“By the lake.”
“Good. Stay over there. Get into the open if you can. Muriel’s bolted, and she has a knife, but we think she’s on the north side.”
“Got it. We’ll hang tight.”
“Whoever you heard?” I murmur to Dalton. “It’s not them.”
“Probably an animal,” he says. “It was just a twig crack.”
He continues on, but his gaze is pulled north often enough that I tap his arm.
“You don’t think it’s an animal,” I say. “Let’s change direction. It could be Muriel, if she got enough of a head start that she’s already collected whatever she left and is moving on.”
He nods and pauses to peer around, mentally marking this spot in case we need to resume tracking. Then we head north.
I fall in behind Dalton and don’t try to keep up. While I need to be aware of our surroundings, he’s doing the same, now that he doesn’t need to focus on her trail, and I can back off and give him space while I cover his back.
This time I’m the one who notices something. I’d like to think it’s a sudden growth spurt in my wilderness skills, but I suspect it’s because I fell behind a few paces. Something moves to our right, passing by after Dalton has gone past that spot.
I jog forward and tug his jacket, motioning to the east. He squints, and then he must see what I did—a dark shape movingmaybe thirty feet from us, heading along one of the smaller trails. Dalton clocks the trajectory and then frowns. The figure is moving toward Muriel’s clearing.
Dalton eases out his gun. I do the same, and we make our way silently to that narrow path. He stays in front, moving carefully, sticking to the shadows.
I look up at the sky. The sun is dropping, and it’s darker in here than it was in town. At least the shadows hide Dalton, letting him move quickly. He lopes about fifty feet and then stops with one hand raised.
I reach him and peer around as he steps aside. Someone is up ahead. A male figure, dressed in black, the hood of his jacket pulled tight.
We aren’t absolutely fixed on Rutherford as our culprit. Muriel did give us a description that matched Rogers, and while we believe she’d been fed that, in case she was caught, there’s still the chance Rogers really is her contact. His defense was that he’s gay, which is easy to claim. Also, we have no evidence that Muriel was actually having an affair with her spymaster. It might have been a purely monetary transaction.
The size of the figure matches both Rogers and Rutherford, the two mining employees who don’t have GPS chips. What Idoknow is that whoever we see is heading for the clearing, where Muriel presumably waits—
Where Muriel waits with a knife.
Before I can speak, Muriel’s voice rings out. “Thereyou are. I told you I was in trouble, and it took you—”
“Shh!” the man says. “They’re patrolling.”
While the speaker doesn’t have an English accent, the timbre seems to match Rutherford’s voice.
“You need to get me out of here,” she whispers. “We had a deal.”
The man mutters something and then says, “Come on then. They seem to have vacated that cabin. You can stay there while I make arrangements.”
“I need to get my bag. I hid it in our clearing.”
He sighs. While it makes sense that she only grabbed the knife in case anyone tried to stop her, I still grip my gun tight, every muscle tense.
“I think it’s a setup,” I whisper to Dalton.
His frown tells me his mind hasn’t gone in that direction, and I resist the urge to back down.
“Just follow me,” I whisper. “In case she tries—”
A scuffle up ahead, and the man saying “What the—?” before he lets out a hiss and stops short.
“You fucked me over,” Muriel says.
The man’s voice comes tight and angry. “How? You were paid. You were caught. Now I’m taking you someplace safe, exactly as I promised. Lower that knife or you will find yourself facing your mess alone.”
