Chapter 19 Cara
NINETEEN
CARA
Cara’s mind swirled faster than the eddies circling her legs. Don’t want to die. Can’t go back to prison. Hate water.
“If you go in, you won’t survive,” Sheriff Burke said.
She had been so focused on not slipping and falling in the darkness, she had completely missed his approach. She couldn’t tell what he looked like, not when she was blinded by his flashlight beam.
“Two people have died this year in water just like this,” he warned her. “You’ll be tossed around like a rag doll, bashed against rock after rock.”
Any vague thoughts she’d had about feigning shock or amnesia or both were drowned out by the fearsome roaring water. “I thought people kayaked or rafted down these things.”
“A long way downstream from here, and not while the water’s this high. We had record-setting snowfall last winter.”
Her teeth were chattering and she couldn’t feel her feet. The water in Mexico had been bathtub-warm, its current like a water-park wave pool. And unlike the rescue in Mexico, there was no Karl on a jet ski to pluck her out of the roiling rapids.
“I don’t want to die,” she said.
“I don’t want you to die, either.”
It sounded like he meant it. The headlamp beam shifted, and she got a quick glimpse of a stocky man, not unhandsome, about her age. She had expected him to be wearing a sheriff’s cowboy hat, like Dudley Do-Right, but apparently it didn’t accessorize well with the headlamp.
“But you’ll shoot me if you have to,” she said.
“Not if you come peaceably into custody.”
“So you can send me back to prison to die. Maybe I should get it over with. Everyone else in that accident is dead.”
“Not everyone. LaDonna’s doing just fine.”
She must not have gotten very far. Cara felt sad, thinking she wouldn’t see her kids.
“And Bree . . .” The sheriff’s voice cracked. “Is clinging to life.”
“If I had known that, I would have stayed with her.”
He lowered the shotgun and reached out with his left hand. “Come on, Cara, let me help you.”
If she went back with Sheriff Do-Right, how could he help her? By testifying to the judge that she should get natural life, instead of life plus additional years for attempted escape?
Shaking from cold, she took one step into the current, gasping in shock as the water reached her waist.
He raised his gun again and stepped toward her. “Don’t do it, Cara! Out of the water, now!”