Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(11)

“Okay,” said Peter. “We should go take a peek. See who’s down there.”

“We?” She stared at him, and he felt that focus again, like the heat of the sun.

He looked right back at her. “Hey, I’m your prisoner,” he said. “Under the Geneva Convention, that means my health and safety are your responsibility. First, I’d like a large cup of strong coffee and a breakfast burrito. Then you need to protect me from those mean men with guns.”

She didn’t look away. He saw something change inside her, some decision made. “You really want to go down there?”

“Not all the way,” he said. “Just far enough to get a look. I don’t suppose you have any binoculars in that bag, do you?”





4





JUNE



He sure looked different, June thought. Not some overfed goon in a suit, like those fake G-men. Definitely not the deliberately casual costume she saw so often in the tech industry, hoodies and expensive jeans on the technical types and golf shirts on the money men.

She fucking hated golf shirts.

This guy Peter looked kind of raggedy, although that wasn’t quite right. Definitely not the golf shirt type. Hair all shaggy, his rough beard not a hipster fashion statement. You’d never describe him as fashion-forward. Too lean and ropy, but with a kind of lightness to him, like one of those uncluttered man-shaped sculptures made of scrap steel.

His clothes were worn to threads, but good stuff, not cheap. So he wasn’t broke. And he was fairly clean, especially if you took into account that he’d been in the woods for a while. So he had decent hygiene, again in contrast to many in the tech industry.

No, she thought. Not raggedy.

Lived-in. The man looked lived-in.

Like that pair of old Levi’s she’d had since college. Frayed but comfortable, washed a thousand times, and fit her hips like they were custom-made.

She caught herself and sighed.

That’s fucking great, June.

You meet some guy in a tree and now you’re thinking about your hips.

I know you’re approaching your sexual peak, honey, but really? Don’t you have more important things to focus on right now?

Like those assholes still chasing you?

She found herself feeling self-conscious, with the bow and arrow. Maybe even a little silly.

She snapped the arrow back into its quiver and jumped from her branch to the platform netting. Her landing made him bounce on the trampoline material. She liked that he didn’t look startled.

He seemed like the steady type.

She went directly to the dry bags she’d insisted Bryce buy and dug through them for the gear she needed. Everything was still clean and dry. Rotten rope was a bad thing if you were three hundred feet up a tree.

She found Bryce’s old narrow climber’s pack, four coils of 9-mil rope, and the heavy clanking bags from Mountain Rescue. “Hey,” she said to make sure she had Peter’s attention, and tossed him a knot of webbing. “That’s a climbing harness. You ever wear one before?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Put it on,” she said. “I’ll check you. How about Jumars, figure eights? Ascenders and descenders?”

“Most of my rope work involved jumping out of helicopters,” he said. “But I know the gear.”

She dumped out her own pack and sorted her belongings. She laid out rope and gear, divided it up, and made a pile for him with Bryce’s old bombproof pack. “Here, take this. You’re going to need it.”

She collected her gear, made sure the compound bow was tightly lashed to the back of her pack, and pointed him back the way he’d come. The bow would make it more difficult for her to travel through the tree, but she wasn’t going to leave it behind.

She liked that he was packed and ready when she was.

They followed the path of red marking ropes past the burnt stub of the original lightning-struck spire, and down through the lower crown. He moved lightly in the tree, found branches that would support his weight without cracking or breaking, and didn’t use his boots to kick footholds into the bark. He moved, in other words, like a real climber, even on this easy path.

The next routes wouldn’t be so easy.

But if he’d really free-climbed a 9-mil rope twenty stories after climbing sixty feet up a redwood sapling, he was plenty capable.

Now they could hear fragments of voices from below, although the wind in the branches drowned out the words. How many men were there?

She wondered if they were the same men from the SUV, and how badly she’d hurt them. Part of her felt remorse about hitting them with the stun gun. A small part, but still. She didn’t want them dead, just unable to ever threaten her again. She hoped these were different men.

Conscious of sound now, she used simple hand gestures to direct him to the Perch. It was a massive limb, six feet in diameter, and horizontal for ten feet before it angled upward toward the sun.

This was the lowest point of decent lateral structure in the tree. She’d run strong webbing from the main trunk to the vertical leg of the Perch, so they had a drop point well above their footing. On their research trips, she’d clipped ropes and pulleys on the webbing for hauling gear up and down in a system she’d privately called the freight elevator. When you had four academic biologists three hundred plus feet up in a tree for two weeks at a time, you hauled a lot of freight. Not just camping gear and sample cases, but all supplies in and all garbage out, including their poop in plastic bags, triple-wrapped.