Meredith tried to peel herself off the door, but the Bronco seemed to be leaning sharply in her direction. Evidently, they’d come closer to going off the edge than she cared to consider.
Dead silence. Even Sammy and Goliath had fallen quiet. Heath sat there, gripping the wheel and staring, as if he couldn’t quite believe they were stopped. Then the faint sound of a voice drifted through the night to them. He swore, depressed the clutch, and turned the ignition keys.
“We have to get out of here!” he said, his speech clipped and agitated.
Meredith nearly wept with relief when the engine roared back to life. Heath was right; they could waste no time in getting away. At least one of those men had survived that wreck, and he could come running across the road at any moment with his gun blazing.
Heath shifted into first and tromped the gas. A shrill, whining sound filled the interior of the Bronco. “Goddammit!”
“What?”
“Mommy! Mommy!” Sammy wailed.
“It’s all right, sweetie!” Meredith cried, unable to tear her gaze from Heath.
“A back tire is off in the ditch,” he said. “We’re high centered.”
“You mean we can’t go?”
He leaned down to shove and jerk on the shorter of the two floor shifts. Meredith didn’t know what he was doing, and her heart was pounding too hard to ask. He tromped the gas again. This time, in addition to the squealing of the back tires, the front wheels grabbed at the gravel shoulder for traction. She realized then that he had put the vehicle into four-wheel drive. The Bronco heaved, then fell back, heaved, then fell back. Meredith rocked forward with it, hoping the transfer of weight might help. But despite all her efforts and Heath’s, they didn’t go anywhere.
“Christ!” He shut off the headlights and everything else on the dash, including his police radio, which had been emitting occasional bursts of sound and static. Then he pressed a lever to roll down the back window, jerked off his seat belt, and threw open his door to leap from the vehicle.
“Get down on the floor. Both of you!” he ordered in a hushed voice as he closed the door almost soundlessly.
Meredith twisted in her seat. Through the side windows, she glimpsed his silhouette against the moonlit sky as he ran to the back of the rig.
She leaned over the console, straining to see him in the darkness through the wire mesh. “Heath?” She heard the rasp of gunmetal, the unmistakable sound of a rifle action, and then the click of a bullet being jacked into the chamber.
“Oh, dear God,” she cried. “Don’t go out there after them! They’ll kill—”
“Meredith, shut up!”
His voice cut through her panic like a sharp knife. She jerked and gulped.
“Your voice will carry! You don’t want to draw their fire. Get Sammy down on the floor! And then get down there yourself! Now! Keep Goliath here with you.”
She saw the shadowy flash of his outline as he loped away into the blackness.
After that, there was only an awful quiet. Meredith felt her teeth chattering and bit down hard. She had to think. Through the side window, she could see the other car’s headlights, tipped at a crazy angle. It looked to her as if the sedan had slammed into a pine tree. She couldn’t tell how badly the car was damaged or if it was likely that more than one passenger had survived the collision. She only knew that if more than one of Glen’s men was out there, Heath was outnumbered and seriously outgunned.
She seriously considered opening her door and making a run for it with Sammy. If they went deeply enough into the woods, maybe those men wouldn’t find them. Only it was dark, so horribly dark. And the terrain around here was undoubtedly rugged. Wearing handcuffs, she wouldn’t be able to carry Sammy or even hold her hand to help her keep her footing.
“Sammy, get down on the floor, sweetie.”
“Mommy?” the child squeaked. “I’m scared!”
“Don’t be scared, sweetkins. Heath will take care of us,” Meredith assured her as she slid off her seat onto her knees. “See? I’m getting down on the floor. Be Mommy’s big girl, okay? Let’s show Heath how good we can follow directions.”
“I don’t want to.”
A burst of gunfire rent the silence, an awful rat-a-tat-tat, the sound so loud and explosive that Meredith nearly wet her pants. Sammy shrieked. Then another lethal burst of noise erupted through the night, followed by several pinging thuds that vibrated through the Bronco. An Uzi, Meredith thought nonsensically. That gun sounds just like Dan’s Uzi.
Goliath whipped toward the noise and leaped at the window, snarling and baring his fangs. Sammy was still huddled on the seat. If she didn’t get down, one of the bullets might hit her next.
“Sammy!” Meredith angled her body over the console to bring her face closer to her daughter’s. “You get your little fanny down on the floorboard. Now! Do you hear me?”
The child mewled and blubbered, but she unfastened her seat belt. As she slid off onto the floor, another shot exploded through the darkness, the ka-boom of a high-powered rifle.
Meredith leaned over to watch Sammy lie down. “All the way. Flat against the floor, Sammy. There, that’s good.”
Goliath followed the child down onto the floorboard, placing his paws on each side of her legs to stand over her. By the animal’s stance, Meredith knew he would die before he let anyone touch her. Meredith could only pray it didn’t come to that.
“Mommy?”
“What, sweetie?”
“Don’t go ’way.”
Meredith pressed herself as close to the console as she could. “I won’t, punkin. I’m right here. If you reach up, you can feel me.”
Sammy twisted an arm up behind her back and touched Meredith’s hair. “You stay, okay?”
“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”
Eternity. Meredith knew the meaning of that word now, and it wasn’t measured by mere units of time, with centuries passing into millenniums that stretched to infinity. Eternity was a state of mind in which every breath you drew took a thousand years to expel, the rasp of your lungs resounding against your eardrums, the loud thuds of your heart spaced a hundred years apart. It was living forever in a black time warp, with gunfire exploding all around you and not knowing, from one heartbeat to the next, if your heart would ever beat again. It was lying only inches away from your child, yet unable to see her clearly in the shadows, your terror mounting because she lay so still and didn’t seem to be breathing. It was staring at the faint glimmer of blond curls, searching for red-black splotches of blood, until your eyes burned in your skull like smoldering coals.
Eternity was knowing that your life, pathetic though it had become, rested entirely in the hands of one man who had loped off into the darkness to do battle against impossible odds. It was seeing him in your mind, memories flashing in a colorful blur like the rapidly turned pages of a picture book. Heath. Looming, bigger than life, his body strapped with muscle. His skin as coppery brown as old bronze. His sable hair, always in need of a trim, trailing in lazy, wind-tossed waves over his high forehead, the gleaming thickness of it furrowed from the habitual raking of his fingers. It was remembering his eyes and how they changed with his moods, gunmetal gray when intense, a twinkling slate-blue when he laughed, and as turbulent as a stormy sky when he grew angry or worried. It was recalling his hands, which could look as large as supper plates when his long, blunt fingers were splayed, the palms as thick and leathery as sun-dried slabs of meat. It was remembering the touch of those hands, how they radiated a comforting warmth, and how gentle they’d always been despite their bruising strength.
Eternity was remembering how he had cupped your shoulder with one of those hands, and how easily you’d let your faith in him be shaken. Eternity was the guilt you felt because you knew he was out there in the darkness somewhere, possibly dying for you, and that if he survived, as grateful as you might be, there would still be a part of you that feared him.
And, lastly, it was hating yourself be
cause you knew your feelings were wrong. Horribly wrong. It was knowing that you had become a sick, twisted person, trapped in the maze of your own emotions, some pure and good, others dark and evil. It was knowing that no matter how hard you tried, you would never claw your way free of the memories or overcome the unreasoning fear. Your rational thoughts and your twisted ones chased after each other inside your mind in endless circles—the hateful and fearful side of you always winning.
Eternity was lying across a console until your breasts felt flattened and your ribs crushed, with your eyes streaming tears and your lips whispering soundless prayers for your child, and for yourself, and for a man whose survival had become inseparably linked with your own. It was begging God to protect him, your heart breaking at the thought of his getting hurt or losing his life, and knowing on some level that you were hopelessly in love with him, whether you wanted to be or not.
Eternity was realizing with a start that you’d become so lost in your churning thoughts that you hadn’t noticed the sudden silence. No gunshots. Just an awful quiet that made the darkness close in around you, blacker than black.
Meredith lifted her head, holding her breath to listen. All she heard was the night wind whispering in the towering pine and fir trees, the mighty trunks occasionally creaking and groaning as they swayed in the gusts.
“Mommy?” Sammy whispered shakily. “Where’s Heef?”
Meredith straightened to peer out the window. The headlights across the road had gone out. Now there was only darkness for as far as she could see—a whispering, shifting darkness filled with black shadows that seemed to move toward her when she stared at them.
“Quiet, Sammy.”
She heard a footstep in the gravel and flattened herself against the console again, her limbs turning to water. Goliath whined and growled.
“Quiet!” she rasped.
Another footstep. Someone was coming. The question was, who? Craning her neck, Meredith stared, her eyes dry and bulging from their sockets. In her temples, she heard the rhythmic swish of her own blood.
In that moment, she wanted to scream at the injustice of it all. Heath had gone out there and died for them. Oh, God. And now those men were coming. She couldn’t run. Not without being able to carry Sammy. All she could do was lie there, waiting to die herself. And afterward, poor little Sammy would probably wish she were dead, too. Glen would get his hands on her. If Sammy survived the years of abuse with her little mind still intact, she would emerge into adulthood as crazy and spiritually decayed as her father had been.
The black, hulking outline of a man appeared at the opposite window. She heard the latch of the driver’s door click. Cool air rushed in as the door swung wide, the hinges giving a metallic clunk. Meredith tried to brace herself for a spray of lead, knowing that the man could cut loose with an Uzi at any moment. Only none of her muscles would tense. Terror had short-circuited the signals from her brain.
“Are you all right in here?” The deep, masculine voice was pitched to a panicky alto. The barrel of his rifle smacked against metal as he propped it in the crack of the door and came scrambling over the seat to grab her. “Son of a bitch! Meredith? Oh, Jesus, no!”
Big hands. They seemed to be everywhere on her body, patting, pressing, checking her clothes. Still numb from fear, the silent screams locked behind her larynx, Meredith couldn’t speak. She just lay there like a beached fish grabbing for air.
Heath. He wasn’t dead. He was here, running high on adrenaline and shaking like a leaf. But here. “H—heath,” she finally managed to gasp. “Oh, Heath!”
“Are you hurt? Did the bastards hit you?”
“N—no. Fine, I’m fine.”
He dropped her like a hot potato. Still unable to control her limbs, Meredith landed hard on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat, her rump smacking the rug between her spread feet. Pain lanced up her thighs from the twisted angle of her knees.
Heath dove his shoulders through the opening between the seats. “Sammy?” He shoved Goliath out of the way with such force that the dog thumped against the vinyl wall. Then he plucked Sammy up from the floorboard, handling her as if she were an oversize rag doll. “Sweetcakes?”
“Heef.”
Meredith could only sit and watch as Heath twisted down onto the driver’s seat and clamped Sammy to his chest in a fierce hug. He didn’t speak, just held onto the child as if determined to squeeze all the breath from her tiny body. Meredith heard his breath catch. When he inhaled again, the sound was jerky and ragged.
After a few moments, he gently deposited Sammy on the backseat again, then left the vehicle. Meredith could barely discern his outline in the darkness as he paced back and forth along the edge of the road. He didn’t want them to see him right now, she thought. He’d been frantic, thinking they were hurt, and now he was trying to walk off the panic.
When he finally came back to the Bronco, he seemed calm. Meredith wished she were. But she kept searching the darkness, expecting a man to emerge, his gun spitting orange flame. She assumed that Heath had eliminated the danger. But he hadn’t said as much. And in a situation like this, she found it difficult to relax on the strength of an assumption.
“Are you all right?” she managed to ask.
“I’m fine. Not a scratch.”
“Wh—what happened?”
Thrusting his arm through the opening between the driver’s seat and the door frame, he patted his dog and ruffled Sammy’s hair. “Hey, there, sweetcakes. How’s my best girl?”
“Fine,” Sammy said thinly. “I was real scared while you were gone, though.”
“Me, too.” He drew his arm free and propped it on the back of the driver’s seat, his head and shoulders delineated against the moonlit sky behind him. For a long moment, he just stood there, leaning as if he were exhausted. Then he said, “It’s all taken care of.”
Just that? It was all taken care of? “H—how many were there?”
“Three,” he replied softly. “Man, I want a cigarette.”
A cigarette? She hadn’t realized he smoked. “Three? Are they all—?”
“I took care of it,” he repeated, cutting her off and glancing toward Sammy as if to warn her to watch what she said.
The encroaching blackness seemed filled with menace to her. “Are you s—sure? That you took care of them all, I mean?”
“Positive.” He made an odd sound that resembled a laugh, but wasn’t quite. “I went over and checked.”
He sounded so confident that Meredith stopped searching the darkness for movement. They were safe. For now. Her heartbeat slowed, the limp heaviness of her body growing even more leaden.
He strode around the front of the Bronco to open the passenger door. She felt his hands at her wrists. A second later, the handcuffs fell away. Her arms were achy, yet numb, and hung from her shoulders like stiff stumps. She flexed her fingers, wincing at the needle pricks of sensation.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Yeah, well. Better late than never.” He opened the glove compartment and rummaged around. A moment later, a lighter flared, and she heard him drag in a raspy breath. The smell of tobacco smoke curled in tendrils through the darkness. “Sorry, but when shit like this comes down, I need a cigarette afterward.”
The smell of the smoke made her think of her father and his pipe. Oh, how she would love to be sitting by the stove with her dad right now, a world away from this, watching the pipe smoke wreathe around his gray head.
Using the heels of her hands on the seat, she pushed up to get her feet under her rump. The pain eased in her knees and thighs. She turned to gaze at Heath.
He took another drag from the cigarette, the tip glowing orange and casting a glow over his dark, sharply chiseled face. As he exhaled, he chuckled drily. “Keeps me from heading for the bushes. Not very macho, I guess, but there you have it.”
Meredith peered through the shadows at him, not entirely sure what he meant. Then she realized he must be feeling sq
ueamish. On the tail of that thought, she turned her gaze into the night beyond the Bronco windows, wondering what horrors the darkness concealed. Three men. All taken care of. And now he was smoking to keep from vomiting. As a girl, she’d once gone hunting with her dad, and she had seen the damage a high-powered rifle could do to a deer. The result was probably the same with a man.
Her stomach lurched, and the blood drained from her head. Three men, all taken care of. Oh, God. He had just shot three men. And then he’d gone over there to make certain they were dead. He’d had to look at them, touch them.
Not very macho? He’d gone to face them with only a rifle and a police-issue semiautomatic against at least one Uzi and God only knew what other weapons. Only a stupid man would have been unafraid, and Heath wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t one to strut, or flex his biceps, or wear his shirt unbuttoned to show off his chest. But when push had come to shove, he’d stood his ground, and he’d put his life on the line. In her book, that was about as macho as macho could get—the very best kind—understated until it counted.
He tossed down the cigarette and ground it out under his boot. “I need to call this in.” He shut her door, came back around the vehicle and swung up onto the driver’s seat. Leaning forward, he turned on the dash lights and then the radio. After adjusting the squelch, he brought the mike to his lips. “Masters, to unit three. Come back.”
Almost immediately, a man’s voice came over the air. “Boss? I been tryin’ to get you. Thank Christ you called. The shit’s rollin’ downhill, and we’re up to our eyebrows.”
Heath glanced over at Meredith. “What do you mean, Charlie? Over.”
“We got the Feds breathin’ down our necks, and three county commissioners are sittin’ in your office, pissed off royal. You gotta bring her back in. Over.”