Dead Man's Curve

by Paula Graves

  Don’t get too distracted, he warned himself sternly.

  The hillside started to level out, the climb less of a strain. Ava stumbled as they reached flatter ground, going down on her hands and knees. She stayed there for a moment, breathing hard.

  Sinclair knelt beside her, laying his hand on her back. Her back rose and fell quickly as she caught her breath. “Sorry,” she rasped.

  He rubbed her back lightly. “We can take a break. How’s your hip?”

  She pushed herself up to a kneeling position and slid down the waistband of her pants to check the bandage. “I think it’s okay.”

  “May I look?”

  Her eyes met his, wide and wary in a shaft of pale moonlight peeking through the clouds. But she shifted, giving him better access to her injury.

  Gently easing the trousers away from the bandage, he checked more thoroughly. There was a little blood seeping through the gauze, but not enough to worry. She wasn’t in danger of bleeding to death.

  Infection was still a major risk, however, and the longer she stayed out here in these woods without professional medical treatment, the greater the likelihood of sepsis.

  He should have insisted they go back to the motel instead of chasing these men, he realized with a sinking heart. He’d been selfish and, if he was honest with himself, a little bit afraid of facing justice after so long on the run. “We should go back to the motel.”

  She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Go back down that hill after we just climbed it? Are you kidding me?”

  “The longer you and that bullet wound stay out here in these woods, the more likely you’ll get an infection. That’s nothing to play around with.”

  “I think I’m good for a few more hours.” She pushed to her feet. “Let’s go. We’re wasting moonlight.”

  His heart still stuck in his throat, he rose and followed her lead.

  Ten minutes later, Sin heard voices. He grabbed Ava’s wrist as she continued forward, dragging her back against his chest.

  She started to struggle, but he tightened his hold and whispered in her ear, “Voices.”

  She froze, her head coming up as if to listen.

  The voices seemed to be floating toward them on the wind, coming from somewhere dead ahead. But all Sin could see in front of them were trees, trees and more trees.

  Where were the voices coming from?

  “Rest a second,” he whispered, letting Ava go. “I’ll scout ahead. If I run into trouble, you can go for help.”

  Her lips pressed to a thin line. “I told you I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “Damn it, Ava—”

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, I’m not sure I could make it back to the motel alone at this point,” she added, her voice softening. “So for better or worse, we stick together.”

  “Stay as quiet as you can,” he warned, leading the way forward. He took care with each step, moving heel to toe with deliberation, eyeing the ground ahead of them for any potential pitfalls. The voices ahead grew steadily louder, and he could make out the high, excited pitch of the conversation. Spanish, of course, but he was fluent, so he had no trouble making out the words flying about in agitation.

  “How’s your Spanish?” he whispered to Ava, who crept up beside him when he paused to listen.

  “A little rusty,” she admitted. “Haven’t had a lot of chances to use it working in the Johnson City resident agency.”

  “It’ll come back to you,” he assured her. But he interpreted anyway. “Someone’s taking hell for running from a bear.”

  “Do you recognize who’s speaking?”

  “Might be Cabrera,” he said, uncertain. “There’s a little echo. Can’t be sure yet.”

  Suddenly, a woman’s voice rang in the night, her Spanish rapid-fire but American-accented. Sin’s heart clenched into a hot, hard fist.

  Alicia.

  “¿Dónde está mi esposo?” Fear battled with rage in her voice.

  “She wants to know where her husband is,” he translated for Ava.

  “Yeah, I got that,” she whispered grimly. “They probably killed him right off. Got rid of the extra baggage. One less captive to worry about.”

  Sin had never met his brother-in-law, but he hoped like hell Ava was wrong. He’d found a lot of comfort in the idea of Alicia happily married to a man she loved, a man who was good to her, who loved her and protected her when Sin couldn’t.

  He’d broken his sister’s heart when he’d gone to Sanselmo and joined the rebels. Knowing he was a wanted man, doing things she didn’t approve of for reasons she’d never understood—that kind of notoriety must have been hard for her to live with.

  The last time he’d talked to her, he’d tried to explain himself, but even if he’d been able to find words to justify his actions, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not over the phone. Maintaining his cover with El Cambio had been crucial to staying alive.

  She’d stopped listening anyway. “I hope the next time you set a bomb, you blow yourself up,” she’d told him, her voice raw with anger and pain.

  Funny, he supposed, that he’d gone out and done exactly that, as far as she and the rest of the world were concerned.

  As he strained to discern more of the verbal exchange between his sister and her captors, the cracking sound of a hand hitting flesh jolted through him, and Alicia’s angry questions ended in a sharp cry. An answering growl rose in Sin’s throat, and he rushed toward the sound of his sister’s cry without thinking, stealth forgotten.

  Ava’s hands circled his arm and she dug her heels in, pulling him backward as he rushed forward. He tried to shake off her grip, but her fingers dug in harder, preventing him from dashing through the underbrush.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” she growled. “Do you want to get her killed?”

  He struggled to control himself, to ease his ragged breathing and hurl cold water on his sudden rage. Ava was right. He knew she was right.

  But even as he regained control of his emotions, a white-hot ball of fury festered in the center of his chest, biding its time.

  Sinclair would make Cabrera and his men pay for what they’d done to his sister. He was going to find great pleasure in making sure of it.

  “They’re not going to do permanent damage to her, not while she’s leverage,” Ava whispered. He wished she sounded more confident.

  “She’s right there! We can get her away from them.”

  “Not without knowing how many people we have to take out to do it.” Her voice was firmer now, her quiet competence taking some of the edge off his desperation. He grounded himself in her calm gaze, taking a few slow, deep breaths.

  “Okay. Okay.” He scanned the dark woods, listening to the sound of murmured conversation, trying to figure out from which direction it came. He pointed north, finally. “I think they’re ahead that way. We need to get close enough to see what’s what, but stay hidden.”

  “You were El Cambio. You know more about how they work than I do. How many men would Cabrera bring with him on a mission like this?”

  He could only guess. Cabrera had been ruthless, unwilling to risk any sort of mutiny among his underlings. He’d trusted few people. Sin had worked damned hard at being one of those people, and if Cabrera was here, looking for him, it was because he knew just how completely Sin had betrayed that trust.

  Cabrera might be keeping Alicia alive now as leverage to get to Sin. But he didn’t kid himself. Cabrera’s only policy was scorched earth. There’d be no witnesses left when he was done.

  “It doesn’t matter how many. We have to get her away from him.” The urgency of his fear forced the words from his tight throat.

  “We need to get our eyes on that camp first. Know what we’re up against. We need to be smart about it.”

  He caught her arm, tugging her around to look at him. Her eyes widened, her lips trembling apart.

  The urge to kiss her, untimely and entirely out
of the question, surged through him as powerfully as fear had done just a moment before. He had the ridiculous sense that if he could just kiss her, if he could feel her warm, soft body pressed to his, feel her fingers on his skin and breathe her breath into his lungs, everything would be okay.

  He tore his gaze away, reminding himself that no matter what happened in the next few hours, everything would never be okay.

  Ever.

  He let her arm go. “Be very quiet and very careful. We’ll have only one chance to get this right.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her check the magazine of her Glock. He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of the pistols he’d scavenged from Fuentes and Escalante and checked the magazine to see if there were any rounds left. The pistol, an FNS 9, held seventeen rounds. Fourteen remained.

  He kept that one for himself and checked the other pistol. It was also an FN Herstel firearm, a twenty-round FN Five-seveN MK2. Eighteen rounds in that magazine. He offered the MK2 to Ava.

  “Eighteen rounds. Use it first.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly widening and her lips curling inward as she nervously licked her lips.

  This is her first big challenge, he realized, suddenly feeling deeply sorry for her. Despite her training, despite the FBI credentials in her pocket and the Special Agent in front of her name, she’d probably never been in a situation as dangerous as what they were about to face.

  “If you don’t want to do this, go,” he said quietly. “The motel should be due west. Be careful, stay out of sight and you’ll probably be there in a couple of hours. But I have to do this.”

  Her nostrils flared. She took the MK2 from his hands, checked the ammo herself, sighted down the barrel to familiarize herself with it and gave a short nod. “Then let’s do this.”

  Sin felt a cracking sensation in his chest, as if something had broken open and spilled out courage and fear in equal parts. Swallowing the fear and marshaling the courage, he followed Ava forward through the woods.

  * * *

  CABRERA AND HIS men had set up camp in a small, sheltered cove just over the edge of a shallow escarpment. Ava had nearly stumbled over the edge of the bluff, as the trees beyond the valley camouflaged the narrow dip between ridges. She pulled up short, grabbing the trunk of a nearby pine to keep from tumbling over the edge.

  Ignoring the pain in her hip and the increasing tremble of her aching thigh muscles, she dropped to her belly, seeking and finding a clearer view of the small valley that lay about twenty yards below the ridgeline.

  Sin nudged his way next to her, his body warm against hers. She drew strength and determination from the solid heat of him. Crazy, she thought, that I’m colluding with a terrorist to take down his buddies.

  But since she’d looked up in the parking lot of the Mountain View Lodge and seen a ghost, insanity had become the least of her problems.

  From her vantage point, she could see most of the cove. There were four tents set up below. Sheltered by the low bluffs rising on either side of the encampment, Cabrera and his men showed no concern for stealth. All four of the tents were brightly lit from within, conveniently for Ava; shadows within gave her a decent head count of all the people in the camp. One in one tent, two in another, two in the third. Three men, plus Cabrera, standing in a huddle near a small campfire.

  But she didn’t see a woman. Had they taken her into one of the tents?

  The four men moved apart, and then she saw the woman. Sinclair’s sister. Small but unbowed, her spine ramrod-straight and her chin lifted, light from the campfire dancing over her delicate features. Next to Ava, Sinclair sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Nine men total,” she whispered. “And we dispatched three back in the woods.”

  “There’s probably at least one more out there,” he whispered back. “Cabrera has a thing about even numbers. An even dozen, plus himself. He’d like that.”

  “We know your sister’s husband isn’t down there, and she doesn’t seem to know where he went. Maybe Cabrera sent one of his men off with the husband?” She didn’t finish her thought—that he’d sent the henchman off to kill Gabe Cooper out of Alicia’s sight.

  She supposed it was merciful, at least, that they hadn’t made her watch his murder. Though from what she’d heard of Cabrera’s crimes, kindness and consideration weren’t exactly his calling cards.

  One of the men below detached from the other group, taking Alicia by the arm. Sinclair stiffened next to Ava, a low growl humming in his throat. She closed her hand over his wrist, afraid he’d launch himself over the bluff to go after his sister’s captors.

  “We need to go back for help. We can find this place again, can’t we?” She knew the general direction they’d gone from where he’d last pitched the tent, and he surely knew how to get to the tent from the motel, since he’d found his way there and back earlier that day.

  “I can’t leave her there with them.”

  She tightened her grip on his arm, making him look at her. The look in his eyes set off a low, painful vibration somewhere in the center of her chest. “There’s nothing you can do by yourself. We have to get backup, don’t you see that?”

  “I’ve seen how backup works,” he said in a low, strained voice. “Backup is a damned good way to get a hostage killed.”

  “I can’t leave you here.”

  “I’m getting her out of there.”

  She shook her head in frustration. “She thinks you’re dead. Let’s say you can fight your way through nine well-armed men and get to her. How easy will it be to convince her to come with you? You lied about your death. Before your death, she wished you dead. You said it yourself.”

  The stricken look in his eyes made her regret her words.

  “I don’t think she really wanted you dead,” she added softly.

  He took a deep, slow breath. “Okay. I’ll go back with you. But I don’t want the FBI involved in trying to rescue her. I remember Waco.”

  Not the FBI’s finest moment, she had to concede. “What would you have me do, then?”

  “Does Gabe Cooper’s family know about the kidnapping?”

  She nodded. “I’m sure they’ve heard by now. My partner said we’d probably be knee-deep in Coopers before we knew it.”

  For the first time in a while, Sinclair Solano’s lips curved in a broad smile. Overhead, clouds swallowed the moon, plunging the night back into near-total darkness, but not before Ava caught a glitter of satisfaction in his midnight eyes.

  “Good,” he said softly, gazing down toward the cove again. “I have a feeling we’ll need all the Coopers we can get.”

  Chapter Five

  By midnight, the camp below the bluff had settled down for the night. Two men remained awake, circling the camp with AR-15 rifles strapped over their shoulders. Now and then, the burning ends of their cigarettes flared red in the darkness, narrow ribbons of smoke rising into the air overhead. Except for the occasional murmur of exchanged words between the two guards, all was silent.

  Beside him, Ava carefully stretched her legs, grimacing. A whispery groan escaped her throat, barely audible. He slanted a look her way, taking in the faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead and the darkened circles under her eyes.

  She was in pain, and he knew it would get worse before it got better.

  Nothing was likely to happen here before morning. Even with most of the camp asleep, he and Ava were outnumbered and outgunned. The AR-15 rifles Cabrera’s men carried were fitted with magazines that would hold at least thirty .223 rounds each. Almost certainly they had spare magazines in their jacket pockets. He couldn’t risk thinking they didn’t.

  “We should find a sheltered place and set up the tent,” he whispered.

  Her eyes glittered at him in the dark. “And what? Get some sleep?” She shook her head.

  “I need to take another look at that wound.”

  She dropped her hand to her hip, covering the torn fabric. “I’m okay.”

 
He touched the back of his fingers to her forehead. Her skin was damp but hot. “You may have a fever.”

  “So give me an aspirin.”

  Pressing his lips to a thin line, he pulled a bottle of water from his pack and handed it to her. Flipping open another small pocket, he withdrew a packet of acetaminophen tablets. “Here.”

  She downed the pills with a couple of gulps of water. “Thanks.”

  “Let me deliver you back to the motel. You need medical attention.”

  “Deliver me?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re the prisoner.”

  He almost laughed but thought better of it. “At least get some sleep.”

  He could see in her eyes how tempting she found the idea of sleep. It would make her feel considerably better, he knew. The lack of it might hasten the deterioration of her strength.

  But she thrust a belligerent chin forward. “I’m good.”

  Frustrated, he crept away from the edge of the bluff on all fours, rising only when he was sure he couldn’t be seen from the cove below. Ava turned, propping herself on her elbows and watching him go, a look of disbelief on her face. Belatedly, she rolled over and scooted backward, mimicking his earlier movements, and finally pushed herself to her feet to face him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to find a place to set up the tent and get some sleep. Those guys down there aren’t going to stay up all night to make things fair. They’re getting sleep and they’ll be in fighting form in the morning. Will we?”

  She looked inclined to argue, but after a tense moment, she lowered her head, her shoulders slumping. He resisted the urge to brush aside the dark curls spilling over her face like a curtain, though his fingers almost ached to do so. She was tired, dirty and downright hostile, but at this moment, in the middle of his churning fear for his sister’s safety, he still felt the languid tug of the sexual attraction that had sent him reeling into her path back in the sun-drenched streets of Sebastian, Mariposa.