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“On the road. On the switchbacks down below. We don’t have much time.”
I tied laces with icy, shaking fingers, messed them up, tried again. “Couldn’t it just be some random car using the road?”
“Two identical black late model SUVs, one right after the other? I doubt it. Is this your only gun?”
“Yes. It never occurred to me that I’d need more than one,” I said.
He was already in the kitchen, rummaging through kitchen drawers and pulling out random items. A corkscrew, a bunch of old, battered kitchen knives. He picked out a couple of the knives. “There’s probably at least four, maybe five guys in each vehicle,” he said. “I’ll take the gun. Which means that you can’t help me except by disappearing. The cabin is a death trap. Run into the woods, and do not come back unless I call you.”
“No! I can’t just leave you to?—”
“You can’t help, Red. You’d just fuck my focus.”
“But I?—”
“Give me the car keys.”
“You mean, the Jeep? You want to try to outrun them?”
“No, the one we came in,” he said.
I grabbed the van’s key fob off the kitchen counter and offered it to him. He seized the back of my shirt, and frog-marched me out onto the porch. “Run. Go. Now.”
“But you can’t go anywhere with that van! It can’t handle the bluff road up over the ridge! I told you! Particularly not with that huge block of ice in the back!”
“I have a plan. No time to explain.” He shoved me out the door. “Run!”
I just stood there, utterly dismayed, as he loped toward the van. I darted back inside, and rummaged through the same drawer that Shane had looked through. He’d taken the likely looking knives. The rest looked barely capable of buttering bread.
There was a big rolling pin, so I grabbed that. Better than nothing.
When I got back out, Shane had backed the van down to the steep incline, and the edge of the tree canopy that hid the cabin. He came around to the back, and opened both of the van’s back doors. Then he looked over at me, his dark brows knit up with fierce disapproval. “I told you to run,” he said, eyeing the rolling pin I was clutching.
“You did,” I said.
“You don’t follow orders very well, do you, Red?”
“Nope. And I told you. My name is Cass.”
“Let’s make a deal,” he said. “I promise to use your real name if you run like hell. When the time comes, I’ll call out and say, hey Cass! All clear! Come out, Cass! Okay? Do we have a deal?”
“No,” I said. “I started this thing, and I am not running from it.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. “You are a pain in my ass, Red.”
“So they all tell me,” I said, following him through the big, draping boughs thick with tufts of pine needles, to a spot where we could peer through the waving foliage and see a piece of the road below.
The first vehicle passed, not more than a couple hundred yards down the hill from us. Then the second one stopped, and two men got out. They were dressed in forest camo, and heavily armed.
“Friendly neighbors, hmm? Rando cars?” he murmured.
“Shut up, Shane,” I snapped. “It was a perfectly reasonable question.”
“You can ask reasonable questions in a reasonable world,” he said. “Ours isn’t. I bet those motherfuckers are armored. I bet they’re counting on me being all fucked up, and you being a clueless bimbo who won’t run and hide. Easy pickings.”
I just stared at him, not taking the bait.
He made an impatient sound. “You stay put right there, and watch the road,” he said. “As soon as they pass that bent-over tree next to the big bare rock tower, with the monolith bit up on top? Give me a signal. Can you do that for me?”
