Her ears were ringing. What was that sound? The wind whistling through the trees? Or was it the sound of gunfire sizzling? No, that wasn’t it.
The noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun; then it started up again, but it was louder, shriller this time. It sounded like a whistle.
“Hear . . . that . . . ?” she panted.
“Yeah.”
Then she heard a trumpet. Was she losing it? She kept running, her feet pounding into the soft earth as she raced along, still panting from her exertion.
The muscles in her legs were burning. Suddenly she lost her footing. She would have hurled headfirst into a gulley if John Paul hadn’t reacted instinctively, lifting her off her feet as he kept stride.
He slowed as he let go of her, then kept pace just in case she went down again. All at once, they broke through the trees, crossed the road . . . and ran into the middle of Boy Scout Troop 183. Before he could stop, John Paul bowled over one pup tent and mowed down the troop master, who got the wind knocked out of him. The trumpet he was holding went flying into another tent.
“Cell phone,” Avery shouted at the man sprawled on his back. “We need your cell phone.”
“No signal up here,” he answered as he came up on his elbows. His face was red with anger. “Who in thunder do you people think . . .”
John Paul was frantically searching the road ahead of them. Monk wouldn’t have any qualms about taking a couple of kids out as long as he could get his primary targets. One of the boys shouted when he saw the gun tucked into the back of John Paul’s jeans. One blistering look from John Paul shut the boy up.
Avery dropped down on her knees next to the leader. “Listen to me. We need help. There’s a killer coming this way. Where’s your transportation? Answer me, please,” she begged.
Her terror got through to him. “We’ve got a camper here, but my Ford four-wheeler is parked about half a mile down the road. The keys are in my jacket in that tent over there, the one with the troop numbers painted on it.”
John Paul was lifting Avery to her feet. “Get in that camper and get your boys out of here,” he yelled back at the man as he pulled Avery toward the next slope, staying well hidden in the trees.
“Get to a phone and call for help,” she shouted.
Her legs were trembling, and she didn’t think she had it in her to run much longer. Concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, her heart feeling as though it were lodged in her throat, she suddenly remembered they hadn’t gotten the keys.
“We have to go back . . . the car keys.”
“We don’t need them,” he said. “Now move it, sugar. You’re starting to drag.”
She fantasized about hiding somewhere and waiting for John Paul to come back with the car. She could find a spot where Monk wouldn’t find her, couldn’t she?
Suck it up. Damn it, I don’t want to. I can do it. I can do it. She kept up the drill until the pain in her side became excruciating. She wondered if she could die upright. Sure she could.
Tears came into her eyes then, for she saw the old SUV parked in the gravel near the curve in the road. John Paul raced ahead of her. He broke the back window, reached in, and unlocked the front door.
Avery ran around to the other side as he unlocked the door for her. It took less than forty-five seconds for him to hot-wire the car, throw it into gear, and take off.
She was impressed. “Were you a juvenile delinquent growing up?”
The second they rounded the curve, she fell back against the seat and allowed herself to fall apart. A sob caught in her throat.
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
“Sure sounded like you were.” He gave her a sharp look.
“I’m joyful.” She hastily wiped the tears of relief from her cheeks.
He grinned. He had the very same feeling, but it didn’t last long. “Hell,” he muttered.
“What hell?”
“The road’s winding back around . . . he might be coming down, getting into position . . . ah, hell, that’s what he’s gonna do, and there isn’t any way we can go off-road here.”
He leaned forward, pulled his gun out, and dropped it into his lap. He rolled down his window, then picked up the gun.
She frantically got her weapon out and then rolled down her window. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Getting ready just like you.”
“No. Get down and stay down. If he’s coming at us, you’ll be on his side.”
She ignored his order. “Just tell me when to start shooting. We’ll keep him down until we get past.”
It sounded like a great plan, and she’d said it with gusto, but that was only because she didn’t believe Monk could have gotten down the hills that quickly.
She was wrong about that. She spotted him before John Paul did.
“Get the hell down,” John Paul shouted.
Her response was to flip the safety off. Leaning against the door, she put her arm out the window, steadied the barrel of the gun on the side mirror, and waited. She ducked down as much as she could.
When Monk crouched down and swung the rifle up, John Paul shouted, “Now!”
They fired simultaneously, again and again as they sped toward the killer. Monk dove for cover, then scrambled to roll over and get his weapon up. Avery kept firing, pinning him down as they flew past.
The road suddenly curved up the mountain. There was a dirt road that angled sharply to the south that would have taken them farther down the mountain, but John Paul knew that, at the speed he was going, the SUV would roll if he tried to make the turn.
“I’m out,” he said as he emptied the magazine.
She was turning to look when John Paul grabbed the back of her neck and shoved her down. “Get on the floor,” he ordered as the back window shattered.
They were still climbing and had reached another sharp curve when Monk blew out the left rear tire.
The car went into a spin. They careened off the road into the brush, narrowly missing a tree head-on, but finally stopping when they hit a rock.
“Move it,” he shouted as he leapt out of the car and raced around to the other side. Avery had no sense of where they were, only knew they were once again climbing. Her heartbeat, like the turbulent white water, was roaring in her ears. She raced up the steep slope, then skidded to a stop.
“No,” she cried.
John Paul stopped beside her. “Ah, hell.”
She wanted to weep as she stared down at the swirling water below. No. Not again. Shaking her head, she said, “I won’t do it. I can’t. You can’t make me.”
He looked genuinely sorry when he grabbed her. “Sure I can.”
Chapter 25
PICTURESQUE, MY ASS. IF AVERY SAW ANOTHER WHITE-WATER anything, she thought she just might start screaming and never stop. At the moment, she was feeling malevolent toward pine trees too. Hated every one of them. She wasn’t real fond of John Paul either. He had tossed her over the cliff like a discarded candy wrapper, and on the way down she had vowed that, if he survived, she’d kill him, just for the sheer joy of it.
She knew she was being irrational. She didn’t care. Her bad mood intensified when she cut her leg on a jagged rock. If they’d been in the ocean, the blood pouring from her cut would have sounded the lunch bell for the neighboring sharks. Trying to stay positive as she fought to stay afloat, she told herself to be thankful there weren’t any sharks around. And her leg didn’t hurt all that much compared to the searing charley horse in her calf that nearly caused her to drown. John Paul hauled her onto the bank, half carried her into the trees so they wouldn’t be seen, and then dropped her. She landed with a thud on her backside.
He dropped beside her. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Since she’d taken in more than enough water to fill a backyard swimming pool, she was too waterlogged to answer the absurd question. Shoving her hair out of her eyes, she glared at him.
“It wasn’t as bad as the first jump, was it? I don’t think that drop was more than twenty feet,” he said.
“You pushed me over a cliff.”
Actually, he hadn’t pushed her. As he recalled, he’d thrown her so she wouldn’t hit the rocks jutting out from the base of the cliff. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention that now, though. “Did I have any other choice?”
She wasn’t ready to admit that there really hadn’t been any other alternative. Their guns were useless against a high-powered rifle, and Monk was hot on their trail.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He grinned. “Cup half empty, sugar? Where’s that optimistic attitude?”
“At the bottom of the river.”
He stood and offered her his hand. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
She didn’t know if she had enough strength to even stand. She was so tired and cold and wet. Suck it up, she told herself.
“Right,” she said as she grabbed hold. When he jerked her upright, she fell against him. He put his arm around her and held her tight while he made up his mind which direction they should go.
“Aren’t you tired?” she asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
She looked back toward the river. “Maybe he’ll give up now.”
John Paul shook his head. “That isn’t gonna happen. He’s a professional. He’s taken the contract, and he won’t stop coming after us until . . .”
“He succeeds?”
“Or until I kill him.”
“I vote for the second option.”
They both heard the sound of children’s laughter. Avery pulled away from him and started running toward the noise. “I hope they have a phone.”
“Doubt you can get a signal.”
She actually smiled. “There’s that negativity I so love. You had me worried, John Paul. For a minute there you were . . .”
“What?”
“Cheerful.”
“The hell I was.”
He sounded as though she’d just insulted him. She was laughing as she ran toward the sound. The reason for her sudden good humor was either joy or hysteria. A family of five was setting up tents near a little stream.
After a brief explanation, everyone piled into the father’s minivan and headed toward a town the man remembered he’d driven through on the way up the mountain.
Thirty minutes later they reached the sleepy little community of Emerson. Downtown consisted of four streets. The father stopped the van in front of a two-story stone building. The second they got out of the van and closed the sliding door, the father sped away.
“I think maybe you scared him,” Avery remarked.
“The faster he can get his family away from us, the safer they’ll all be.”
There was a police station, which was surprising, considering the size of the town. Sharing the same building, the police station was squeezed in between the volunteer fire department on one end of the building and Bud’s Burgers on the other. There were three doors facing the street with signs above each one. They walked through the middle door into a wide hall. Swinging doors were on both sides. One connected to the restaurant, and the other to the fire department. The police station was directly ahead.
The aroma of hamburgers and onions and french fries filled the air, but the smell didn’t spur Avery’s appetite. It actually made her nauseous. The lack of food, running for miles and miles, the cold, and the terror had taken their toll. She felt all used up. Getting from the door to the counter was suddenly more challenging than surviving the currents. Her feet felt as though they weighed a hundred pounds, and it took every ounce of stamina she had left to move at all.
John Paul could tell she was having trouble. She seemed to wilt before his eyes.
“You okay?” he asked as he put his arm around her waist.
“I feel like rigor mortis has set in,” she said. “I’m not dead, am I?”
Smiling, he said, “You’re still breathing.”
He looked through the glass window and saw the police chief sitting behind his desk. There was a stack of papers on the blotter, and he was poring over them. Every couple of seconds he would glance up at a television mounted to the wall behind the counter. Dressed in navy pants and a white shirt with the name Chief Tyler on the pocket, the middle-aged man was frowning as he picked up a sheet of paper.
A woman in her late sixties stood behind the counter with her back to the door. Her hair was as white as Avery’s face. She seemed mesmerized by the program on the television.
John Paul could hear her talking as he pushed the door open. “Didn’t I tell you something bad was going to happen? Didn’t I tell you, Bud?”
“Yes, Verna. You told me.”
“And didn’t I tell you he brought this on himself?” she asked. “Tearing out all those beautiful trees and digging away at the mountain just to build himself a fancy monument. It looks like Mother Nature decided to get even, didn’t she?”
The chief wasn’t paying much attention. “Yes,” he drawled as he continued to scan the sheet of paper in his hand.
“If you ask me, he’s the villain. I feel sorry for his wife.”
“You mean ex-wife, don’t you?”
“That’s right. He got rid of her so he could move on to a younger model. It’s criminal, if you ask me. Poor thing. He got her used to living the high life, and then he yanks the rug right out from under her.”
The chief was clearly exasperated. He dropped the paper on the desk and looked at the television. “‘Poor thing’? Didn’t you see that interview they did with her last month? They had to bleep out every other word she said. I think he was crazy to ever marry her.”
“But how is she going to get along now?”
“She can get a job and work like the rest of us. Nobody put a gun to her head when she signed that prenup,” he pointed out.
John Paul and Avery had been listening from the doorway. They walked inside as Verna was telling the chief it was all a terrible shame. The chief spotted them, did a double take, and stood.
“What happened to you two?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ll be happy to listen,” he said.
Avery pulled away from John Paul and walked over to the counter. Verna gasped, and her brown eyes widened as she approached.
“My name’s Avery Delaney,” she said.
“You’re soaking wet. What in heaven’s name happened to you? You look like something my cat dragged in.”