Deception Lake. Пола Грейвс
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told him about what had happened in Amarillo, but Quinn was smart enough to guess.
“I don’t care,” she said flatly, looking at the duffel bag lying at her feet. She didn’t intend to stick around Purgatory for another hour, so what Jack Drummond had or hadn’t done four years ago meant nothing to her.
Nothing at all.
“Why do I think there’s something you’re not telling me?” Quinn asked.
“Because you’re a suspicious old spook,” she snapped back. “Go bother someone else.” She ended the call, her hands shaking.
Stop, she thought, forcing her hands to go still. She took a couple of long, deep breaths, tried to clear her mind of the clutter that Jack Drummond’s unexpected invasion of her life had wrought.
The data-shredding programs she’d fed into her remaining computers were nearly finished. Anyone, Quinn included, who tried to figure out what she’d been working on would fail.
The information she needed to continue her work was saved on three portable flash drives sewn into the padding of her backpack, safe enough for the moment. Once she reached her next bolt-hole, she’d try to find a safer place to keep them.
It was time to leave Mara Jennings behind for good.
Darkness fell across the woods surrounding Mara Jennings’s cabin, aided by lowering clouds that cocooned the cabin in a misty veil. Rain had not yet started to fall, but the air outside the truck was cool and damp with the promise of precipitation when Jack got out to stretch his legs.
Nothing had stirred around the cabin for a couple of hours. No cars had passed his parking place going in either direction. He checked his watch as he climbed back into the truck—not even eight o’clock yet.
Where the hell was she?
Suddenly, light flickered on inside the cabin.
Jack sat forward with a start.
A dark silhouette glided past the one window Jack could see from his vantage point. It was hard to make out distinguishing characteristics like height or shape, but he supposed it might have been a female.
Had Mara been in the cabin this whole time? Or had an intruder made his way inside without Jack seeing him?
He’d unpacked his Colt pistol and loaded it while he was waiting for something to happen. He checked it now, making sure he had a round chambered, and reached for the door handle.
The light in the cabin went off.
Jack froze in place.
A second later, the front door opened and a dark-clad figure slipped out onto the porch. It crossed to the steps and began to descend, coming out of the shadow of the porch roof.
Despite the darkness of the cloud-covered night, Jack’s eyes had adjusted enough to the low light to make out Mara’s pretty oval-shaped face as she lifted it toward him.
She froze in place when she spotted his truck.
He knew she probably couldn’t see him sitting there in the cab, watching her. Maybe she’d just assume his brother-in-law drove him back to the hotel for the night and they’d pick up the truck in the morning.
After a few more seconds of complete stillness, Mara edged toward the tree line to her left, closer and closer to the woods. If she entered the dense thicket of trees and underbrush, he’d lose sight of her completely.
Would that be so bad?
“Yes,” he whispered, the hiss of breath loud in the quiet truck cab. It would be bad, because the woman was clearly in trouble. Someone had tried to attack her that afternoon and now she was sneaking out of her house with a duffel bag and a backpack and disappearing into the woods. After dark.
What the hell was going on with her?
Gunfire split the silent mountain air, impossibly close. Ducking on instinct, Jack peered through the truck’s passenger window, his heart rate tripling in the span of a few seconds.
Was she shooting at him?
A rustle of bushes caught his attention just before Mara raced onto the road in front of his truck. A second shot rang out as before, and Mara halted with a jerk. She pitched forward, disappearing from his view.
Jack’s heart stuttered as he scooted toward the driver’s door, jerking twice at the door handle before he managed to get it open.
Keeping low, he moved toward the front of the truck and peered around the bumper.
Mara lay facedown on the gravel, her eyes half-open and her breath coming in harsh gasps.
For a second, Jack wasn’t sure what to do. He might consider himself a man of action, but most of the action had to do with planting his tail on the back of an enormous, angry bull and trying to stay there for eight seconds. He was a pretty good shot with the Colt pistol gripped tightly in his right hand when he was standing at a shooting range with nothing else going on, but he’d never been shot at in his life.
“Mara?” he whispered, looking for blood in the dark gravel beneath her body.
In the woods to his right, the whisper of movement in the bushes spurred him into action. Scrambling forward, he grabbed Mara by the upper arms and dragged her around the truck. She struggled weakly against his grip, but he managed to get her tucked between him and the door of the truck.
“Where were you hit?” he asked quietly, daring a quick peek over the bed of the truck.
“Are you with him?” she asked in a raspy growl.
“What?”
“The man with the gun—are you with him?”
Jack heard more movement in the woods. A lot closer this time.
Without taking time to answer her, he moved her to the side and pulled open the door of the truck. “Can you get in?”
Her eyes met his, glittering in the dim glow of the truck’s dome light. He felt her wriggle against him, the slide of her body against his sending an unexpected, badly timed flood of heat pouring into his groin. She turned around, the curve of her bottom brushing against him and sparking more fires as she scrambled into the truck cab ahead of him. “Get us out of here.”
He pulled himself behind the wheel and turned the key. The truck growled to life.
“Is there a faster way out of here than backward?” he asked.
“No.”
“Hold on.” He put the truck in Reverse and hit the gas pedal. The Ford truck jerked backward, spraying gravel as he braked, spun the steering wheel into the resulting slide and whipped the truck into Drive, shooting forward.
Beside him, Mara’s hands gripped the dashboard as she struggled to keep from tumbling onto the floorboard. “Go!” she rasped.
Another gunshot rang out. Jack heard the screech of metal on metal and realized the last shot had hit the truck. He swallowed a profanity and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
“Left or right?” he asked seconds later, forced to brake when they reached the T intersection with the winding road that had brought him there from the main highway.
“Left,” she said after the briefest of hesitations.
Right would take them to the highway, he knew. He wondered where she was taking them.
He watched the rearview mirror as he barreled along the narrow two-lane road that appeared to hug the curvy contours of Deception Lake. Riley and Hannah had taken him fishing there earlier that morning, he realized, though probably on a different part of the lake, since nothing about this road or these woods seemed familiar to him.
He spared a