Chapter 48
Helpless and useless at her friend's side, Cara couldn't stop staring at the blood running down Tom's side onto the rough planking. "Reagan. Talk to me. Is he—"
"Don't." Reagan didn't look up. Both hands buried in Tom's side, blood welled dark between her fingers however hard she leaned. "Don't ask me that. Just keep that light steady, and don't let go of his hand."
Cara had his hand. She'd had it since she'd crawled to him across a floor still hazed with gunpowder. His fingers were too cold, his breathing too thin, his skin way too white.
"Pressure's dropping." Reagan said it low and flat, to no one. "I need a trauma bay. An OR. Things that do not exist in a fish cabin on stilts." She leaned harder. "Stay with me, Tom. You hear me. You do not get to do this."
"How long?" Cara forced the question out. "How long does he have?"
Reagan looked up, finally. The answer was on her face before she said it. "Not the two hours it'd take to drive him out of here."
The boats were both on the bottom of the bay. Thibodeaux's patrol cars would arrive any second, not that it would help. She squeezed Tom’s frigid hand. “Hang on. We’ve got you.”
The same thing Gabe had said to her. Was it just a day ago? Two? She hoped Tom heard her. And she prayed the silly, meaningless words would give him hope.
Then she heard it.
The miracle came out of the black night with its lights off and its engine screaming. The drone of an engine climbing over the marsh. The floatplane swooped out of the sky onto the black bay in a long tearing sheet of spray, pontoons throwing white, and swung up to the broken dock.
Cara was up and out the cabin door before she'd decided to move, Tom's hand passed off to Owen, her boots loud on the canted boards. A plane was a chance, and she meant to be on the dock to meet it.
The cockpit door flew open. Nomad leaned out and took his time looking them over, the two boats going down at the pilings, the cuffed men on the boards, and Gabe and Wade standing on the edge of the dock, arms akimbo. "Somebody order a ride?"
"How'd you know we needed you?" Cara's voice came out shaking.
Nomad shrugged, already swinging down onto the pontoon.
"You were late. And if there's one thing I know about my man Wade, it's that he is never late.
Not ever." Halfway down the float he stopped, toeing a thick coil of cottonmouth off the pontoon into the bay.
"Find your own ride, dude." He grinned up at them.
"So I figured he was dead, or in a bad way. "
His eyes went past her then, through the open door, to Reagan crouched over a man who wasn't moving. Every ounce of the clowning went out of him at once. "Right again," he said. "Looks like our first stop's the closest ambulance shack."
They carried Tom out on the door. Wade at the head, Gabe at the foot, Reagan walking alongside with her hands pressed exactly where they'd been since the lights came up.
Cara stood on the pontoon and held onto the wing strut while they lifted him in, Owen and Skye watching from the doorway of the cabin.
Tom's face remained rigid and drained of color. He didn't wake.
"Ten four." Inside the cockpit, Nomad clicked off the radio. "Nearest ER is ten minutes away by air. They'll have an ambulance standing by, then it’s a two-minute ride from the airfield. The lighter we travel, the faster we get there."
"Just me, then." Reagan climbed in after him and didn't look back, and that was how Cara knew. There was no guarantee the rest of them would see Tom awake and talking again.
The instant Reagan was aboard, Nomad spun up the engines, turning the ungainly craft in a neat circle, then the floatplane blasted back down the canal, trailing thick wakes of white water that slapped into the leaning docks.
The sound of it thinned as it rounded the first bend, and then it was gone, and the marsh folded back into its own enormous quiet.
For a moment, in that ringing quiet, none of them moved. Gabe drew her in, and Cara put her face against his chest and let herself shake, biting back sobs of fear.
"Lord, keep him," she said into his shirt. It was the whole of the prayer she had. "Don't take Tom. Not Tom."
"Amen," Gabe said, low, his mouth against her hair. Then he let her go, because there was still the cabin and the prisoners and a night that wasn't done with them.
They went back inside. Owen sat gray-faced against the galley counter.
Skye had slid down the wall with her hand still locked over her side, refusing to be a patient until the place was secure.
Wide-eyed, yet still as a panther, Skye watched Helen Cartwright.
The woman hadn’t moved an inch. Wade stayed out on the dock with his rifle, practically daring any of Cartwright’s men to return.
Cara wasn’t about to put any money down on that. The slowest of them would be miles down the road by now, melting into the shadows.
Gabe keyed his radio. "Cole. Tell me you're close."
"Two minutes, brother." Thibodeaux's voice came back tight under the whine of his own engine. "Heard enough on the way in to know to hurry. Sit tight."
Two minutes later, true to his word, the patrol cars came down the cabin road, light bars strobing red and blue through the cypress, too late to be anything but cleanup.
Cole Thibodeaux unfolded out of the lead car, took in the cabin and the sinking boats and his old friend standing in the middle of the wreck, and didn't waste breath. "Everybody alive?"
"Mostly," Gabe said.
"You can thank the man who called me." Cole tipped his head back toward the road. "Wouldn't give a name. Told me it was time to roll, with or without your say-so. He wasn't wrong." He shook his head. "Long gone now, whoever he is."
The thing Cara had carried since the doorstep finally set itself quietly down.
Don't come back the way you went out. Not a leash.
A hand on her back in the dark. Barrett had spent the last of his cover to keep them breathing, and he'd done it from inside the one place where a man got nothing for it but a knife or a bullet.
"Leave him out of your report," Skye said.
She'd come up at Cara's shoulder, gray and swaying and standing on pure spite, one hand clamped to her side.
"You got an anonymous tip, and you found the place.
" She held Cole's eyes until he gave her the nod.
It was the only protection any of them could hand a ghost.
"I've got one passenger for you," Gabe told Cole. “Don't let her out of your sight, and don't let her near a phone." Two of Cole's deputies went in for her.
They brought her out without a fight, wrists zip-tied in front of her, cardigan still buttoned to the throat, mild as a woman being shown to her table.
At the cabin door she stopped and looked at Cara. Something oddly like fondness softened her features. "I knew you’d be the most dangerous one." A small, tired smile. "You talked your way into my world tonight, dear. There aren't many people still breathing who've done that."
"You'll have a long time to think that over," Cara said. "In prison."
Cartwright shook her head gently. "No, I won't."
Her eyes slid past Cara to the dark line of the brush. She seemed, if anything, like a woman who had been waiting on a bus and finally seen it come around the corner.
It happened almost gently. One soft cough of a silencer under the rising insect chorus, and Helen Cartwright folded down onto the boards as though her strings had been cut.
Cara gasped. Owen squealed. Cole Thibodeaux ducked, then raised his weapon. Skye didn’t even bother to react.
As Thibodeaux’s men fanned out, weapons trained on the perimeter, Gabe and Wade and Thibodeaux tore into the brush, crashing through cypress and palmetto after a shooter who had left nothing behind but a settling quiet and a wrinkle in the black water.
Cara dropped to her knees beside Cartwright. Skye was already there, both hands going to Tom’s side out of the same reflex that had kept Reagan's hands pressed to Tom’s wound. But instead of compressions, she sat back on her heels and met Cara’s eyes, shaking her head. “Nope.”
The entry wound told its own story. One hole, dead center. Nothing anyone's hands could do a thing about.
Skye pursed her lips, her gaze following the direction of the shot. "Through the heart. First round, in this light, at that range." She shook her head slowly. "I know maybe two people alive who could make that shot. I'm not sure I'm one of them."
"That's why nobody ever talks," Skye said, her voice low. "Super effective, I’ll give them that."
While two of Thibodeaux’s deputies guarded the site, the other two photographed the body and the scene. Once they finished, Owen laid a canvas tarp over what ten minutes ago had been a ruthless, capable woman.
Gabe and Wade and Thibodeaux came back with nothing. Not that Cara was surprised.
Face slack with exhaustion, Gabe holstered his weapon. “Shooter’s long gone. I didn’t even catch a glimpse.”
Eying the body, Cole Thibodeaux snorted. “Wouldn’t help anyway. These folks move way above my pay grade.”
“You got that right.” Rifle slung over his back, hands on his hips, Wade stared down at the body.
Cara’s phone buzzed. Clearly, so did the rest of the team’s. A text from Reagan.
Tom in surgery. Internal bleeding. A lot. Touch and go. Send prayers. And get here ASAP.
For a moment nobody said anything. Cara watched the words land on each of them in turn — Wade's jaw going hard, Owen closing his eyes, Skye reading it twice like she could argue with it.
Touch and go. They had walked out of a gunfight that should have killed all of them, and the one of them who'd saved the rest was the one they might still lose.
"Then we don't stand here," Gabe said, low. It was the only thing left to do for Tom, and they all knew it. Get there. Be there. The rest was out of their hands and in better ones.
The sun was coming up over Petit Marais. Cole's people strung tape and then sat back, waiting for the coroner’s wagon to arrive. Out in the shallows the herons came back to their fishing as if nothing in the night had happened at all. None of it belonged to the team anymore.
"Take my unit." Cole pressed the keys into Gabe's hand before he could ask for them. "Two hours to the regional, less the way you'll drive it. I've got all this. Go be there when your boy wakes up."
They didn't wait around. Skye went in the back with her side packed tight and her color all wrong.
Owen wedged himself in beside her to hold her upright.
Wade took shotgun, rolling his window down and keeping his eyes on the treeline the whole way out to the highway.
Gabe drove. Cara took the middle seat beside him and kept hold of his hand.
They had won. Ray Harney’s witnesses were safe. Owen and Skye were free to resume their lives, though in Skye’s case, Cara wasn’t sure what that was.
"Tell me Tom makes it," Cara said.
Gabe didn't lie to her. It was one of the ways she'd always known him.
He only held on to her hand and drove them toward the morning, and the boy fighting for his life at the far end of it, the whole carload of them having won every single thing they came for, and unable, for the life of them, to feel it yet.