Payne decided to follow his gut. And it told him to attack.
With quiet confidence, Payne lowered his right hand to his hip and grabbed his Glock. As his finger curled around the trigger, Payne glanced under the motionless vehicle, looking for Holmes’s feet. If he had seen them, he would’ve blasted them immediately, but Payne’s search turned up empty.
That meant that Holmes was either inside the truck or on it.
Since the front windshield was missing, Payne knew he’d have an unobstructed shot if Holmes was in the front seat. He realized, though, that the windowless space would be far more beneficial to his opponent. The gap would give Holmes more room to maneuver inside the cab and an extra way to escape. But Payne wasn’t about to let
happen.
No, the only way that Holmes was going to get away was through Payne, not through a window. Unfortunately, that was what Holmes had in mind.
While recovering from the sneak attack, Holmes noticed Payne’s silhouette on the ground ahead, created by the headlights. The shadow gave Holmes all the information he was looking for: Payne was still alive and directly in front of the truck.
Without delay, Holmes slammed his foot on the gas, launching the truck forward at full speed. Payne, using his well-honed instincts, sensed what was about to happen before it actually did. With mongooselike quickness, Payne fell backward onto the hard ground. A split second later, the truck roared above him, its high undercarriage protecting Payne from injury.
The instant the truck had passed, Payne flipped onto his belly and burst forward like a sprinter at the start of a race, but he quickly realized that the vehicle was too far ahead for him to catch it. Stopping immediately, he aimed his Glock at the truck’s back tire and discharged three quick rounds in succession. The second and third bullets hit their mark, piercing the right wheel and causing Holmes to temporarily lose control of the truck. The vehicle fishtailed, skidding sideways on the dew-filled grass, but Holmes didn’t panic. He coolly compensated for the loss of air pressure, allowing the back end to straighten itself out, then continued forward as fast as the vehicle could carry him.
“WHERE the hell have you been?” Levon Greene growled. He had been standing by the boat for several minutes, impatiently waiting for Holmes’s return. “I was getting ready to leave you.”
With a look of annoyance on his face, Holmes stepped from the heavily damaged truck. “Where the hell have I been? I’ve been doing your dirty work, that’s where I’ve been!” He opened the back of the truck with a slam, then climbed onto the tailgate. “If it wasn’t for your selfishness, we’d already be far from this place, somewhere in the gulf by now. But no! You just had to have your pet slave, didn’t you?”
Greene moved forward, glancing into the back of the truck. He wanted to make sure that Holmes had returned with Nathan. “He’s gonna fetch you a lot of money, so I don’t know what you’re so pissed about.”
Holmes glanced down at the slave and gave him a swift kick in the midsection. He was completely fed up with Greene’s shit, and he needed to take it out on somebody.
“You don’t know what I’m pissed about? Well, let me tell you! You brought two MANIACs to my island, then when they got loose, you ran and hid while I was forced to deal with them!” Holmes pulled the slave toward the back of the truck and waited for Greene to take him. “I mean, this is
guest, not mine. So why did I have to risk my life to get him?”
Greene shook his head at Holmes’s ignorance. “Because I’m the one with money. If your name was on the bank account, then I’d be doing stuff for you. But I’m the one with the cash, so you’re the one with the job.”
PAYNE knew he had a lot of ground to make up-probably too much to do on foot-so he decided to take a chance. He wasn’t sure if his four-wheeler had survived the vicious jolt from Holmes’ truck, but he decided to run back to the crash site and find out. Thankfully, the gamble paid off. The Grizzly had overturned, but it worked just fine.
After putting it on its wheels, Payne jumped on the ATV and rocketed ahead with a touch of the accelerator. The green and black vehicle reached top speed as Payne urged the machine to catch Holmes. If Ariane was taken from the island, he knew the odds of finding her would go down significantly. It wouldn’t be an impossible task-hell, Payne would devote his entire life and all of his resources to finding her-but he knew it would be quite difficult.
“Come on!” he implored, digging his heels into the ATV. “Go faster!”
But the vehicle was going as fast as it could, vibrating rapidly from the strain. The darkened scenery of the Plantation whipped by in a blur. The trees, rocks, and animals were all a part of the landscape that Payne ignored. His full concentration, every thought in his throbbing head, was focused on the love of his life and the bastards that had taken her away.
Oh, they would pay. They would fucking pay!
But he had to catch them first.
IT wasn’t until the hydroplane eased into the warm water of the inlet that Holmes was finally able to relax. Until that moment, he was certain that Payne or Jones would appear at the last possible moment to foil his escape. But as he glided from the marsh’s rugged shoreline, his anxiety started to fade.
He had faced two MANIACs in battle and lived to brag about it.
As the boat moved farther into the swamp, passing groves of cypress trees and several curious alligators, Greene noticed the difference in Holmes’s appearance. His partner’s face no longer looked haggard, and his body no longer looked beaten. In fact, he actually seemed to lose years as the boat continued forward.
“What’s your deal?” he wondered. “You look like a new man.”
“Feel like one, too.” A full smile crossed his lips for the first time in hours. “My gut told me we weren’t gonna make it. I don’t know why, but something warned me about Payne and Jones.”
“What did it say?”
“It told me that they were gonna be our downfall.” Holmes took his eyes off the water and cast a paranoid glance back at the shore. “But I guess I was wrong, huh? We beat Mr. Payne-in-the-Ass once and for all.”
Greene stood from his seat and looked back as well, but the hydroplane had traveled so far he could barely see the shoreline through the trees. “What does your gut tell you now?”
Holmes pondered the question as he increased the boat’s speed. There was a faint glow in the water up ahead that he had a theory about. “Actually, it tells me that we’re gonna make it to Africa, and something good is going to happen along the way.”
“Along the way?” Greene questioned. “Why do you say that?”
Holmes extended his finger forward, causing Greene to glance in front of the hydroplane. When his eyes focused on the scene, he couldn’t believe their good fortune.
Paul and Donny Metz were standing on a fallen cypress tree, trying to push the boat into the center of the channel, but their effort was completely useless. The duo, weakened from days of labor in the field, didn’t have the strength to disengage the boat by themselves, and Robert Edwards didn’t have enough experience with the craft to assist them.
No, the slaves weren’t about to free themselves from the tree, and now that Holmes and Greene had stumbled upon them, they wouldn’t be getting free at all.
PAYNE
tried to follow the truck’s tire marks in the grass, but the rocky terrain near the eastern shore of the island limited his tracking ability.
Once he was on his own, forced to locate Holmes with nothing to guide him, he decided to scan the swamps in both directions, hoping to stumble upon a clue. With each passing minute, he knew the chances of finding Ariane on the island were getting smaller and smaller, but he refused to give up hope while there was still fuel in his gas tank and ground to cover.
It wasn’t until he saw Holmes’s truck, slowly sinking into the soft mud of the marsh, that he knew he was too late to make a difference.
The Posse had escaped from the Plantation.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed while punching the leather seat in frustration. “I can’t believe I let them escape!” He took a deep breath, trying to calm down, but it didn’t work. The extra oxygen simply made him more agitated than before. “Fuck! Fuck!
