Dan wasn’t there. Wasn’t on the bridge.
Had Shep been wrong to leave Joss and Maggie? Maybe that was exactly what Dan wanted. Shep turned to run back through the woods only to find that he had been correct.
Dan was standing fifteen feet from him with an arrow notched in his compound bow. It was aimed directly at Shep’s chest. “Finally got you where I want you,” he taunted.
Striking Edge Page 27
