Scorched (19 page)

“Do it fast,” he said, digging into his pocket for his E & E kit. He took out a sterile bandage and ripped open the package. “Here.”

“Is that your only one?”

“Yep.”

She tore it in half and began shining the flashlight around, collecting specimens of some sort. Clearly, she was on a mission. Having seen her at work before, he knew better than to get in her way. He stepped to
the side door to make sure Weber wasn’t coming out again.

Unless this
was
Weber.

Gage looked at Kelsey kneeling beside the mangled body. For the first time he noticed how shriveled the skin was. It looked like beef jerky, and he could see yellow bones protruding around what was left of the neck.

“I wish I could take a tissue sample,” she muttered.

“He won’t mind.”

She darted a glare at him. “This is a crime scene. I can’t touch him. I shouldn’t even be taking this sample.”

“Whatever you’re taking, do it quick. It’s time to get out of Dodge.”

She tucked the evidence into the pocket of her Windbreaker as the sound of another car neared the house.

“Shit, more company.” Gage pulled her to her feet. He hustled her to the side door and peeked out to see where the headlights were moving. The driver pulled up to the front of the house and cut the engine.

“Now.” Gage tugged Kelsey through the door and positioned her ahead of him, keeping his body between her and the house. “Get low. We’re going due north until we put some distance between us.”

They moved swiftly through the darkness, with Gage checking over his shoulder every few seconds. The back door opened again. Two men stepped out this time—the dark-haired guy they’d seen earlier, plus someone taller with light brown hair. Gage immediately zeroed in on the weapons—a couple of M-16s with custom sights. The tall guy held his awkwardly at his side, but the dark one had his gun slung casually across his body in a posture Gage had seen many times before.

Gage pushed her faster. They were almost running now and he hoped to hell they didn’t step in a hole or turn an ankle.

She glanced over her shoulder and stopped dead. “Oh my God,
look,
” she said breathlessly.

He turned around. The taller guy was pouring something from a metal can around the door of the barn.

“Bet that’s gasoline,” he said.

“Gage, that’s
Trent.
What’s he doing here?”

“Looks to me like he’s torching your crime scene. Come on.” Gage grabbed her hand and towed her behind him. He picked up their pace. Trent looked distracted, but Gage wouldn’t be comfortable until they were well out of bullet range. Those rifles had a much farther reach than Gage’s pistol. He and Kelsey had darkness in their favor, but a simple nightscope or a pair of NVGs would make them easy targets in this wide-open field.

Gage spotted a familiar boulder in the distance and shifted direction. In a few more minutes, they’d reach the sign where they’d left the SUV. Another glance over his shoulder. The barn was on fire now, orange flames licking up around the door. Trent and his buddy were nowhere in sight.

“Look.” Kelsey stopped and pointed at a car racing across the field, no headlights, straight for the highway. Gage scanned the area and spotted the other sedan—a dark shadow bumping over the terrain. If either one of them swung north, he and Kelsey would be roadkill.

A deafening
boom
as the house fireballed. Kelsey pitched forward into the dirt. Gage leaped on top of her,
trying to shield her with his body as debris shot into the air and then rained down. Dust billowed around them. Gage lifted his head to see flames curling up into the night sky. Beneath him, Kelsey wheezed and coughed.

He rolled off of her. “You okay?”

“Holy
shit,
” she croaked.

He’d never heard her use that particular phrase, and he took it to mean she wasn’t injured as she stared with astonishment at the house. Twin flames were reflected in her shocked brown eyes.

“Was that a
bomb
?” she asked.

“Gas explosion, more likely. Maybe they turned on the stove. Come on.”

He hauled her to her feet and pulled her toward their vehicle. She stumbled along behind him, gasping for breath. She seemed dazed and confused as they finally reached the barbed-wire fence.

“Careful.” He held the wire for her as she ducked through. He followed. The black Explorer was a welcome sight, and Gage wanted nothing more than to get down the road, well away from the emergency vehicles that would no doubt be racing to the scene soon.

He climbed behind the wheel and looked at Kelsey. “You all right?”

She stared at him blankly. She had a red scrape on her chin and debris in her hair. The front of her T-shirt was coated with dust.

“Nod if you understood the question, Kels.”

She gave a slight head bob. Okay, maybe she was in shock. She wasn’t used to seeing things go boom like he was. She needed a minute to recover.

Gage nestled his SIG in the cup holder between them, within easy reach in case an unfriendly car should pull up alongside them. He started the engine and turned west onto the road.

“Where are you going?” she asked in a wobbly voice.

“Right now anywhere besides Briggs is a good bet.”

Gage pressed the gas until they were going just under the speed limit. Kelsey started coughing. Gage reached into the back and grabbed a bottle of water for her, and she took a long swig.

“Better?”

“Yeah.”

He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he let it go. She put the water bottle away and took out her phone.

“Whoa there. What are you doing?”

“We’ve got to call this in.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Gage, that was a
homicide
scene they just tried to destroy.”

“They did destroy it. It’s blown to smithereens.”

“Not the barn,” she said. “The barn only burned. Arson investigators will find those bones and probably bring in a forensic anthropologist to identify them.”

Gage fixed his attention on the highway that stretched endlessly into the desert.

“You need to think about that, Kelsey. That’s the second homicide scene you’ve run away from in less than a week. How do you plan to explain that?”

She gazed down at the phone in her hand.

“You probably won’t even get a signal way out here, anyway.”

She bit her lip as she stared down at the phone, and
he could feel the tension created by her dilemma. She wasn’t used to being on the wrong side of the law. Her whole career, she’d considered herself on the side of justice.

She tucked the phone in her pocket and gazed out the window, probably contemplating this latest addition to their unbelievably crappy run of luck.

Gage drove through the darkness, on alert for any sign of the vehicles they’d just witnessed leaving the scene. Both were sedans, one white and one dark—maybe gray or navy blue.

“That guy back there—I know him.”

Gage glanced at her. “You mean Trent?”

“The other one, too. I recognize him from someplace.” She shook her head. “I can’t pinpoint it.”

“Try.”

“I am. I keep picturing him . . . I think it was something recent.”

Gage checked the mirror. No sign of a tail.

“Oh God, the video.”

He looked at her. He couldn’t see her expression in the darkness, but her voice was filled with alarm.

“Gage, he was in the
video
!”

“What video?”

“The one I told you about—at Blake’s place the night he died. The terrorist training video. Gage, what is this
about
?”

Gage glanced at her, then back at the road. He had no fucking idea, but it wasn’t good.

But how could she be sure it was the same man? She’d seen him from a distance. Maybe she was still rattled from the explosion. Maybe she’d hit her head.

The Explorer slowed abruptly and made a choking sound. Gage tapped the brake. He noticed the light glaring up at him from the dash.

“Shit, no way.” He pressed the accelerator, but they continued to lose speed. “It says we’re out of gas.”

“But we just filled up. I gave the attendant three twenties back in Provo. Didn’t you fill it?”

“Hell yeah, I filled it.”

The engine continued to sputter. Gage steered onto the shoulder and coasted to a stop. Alarm bells were going off in his head as he thrust it in park and cut the engine.

“Stay here.”

He grabbed his gun and listened intently for the sound of an approaching car before going around to check the fuel tank. Cold fury filled his chest as his flashlight beam illuminated scrapes on the paint. Someone had jimmied open the hatch.

He jerked open Kelsey’s door. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

He reached around her and grabbed everything he could—water bottles, map, the baseball cap he’d left on the floorboard. He checked the glove compartment for anything useful, but the only thing inside it was the rental agreement with his fake name on it. Gage grabbed it and stuffed it in his pocket.

He checked up and down the highway again.

“What is it?” she demanded.

“They siphoned our gas.”

“Who did?”

“Trent. Guy at the house probably called him after he noticed the break-in and told him to look for a vehicle on his way in.”

Gage shoved a water bottle in Kelsey’s hand. He pulled the keys from the ignition and stuffed them in his pocket.

“But why would he do that?”

“Who knows? Maybe to get us stranded on a deserted highway so he can roll up and hose us down with bullets.” He took her arm and pulled her away from the Explorer.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, but we’re not just going to sit out here and wait for an attack.”

“But it’s pitch dark! We can’t see!”

“I do my best work in the dark. You should know that.”

“Gage, I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, looking for any sign of approaching traffic. No headlights in either direction. Maybe he was being paranoid.

Kelsey halted. “You hear that?”

Sure enough, the sound of tires on asphalt echoed across the landscape. The car was coming from the east, moving closer, and the lack of headlights told Gage that it was wasn’t friendly.

“Come on.” He broke into a jog, pulling Kelsey with him. “See that line of rocks in the distance?”

“I don’t see anything!”

“Hold on to me, then. And run like hell.”

•   •   •

Kelsey stumbled through the darkness, expecting at any moment to feel the sting of a bullet in her back. They’d been moving briskly for what seemed like
hours, pushing deeper and deeper into the empty desert.

“Another quarter mile, we’ll take a break.” Gage’s voice was little more than a murmur beside her, but the familiar sound of it reassured her, even though they were out here running for their lives.

She couldn’t even see him, and yet he seemed to cut through the blackness with complete confidence. She knew he was accustomed to moving around at night. Maybe he even preferred it. SEALs were trained to move stealthily through the dark, using the shadows and the dead space to conceal themselves. They were trained to slip through forests and jungles and deserts in any light conditions without making a sound.

Kelsey, not so much. And with every crunch of rocks beneath her feet, she shuddered at the possibility that she’d just betrayed their location to a determined killer with an automatic rifle and a pair of night-vision goggles.

She touched Gage’s arm again and eased closer. So often, his cocky confidence had driven her crazy—he acted like he was bulletproof. But she needed that confidence right now. She needed that unstoppable determination that told her he was going to keep them both safe, no matter what, and they’d make it out of here alive.

Gage’s grip tightened, and a moment later the ground sloped down beneath her feet. They’d worked out a communication system: He gently squeezed her arm whenever the terrain was about to shift. She wasn’t sure how he knew—only that his silent warnings
had kept her from falling on her face at least a dozen times.

She glanced up at the sky, where a sliver of moon did almost nothing to help them.

Or maybe it
was
helping. If the moon had been full tonight, they might have been riddled with bullets back at the house.

Gage slowed his pace and then halted beside a boulder she hadn’t even noticed. He took something out of his pocket and looked at it.

“What’s that?” she whispered.

“Compass.”

His voice was normal and her shoulders drooped with relief. For the first time in hours, he wasn’t worried that anyone was close enough to hear.

“Are they still behind us?” she asked.

“We lost him.”

“Him?”

“It was only one. We shook him loose in the first half mile.”

A wave of relief crashed over her. Her knees wanted to give way. She reached out until her hand encountered the cool hardness of the boulder and then she sank onto it.

He sat down beside her. “How’s the chin?” His warm fingers cupped the side of her face.

“How’d you know about that?”

“Noticed it in the car.” He shuffled around for a moment, then folded something damp into her palm. “Antiseptic. I’d give you a hand, but you know better than I do where it hurts.”

Kelsey dabbed the cool cloth against her chin.

“You need any of this?”

“I’m good.”

She used the remaining moisture to wipe the scraped heels of her hands. Her jeans had protected her knees at least, but that wasn’t saying much. Every part of her body either stung or ached, and now that she was no longer moving, her thighs had begun to quiver from fatigue.

“How long have we been out here?” she asked.

Gage consulted his watch, and the faint green glow gave her her first glimpse of his face since they’d fled the Explorer.

“Three hours, twenty minutes.”

She absorbed the number, a little dazed. “How far is that?”

“Fourteen miles.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not in a straight line, though. We did some looping around at the beginning to cover our tracks.”