Beyond the Rules (21 page)

Her arm burned as she tightened the second tie.
Whatever
, she told it. Just stop bleeding. There’d been no spurting, but there’d been enough of a flow to let her know something important had been nicked. She flexed her hand, testing—nerves intact.

By then her heart had slowed from an explosive rate to something merely frantic, and her vision only grayed around the edges. She stuffed the remaining garbage bag and remnants in her back pocket and prepared to move on, this time with as much stealth as possible.

At some point in the last few moments she’d gone down on her knees. Now she used her good hand to haul herself up the nearest stout sapling. She altered direction and pushed herself into a forced pace—four steps jogging, four steps walking. Her world became all about moving forward and listening backward, and her vision was just some vaguely useful tool that let her avoid the biggest trees. The sweat she’d worked up grew clammy as the afternoon cooled, and she hesitated long enough to slice head and armholes in the remaining garbage bag, cutting an extra hole through which to tuck her wrist and rest her injured arm. The all-purpose garbage bag. She giggled and clapped a hand over her mouth.

That couldn’t be good.

Suck it up, Kimmer
. She’d find the Miata and use it to orient on the dairy farm to which the pasture belonged. All she needed was a barn with a loft—no one would know she was
there, nor even think to look. She’d get warm, she’d see about stealing an egg or two to supplement the snacks she’d left in the Miata. And then she’d arm herself to the teeth and go back to where two little girls waited.

If they’re even still there.

The thought snatched away her energy; a stumble turned into a fall, and she had just enough wherewithal to turn her good shoulder into it and roll away the impact. From there she blinked up into the spring canopy of the woods, unaffected by the disgusted voice in her head that urged,
Get up, you fool!

Instead what started out as a small conflicting voice quickly grew loud.
I can’t do this alone.

Which was absurd, because she always did it alone. She might be part of a team, she might have Hunter at her back, but she never counted on them, not deep down. Deep down, she was always going it alone because she never gave anyone else the opportunity to be in it along with her. Not Hunter…not Rio.

Did I drive him away?

Foolish, foolish, to lie here on the cool ground and ponder such things.

But I hurt. And I’ve lost blood. Determination can’t always be enough
. Sometimes the world was just bigger and harder than any one person could overcome.

Wasn’t it?

Kimmer didn’t know. For the first time in her life, she honestly didn’t know. She gave up and wallowed in it all—the pain of her arm, the shakiness of a body fighting off shock and the big gaping spot in her chest that had been there since childhood, waxing and waning with the events of her life and now torn wide open by fresh betrayals and losses. Quite ab
ruptly she thought
that poor old cat
and found a few big fat tears leaking out the corners of her eyes to roll down toward her ears.

Just as abruptly, anger blossomed. Yeah, she was alone in this. Yeah, she was fighting betrayals on all sides—the police were compromised, Hank had set her up and somehow Susan had given the goonboys a heads-up about Kimmer’s presence when the goonboys had arrived hours earlier than planned. How fair was that?

It wasn’t. So what else was new? Besides, the odds were so stacked against her that it didn’t much matter what she did now, so she might as well do what she could live with on the offhand chance that she would have a life to get on with after this.

It was, she realized, the same thing Rio had said to her. About not making her choices based on who Hank was to her, but making decisions that spoke about Kimmer herself. “Are you listening?” she asked the BGs out loud, still squinting up at the trees. “Because here’s the truth about me…I’m
That Bitch Kimmer
.”

Kimmer rolled slowly up to sit on one hip, waited for the whirlies to clear, and then carefully climbed to her feet. She headed for the Miata, where she ruined the resale value of the car by slumping into the driver’s seat to bleed all over the interior—and was grateful to see it was more a blood transfer from the existing collection within her clothing than fresh bleeding. She started the car, fumbling through the grocery bags in the footwell of the passenger side for a handful of protein bars and pop-top containers filled with thick, barely tolerable nourishment intended for invalids and the elderly. Her stomach nearly rebelled several times, but she deep-breathed her way through it.

After a few luxurious moments of warmth from the heater, she fumbled her way around to the trunk and pulled out the first aid kit and the blanket from the emergency winter road kit she hadn’t bothered to remove from the car. She left the car running so she could return to its blast of warmth, and knelt by the side of the car in the sharp late-afternoon light. As much as she’d prefer not to disturb her arm until she was sure it had stopped significant bleeding, her hand had gotten clumsy and tingly. No choice.

With care, she removed the garbage bag—she intended to make a sling of it when she was done, something she could use or shove aside as needed. Beneath it, the jacket was a mess. “Sorry, Hunter Agency budget people,” she muttered, easing the jacket off and then slipping it back over her back and good arm—she was all too vulnerable to chill even sitting here in the spring sunshine. The shirtsleeve had to go—soaked and cold and clammy, it wasn’t doing her any good, anyway.

And after that she just moved as quickly as she could, revealing the elongated oval of an entry wound from an angle, lifting her arm to find the messier exit. Not a large caliber from the looks of it. Could be worse. With plenty of hissing and cursing and a little kicking of the ground for emphasis when the antiseptic bit in, she tore freely into the first aid kit to swab and mop and firmly rebandage, using a whole pile of gauze pads at the still-dripping exit wound, glad for the sharpness of her knife and the additional tool of her teeth. One-handed, she shook the jacket out, snapping it into the afternoon’s light breeze and then sluicing off the sleeve with a carefully metered portion of her bottled water—although she had plenty to spare. She snapped the material free of extra liquid and spread the jacket on her trunk to dry while she
pulled the blanket over her shoulders and hopped into the driver’s seat again, her jaw aching from clenching she hadn’t realized she’d done and goose bumps of pain raising the hair on her arms.

And then she fell asleep.

Not for long. Long enough for the car to grow stifling and the warmth to reach her bones. Long enough so the jacket sleeve was merely damp. Long enough to fall into a weird haze of flashbacks,
running through the night, running through the woods, running to the barn—

And that’s exactly where she’d go. She opened her eyes to the incongruous daylight and blinked across the field. Not to the barn that went with this property, but back to Hank’s barn. If they were hunting her, they might well bring the hunt out this far. They weren’t likely to check Hank’s barn. They weren’t likely to believe she’d be back. They had no idea what drove her.

Life. My life. What it needs to be
.

Not to mention a damn good dollop of revenge. These goonboys were going down. If she had anything to say about it, they’d go down hard.

She put the jacket back on, made a poncho of the blanket and tied it in place with a garbage bag tie, making sure she had free access to her pockets. She reloaded her pockets so her favorite weapons were accessible from the right. Her stomach only quailed slightly at the thought of the electrolyte drink in the front seat, so she drank half the bottle in measured gulps and loaded the lefthand pockets of the jacket with trail mix bars and a package of Twinkies she’d gotten only because they made her think of Rio. She slung a couple water bottles over her shoulder on garbage bag belts—she thought she’d find water in the barn, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

Before, she’d been on a mission to infiltrate and extract the kids.

Now she was on a search and destroy and rescue. And she was well aware that Susan or Hank might get caught in the crossfire. Not her intent, but they had made the decisions that brought themselves to this place. Hell, they’d worked hard to get themselves here, manipulating and lying and finagling. But the girls…the girls didn’t deserve this. While the goonboys…

Deserved everything they got and more.

And she’d do it alone if she had to.

F
rom the barn loft, perched upon what was left of the previous season’s hay and peering out the loading doors, Kimmer could see most of the Quonset hut, the trees crowding the back of the building from which she’d so recently escaped, the vent pipe for the toilet in the girls’ prison. She could certainly hear the activity within it—torque wrenches and compressors and men shouting to each other above it all. More trees obscured most of the approaching drive and the front of the building—not the perfect observation perch after all—but she thought if she climbed the final ladder up to the tiny window at the peak of the barn, she’d be able to see nearly all of it. But the ladder, normally used to reach the top level of fully stacked hay, now loomed above mostly empty space. Kimmer had no particular issue with heights, but it’d be a damn shame if she got shaky up there and took a header onto the loft floorboards.

So she watched from where she was, knowing the light would fail her all too soon—or that Hank might return home, or that her own interference in the chop shop might change their plans entirely.

Those girls could already be dead.

Get real, Kimmer. The girls are fine until they’re of no further use. And right now the BGs still need this property. They still need Susan to keep up the front of family normalcy
.

As if this family had ever been normal.

Kimmer rifled through her weapons gymbag, coming up with a handful of clips for the SIG—fifteen 9 mm rounds each—and distributed them around her various pockets. Easy to reach. Once she started using the gun, she’d have no more need to be subtle. No need to keep the noise down. She made sure she knew where she’d stashed her knives, her brass knuckles and of course the war club, her hand going from one to the other until she no longer fumbled or guessed. She checked that the SIG was in single-action mode, cocked and locked. All the while she watched across the long shadows of the late afternoon, until she finally spotted what she’d been looking for.

The slanted roof of an outhouse, peeking out from beneath immature second-growth trees. Not far from the glorified chop shop at that. She could just make out the movement that had drawn her eye that way, a man on his way to the building. And there…the swing of the door.

That’s where she needed to be. She figured she could get a couple of them on the outhouse path before someone came looking, and probably at least one of the searchers before they got savvy and sent real firepower. Thanks to the unlimited hay twine down in the barn and the gags she could make with the rest of the garbage bag partials, she could avoid as much bloodshed as possible.

Though she’d do what she had to.

Great, kid. Don’t get cocky
. Good advice, once given to Luke Skywalker. She was hurt, for one thing. Under control so far, but definitely weakened. The numb tingling down her arm and the clumsiness of her hand hadn’t receded; it’d gotten worse. She closed her mind on the thought that there could be nerve damage. Internal swelling, maybe. That would go away. Meanwhile, these men knew she was here. She could only hope that they counted her out of the action, running as far and as fast as she could go before she collapsed from blood loss, the rate of which would have been obvious from those few moments she’d spent in the Quonset before escaping. But they’d be on guard. They’d be idiots if they weren’t, and while Kimmer had any number of opinions about these goonboys, they’d accomplished too much to be idiots. And their goonboss had accomplished too much—infiltrating the police, managing to maintain operations so slyly that even identifying three of the goonboys hadn’t flushed out a name—to have hired idiots.

Kimmer stiffened, her hand on the SIG in her jacket as the outhouse door opened—just a glimpse of straight-edge movement in the foliage—then the man’s head reappeared…and promptly disappeared again.

He’d stumbled. He’d decided to tie his shoe. He’d found a pretty bird egg.

But he didn’t come back up for air.

Kimmer scowled at the place where he’d been and considered the options. He’d either taken a different way back to the hut and disappeared into the foliage, or…
I’ve fallen and I can’t get up
.

How likely was that?

Time to go check it out up close and personal. She’d been about to head that way, anyway.

When she stood, she discovered that short of body fluids or not, some of the recently gulped liquid had gone right through her kidneys. No matter. Not in a barn with plenty of open feed areas for Hank’s few beef cattle, who certainly never bothered to go outside when the urge struck. She took care of business and resettled her gear around her, intending to cache the awkwardly swinging water bottles as soon as she closed in on the hut. A cautious glance at the house showed no sign of Susan. Kimmer squelched the urge to go slap the woman silly.
I don’t know how you betrayed me, but you did it
.

Later.

Kimmer headed for the goonboys, skirting the edge of the woods. Old survival skills had never seemed so close to the surface, here on a farm so much like the one on which she’d grown up, surrounded by family betrayals. At every step she expected the trees to morph into familiar territory; at every step she was slightly surprised when they didn’t.

I’ve definitely lost too much blood.

She stopped short at the sight that greeted her through the trees—the gravel driveway and its lineup of cars and several flatbed tow trucks, a semi parked off to the side. How they’d gotten a shipment this large out of the city without being spotted…

Maybe they had been.

Not that she’d seen any sign of it. She’d assume they hadn’t been spotted; she’d assume there was no backup coming. But what—? In the middle of the lineup, two sweet little Corvettes had tangled with one another. In fact, if she followed the disturbed gravel, it seemed very much like one of them had come from the back of the line, gathered speed and swooped in upon the other.

Nothing but parts, now.

She recalled the commotion that had led to her escape. Between this incident and Kimmer’s presence, the goonboys must be beside themselves. She doubted their goonboss would be understanding about the loss of the vehicle and the compromised situation. If she were the goonboys, she’d want to deal with this whole delivery as quickly as possible—and clean up after their mess as thoroughly as possible—before the goonboss ever heard about it.

She contemplated the difficulties the damaged Corvettes would cause for the goonboys and allowed herself a smile. And then she moved on, circling wide and around the Quonset, crossing over her own early brush-crashing trail and the significant disturbance added by those who had followed, and finally approached the outhouse from the back.

The little building was barely in sight—although evident to her nose—when she heard a rustling. She froze, pinpointing the sporadic noise down low. On the ground. Spooked by a chipmunk.

Or not. That had been a distinctly human grunt she’d just heard added to the latest rustle.

Kimmer found her war club, made sure the SIG was within easy access and eased up on the noise, keeping the stoutest of the available tree trunks as cover.

And found herself staring at a red-faced goonboy in mechanic’s coveralls, squirming on the cool ground with duct tape over his mouth, around his ankles, and his bound wrists taped to a sapling.

She leaned against her tree, crouching to take in the sight and ignoring the man’s alarmed reaction at her intrusion.
What in this picture doesn’t belong?

The carboy didn’t seem much reassured by the wave she
gave him, a casual dismissal meant to let him know she didn’t care about him, at least not personally. He finally quieted somewhat when she murmured, “Be still. You’re surrounded by poison ivy.” And then she simply stared at him a moment, and rubbed her forehead with the back of her wrist. Maybe that slight pounding in her head meant she was already feverish. Maybe it meant she was just plain losing it.

Make sense of this
. The timely collision in the driveway, allowing for her earlier escape. Somebody already going after the goonboys.

I’m not alone after all
.

The quiet knock of knuckles on wood behind her made her freeze up again. She dropped the war club to hang by its thong, her hand poised to dive for the SIG.

And then she remembered not so very long ago when she’d once introduced herself to someone with that very same sound, and she whirled around to find Rio leaning against a tree, that big grin slapped across his face and the sun shining through the trees to dapple his bright wheat-blond hair.

She stuttered over words and finally settled on “Sonuvabitch!” which more or less wrapped up her astonishment at the fact that he was somehow here, that he’d been here, that he’d been working with her even as she’d felt so terribly alone—a realization that left her at once completely baffled and somehow warmed to the core.

By then the grin had fallen away and she thought maybe he’d noticed that she’d taken advantage of her movement in facing him to dip her hand into her pocket, intuiting that the SIG’s grip filled her hand and she’d already thumbed off the safety.

She quietly thumbed it back on, even as he said, “God, I had no idea you were hurt. I thought you made it away clean…I would have come after you. I thought—”

She gave a quick shake of her head. He’d thought she was lying low, letting things settle. Scoping things out. He’d had every expectation she’d be back…and he’d quietly started working the very plan she herself had formulated. “You saved my life. And you crashed their profit into little Corvette bits. Doesn’t get any better than that. What the hell are you doing here? How did you—”

“Ari,” Rio interrupted, doing a quick check of the area before pushing off from his tree and coming to kneel by her, taking her cold hand where it emerged from the makeshift sling and eyeing the blanket-poncho arrangement to plan the best approach to her arm. “He overheard us talking. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. I would have done it alone if I’d had to, but we both knew I’d be of more use to you if I hadn’t just done all that driving.”

“No,” she murmured, trying to comprehend that Rio’s brother had dropped his life to drive across several states and back again, no doubt in a rental. Trying to comprehend that he’d volunteered to do it, and persisted over objections.

Knowing she was glad of it.

Rio lifted the poncho, found the entrance and exit holes in the jacket, said something angry in Japanese that Kimmer hadn’t heard before.

“I like the sound of that,” she said, allowing him the examination. “I might have to learn it.”

“Chikushou.”
He gently nudged her shoulder to get a better look at the exit wound. “It means they’re beasts. It’s pretty stern stuff. Promise you’ll never say it in front of my parents. Or, heaven forbid, my grandmother. I’d really like a look at this.”

Kimmer shook her head. “It’s stopped bleeding. Best if we leave it alone. No broken bones, no spurting. I had a first aid
kit in my car and it’s as clean as it’s going to get out here. And did I mention it’s finally stopped bleeding?”

He only scowled at the evidence of how much it had bled in the first place. “Your hand is cold.”

“Probably the sling,” she told him, and then looked away with annoyance as he kept his gaze steadily on hers. “There might be some swelling getting in the way. It’s a little numb, too. Not really useful.”

He shook his head, sharply. “Then it’s time to go. Owen can clean up here.”

“No!” Kimmer said, and rubbed her forehead again at his surprised look. “There’s a lot you don’t know. Starting with the girls.”

Starting with the girls
. Rio sat back on his heels and listened—let Kimmer talk in spite of the oh-so-manly way he wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and take her away from here.

Because yeah, that would go over so well with Kimmer.

He heard her words—the girls held hostage, the role Hank and Susan had played to set Kimmer up from the start, Kimmer’s supposition that Susan had somehow betrayed her—a guess that fit with what he’d seen from his rearguard position shortly after arrival, when the bad guys had approached the Quonset chop shop with a prepared wariness, even sending one man around the back, chasing off the goat who’d been nibbling choice spring grass at the edges of the gravel.

He heard the words…he just couldn’t quite believe them. He thought back at his discomfort at how Kimmer had received Hank in her home, at his sneaking suspicion that she’d been overreacting, even when Hank proved himself to be a number one asshole.

Boy, had he been wrong. Could he have possibly been more wrong?

But he saw the hurt in Kimmer’s clear, deep blue eyes, as much as she tried to hide it with the hard edge of her voice. She hadn’t expected the betrayal to run this deeply, either.

And then there were the girls.

“No,” he said, thinking out loud when she finished. “We can’t leave them behind.”

“Besides, there’s no point in hitting a hospital anywhere within the good old
Pinsivania
line,” Kimmer reminded him.

God, she looked awful. Paler than he’d ever seen, revealing freckles on her face he hadn’t known about. Shakier than he’d ever seen. And there was enough blood left on the jacket to tell him she didn’t have far to go before she hit bottom.

“We’d have to go all the way to Hunter before we could be sure I’d get treatment before I got arrested.” She paused, grew more thoughtful. “I wonder what I’m supposed to have done? I should have asked that trooper.”

Owen
. Rio frowned, resting a hand on Kimmer’s knee to keep himself from fussing with her arm. “Why didn’t you call for help? Dave is in Pittsburgh trying to track down the Big Bad Guy. He could have been here in less than two hours. Owen himself would have come down here if he’d known the squeeze you ran into.”

And here was another new one. He’d never seen her look quite this sheepish before. She cleared her throat. “The goat ate my phone.” She looked up at him from a slightly down-tipped brow, a direct dare for him to say anything disparaging.