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A pause while the big man listened to his boss. Even with all that I was seeing and experiencing, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of our situation.
“We got William Theodore Robinson,” the big guy read from the license he had taken from my wallet. Then switched to Susan’s. “And Susan Ann Solie… I don’t know. They were just driving it. Maybe she sold it or gave it away or somethin’? Beats me, Boss. I’m asking them where she is, they’re either acting dumb or they genuinely don’t know… Could be… Let me try.”
The big guy leaned out the open door of the car and looked at me.
“Where’s Marris?” he asked.
I looked at Susan. She was blank.
“Who?” I shrugged.
The man listened on the phone call for a few seconds, thenhung up. He jutted his chin at his partner, which seemed to mean something, and the two of them came toward us.
“Listen, folks,” the big guy said. “I’m real sorry. Seems like what we got here is a real bad case of mistaken identity.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Susan snapped. “Look, whoever this old lady named Marris is, we don’t know her, and we’ve never met her. You picked the wrong people, the wrong truck, and the wrong mode of approach. You idiots just nearly killed an ex-cop and an ex-FBI agent. A world of trouble is about to fall on you right now. So put the gun down and back away.”
The two construction workers looked at each other.
“Huh.” The little one made a surprised noise at his buddy. “They’re the law?”
“We better do this right, then,” the big one said. “No cutting corners. We bury them deep, dump the guns, and burn the truck.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
SUSAN’S LAUGH BROKE a long moment of hard silence. We all looked at her, the sound absurd in the icy tension in the quiet forest at the roadside. She covered her mouth, shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said and glanced at me, her eyes a little too wide, meaningful. “I just… Wouldn’t that be just perfect? If they burned the truck.”
I caught on quickly, gave a smirk I hoped was convincing. “Would serve them right.”
“Why?” the big guy said. “What’s… what’s in the truck?”
I eased breath through my bruised chest, clenched my fists, tried desperately not to give the game away. I could see Susan doing the same, trying to rein in that desperate urge to plea, to fight, to run.Stay cool. The big man lowered his gun, gave a quick glance back toward the upside-down truck. Fuel was dribbling into the soil, and the crushed engine was hissing,easing a thin line of smoke. The big guy’s boot crunched on a slab of safety glass as he took a curious step back.
“Looks like with all that fuel leaking, it’ll be gone in a minute, anyway,” I murmured to Susan. “By the time they’ve dealt with us, it’ll be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“What’s in the truck?” The smaller guy came over and pressed the barrel of his gun against my forehead. I fought the urge to knee him in the groin and slap the gun away. I knew I could disarm him before he could pull the trigger. But that would leave the big guy open to fire on us.
“What are these bags?” the big guy asked, nodding toward the suitcases. Two were still strapped into the truck bed. One had been flung into the forest, only feet away from him.
Susan and I remained quiet. Every muscle in my body was tensed, my thighs ticking, my knuckles cracking. I was waiting for that moment. That precious moment. When the big guy relented to his curiosity and went to the suitcase. The barrel of the gun against my forehead was warming with my body temperature. The little guy’s eyes bore into mine. I heard the whiz of the suitcase zipper and the sound of the hard shell flipping open.
“Oh myGod,” the big guy said.
His partner turned at the sound. I reached up and grabbed the gun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE LITTLE GUY pulled the trigger. I felt the gun buck in both our hands, the sound of the blast beside my eardrum like a punch to the side of the head. There was no time to react. In a world filled with a high-pitched ringing noise, I kicked out as hard as I could, landing my boot hard in the little guy’s hip, sending him sprawling. By now the big guy was up and firing at Susan. I saw the flash but heard nothing but the ringing. I fired back, splinters of tree flying as the two guys took off toward their truck.
My heart was in my throat when I got to Susan. The broken nose had covered her in blood. I just about fell on her, searching with my shaking hands, the gun dropped, forgotten.
“Are you hit?”
Her tone was muffled, my hearing slowly returning.
