“One moment please.”
Catriona heard him talking to someone.
Volkov’s face appeared once more. “I guess today is your lucky day.”
Catriona nodded. “I was just thinking I should buy a lottery ticket.”
He flashed her a toothy grin. “I like you. You have fire. We are going now. Do not follow us.”
With that, the man disappeared behind the curtain.
Catriona remained still until she heard the bell on the restaurant’s front door jingle.
She looked at Broch. “That was it? Just like that?”
Broch frowned. “How come did he leave?”
“I don’t know. Everyone keeps letting us off the hook today and I don’t like it. Things aren’t supposed to be this easy.”
“It means it’s going tae get worse.”
“Exactly.”
Brock kept his knife and the two of them crept to the doorway. Broch held up a finger, asking her to wait, and dropped to his hands and knees. Dipping low, as if doing a pushup, he stuck his head through the beads and into the hallway before retracting it to stand.
“It’s clear.”
Catriona stared at him. “What the hell was that? An impromptu push up?”
“Ah lik’ tae keek aroond corners that wey. Na yin ever haes thair gun trained tae shoot someone’s foot. By the time thay keek me and adjust, ah’m gaen.”
Catriona squinted at him. “And if they run after you, you’re on your hands and knees scrambling away like a raccoon?”
“Ah’m a very fast crawler.”
Catriona rolled her eyes.
“Okay, forest critter, let’s get out of here and get to the warehouse. I’m suddenly very inspired to find out what Alain is up to.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sean opened his eyes to find himself staring at a gray-blue sky. Something felt very wrong. He couldn’t discern what until a nippy breeze ruffled his hair. Goose pimples arched their heads and waddled down his arms. They’d been desert geese for decades and the chill had sent them scurrying.
Sean spotted a dull glow behind the thick clouds above him.
Definitely daytime.
Southern California never felt chilly in the daytime.
Cold damp spread across his back, tickling his neck and making him shiver. He rolled a little to his left and heard the ground squish beneath him.
Cold and wet. Very unlike Southern California.
He heard the sound of people talking not far from where he lay. Something about their language didn’t seem right, but he attributed it to the voices being too faint for him to make out the actual words.
Okay. One thing at a time.
He strained to sit up and then stopped, out of breath.
Och. My chest hurts.
He chuckled that he’d said och. Broch was rubbing off on him, bringing back the Scottish accent he’d spent so long correcting.
Sean lifted his right hand. It felt as if he were underwater, or as if Lilliputians had tied him to the ground, and every movement he made dragged the little people with him, clinging to the ropes.
I am not firing on all cylinders here.
Crawling his fingers across his ribcage like a spider, he felt for the spot that pained him the most. His fingertips located something hard just below his left pec. He traced its edges with his finger.
What could be so hard in the center of my chest?
A little voice in the back of his head answered him.
A bullet.
No. That’s crazy.
Why would I think there’s a bullet in my chest?
And yet... There was a bullet in his chest. He couldn’t see it, but he felt certain.
That bastard shot me.
Even as he said the words, he wasn’t sure whom he meant.
Who shot me?
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the last thing he could. He’d been driving. In the road, a tall, thin man stood, his arm raised.
He had a gun.
Rune.
The image of Rune grew larger and clearer by the second.
I’m going to run him down.
The gun fired. Sean saw the hole appear in his window, closer to the passenger side than his side.
Not the Jag. First the back window, now the front—
He could hear the air whistling through it.
The gun fired a second time. Another hole. His first thought had been thank god he’s destroying the window over and over and hasn’t hit the engine block or the body.
But then...he did hit a body, didn’t he?
It felt as though someone had pointed a blowtorch against his breastbone and flicked on the searing flame.
He remembered now. Rune shot him.
I must have hit him with my car?
Groaning, Sean pushed himself into a sitting position. The wind iced him as it molested more of his body. He wanted to lie back down and hide from it, but he needed to move before he froze in place.
He curled his left fingers and felt the dirt give beneath them. Wet. Thick. Spongy.
I must have been thrown from the car. Maybe in a soggy ravine?
Fifty yards ahead of him people milled around low stone buildings with thatched roofs and a cluster of ramshackle booths. The scene reminded him of a California farmers’ market, but no one wore yoga pants. The colors were all wrong. Everything was some variation of black, brown and green. Muted earth tones. Much like the land around him...green and black, wet and clumpy. The air smelled fresh, though he wished it would stop assaulting his flesh with its frigid claws.
He took a deep breath.
I know that smell.
The smell told him one thing for sure.
This isn’t California.
Sean heard a whistling noise.
What is that?
The noise stopped and he resumed sniffing the wind.
There it is again.
He cocked his head.
A wheezy, bubbly—
Oh.
He tucked his chin and peered down. The hard object he’d felt earlier sat there, like a tiny sheriff’s badge
