High-Risk Affair. RaeAnne Thayne
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a natural athlete. Not that he had ever spent much time noticing, but maybe he should. These last few weeks had made him painfully aware of the loneliness of his life outside of work. Somehow he had focused all his energy on the job, leaving nothing for a personal life.
When the job went wrong, he had been left with nothing.
Not that he wanted that kind of complication right now. But if he did, he ought to think about hooking up with someone tough-shelled and resilient, like Wilhelmina Carson.
He certainly wouldn’t be stupid enough to waste his time taking a second look at someone breakable like Megan Vance.
“Did I miss something?” Willy asked.
He put any thought of soft, fragile women out of his head, then slipped off his shoes and socks, gauging the wall carefully as he did. “I don’t know. See those holes up there?”
She looked baffled but studied where he pointed. “Those little things? I thought they were just screwholes or imperfections in the logs or something.”
“They’re a little too evenly spaced to be imperfections. Hang on.”
He stuck the index finger of his right hand in the lowest three-quarter-inch hole, then extended his left hand to the next highest. Pain radiated from his shoulder but he ignored it, as he’d been trying to do for two long weeks. As he suspected, the holes were about three feet apart, just about the width of a nine-year-old’s outstretched fingers.
“Damn. This kid is amazing.”
Ignoring the strident cry of protest from his shoulder, he pulled himself up the logs using the conveniently placed fingerholes, pausing about halfway between the ground and the boy’s window.
“You are frigging crazy, Davis!”
Below, he caught a clear view of Willy’s consternation. “You’re two weeks out of having your shoulder ripped open, you idiot. Let me find you a damn ladder.”
“I’m good. Just hang on.”
“Do I have to go find McKinnon to drag you down?”
Okay, this hadn’t been the smartest idea. His shoulder wasn’t anywhere near ready for this, especially when he was wearing a shirt and tie and his second-best summer weight slacks instead of Lycra and climbing shoes.
“I’m done.” He jumped the five feet to the ground. “You’re going to want to find that ladder now and dust those finger holes I didn’t use for prints.”
“You really think the boy climbed out on his own using those dinky finger holes?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a kid climbed out an open window.”
“That took time and effort to drill those holes. This wasn’t something that happened overnight. Could someone else be involved?”
“Possibly, but I’m beginning to doubt it. Those holes are custom-set for a nine-year-old’s arm span. Did you notice how awkward they were for me to use, spaced so close together?”
Willy shook her head in disbelief. “All I saw was an agent with the Federal Bureau of Idiots trying to kill himself. Good grief, Davis. This kid is only nine years old! How the hell could he pull it off?”
“My guess is practice. The holes are already worn in spots.”
“That would explain why the boy’s fingerprints are the only ones I can find on the window ledge. Am I wasting my time looking for evidence somebody else was involved in the kid’s disappearance, then?”
His gut was telling him the boy escaped completely on his own, for reasons Cale didn’t yet understand.
He really hoped that was the case, for the mother’s sake, and that searchers would find him camped out in the mountains somewhere oblivious to all the trouble he had left behind.
“It’s never a waste of time to check out all the angles. I could be completely off base here.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” he answered. “Until we know otherwise with absolute certainty, the FBI will continue working this case as a possible abduction.”
And he would do his best not to spend more time than absolutely necessary dwelling on the missing boy’s mother, with her soft skin and her scared eyes.
12:25 p.m.
This wasn’t the right way, either.
In the fading light of his flashlight, Cameron saw a huge pile of rubble blocking the shaft he had been certain would take him back to familiar ground.
He turned off the flashlight to conserve whatever juice he had left and slumped to the ground, feeling worse than the time his soccer team back in San Diego had lost the championship game in the league playoffs by one stinking last-minute goal.
He pressed one hand to his whirly stomach and used the other to wipe away the hot tears burning his eyes. He had been so sure this way would lead him back to the tunnels he had explored, where he could follow his own chalk marks back to the entrance and go home.
Home.
He wanted so much to be there, safe in his own room with the pictures of his dad on the wall and his soccer trophies on a shelf by his bed.
He sniffled, wiping his nose on his shirt. Was anybody looking for him yet? He could bet his uncle and cousins were out there. But his stomach hurt even worse thinking about it. Nobody would have any idea where to look for him, and that was the scariest thing of all.
He knew a good Navy SEAL left no trace behind him, and Cam had been careful to wipe away his tracks leading into the shaft and to cover the entrance with a dead sagebrush.
If only he hadn’t been so careful, maybe someone would find the mine entrance and figure out he was in here.
He never knew dark could be so dark. It was heavy and scary—he couldn’t even see his own hand when he held it right up to his eyes.
The two times he had sneaked into the tunnels before, he hadn’t stayed very long and he had always had plenty of light. It had been more exciting than scary, like exploring a whole new planet somewhere that nobody else knew about.
It was exciting then. Now the dark was so heavy and sometimes he couldn’t even tell whether his eyes were open or closed.
He had two more sets of batteries and a spare flashlight, but he didn’t know how long he was going to be in here. He didn’t want to use all his light and then be left with nothing.
He didn’t want to die in the dark somewhere, alone and scared. He wiped his nose again, wondering what he should do. He had turned so many corners in the mine that he didn’t have the first idea which way would lead him out.
Overwhelmed by his fear and at the thought of dying, he couldn’t keep in a sob. He cried for a minute, then tried to stop. He wasn’t making any progress sitting here like a big baby and bawling his eyes out. Every minute he wasted was another minute he had to stay in the dark.
His breath came in little baby gasps, but he managed to quit bawling after another minute or two. He would say a prayer, he decided. That’s what his mom told him to do whenever he was worried or scared or hurting.
Though he whispered the words, they sounded loud and echoing in the total quiet of the tunnel.
“Help me out of here, please. I promise if You do, I’ll never sneak out at night again, even when I’m a teenager, and I won’t yell at my sister when she touches my stuff. I’ll share my Play Station with her and I won’t talk back to my mom, even in my head.”
He paused, not sure what else to say. “You know,” he said after a minute, “I could really use my dad’s help in here. If he’s not busy, could You send him down to help me out? Amen.”
He felt a little better after he prayed,