Clay raised his eyebrows, hit the gas, and spun the steering wheel to do a U-turn over the thin strip of dirt and grass down the median of the road.
“Hall?” he said. “Like Arlo Hall?”
“Yeah. His great-grandfather or something used to run it,” Jones said. “Story is he shorted the miners on goods, and one night they came and burned it out. Sounds about right for that family.”
It sounded to Clay like the sort of place Elizabeth Hall might suggest her co-conspirator use if he needed somewhere to lie low. Or hold a girl hostage. It would work for either.
“Want me to have someone pull him over?” Jones asked.
“No,” Clay said. “No need. Thanks.”
He hung up and pressed his foot down on the gas pedal as he headed up the mountain.
Most of the paint had worn off the rock. It was just splattered with gobs of color now, but it was still easy enough to pick out from the plain gray rocks around it. Clay eased his speed down as he cruised past it, on the lookout for the next turn.
The first one he came to looked more like a dirt track than a road. The concrete had cracked and broken up down the middle, only a zipper line of solid gray left on either side to keep the grass and shrubs at bay. Clay cursed under his breath as he drove along it until he saw the old stone building ahead, half-reclaimed by the woods already. Vines crawled up and in through broken windows, and the slate-roof had buckled and broken to let the tree inside stick its head out.
Clay drove on past it. He pushed the SUV as far up the road as he could get, until even the thin strips of gray on either side broke down and it was just mud and grass under the wheels. Far enough, hopefully. He parked and climbed down. Mud squelched under his boots as he cut through the trees on his way back down toward the back of the old store.
He pulled his gun, familiar and heavy in his hand, as he ghosted silently from log to dense bed of moss and back again. It wasn’t likely that Hadley would do a sweep of the area, but old habits died hard.
Lucky enough, otherwise Clay would have missed the first tripwire. Pulled tight along an open patch of ground, nearly hidden in the mulch, it was just a glimmer of sunlight that gave it away. Clay crouched down and ran a finger under it as he traced it back to the thin green plastic box discreetly tucked against the base of the stone wall, camouflaged in the long grass.
It was an innocuous enough little box, but Clay had encountered them before. It was a Serbian MRUD, an anti-personnel mine that would have shredded Clay’s legs down to the bone if he’d triggered it.
He grimaced. Death wish or not, that would have been a bad way to go.
Clay positioned himself to the side of the device—just in case—and pulled a pocket knife out of his boot to cut the wires. How the hell had someone like Hadley got his hands on kit like this? And why?
His brain winked at him:You know.
Except he didn’t. Clay growled under his breath as he pushed himself back to his feet and made his way carefully around the edge of the building. The front door had been replaced with a heavy metal door bolted shut with a padlock. Clay could have picked it, if he took the time.
Instead, he stepped to the side and smashed one of the already cracked and grimy windows with the butt of his gun. As the glass broke, he heard a muffled scream from inside. He booted the worm-riddled wooden frame out of his way and climbed in.
The old Hall store smelled like skunk, something dead, and gun oil. In addition to the Serbian mines outside, Hadley—Clayfelthis brain nudge at him—had a small but effective armory set up in the old building: shotguns and rifles, boxes of ammo. He was set for a siege.
Or maybe this had been Buchanan’s stockpile? At some point, Elizabeth and Buchanan had been in on this together. He could have stocked this place up in case their plan went south and Fisher’s men caught up with them. Or so it would be ready for them to head down to Mexico. There were plenty of places to get over the border without anyone checking what shit you had with you. More if you knew whose palms to grease, and Buchanan would have.
The scrape of chair legs on the old concrete floor and choked yelps reminded Clay that he could get those answers later. Right now, he wanted to pull Hadley’s leverage out from under him.
He found Dory tied to a chair with a tarp thrown over her. She was gagged and blindfolded with oil-stained old rags that dug into her skin. The knots were yanked tight at the back of her head, her hair tangled in with them.
“Dory,” Clay said as he tried the knots with his fingers. She whimpered as his attempt to untie them pulled on her hair. “Your brother sent me. We met earlier.”
She squirmed furiously in the chair and twisted her head around toward him. He couldn’t make her out through the gag shoved in her mouth, but from the tone of it, nothing she said was complimentary.
“I’m here to get you out,” Clay said. He gave up on untying the gag and pulled his pocket knife again. The flat of the blade kissed her cheek as he slid it up under the twisted cotton, and she went very still. The only movement was her hands as she clenched them into fists on the arms of the chair. Clay cut the gag free and left her to spit it out while he got to work on the blindfold. It was cut halfway through when he heard the death-rattle groan of the pickup as it pulled up outside. “Shit.”
Dory turned her head blindly toward the noise. “Is that him?” she asked. Her voice was thick and dry. She stopped to swallow and tried again. “Why is he back? He said he’d be gone for a while.”
“Something went wrong,” Clay said easily. “Stick the gag back in your mouth and play along.”
He ignored her moan of protest as he threw the tarp back over her. Then he loped back to the front of the store and tucked himself into the shadows there.
The padlock rattled on the other side of the door—someone cursed, a thick angry sound—and then it finally clicked open. Hadley dragged Grade, bag still clutched in his arms, inside.
“You lying redneck piece of shit,” Hadley ranted. He pressed his gun up under Grade’s jaw, dug deeply enough into the soft skin that Grade had to cock his head back and to the side to escape it. “Did you tell them I was here?”
