Mitch pulled out a field kit and handed it to me. Then he scrambled to the top of the rise, lay on his stomach, and pulled out his binoculars to scan ahead.
“Take your shirt off,” I said to Kayden.
He eyeballed me. “I’m okay, Fire. We need to?—”
“Don’t.” I gave him a flat look. “Get it off.”
He shrugged out of the long-sleeved plaid and dropped it across his lap. I rolled the bloody sleeve of his T-shirt up over his bicep. The bandage I’d wrapped last night was soaked through, with fresh blood running down his arm. I pressed two fingers above the wound. The skin was hot. Shit. That, too, should be settling down by now.
“You should be in a hospital.”
“Yeah. Add it to the list of things I should be doing.” He met my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, Fire. So, patch me up, and let’s keep moving.”
I tore open a fresh field dressing, and working fast, wrapped it tightly over the soaked bandage. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do.
“Thanks,” he said, pulling his bloody shirt back on.
As I shoved the equipment back into Mitch’s pack, Kayden crawled to Mitch’s side, and peered through his binoculars.
None of them were cops.
Two of them hadn’t been trained for what we were walking into.
And all of them were Bransons. If Bob saw a Branson coming over that rise, he’d shoot fast.
If he saw me, he’d shoot faster.
I’d watched him corrupt crime scene evidence, and I’d put a gun in his face yesterday.
He knew I’d do everything in my power to arrest him. So now, he had nothing left to lose by killing me, and everyone with me.
I lowered the binoculars and turned to the three of them. “Listen up.”
Cassidy raised her water bottle. Mitch got up off his belly. Kayden watched me with that intense focus he got when he was about to argue.
“Bob will kill any one of us on sight. He’s gone past the point of pretending he’s a decent guy. The second he sees us, he’s going to shoot, and he is not going to miss.” I kept my voice flat, the way I’d been trained to talk in stressful situations, the way Bob himself had taught me for years. “I’m the only person here who can legally fire at him. And I’m the only person here who will. Are we clear?”
Kayden’s jaw was working.
I aimed a glare at him. “Are we clear, Kayden?”
“Those men are dangerous, Fire.”
“I know.” I held his gaze. “And I am asking you to trust me to do my job. If you go in front of me, I’m going to be trying to keep you alive instead of doing what I’m here to do, and that’s how all of us end up dead.”
He didn’t answer, but his shoulders dropped half an inch, and that was as much as I was going to get.
“You all stay behind me and stay low. If I tell you to drop, you drop. If I tell you to run, you run. No negotiation.”
“Understood,” Mitch said, steady as he’d been all day.
Cassidy gave a tight nod, her grip white on the water bottle.
“And if I go down ...” I drew a breath. “You don’t come for me. You get back to the chopper. You call Detective Jaxson Callahan from Rosebud. Nobody else. Just Callahan.”
“Fuck no,” Kayden said.
“Kayden.”
