Storm Force

by Meredith Fletcher

  Except to get killed, of course.

  That had almost happened twice. But Shane had gotten what he was after both times.

  Working outside an undercover assignment, in the largely white-collar world of the FBI, left Shane cold. He didn’t like playing the political games and kissing ass. He was blunt and confident, and those were things he liked about himself. Not exactly career-building personal skills, to be sure, but they got him by and lowered the daily dose of crap leveraged his way through administration channels. The level he worked at, the things he was willing to subject himself to and be cut off from, bought him leeway and room to maneuver. It also made up a lot for the lack of polish he felt he was missing.

  Some days Shane thought he would have been better off staying in the army. But he knew he would have gotten tired of being told what to do every day. In fact, most of the time, if asked, Shane would have replied that he didn’t know what he was looking for. His world was all about the hustle and flow, the adrenaline-laced edge of life or death as he conned or outsmarted everyone he was in the room with.

  He was getting close on this case, and he knew it.

  Everything he’d learned before going to the Everglades Correctional Institute, everything he’d overheard afterward, had indicated that they were somewhere close to where Jolly and his fellow kidnappers had stashed the ten million dollars they’d demanded from Gabriel Martini, Desiree Martini’s wealthy father. The FBI had captured Jolly and his men, but the young woman’s body and the money had never been recovered.

  “Deke!” Jolly yelled. “Stay with the truck!”

  Of them all, Deke was the only one who didn’t seem to operate off bloodlust. He was young, nineteen, a cousin to Ernie Franks, who had been a career criminal for the last twelve years since he’d gotten his start knocking down banks.

  Shane wasn’t even certain that Deke belonged in prison with the others. Shane had never been as innocent as Deke was. During his early years, Shane had been in and out of juvie, a misguided boy who was looking at the long fall till he landed in prison for the rest of his life. A judge had pitched him toward the army, telling him he had a choice to make. Shane had made the choice, then gotten a taste for police work while he was in the Criminal Investigation Division arm of the military police.

  Lengthening his stride, Shane pulled even with Jolly. That was hard. The guy was a monster. In Cell Block D, Jolly had held the record for the most weight lifted, and he ran on a daily basis. Shane had only gotten close to him through Jolly’s latest interest in prison basketball, playing two-on-two. Basketball was something Shane had played all his life, too.

  He paced Jolly, breath burning the back of his throat. “You don’t want to kill them, Ray.”

  “Why not?” Jolly demanded. “I’m in prison for life.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t strapped down in Ol’Sparky, man. Not even for capping Desiree Martini. You take these two people out, you could be. That mouthpiece you got that talked the jury and the judge into giving you life won’t be able to pull off a miracle twice in a row.”

  “I ain’t going back to prison, man,” Jolly vowed. “I had me a bellyful of that.”

  Doing time in prison wasn’t easy. Shane agreed with that. It was a lot different than juvie. But he’d understood the edgy ebb and flow of criminal life.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Shane urged. “Get in the truck and get gone, man. That’s what we should be doing.”

  “I got unfinished business here,” Jolly said. “I need time to work it and bring it to a close.”

  That gave Shane heart. Jolly hadn’t said anything about going after the ransom money, but he would try for it if he thought he had a chance to get it while he was outside prison walls. That was what Shane was hoping for. A chance to finally bring Desiree Martini’s body home and give her family some peace.

  But he said, “Chasing these people is a mistake. We’re wasting time we could use to get the hell out of here.”

  “I like you, Shane,” Jolly growled. “Really I do. I like the way you handle yourself. But don’t try to tell me how to run my business.” He poured on more speed and plunged into the rapidly moving water.

  Shane followed him, hoping the two people they were chasing got away. He didn’t know what he was going to do if they didn’t. There was still a lot of his plan that he was working out, so many things he hadn’t taken into consideration. Like this damn storm. He ran, spotting the shadows of their prey ahead of them.

  Kate kept her hands and arms lifted ahead of her, using them to fend off the smaller branches and brush and keep it from her eyes. She ducked or dodged the bigger ones, twisting and gliding through them. Her hiking boots bit deeply into the mushy ground.

  Tyler ran only a few short feet away, keeping to his own path. The rain and the intermittent lightning flashes made the already treacherous ground almost impossible to navigate.

  She glanced over her shoulder again, knowing she shouldn’t have. Two of the men chased her. Two others chased Tyler. She didn’t want to split off from Tyler and leave him alone, but their paths took them in different directions. Tyler had chosen a course along a creek, swamping through the shallows as fast as he could go.

  Kate chose the high ground because it favored her higher muscle to mass ratio. At five-feet-ten, a hundred and fifty pounds, lean and in shape from exercise and an active life, she knew she could charge up the hill easier than the two men following. Both of them were carrying in excess of two hundred pounds. Even if that weight was from lifting and working out every day, it was still fifty-plus more pounds than she had to carry up the hill.

  Her strategy was sound. She just wished that Tyler wasn’t off to himself and that her breath wasn’t already coming short. She ran on.

  “Over there, Shane!” someone yelled. “Head over to the left! I’ve got her on this side!”

  Kate tried to lengthen her stride. At the top of the hill, she cut back to the right, hoping to split up her pursuers and maybe get a chance to find Tyler. There was no way she was going to leave him out here alone.

  The thing that bothered her most was the fact that the convicts weren’t slowing down. By rights, they should have grabbed the truck and gotten gone.

  So what do they want?

  Tyler’s pain-filled scream brought Kate up short.

  “Oh my God! Kate! Kate! Help me, Kate!” Tyler screamed again in pain.

  Kate drew up against a bald cypress, distinctive because of its straight trunk and brown bark. The feathery needles brushed at her face. She stood in the middle of eighty-footers who still had some growing to go before they reached their optimum of a hundred and twenty-five feet.

  She drew the Asp and pressed the button. The length extended with a metallic snap that she didn’t think could be heard over the constant hiss of the rain and the thunder.

  “Kate! God! Kate! Help!”

  Quivering, so scared she thought she was going to be sick, Kate stood in the shadows of the tree and listened to the thudding footsteps of one of her pursuers getting closer. The man was heading for Tyler’s voice too.

  Tyler kept crying out, panicked and in pain.

  Kate bit her lips and made herself wait. The big man ran by her and looked out across the cypress forest. Then he turned unexpectedly and a big, cruel smile split his face.

  “Playing hide and seek?” he asked.

  Kate didn’t answer. She kept the Asp hidden behind her thigh. Maybe he’d found her, maybe she hadn’t been as hidden as she’d hoped, maybe a stray flicker of lightning had given her away, but she was going to keep one surprise.

  “Why don’t you come on out here where I can see you, pretty lady?” the man invited in a low voice that he probably thought was sexy. He held out a hand. “C’mon now. Don’t be shy.”

  Kate didn’t move.

  The smile dropped away from the man’s face. He held up a broad-bladed hunting knife. Lightning flickered along the keen edge. “You better come on out of there i
f you know what’s good for you. Otherwise, I’m going to come in there and get you. Take you out piece by piece.”

  Renewed fear clawed through Kate.

  Tyler continued yelling for help. Only that kept Kate nailed to the spot, because there was room to run and she could have been gone again.

  “Out. Here,” the man ordered.

  Slowly, Kate took a hesitant step toward him. She kept her eyes down, as though she was afraid to look at him or the knife. What she was really doing was watching his body movement, looking for an opening.

  “Kate!” Tyler sounded like he was going into shock or about to pass out.

  Kate thought maybe he’d fallen and broken his ankle or his leg. In the darkness, on the broken terrain, that was the most likely. She kept moving toward the big man.

  Up close now, she saw that he was in his early thirties. Years of weightlifting showed in the broad shoulders and muscular neck. He came close to being a rhinoceros. His hair was cut short. Tattoos covered both arms. He’d torn the sleeves off his jumpsuit, and Kate suspected it was to show off the ink work.

  “That’s right,” the man growled in a voice filled with anticipation. His eyes raked Kate. “Is that poncho hiding some kind of body?” He laughed. “I bet it is. A tall girl like you, I bet you are one fine-looking woman.” He gestured with the knife and smiled. “What say you take off that poncho and show me what you got. Treat me to my own wet T-shirt contest.”

  Kate pulled the Velcro loose with her free hand. If she was going to fight the guy, she didn’t want him to be able to grab hold of the poncho easily. She shrugged out of it, and then let the sleeve leak down the hand holding the baton, still hidden behind her leg.

  He smiled bigger, then reached down and rubbed his groin with his free hand. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. I haven’t had a woman in over seven months. You’re in for a treat.” He shrugged. “Then I suppose I’ll have to share you with the others.” He reached for her.

  When Kate felt his fingers close around her wrist, she struck. Her instructor in the dojo had told her that was the primary time to go to work with the baton, the time when she could cause the most immediate damage. She didn’t hesitate, listening to Tyler in the distance and knowing that others were closing in on him.

  She swung the baton, whipping it up at the man’s head. She didn’t hold back the way she had with Mathis. In that situation she’d aimed to incapacitate, not truly injure. At the moment, not knowing what had happened to Tyler and feeling responsible because she’d brought Tyler along, she wanted to cripple the man. She didn’t want him to cut her with the knife.

  The baton smacked into the man’s forehead, staggering him backward. But it didn’t put him down, and it was her fault for not following up immediately. By the time she realized the man wasn’t going down, he was roaring in rage and slashing at her with the knife.

  Shane pulled up short when he saw the woman fighting Monte Carter. The man was a monster, a steroid freak even in prison, trading sexual favors for his drug of choice. Shane didn’t know why Jolly had Carter along, except maybe as the wild card if things had to turn bloody.

  When Shane saw the woman hit Carter with the baton, it stunned him but he knew she was going to trigger a murderous rage in the man. Carter wouldn’t quit now until the woman was dead—or begging to die.

  Carter slashed at her, attacking again and again. Shane ran toward them, slipping and falling on the loose ground, tripping over a log concealed by the tall grass. He pushed himself up, watching in disbelief as the woman took Carter apart.

  She blocked the knife and the rasping metal on metal sound reached Shane’s ears. Even as he registered that, the woman disengaged, stepping to the side. Carter wheeled and tried to lunge at her, but his greater weight tore the ground loose and caused him to stumble.

  Just as she was counting on, Shane realized. His estimation and respect for her rose like mercury on a hot day.

  Turning, the woman set herself and slammed the baton into Carter’s temple. He staggered and remained on his feet through an effort of sheer will. Her second strike hit Carter’s wrist. The big-bladed hunting knife dropped from Carter’s numbed fingers. He staggered back and lifted his hands to protect his face.

  The woman kicked him in the groin. Carter dropped to his knees, catching himself on one hand. Moving to the side, the woman slammed the baton against the back of Carter’s neck.

  The man went down like a poleaxed steer. Considering the steroids and Carter’s size, maybe the comparison was really fitting, Shane thought. By the time he’d registered what had taken place, she was running toward the plaintive voice.

  Instead of catching up to her, Shane trailed along behind her, wanting to see what was going to happen next.

  “Kate!”

  Pausing to listen again, thrown off by the constant sound of the rain, Kate got her bearings on Tyler’s voice. She tracked him to a rise and looked down at the creek twenty feet below.

  Tyler stood in the middle of the rushing water, up to his chest. He held his hands over his midsection.

  At first, Kate couldn’t see what the problem was. Then, when lightning chased across the sky, she saw the line tied tightly between the trunks of two cypress trees on either side of the creek.

  “Oh God,” Kate whispered, knowing what had happened then.

  Bait-hook alligator traps were the chosen weapons of hunters trying to keep alligators from their land, or of poachers. Normally a size 12, barbed fishhook was suspended two feet above the water level, attached to a strong rope or cable, and baited with nutria, beef lungs, fish or chicken. Once the alligator took the bait, usually swallowing it whole, the hook became embedded in the stomach and it was stuck there till the hunter came back and put it out of its misery with a bullet through the brain.

  In the darkness, probably running at near full speed, Tyler had run into one.

  Kate didn’t even want to think about the possible damage the barbed hook had already done. She looked for a way down. Then she heard something move behind her.

  Whirling, she brought up the baton, seeing the man-sized shape rise out of the shadows behind her. She saw then that the hair was blond, and she recognized the man in front of her. Shane. Something. She couldn’t remember what it was from the fragments of news stories she’d caught on the radio and television. But she did remember that he hadn’t been one of the men who had kidnapped Desiree Martini. He was a drug-dealer and a cop-killer, though. Not the kind of guy to get caught alone in the dark with.

  She lifted the baton, but he caught her wrist. She tried to knee him in the groin, but he caught her knee and slipped inside the kick, pulling her up close against him so that his thigh slid neatly between her legs.

  He grinned at her for some stupid reason that she couldn’t understand. She felt the hard planes of his body against hers, felt the strength of him.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

  Kate almost believed him. He had sincere down pat. She reared her head back and slammed her forehead into his face.

  “Damn!” he said.

  Shifting quickly, Kate tried to free her wrist. Instead, he wrapped his leg more tightly around hers and threw her to the ground. He landed on top of her. Shane outweighed her by a good sixty or seventy pounds and was four or five inches taller than she was. This was exactly the situation her dad had sent her to the martial arts dojo to learn to avoid. She tried to head-butt him again. He smacked her forehead with his open palm. Her senses spun.

  “Stop it!” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

  You’ve got a strange way of showing that, Kate thought, and kept wriggling to escape. His long hair hung down in her face. He kept his head against hers so she couldn’t head butt him again. His hazel eyes stared into hers.

  All at once, Kate was struck by the intimacy of the situation. Shane lay plastered against her like another skin. It had been years since she’d had a man that close to her. She’d only had a physical rel
ationship with a man once, two years after she’d gotten divorced.

  Bryce had found out about the affair. He’d hired a private detective to make the man’s life hell for a month or so, informing her lover’s employer about indiscretions he’d made in past jobs and money he’d hidden from the IRS. Kate hadn’t known about his problems beforehand, but it didn’t matter either way. He got the message and stayed away from Kate. In fact, everybody got the message and stayed away from Kate.

  She stared up at Shane, feeling helpless and pissed and scared.

  “Over here!” someone shouted in the creek below. The sound of slogging footsteps echoed up from the lowlands. “He’s over here! Got himself hung up!”

  “Hey,” Shane said.

  She looked at him, refusing to respond.

  “When I let you go, I want you to promise not to hit me,” he said. “Then I want you to get the hell out of here.”

  She studied his face, trying to figure out what his game was. “What?”

  Voices sounded down in the creek, but Kate couldn’t understand them.

  “These are bad men,” Shane said. “They won’t think anything of killing you.” His hazel eyes bored into hers. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “Why?” It didn’t make any sense.

  He smiled at her, looking like a little boy with a secret. “Because I’m not like them. And you’ve been unlucky enough to cross paths with us twice today. Nobody deserves that much bad juju.”

  So he recognized her. That made Kate feel a little more vulnerable.

  “Do we have a deal?” Shane asked.

  “Sure,” Kate said after what she deemed a proper hesitation.

  Gradually, Shane got his knees up under him and lifted his face from hers. She promptly headbutted him in the face and brought her leg up into his groin.

  “Damn!” he swore as she pushed him off her. He lost control of her baton wrist. She levered it up under his throat and pushed, rolling over on top of him, her knees straddling his hips and locking him to the ground.