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Jack crawled forward, blinded by tears. He knew the girl. He knew her. Brittney. She’d been in history with him. Three rows back.
Again Drake struck.
The empty gun fell from Brittney’s hand.
She was cut, bleeding, legs shattered from the impact of the door, her face a mess of tears and blood and Diana screaming abuse at Drake and Caine saying nothing to stop the psychopath and Jack wanting to cry, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but unable to find the words.
Diana reached Drake and grabbed his whip hand at the shoulder. “Enough, you sick piece of—”
Drake spun around, face-to-face with Diana. He bared his teeth and roared at her, roared like an animal, spit flying.
“She’s right: enough,” Caine said at last.
“Keep your girlfriend out of my face!” Drake bellowed at Caine.
Caine looked coldly at Drake. “I let you have your fun. We’re not here for your entertainment.”
Jack was stunned. He was unable to tear his eyes away from Brittney. She moaned, tried to move, then slumped to the floor. Unconscious or dead. Jack didn’t know which.
She’d been in his class.
He knew her.
“Get to work, Jack,” Caine said.
Diana turned bloodshot eyes on Jack, eyes full of hatred and sorrow. She brushed tears away. “Jack’s hurt.”
“What?” Caine demanded. “Jack?”
Jack wasn’t hurt. He started to get up, ashamed of cowering on the floor. But his left foot gave way. He looked down, mystified, and saw that his pants, from the knee down, were soaking red.
“He’s losing a lot of blood,” Diana said.
It was the last thing Jack heard before the floor rushed up and smashed him in the face.
Lana heard Quinn’s shouts. She heard the truck’s horn. She was no more than two or three hundred feet away, just beyond the reach of the stabbing flashlight beams.
Cookie walked stolidly be
side her, quiet, though he must have had his doubts.
Lana hoped Quinn and Albert wouldn’t come after her. She didn’t want to have to explain what she was up to.
Patrick, too, heard the honking horn, so she whispered, “Quiet boy. Shhh.”
Lana had made sure to wear sturdy boots—a big improvement over the last time she had walked this route. She had her heavy pistol in her shoulder bag, which was another major improvement. And she had Cookie.
If Pack Leader found them out here, Lana intended one of them—she hoped it was she, not Cookie—to shoot him in the face.
Also in her bag was a bottle of water, a can of button mushrooms, and an entire cabbage. Not much food, especially for a guy Cookie’s size, but then she expected to find at least a few cans of something in the shed at the mine. Hermit Jim would have stashed at least some food there.
She hoped.
The last time she had walked this path she’d gone in search of Jim’s truck, hoping to use it to get to Perdido Beach. By that point she had found the gold and figured out that the eccentric hermit was a prospector. She had followed tire tracks to the tumble-down, abandoned mining town hidden in a crease of the hills. She’d found Jim’s truck but not the keys. Then she had found Jim himself, dead in the mine shaft.
She knew now where the keys were.
Back then, back before so much had happened, she would have been terrified of digging through the pockets of a corpse. But that was the old Lana. The new Lana had seen things that were so much worse.
