find out if he was right or just having a trick of the night. He was right. The presence was January, sleeping peacefully next to him, naked, on her stomach with her arms up and her hands tucked under the pillow. The sheet draped over the lower half of her body. Her back and ribs and the sides of her stomach and the cusps of her breasts were exposed.
River studied her tattoos and the wonderful curvature of her body for a heartbeat, then rolled onto his back and closed his eyes.
Last night was still in his brain.
Finding January out there in the night still alive was by far, without a doubt, the best moment of River’s life so far. With the first wiggle of her body that showed she was alive, a terrible weight lifted off River’s shoulders. Everything in the world was suddenly right again, just like that.
He didn’t want to bring her back home.
He wanted to get her a thousand miles away.
“Forget it,” she said. “I hope he does come for me, or you, or us, or whatever sick plan is in his sick little brain. I really hope he does. In fact, I hope he does it tonight while I’m still mad enough to do what I’m going to do to him.”
“Which is what?”
“Which is what he did to me.”
River cocked his head.
The tone in her voice was absolute.
He could try to talk her out of it, but that’s all it would be-a try.
“Fine, we’ll go home,” he said.
She looked into his eyes.
“You said
“Right. So?”
“You didn’t say
“No, I said home.”
Coyotes barked and howled under the stars. The eerie sounds came from three or four different packs, all suddenly on the hunt at the same time.
January’s bare feet were no match for the Colorado prairie.
River carried her all the way to the road without rest.
She was naked and even though River cured that by giving her his shirt, she was still naked underneath, not to mention imbedded with dirt. Her wrists and ankles were raw and chaffed, almost to the point of bleeding. River, now shirtless, was half naked.
They walked for an hour before the first car appeared.
It was a woman, fifty something, a veterinarian, driving home to a nice warm bed after a night call. She took them all the way to River’s place and wouldn’t take a dime in return. Apparently there were still a few people like that left in the world.
They showered.
They melted their bodies together.
Then they passed out.
That was last night.
Now it was morning.
River slipped out of bed without waking January and headed for the shower.
The water was hot.
The sound of the spray was heaven.
The fact that Spencer hadn’t stopped to kill January didn’t mean he wasn’t going to. It only meant that he’d been too occupied with his new captive-Alexa Blank-to get distracted at that particular time and place in the universe. Spencer would get around to them first chance he had.
River knew that.
He also knew that might be as early as today.
It might even be in the next sixty seconds.
He got the soap off and turned the valves to the right until the spray stopped.
He listened for sounds.
There were none.
He heard no intruders.
January wasn’t calling out for help.
Everything was normal.
River’s blood suddenly raced.
Everything was too normal.
He stepped out of the shower.
Two towels hung next to him on a rack.
He didn’t reach for them.
Instead he stood there, dripping onto the floor, listening for a stray sound with every ounce of energy he had.
112
Wilde woke up, not in a bed. He was behind the steering wheel of Blondie, parked on the side of a street. The sky was lighter than midnight but not by much. A bona-fide dawn was still an hour away. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. The street was quiet, eerily so.
He stepped out.
His legs were heavy.
The thin Denver air was cool.
No one was around.
He walked over to the bushes, unzipped and took a long, heaven-sent piss. The bullet missed him last night. It also forced him into a panic dive. By the time he got to his feet, the sprint was on. The other man was faster and that was that.
Wilde was stupid.
He was stupid beyond belief.
He should have made the cab driver tell him where he was going to drop London off. Was Wilde smart enough to ask that simple little question? No, he wasn’t, because he was the stupidest man on the planet. So now there he was, having no idea where London was.
The other man knew, though.
He knew only too well.
Wilde hadn’t planned for that contingency. He had planned to the point of capturing the guy, but not for failure.
That was stupid.
He had run over to Colfax then east towards town until he was able to flag down a taxi. He took it to his house, got Blondie, dropped Alabama off at a hotel just in case the guy had been following London earlier in the day and had figured out who Wilde was, then started crisscrossing the city, hoping by blind luck to stumble across London.
