It was 2:46 P.M., and they soon left the city, passing now along quiet residential streets, then stretches of forest, the houses more scattered, only a few per mile, then no homes or power lines and the road gone to gravel, narrowed into one lane, with tall spruce trees on either side. The Suburban was kicking up substantial clouds of dust, so she couldn’t see in the side mirrors if Will was following them.
Another five miles and the dirt road ended on the shore of a long, skinny lake.
The tall blond turned off the car. They waited, parked parallel to the lakeshore, affording Kalyn a view of the road as it disappeared into the trees. The dust of their passage had settled.
“Would you please tell me where I am?” Kalyn asked.
The man behind the wheel looked in the rearview mirror, said, “Shut up.”
“I have to pee.”
“Hold it.”
“Seriously, my bladder’s about to rupture. I don’t know if I can hold it much longer, and I don’t want to pee all over your seat.”
The blond said, “Take her, Marcus.” She hoped he meant the younger of the two, but the freckled man opened his door instead and helped her out of the car.
He walked her twenty feet from the Suburban to a cluster of saplings, and Kalyn pulled her panties down, lifted her skirt, and squatted.
As her piss hit the ground and steamed, Marcus did exactly what she’d hoped for—looked away.
Kalyn came quietly to her feet, stepped out of her panties, and slipped her hands over Marcus’s head, squeezing them back into his neck for all she was worth. He was a few inches taller, much stronger, but that didn’t matter, because Kalyn had the edge of the metal cuff digging into his carotid artery, the bone of her forearm crushing his windpipe, and it only took five seconds for his knees to go.
She dragged him behind the saplings, ripped open his vest, calculating that she had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the other men started to wonder where they were.
She found a .357, broke open the cylinder—six rounds—snapped it closed and started toward the Suburban, her bare feet freezing as she moved low and fast across the grass and rocks. She crouched behind the Suburban and peeked around the left rear taillight, spotted the side mirror on the driver’s side, the tall blond in the reflection, his head turned, talking.
She glanced back toward the cluster of saplings, Marcus already sitting up, trying to climb to his feet.
Kalyn crawled past the gas tank, the rear passenger door, stopping finally at the driver’s door.
She thumbed back the hammer, stood up, Marcus shouting in the distance, the whine of another car coming up the road.
Though the side window was deeply tinted, she could see the profile of the man’s head.
Glass shattered. Blood sprayed.
She jerked open the door behind the driver’s seat, the young man wide-eyed, shaking his head and mouthing “No” as he reached into his vest.
Two squeezes, center mass, gurgling, pieces of down floating between them.
The sound of the engine getting louder.
Marcus was coming toward the Suburban now, knife in hand, moving awkwardly, zombielike, his brain still reeling after the lapse in blood flow.
Kalyn ran toward him, ears ringing, stopped ten feet away, feeling comfortable enough with the .357 to draw a bead on the man’s face, yelled, “Drop the knife and stop right there!”
But he didn’t do either, just kept staggering toward her.
“I’ve shot your friends. I will shoot you. Do you want to die today, Marcus?”
He kept coming, Kalyn thinking,
The shot took the top of his head off and he collapsed to his knees, toppled over in the moist, spongy soil.
Kalyn ran back to the Suburban, opened the driver’s door. Sea Ice Eyes had slumped over into the passenger seat, and she hauled him out of the car, searched him, found the handcuff key and a handgun—.45 Smith.
The car engine had become deafening, and then she realized it couldn’t be a car, because the sound was coming from the lake.
A single-prop floatplane had just landed, its engine screaming as it sped shoreward.
Kalyn unlocked the handcuffs and crawled behind the Suburban, ducked down, watching through the rear tinted glass as the plane sidled up to the pier. The propeller had stopped. She heard the pontoons bump into the wooden posts. The plane’s door swung open, and a man climbed out. Impossible to see any detail in his face or even determine his height, since he was still thirty yards away and dimmed by the smoked glass.
As he walked down the pier, the Suburban’s rear passenger door opened.
Now the pilot had stopped. He stared at the injured man coming toward him, yelled something Kalyn couldn’t understand, then ran back toward the plane, scrambling up into the cockpit, the propeller sputtering to life.
She stepped out from behind the Suburban as the plane pulled away from the dock, saw the young man lying facedown in the grass. She sprinted the length of the pier as the engine roared, the plane gliding away from her, skimming the surface of the lake with increasing speed. It was already a hundred yards away. Two hundred.
The high-pitched whine sounded like a buzz saw as the plane lifted from the lake, climbing into the sky. It banked left and screamed west over the forest, disappearing after ten seconds, its engine no louder than the mosquito behind Kalyn’s ear.
She ran back to the young man and rolled him over. Lines of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth into the grass, his glassy eyes reduced to slits. She propped him up against a spruce tree, slapped his face.
“Where’s that plane going?”
He shook his head and ripped open his vest, looked down at the two dark stains on his shirt merging and spreading across his stomach. He began to cry.
“I can help you,” Kalyn told him, lying. “Get you to a hospital. You could survive this. But I need to know where that plane’s heading.”
His voice came ragged and wet: “I’m cold.”
“You wanna live?”
He nodded.
“Then tell me.”
He whispered something.
“What?”
“Hills.”
“What does that mean?”
“—ine Hills.”
“The ing hills?”
“Wolverine Hills.”
“Wolverine Hills?”
He nodded.
“Where’s that?”
The young man coughed up a mouthful of blood, moaned, “Please.”
“What’s his name? The guy who got out of the plane.”
His eyes grew more distant, like someone had pulled down the shades.
“Was this the last exchange, or was that man going to deliver me to someone else? I need to—”
He let out a long exhalation and the muscles in his neck and back relaxed. He drooped forward. Kalyn touched
