Читать книгу Dead Man's Curve - Paula Graves - Страница 10
ОглавлениеClearly, she thought he was crazy. Hell, maybe he was—those men were probably better armed and equipped than either of them, and he had no idea how many of them might be roaming the woods at the moment.
“We need to go back to the motel and report those guys,” she said firmly, starting westward.
He caught up with her, taking care not to touch her this time. “The bear scared the hell out of those guys. I’d bet they’re heading back to wherever Cabrera has set up camp in these hills. This could be our best chance to find out where that is.” His voice went raspy as emotion tightened his throat. “They might lead us to my sister.”
Her gaze softened. “They’re already out of sight.”
“I can track them. I’ve had a lot of experience in the past few years.”
Pinching her lower lip between her teeth, she gazed toward the darkness where the two men had disappeared. She released a huff of breath. “Okay, you’re right. We can’t let this trail go cold. But we don’t do anything but observe when we get there, understand? We find the place, then memorize the trail back for when I have reinforcements.”
He wasn’t sure he could agree to her stipulation, not with his sister’s life at risk. But if he didn’t agree, she would dig in her heels and make it next to impossible for him to tail those men. “Understood.”
She looked bone-tired briefly before her spine straightened and her chin came up to jut forward like the point of a spear. “You can track them? Then you lead.”
He suspected she wanted him in front as much to keep an eye on him as to let him lead the way. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to run from her.
Not yet, anyway.
“Let’s pack up the tent. We may need to set up camp later.” He accomplished the task quickly, and they were underway in minutes. The men hadn’t covered their tracks while they were running, but about a mile from where they’d encountered the bear, they stopped blazing an obvious trail through the woods. In the dark, trying to figure out what was evidence of human passage and what was normal woodland wear and tear became a hell of a lot harder, especially with clouds scudding overhead, blocking out most of the moonlight. At least the rain had finally stopped, leaving the ground wet enough for footprints to show up in the softened soil underfoot.
“There.” Three miles out, Ava spotted the faint tracks of their human prey. “Aren’t those footprints?”
He studied the tracks. “Good eye,” he murmured with approval.
“You’re not the only tracker around here,” she answered bluntly. But she sounded pleased. He spared her a quick look, struck by how pretty she was, even rain-drenched and weary. What makeup she’d been wearing back at the motel had washed away completely, leaving her looking more like the dewy-faced girl from Kentucky he’d found so fascinating when they’d met on the beach in Mariposa eight years earlier.
But looks could be deceiving. No matter how much he might wish those intervening eight years had never happened, he couldn’t deny they had. He’d changed. She’d surely changed as well.
And she was right. They weren’t friends. They couldn’t be.
“We need to be careful. Now that they’re covering tracks, we risk running right up on them. We have to watch for an ambush.”
She nodded, her expression grave. “It’s not too late to go back. We can come back in daylight. Track them when the light is better.”
His instincts rebelled against the idea, but he didn’t trust his decision-making skills at the moment. Right now his gut was too full of fear for his sister to provide any objectivity. Tracking two well-armed men in the dark woods was clearly risky.
But was the risk worth taking?
He looked at her. “What do you think?”
She nibbled her lip again. “We keep going. By now they may realize they’re missing three of their men. When those guys get back to camp, they could decide to bug out to somewhere else. If we wait until morning, we could follow this trail straight to a dead end.”
He loosed a sigh of relief. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
They followed the trail another hour, moving with extreme caution as the trail rose upward into the mist-veiled mountains. The climb became steeper and more treacherous, and as they neared a particularly vertical rise, Sin stopped and offered Ava a drink from a water bottle in his backpack.
She drank the water gratefully. “Don’t suppose there’s any way to go around that hill?”
“Not without losing at least a half hour.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Then up we go.”
“You go in front,” he suggested. “You’ve got the bum hip. I’ll be able to catch you if you lose traction.”
She eyed him with caution, clearly weighing her options. No snap judgments from the Kentucky belle, he thought with a hidden smile. He’d always rather liked that about her, if he was remembering correctly.
“Okay.” Turning, she reached for a handhold in the steep incline, closing her fingers around a rocky outcropping.
Sinclair stayed close behind her, distracting himself from the gnawing anxiety eating a hole in his gut by enjoying the sway of her curvy backside as she climbed the trail in front of him. She’d filled out a bit in the eight years since he’d last seen her, her once lithe, girlish body developing delightful curves in all the right places. She had the kind of hips that made a man want to sink into her and stay there forever. His hands, gripping a rough-edged rock jutting out of the hillside, itched to close around her round, firm breasts instead....
Don’t get too distracted, he warned himself sternly.
The hillside started to level out, the climb less of a strain. Ava stumbled as they reached flatter ground, going down on her hands and knees. She stayed there for a moment, breathing hard.
Sinclair knelt beside her, laying his hand on her back. Her back rose and fell quickly as she caught her breath. “Sorry,” she rasped.
He rubbed her back lightly. “We can take a break. How’s your hip?”
She pushed herself up to a kneeling position and slid down the waistband of her pants to check the bandage. “I think it’s okay.”
“May I look?”
Her eyes met his, wide and wary in a shaft of pale moonlight peeking through the clouds. But she shifted, giving him better access to her injury.
Gently easing the trousers away from the bandage, he checked more thoroughly. There was a little blood seeping through the gauze, but not enough to worry. She wasn’t in danger of bleeding to death.
Infection was still a major risk, however, and the longer she stayed out here in these woods without professional medical treatment, the greater the likelihood of sepsis.
He should have insisted they go back to the motel instead of chasing these men, he realized with a sinking heart. He’d been selfish and, if he was honest with himself, a little bit afraid of facing justice after so long on the run. “We should go back to the motel.”
She looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Go back down that hill after we just climbed it? Are you kidding me?”
“The longer you and that bullet wound stay out here in these woods, the more likely you’ll get an infection. That’s nothing to play around with.”
“I think I’m good for a few more hours.” She pushed to her feet. “Let’s go. We’re wasting moonlight.”
His heart still stuck in his throat, he rose and followed her lead.
Ten minutes later, Sin heard voices. He grabbed Ava’s wrist as she continued forward, dragging her back against his chest.
She started to struggle, but he tightened his hold and whispered in her ear, “Voices.”
She froze, her head coming up as if to listen.
The voices seemed to be floating toward them on the wind, coming from somewhere dead ahead. But all Sin could see in front of them were trees, trees and more trees.
Where were the voices coming from?
“Rest a second,” he whispered, letting Ava go. “I’ll scout ahead. If I run into trouble, you can go for help.”
Her lips pressed to a thin line. “I told you I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“Damn it, Ava—”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, I’m not sure I could make it back to the motel alone at this point,” she added, her voice softening. “So for better or worse, we stick together.”
“Stay as quiet as you can,” he warned, leading the way forward. He took care with each step, moving heel to toe with deliberation, eyeing the ground ahead of them for any potential pitfalls. The voices ahead grew steadily louder, and he could make out the high, excited pitch of the conversation. Spanish, of course, but he was fluent, so he had no trouble making out the words flying about in agitation.
“How’s your Spanish?” he whispered to Ava, who crept up beside him when he paused to listen.
“A little rusty,” she admitted. “Haven’t had a lot of chances to use it working in the Johnson City resident agency.”
“It’ll come back to you,” he assured her. But he interpreted anyway. “Someone’s taking hell for running from a bear.”
“Do you recognize who’s speaking?”
“Might be Cabrera,” he said, uncertain. “There’s a little echo. Can’t be sure yet.”
Suddenly, a woman’s voice rang in the night, her Spanish rapid-fire but American-accented. Sin’s heart clenched into a hot, hard fist.
Alicia.
“¿Dónde está mi esposo?” Fear battled with rage in her voice.
“She wants to know where her husband is,” he translated for Ava.
“Yeah, I got that,” she whispered grimly. “They probably killed him right off. Got rid of the extra baggage. One less captive to worry about.”
Sin had never met his brother-in-law, but he hoped like hell Ava was wrong. He’d found a lot of comfort in the idea of Alicia happily married to a man she loved, a man who was good to her, who loved her and protected her when Sin couldn’t.
He’d broken his sister’s heart when he’d gone to Sanselmo and joined the rebels. Knowing he was a wanted man, doing things she didn’t approve of for reasons she’d never understood—that kind of notoriety must have been hard for her to live with.
The last time he’d talked to her, he’d tried to explain himself, but even if he’d been able to find words to justify his actions, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not over the phone. Maintaining his cover with El Cambio had been crucial to staying alive.
She’d stopped listening anyway. “I hope the next time you set a bomb, you blow yourself up,” she’d told him, her voice raw with anger and pain.
Funny, he supposed, that he’d gone out and done exactly that, as far as she and the rest of the world were concerned.
As he strained to discern more of the verbal exchange between his sister and her captors, the cracking sound of a hand hitting flesh jolted through him, and Alicia’s angry questions ended in a sharp cry. An answering growl rose in Sin’s throat, and he rushed toward the sound of his sister’s cry without thinking, stealth forgotten.
Ava’s hands circled his arm and she dug her heels in, pulling him backward as he rushed forward. He tried to shake off her grip, but her fingers dug in harder, preventing him from dashing through the underbrush.
“Don’t be an idiot!” she growled. “Do you want to get her killed?”
He struggled to control himself, to ease his ragged breathing and hurl cold water on his sudden rage. Ava was right. He knew she was right.
But even as he regained control of his emotions, a white-hot ball of fury festered in the center of his chest, biding its time.
Sinclair would make Cabrera and his men pay for what they’d done to his sister. He was going to find great pleasure in making sure of it.
“They’re not going to do permanent damage to her, not while she’s leverage,” Ava whispered. He wished she sounded more confident.
“She’s right there! We can get her away from them.”
“Not without knowing how many people we have to take out to do it.” Her voice was firmer now, her quiet competence taking some of the edge off his desperation. He grounded himself in her calm gaze, taking a few slow, deep breaths.
“Okay. Okay.” He scanned the dark woods, listening to the sound of murmured conversation, trying to figure out from which direction it came. He pointed north, finally. “I think they’re ahead that way. We need to get close enough to see what’s what, but stay hidden.”
“You were El Cambio. You know more about how they work than I do. How many men would Cabrera bring with him on a mission like this?”
He could only guess. Cabrera had been ruthless, unwilling to risk any sort of mutiny among his underlings. He’d trusted few people. Sin had worked damned hard at being one of those people, and if Cabrera was here, looking for him, it was because he knew just how completely Sin had betrayed that trust.
Cabrera might be keeping Alicia alive now as leverage to get to Sin. But he didn’t kid himself. Cabrera’s only policy was scorched earth. There’d be no witnesses left when he was done.
“It doesn’t matter how many. We have to get her away from him.” The urgency of his fear forced the words from his tight throat.
“We need to get our eyes on that camp first. Know what we’re up against. We need to be smart about it.”
He caught her arm, tugging her around to look at him. Her eyes widened, her lips trembling apart.
The urge to kiss her, untimely and entirely out of the question, surged through him as powerfully as fear had done just a moment before. He had the ridiculous sense that if he could just kiss her, if he could feel her warm, soft body pressed to his, feel her fingers on his skin and breathe her breath into his lungs, everything would be okay.
He tore his gaze away, reminding himself that no matter what happened in the next few hours, everything would never be okay.
Ever.
He let her arm go. “Be very quiet and very careful. We’ll have only one chance to get this right.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her check the magazine of her Glock. He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of the pistols he’d scavenged from Fuentes and Escalante and checked the magazine to see if there were any rounds left. The pistol, an FNS 9, held seventeen rounds. Fourteen remained.
He kept that one for himself and checked the other pistol. It was also an FN Herstel firearm, a twenty-round FN Five-seveN MK2. Eighteen rounds in that magazine. He offered the MK2 to Ava.
“Eighteen rounds. Use it first.”
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly widening and her lips curling inward as she nervously licked her lips.
This is her first big challenge, he realized, suddenly feeling deeply sorry for her. Despite her training, despite the FBI credentials in her pocket and the Special Agent in front of her name, she’d probably never been in a situation as dangerous as what they were about to face.
“If you don’t want to do this, go,” he said quietly. “The motel should be due west. Be careful, stay out of sight and you’ll probably be there in a couple of hours. But I have to do this.”
Her nostrils flared. She took the MK2 from his hands, checked the ammo herself, sighted down the barrel to familiarize herself with it and gave a short nod. “Then let’s do this.”
Sin felt a cracking sensation in his chest, as if something had broken open and spilled out courage and fear in equal parts. Swallowing the fear and marshaling the courage, he followed Ava forward through the woods.
* * *
CABRERA AND HIS men had set up camp in a small, sheltered cove just over the edge of a shallow escarpment. Ava had nearly stumbled over the edge of the bluff, as the trees beyond the valley camouflaged the narrow dip between ridges. She pulled up short, grabbing the trunk of a nearby pine to keep from tumbling over the edge.
Ignoring the pain in her hip and the increasing tremble of her aching thigh muscles, she dropped to her belly, seeking and finding a clearer view of the small valley that lay about twenty yards below the ridgeline.
Sin nudged his way next to her, his body warm against hers. She drew strength and determination from the solid heat of him. Crazy, she thought, that I’m colluding with a terrorist to take down his buddies.
But since she’d looked up in the parking lot of the Mountain View Lodge and seen a ghost, insanity had become the least of her problems.
