Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(23)

“Are you okay?” he asked as he shoved the pistol into the back of his pants. His ribs were sore, his left lower leg a strong dull ache. The rain came in hard little drops, few in number but driven by the rising wind. “Where are you hurt?”

She took a step away from the car, raised the compound bow and drew the string back. She’d found four broadhead arrows for the snap-in quiver. A fifth was nocked in place, pointed right at his chest. Her arms were steady.

“Take it easy.” He put his hands up, the black drawstring sack hanging from one finger. “What’s going on?” He thought there was a real possibility that she would put a hole in him.

“You killed those men.”

“I did.” He was very tired, and his head hurt. “It seemed better than the alternative.”

“Which was?”

“Them killing me and taking you somewhere.”

Her face softened a little at that. She said, “What’s in the bag?”

Peter set the black sack down carefully on the half-crushed roof of the car. “Their wallets, the car registration, whatever I could find. If you want to figure out what’s going on, you need a place to start, right?”

He didn’t tell her what the sack itself was. He’d seen them before. It was a hood. The kind of thing the CIA put over your head when they took you away. He’d found it in the glove compartment along with a gag and multiple sets of plastic restraints. Whatever she was into, it was serious.

“Why did you set their car on fire?”

“To get rid of their phones, anything that might have your name on it. Any DNA and fingerprints I left behind.” He could feel the heat on his back as the burn began to really take off. The gas was just the igniter. It was all the plastic padding and upholstery and insulation that would cook the Tahoe down to a skeleton. “Also to send a message.”

“What’s the message?”

He smiled gently. “Don’t fuck with June Cassidy.”

Her arms drooped a little, and Peter began to feel better about his chances.

“Listen,” he said. “I know what you’re going through. This is hard stuff to process. But we need to keep moving. The ammunition in that car is going to start to cook off any minute. And there are probably more of those guys out there somewhere. Maybe you could do me a favor and shoot me later?”

She didn’t answer, but she let the tension off the bow. The faint outline of a smile ghosted across her face.

He put his hands down, took the gun from his waistband, and dropped it and the black drawstring sack through his broken window onto the passenger seat. “I’m hoping your car will get us out of here. Can you drive?”

She looked at the gun and the black sack, then back to Peter. “Yeah.” She pushed the bow through the broken back window, climbed up to the sunroof, and swung her legs through.

Unbelievably, the Subaru started on the fourth try. Steam plumed from under the hood and a loud clattering sound came from somewhere in the engine compartment. There was nothing Peter could do about it, so he didn’t waste time trying to figure it out.

It was a far better outcome than trying to get that logging truck turned around.

So he limped ahead of the battered little car, scouting down the dry section of the riverbed for a way back up to the road, while June drove slowly behind, piloting around the larger rocks.

The Subaru was rapidly approaching the end of its life, and they were still a long way from anywhere.

Finally they came to a broad oxbow where the river had deposited sand and gravel on the inside bank, leaving a broad shelving path. The Subaru labored up the final steep shoulder, tires slipping on the soft vegetation, Peter pushing from behind with his leg on fire until they hit the packed gravel of the road.

When the tires finally caught, he thought June might keep driving without him, but she stopped and waited without a word.

Peter climbed into the passenger seat. She put the car in gear and pointed it downhill toward so-called civilization and the beginnings of some answers.

? ? ?

THE RAIN NEVER MATERIALIZED, and the clouds thinned and rose as they drove. June wasn’t talking, so Peter opened the black drawstring sack in his lap. Three wallets and the registration. The phones were all password-protected, plus they could be tracked, so he’d thrown them into the fire. He never found the handheld locator device they’d used to track June. There were only so many seconds he could spend inside that slaughterhouse.

The wallets were clean and new and anonymous, although each had a driver’s license, a corporate credit card in the name SafeSecure, and federal IDs under different names, one from the Department of Defense and another from Homeland Security. They looked pretty good, but Peter was willing to bet that none of them were real. Each wallet also had four or five hundred dollars in mixed bills.

So they had money for food and gas for the next few days, and a few ways to start looking into the hunters. As an investigative reporter, June would have better resources than Peter for that.

The car was a problem. When the road changed from rutted gravel to uneven asphalt, June put it in third and the clattering got louder. A new noise came from under the car, the unnerving grind of nuts and bolts in an industrial blender. The plume of steam rising from under the hood seemed thinner, and Peter was pretty sure that wasn’t good news. June kept both hands on the wheel because the steering was unreliable at speeds over fifteen miles per hour. Something else wrong in the front end, maybe a tie rod, maybe the frame was bent, or both. The list was getting longer by the minute.