Storm Force

by Meredith Fletcher

  She saw the snake. From the size and shape of the head, she knew it was a cottonmouth. She ran forward and dropped to her knees beside Shane. He was panicked, which was understandable if it was the first time he’d been snake-bitten. But yanking on a snake only made the bite worse and spread the venom farther and faster.

  She dropped to her knees beside Shane. “Shane!”

  He looked up at her, still pulling at the snake.

  “Stop pulling,” Kate said. “Let me do this.” Normally when she had to detach a snake the victim was too panicked to listen. Then again, normally when a snake bit someone, it didn’t stay attached.

  “Get it off me,” Shane whispered hoarsely.

  Moving quickly, Kate seized the viper’s head by the jaws and squeezed them together. The snake’s mouth popped open as the hinge buckled. The fangs slid free of Shane’s arm. She broke the snake’s neck and threw its writhing body into the brush.

  Shane cursed, already shaking. Grabbing his elbow, he tried to look at the wound. “Tell me that was just a mean snake and not a venomous one.”

  “It was a cottonmouth.” Kate took his arm and examined the wounds. There were two of them, both large holes.

  “Are they poisonous?”

  “Yeah.”

  Shane started to get up.

  Kate put a hand in the middle of his chest and pushed him back. “Lie still.”

  “So the poison won’t spread?” Shane lay on his back.

  “So you don’t hurt yourself running around in the dark,” Kate replied. “Or maybe trip over another snake. You don’t find cottonmouths by themselves very often. And they’re water snakes, so getting wet or getting flooded doesn’t bother them.”

  Shane lay back and swallowed hard. “Aren’t you supposed to suck the venom out or something? I can’t reach my arm or I’d do it.”

  Kate listened intently and looked back towards the makeshift shelter. A golden glow of light defined it in the distance. She didn’t see or hear any signs of pursuit.

  “You’re supposed to suck out the poison,” Shane insisted. “I’ve got a knife in my pocket.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me see it.” When he produced the clasp knife, Kate opened the blade and found it was razor-sharp. At less than five inches long, it was better than nothing. Barely. She closed the knife again and shoved it into her pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Shane asked.

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?” Anger knotted his face then. “For me to die?”

  “You’re not going to die. Do you have an ink pen?”

  “An ink pen?” Despite the situation and how scared he was, Kate thought Shane was holding up remarkably well. Most people would have been screaming idiots by now, making the situation worse by getting jacked on adrenaline.

  “So you can write your last will and testament,” Kate said.

  Shane cursed.

  “See? You sound better all ready. I really need that ink pen, though, if you have one.” Since she was soaked through already, Kate sat cross-legged on the ground, grateful for the brush and that they were out of most of the mud.

  Reaching into his pocket, Shane took one out and handed it to her.

  “This is going to hurt a little.” Kate pressed the retractable button and pushed the point out. Then she held his arm and encircled the wounds, marking the edema. Then she glanced at her watch and marked the time 11:27 p.m. She’d check again at 11:42.

  Shane cursed and swore during the process, jerking his arm away. She didn’t let go of the limb till she was finished.

  Kate didn’t blame him. Snakebite wounds were painful, and scary as hell.

  “What did you do that for?” he demanded.

  “To mark the envenomation. When you’re bitten, you measure how far the venom spreads for the first few hours. Take readings every fifteen minutes to find out how big a problem you’re dealing with is.”

  “That’s why you suck the venom out, Kate. So it won’t spread.”

  Kate sighed and tried to be patient, but it was hard. She knew he was scared and hurting, even a non-lethal snakebite hurt. The problem was, she considered Shane Warren to be more dangerous than any cottonmouths that might be crawling around.

  “What do you think I should do? Cut X’s over the snakebite and try to suck the venom out?”

  Shane just looked at her, one part pissed and the other part perplexed. “Yeah,” he said finally.

  “If this was a cowboy movie,” Kate told him, “maybe I’d do that. But the truth of the matter is that cutting into your arm is only going to spread the poison faster and farther. If you do have venom in your arm, which we’ve got to wait to see, it already has necrotic properties—if you’ve never heard the word before, it means that it kills living tissue, and I said tissue not people—and spreading that necrosis over your arm is going to leave a scar worse than your granny did. Not to mention leaving your body open to all kinds of infections.”

  He lay quiet for a moment, trying to get control of his rapid breathing. His eyes searched her face. “You’re not just lying to me are you? So I’ll just lie here, never knowing my heart is about to stop?”

  “Man,” Kate said, smiling in spite of the situation, “you do have an imagination.”

  “I mean, you could still be pissed about me helping with your kidnapping—”

  “That I’m not too happy about,” she agreed. She kept talking although she didn’t want to because she knew talking would help keep Shane focused on something other than his condition and because it would relax him.

  Personally, she found talking to Shane confusing. Despite the fact that she was running for her life and was presently stuck on a hilltop with cottonmouths and potentially rabid swamp creatures, she was all too aware that he was a handsome man.

  But all she had to do was remember his talk earlier with Jolly, about how he was going to keep quiet about Deke’s murder for a bigger cut of the Desiree Martini ransom. Handsome he might have been, and sexy, but he was also a rat.

  “—and you could be telling me to lie here so I’ll die instead of going back to the camp and getting help,” Shane said.

  “That would make me a real bitch, now wouldn’t it?”

  He blinked at her, not knowing how to handle that. “Yeah,” he said finally, “yeah, it would.”

  “Well, for your information, I’m not. What I’m doing here, the way I’m treating you, is the best thing we can do.”

  “You’re treating me?”

  “Yeah.” Kate did feel increasingly irritated at his attitude.

  “Lying here, with my arm throbbing, with poison coursing through my body, that’s treating me?”

  “This is what you do for a snakebite just after it happens. You observe.” Kate looked at him then and decided to unload somewhat. “You know about petechiae. I know about snakebites. We’re both experts in our own fields.” She cocked her head at him as he lay back. “I just haven’t figured out what your field is.”

  That stopped him dead in his tracks. “You heard Jolly and me talking this morning. About the fact that he killed Deke.”

  “I saw Jolly suffocate Deke with a pillow,” Kate said, her voice more strained than she would have thought. “I knew he killed him. What I didn’t know was that you knew.”

  “It was too late to save Deke,” Shane said defensively. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “Except leverage more of the Martini ransom money.”

  Shane sighed. He looked at his arm. “Has it been fifteen minutes?”

  Glancing at her watch, Kate discovered that it had. She took his arm when he offered it, then waited for a lightning strike to see. When the sky lit up, she saw that the edema had spread beyond the encircled areas.

  “Okay,” she said, “it injected you with some venom.”

  Shane paled at the announcement. “So now I’m going to die?”

  “No, you’re not going to die. I’ve never k
nown anyone to die from a cottonmouth bite.”

  His expression showed doubt and great concern.

  “If you don’t believe me,” Kate said, “then hike back to your friends—”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  “—and maybe they’ll suck the poison out of you. Maybe they grew up on the same John Wayne movies you did.”

  “Clint Eastwood was more my style.”

  “Whatever. But I’m betting Jolly will kill you the next time he lays eyes on you.”

  Shane shifted his injured arm and grimaced in pain.

  “And I’m keeping your knife, just so you know.”

  “Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

  Kate sat and watched him lying there on the cold wet ground. She saw the fear in him.

  “I just want to know if I’m going to die,” he said finally.

  “You’re not going to die,” Kate repeated.

  “Everybody in my life died without knowing they were going to, Kate,” Shane told her. “My father, my brother, my mother. Every one of them. His voice turned brittle. “And I didn’t know until they were already gone.”

  “That’s all true?”

  “Yeah. It’s all true.”

  For a while, Kate sat there in the rain, feeling it beat down on her as the wind whipped through the trees and branches clacked against each other. “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” he said. “Not just for myself, but for you because you got caught up in this.” He looked at her. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “You’ve been poisoned,” she told him, “but you’re not going to die. You’re lucky you were bitten by a full-grown cottonmouth. Adult pit vipers don’t usually release all their venom at one time. They hold some back in case they have to strike again.”

  “Okay.”

  “Twenty-five percent of the time, you get what is known as a dry bite. That’s one where there’s no venom injected. It’ll still hurt because you’re talking about a certain amount of trauma anyway. And getting bitten is always scary. You get jacked on adrenaline, you’re going to think you’re having heart seizures. And you’re going to get dizzy. That’s all natural.”

  He lay quiet, listening to her.

  “Cottonmouths are poisonous, but not as poisonous as a lot of snakes. Copperheads and rattlesnakes, which we have here in Florida, are much worse. But even then you rarely see a death associated with a bite. Generally you have people die from a subsequent heart attack brought on by anxiety or fear. Or, on rare occasions, you have people who are allergic to a snakebite and go into anaphylactic shock, then die.”

  “And if I was allergic?”

  “You’d already be having problems. You’re not allergic. But you may get sick since poison is present.”

  Shane did get sick. Less than twenty minutes after she told him he wasn’t going to die, he thought she’d been lying. Nausea swept through him and turned his stomach to water. He rolled over to his hands and knees, head swimming, and threw up everything he’d eaten earlier.

  He got really scared then, because he truly didn’t know how much he could trust Kate Garrett to tell him the truth.

  But she stayed there with him, helping him through it, dealing with the vomiting and the weakness. Every time he finished throwing up, his head pounding like it was going to burst, she scooped up a handful of rainwater and washed his face. Then she guided him to a different spot that kept them at least partially protected from the elements.

  “I’m not dying?” he asked through chattering teeth after the last round of sickness. He sat huddled with his back to a tree, his arms wrapped around himself in an effort to stay warm.

  “You’re not dying,” she repeated just as patiently as she had the first time.

  He watched her as she sat with him. Maybe it was the pain, but at that moment he believed she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And the most resourceful. None of the women he’d dated before entering the army or the FBI knew the things that Kate Garrett knew. None of them could have done what she did. He was willing to bet none of the Bureau agents knew a woman who jumped into flood zones and cut the throats of alligators.

  She was one of a kind.

  And she thought he was the scum of the earth.

  “Do you have any analgesics?” he croaked.

  “No. And if I did, you couldn’t take them. They thin the blood, and that would—”

  “Spread the poison,” Shane said. “Yeah. I got that.” He shifted, trying to figure out how to do what he knew he needed to.

  She leaned back against the tree on the other side of him. Her eyes watched the forest. He knew she was thinking and planning. She’d already cut a half dozen branches that were as big around as his forefingers and were three feet long. She’d also sharpened them on one end.

  “Kate,” he whispered, “I have to tell you something.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” he said, thinking maybe that was the dumbest opening he’d ever tried to use.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re definitely not who I thought you were. I was figuring on someone a little less callous and bloodthirsty.”

  Okay. I had that coming. I deserved that. Shane took a deep breath and wished that his head would stop spinning.

  “I’m a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said.

  She just looked at him, not impressed.

  “You know,” Shane said, “the FBI.”

  “I think I had the acronym figured out,” she said sarcastically. “Even down here in the rural areas we’ve heard about the FBI.” She paused. “This is the part where you flash your badge, isn’t it?”

  She was still being sarcastic, Shane realized. “I don’t have my ID. I’m undercover.”

  “Oh,” Kate said, rounding her eyes and her mouth as if she were in on the joke.

  “It’s the truth,” Shane said, getting irritated.

  “That whole not-having-identification thing gets in the way a little, don’t you think?”

  Shane forced himself to go on. This was turning out a lot differently than he’d believed it was going to.

  “My assignment was to get close to Raymond Jolly,” he said.

  “You’ve managed that quite nicely, too,” she observed. “Except for the part where he wants to kill you now.”

  “I did that to save your life.”

  “I can see it’s really working out for you.”

  “He had you in his sights.”

  “It was dark,” Kate argued. “People have a tendency to aim low in the darkness. I’m betting he might have missed, so I’m thinking maybe I saved my own life. Just like I saved yours.”

  “How?”

  “From the snakebite.”

  “You said the snakebite wouldn’t kill me.”

  “It won’t, but running back to Jolly for medical assistance would have. I’ve seen his bedside manner for patients.”

  Shane sighed and willed himself not to throw up as nausea twisted his stomach again. During the last hour he seemed to be getting better. Or maybe there was just nothing left.

  “My Director wanted me to find out where Jolly and his crew left Desiree Martini’s body. I was supposed to get the location so she could be recovered and her parents could get some kind of closure on their grief. I know about grief, and about losing family. The Director didn’t have to ask twice.”

  She regarded him curiously then. “To get close to Jolly, you had to go to prison.”

  He nodded and regretted it. “I’ve done that three times before. The longest time was for a year, to put together the cover I needed to bring down the Colombian cartel that killed my brother.”

  She looked surprised but said, “I can’t imagine willingly going to prison.”

  “I couldn’t imagine letting my brother’s killers go free.”

  “So you were here to find Desiree Martini’s body? Not the ransom money?”

  “That’s right.”
/>
  “But you’re thinking probably they’re in the same place.”

  Shane knew then how neatly she’d laid the trap for him, making it look as if he could still be after the money. “I’m not here for the ransom, Kate. I give you my word on that.”

  “And how much is your word worth?” she asked.

  He was quiet, wishing he knew what to say to make her trust him.

  “You’re here for Desiree Martini’s parents,” Kate said. “Is anyone here for the maid’s parents?”

  Shane leaned back against the tree. There’s no winning with her. He sat still and tried very hard not to throw up.

  Kate stood and gathered the sharp sticks she’d made. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She looked at him, her face mottled by the rain, and he saw there was no mercy in those jade-green eyes. “I was on my way back to Everglades City two days ago when Jolly and you popped out of the swamp into the path of my truck. My two kids are there. They were right in Genevieve’s path. I need to make sure that they’re all right.” She nodded in the direction of the shelter. “Your two friends—or suspects or whatever you want to call them—have got the only boat that I know of. I’m going to get the boat.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’ll stay here,” she said. “You’ll only get both of us killed.”

  Stubbornness brought Shane to his feet, but sickness swirled inside his head and his stomach, bringing him back down again. After he’d retched up nothing a dozen times or more, the spasms finally went away.

  When he looked for Kate, he discovered that she’d already gone.

  Chapter 13

  Kate crept up on the shelter in the darkness. Thoughts of what she was about to do almost made her sick. Taking out drunks like Mathis or would-be rapists who thought her presence out in the brush was an open invitation to rough sex was never premeditated. And those men had only ended up with bruises and bruised egos.

  She took one of the sticks she’d sharpened and waited at the back of the shelter. Hours passed. At 4:08 a.m., Ernie emerged from the shelter and went to empty his bladder.

  Moving stealthily, Kate crept up behind him and drew back the sharpened stick. She hesitated just a moment, hearing the sound of him relieving himself, and thought about Steven and Hannah and how she didn’t know if her son and daughter were alive or dead.