Chapter 44
Gabe mashed the brake pedal, bringing the truck around in a slither of crushed shells. The shoulder harness bit into his neck until he wrestled with the wheel hard enough to bring the rear of the truck back under control. He pointed it back the way they'd come and punched the accelerator.
"Nice move," Wade murmured. "Ten bucks says that woman's got eyes on the road. They'll pick us off like fleas."
"Agreed." Gabe set his jaw and drove, forcing himself to head away from their friends. "There's one road in, and they're sitting on it. We drive up it, we die on it, and so does everybody in that cabin."
It should have hit him the second Barrett's voice came over the line, and it hadn't, because the only thing in his head had been, get there. You didn't get there by walking up the front steps of a house full of people who'd come to kill you, and most of the people you cared about.
"What's the plan, then?" Cara had the dead handset against her ear, the way there'd been nothing the whole way back.
He made himself ease off the gas, because panic drove fast and stupid and they couldn't afford either. "We've got no comms and no way to know exactly what we’re facing."
"So we go in blind," Wade said. Not a complaint. A fact. "Against whatever she brought. I'll take those odds."
Four people in a truck and a bag of bandages. That was the army on their side. Not that Gabe needed to point that out.
Cara twisted around in her seat. "Then we don't come the way they expect. We come by water."
Wade made a sound. "They'll expect that, too."
"Yeah." Cara sighed. "Any better ideas?"
From the back, Bennion spoke. "I've been hiding in this swamp for months.
You think I didn't plan five different escape routes?
" She leaned up between the seats and pointed past Gabe's shoulder, down a cut he'd have driven right past. "Two miles back there's a launch nobody uses.
There's a flatboat chained under the dock.
Nobody'll miss it before morning. Take the east channel and you can come up on that cabin from the open bay, downwind in the dark.
It's the side nobody watches, because nobody comes that way. "
Gabe took the turn she pointed at.
It put Barrett's voice in a different light. Don't come back the way you went out. Minutes old, impossible to weigh, a warning from a man burning his cover to keep them breathing. Or a hand steering them into something worse.
"Barrett's telling us the road's covered," Cara said. She'd heard it too. They all had.
"Or telling Cartwright we'd run the second he said it," Wade said, flat. "We don't know what he is."
Gabe stared between the headlight beams, gaze fixed on the center of the rutted road. Vegetation crowded in on both sides, squeezing down on them. Hiding things. Hiding dangers. "Doesn't matter."
"Not even a little." Cara smiled grimly, two minds with the same thought. They were going in for their people. Period.
"Thibodeaux's team is still staged at Bennion's," Gabe pointed out.
"So move them," Wade said.
"To what? A hostage scene he's never seen, with deputies I've never met? Not my first choice."
The bayou crowded the road, green and wet and alive.
Weeds slapped the undercarriage, vines snapped off the side mirrors, and broad leaves smeared muddy water across the windows as Gabe forced the SUV down the overgrown track.
The smell hit hardest—stagnant water, churned mud, crushed vegetation, and a sour, fishy rot that pushed through the vents no matter how high he ran the air.
The whole place smelled drowned. Like the road had been carved through something that wanted it back.
"Cole I'd trust with any of you,” he said. “The badges he brings I couldn't pick out of a lineup."
The click of Wade snapping a magazine into the grip of his Sig Sauer hit Gabe's ears. "We need more shooters. I'll take my chances with his guys. More guns is more guns."
"More guns is more pressure on Cartwright," Cara argued. "She hears a convoy, our people are leverage before his people's boots hit the ground."
"And if one of those badges is bought," Reagan added, "Tom and Skye and Owen are toast. Us too."
"It's not like we're not anyway." Bennion's voice was flat. "I don't see a good way out of this one."
"You're all not wrong." Wade's knee pressed the back of Gabe's seat as the big man shifted. "Looks like it's the A team."
It came together, fast and overlapping, everybody holding one true thing. Gabe made the call out loud, so it was made.
"Cole comes. The guns are worth the chance one of his is a plant. He stages short, half a mile from the cabin road, dark, engines off. Nobody moves until I say." He caught Cara's eyes for half a second. "We go in first. The four of us. The way nobody comes."
Nobody argued. One hand on the wheel, Gabe thumbed the phone and gave Cole the plan, emphasizing the word hold. Cole said copy, brother, and nothing else, because that was Cole.
The launch ramp was where Bennion said it would be, a cracked slab of crumbling concrete slipping down into black water under a dead light. The flatboat was where she said it would be. A dented jon boat chained to a piling. Wade had the chain off in under a minute.
The four of them filled the narrow craft. Wade took the tiller, taking them out low and slow, the little outboard barely above an idle.
Bennion crouched in the bow calling the channel by feel. "Stay left of that dead cypress. Mind the trap floats on your left. Cut here."
The marsh slid past close enough to touch, the air thick and rank and loud with the drone of insect life that never stopped. Then the channel opened and the bay was in front of them, flat and wide, a shade lighter than the dark they'd come through.
"The access'll be on our left," Bennion said. "Head for shore. We'll poke along until we find it. It'll be harder for them to see us if we stay out of the open water."
"Copy that." Wade turned the little boat toward the black shoreline.
"How do you want to do this?" Wade kept his voice under the idle.
Gabe had been constructing the plan the whole way across the bay, out of almost nothing.
"There's a utility hatch under the galley where Tom ran his cable up through the floor. It’s out behind the workbench, the one corner of that box nobody will think to guard. We park the boat far enough away they can’t see us approach, then we head along the water. ”
Cara fiddled with her seatbelt. “I walked down to that old dock when we got there. There’s plenty of cover on that side of the structure. There are weeds and bushes all the way up to the side of the cabin there.”
Gabe couldn’t help but grin. He was starting to believe they shared a brain sometimes.
“We should be able to go up the hatch. Wade, you’re on point.
I'm on him. Cara, second gun and my eyes.
Reagan, you stay behind the door until I call.
Somebody in there is going to need you, and you're no good to them shot. "
"And me," Bennion said.
"You hold the boat and the water. Anyone leaves that dock who isn't us, make sure they don't reach the bay."
“What about their boat?” Wade asked. “I’m betting they’ll have one. Can you disable it?”
“Just tell me what to do.” Bennion answered instantly.
“Will do.” Wade tapped Gabe on the shoulder. “We should be getting close now. Slow up.”
Both Gabe and Cara slowed their paddle strokes, careful now not to make a sound. Not that anyone could hear much over the incredible hum of insect life surrounding them.
"Nobody fires," Cara said, "until there's no other answer."
"Until there's no other answer." Gabe nodded. "Then it's loud everywhere at once. Cole rolls, and we stop being quiet and start being fast. We've got one card, surprise. We only get to play that once."
"Four against a house," Reagan said. Not arguing. Just naming it.
Wade’s teeth shone white in the dark. "I've had worse odds."
A long row of weathered, leaning fishing cabins materialized in the dark, aging docks leaning and tilting every which way. Gabe pulled his paddle out of the water and held up a fist. The boat drifted forward a few more feet before the sluggish current caught it, stopping their forward progress.
The stilted boxes sat gray against a tree-choked sky. No lamps. No generators.
“There’s ours,” Cara whispered.
Gabe craned to see ahead. The herons that had worked the shallows all afternoon were gone, the water flat and empty where they'd been. As he feared, a speedboat was tied to the long end. No one visible aboard.
The cabin was hidden. Tom had picked it, water on three sides, one road, the end of nowhere.
And Cartwright had found them anyway.
That was the thing he'd carry out of tonight, if he carried anything out at all. The fact that they had done every single thing right, and right hadn't been enough.
Cole was holding half a mile off. Nomad was at the strip with the plane and a promise. That left five of them, in a stolen jon boat, drifting the last yards onto the one side of the cabin nobody was watching.
That left the five of them on foot, and a stretch of black shoreline between them and the camp.
They put in well short of it, at a neighbor's fish cabin dark and shuttered for the season... Bennion took the hull and the shotgun and the water at their backs. The other four stepped off into the muck.
Cara stopped him with a hand flat on his chest, her face a pale blur a hand's width from his. "If this is the one we don't walk out of—"
"It isn't." He caught the back of her neck and put his forehead to hers, one second, the whole bad night held off for exactly that long. "But if it is, it's with you. That's the only way I ever wanted to go anywhere."
"Then don't make me finish it without you." She kissed him once, fast, and let him go.
Then they moved, low and quiet, along the shoreline toward the camp, cypress knees and black mud, the water on their right, the dark wall of marsh on their left, the held cabin growing out of the night one angle at a time.
And that smell, decay and death. Gabe wondered if he’d ever get it out of his head.
He made one last stab at the math. Three of them in that black box, five of them in the mud below it, facing who knew how many hostiles? He let it go. Some nights you stopped counting and started moving.
They came up on the cabin from its blind corner, crouching in among the pilings in knee-deep water, where the floor met the bank, and Gabe got his fingers under the edge of Tom's hatch.
Before he could tug it open, the night came apart. A muzzle flash, white and enormous. The first round splitting the air where his head had been. The whole black marsh lit up like the inside of a struck match.