“NO!”
The shriek jerked her head to the right, toward a sight that froze her blood—a girl was crab walking backward, partway up a felled tree, slick with lichen and draped with Spanish moss that dangled into the water below. But Meg couldn’t spare any attention for the girl, not when the biggest alligator she’d ever seen was crawling up the trunk after her.
The girl screamed and kicked out, but the alligator just snapped lazily at her.
No matter what the girl did, she was going to lose. If she kept climbing, she’d run out of tree and the reptile would catch up. If she lost her grip and fell into the water below, the alligator would simply go in after her to its preferred killing ground. One vicious clamp of those teeth and it would pull her under in a death roll, and that would be the end. And from the look of terror on the girl’s face, she knew it.
Not if Meg had anything to do with it.
“Hawk, with me!” Meg sprinted along the edge of the swamp water, yelling and waving her arms in the air to distract the reptile. The alligator paused only briefly to swing its heavy, flat head to fix her with a slitted green eye. “Get away from her.” Her fingers found the handle of her knife by touch alone and she yanked it from the sheath. Now she just had to get close enough to use it. She was handy with a knife in hand-to-hand combat with a human, but she had serious doubts about her ability to successfully throw the knife with the precision and strength required to pierce the alligator’s hide. And if the blade just skittered off and fell into the water, she’d be down a knife, at a time when three lives could depend on every weapon she carried.
Coming within five feet of the reptile, Meg quickly assessed the situation. She needed to lure it off the trunk, so Emma could get down. But tackling it and trying to knock it down into the water would most likely be a death sentence. That meant she needed to force it to turn on her and follow her onto dry land. She remembered from Southern search-and-rescue training that the average human could outrun an alligator’s top land speed of ten miles per hour for short periods of time, but for that to happen, Emma would need to be down off the trunk. If she’d only known to run.
Meg picked up a small rock from the dirt and hurled it at the alligator with all her strength. The rock bounced off its shoulder and the alligator paused in its upward climb. Meg picked up another rock, took another step closer and whipped it at him. “Hawk, speak!”
Hawk joined the fray, teeth bared, growling and barking, his front feet splayed wide and his head dropped between his shoulders. That caught the alligator’s attention, likely because of the wolves that inhabited the area. The alligator immediately slithered back down the trunk and slid onto the ground below to deal with the more relevant threat. His meal could wait.
Meg kept her eyes locked on the dog versus alligator standoff forming in front of her and took a step closer, her knife clutched in her hand. “Emma? Emma, you need to listen to me. I need you to get down off that tree trunk. We’re search-and-rescue and we’re here to help. Get down. Get behind me. I don’t know how long we can hold him.”
In her peripheral vision, the girl slid down the tree and hopped to the ground. The alligator saw the movement too, and the moment Emma’s feet hit the ground, it lunged for her, its jaws opening just before the long, jagged teeth clamped over her calf.
Emma screamed in agony as the alligator gave her a jerk that yanked her off her feet. Then it started to drag her toward the water. Once in the water, it would be game over.
“Talon, back!” Meg’s use of Hawk’s “don’t mess with me” name, the one she only used when instant compliance was absolutely required, had Hawk backing off, albeit reluctantly.
Now that her dog was out of the way, Meg took two running steps and launched herself through the air. She landed on the animal’s scaly back, digging into its shoulder with the fingers of her left hand and using the leverage of her body to drive her knife into the right side of its thick neck. The alligator roared, whipping its head abruptly to one side, yanking another haggard scream from Emma, but it didn’t let go.
In the back of her mind, Meg heard Hawk going crazy just to her right, but tuned him out to focus. She had to make the alligator let Emma go. Otherwise, she was dead.
Meg had one idea, but didn’t know if it would work. Pulling back with her right arm, she slammed the knife back into the gator’s neck, using the hilt of the knife as a makeshift handgrip to pull her body up and over the top of its head. With her left hand, she slammed down repeatedly with all her strength on the flat snout, directly on its nostrils.
To her amazement, the tactic worked, and the viselike jaws popped open, freeing Emma, who scrambled away as fast as she could. “Talon, go! Emma, with him. Go!”
Meg couldn’t look to ensure he complied; she had to trust her dog.
Now it was just her and the gator. A very pissed off gator, who was trying to reach around to rip her off its back.
One chance to get away. She didn’t have to kill him; she just needed to get in front of him at a sprint.
If this didn’t work, there was no one to help her.
She ripped the knife from the gator’s neck and, clamping her knees around its torso like it was a bucking bronco, she clutched the hilt in both hands. Leaning forward, she drove the knife into its right eye, deep enough to feel the knife scrape bone. Just as quickly, she yanked the knife out and rolled off the screaming animal—agony or death throes, she wasn’t sure, and couldn’t afford the time to check—hit the ground running, and tore straight for the trees where she imagined Hawk would have led Emma. She pushed through the cloying undergrowth, using the blood-smeared knife to hack away the vines in her path. Meg ran for a full two minutes before she took the time to stop, pressing her fists to her knees as she bent over, breathing hard, her knife still clutched tightly in her hand. She tried to slow her breathing as much as possible, listening for any sign of pursuit, but there was only quiet.
She gave herself twenty seconds to get some of her breath back. Realizing she still held the bloody blade, she wiped it clean on a moss-covered rock, then slid it home in the sheath. Straightening, she looked around, but she was surrounded by vines and trees. “Hawk?” she called.
A bark to her left gave her their direction. “Hawk, stay. I’m coming.”
A few minutes of wandering through the forest and two more commands for Hawk to speak, and she found them. They’d come upon yet another ditch, but this one was wider and flanked by a double dirt track with grass growing between the ruts. Hawk sat on that grass, Emma collapsed beside him, one arm thrown over his back, her face buried in his fur. Her position gave Meg the chance to get a better look without making the girl self-conscious. In the swamp, all Meg had was a vague impression of long, blond hair and a short skirt, but now she could see the short skirt was actually a black V-neck sheath dress paired with ballerina flats over bare feet, and the loose hair was matted, filthy, and full of brambles and bits of twigs.
Meg knelt down beside the girl. Before they did anything else, Meg needed to treat her bite with the first aid supplies in her SAR pack as a temporary fix until Emma got real medical treatment.
Meg laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder, rubbing gently. “Emma, you’re safe now.”
The girl raised her head, but where Meg was expecting to see tears and terror, there was only defiant exhaustion. Her makeup was skillfully applied, but had mostly worn off at this point, and her face was smudged with dirt. “You can’t promise that.”
“Actually, I can.” Meg slid her pack off her shoulders and dragged it beside her. Opening the front pocket, she pulled out her FBI identification and flipped open the case.
Emma looked in confusion from Meg to Hawk and back again. “You’re FBI?”
“We are. Search-and-rescue, and before that I was with the Richmond PD.” She met the girl’s eyes. “Emma, I know what happened to you.”
The eyes that fixed on her were full of suspicion. “How do you know my name?”
“I wa
s driving down I-64 this morning with a paramedic firefighter when he spotted the van in the river. We pulled off and checked it out. Evidence in the van told us there were occupants missing, and Hawk led us to Mary.” A mixture of hope and fear sprung into Emma’s eyes, so Meg answered the question before she could voice it. “Mary’s at the hospital now. She was in shock and her leg is in bad shape, but they’ll look after her. She’s safe and she’s going to make it. She’s also not in trouble with law enforcement.”
Emma’s defiant posture deflated and she sank a little further into Hawk. “Thank God.”
“Mary told us about you, including your name. Now, I need you to let me take a look at that leg. It will need real treatment or you’ll risk serious infection, but I can at least clean and cover it for now. You’re sure it’s not broken?”
“Don’t think I could run on it if it was.”
Meg pulled out the small first aid kit she kept at the bottom of her SAR pack. She opened it and took out a handful of alcohol wipes, some gauze, and a roll of medical tape. “Okay, I need you to extend your leg so I can see it.”
Momentary indecision flashed over Emma’s face, but then she shifted enough to extend her leg.
Meg swallowed the gasp that threatened to break free at the sight of the bruised flesh, pierced in a perfect imprint of the gator’s U-shaped bite. Blood ran from each puncture wound, down her leg and over her foot to pool in her shoe, and smeared over her calf from her flight through the forest with Hawk. Meg opened several of the alcohol swabs. “Take a breath; this is going to really hurt.” She started to clean the wounds, feeling Emma’s calf tighten reflexively under her hand at the sting of alcohol. She glanced up; the girl had gone sheet white, her lips pressed in a tight, bloodless line, but she hadn’t made a single murmur of pain. Gutsy girl. Get her talking. Keep her distracted. “All Mary told us was your name. We figured out the rest.”
“The rest?” Emma’s words were strangled.
“We know you’re a victim of human trafficking and that you’ve been trapped in the sex trade for a while.”
Other girls might have blushed and averted their eyes, but Emma met her gaze head-on. “What makes you think that?”
“As I said, I was Richmond PD. I’ve seen it all. The girls in the van, Celia and Leah, they were too young to look the way they did. The makeup, the clothes, that’s not the way preteen girls dress, even when they push the boundaries to look older. I was a preteen girl once. I remember. But the big red flag was the restraints.” Meg’s gaze shifted to Emma’s slender wrists, each of which was circled with abrasions. “Did you pull the strap free, or did it break on you during the rollover?”
For a moment, Emma just stared at her, wide-eyed. “A little of both. I was yanking on it as hard as I could, but the force of the crash probably helped.”
“With one hand free, you could free the other. And then Mary.”
“Everyone else was gone.” The words came out on a hoarse croak. “Mary, she was hurt so bad. I almost had to carry her.”
Meg tossed down a bloody wipe, opened a fresh one, and continued working on the bite. “You got her out of danger and away from the water. You got her to shelter in a terrible storm, didn’t you?”
Emma simply stared, but didn’t disagree.
“Then you couldn’t take her any farther. That was a really bad break. You had to leave her, but why didn’t you get her any help?”
Silence rode heavy for several heartbeats and Emma’s internal battle played out on her face. After years of being indoctrinated into not trusting law enforcement, Meg could see the battle between those rules and a young woman’s yearning for freedom.
Meg stopped cleaning and laid a hand on Emma’s knee. Making contact. Trying to make a connection. “I know you’ve been taught that cops are the enemy. Yes, I’m an ex-cop. But I’m search-and-rescue now. Saving lives, finding the lost, that’s what Hawk and I do.” Hawk looked up at the sound of his name and she smiled at him and stroked a hand down his fur. Watching Emma’s eyes follow the gesture almost longingly, she tried a change in tack. She went back to working on the wound, but asked, “You like animals?”
Emma made a noise in her throat that Meg took as an affirmative response.
“Do you think animals have an intuition, a kind of sixth sense that tells them something about a person? If someone is to be trusted, or feared?”
“Yes.”
“So, what does Hawk say to you?”
Emma sat up a little straighter against Hawk, and ran a hand over his neck and shoulder. “He trusts you. In the swamp, he followed your commands even though it meant leaving you. He . . . he led me away to safety, got me away from that gator, but he left you behind.”
“Hawk and I have been a team for over two years now. We trust each other implicitly with our lives. He’s saved me. I’ve saved him. He trusts me to make the right call because it’s what we need to do to save a victim. Do you think he’d trust me like that if I was the kind of person who would mess you up somehow?”
The girl shrugged and tipped her head down to rest on Hawk’s shoulder.
“I’m asking you these questions because I want to help. It’s what Hawk and I do. There’s nothing in it for us personally except the satisfaction of burying some son-of-a-bitch who totally deserves it.” Meg let venom saturate her tone, leaning on memories of burned, shattered bodies, and fingertips scraped down to bone in an attempt to escape being buried alive.
Emma’s gaze slid upward to stare at Meg, a new understanding dawning.
Meg took a breath and forced away the anger that rose up at the memories. “When I ask you these questions, it’s because I can help you. But to help you, I need you to tell me everything you can. Can you give trusting us a try?”
Emma gave her a long, unblinking stare. “Screw with me once, and I’m gone.”
“Totally fair. I’m just telling you, it’s not going to happen. Now, back to Mary. Why didn’t you call for help?”
“She made me promise not to. She was terrified that the cops would lock her away forever.”
“You could have made the promise to her, gotten away, and told someone about her.”
Emma shook her head fast enough that her long hair rippled. “No. We . . . us girls . . . we had a pact. Everyone else lied, everyone else broke promises. Not us. Never us.”
A shred of decency and honesty in a world where none seemed to exist. Meg could understand why the girls would value that. “Would you like to see her?”
“Mary?”
“She’s in the hospital. We can take you to her.” Meg grabbed the third wipe, thinking one more cleaning would finish the job, then she’d wrap the wound. She’d leave the deep cleaning and the antibiotic pills and ointments to the ER.
“What if she’s not there?”
“She’ll be there. I could be wrong, but I suspect that leg is going to need surgery. If not, she’s going to need rehydrating and a cast. She’s only been there for a few hours. She’ll still be there.” Meg reached for the roll of gauze, tore open the plastic and started to wrap Emma’s calf.
“Okay.”
“We’ll get you treated at the same time. Emma, is there any family I can call for you?”
The wall went up so fast that if Meg hadn’t seen Emma’s expression go blank, her eyes flat and dead, she might not have believed the other girl had ever existed. “No.”
“Are you sure? I—”
“I said no.” Emma cut her off, swiftly. Viciously.
Back off, Jennings. You were making progress, don’t blow it all now. “Okay,” Meg said lightly. “We’ll just get you treated.” She taped the gauze securely, repacked her bag, and pushed to her feet. She held out a hand to Emma. The girl slapped her palm into Meg’s and let herself be hauled to her feet.
Meg pulled out her phone and checked for a signal—still nothing. She gauged the sun up above and the direction of shadows in the forest flanking the twin tracks. She pointed to the northwest. “That way
. We may be closer to civilization straight through the swamp that way”—she pointed due west—“but I think we’ve all had enough of the swamp and its inhabitants for now. Hawk, come.”
Hawk stood and all three of them started down the rough road beside the ditch. Meg didn’t say anything, but she noted that Hawk heeled beside Emma, who gamely limped along, setting their pace.
Emma had gone about fifteen feet when she suddenly stopped, Hawk halting with her. “What happened to the gator? Did you kill it?”
“Without getting graphic, I’m pretty sure he couldn’t survive what I had to do to get away from him.”
“What did you do?”
Meg hesitated for a second, but then decided that with everything else that had happened to this girl, it was only fair for her to know that this particular nightmare wasn’t going to come after her. “I jammed my knife through its right eye and into its brain. I didn’t stick around to make sure he died, but I can’t see how that particular injury could be survived.”
“Good.” It was the only word Emma spoke, but when she started to walk again, her head was a little higher with the news that one enemy was vanquished.
It looked like hope.
CHAPTER 12
Incident Commander: The person responsible for managing emergency personnel committed to the rescue operation.
Sunday, July 23, 5:28 PM
Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters
Norfolk, Virginia
Meg and Hawk met Craig in the corridor outside Mary’s hospital room. “What’s the word on jurisdiction?”
“It’s ours.” Craig stopped as laughter burst from inside the room. “They’re both in there?”
Meg nodded. “They disinfected and wrapped Emma’s leg, and got her cleaned up and lent her some nurses’ greens because her own clothes were filthy. Not that she’d ever want to wear them again. Mary’s surgery is set for tomorrow. Her fracture was worse than I thought, with a few smaller pieces of bone also broken off, so they need to do surgery to stabilize it.” She glanced in the open doorway, toward the couple who sat in chairs against the wall, looking scared and ecstatic at the same time. “Mary’s parents are here,” she said quietly. “Mary’s only fourteen. They had a falling out about a year ago over a new, older ‘boyfriend’ the parents were uncomfortable with. Turns out they were right because when Mary ran away from home to be with the guy, he sucked her into the sex trade and then she couldn’t get out.”
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