The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (55)

She was about to unsling it when her phone buzzed. Kaiser: “Somebody’s coming in. Get out here.”

“I gotta, I gotta . . .” The boxes were still on the floor. “Kaiser: Go. Go now. I’ll run out the back and get in the creek bed. I’ll call you and tell you where to meet. I got a thing I gotta do, or they’ll know we were here. Go. Go.”

“Going.”

Letty heard him pull away, scrabbled across to the boxes, and began repiling them. One tried to fall off the top of the pile, but she pushed it back, stepped toward the back door. Saw the ResistUS! book on the floor, picked it up. Nothing else seemed to be out of place. She turned the flashlight off, went out the back door and pulled it shut, heard the lock click. As she did that, headlights swung across the front of the building.

She walked straight away from the shed, toward the creek bed. There wasn’t much cover, so she broke into a careful jog, unable to use the flashlight. A light came on in the building and she could see her shadow on the ground in front of her. Had to hurry . . .

She nearly fell into the creek bed. There was little warning, nothing but a sharp dirt edge and then the arroyo below. She couldn’t see how deep it was. She sat down, her feet over the edge, and turned back to the building, saw a tan Jeep sitting on the shoulder of the road, bathed in the light from a window. Then the back door popped open and a woman stood there in the light, the rifle in her hands. The woman shouted, “Vic? Vic? That you?”

Letty slipped over the edge of the cutbank, flicked the flash on and off. The bank was steep, but walkable, crumbling dirt, heavily cut up by foot tracks going up and down. The woman at the house shouted again, “Vic! Terry! That you?”

At the bottom of the creek bed, she turned right and began walking east as quickly as she could; dropped the book, stooped, snatched it off the ground, and hurried on. The creek bottom was eroded and uneven and the going was difficult. She was a hundred yards or so up the creek bed when a light cut across the creek. She pressed herself into an eroded crevice, squatted, and froze. The woman was standing above the truck’s parking spot, shining a brilliant white light along the arroyo.

She’d stopped shouting: if there was anyone in the arroyo, she’d apparently realized it wasn’t Vic or Terry.

After scanning the creek bed, she shined the light down the arroyo wall directly in front of her, examining something. Tracks, Letty thought. She was looking at the place Letty had gone over the side. Then the woman turned, and the flashlight went out, and the woman fired a shot down the arroyo, past Letty, and then a dozen more shots, quickly, spraying them down the creek bed, first one way, then the other.

One came close enough that Letty could differentiate between the crack of a slug breaking the sound barrier ten feet away and the boom of the shot itself. She didn’t move.

The shooting stopped, the light came back on, scanning the creek bed. Then it began to fade in a stuttering way, as if the woman were running away from the creek bed but shining the light back toward it as she ran. Letty waited, heard what sounded like the building door closing, then a car started. She got up and began to walk again. On the way, she called Kaiser.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I was afraid to call, afraid I’d give you away. I saw the muzzle flashes, there were so many that I figured he didn’t know where you were . . .”

“It was a she . . . and I’m good. I’m in the creek bed, heading east,” Letty said. “When I cross that road, the road going north, I’ll come up and run along it.”

“I’ll come down there. I’ll pick you up.”

“Don’t let her see you. She’s got a .223.” Letty clicked off, worried that the lighted face of the phone would pinpoint her.

In the pale moonlight, Letty could see the rim of the arroyo wall above her. Another hundred yards and it curved slightly to the north. When she could no longer see the glow of lights from the shack, she turned the flashlight on and began to run. The bottom of the arroyo was studded with water-worn stones the size of her fist; she’d been lucky not to twist an ankle.

She’d gone only a short distance when her phone vibrated again: Kaiser. “Where are you?”

“Still in the creek.”

“You gotta run. She’s turned her truck down the creek bed, she’s behind you and I think she’s coming in your direction.”

“I’m running.”

Another hundred yards and a culvert pipe appeared ahead of her. She looked back but couldn’t see headlights; the truck’s lights would still be behind the curve in the creek bed.

At the culvert, she climbed the bank onto the north road, turned off the flashlight, and began running hard. Down to the southwest, she could see the light from the back window of the building, and along the line of the creek bed, the glow of headlights coming her way. No way that the Jeep could get out of the creek bed without going back, but the headlights were closing on her.

She ran faster. Another minute, a few more hundred yards, and Kaiser was there, waiting in the Explorer, lights out. Through the open passenger-side window, he said, “I’ve taped over the interior lights. Get in.”

She climbed in the passenger side, breathing hard, and pulled the door shut and he asked, “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Scared?” He stepped on the gas and they accelerated down the moonlit track.