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“This one’s still alive,” Shane said. “And two of the others are still breathing. They won’t be chasing us, but it looks like Halliwell knows exactly where we are. Which means we should get the hell out of here right now.”
“Fine by me,” I said, and then I noticed the blood on the rocks where his feet had stepped. “My God, Shane! Your feet! They’re all torn up! We have to?—”
“Later. Let’s get the Jeep keys and your phone, and scram.”
He set the pace himself, messed up feet and all. We hurried up the hill, past the wrecked vehicles. I saw a body twitching. Still alive, but he wasn’t getting any first aid from me. “Can’t you get a pair of boots from one of them?” I asked. “Or another gun?”
“I’m tempted,” he said. “But I’m too worried about GPS traces, and he already tracked us once. Probably the van. Halliwell is a devious bastard. It’s his defining characteristic. Better not to give him any openings.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” I admitted. “But he creates his own openings. Like when he made my little sister sick on purpose to manipulate me.”
“Well, she’s safe now,” Shane said.
I didn’t reply. Partly because I couldn’t breathe, partly because I knew that she wasn’t safe at all. I didn’t know how Halliwell had made Reggie sick, or know how to fix it. Maybe the Masters team had snatched her before Halliwell could make an example of her, but if she got sick again now, I was right back to square one. I would have my sister, but no cure. Which amounted to a handful of dust and ashes.
Later for that. I ran inside for the go bag. My alt identity was fried now that Halliwell had found this place. So much for the very expensive Layla Stearns and all her credit and gear and well-establish background. But the phone, the protein bars, the clean underwear and the cash, those might come in handy.
I yanked the tarp off the Jeep, and we got in. It smelled damp and stale in there, and I was pretty sure I heard the skittering of tiny frightened feet. Some rodent or other had nested in there. I just hoped to God that they hadn’t chewed through any cables or belts, or gobbled up brake fluid, or whatever hungry forest rodents liked to gnaw.
I got the thing in gear, and the engine gave me a reassuring roar. I tossed my bag onto his lap. “Phone’s in there. You do communications.”
“You have a route planned out?”
“Yes. There’s a sort of a road up to the top of the bluff, and then a track that leads all the way across the plateau,” I said. “We’ll just get up to the top and drive right across Burnt Prairie until we hit the road for Dalton Mills. It’s rough, but doable.”
“Prairie? Sounds flat.”
I tried to retrieve the images from the satellite photos that were in my head. “Yeah, more or less,” I said. “It gets flatter a few miles northeast.”
He made a phone call to his brother, and I concentrated on keeping the Jeep moving. It wallowed and jounced in the long grass, banging and scraping over rocks. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying, but his tone was brusque and practical as he recounted what happened in a few terse words, and shared where we were heading.
He was in studly-hero mode. What he had accomplished was incredible. On the fly, with every possible disadvantage. Nothing but his wits and what he scrounged up from a cheap vacation rental kitchen. Barefoot, bleeding, toxic from being jerked around by drugs and put on ice in a body bag. And all that after suffering months of imprisonment, interrogation and torture.
Images of the bodies scattered on the hillside kept flashing through my mind. Strange details, the blood spray across the angle of the E of the ice sculpture. A symbol of Halliwell’s influence, carved into a ton of ice. How fucking appropriate was that.
Well, suck it, Halliwell. Suck it like a big old blood-spattered popsicle.
That silly thought made me almost laugh, but I quelled the impulse. Just like crying, it could push me over the edge, and I would end up gibbering and useless.
Shane was looking at me, with a worried frown. “You good?”
That almost made me laugh, too. What about any of this could be called good?
Come to think of it, being pinned against the bedroom wall by a big, hot, sexy guy while he furiously fucked me into mindless oblivion… that had been very good.“I’m fine,” I said shakily. “What’s your brother have to say?”
“They’re on their way to Burnt Prairie with a helicopter. Let’s hope Halliwell doesn’t send a helicopter after us. He’s closer than my brother.”
This thing kept getting bigger in scale. Like a world war. “God,” I muttered.
“Sorry. Never mind what I just said. Just drive. Chances are, he won’t want that kind of exposure. Someone could see.”
We jolted and bounced over the rough track in the grass. The trees had thinned out, and we were finally at the top of the plateau. I could see the ocean from up here, beyond the clefts of the lower hills. The sun was low. The sky was turning a bloody color, like that blood-splotched rolling pin. I kept hearing the blow as it connected with the man’s skull. The contact, vibrating through my body.
The guy with the knife sticking out of his eye. The spatter of blood from the slashed throat. The huge crash of the van hitting the SUV, all the crumpled, fragmented bodies. The ice sculpture, flying, turning… landing.Crunch.
“Whoa! Slow down” Shane touched my arm. “You’ll break the axel!”
“Sorry,” I whispered.
