Stillhouse Lake (Stillhouse Lake #1)(90)

I hear something through the roar of the rain and the distant rumble of thunder.

Graham’s laughing.

I slip behind a thick tree trunk and catch my breath, and as I look back I catch a lucky bolt of lightning that lights up the trail. He’s not far behind me, and he throws up a hand to shield his eyes from the bright flash—and I realize he’s wearing night vision.

He can see me running through the darkness.

I feel a wave of despair. I have seven bullets to his shotgun, no way to accurately sight my shots in this dark, soaking hell, and he has night vision. I feel it all slipping away from me. I’ll never find my children. I’ll die out here and rot on this mountain, and no one will ever know who killed me.

What steadies me again is a vision of what the Sicko Patrol will make of that fate. Served her right, the bitch. Justice at last.

I will never be their victory.

I wait while Graham closes the distance. If I’m going to shoot, I’m going to make it good. I can do this. Wait for the lightning flash to blind him again, step out, open up. He’s a paper target on the range, and I can do this.

It all happens perfectly. The hot, blue-white flash of the lightning lights Graham perfectly, and I aim, smooth and calm now, and just before I squeeze the trigger, I feel the barrel of a shotgun press hard against my neck and hear Kyle Graham, the older son, yell, “I got her, Dad!” Surprise dulls the flush of panic, but I don’t think. I just act.

I spin to my left, graceful and fast in the mud—finally, it’s working for me—and sweep the barrel away with the edge of my hand, reversing as I go to take a good grip on the metal and twist. While that’s in motion, I kick hard into Kyle’s groin. I pull it at the last moment, remembering that I’m not fighting a man. He’s a boy, just a boy about my daughter’s age, and it’s not his fault his father’s a world-class psychopath any more than it’s Lanny’s fault she is Mel’s child.

All this is still enough to shock Kyle. He chokes and staggers back, letting go of the shotgun. The weight of it drags at my wounded left arm. I jam the pistol into my jeans pocket, hoping to hell I don’t shoot myself, and shove Kyle hard in the flat of his back. “Run or I’ll kill you!” I scream at him, and the next flash shows him flailing through the underbrush, heading up the hill, not down. I wonder why, but I don’t have time to think. I bring the shotgun up and spin toward where his father must be, and I pull the trigger.

The weapon’s kick nearly knocks me on my ass in the slippery footing, but I manage to catch myself against the thick, moist bark of a pine. The photo-flash of the gun igniting showed me that I’d missed him. Not by much, though. Maybe I’d given him a couple of pellet kisses to remember me by.

“Bitch!” Graham yells. “Kyle! Kyle!”

“I let him go!” I shout back. “Where are my kids? What did you do to them?” I duck behind a tree in the darkness.

“You’ll be with them soon, you fucking—” Though thunder mutes the sound of the gunshot, I feel the tree shiver slightly as it absorbs the pellets. I wonder how well armed he is. If I can get him to run out of ammunition . . . but no. Lancel Graham would have planned this as meticulously as everything else. I can’t count on something so simple.

I realize in the flash of another lightning strike that I’m standing not far from another trail, one that branches off to the west. It seems to wander that way, and I think it slopes down. The lightning has picked up now, and I think it might be enough to lessen the effectiveness of Graham’s night vision equipment. He’ll have trouble picking me out in all the flashes.

I go low, hoping that even if he spots me he’ll think I’m a deer, and I make it to the point where the trail begins to curve down. If I can make it to the ridge, it’s possible that Graham’s one of those hide-a-key fools, and I can find a magnetic box in the wheel well that will let me steal the thing and get out of here, find help, find my children. He must have GPS. Maybe a record of where he’s been.

I fall halfway down the trail, slide, and my head slams hard into a jutting boulder. Sparks and stars, and a wave of icy, tingling pain that makes everything strangely soft. I lie for a moment in the cold rain, gasping, spitting out water like a drowning victim. I’m cold. I’m so cold, and I wonder, suddenly, if I’m going to be able to get up. My head feels strange, wrong, and I know it’s bleeding badly. I can feel the warmth running out of me.

No. I’m not dying here. I’m not. I don’t know if Graham is still tracking me; I don’t know anything except that I have to get up, cold or not, hurt or not. I have to get to the ridge and find a way to get help. Somehow. I will fucking shoot one of the Johansens’ prize paintings if I need to, to make my point.

I slip and slide my way to my hands and knees, and I remember that I had a shotgun, but I can’t find it now. It’s gone, pitched into the darkness by my fall, and there’s no way for me to find it now. I still have the pistol, which miraculously hasn’t blown a big, devastating hole in my thigh. I take it out of my pocket and hold it tight as I get up and rest against the boulder. Blood is sheeting down the side of my face in a warm torrent that the rain dilutes almost instantly.

I slither down the trail, grabbing for handholds.

It’s a nightmare that I can’t escape, this descent, and I form the idea that Graham is right behind me, grinning and taunting me. Then Graham morphs into Mel, the Mel behind the Plexiglas at the prison, grinning at me with bloody teeth. It feels eerily true, but when I finally, breathlessly twist around, I find that the next flash of lightning shows me there’s no one on the trail at all.