Manhunt in the Wild West (17 page)

In the distance, he could hear sirens and emergency vehicles approaching, but it’d take too long for them to fight through the jammed roads. In the meantime, thousands of people would remain trapped in the bowl-shaped depression where the stadium had been built at the base of the mountain…right below the threatening shelf of a potential landslide.

Chelsea and the others were up there, Fax thought, his heart hammering painfully against his ribs. For all he knew, they were already dead, killed by al-Jihad and his ruthless terrorists as they cleared the way for the next stage of the plan.

It wasn’t a case of the landslide or the stadium: the bastard had targeted both.

“I should’ve seen it,” Fax said, cursing himself as he fought through the mob, headed for the road below, which was rapidly jamming with cars. “I should’ve known.”

But he didn’t, he hadn’t. And because he hadn’t been thinking clearly, innocent people that he cared about—yes,
cared,
damn it—might already be dead.

He hurled himself down the steep incline to the road, his feet barely moving fast enough to keep up with his momentum. He staggered when he reached the level strip of grass beside the road, but righted himself and kept running until he found what he was looking for.

The red SUV was empty, parked in the farthest lane with the driver’s-side door open and the motor running. No doubt the driver was one of the many people who’d gathered at the edge of the road, shading their eyes and staring up toward the smoking stadium, talking in high, excited voices.

Fax climbed in the driver’s seat and slammed the door, then hit the button to lock the vehicle tight. He was most of the way out of the nose-to-tail line of cars when a man ran at him, waving his hands and shouting.

Fax cracked the window and shouted, “Police business. You’ll get it back.”

Then he hit the gas and sent the SUV hurtling across a strip of grass and into the wide ditch separating the eastbound and westbound lanes of traffic. The SUV dug in and bounced hard and its tires spun. For a second, Fax was afraid the thing was going to dig itself into place and he’d be stuck. Then it tore free with a roar and a lurch, and started climbing up the other side.

He didn’t wait for a break in the rubbernecking traffic in the other lane. He just hit the gas and aimed for a gap that wasn’t quite big enough for the SUV. Paint scraped and the vehicle shuddered and bounced as he fought it into a straight line following the road.

Nearby drivers swerved, honked and swore at him, but he didn’t care. He leaned on the horn and flashed the high beams like a crazy man, and weaved in and out of the near-gridlocked traffic.

The other drivers must’ve thought he was with the emergency rescue personnel or something, because they started getting out of his way, just a few at first but then more and more of them, opening up a pathway until he was free, on the open road headed for the turnoff that would lead him up the mountain.

Once he was speeding along and not focused solely on the driving anymore, his brain kicked back online, and all he could picture was Chelsea’s face as she’d slept, all he could imagine was that same face, still and gray, with her stretched out on a table in her own morgue, dead because he hadn’t listened to her, hadn’t trusted her, or his own instincts.

“No,” he said aloud, denying the image, denying all of it. He would be in time to get to her, would be in time to save her.

Failure was
not
an option.

When Chelsea regained consciousness, it took a few moments for her eyes to clear and her brain to process what she was seeing. Memory returned with a brutal slap when she saw dirt, ledge stone and uprooted trees all piled in a disarray, tilted at a seemingly impossible angle.

She was still up on the mountain. But where was her attacker? Where were Seth, Cassie and the others? Moving her eyes first, then her head, she craned to see. When her neck twinged, suggesting that she’d pulled muscles in the struggle, she winced and moved her body instead.

Or rather, she tried to move her body. It didn’t budge, because she was tied fast.

Panic slapped through the mist of unreality, warning her that the situation was very, very real. Her heartbeat accelerated and her blood fired in her veins, telling her to run far and fast.

Or stand and fight.

Slow down,
she told herself when her mind started to race in terror.
Think it through.
For some reason, she heard the last three words in Fax’s voice. Instead of making her mad or sad, as it probably should have, the sound steadied her. It made her think of his warm, solid body and the mask he could drop over his eyes, making it seem like he was running cold when she knew from experience that the blood running in his veins was very, very hot.

She closed her eyes and pictured him, imagining the worry lines that cut beside his mouth from having taken on too much weight for far too long, and the unexpected dimple that winked on one cheek on the rare occasion when he smiled for real.

Holding that image in her mind, she consciously slowed her breathing and counted her heartbeats.

The panic receded somewhat. It was still there, no doubt about it. But it was manageable, more or less. She could think. She could plan.

Okay,
she thought, opening her eyes.
What’s the deal?

Unfortunately, calming down hadn’t improved her immediate situation much. She wasn’t in danger of hyperventilating anymore, but she was still bound to a big tree at the edge of the landslide.

Worse, she could see a heavy work boot sticking out from behind the precarious tilt of the earthen overhang.

She recognized it as one of Tucker’s boots. As she watched, it moved, swinging from side to side as though he was fighting the same sort of bonds she was.

Her heart seized on the sight and she gave a low cry of horror.

A masculine chuckle—low and nasty—greeted her response, and Muhammad stepped around in front of her, moving gingerly on the shifting soil at the edge of the slide.

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes blatantly lingering on her breasts then flashing back to her face as though daring her to say something, challenging her to a fight she couldn’t possibly win.

When she said nothing, merely glared at him with all the hatred that pounded in her veins, he sneered and turned his attention to the overhang. “You should’ve died that afternoon at your house, bitch. Then your friends wouldn’t have gotten dragged into this.” He fiddled with a small, flat handheld unit that might’ve been a PDA, might’ve been a phone, and said with a fake-sounding note of revelation, “Granted, then they probably would’ve been down at the stadium helping with crowd control and listening to that horrible excuse for a band. Which means they would’ve died anyway, once I did this.”

Without warning, he lifted the handheld and pressed a couple of touch-pad keys.

“No!” Chelsea cried, realizing the unit was a detonator of some sort. “Don’t!”

But it was already too late. There was a series of sharp explosions nearby, six of them, one after the other,
rat-tat-tat,
like machine-gun fire.

By themselves, they were little more than firecrackers. Combined with the instability of the ground, though, they were devastating.

A low rumble started, humming in her bones and rising up through the audible wavelengths, shaking the tree she was bound to, making it sway and dip.

Looking surprised that the earth shift was fanning that far out, Muhammad shoved the unit in his pocket and started backing up, moving quickly but carefully. When he reached stabler ground, he sketched a wave in Chelsea’s direction. “Bye, bitch. I hope it hurts.”

The hatred vibrated in the air between them, less because of what she’d done to complicate al-Jihad’s plans and more because of what she was—an American and a woman.

Her stomach twisted in knots at the thought that Muhammad, and men like him, were going to win this time.

The tree shuddered, dipping alarmingly, and she cried out. Her words were lost beneath the growing roar, and suddenly the world was moving around her, underneath her. The overhang gave way and crashed like a breaking wave, sending tons of earth and rock onto the place where she’d seen Tucker’s foot.

Chelsea screamed as her closest friends died. Tears blinded her and she choked on her sobs, on her terror. Then the earth was moving, faster and faster, gaining mass and momentum as it went, crashing its way toward the stadium. And Fax.

“Jonah!” she screamed, knowing there was nobody up on the mountain with her anymore who cared about her cries, except to feel pleasure in her pain.

Then the tree she was bound to pulled free of its root system, or the earth gave way beneath it, she wasn’t sure which, she only knew that she was moving, tilting, and starting to slide, then stopping again as the entire mountainside paused, teetering on a pinpoint of balance that she knew could give way at any second.

Tears poured down her face. “
Jonah!
” she screamed again, even though she knew there was no hope of an answer.

Yet incredibly, she got one.

“Chelsea!” He was suddenly there, appearing out of nowhere, his face streaked with mud and sweat and set with horrible tension as he skidded along beside the tree she was tied to, yanking at her bonds. “Hang on!”

“What—” she gasped. “How?”

“Long story.” He met her eyes briefly, and she saw a light in them that hadn’t been there before, a mix of anger and something else, something that was simultaneously softer and hotter than his usual expression. “Short version is that you were right and I was wrong, but I’m not apologizing. I’m telling you I love you instead.”

He gave a huge yank and the ropes came free.

Heart pounding from surprise and fear, and more adrenaline than she’d ever weathered in her life, she threw herself against him.
“Jonah!”

He grabbed on to her, held her hard and started dragging her up and across the mountain face, moving fast, not seeming to care that the earth sponged and fell free beneath them, that their mad dash for safety was triggering small landslides that merged into bigger ones.

“Hurry,” he urged, dragging her along. “We’ve got to get out of here before—”

A huge freight-train roar cut him off, and the side of the mountain collapsed onto itself, and hurtled down the slope toward Bear Claw.

“Up here!” Jonah dragged her up onto a huge rock ledge, one that shuddered but held as the earth and smaller rocks pounded past it. He pulled her up, wrapped his arms around her, and held on so tightly she couldn’t breathe.

She hugged him back just as tight, crying. “Jonah, the others…” she managed between sobs. “They were under the ledge when it gave.”

He said something that she didn’t catch, sure it was the roar of the avalanche. “What?”

Putting his lips close to her ear, he said, “They weren’t under the ledge. I got them free while you distracted Muhammad. I sent them down the hill and told them to—” He broke off as a new sound echoed above the freight-train rumble, a heavy thump of detonations, one after the other, not the
rat-tat-tat
that had started the landslide, but the deep throated
whump-whump-whump
of heavy-duty explosives.

A cloud of earth shot up into the sky at the leading edge of the slide, and the avalanche changed course, flattening and dropping off, fanning out and eventually stopping.

The terrible roar diminished to a hiss, then a scattering of pebbles.

Chelsea stared, mouth agape. Then she turned to Fax, hardly able to believe what had just happened.

“You sent them to blast a channel between the slide and the stadium,” she said in wonder.

He followed her gaze. “Looks like it worked.”

“You let them go,” she said and started to shake. “You took care of them first before you came for me.”

Fax stiffened against her. “That doesn’t mean—”

“No, no.” She shushed him with her lips on his, letting him feel the smile in her kiss. “You trusted them to get the job done, and you trusted me to stay alive long enough for you to come for me. You did it right, Jonah. You saved us all.”

A shudder went through his big body. “I almost didn’t.”

She heard him clearly, heard the pain and fear in his voice, because the landslide had trailed all the way to silence, piling into the trench her friends had blasted using explosives from the lower Quonset hut.

“But you did. Thank you.” She pressed her lips to his, and he hesitated only a moment before he leaned into the kiss, opening to her and—

The click of a semiautomatic weapon being racked for firing echoed on the suddenly still air, freezing them both. Only for a second though, because before Chelsea could react, before she could even process the fact that they were in danger, Fax had twisted, bearing her to the ground and covering her as a bullet whistled over them both.

Then Fax lunged up with a roar, and charged Muhammad, who must’ve come back to make certain she was dead. As Fax came, he scooped up a handful of clay. Chelsea saw him grab Muhammad’s gun with the hand that held the soil. Then Fax let go and danced away.

Al-Jihad’s second in command roared something in a language Chelsea didn’t know, spun toward Fax and fired point-blank.

The bullet impacted the pebbles and clay Fax had jammed down the barrel, and the weapon roared and jammed, blowing back in the terrorist’s hands. He screamed and grabbed for his wrist as it spurted blood, and Fax took him down with a roundhouse to the jaw.

Muhammad went sprawling, bleeding and howling and clutching at his injured hand.

Fax kicked the gun away and then stood, breathing hard, staring down at his fallen enemy.

Chelsea gave the deep lacerations a quick look, and glanced at Fax. “He won’t bleed out as long as he keeps pressure on.”

“Then we’ll tie him so he can.” With more expediency than gentleness, Fax bound the sobbing man hand and foot, and searched him, dumping the contents of Muhammad’s pockets into his own.

Seeing the transfer, Chelsea arched an eyebrow. “You planning on sharing that with the cops?”

Fax stilled, then turned slowly, that cool blankness dropping down to shield his expression, although she sensed that his blood was running hot and hard beneath. “Jane betrayed me—she was working for al-Jihad all along. Which means there may not be any way for me to prove my story, and even if I can, the authorities could still decide I’m a liability and a criminal.” He drew a deep breath. “What if I said my next stop was Mexico?”

If it was a test, it was the easiest one Chelsea had ever taken. “Then I’d ask if I could swing by my place for a bathing suit.”

He straightened, crossing to her and taking her hands in his, fitting their fingers together. “And if I said I wanted to turn myself in and offer up evidence against Jane in exchange for WitSec protection?”

She swallowed, knowing this was it, this was the rest of her life, staring at her with cool blue eyes that hid nothing of his feelings, once she knew where to look. “Then I’d ask if I could say goodbye to my friends before we left.” Her voice shook a little on the words as she continued, “How about you? What’s your opinion of taking on a most likely unemployed, blackballed medical examiner who’s wishing she’d gone on that FBI interview way back when? For that matter, given that WitSec would make me change jobs anyway, what’s your opinion of being with someone who suddenly doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up?”

He inhaled a long, shuddering breath, then blew it out slowly so that he was almost whispering when he said, “I can’t think of anything I’d like more. Employed, unemployed, spy, doctor, pathologist…I don’t care what you wind up doing next, as long as I’m part of it.” He dropped his forehead to hers. “I love you, Chelsea. We’ll figure out the rest of it together, okay?”

Hope bloomed inside her, hard and hot, expanding to fill every inch of her body as she nodded, feeling her smile stretch so wide it pulled at the skin of her face as she rubbed her cheek against his, against the place where that elusive dimple flickered to life. “I love you back, Jonah. And, yeah, the rest will wait. This won’t.” She turned her lips to his, inviting a kiss, demanding it.

He’d just groaned and opened to her when a Bear Claw PD chopper buzzed up from below and hovered right above them, tilting to give its occupants a clear view.

Hoots and hollers filtered down, and Chelsea felt a laugh bubble up as she raised her hand and waved at her friends. “Guess they made it okay,” she said, counting five heads pressed together in the windows. “And I’m guessing at least someone in the PD is grateful for our help. They sent the chopper after all.”