Chapter 21 Hunted
Chapter twenty-one
Hunted
“We can’t hold up here!” Jenna hissed, her voice barely louder than the steady roll of the creek beside them.
Lynnette frowned and pressed firmly on Jenna’s shoulder.
“Yes, we can,” she whispered back. It was a miracle they’d put as much distance between themselves and their assailants as they had, but the creek wasn’t so loud that she couldn’t hear the assholes eating up that distance with every passing second.
“Your ankle’s too weak to panic-run on uneven ground, so we need another plan while we have the opportunity to make one. ”
Jenna’s knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the large boulder Lynnette had instructed her to duck behind.
It was one of three, in fact, that formed a nice, natural half-circle around the water’s edge.
It would mean Jenna got wet, yes, but the tide wasn’t terrible and wet was immensely better than shot full of holes or kidnapped by sex-trafficking murderers. “You’re the one they’re shooting at!”
As if I’m not aware of that. Her father would make good on his threat to break out her grandpa’s legendary switch if he ever found out what she was about to do.
But Lynnette saw no other way. So, she gave her friend one more firm nudge, tossed her purse over the rocky barricade for good measure, and turned up the small but muddy embankment they’d slipped down minutes earlier.
The fact that she’d thought to replace her bear spray was little consolation, really.
Unless she could get the drop on all four gunmen, inevitably it would do her no good.
Lynnette gave herself a shake. If it helped her take out only one gun-toting scumbag, that was enough. And she was pretty confident she could manage that much. Unless they got a clear shot from jump.
Shouting in Spanish and the sound of unnatural movement through brush drew her attention. They’d closed in.
Lynnette studied the mud for another beat, frowned, and twisted back for the water.
The ground sloped softer a short jog backward, which would also lure the assholes further from Jenna.
A win-win in her book. She didn’t dare glance over her shoulder, instead praying to a deity she didn’t believe in that her friend was heeding her instruction to stay low and stay quiet.
All she could do was move, making just enough noise to be believable.
She wasn’t trained in stealth or subterfuge, after all.
More shouting, clearer, assailed her ears. She didn’t know the words, but she understood what was said all the same. They’d spotted her.
One of the few phrases she did understand followed—someone, not Quetzal, asking where someone else was. Jenna, undoubtedly.
Keep your sweet head down, babe. Jenna was too kind a soul to let anyone die for her, and Lynnette had no intention of dying quietly. But everything would get worse if her good-hearted friend leapt out front again.
Bullets whizzed past, piercing the water and biting into tree trunks.
Lynnette threw herself sideways, into a roll, and let her eyes squeeze closed to avoid getting debris in them from the impact.
The dirt was dry when she hit it, not so much once she’d rolled across it, as the lower half of her body was soaked.
It hardly mattered. A rifle blast exploded, tearing an innocent bush from its root in her peripheral vision even as she popped her eyes open.
More shouting, behind and to the left of her rather than strictly to the left of her.
Good. That was what she wanted. She kept the bear spray clutched close to her chest, hopefully out of sight, and ducked behind a wide tree as something zipped past her thigh. Nothing stung sharper than the bite of her impact on the hard ground, so she took that as the best sign so far.
“Come on out, bitch!” one of the men shouted. “We don’t even wanna play wit’ you, we’re just gonna put you down like we did that ol’ lady!”
Lynnette’s insides twisted and she locked her jaw.
They were worse than murderers. They were monsters.
But she didn’t take the bait—her father had raised her better than that—and instead she pivoted, keeping the tree at her back and moving straight ahead until she found another tree she could slip behind.
The rain of bullets had slowed, indicating they were intelligent enough to want at least some direction of where to aim before they pulled the trigger.
Lynnette lowered to her knees, knowing they were looking for her at full height, and more slowly moved behind some nice, dense bushes.
She held there and wedged just a couple of fingers into the shrubbery, gently, carefully parting it until she had the smallest line-of-sight.
It felt weirdly like performing a surgery.
She held her breath as one of the gunmen stepped almost immediately into view.
He wasn’t terribly close, and she was fairly sure he was one of the ones who’d shot down Jenna’s landlady. His attention was fixed off too far to the left, as was the barrel of his gun.
More movement, from the direction of the water, caught her focus next.
And her gut churned. The trigger-happy, tobacco-chewing asshole she’d gotten the best look at previously had managed to come nearest of all.
He’d come up from the creek side, obviously having pursued her path more directly.
And while he wasn’t looking straight at her, he was looking toward the bushes with suspicion.
Enough suspicion to make her uncomfortable.
A voice from further back, somewhere between him and the killer she’d first spotted, drew his attention.
The male spoke in low, brusque Spanish. He sounded agitated, impatient.
From his tone, Lynnette gathered the man only then clearing the trees she’d used for protection wasn’t appreciating his assignment.
He motioned behind them without twisting.
Lynnette bit her lip. Where’s number four?
For that matter, where was Quetzal? She struggled to imagine the polished bastard giving chase in the woods, but desperate was desperate, so she couldn’t assume he hadn’t.
On the other hand, if he hadn’t, perhaps the fourth man had stayed back as protection?
A voice called from beyond the guy who’d helped kill Diane. Definitely not Quetzal, definitely masculine, so probably the other killer—the fourth gunman. He was out of sight, and too far to the side, but he succeeded in drawing the attention of all his cohorts.
Lynnette watched as the two furthest from her moved in the wrong direction entirely, guns lazily hanging at half-mast in their respective grasp.
She watched as the one that made her the most nervous, the one closest, gave one last lingering glare toward her bush before shouldering his own gun and adjusting direction to follow suit. They moved as a pack, apparently.
And a part of her knew she shouldn’t.
The smarter thing would have been to hold her breath and let them waltz completely out of sight, all the way left of target, and then make a mad-dash along the creek’s edge back toward civilization and possibly help. But then that begged the question, what help did she expect to call?
She blamed that for why she did what she did.
She blamed the horrendously corrupted, mostly useless local law enforcement and her father’s ruthless instillment of self-sufficiency for why she sprang to her feet as the guy moved past her and swung out her arm.
Bear spray in-hand, nozzle out, lips pressed tightly shut, Lynnette damn near punched the bastard in the nose as she depressed the spray and gave him a point-blank dose of maximum-strength “deterrent.”
Of course, he opened his mouth and shouted.
A gob of black, half-chewed, wadded-up tobacco rolled from his lower lip the way a child might reject an over-eager bite of something they belatedly deemed disgusting.
He stumbled back, fumbling with his weapon and swatting at the air as if the spray were a bug.
Lynnette released the pressure on her nozzle before she could use it up—and before she could make too much of a target of herself—then boldly shot out her other hand and took hold of the nasty asshole’s gun. He shouldn’t be handling a firearm in his condition, anyway.
Someone shot at her, of course, but their friend was between them so they fired too wide.
With a sharp jerk the gun came free, the movement causing its previous owner to fall on his ass as he coughed violently, and Lynnette threw herself into an angled sprint.
She didn’t go for the obvious tree, or the next one after that, before finally twisting around and ducking behind one she’d allowed herself to nearly pass.
She’d managed to shove the spray into a pocket, freeing up both hands for her new weapon.
Her father’s lessons finally came in handy as she took a half-second to look over the thing.
Guns were not her favorite tool in the universe. Probably very near her least, in fact. That did not mean she didn’t know how to use one.
Two bullets tore out a solid chunk of her shield in quick succession, the second piece of flying bark scraping off her shoulder in the process. She hadn’t exactly lost her pursuers. But losing them hadn’t been the goal.
Lynnette blew out a careful breath. No, the goal had been exactly the opposite. She needed to keep them occupied. It was the only way to keep Jenna safe.
Someone shouted in Spanish, and while she didn’t know the translation of his words, she recognized the crudity of his tone.
Lynnette twisted the opposite way from the chipped-off side around the tree, gun raised, and snapped, “That’s no way to talk to a woman, asshole.
” The moment she got one of them in sight, she pulled the trigger.
She didn’t wait to see if her target took the hit before diving for safety behind the tree again.