Chapter 10
Ten
Mackenzie darted a look at the sky, but Gideon was already pulling her toward the shrubs as a helicopter rumbled through the clouds.
The machine was light and agile as a dragonfly, dipping to the right and left, rain gleaming on its sides.
When it flew closer, she caught a glimpse of a person in the rear, leaning out the open door, tethered, binoculars scanning, a rifle pinched under his arm.
“Bullseye’s got helicopters at his disposal? How big is his budget anyway?” Gideon snapped.
“You don’t want to know.” She scanned frantically for a hiding place as they ran.
The thickly clustered trees at the edge of a hollow beckoned, but the wide oblong of tall grass meant they would be spotted and shot well before they reached it. Gideon was urging her toward a dip in the ground where an oak tree had fallen long ago, the bark crumbling from the decaying branches.
He dove behind the tangle of wood that rose only about two feet above the grass line and she followed. How was this going to help?
“Arms up,” he said.
Bewildered, she did as she was told and he pulled off her poncho, rolled it into a ball, and stuffed it under his jacket.
“Scrunch down as much as you can.”
Grass and twigs caught in her hair as she made herself as flat as possible on the sodden earth. He flopped down next to her and heaved some branches over them, caging them as they burrowed like forest animals into the crackling debris.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered. “And don’t move.”
That went without saying. She shut her eyes, the darkness more terrifying than the enemies.
The rotors spun debris into a whirlwind that spattered her body.
Would the air disturbance blow away their sheltering branches and leave them exposed?
Had they been spotted despite the last-second hiding spot?
She clung to Gideon’s jacket front, his arms holding her tight.
The soggy ground underneath them quaked with the force of the vibrations.
Judging from the deafening roar, the helicopter had to be directly over them.
The noise shuddered right through her, threatening to blast away her remaining self-control.
Just hold on. That’s all you can do.
Something moved under her hip. A snake? Her muscles turned steel-taut as she fought hard not to scream.
They’d no doubt flung themselves right on top of whatever creepy-crawlies called the decaying tree home.
Visions of reptiles and spiders danced in her brain.
She tried for calming breaths, telling herself she’d take her chances with vermin and insects any day over the predators in the sky.
But the stinging, biting, slithering . . .
The helicopter swooped lower, and the whoosh from the rotor thwapping the air vibrated her teeth. Had their location been pinpointed and the craft was about to land, freeing men to execute them?
Again she felt the movement against her body, but this time she identified it.
Not an animal or insect.
Her phone.
The ringer was on silent, but it could be nothing else pulsing in that regular rhythm. A cell signal was possible? Here? Now? Her fingers clenched, her desire to answer overpowering.
But she dared not. It was too risky even to check the screen because now she heard voices from the helicopter shouting to each other through their radios, cutting in and out.
“Negative, I don’t see them . . . but they’re close. They’ve . . . fire tower . . . Soon.”
Move away, she silently demanded as her phone vibrated again. Go search for your prey somewhere else.
The helicopter dipped closer, and she was desperate to look, but she kept her eyes closed and her face hidden in Gideon’s chest. His rapid heartbeat told her he was as stressed as she, but he was motionless, his arms strong and reassuring.
Another pulse from her cell.
The phone went still.
She wanted to scream. Still the men hovered above, scanning for her and Gideon, two rabbits tracked by the falcon.
An eternity later the helicopter roared away. Gideon did not loosen his grip. “Stay still for a few more minutes, just to be sure,” he whispered in her ear.
At last when he relaxed his hold and eased to a sitting position, she did the same and grabbed her phone.
“I got a call. Someone left a voicemail.” She peered at the screen.
Then everything felt very far away, as if she’d been snipped from the bonds of gravity, floating free.
“What?” Gideon said. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s . . . The call . . . It’s from Aaron’s cell phone.”
His shock mirrored her own. “How?”
She had no answer. The call had come from her brother’s number. It was inconceivable.
“Was . . . Did Aaron have a phone on him when he was killed?”
“He told us the day before the murder he’d lost his phone. I don’t think he had an opportunity to get a new one before the murder.”
Gideon seemed to mull it over as he grabbed his own phone. “I can’t make an outgoing call. Can you?”
She forced herself to check. “No.”
“Texts won’t send either, but someone managed to get through to you.” He watched as she pushed the playback button and held the phone between them so he could hear too.
Her heart pounded as he pressed close. Aaron’s phone . . . his number.
The message was staticky and garbled, indecipherable the first time, so she pressed the button again. “Is that a woman or a man?”
“Not sure, maybe even a teen, but I can’t understand what’s being said. Only the last two words.”
His breath hitched in her ear as the message replayed.
“Trust me.”
Gideon frowned as he got to his feet. “Trust who?”
Mackenzie was dizzied. “How did someone get his cell? And why would they call us?”
“If Aaron was dealing for Bullseye, it’s possible he got Aaron’s phone somehow. Cloned it, maybe.”
She stared at her phone as if it could provide some answers. “It definitely wasn’t Bullseye in the message.” She groaned. “Why can’t we get a signal now when we got one two seconds ago? Phones are completely maddening.”
“Agreed. Maybe when we reach higher ground.” He was scanning the scattered debris under his boots.
“Has the plan changed?” she said.
“Only that we’ll have to move slower and more carefully and stay in the trees as much as possible. We’ll parallel the trail but keep out of the open.” He checked his watch. “It’ll be close, because in another hour we have to be clear of this valley.”
“Which way?”
He pointed to the steep, densely wooded slope, and her body sagged.
“Straight up and no roads?”
“I’m afraid so.”
She bit back a sigh and took off her pack to shake away the debris that had snagged on the fabric as he bent to retrieve something.
“Hold up,” he said.
Before she realized what he was planning, he’d scooped a handful of mud and smeared it on her face, then his own.
The cold goop was clammy and smelled of moldering things. It was all she could do to resist a shudder as she glared at him.
“I hope that was a real important survival tactic, buddy,” she snapped through clenched teeth.
He smiled and removed the rain poncho from under his jacket.
“Same issue as with this. Shine. It’s one of the things that gives people away when they’re trying to hide.
Movement, position, shape, shadow, shine .
. . et cetera, basically anything that stands out to the enemy.
” He fingered the slippery poncho. “Shine where it shouldn’t be is like a beacon to point them right to us.
Nothing shinier than a beautiful woman.”
She blinked. Did he just say she was beautiful? She laughed nervously. “You probably say that to all the girls after you smear them with mud.”
“Only when it’s true,” he said. Was he blushing under his mud face paint? “Um, anyway, so it’s, you know, important to work the camouflage as much as we can, now that they’re hunting us from the air too.”
“Okay. I accept that, but you didn’t have to look so happy about sliming me.”
His grin was full of the mischief of a high school boy. “Gotta get the entertainment where you can, you know?”
“Right.” They’d restored the easy balance between them, but the word still rang in her ears. Beautiful. It made no sense that he’d say it, or that it would quiver like an arrow in her heart. She was unraveling, that was it. The call from Aaron’s phone had shaken her, left her off-balance.
Gideon busied himself snatching up a leafy branch and scouring the ground with it to smooth over where they’d left boot prints. When he was done, he threw around some twigs to cover those they’d broken in their landing.
“We have to stay vigilant with Bullseye’s guys so close. They probably figured out we sheltered in the fire tower, and since we’re on foot, it won’t be hard to narrow down the search grid.”
She groaned. “The current head count is one in a vehicle, two in a chopper, Al and Jerry, possibly Kevin and Cordelia, and who knows how many more out there beating the bushes for us.”
“Not to mention the caller. Dunno if they’re friend or foe.” Gideon walked back over to her and picked a twig out of her hair. “But it doesn’t matter how many are looking for us. We’re going to be careful, and we’re smarter than they are.”
“Such confidence.”
“That’s not usually something you lack.” He paused. “Still planning to get to the airstrip?”
She nodded and pulled on her pack. As they hurried through the brush toward a steep, rocky rise, she wondered again at the phone call.
Aaron’s cell number on her screen.
“Trust me.”
Who?
As the climb became more excruciating, it consumed her concentration. The rocks were slippery, the ground treacherous with protruding roots and mud. In some places, they had to hold on to those roots to haul themselves over places where the ground had washed away.
In other circumstances, the landscape would have been breathtakingly beautiful—verdant, pristine, like an untouched paradise.
A thought hit her so suddenly she almost lost her balance and slid down the slope.
“What?” Gideon said, scanning in all directions. “Why’d you stop?”
“Aaron came here.”