Overkill(92)

Zach spun away. “Kate! The lamps.”

She was already off the sofa. She ran over and slapped the wall switch. It plunged the room into total darkness, but Zach had a clear path to the front door. He bolted toward it, reflexively ducking his head as Eban, screaming in fury, released another barrage of bullets.

Kate already had the door opened. Zach shoved her out onto the porch, then grabbed her hand and ran like hell.





Dave Morris had replaced the Glock that that asshole Bridger had thrown into the woods the night of their fight. He’d gone searching for it in daylight, but it had been hopeless. A buddy who ran a pawn shop had sold him one under the counter.

Most of the swelling in his face had gone down, but the bruises were still evident. Everybody in town knew who was responsible for the whipping he’d taken, and that was the most galling thing of all, to have been bested by that has-been.

And even after he’d done the bastard a favor and told him about his ex-father-in-law’s spying scheme, Bridger had won the ear of Sheriff Meeker, who, with Bridger’s urging, was keeping him on unpaid suspension indefinitely.

After all the hardship he continued to suffer on Bridger’s account, he questioned why in hell he was risking his neck to make this drive up the mountain in pea soup conditions to deliver a message.

However, the request had come from a doctor—Gilbreath, he thought she’d said—and it was more about Bridger’s ex-wife than it was about the asshole himself, and Morris wasn’t completely immune to compassion.

He was doing his good deed for the day. For the year, maybe.

But when he reached the turnoff to Bridger’s place and discovered a chain across it, his altruism receded. Who the hell and what the fuck? He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, considering his options. He wasn’t an errand boy. He wasn’t Bridger’s private secretary, and sure as hell wasn’t his buddy.

But he remembered his ex-wife as being a hot ticket. Face a ten, figure an eleven, and now she was on life support, for crissake.

In the trunk of his car was a pair of bolt cutters. He’d used them to carve that gash down the side of Bridger’s pickup. To make up for that, he would deliver this damn message, and then they’d be square. He’d be done with Mr. MVP once and for all.

Cursing himself for being a soft-hearted sucker, he got out and took a Maglite and the bolt cutters from his trunk, then sauntered over and bent down to inspect the chain.

When he saw its heft and the quality of the lock, he muttered, “No way.” Biting through those links was going to require more effort than he was willing to exert, and his bolt cutters would probably break before the chain did.

And this really wasn’t Dave Morris’s problem, was it? In order to drive up here, he’d left a cozy bar, a cold longneck, and a ten-dollar wager riding on a pool tourney. No, that doctor down in New Orleans would have to find another way to contact Bridger. He had tried.

He was walking back to his car when gunshots stopped him in his tracks.

Having lived in the area all his life, he knew that fog was deceptive. It could muffle sound or magnify it. It fooled you about the direction of its origin, and from how far away it had traveled. Even on clear days, sound waves ricocheted off the mountains in ways that defied physics.

But hell if he didn’t think those shots had come from Bridger’s place.

When he heard another spate of gunfire, he was certain of it.

He dropped the bolt cutters but kept his Maglite. He chambered a round in his new Glock, jumped the chain across the turnoff, and started up Bridger’s private road, plowing through the fog.





Zach was so familiar with the trail he’d charted, he could run it in the dark, in the fog. He knew where there were boulders to dodge, low limbs to duck, fallen tree trunks to hurdle. He knew where runoffs, no more than mere trickles, could make rocks and forest debris hazardously slippery.

“How can you see where you’re going?” Kate was panting, but she kept her voice at a whisper.

Zach had cautioned her to be as quiet as possible because he hadn’t wanted to make it any easier for Eban to follow them. He hoped that whatever inevitable sounds they made would be overridden by the thrum of the waterfall.

“Just step where I step,” he said.

“How do you know where to step?”

“I hike this trail several times a week.”

“This is your hike?”

“This is it.”

“This is a trail?”

“Low branch coming up on your right.”

She cleared the branch without breaking stride. “Do you think Eban is coming after us?”

“What do you think?”

“Murderers don’t leave eyewitnesses.”

Zach guided her around a flat rock where he sometimes stopped to drink from his water bottle.

“But unlike you,” she huffed, “Eban won’t know where he’s going. He won’t be able to follow this trail. He’ll turn back. He probably already has.” When Zach didn’t respond, she said, “You don’t think so, do you?”

“I think we need to keep running.”

“So do I. How far to the turnaround?”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that the turnaround was the white-water river at the bottom of the gorge. “Just stay right behind me and don’t let go of my hand.”