He’d glimpsed two other people inside. Who were they? He recognized the truck—it belonged to the Mendozas. But the two people were definitelynotthe Mendozas.
So he put on his hazards and stopped his truck in the middle of the road, ten feet from where she’d gone over.
He had encountered no other vehicles since he crossed County Road 122; no one was stupid enough to drive on the unpaved roads saturated with water and marked with deep ruts.
As he stepped out, he saw two people coming up the bank.
“Avery!” he called out before he realized the woman wasn’t Avery.
The woman had a gun in hand, and she pointed it at Ryan. “Keys.”
“They’re in the truck,” he said, keeping his hands in plain view, not wanting this woman to think he had a gun. “Where’s Avery?”
The woman didn’t answer him. “Move away from the truck.”
The man looked sick and he was bleeding. Oh, God, was Avery in the truck bleeding? Was she hurt? Worse?
“Now!” the woman screamed and fired the gun at his feet. She didn’t hit him, but he moved away from the truck.
The woman opened the passenger door, helped push the man inside, then slammed the door shut. She ran around to the driver’s side and climbed in. Thirty seconds later they were driving off.
Ryan watched until he was certain they weren’t coming back, then he ran to the ditch and looked at the truck stuck in the muddy water at a sharp forty-five-degree angle, only the rear wheels of the truck bed visible from the road.
“Avery!” he shouted.
He didn’t hear anything at first. The water in the ditch was rising—either because one of the many creeks that cut through the valley was filling it, or the drainage pipes couldn’t keep up with the rainfall. Or both. Either way, if the ditch filled, the cab would be completely underwater and Avery would drown.
If she was unconscious, she may be drowning right now.
He screamed her name again and scrambled down the slope slick from rain. He slipped, swore, and thought he heard “Help!”
Then he saw her. She had her face against the window and when she spotted him she looked both terrified and relieved.
“Ryan! I need help!”
The two front doors would be almost impossible to open between the water pressure and being pressed against the ditch.
“Can you climb over the seat? I’ll get the back door!”
“I can’t!” she said.
“Are you hurt?”
Maybe he heard wrong because the windows were up.
“My hands! They’re tied to the steering wheel.”
He looked at the steering wheel, but the visibility was so bad he couldn’t see much of anything inside, plus the windows were fogged up.
He slipped and fell into the water, stumbled and his hands hit the side of the truck. The truck shifted toward the passenger side and Avery screamed.
It took all his strength to pull open the back door against both water pressure and gravity. The truck was aimed down into the ditch, but now was also listing a good twenty degrees toward the passenger side.
He put his body between the door and the frame. It hit him as gravity forced it down, but he held it open with his body.
“Avery, are you okay?”
“Ohmigod, I thought she shot you,” Avery cried. She held the steering wheel tight. Her wrists were red and bloodied. “I can’t get out.”
