Chapter 48
Jojo had retrieved the evidence bag from the cruiser and was on her way back, a step away from going around the front corner of the cabin when a Crack! ripped open the early morning air, and she dropped to her knees.
Conor? Had Conor been shot?
An instant of terror stabbed her gut like an ice pick.
“Mr. Mason, this is Conor McCaffrey with the Pennsylvania State Police?—”
Jojo breathed then and the world righted itself.
Crack!
She got to her feet as she pulled her weapon, and ran back behind the cabin to the first of two small windows and could see Conor crouched just inside the door.
She tapped on the glass, and he whirled around, then he ran to the window. It opened out from the top and he managed to get it about halfway before it stuck.
“I’ve called for backup. You need to stay out of sight?—”
“The shots are coming from the woods. He’s got to be in a deer blind in a tree with a sightline to the front door of the cabin. You so much as stick a toe out that front door, and he’ll nail you.”
“He must not have been there when we arrived, or he’d have picked us off while we were standing on the porch.”
“… which means he doesn’t know I’m here.” Jojo said it as she realized it. “If he did, he’d have waited and shot me as soon as I came out from behind the cabin.”
“The nearest unit is at least ten minutes away?—”
“And these are his woods. I’m sure he’s hunted them for years.”
“So what’s your point?”
“If he gets loose in them, it’ll take an army to flush him out.” She paused. “If you can keep him occupied, hold out your hat for him to shoot or something, I can circle around behind him, zero in on his position from the sounds of the gunshots.”
Conflicting emotions crossed Conor’s face but before he could speak, she hurried on. “I’ll have the element of surprise.”
“You’re not going out there armed with a Glock against a man with a hunting rifle!”
“So you’re saying I can’t go after him?”
He took a breath. “No, I’m saying you need to get my Colt AR out of the rack.”
Conor’s patrol rifle wasn’t a military M4, but it was damned close—same basic shape, caliber, magazine and sight. But with an M4, you could fire three-round bursts or go full automatic. The AR patrol rifle was semi-automatic—one trigger pull, one bullet.
Jojo ran straight into the woods from the back of the cabin until the cabin was out of sight.
Then she began to curve around through the trees to make her way to the edge of the woods facing the structure, peering into the treetops for a deer stand.
She heard another gunshot. Then Conor shouted something.
Then one more gunshot. After that, the woods were silent.
Not peaceful silent, held-breath silent.
If Mason was no longer shooting, that meant he had cut and run.
And he was somewhere out here in the woods.
The leafless trees and bushes offered little cover.
Here in the shade, the snow from last week’s blizzard had not melted off.
It was crusted, wind scoured, and her boots sank through the top layer with a crunching sound she couldn’t hide.
She stopped, held still, and listened. There was no sound but the moaning of the wind through bare tree branches.
She carefully took another step, her head on a swivel.
SNAP!
The sound was metallic and vicious, like a bone breaking inside a steel pipe. Pain exploded up her right leg and she went down hard, managed to strangle a scream into a grunt as the rifle flew out of her grip into the snow.
A trap. A damned leg-hold trap buried under snow and pine needles.
The steel jaws were clamped around her boot, the metal chewing through leather into the flesh of her shin.
She looked around for the rifle, but it lay in the snow out of her reach.
The trap was chained to a tree. To get free, she’d have to break the chain or pry open the jaws.
She felt vulnerable and exposed, her fingers scrabbling to pull the chain free from the ice.
Something moved in her peripheral vision, but when she turned her head to look … It was nothing. Yet her spidey sense was raising hairs on the back of her neck. She rolled to the side, reached down into the holster at her waist and pulled out her pistol.
“Drop the gun.”
She whirled toward the words but saw nobody.
“Toss the gun away now or you’re dead.”
Still, she could see no one. She couldn’t shoot what she couldn’t see, and she pitched the pistol away into the snow.
And then a pile of brush moved, the whole pile, and her eyes made the adjustments to see the man in the ghillie suit.
It was the kind snipers wore—not smooth but shaggy, messy, and three-dimensional.
There were strips of burlap and jute twine, netting, leaves, grass, twigs.
Stand still in it and you became invisible.
Then she saw the rifle in his hands.
In the distance, she heard the first notes of the symphony of sirens.
He heard them, too, and continued to advance on her, lifting the hood and netted mask covering his head so she saw his full face for the first time.
Even with the green and black camo paint he’d smeared on his skin, she could see the huge scar a couple of inches below his left eye and gouging a puckered path down his cheek to his chin.
Somehow familiar … Something about him … She recognized …
“You, bitch,” he spat out the words. “You saw me and you knew. You’d have set the dogs on me, but you’re not taking me.”
She had no idea what … and then the image formed from nothing in her mind. Roosevelt. The man he’d gored, who’d maybe mistreated him. Was he that man? How could she set the dogs on him?
He took two more steps, was right in front of her and jammed the barrel of the rifle into her chest. “I’ll make it out of here. I always do. I get to the woods … and poof, I’m gone. But this is your last stop, darlin’. You’re at the end of the line. You’re gonna die right here, right now.”
Jojo realized that he intended to pull the trigger. Her breath caught in her throat. Terror hammered through her veins. Thoughts raced through her mind like water spiders on a still pond, going every which way so fast she didn’t have time to think any of them.
I’m going to die. She’d believed that on other occasions, too. But this time, it was true.
“Say goodbye to life, pretty lady,” he snarled.
She sucked in a gasp of air. Her last breath.
“Drop the rifle!”
She heard Conor’s cold voice from behind her. Close. Cruz’s head snapped up, then he froze. She could picture Conor, feet spread apart, his 9mm Walther extended in a two-hand grip.
“You shoot me and I squeeze the trigger—she dies.”
“Last warning. Drop the rifle or I drop you.”
“You won’t sho?—”
A gunshot rang out, the rifle toppled in the snow in front of her and the man collapsed like a puppet with the strings cut.
Then Conor was at her side talking, prying apart the trap holding her boot.
She heard his words, felt his hands on her leg, but her whole mind was consumed by the single image being delivered to it from her eyes.
The scar-faced man lay on his side in front of her …
with a bullet hole right between his eyes.
Conor had saved her life with a T-zone shot.
“Imagine a capital T on someone’s face,” her firearms instructor says, “a horizontal line across the eyes and a vertical line straight down the center of the face. At the back of the skull behind that exact spot is the medulla oblongata, the brain stem. Nail a bullet perfectly through the center of the T-zone and all motor control stops. The hand can’t reflexively pull the trigger because there is no brain signal left to the hand. ”
Conor dragged her boot out of the trap, stood, and extended his hand.
Jojo took it and stood. No, she didn’t collapse into his arms.
But he did have hold of her arm, and she was glad for the support.