Manna from Heaven

Karen Robards

1

THE GREEN GLARE OF THE INSTRUMENT PANEL was the only illumination in the pitch-dark cockpit.

"Ready?" Skeeter Todd stood by the door of the small Cessna, tightening the harness of his parachute. At his feet, perhaps three dozen duffel bags slumped, each equipped with its own parachute.

"Yeah." Jake Crutcher rose from the copilot's seat and moved toward Skeeter, checking his own parachute as he went. Then, in a gesture as automatic as a breath, he rubbed a hand over his chest to make sure that his Glock was still securely holstered. It was.

Skeeter opened the door. Cold night air rushed through the plane's interior. Bracing himself against the sudden gale, Jake went to work helping Skeeter toss the duffel bags out into the night sky. They were flying low, and the specially designed search light was on, making it easy to identify their target a narrow line of grassy fields in the midst of a heavily forested section of western Tennessee. A river ran nearby, and landing their cargo in mat would be a disaster.

"Just think, in about six hours from now I'll be sippin' a cold brew and sittin' in a hot tub with my baby." Skeeter stopped working to grin at Jake. Jake didn't grin back. His expression was grim.

"Like I told you, I don't think dragging your girlfriend into this was a good idea." Jake kept on heaving bags out the door, his booted feet planted wide apart so that he wouldn't slip. Skeeter was twenty-five years old, little more than a kid, a feckless, reckless fool who had no idea of the magnitude of what he'd gotten himself into.

"Laura's okay. I'd trust her with my life. Anyway, I didn't want to leave my truck parked out here for a week. Somebody might have stolen it."

That was so damned stupid that Jake didn't even bother to reply.

"There she is, right on time." Jake's silence either didn't register, or it didn't bother Skeeter. He sounded as cheerfully unconcerned as if he'd arranged for his girlfriend to meet him at a movie. Together, they tossed the last couple of bags over the side. Then Skeeter straightened and gave Jake a mock salute.

"See ya on the ground," Skeeter said, and stepped out the door. At the last second Jake noticed that a duffel bag was tied to Skeeter's waist.

Damned stupid kid, Jake thought, and stepped toward the door. Hanging onto the edge, he glanced down. Skeeter was nowhere in sight. Of course, it was dark as hell, and the kid would have been blown back behind them by the force of the wind. But far below he could see two tiny pinpricks of light that could only be the headlights of Skeeter's approaching truck with the unknown Laura at the wheel.

To get mixed up in something like this, she had to be as big an idiot as Skeeter, Jake thought, and that was saying a lot Shaking his head, he looked up at the pilot.

"I'm outta here," Jake mouthed, knowing the man wouldn't be able to hear over the roaring wind. He waved, and the man waved back.

Then Jake jumped into the vast emptiness of the night, enjoying the sensation of free-falling for the few precious seconds he allowed himself before he jerked his rip cord.

2

The low, hissing growl was enough to make the hair stand up on the back of Charlie Bates' neck.

Curled on her favorite blue velvet cushion in the passenger seat, Sadie whimpered in sympathy.

"It's okay, girl." Charlie glanced over at the tiny Chihuahua whose liquid brown eyes stared anxiously at her through the dim glow of the reflected headlights. "It can't get out. We're safe."

The cage door rattled violently. Charlie and Sadie exchanged mutually apprehensive looks. Charlie gritted her teeth, forced herself to focus on her driving, and tried not to think about what she was hauling in the back of the Jeep.

Another threatening growl caused her shoulders to rise in an instinctive bid to protect the nape of her neck. Sadie lowered her head, covered her muzzle with both paws, and whimpered again.

The critter in the back was one ticked-off raccoon. As she barreled down the pitch-dark highway toward the state park and animal preserve that was her goal, Charlie listened to it growling and rattling the bars of its cage with growing dismay. At the end of this journey, she was going to have to let the thing out. And she was really, really fond of her slender white fingers with their perfectly manicured nails. To say nothing of her long, creamy and all-too-vulnerable neck.

The things she did to earn a living! She was a singer, for God's sake. Not an animal wrangler. Especially not a wild animal wrangler. A country and western singer, trying her best to make it in Nashville, the New York, New York of the country music world.

An only modestly successful country and western singer, she had to admit. Otherwise she would never have allowed herself to be cajoled into doing this.

"All you have to do is drive the Jeep about a mile inside the park and let the animals in the back go free. What's the big deal about that?" That was how the job had been broached to her.

"And for this I get paid two hundred dollars?" Charlie had responded skeptically.

"Yep."

The persuasion had come from her sister Marisol, who was also her sometime singing partner—when they performed together, they billed themselves as the Sugar Babes—and the new owner, by way of a day job and about ten thousand dollars of carefully saved earnings, of County-wide Critter Ridders. The fledgling business billed itself as being able to rid residences of any and all unwelcome species of wildlife that had for one reason or another decided that sharing a home with humans was not half bad. Usually the humans disagreed, which was where Critter Ridders came in. For the right price, they (at the moment, they consisted of Marisol, her boyfriend Mark Greenberg, and Howie Stubbs, the previous owner, who was training them) would remove and relocate anything. Not kill, but move to a new home in a sylvan setting where creatures of the wild should live. The usually well-to-do homeowners who availed themselves of Critter Ridders' services liked the idea of that. They didn't want to kill Bambi. They just didn't want him living in their garage.

"So what's the catch? We're not talking bears or anything, are we?" Charlie had known her sister long enough to be cautious. Marisol had a talent for trouble—or, more properly, for getting Charlie into trouble—that she had been honing since they were toddlers.

"Squirrels, chipmunks, maybe a bird or a raccoon— no man-eaters, I promise," Marisol had said airily. Then, with a wheedling smile at her sister, she'd added, "Come on, Charlie. Mark and I just want the one night off to celebrate his birthday. Howie's going to pick up the animals and load them for us. All I need you to do is drive. It's not like you have anything better to do. You and Rick go out for Sunday brunch, and then on Wednesday and Friday nights, world without end. This is Thursday. So please?"

Put that way, Charlie's love life sounded positively dull, which she supposed it was. Rick Rozen was a big blond who coached football at St. Xavier High. Their dating schedule had long since settled into a comfortable groove dictated by Rick's need to have everything in life be on a schedule. Charlie was starting to find Rick and his schedule a little boring—all right, a whole lot boring—but he was good-looking and had a good job and, as Marisol pointed out, wouldn't be lacking for offers if Charlie cut him loose. Charlie hadn't even realized that she was thinking about cutting him loose until Marisol said that, but Marisol had, because she knew her little sister pretty darn well, as she frequently pointed out. Charlie's elder by two years, Marisol was, at twenty-nine, a tall, voluptuous, redheaded beauty with the personality of an army general and the determination of a bulldozer. As far as facial features went—oval-shaped, high-cheekboned faces, big blue eyes, delicate noses, wide, full-lipped mouths—Charlie and Marisol looked enough alike to be twins. But Charlie's build was far more slender than her sister's, even taking into account the D-cup implants that Marisol unashamedly admitted to, and Charlie's thick mane of shoulder-length hair was a quieter honey blond. And her personality was nowhere near as forceful as her sister's. Charlie could generally be counted on to go along to get along, a trait which (unless it was benefiting someone else at her expense) Marisol thoroughly approved of.

Only Charlie was getting tired of it. She had always been the good girl in the family to Marisol's bad one, and now everyone expected her to behave that way, and the role was getting old. A touch of excitement in her life would be a good thing. An exciting man in her life would be a good thing. Put it this way: If one suddenly dropped into her lap, she wouldn't turn him down.

Or would she? The truth was, she probably would. If a truly exciting man came into her life he would probably strike her as being too much of a risk. Her choices tended to be safe ones, and exciting was something that happened to someone else, not Charlotte Elizabeth Bates.

Tonight was a case in point. Hanging onto the steering wheel with both hands and leaning slightly forward as she strained to see through the darkness, Charlie cursed her own people-pleaser nature. Even if she ended up getting her throat ripped out by a wrathful raccoon, as at the moment seemed entirely possible, she had no room to complain, she scolded herself. She deserved exactly what she got.

After vowing not to, she'd given into Marisol's entreaties again.

The raccoon snarled and rattled the bars of its cage as forcefully as a convict demanding release. Maybe a raccoon, Marisol had said, oh, so casually. Well, this thing was as big as a bear cub and as mean as a badger. Charlie couldn't help it: Shivering, she glanced in the rearview mirror, which, as the raccoon's cage was wedged in with the others in the cargo area behind the backseat, allowed her to see precisely nothing.

The creature could be loose, and she wouldn't know about it until it leaped on her.

Sadie moaned. Charlie knew just how she felt.

"Just a little bit farther." Charlie realized as she said it that she was trying to comfort herself as much as Sadie. Not that the idea of reaching her destination was precisely comforting. Once there, she had to don the special gloves and mask and overalls that Marisol had provided, lift the cages from the rear cargo compartment of the Jeep, set them on the ground and open the doors.

And then leap back inside the Jeep until the animals chose to vacate the premises, at which point she was supposed to load the empty cages up again and return to home base.

What had she been thinking? Marisol's offer of two hundred dollars for a simple drive into the countryside was beginning to make sense. It was really more in the nature of combat pay.

There were other animals in the back besides the raccoon. A skunk, for one. A ticked-off skunk beat a ticked-off raccoon for sheer unadulterated unpleasantness any time, as Howie had told Charlie with a cackle when she had accepted the keys to the loaded Jeep from him. But this one was tranquilized—Howie informed her proudly that he'd hidden the dose in a section of apple—and peacefully asleep.

So what was she supposed to do when it came time to set it free, Charlie wondered for the first time with a touch of hysteria: Upend the cage and tip the poor drugged creature out beside the road?

She would, she decided, cross that bridge when she came to it.

The rest of her cargo—a possum and its kits, a barn owl, and an eight-foot long black king snake that made her shudder every time she thought about it—were awake, but more or less behaving themselves. Only the raccoon was throwing a hissy fit.

It was just after midnight. The song on the radio crackled, then sputtered away into static. After fiddling with the dial for a moment without success, Charlie turned the radio off. From past visits to the area, she knew that the surrounding mountains blocked all transmissions from here on out, including those of cell phones. Hers, in her purse on the floorboard beneath Sadie, was now useless, which was, she reflected, something she was better off not dwelling on. A small green rectangular sign flashed by: cheatham wildlife management area, ten miles. Thank God, she was almost there.

The two-lane highway was deserted. Although the mountains rose up to scrape the sky to the north and east, this particular stretch of road was relatively flat. Grassy fields interrupted only by the occasional stand of trees stretched endlessly all around. The fast-flowing Cumberland River ran parallel to the road perhaps a half mile away, visible occasionally when a bend in its course brought it closer. The last sign of civilization had been a self-service gas station some fifteen minutes back. Which meant, essentially, that she and Sadie and the zoo in the rear were alone in the wilderness.

Except for the light in the southern sky, that is. Charlie had first noticed it when the Jeep had topped that last rise. At the time, it had been distant, noticeable only because the October night was so very dark, threatening rain, with clouds obscuring any hint of a moon or stars and fog creeping in from the river to cover the low places in the road. The light was beneath the clouds, way low for an airplane if that's what it was, and way bright.

Too bright? she wondered, watching as it drew nearer. And didn't airplane lights shine straight ahead? It almost seemed as if this light was directed at the ground, like a spotlight or a searchlight or something.

The rattling of the raccoon's cage reminded her that she had more immediate problems than a too low, too bright light.

Sadie whined. A glance showed Charlie that the six-pound dog was sitting up now and looking anxiously at her.

"I know. I should keep my eyes on the road." But with the best will in the world to do so, Charlie could not ignore the light. She barely had to lift her eyes from the gleaming surface of the asphalt to see it now. It was closer, brighter, and seemed to be coming straight toward the Jeep. Could it be a UFO?

The thought popped into her mind from the part of her brain that enjoyed X-Files and Stephen King novels, only to be immediately dismissed. She did not believe in UFOs. At least, not when it was daylight and she was within shouting distance of another human being. Tonight, on this deserted stretch of foggy highway with only her tiny dog and a bevy of disgruntled forest friends for company, the existence of UFOs suddenly did not seem quite so farfetched.

It occurred to her that the shining twin beams of her headlights made her about as visible to the craft in the sky as its light made it to her.

Charlie was possessed of a sudden, almost irresistible impulse to douse her lights. Don't be an idiot, she scolded herself. She was not going to spook herself into a crash.

But no matter how hard she tried to focus on the highway to the exclusion of all else, the light was now impossible to ignore. Whatever the flying object was— an airplane or a helicopter were the only possibilities, of course—it was heading straight toward her. In just a few minutes the Jeep would be illuminated by the beam.

Alien abduction were the two words that popped into her head.

Which was ridiculous. She knew it. Casting a nervous glance at her instrument panel to make sure none of the dials were gyrating wildly—she would have had a heart attack there and then if they were—she stepped on the gas. From experience she knew that a thick stand of trees lay not more than two miles ahead.

If she could just scoot beneath the trees before the light reached her, she would be safe—wouldn't she?

She wasn't going to make it. Her speedometer read sixty, seventy—an insane speed for this stretch of road—and yet the Jeep suddenly seemed to be moving in slow motion. The light was close now, just a couple of hundred feet away and closing fast, its blinding beam illuminating the tall grass in the fields beneath it. The light was beside the Jeep, on the Jeep, its brightness lighting up the inside of the vehicle as if it were the middle of the day.

Ridiculous or not, all she could think was: tractor beam. Designed to pull her and her vehicle up inside the craft. Any minute now, she would be paralyzed, and the Jeep's wheels would leave the road.

Sadie whimpered in sympathy.

Charlie's heart pounded. Her mouth went dry. She stomped the gas, pressing the pedal to the metal with a vengeance. The Jeep's rear wheels squealed as she peeled away from the light.

Something crashed into the roof of the Jeep with the force of a falling boulder. There was a sudden loud thud just above her head. Charlie cried out, ducked and instinctively hit the brake. The tires shrieked. Though she fought to keep it on the road, the Jeep went out of control. It shot over the gravel shoulder and into the adjacent field, jerking and bouncing and sliding sideways as it went. For one blank, horrible moment as she wrestled the steering wheel, all Charlie could think of was that she could no longer see where she was going. Then she realized that the reason she couldn't see was because a black-clad body—a human body—was plastered across her windshield. A pale face rested almost directly in front of hers. Blood poured from its mouth. Its wide open eyes stared at her through the glass.

Charlie screamed. The Jeep crashed with an ear-shattering bang, and she was thrown forward as it came to an instant, jarring halt. The body flew off the hood, vanishing into the tall sea of grass beyond the vehicle.

For a moment after the Jeep stopped moving, she simply sat where she was, stunned. Her face rested in a smothering pillow; the world had turned white. It took just seconds for her to realize that the air bag had inflated. Then it deflated, leaving her leaning limply against her seat belt and staring out through the windshield into a field of tall golden grass that was partially illuminated by the one working headlight The other, like the entire right front of the Jeep, had plowed into a tree.

A pitiful-sounding whine drew her gaze sideways. The blue cushion was no longer on the seat beside her. Neither was her dog.

"Sadie!" Charlie called in an unsteady voice. The passenger compartment seemed to be intact, although the impact had severely damaged the Jeep's exterior. Sadie had been flung forward with no seat belt or air bag to cushion her flight; please God she wasn't hurt. Charlie called her again.

Looking as shaken as Charlie felt, Sadie clambered out of the passenger side footwell into her arms. Charlie did a quick check. The dog was trembling, but seemed unharmed.

Oh my God, Charlie thought, gathering Sadie close and burying her face in the dog's satiny coat as she remembered the body on the windshield. I've run over someone!

At that moment there was a brisk tap on the driver's side window. Startled, Charlie glanced around to discover a face peering in at her. A black-gloved hand gestured imperatively at the lock button. Automatically, before she had time to think the action through, she released the lock.

The door was yanked open.

Still shocked and seat-belted into near immobility, Charlie found herself gaping at a tall, broad-shouldered, black-clad man with a black knit cap pulled down over his head almost to his eyebrows. One of his hands gripped the door. In the other he held a pistol, which was, thankfully, pointed at the ground.

He surveyed her out of hard, narrowed eyes.

"Laura, isn't it? Think you might have been going a little fast?"

3

From the safety of Charlie's arms, Sadie yapped at him hysterically.

"What the hell is that?" His voice was a menacing growl. His expression was grim. Charlie realized that with the door open and the interior light on he could see her and Sadie clearly: a slender blonde with a dazed expression wearing black cowboy boots, jeans, a black T-shirt with Sugar Babes written across the front, and a fringed suede jacket, holding a tiny, shivering dog the same shade as her hair. He, meanwhile, remained in deep gloom, rendered all but invisible by his black clothes. As her gaze met his, it occurred to her that he was not, perhaps, overly friendly. She hugged Sadie closer.

"Oh, my God, I think I ran over somebody." She ignored his question. It was stupid anyway. Anyone could see that Sadie was a dog. The pale face so recently plastered against her windshield was all she could think about, with its wide eyes and the dark stream of blood spilling from its mouth.

"Ya think?" The words dripped sarcasm. "That was Skeeter. You were supposed to pick him up, remember? Pick us up. Not run him the hell over."

Most of what he said didn't make sense, but she was too upset to notice.

"We've got to try to help him—he's got to be somewhere right in front of the Jeep. He flew—he flew off the windshield when the Jeep hit the tree." Charlie shuddered in remembrance and scrambled out of the car, Sadie in her arms. Her knees almost buckled as she stood upright, and he caught her by one elbow, steadying her.

"Are you hurt?" His voice was rough. The hand around her elbow was large and strong.

"No. No, I don't think so." She was trembling, she realized, with reaction no doubt, but within seconds her leg muscles seemed to firm up and her knees no longer threatened to collapse. Pulling free of his grip, sliding Sadie beneath her arm, she began to move toward the front of her car. "I didn't even see him."

He followed her. She was so busy scanning the weeds for some sign of the man she had hit that she was only peripherally aware of the presence of the stranger behind her.

"Yeah, well, he was probably cutting it pretty close. The damned fool never did like to walk farther than he could help. But that still doesn't let you off the hook. Damn it to hell, you were supposed to stop when you saw our lights, not go rocketing down the road like a Nascar driver. Oh, yeah, I saw you speed up. What the hell were you doing?"

His words still barely registered. She followed the beam of light forward on the theory that it was the path the body would have taken, wading through the shoulder high grass, looking down and all around and scarcely attending to the furious-sounding man behind her.

A pair of black combat boots, toes pointing downward, were just visible at the far edge of the light They were attached to black-clad legs; the rest of the body was concealed by the grass.

"There he is." She choked and stopped, pointing. Her companion broke off his diatribe to move swiftly past her. Charlie found that she could not, for the space of a couple of heartbeats, follow him. The horror of what she had done was suddenly all too real.

She had run over someone. Killed him, probably.

"I didn't even see him," she said again, pitiably, to no one in particular as she forced herself finally to move and join the man who crouched at her victim's side. He was turning the dead man over—there was little doubt, from the open, staring eyes and the blood running from the mouth, that he was dead—and checking his pulse. His gloves were off now, and she saw that his hands looked large and brown and capable. He certainly did not seem overly concerned about the other man's fate. There were no gasps, no groans, no rendering of first aid, no rush to summon assistance.

Charlie frowned as he began to rifle through the victim's pockets. His manner just seemed—off.

Both men were dressed identically, Charlie registered, in solid black from head to toe. Black knit caps, black army jackets, black gloves, black pants, black boots. A black backpack lay on the ground beside the dead man, a tangle of what looked like white silk and strings spilling from its partially open top. A black duffel bag was tied to his waist.

It hit Charlie then that there was something mighty peculiar about all this. Suddenly cold, she wrapped her arms around herself, and must have made some small sound, because the live man in black glanced up at her. His eyes gleamed, reflecting the light. They looked black, too, just like his thick brows, but after a moment she saw, that they were a deep, coppery brown. His skin was tan, his nose straight, his jaw square. It was, weighed objectively, a handsome face, she supposed. But the set of his mouth looked ruthless, and the glint in his eyes was hard.

Charlie took a tiny, instinctive step backward.

"Don't have a breakdown," he recommended impatiently, his gaze already returning to the assortment of items he had spread out on the victim's chest: a set of keys, a wallet, a Chapstick. "You didn't run over him. Or at least, if you did, that's not what killed him. His parachute didn't open. He would've been dead wherever he hit."

Parachute? Charlie barely stopped herself from saying it aloud. Her mind, still slightly sluggish with shock, was nonetheless beginning to sound an alarm. This man was no rescuer, as she had assumed; he was not a passing motorist who had seen the accident and stopped to help; he was not a fireman or a policeman or even a forest ranger. Except for her wrecked Jeep, there were no vehicles in sight.

Where, then, had he come from? He did not look like a camper, or someone out for a nocturnal hike. Anyway, the area was too remote to make either plausible.

Charlie regarded the mass of white protruding from the backpack on the ground with fresh eyes. A parachute: The man—both of the men, she guessed, although the live one wore no backpack—had jumped from the plane, helicopter, or UFO (choose one) that had pinned her with its light. The blow the roof had taken just before the wreck had been the dead man landing on top of the Jeep.

Charlie watched with widening eyes as he opened and upended the duffel bag. Perhaps a dozen shoebox-sized bundles of a plastic-wrapped white substance tumbled out, along with a large quantity of cash, bound into bricks with rubber bands. Both hands rose to cover her mouth as she realized what she was looking at.

His next words, uttered without a glance at her, confirmed it. "Coke's all here. Money, too."

"Um, good," Charlie said, trying to sound enthused, or at least not as horrified as she felt. She must have succeeded, because he didn't pay her any particular attention. Instead, he pulled a wicked-looking stiletto out of his boot, and used it to saw through the rope that bound the duffel bag to the dead man's waist.

Her stomach began to churn at the sight of the stiletto. A deadly knife in his boot, a pistol in his hand— the pistol was no longer in sight, she realized, but didn't doubt for a moment that he still had it—the way he was dressed, the coke, the money, the parachute, all begged the question: Who was this guy?

The answer came to her instantaneously: nobody she wanted to know.

Everything he had said to her since she had first unlocked her door for him scrolled in double-fast time through her mind. He had called her Laura. He'd been angry because she hadn't stopped when she'd seen the approaching light. He had said that she was supposed to pick him and Skeeter up.

He clearly thought she was someone else. And, just as dearly, he was engaged in something she wanted no part of.

Could anyone say "drug smuggling"?

Had she really just been thinking that her life needed a little excitement? An exciting man, to be precise? God, she thought, if you're listening, I take it back. An encounter with an alien would have been preferable. According to the tabloids, people usually survived those.

Fright cleared her mind, and rendered it suddenly sharp. If he discovered who she was—or wasn't—it wouldn't be a good thing, to say the least. She had to get away from him and back to civilization. The gas station she had passed sprang to mind. From there she could call the police and wait in safety for them to arrive.

Her first order of business was to discover if the Jeep was still drivable.

Subtly. Without alerting him to her intent. Without letting him know that she was not, in fact, Laura.

She shivered artistically. No real acting required there. She was suddenly so nervous that her palms were sweating. The only surprise was that her knees didn't knock. Sadie whimpered as if sensing her distress. The dog, Charlie thought as she had many times before, was a mind reader.

"I'm freezing," she said, in a tone that sounded slightly squeaky to her own ears. The night was growing colder, although under normal circumstances she would have been perfectly comfortable in her jacket. Still, he had no reason to disbelieve her. "I think I'll go wait in the Jeep."

"Mmm." Engaged in returning the cash to the bag, he didn't even glance up. Lightheaded with relief, clutching Sadie tightly to make sure she stayed put—all she needed about now was to have to go chasing the dog across night-dark fields—she headed for the Jeep. It was still running, she realized as she reached it. She had never turned the engine off. Surely that was a good sign?

The door was open, too. Sliding in behind the steering wheel, Charlie closed it—very gently so that the sound would not attract his attention—and pressed the button that locked all the doors. The resultant emphatic dick made her feel a little safer, but locking herself in the Jeep was useless if she could not get away, she knew.

Set free, Sadie clambered across her lap into the passenger seat, where she remained standing as if poised for action. From the rear, a faint hiss and a rattle reminded Charlie of the raccoon. The wreck had apparently simmered it down some, not that it mattered. The creature was now the least of her worries.

A live, armed drug smuggler trumped a riled-up raccoon as a source of terror any time, she reflected.

Pushing the limp white carcass of the air bag out of the way, Charlie shifted into reverse. Heart thumping, eyes fixed on the black figure she could just see through the veil of golden grass, she stealthily trod on the gas.

At first she didn't think the Jeep was going to respond. But then, with a screech of metal that made her wince, the vehicle disengaged from the tree and began to back up. It stopped abruptly. Charlie realized that something, the front bumper, the undercarriage, who knew, was hung up. Oh, God, what could she do? A quick, panicked glance revealed that the man was still crouched in the grass, although his position had altered. Was he looking at the Jeep? She couldn't tell.

"It's okay" she said to Sadie, trying to calm herself as much as the shivering dog and not much liking the quaver she heard in her voice. Panicking would not help, she told herself sternly, taking a deep, steadying breath. Then, gritting her teeth, she shifted into drive. Maybe she could rock the Jeep free.

Oh, God, he was on his feet now, heading her way. She could see the tall black shape of him through the grass, walking swiftly toward the Jeep. Panicking for real now, gripping the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles showed white, she shifted into reverse again and stomped the accelerator.

The engine roared. The tires spun with a sickening slithering sound. The Jeep strained backward to no purpose: It was still stuck.

"Oh, God," Charlie groaned aloud. Sadie whimpered. Her eyes were as big and shiny as black olives, and she looked as scared as Charlie felt.

Disappearing behind the tree to reappear on the passenger side, he reached the car. He glanced in at her, then knocked peremptorily on the window. Charlie's heart pounded. Her breathing came in short, sharp pants. Her foot ground the pedal to the floor.

The engine roared. The tires spun. The damned Jeep didn't shift by so much as an inch.

He knocked again, more demandingly, frowning at her through the window. She might as well face it: The Jeep was not going anywhere. She was breathing so hard that she feared she might hyperventilate. Oh, God, she was trapped! What should she do? What could she do?

Charlie remembered his gun. He could break the window. He could shoot her through the glass. Locked doors would not protect her. She was as easy a target as one of the caged animals in the back.

Sadie moaned. It was all Charlie could do not to join in.

He thought she was on his side. The thought steadied her. She just must play along.

Taking her foot off the gas, Charlie swallowed convulsively and unlocked the doors. The click sounded as loud as a gunshot to her ears. The comparison made her shiver.

He pulled the door open and looked in at her. Charlie realized that she was sweating. The breeze blowing in through the open door felt icy as it hit her damp skin. She pinned a questioning smile on her face, and hoped it didn't look as fake as it felt.

"It's stuck on a tree trunk. Put it in reverse and hit the gas when I tell you," he said, seeming to notice nothing amiss in her demeanor. "I'll push."

Charlie damped her teeth together to keep them from chattering and nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Then he slammed the door and walked around to the front of the Jeep.

Charlie almost melted into a puddle of quivering jelly right there in the driver's seat. She felt like a death row inmate who had just been granted a reprieve.

"Get a grip," she ordered herself fiercely, watching mesmerized through the windshield as he braced a shoulder against the hood. He waved. Meeting his gaze for a brief, trauma-filled instant, terrified that he might somehow be able to read her intention in her eyes, Charlie recognized that the wave was a signal and put the transmission into reverse. Then she stepped on the gas.

4

The engine roared. The wheels spun. He lifted and pushed from the front. The Jeep rocked—and came free. It shot backward in an arc, cutting a wide swath through the tall grass that swished past the windows. As she rocketed away from him, Charlie kept her foot to the floor. She dragged her gaze from his surprised expression to look over her shoulder—just in time to get a split-second glimpse of a second tree before she hit it.

Fortunately it was only a glancing blow. The gray-barked trunk scraped along the left rear of the Jeep with a scream like bear claws on a blackboard. But there were more trees behind her, crowded together, blocking the way. Panting with terror, she hit the brake. She had traveled as far as she could in reverse.

If he caught up with her...

Licking her lips, she glanced wildly around to try to determine if he was anywhere near. She could see nothing in front except the narrow path illuminated by the single working headlight. For all her sight told her, the world might have consisted of no more than a golden carpet of mown-down grass, the trees beside and behind her, and the foggy night.

The thought that he might be racing toward her unseen, or even getting ready to shoot her through the glass, acted like a cattle prod on her fear-disordered reflexes. Slamming the transmission into drive, she stomped the gas.

The wheels spun out over the slippery grass. Just as they found a purchase and the Jeep started to move, the passenger door was jerked open and he dived into the seat beside her, dislodging Sadie, who leaped into the back with a high-pitched yelp.

Her foot stayed on the floor. The Jeep flew in a bumping, jolting beeline toward the road. He clung grimly to the edge of the seat with both hands, swinging his long legs inside as the door flapped like a wing beating the air. Charlie knew she was in deep trouble even before he managed to haul himself into a sitting position and grab at something inside his coat.

The gun. Of course. Casting a terrified glance at him, she discovered it pointed straight at her and realized with a fatalistic sense of calm that she was going to die.

"Stop the god-damned car!" he roared. If ever murder blazed from a man's eyes, she thought, it was blazing from his at that moment.

In a display of obedience that she doubted he was going to appreciate, Charlie stood on the brake. At the same time she spun the wheel, hoping to throw him out again through the open door or at least injure him enough to enhance her prospects of escape.

He was flung forward, but managed to catch himself with a hand on the dashboard before any damage was done. Charlie, hanging onto the steering wheel for dear life during the double doughnut that ensued, saw with dismay at the end of it that he was still aboard and unhurt. Her desperate gambit had served about as much purpose as swatting futilely at a hornet: It had just made him mad.

Curses poured from his mouth in a steady stream as the Jeep shimmied to a halt just a few feet shy of the highway, facing back the way she had come. Charlie looked at the beckoning trail of asphalt with burgeoning despair. So near and yet so far, she mourned inwardly, following the road home with her eyes. She thought of leaping from the Jeep and running for it, but a single glance at him dissuaded her. The door was closed now, which meant the interior of the vehicle was once again dark. But there was no mistaking the pistol pointed straight at her, shining with a dull black gleam that was no more menacing than the evil glint in his eyes.

"What the hell is this?" His voice was lower than before, but no less furious. "Are you fucking nuts?"

Before Charlie could reply, headlights from an approaching vehicle caught her attention. If she leaped out just as the car passed them, she calculated frantically, and hurled herself in its path, it would surely stop. "Don't even think about it," he growled, grabbing her wrist just as if he could read her mind. Charlie felt the strength of his grip and abandoned all hope. No way could she break free.

But, miracle of miracles, the vehicle seemed to be slowing down without any help at all from her. Yes, it was slowing down. The driver had obviously seen the Jeep with its smashed right front. Maybe he or she was the kind of Good Samaritan who would stop to see if there'd been an accident.

Please God let it be a he. A big, burly he, preferably complete with gun. A cop would be good. Yes, please let it be a cop. A pair of cops.

It wasn't. It was a couple—no, a trio—in a mid-sized SUV. It was too dark to be precise about make or model or even color, although like the Jeep it was some dark shade, but she was clear on the number of people because the SUV pulled off the road right in front of the Jeep, stopped and turned off engine and lights. Then the trio got out. For a moment, as the SUV's door opened, Charlie saw the occupants clearly: The driver was a blond woman several years younger than herself, and with her were two men. All of them were dressed in black, and, like the man beside her, the men brandished pistols.

God, it seemed, had a sense of humor. When she'd started wishing for a little excitement, he'd sent her enough to cure her of the hankering for the rest of her life.

Beside her, her captor was staring at the newcomers, too, with an arrested expression. As they approached the Jeep, stepping momentarily into the full beam of the single headlight, his gaze swung to Charlie.

"God damn it to hell and back," he said bitterly. "You're not Laura, are you?"

Charlie shrank away from him. Having been taught from an early age that discretion was the better part of valor, she chose not to reply. His hand tightened painfully around her wrist.

"If you have the sense God gave a gnat, you'll pretend you're supposed to be here," he said through his teeth. "What's your name?"

The urgency of his manner compelled her.

"Charlie. Charlie Bates."

He swore, his gaze raking her. "I should've guessed. The clothes, the damned dog. You ever hear the saying, up shit creek without a paddle? Lady, that's where you are right now. Get out, keep your mouth shut, play along with whatever happens and stay the hell close to me. My name's Jake Crutcher."

The trio had almost reached the Jeep by this time. Giving her a final inimical glare, he reached across her, doused the lights, turned the ignition off, pulled the keys from it, and got out. When she didn't immediately follow suit, he ducked his head back inside the open door and said "get out" in a tone that made her jump. Though she would by far have preferred to stay where she was, Charlie did as he ordered. Not to do so might well be a fatal mistake, she thought, although she didn't know whether to be more afraid of him or them. He was a solid black shape in a world full of charcoal shadows as he moved toward the front of the Jeep. Stomach quaking, hands icy with fear, she joined him, not seeing any alternative. As she did, he glanced down at her, and caught her hand in a grip that hurt.

Jake. His name was Jake, and apparently, as far as she was concerned, he was the good guy now, she reminded herself in a panic, discreetly wriggling her crushed fingers in an attempt to loosen his grip. Oh God, would they kill her if they discovered she was not one of them? It seemed very probable that they would: They were drug smugglers, after all. Heart thumping, the dry, tinny taste of fear in her mouth, she pondered her options. Running for it was out of the question; his hand held hers in what she was certain was an unbreakable hold, as if he feared she might try to do exactly that. Besides, she would never be able to get away, and to run would be to reveal her fear. That might very well prove fatal. Already the newcomers were looking her up and down in a way that made her shrink closer against the dark bulk of Jake's side.

Suddenly he truly did seem more like an ally than a threat. If he meant to kill her, her guess was she'd know it by now.

Instead he'd told her to stick close to him, and was even now holding her beside him with a death grip on her hand. For whatever murky reason, this particular drug smuggler was prepared to protect her, it seemed. Not exactly the protector she would have chosen if she had been doing the selecting, she reflected, but the old saying about not looking a gift horse in the mouth definitely applied in this case. He might appear menacing, and be every bit as much a criminal as the others, but every instinct she possessed screamed at her that he was the only chance for survival she had.

"Who the hell's she?" One of the men—the shorter, stockier one—was looking her over in a distinctly non-friendly fashion as the newcomers reached them. "And where's Skeeter?"

"This is Charlie. She's okay. I told her to meet us out here because I thought we might need a backup vehicle. Skeeter's dead. His chute didn't open." This last was said without emotion.

"Shit." The stocky man sounded annoyed rather than grieved. The woman gave a little choked cry, and her hand flew to her mouth. The stocky man's head turned toward her. "Shut up, Laura." His tone was brutal. Then, to Jake, he added, "What about the stuff?"

"It's here. All you have to do is pick the duffel bags up. Skeeter kept the cash with him. He's over there." Jake nodded in the general direction of Skeeter's body.

"Hel-lo, seventy-five million." the taller man chortled.

The woman—Laura—made another small sound. Despite her drumming heart, Charlie felt a stirring of sympathy for her. No one else seemed to care so much as a snap of his fingers that a man was lying nearby, dead.

"I said shut up, Laura." The stocky man sounded positively menacing. Laura seemed to shrink.

Jake's hand tightened again on Charlie's fingers. Charlie had just managed to wriggle them into a state of near comfort, and it was all she could do not to wince.

"What are you and Denton doing here, anyway? Skeeter told me that Laura was the only one coming to meet us."

"Yeah, well, change of plan." The stocky man looked at Laura again. "You get back in the Blazer and pull it over there by those trees. I'll be with you directly."

"Sure, Woz. Whatever you say." Laura looked at Charlie for an instant, her face pale and her eyes wide with what Charlie took for fright. Then she turned and walked back toward the Blazer without another word. The stocky man—Woz—and Denton exchanged glances. Charlie frowned. Before she could figure out what it was in the atmosphere that suddenly caused her sixth sense to go on red alert, Woz was addressing Jake again in a voice that sounded almost amiable compared to his earlier harshness.

"Good idea, about having a second truck. We can throw Skeeter in the back, and keep Laura from having to see him. God, women! Well, we all have to live with 'em, don't we?" He nodded significantly at Charlie, as if commiserating with Jake for having to live with her, then looked around as Laura pulled the Blazer's door open. As the interior light flared briefly, Charlie was able to make out Woz's profile silhouetted against the distant windshield. His forehead was low, his nose large, his lips thick, his chin pugnacious. Not a pleasant face, she thought. Then, as a corollary, came the companion thought: not a pleasant man. "Come on, let's get a move on. We'll retrieve Skeeter and the coke first. Babe, whatever your name is, you drive."

"Sure." Charlie was proud of how cool and collected she sounded. Inside, she was as jittery as a pain-phobic patient on a first visit to the dentist. Jake released her hand—under the circumstances he had no choice—and they all headed for the doors. She and Denton were on one side of the Jeep, Jake and Woz on the other. The night was cool and full of mist and eerily quiet except for their footsteps. She was just reaching for the handle when she heard a muffled thunk, followed almost immediately by a grunt and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground. Glancing across the top of the Jeep, she saw no one. Before that could even start to alarm her, something hard was jammed painfully against the base of her spine.

"You really think we were going to buy that backup vehicle crap, Blondie?" Denton asked as Charlie, realizing that the "something hard" was his gun, froze in horror. "Get your hands up and let's see if you're packin'."

This was bad. The fact that she could no longer see or hear anything of Jake was worse. Dry-mouthed, Charlie lifted her hands in the air, and was shoved hard against the side of the Jeep for her pains. Her legs were kicked apart as Denton patted her down with an enjoyment that made her sick to her stomach. Woz popped into view like an evil jack-in-the-box, glanced in her direction, smiled, then disappeared again, leaning over something on the ground. The something was, presumably, Jake.

Oh, God, had they killed him? If so, she was almost certainly next. But she was too young! This whole insane episode was a mistake. And she didn't—really didn't—want to die.

God, she was taking that excitement thing back right now.

"She's clean," Denton called to Woz as he completed his search and straightened.

"Put her in the car." The Jeep's interior light came on as Woz opened the passenger side door. Denton grabbed Charlie's arm, opened the driver's door, and pushed her inside. Woz wrestled Jake's limp body inside and belted it into the passenger seat. Jake was missing his cap, and his head, covered with ruthlessly short black hair, lolled limply on his shoulder. For a horrified moment Charlie was sure he was dead. Then she saw his chest rise, and with a flood of relief she realized that he was merely unconscious. Sadie leaped nimbly between the seats and into her lap as Denton got into the back. Absurdly comforted by the dog's presence, Charlie nevertheless wasted no time in thrusting her into the footwell out of sight. These men would not, she felt sure, hesitate for so much as an instant over killing a dog.

"Watch 'em. I'll be right back. If he moves, hit him again. But don't kill him. Not till after I get done talking to him." Woz slammed the door. Charlie jumped reflexively, only to feel Denton's gun nuzzle her cheek.

"Remember, ol' Woz didn't say nothing about killing you."

Charlie sat very still. Through the windshield, she watched Woz open the door to the Blazer as Laura, illuminated now by the vehicle's interior light, turned to look at him.

Then, just like that, Laura's head exploded. Blam. Blood coated the inside of the Blazer's windshield before the door was closed again, shutting off the light.

Charlie was still in shock when Woz jerked open the door and climbed into the backseat.

"I ain't cleaning up that bloody mess you just made," Denton said as Woz shut the door again. "Why the hell didn't you do it on the grass?"

" 'Cause we're going to lose the car, dumbass," Woz replied. "Just like we're going to lose this one. Nobody's going to have to clean up nothing."

Denton grunted. "Good. 'Cause I ain't."

Jake made a slight sound. Terrified, Charlie cast him a sideways look. Would they blow off his head, too, when Woz was finished with him? And hers? Oh, God, and hers?

5

She was going to have to take a chance on making a break and running for it. It might be a long shot, but it was the only shot she had, Charlie knew.

"You got the cuffs? Get 'em on him before he wakes up," Woz said to Denton.

Denton leaned an arm against the back of Charlie's seat and stroked her cheek with the pistol again. She shivered at the touch of the cold metal, remembered Laura's head exploding against the windshield, and almost vomited where she sat. Only the fear that it might cost her her life kept her from doing exactly that.

"What about her?" The pistol still touched her cheek.

"Cuff her, too."

"I just got the one pair. Besides, she's got to drive."

"Yeah." Woz seemed to ponder. "Cuff 'em together. That way neither one of 'em's going anywhere."

Charlie's eyes widened in horror as she realized that her last chance of escape was getting ready to fly right out the window.

"Give me your hand, Blondie."

When Charlie didn't comply fast enough—she was still mentally dithering over whether or not to attempt a run—Denton reached between the seats and grabbed her right arm, twisting it toward him painfully. A cold metal handcuff snapped closed around her wrist. Seconds later, the second cuff was fastened around Jake's wrist Charlie glanced at Jake's big body, sprawled limply now in the seat with only the seat belt keeping him semiupright, with despair. There was no longer any hope of running for it. She'd just been shackled to a two-hundred-pound deadweight.

Woz passed her the ignition keys, which he had presumably taken from Jake. They jangled as she took them, and Charlie realized that her hand was shaking.

"Pull up on the road nice and easy, and head on into the forest," Woz directed as Charlie started the Jeep.

"And don't fuck with us, Blondie, or you're dead," Denton added as, forgetting that the Jeep was still in park, she nervously stepped too hard on the gas, causing the engine to rev. He punctuated this remark with his gun, with which he prodded the back of her neck.

Charlie shrank, shivering. She was breathing hard, and her left hand was clammy as it grasped the wheel. Her right, rendered useless by being tethered to Jake, felt sweaty, too, as it rested on the console between the seats. At her feet, Sadie pressed up against her legs in sympathy. The dog was shaking. Or maybe the shaking was coming from her own legs. Charlie was so scared it was hard to be sure.

She kept seeing Laura's head blow up. Oh, God, she didn't want to die. She and Marisol had a really important singing gig on Saturday, and she'd just bought a killer new dress that she hadn't even had a chance to wear yet, and... and...

They were moving now. The cages rattled in the back as the Jeep bumped up onto the road. Jake moaned, stirred, and sat up, shaking his head.

Apparently feeling himself tethered, his eyes opened and his gaze slashed sideways. Charlie cast a frightened glance at him just in time to see a loop of rope descend over his head and tighten around his neck, yanking his head back against the headrest. Jake grunted, grabbing at the rope, and at the same time the muzzle of Woz's gun jammed into the hollow just below his ear.

"Welcome back, asshole," Woz said softly.

"What the hell?" Jake's whole body seemed to stiffen. Before he could say or do anything else Woz slammed the butt of his gun into Jake's temple. Charlie winced in terrified sympathy as Jake made a pained sound.

Blinking against incipient tears, Charlie forced herself to refocus her attention on the road. Although she was driving an as-slow-as-she-dared thirty miles an hour, the forest already loomed in front of them, its gravelike darkness as ominous as an executioner. Would they die in that forest? It seemed likely.

Charlie shuddered. In the footwell, Sadie pressed closer against her legs. The dog rubbed its head against her calf in silent sympathy.

"What the hell is your problem, the both of you?" Jake spoke in the tone of a reasonable man sorely tried. The rope around his neck pinned him back against the headrest, and his voice was raspy. A lightning glance in the rearview mirror showed Charlie that Woz had the ends wrapped around his fist.

Woz snorted. "Come off it, asshole. We know you're a cop."

"What?" Jake gave a derisive laugh that ended in a choked cough as Woz twisted the rope. "You're crazy."

A cop? Charlie felt a wild burbling of hope. He was a cop? Surely that was a good thing—if it was true. But he didn't sound like it was true. That laugh had sounded incredulous. And maybe it wasn't a good thing anyway, under the circumstances. A cop at the mercy of a pair of drug smugglers was kind of like a bird at the mercy of a pair of cats.

And she was with the cop.

Denton's gun nudged her in the back of the neck, and she cringed. "Take a left up here at the fork in the road."

They were in the forest now. Outside, the night was dark as a cave. Mist floated in front of the Jeep. She might, Charlie thought desperately, be able to blink the one remaining headlight if another vehicle came into view. Or honk the horn. Or drive head-on into the other car. The operative principle was, whatever it took. Anything would be better than what she feared would happen to her once the pair in the back ordered her to stop the Jeep.

But there was no other vehicle in sight. And, frightening as it was to face the truth, they were not likely to encounter one. This area had been chosen by Critter Ridders as an ideal place to release their captives for one primary reason: It was remote.

Charlie groaned inwardly. Why, oh, why, when Marisol had asked her to do this tonight, hadn't she decided in favor of pleasing herself instead of her sister and just said no?

Woz was still talking to Jake. "You know what? Blowing your brains out will be my pleasure. I never liked you anyway."

"Yeah, well, you're not going to get a marriage proposal from me any time soon either, but this cop shit is the stupidest thing I ever heard."

"Liar! You're going to tell us everything you know, believe me. Or maybe your friend will. She a cop, too?"

"No!" Charlie squeaked in horrified protest.

"Shut up." Woz growled. Charlie shut up. Protesting her innocence would not save her, she realized with despair. Indeed, it might even hasten her end. If they thought she was a cop, they might try to torture information out of her. Once they knew that there was no reason to keep her alive, however, she was pretty much toast.

"Turn here," Denton ordered.

Trembling so hard that she had to grit her teeth to keep them from chattering, Charlie turned. Gravel crunched as they left the paved road. Denton's gun brushed the back of her neck almost caressingly. Short of a miracle, there was no chance of any kind of encounter that might save them. They were as good as dead. Charlie realized that she was starting to hyperventilate, and deliberately slowed her breathing down. Breathe in, breathe out, in, out...

Sadie was behind her legs now, rubbing against them, offering what comfort she could. If she didn't think of something, fast, poor innocent Sadie would die along with poor innocent her and who-cared-if-he-was-innocent Jake. Charlie thought frantically, but could come up with nothing that might save their lives.

Running the Jeep into a tree would not help. If she did that, and survived, she would almost certainly be shot for her pains.

She was going to be shot anyway. Oh, God, would it hurt? Had it hurt Laura to be shot like that? With a sense of deepening horror, she realized that Jake did not even know that Laura was dead. He'd been out cold when it had happened. She glanced at him, burning with an urgent need to acquaint him with Laura's fate. But she didn't dare so much as open her mouth.

Sadie rubbed against her leg again, twining around her left ankle almost like a cat. Poor, dear Sadie. Beloved Sadie.

"Is Jerry Colina working with you? He is, isn't he? I always hated the bastard." There was a certain grim pleasure in Woz's voice, Charlie realized, that told her that he was enjoying the situation. Out of the corner of her eye, Charlie saw him grind the mouth of the pistol into Jake's neck. She could see the gleam of Jake's teeth as he grimaced. She could see something else, too, she realized: the gleam of Sadie's eyes.

Sadie was huddled in the footwell on Jake's side.

Charlie froze. If Sadie was on Jake's side, what was rubbing against her leg?

She glanced down. Something black was twining around the paleness of her jean-clad calf. Something twisty and ropelike and alive. A triangular head was slithering up the pale blue column of her leg toward her knee.

Charlie screamed No, she shrieked. The sound was earsplitting, window-shattering, heart-attack inducing. No horror film in history had ever recorded a more bloodcurdling screech. Completely forgetting that she was at the wheel of a vehicle traveling at thirty miles an hour over a narrow bumpy track, completely forgetting that there was a gun pointed at her and two armed murderers in the back and a strange man cuffed to her wrist, she shot out of that seat like a ball out of a cannon, flinging herself over the console and onto Jake in an insane effort to dive through his closed window, screaming all the while.

"What the hell!" Jake grabbed her.

"Shut the bitch up! Shoot her!" Denton lunged between the seats. Without even meaning to do it, Charlie kicked him in the face. He fell back.

"Snake! Snake, snake, snake, snake, snake!" The snake swarmed toward her crotch, then undulated past her pelvis, moving up her body like it had somewhere to go. Charlie screamed like a steam whistle, kicked like a demented mule, then grabbed the writhing, leathery thing and flung it as hard as she could. Two plus yards of twisting, ropelike reptile flew into the air, smacked against the roof, and disappeared into the backseat.

"Snake!" Woz screamed as horribly as she had done seconds earlier, and kept on screaming to the sound of beating fists and stomping feet.

"Shit! Snake!" Denton was screaming, too, as they both engaged in panic-stricken battle with the snake. A hideous smell suddenly exploded in the air.

The Jeep smacked into a tree. Charlie, still screaming for all she was worth, was thrown forward, hit the side of her head on the dash, and was still seeing stars as she found herself hauled bodily across the seat and out into the cold night air.

"Run, damn it!" Jake yelled as he dragged her upright. Head spinning, gasping now rather than screaming, Charlie needed no further urging. With visions of that hideous black snake slithering after her to spur her on, she ran like the hounds of hell were on her heels. Jake pounded beside her, his hand tight around hers.

Behind them, she could hear the sound of the Jeep's doors opening and Woz and Denton spilling out.

"There's a fucking skunk in there!" Woz shouted, coughing and cursing at the same time.

"And a snake! God, I hate snakes!"

"You fucking pussy, Denton! I hate snakes!" Woz mimicked Denton's voice, all the while coughing his lungs out.

"I'm going to puke! That smell...." There was a gagging sound.

"What are you, some sort of pansy-ass? Come on, we can't let them get away."

"Jesus, I'm gonna be sick."

The voices faded as Charlie found herself sliding on her backside down a steep, vine-covered embankment. Jake was slightly in front of her, sliding, too, his hand clamped around hers, his weight pulling her down.

"Sadie," Charlie gasped.

"We've got more to worry about than a damned dog," Jake said as they reached the bottom. He dragged her to her feet. "They've got guns, remember. Be as quiet as you can."

"But they'll kill her."

"Why would they? She's a fucking dog. It's us they want to kill."

With this grim reminder, Charlie found herself running again, dragged along in Jake's wake. The woods were so dark Charlie could barely make out the outlines of trees as they flashed by. The ground underneath was slippery with fallen leaves. The smell of damp was everywhere, and here and there small points of light glowed through the darkness.

Eyes, Charlie thought with a shiver, trying not to think about the kinds of nocturnal creatures they might belong to. The next thought that popped into her head brought feint comfort: nothing, nothing, could be as bad as that snake.

Something was behind them, giving chase. Charlie could sense it more than feel it, sense rather than hear the pant of their pursuer's breathing, sense rather than feel the weight of their pursuer's gaze.

It could not be Woz and Denton. They could not have found them so easily in the dark. And they would make more noise, with heavy thundering footsteps and the crashing of their bodies through the undergrowth.

To say nothing of the firing of their guns.

"Jake! Jake!" She tugged on his hand to warn him. Head lowered, he was burning up the ground in front of her, leading the way, either knowing where he was going or giving a good imitation of it.

"What?" It was a growl thrown over his shoulder. His pace never slackened.

"There's something behind us."

He glanced over his shoulder again, and his hand tightened on hers, but before he could respond in any other way a bullet smacked into a tree not two feet from Charlie's head.

"Shit!" Jake altered course, propelling her in a right angle to the shot as another one was squeezed off. This one went thankfully wide, whistling harmlessly through the trees in the same direction as the first.

"Over there!" The voice was Denton's, and it was still some distance behind them. Whatever she had sensed chasing them had been far closer. The crack of a shot and the whoosh of a bullet passing terrifyingly near Charlie's ear put all thoughts of a second pursuing party out of her mind. The first was bad—and close— enough.

"Keep your head down, and move your ass." It was a roar. Jake raced through the trees, leaping over the underbrush and fallen logs that were suddenly underfoot, practically pulling her arm from its socket as he towed her behind him. Bent over like an old woman with a dowager's hump, feet barely touching the ground as she ran and jumped and stumbled and was dragged until she was on her feet and running again, Charlie gasped for air and prayed harder than she had ever prayed in her life. Bullets spat through the air around them, tearing through the leaves, smacking into trunks.

"Get 'em, get 'em, get 'em, get 'em!" Woz howled. Charlie barely heard him over the odd roaring in her ears.

Ahead of her, Jake suddenly stopped, and jerked her up beside him. His hand gripped hers tighter than ever even as her free arm windmilled for balance. Looking ahead, Charlie saw to her horror that they teetered on the brink of a cliff. Some twenty feet below, pushing deep into undercut banks, was a shining black ribbon of rushing water: the Cumberland, Charlie guessed.

No wonder she'd heard a roaring in her ears.

In that instant she realized what he meant to do. Charlie tried to back up, shaking her head in protest

"I can't—" she began, even as he growled, "Jump!"

She had no choice. He leaped with a death grip on her hand, and, willy-nilly, she went with him as bullets peppered the place where, seconds before, they had stood. Charlie fell like a stone, plummeting through the darkness, limbs flailing as she completed what she had been going to say in a hapless wail.

"—swim!"

6

Charlie belly flopped with a tremendous splash. Cold dark water closed around her, blinding her, choking her, shooting up her nose, filling her mouth. The shock of submersion galvanized her. Shutting her mouth with a snap, Charlie fought for all she was worth, kicking and thrashing against the life-stealing depths. Still she tumbled like a sock in a washing machine, helpless in this element that had terrified her from the moment she'd fallen into a neighbor's swimming pool as a five-year-old and nearly drowned. That time, just as she'd given up hope, she'd seen an angel, a lovely winged angel dressed all in white, and heard a heavenly chorus sing.

This time there was a big black shape rising like a giant bat beside her and a sudden vicious yank on her arm. She felt as if it was being wrenched from its socket as she was hauled ruthlessly upward. Seconds later her head broke the surface, and she gasped for air.

"Help!" she croaked, or tried to croak, but icy water spewed from her mouth like flow from a fountain as she struggled madly to keep her head up. Her own saturated hair blinded her and she still had trouble breathing because of all the water she was coughing up. Then she was once again sinking, slipping back down into the liquid abyss that terrified her more than anything in life. Despite her frantic efforts her head went under. She fought the amorphous enemy like a wild thing, kicking and clawing to no avail, only to find herself dragged to the surface again through no effort of her own.

"Hold still!" It was a roar. It had to be a roar, for her to hear it over the sound of her own heart pounding in her ears and the deep gurgle of the water as it rushed past. Charlie realized that Jake was there, right beside her, holding her hand in a steely grip as both of them were swept ruthlessly downstream by the strength of the current. She surged desperately toward him, free arm windmilling, kicking with all the strength left in her legs. They felt heavy, so very heavy, as if lead weights were attached to her feet, pulling her down. Nevertheless, she managed to reach him with that panic-stricken lunge, and locked onto him as the only solid thing in a terrifyingly unsolid world, wrapping her free arm around his neck, trying to climb on top of him in a blind panic that left no room for rational thought.

"God damn it," he began, trying to pry her off him, but whatever came after that she didn't hear. She sank like an anvil. Rather, they sank like an anvil, because the death grip she had on him wasn't being shaken off this side of the grave. She clung to his neck like a giant squid to a battleship, and for all his superior strength he couldn't budge her.

Within a minute or so he managed to break the surface again anyway, dragging her up with him. With her mouth and nose above water, she gulped in air. They were cheek to cheek, she discovered, and his was wet and cold and rough as sandpaper.

"Let go of my neck." He was somehow keeping them both afloat despite having her battened onto him like a barnacle and only one free hand to work with. Wrapping her legs around his waist for good measure, she choked and gasped and sucked in lifesaving air as they were swept downstream. "Damn it, you're going to drown us both."

"You're the idiot who jumped in the river." Her hold on him tightened as, using him for a ladder, she tried to climb a little higher out of the maelstrom. Her efforts plunged his head under. She went down, too, despite her best efforts to save herself, and tumbled head over heels as the current spun her around like a child with a ball. Having managed in the course of the past hour to survive two car crashes and the same number of armed killers and a hideously close encounter with a snake, she realized with the kind of mental clarity reserved for only the most extreme situations that she was now face-to-face with a death that was the stuff of her worst nightmares: She was going to drown.

She would never, ever, ever wish for excitement again, she thought despairingly, and managed by dint of pressing down on the closest submerged object—boulder-hard and covered with human hair, she suspected it might be the top of Jake's head—to win through to the surface, and draw air into her tortured lungs.

The surface exploded right in front of her, and Jake's seal-sleek head shot into view. Coughing, sputtering, he caught both her wrists in a crushing grip as he took a few gasping breaths. Without the boost of his body beneath hers to keep her up, she felt herself being sucked down again, and made a despairing sound just before her head submerged.

As she went under, his grip shifted. Somehow she was spun around, then hauled upward. When her head broke through again, and she coughed and gasped and sucked in air, she found that he was behind her, wrapping their shackled arms around her waist, supporting her with his body.

"All you have to do is be still!" he yelled in her ear. "Do you hear me? Quit fighting and be still. I can swim well enough for the both of us if you'll quit trying to drown me."

"Oh, God." Charlie had no strength left to fight anyway. The lead weights dragging her down seemed suddenly less oppressive, and she realized that one of her boots had fallen off. Enlightenment dawned, and she kicked off the other one. Never mind that they were her best boots, made of ostrich skin and costing over five hundred dollars; if she had to lose them to live, lose them she would. Even without them she wouldn't call herself buoyant—she was about as buoyant as a slab of marble—but her body definitely felt lighter. Bye-bye, boots.

"Just relax. Lie back against me and relax. I won't let you go, I promise. Hell, I can't, remember?" His voice was soothing now—well, as soothing as it was possible for a near-shout to be. With his arm around her waist and his back against hers, Charlie found to her surprise that she was not sinking. The water stayed at chin level, and she could breathe. She could feel his legs moving beneath hers, and his free arm seemed to be moving, too. He was swimming and keeping her afloat.

"I never even go out on boats," she moaned through chattering teeth, unable to believe the situation in which she found herself.

"I've got you. As long as you don't panic, we'll be fine." His tone was reassuring. So was the knowledge that, he was handcuffed to her wrist. No matter what happened, he wouldn't be letting her go.

Something that glowed faintly in the darkness floated into her line of vision, rising and falling with the motion of the water. It was pencil thick, and semicircular....

"Hold onto this," Jake instructed, distracting her by shoving a branch the size of an oar in front of her nose. Charlie took one look, and thought thank you, God! With his help, she wedged it under her arms, and felt marginally more secure. Between Jake and the branch, she just might survive this nightmare after all.

"Okay, we're heading for dry land. We'll be out of this in just a few minutes. Hang on."

He was towing her steadily toward shore, Charlie saw with a quick glance around. Although it was so dark she could barely differentiate the solidness of the branch from the inkiness of the water, she could tell where shore was: It was that place where the white line of foam bubbled against a grayer shade of night. Looking closer, she realized that the grayer shade belonged to a wall of sheer rock. Even if they reached the riverbank, getting out might prove difficult if that wall of rock was as straight up and down as it looked.

"Jake. Jake, they killed Laura." The imminent prospect of drowning had knocked the horror of it clear out of her head. Now that she felt fractionally more secure, her brain was able to function enough for her to remember.

"What?" He sounded startled.

"They killed Laura. After Woz knocked you unconscious, he shot her. Her head—it—it exploded."

"Jesus." She could feel the arm beneath her breasts tighten. "Stupid sonofabitch, I told him not to get his girlfriend involved. Now they're both dead."

Charlie took deep breaths, trying to expel the hideous image once again. For a few moments both of them were silent, as Charlie did her best to erase her memory banks and Jake concentrated on keeping them afloat. The glowing thing bobbed into view again, closer this time. Successfully distracted, Charlie frowned at it, then realized with a burst of pleased surprise what it was.

"Sadie!" The little dog was swimming valiantly in their wake. The glow Charlie had seen was from the reflector strip on her collar. Now that Charlie knew what to look for, she could see her distinctly. Sadie was stretching her neck, holding her head as high above the surface as she could, her eyes round and black in her pale face. She looked about as drowned and desperate as Charlie felt.

Without thought, Charlie reached out toward her. The branch immediately tried to dislodge itself from beneath her arms, and she grabbed it with a sudden fresh upsurge of panic and damped it back into place.

"What the hell are you doing? Lie still." Jake sounded breathless. "This is like swimming with a ton of bricks on my chest as it is."

"Sadie!" Charlie tried to coax the dog closer. "Come on, Sadie!"

"Are you deaf? I said lie still."

"It's Sadie! Here, girl!"

"I don't give a damn if it's Madonna. You keep wriggling like that, and we're both going to go under."

The warning terrified her anew. Charlie made a conscious effort to relax her muscles as best she could, letting her head rest back against his broad shoulder while her lower body floated, but she kept her eyes on her dog.

Sadie paddled determinedly, but whether her efforts or the force of the current brought her nearer Charlie couldn't tell. She was almost close enough to grab.

"Look at the damned dog's damned collar." Jake sounded so alarmed that Charlie stiffened instinctively. His arm tightened, and she was reminded to relax. "Look at it! It glows in the dark! No wonder they were able to track us through the woods. The damned dog was following us the whole time. They'll be able to find us in the river, too. Don't call it any closer. Damn it to hell, anyway! Grab it, and let's ..."

His words were interrupted by what sounded like a firecracker going off. A sudden splash of water hit Charlie in the face.

"Shit!" Jake said. "That was close."

Even as she looked in the direction he was looking in, Charlie heard what sounded like a whole string of fire-crackers exploding. Water shot up all around them in frothy white mini-geysers, showering her with spray.

From the top of the rocky wall that lined this section of the river, a baseball-size circle of light shone in their direction: a flashlight, she realized. Its beam was a puny thing as it reached over the dark water toward them, but its impact couldn't have been greater if it had been the spotlight that had mesmerized Charlie earlier: Woz and Denton had clearly found them. The geysers were caused by bullets hitting the water. Her pulse, frozen into near nonexistence, began to race anew. Had she thus far survived drowning only to be shot? Or maybe she would be shot, and then drown?

What was this, a hundred and one ways to die? Charlie moaned.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jake grab Sadie, pulling her in. His savage kicks and her death grip on the branch was all that was keeping them afloat. Bullets smacked the water in a sharp, staccato rhythm, kicking up water all around.

At least, she thought semihysterically, she wouldn't die alone. Not that there was much comfort in that.

"Let go," Jake said in Charlie's ear, and to her horror the branch was wrenched from her grasp. She gasped, stiffened, flailed and sank, swallowing what felt like half the river in the process. Jake sank right beside her, but instead of hauling her up again he kept her beneath the surface, holding her down and pulling her along as he swam. He was careful to keep just enough distance between them so that she couldn't latch on to him as she was desperate to do. Lungs aching, eyes wide open but unable to see anything in the frigid darkness, Charlie kicked and clawed at the water with her free hand even as she mentally surrendered to the inevitable: One way or another on this hideous night, she was going to die.

When they surfaced at last, she was so limp with terror and exhaustion and lack of oxygen that she couldn't even latch onto Jake. She gasped and coughed and wheezed, filling her lungs with air, letting him do with her as he would. Once again she found herself with her back to his front and their connected arms beneath her breasts. He was treading water, supporting her, and she leaned her head back against his shoulder and just breathed. None of her senses seemed to be working properly. Even her sense of fear was numbed, which she realized vaguely was probably a good thing. Otherwise she would, by now, probably have been literally scared to death.

However, she could, she realized after a moment or two in which air was the most important thing in the world, still hear. More specifically, she could still hear gun shots, although the sharp pop-pop-pop was fainter than before. That realization caused her to lift her head, brush the soaked hair from her eyes and look around. She could see, too, she discovered, and feel, and even smell. The wind was brisk and cold against her face. The muddy smell of the river was all around her. The intense blackness of the water and the slightly lighter darkness of the shore was interrupted by the faint beam of the flashlight which was now moving away from them. She and Jake had surfaced, Charlie judged, almost in the middle of the channel, and the flashlight seemed to be chasing a pale, glowing semicircle that bobbed up and down as it fled downstream.

Realization was sudden and terrible.

"They're shooting at Sadie!" Charlie gasped with horror, stiffening in spite of herself.

"God damn it." It was a warning growl in her ear as they started to sink, reminding her of the need to remain limp. "They're shooting at the branch. I put the damned dog's collar around it. With any luck, they'll follow it clear into the next county."

"But Sadie..."

"Right behind us," Jake said, sounding as if he was talking through clenched teeth. "What is the thing, a damned bloodhound? The way our luck is going tonight, we couldn't lose it if we tried. Think you could kick your feet a little without sinking us both? I'm getting kind of tired here."

That news was so alarming that Charlie found that she could, indeed, kick her feet. Meanwhile, her gaze fastened on Sadie's knobby head stretched cobralike above the water. The killers had been, for the moment at least, thrown off the trail. Now if they could just survive the river...

The current was far stronger where they were, Charlie realized after a few minutes. With the water rushing them inexorably downstream, they managed nevertheless to make progress toward the opposite shore. Jake's breathing grew increasingly labored, rasping its own warning against Charlie's ear. Now that she had the hang of it, she kicked fervently, although she could no longer feel her legs. Her teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering. She was so cold that she would have felt warmer sitting in a freezer, and the sad thing was that being cold was the least of her problems.

Thankfully Sadie remained near, fighting the current just as they were, sometimes drawing closer, sometimes being forced farther away. Charlie could not do much to help her pet under the circumstances, but she kept her gaze on her, almost as concerned for Sadie's safety as she was her own.

Another oar-size branch floated past, and she managed to grab it despite Jake's snapped warning to stay still. Wedging it beneath her arm, she felt marginally better. It provided an extra degree of buoyancy that might prove to be the difference between life and death. For Jake as well as herself, she realized. With their wrists handcuffed together, their fates were inexorably entertwined.

In a strange way, she found the knowledge almost comforting—until she considered that it was Jake the bad guys were primarily trying to kill.

She was just, with the worst luck in the world, along for the ride.

7

“Tell me something: What the hell kind of normal adult human being doesn't know how to swim?" Jake growled in her ear, sounding very tired. Charlie had thought his movements were feeling more and more sluggish, and his tone confirmed her estimate of his exhaustion. Their bodies were definitely riding lower in the water, too; her chin was more or less resting on the undulating surface. Her fear was already so acute that it could scarcely grow worse, but it definitely gave off a new, very sharp, pang. Sort of like an appendix that intermittently flared up, warning that it badly needed to come out, before it finally gave up the ghost and burst.

"One who never, ever planned to dip so much as a toe in a river," she said, and swallowed a mouthful of muddy-tasting water for her pains as a surge slapped her in the face. Clinging to his encircling arm for dear life, she coughed the water up. They seemed to be sinking lower with every movement, she realized. Among other problems, most notably her lack of swimming skills, their waterlogged clothes were dragging them down. There was nothing to do about it. Handcuffed as they were, they could not shed the soaked jackets that now seemed heavy as anchors. The only thing they could lose—their pants—didn't weigh enough to make their removal worth the near-death experience that would almost certainly be involved.

"I suppose you'd rather have been shot back there."

"At least I would have died quick."

They were being swept downstream at a far faster pace than they were progressing toward shore. Still, they were getting closer to safety, Charlie saw, twisting around to cast an assessing look over his shoulder at their destination. They had, roughly, another four hundred yards to go. Maybe—please God, please God—they would make it after all.

"Are you trying to sink us? Quit squirming." Something else she had seen in that one quick glance registered on her consciousness: a faint, luminous line on the horizon dead ahead. For a moment Charlie puzzled at it; then, absolutely unable to resist the temptation to do so, she sneaked another sideways glance that required just barely moving her head. The puzzling white line was still visible. There was no bank in that direction for the river to break against. The banks, a sheer wall of rock behind them and a more forgiving wooded shore ahead, were to the north and south. The new line of foam was to the west. Suddenly the increasingly louder roar which had been filling her ears for some time began to make a certain, terrible sense. The sound, which she had put down to a combination of the normal murmurings of the rain-engorged river and the thundering of her own blood in her ears, had a far more terrifying source.

"There's a waterfall ahead!"

"Just figuring that out, are you?" He sounded as if he were fighting for breath. "If you want specifics, it's about a thirty-foot straight drop onto rocks. I saw it when I checked this place out a couple of weeks back. Think you could kick a little harder?"

"We're going to die," she moaned, kicking so vigorously that the splash she made hit her in the face.

"Not that hard!"

She moderated her kick so that no more water was displaced, but kept her foot action vigorous. They were making steady progress toward shore, another eyeball-rolling glance informed her, but at the rate they were going they weren't going to make it. Already the current was much faster, pulling them along just like the debris swirling past. Its force made simply staying afloat while gaining scant inches per stroke about as much as they could hope for. There was no way to swim any harder. Both she and Jake were doing the best they could. Even Sadie was desperately fighting the current. Close behind them now, pushed against their bodies by the force of the water, Sadie was swimming almost backward, her muzzle pointing upstream. Her eyes were big as quarters and she looked terrified—almost as terrified as Charlie felt.

"Look at it this way," Jake said, his arm tightening around her rib cage as an entire tree rocketed past them, missing them by less than a yard. "Nobody lives forever."

"Oh, that made me feel better." She kicked for all she was worth, muttering every prayer that she, the daughter of a Baptist preacher and a gospel singer, had ever learned in her life. After a moment or two spent praying and kicking, she was interrupted by an amused sounding grunt in her ear.

"You sure know a lot of prayers."

"You should try saying some."

"I don't know any. But yours seem to be working, so keep it up. There's a rock dead ahead. I'm going to let go of you, and we're going to spread out and latch on to it. All you have to do is stay afloat. Ready?"

"No!" He was going to let go of her? No way! No how! She would sink like a stone. She would drown. She would...

But he had already let go and was swimming out from underneath her, pushing her away from him so that suddenly she found herself facing forward with him beside her but as far away as the chain would allow him to get. Panicked, Charlie churned her feet like a duck in its death throes, pawed at the water with her chained hand, and prayed as she had never prayed in her life. She was going down. But no. No. She still had the branch wedged under her left armpit. It was keeping her up. All she had to do was not let go.

At that point, the combined plagues of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn't have forced her to let go.

Caught up by the current, she—they—were heading straight for what was to all intents and purposes a tiny island. The centerpiece of it appeared to be a large rock, visible because it was a solid, unmoving charcoal triangle above the oil-black water, and because of the foam that leaped and curled against its base. Logs and a variety of miscellaneous debris had been trapped against it, making it into a small, precariously put together oasis— and their only chance. Latching onto it in their previous position would have been almost impossible. But in their present butterfly formation, they might, just might, be able to snag it.

Another strand of the current caught them up, carrying them wide. Suddenly they were being swept too far to the left.

"No!" Charlie cried.

"Kick! Kick!" The roaring of the water all but drowned out Jake's words. He surged toward the rock with a mighty one-armed stroke, towing her after him. She kicked frantically in an effort to do her part. All at once, while still about three feet short, they were level with the rock, passing it, going to miss it altogether....

Jake hurled himself across the surface of the water like a flying fish and latched on to the outermost branch of the outermost log. Charlie could see the paleness of his hand closing around the dark wet bark as, despite kicking for all she was worth, she was carried on downstream. Would his one-handed grip be strong enough to hold them? Would the forearm-sized branch break? The falls were so close she could have thrown a rock and it would have gone over, she discovered with a single terrified glance over her shoulder. She could feel the current tugging at her like a giant vacuum, intent on sucking her down.

Sadie, still paddling frantically upstream, swept past. "Sadie!" Without thought, Charlie lunged for her pet, knowing the dog faced almost certain death if she did not catch her. Her clutching hand closed over one fragile front leg. The branch wedged under her armpit shot free and was gone, just as quick as that. Charlie didn't even have time to feel horrified. Gasping, kicking, flailing, hanging onto Sadie with every scrap of determination she possessed, she sank. The water was merciless, swallowing her up like a giant mouth, shutting off air and hope. She clawed for the surface, for air—and felt a powerful jerk on her right arm.

Jake! Thank God for Jake! He was reeling her in. Her head broke the surface, and she gulped in sweet, blessed, lung-filling air as he pulled her toward him. Kicking for all she was worth, still maintaining her death grip on Sadie, she wrapped her fingers around the reassuringly thick bones of Jake's wrist and then, when she was close enough, practically swarmed atop him, locking her free arm around his neck. He felt reassuringly big and solid, her own private rock, and she was never, ever going to let him go again this side of dry land.

"You almost got us killed! Over a damned dog!" With one arm hooked over the branch, he kept them both afloat as she pressed her shaking body to his. He was as wet and cold as she was, and in as precarious a position, too, but his shoulders were broad and his chest was wide and his arms were strong, and, reasonably or not, Charlie felt safe in his hold. She pressed her cheek to his wet bristly one and clung, coughing and sputtering, as she fought to clear her lungs. Sadie, dear Sadie, scrambled free of her grip and up over her arm and shoulder to stand, trembling, completely clear of the water, on the uprooted tree which had saved them.

"She would have drowned if I hadn't grabbed her."

Each word was punctuated by a choking cough. She was numb with cold and boneless with exhaustion, and if he hadn't been holding her up she feared she would have just slithered down into the water like not-quite-set gelatin.

"Better the dog than us. For your information, when you grabbed her, I almost lost my grip on this tree. If I had, we would have gone over the falls." His voice was grim, but his breath fluttering past her ear was surprisingly warm and comforting.

"I'm sorry, okay?" Charlie coughed some more, pressing her cheek closer to his, greedy for even the meager warmth generated by this small area of skin-to-skin contact. Sadie, secure in the knowledge that the worst of the ordeal was now behind them, chose that moment to shake the water from her coat. Unfortunately, Jake got the brunt of the shower right in the face. When he opened his eyes again, he was scowling.

"I think that's called adding insult to injury. You're pushing your luck, dog."

This was addressed to Sadie, uttered half under his breath and on such a sour note that Charlie, feeling safer than she had for some minutes, almost smiled.

And why not? The situation wasn't good, but it was at least stable. The man she clutched was reassuringly solid, the thugs were off on a wild-goose chase somewhere downstream, and suddenly the odds of surviving the night appeared to have improved to something at least a little better than zero. As ridiculous as it seemed, that combination of factors made her suddenly feel almost euphoric.

The thought that she might actually be going to live was intoxicating. Maybe she would get a chance to wear that new dress and sing with Marisol at the Yellow Rose after all.

Or maybe not. Reality hit right along with a cold splash of water in the face. Charlie was reminded that her nonswimming self was still trapped in the middle of a rushing river only a few hundred yards above a deadly falls, hanging on for dear life to a stranger whom a pair of really bad guys were doing their best to kill.

If her odds of survival had increased, it was only because they had been so low to begin with. They were still so bad that no gambler worth his salt would touch them with a ten-foot pole.

"What now?" she asked, pulling her head back so that she could look at him. She couldn't see much of him in the darkness, but what she could see—and feel—gave her a tiny spurt of hope. He was exactly the kind of hard-muscled man's man who would know what to do in all manly situations. She bet he knew how to fix car engines and repair roofs and grill steaks outdoors. She knew for a fact that already tonight he'd jumped out of a plane, dodged a hail of bullets and swum more than halfway across a river with her dead weight attached. Right at this very moment, he was probably formulating a plan for their salvation.

"Got me," her hero answered.

"Great." Her bubble of burgeoning hope deflated like a pricked balloon.

"If you've got any suggestions, I'm all ears."

Charlie glanced around. The utter impossibility of remedying their situation was clear. "I don't."

"Look on the bright side: We're not dead yet."

"Yet is the key word here, I think."

"Regular little optimist, aren't you? All right, let go of my neck and hold onto the tree instead. I want to see what's on the other side of this rock, and to do that we have to move."

8

Charlie wasn't happy about letting go, but it was beginning to occur to her that hypothermia could probably be added to the list of ways she might reasonably expect to die tonight, right up there along with being shot and drowning. They had to get out of the water soon. She wasn't even shivering much any longer, and that, she knew, was a bad sign. With Jake's support she turned, hooked the arm that had been around his neck over the branch, then inched herself along in his wake. The tree seemed to be solidly wedged, she noted gratefully. It didn't budge despite their shifting grip, or the force of the water pushing against it. Sadie trotted along above their heads, careful to stay well clear of the water while keeping pace.

"Are you really a cop?" Charlie asked, grasping at any straw of hope she could think of as they made it to the other side of the pile of trapped debris. Jake was looking toward the bank as if he were contemplating the possibility of swimming for it. Not in this life, Charlie thought, and definitely not with her attached. No way. No how. In her opinion, dying of exposure was better than drowning. Anything was better than drowning.

"DEA." His tone was absent. He was still looking in a measuring way toward shore.

"Then don't you have any little DEA buddies around here somewhere who might come charging to the rescue about now?"

"Nope." He glanced around at her then, and grinned suddenly. She could see the faint gleam of his teeth through the darkness. "Sorry, Charlie."

"Oh, funny." She had heard that one so often that it had ceased to amuse about ten years back. "Why not?"

"Because none of my little DEA buddies, as you call 'em, has any idea that anything's gone wrong here. As for as my guys know, this operation is going down exactly as planned."

"Fantastic," Charlie said. "Were you supposed to be undercover or something? What were you going to do if something went wrong—as it obviously has? Didn't you have a Plan B?"

"Working on it."

"Care to share your thoughts?"

"You ever hear that old saying about curiosity killing the cat?"

Charlie snorted, and glanced meaningfully around. "Curiosity's going to have to get in line."

He grinned again. "Yeah, well, being in the wrong place at the wrong time works, too. Do you always drive alone through remote areas of the country in the middle of the night, by the way? It's just a suggestion, but you might want to rethink that."

"I was working," Charlie said through lips that were starting to feel alarmingly stiff.

"What do you do, run a traveling animal act? Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but driving around with a snake and a skunk—to say nothing of that pitiful excuse for a dog—doesn't sound like any job I ever heard of."

"I was releasing animals into the wild." That sounded commendably noble. It was also the literal truth. But Charlie had been brought up to tell the whole truth, so she reluctantly continued. "My sister just bought a company called County-wide Critter Ridders. People hire them to rid their houses, or barns, or whatever, of wild animals that have somehow managed to get in. Tonight Marisol—my sister—had something else to do, so she asked me if I'd drive the animals to Cheatham Wildlife Management Area and let them go. That's what I was doing. Getting involved with this—with you—was just bad luck."

"Yeah, well, your luck doesn't seem to be getting any better." Surprisingly, his voice was grim again. "Look upriver."

Charlie did, and her eyes widened. A bright light, the same kind of light that had first attracted her attention on the road, was just visible through the trees. It obviously came from some kind of aircraft, and it was just as obviously scanning the river.

"Could somebody have called the police?" she asked on a last, forlorn hope.

" 'Fraid not. Woz must have called for reinforcements. That's a helicopter."

"Looking for us?"

"Yep. They can't afford to let us get away, you know. We know too much, and they'll do whatever it takes to make sure we don't live to tell the tale. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a boat coming, too."

Charlie glanced wildly all around. Where they were, the river was about a quarter of a mile wide. The light seemed to be moving methodically from side to side. There was no way it wasn't going to see the rock jutting up from the glossy black surface of the water—and if it found the rock, it would find them.

"Oh, my God, what do we do?" Panic sharpened her voice.

"Only one thing to do: Swim for it."

"No! Oh, no!" She shook her head vigorously. "You know we can't make it to shore. The waterfall's too close and..."

Her voice broke off abruptly as Jake took a deep breath and disappeared underwater. For a moment Charlie could only stare in horror at the place where he had been. At any second she expected him to yank her down, too. There were several tugs on her handcuffed arm, but they were relatively benign, as though he was moving around. After the first one, she stopped paying attention anyway. She hung onto the branch like a monkey in a hurricane while her gaze fastened on the spotlight which was drawing ever closer. As she watched, wide-eyed, the helicopter itself appeared around a bend in the river. It was flying low, perhaps only a few hundred feet above the surface, and the whirr of the blades could now be heard distinctly even above the rushing water. The spotlight moved from side to side like a great all-seeing eye. In minutes it would be upon them. With her heart pounding so fiercely that she could feel each slamming beat, Charlie gave a sharp tug on the chain linking her to Jake. Seconds later he popped back into view, shaking water from his head and sucking in air.

"Jake, Jake, look! They're getting really close. There's no way they're going to miss us. We're out of time."

"Yeah, I see." He barely glanced at the oncoming helicopter. Instead, his gaze fixed on her face. "Charlie, listen: There's a tree wedged against this one that stretches out toward the bank. We're going to go underwater and hang on to it as far as we can, and then we're going to shove off hard with our feet and hope that the little extra boost that gives us brings us close enough to the bank so that we can make it. We're going to stay under until the helicopter passes, and we're going to have to take the dog under with us. If we leave it here, they'll spot it and it will give us away. All I want you to do is hang on to the dog, and leave everything else to me."

"I really don't want to do this." The prospect of leaving their safe haven terrified her. The shore was close, but the falls were closer, and the current was strong and swift.

"We don't have any choice."

He was already scooping Sadie up and handing her over. Charlie accepted her blissfully ignorant pet because there was nothing else she could do, and cradled the shivering dog close. A glance upriver and the increasing volume of the roaring in her ears confirmed that the helicopter was still there, its spotlight sweeping pitilessly from side to side.

Clearly, somebody upstairs was having a huge laugh at her expense.

"Here we go. Take a deep breath, hang onto the dog, and trust me, baby. We're going to make it."

With that he submerged. Charlie only had time to take a terrified breath that wasn't nearly as deep as she'd meant for it to be before he was pulling her under after him. The icy depths claimed her once again. Her heart was pumping so fast that a heart attack seemed like a foregone conclusion. She could feel Sadie's heart thudding, too. She had the little dog tucked under her arm like a football with her hand clamped over her muzzle. Did dogs know to hold their breath? Sadie seemed to. Caught up by the current, Charlie's hair wrapped seaweedlike around her face, covering her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Not that there was any need to use any of those organs. She could neither see, nor breathe, nor speak. She could only hang onto Sadie and trust in God and Jake as he pulled her with surprising speed through the water. She kicked, and gripped the slippery wood of the submerged log with the hand that was chained to his, but on her own she would have been swept away, she knew. The river was just too powerful. The current sucked at her feet, her legs, her body, drawing her toward the falls and certain death.

A sudden brightening of the depths made her eyes widen. It was only then that she realized they were open, and had been all along. The water around her was lit from above, turning a clear golden brown that was aswirl with twigs and clumps of mud. She could see Sadie's bug-eyed and terrified expression as her tiny paws paddled frantically, and Jake's big black shape in front of her, his hair standing on end as he pulled them along the log, and the solid gray cylinder of the fallen tree itself. All that she glimpsed in an instant, as if a camera had flashed, illuminating the scene. Then the light was gone, moving on, and she realized that the spotlight, and the helicopter with it, had just passed them by.

Without warning, Jake pulled her close, and his arm locked around her waist. An instant later she felt his legs bunch and then give a powerful thrust as, having reached the root of the tree, he abandoned their protector and launched them defenseless into the maelstrom. Hanging grimly onto Sadie, she kicked, but there was no doubt that Jake was propelling them both. Not that he seemed to be accomplishing much. They were being swept sideways despite everything he could do. The river had them at its mercy now; their best efforts were puny against its strength. Any minute, any second, she feared to feel the world dropping away beneath her, and herself going with it, shooting out into space, falling, falling, to drown or be crushed at the foot of the falls.

In seconds fear took a backseat to a more immediate need. Her lungs were bursting. She needed air. She had to breathe or die. Sadie, obviously in like distress, was struggling in her arms. Thrashing her legs, tugging frantically on her shackled wrist in an attempt to signal Jake, Charlie fought to surface. Her side crashed into something hard, and then her head was above water and she was gasping, coughing, drinking in air, lifting Sadie so that the little dog, too, might breathe. They had fetched up against another rock, she saw, blinking, and saw too that Jake stood—stood!—no more than chest deep in front of her. He grabbed the back of her jacket and hauled her to her feet. Knees shaking, still clutching Sadie, Charlie threw herself against him, clutching the soaking front of his coat in both hands as if she never meant to let go again.

"Hey, we made it." His arm came around her waist, hugging her close. Charlie's head was bent, and her forehead rested against his broad shoulder. It was a luxury, a wonderful, unimaginable luxury, to feel solid ground beneath her feet, and be able to breathe. A sideways glance showed her that the rock she had hit jutted like a finger about three feet out from the bank, and that without it they probably would have been swept over the fells, which were now no more than a hundred yards away. The helicopter with its spotlight was still visible, but it was moving away from them, continuing the search downriver. For the moment, at least, they were safe.

"Thank you, God," she muttered devoutly.

"Come on, let's get out of here." Taking Sadie from her, gripping her hand tightly, he started sloshing toward shore, pulling her behind him. Even with the rock to lean against, the current was strong and the footing was uneven. Her knees were still unreliable, and her stocking feet slithered and slid. It was hard to keep from falling, but Charlie managed it. If she could help it, she was never going to be submerged in water again, not even in the bath.

"Did we time that right or what?" Jake was climbing the rocky bank now toward the thick pine woods beyond, hanging onto Sadie and pulling Charlie behind him. He paused to nod upriver. Charlie looked, and felt her heart give a great leap of fear. Just as he had predicted, a boat was on the river. Its running lights and the powerful hum of its motor were unmistakable. It was small, an aluminum fishing boat perhaps, and coming downstream fast. Undoubtedly it was looking for them.

"They're better equipped than an army." Despair almost dropped her to her knees. She had no strength left to struggle on. Her muscles were as limp as wet shoelaces. Her bones seemed nonexistent. Her soaked jacket and jeans were unbelievably heavy and cumbersome. She was so wet water poured from her in streams, so cold goose bumps were racing along every square inch of her skin, and suddenly totally devoid of willpower. Jake the indefatigable dragged her on, hauling her up the slippery bank in his wake until the scent of pine replaced the muddy smell of the river and the first few feet of a thick growth of old forest stood between them and the unseen eyes of those on the boat.

Then he pulled her to him, and let her rest against his strength while she caught her breath.

"They are an army. A renegade army with one purpose: to make money. We're talking billions and billions of dollars here. This group is just one small branch of an enormous tree. And with what I know, we can start chopping that tree down."

"Always hoping you live to tell it."

He grinned. "Yeah, well, there is that. If we can keep alive until morning, though, we've got a shot. Come six a.m., my guys are staging a raid on the farm where the stuff we dropped tonight was supposed to end up. When they find out I'm not there, they'll come looking. I figure it'll take 'em maybe two, three hours after that to get out here, tops."

"So all we have to do is survive for, what, another eight hours?" Charlie's tone made it clear that she thought it was an impossible task.

He lifted the wrist that was manacled to hers, and checked his watch. The faintly luminous blue glow as he pushed a button drew her eyes.

"No more than five or so. It's three seventeen."

"Piece of cake." The sarcasm was unmistakable.

He chuckled. "You're still alive, aren't you? I mean to keep us both that way. Trust me."

Charlie sighed. Under the circumstances, what choice did she have?

"Okay, I trust you. So what do we do now?"

9

Walk was the answer to that, it seemed. Walk until Charlie had lost all sense of time and direction, until she was staggering like Frankenstein's monster through the tangled growth that covered the forest floor, until she wished her poor abused feet were once again numb as they were bruised and pricked and stubbed by countless rocks and sticks and brambles and who knew what else underfoot. Walk up a slope that was growing ever steeper. Walk until she was gasping with every breath she took, until the muscles in her legs ached, until she was ready to collapse with exhaustion. The only good thing she could say about all that walking was that it was probably keeping her from freezing to death. The temperature was in the forties, the wind was strong enough to intermittently shower them with dislodged pine needles, and the water weighing down her wet clothes seemed to have turned into about two tons of icy slush. "Do you have any idea where we're going?"

"Maybe." He didn't even glance back, just strode relentlessly on. He was in his stocking feet, too, his boots hawing been lost to the river just as hers had been, but if his feet were being systematically tortured he gave no sign of it. His fingers were entwined with hers and the warmth of his hand was appreciated, but that hold she could have broken. It was the unbreakable link of the thrice-cursed handcuffs that kept her on her feet. That, and the knowledge that Woz and Denton and who knew how many others were fanned out behind them, pulling out all the stops to find and kill them before they could make it to safety.

"Is it a secret?" There was an edge to her voice when he didn't elaborate.

"Are you always this sarcastic, or am I just getting lucky tonight?"

"Look, pal, I'm scared out of my mind and soaking wet and freezing to death and hurting in places I didn't even know I had and I lost my brand-new, five hundred dollar ostrich-skin boots in the river, which means I'm tramping around here next door to barefoot and my feet are being cut to ribbons and the whole thing is basically all your fault, so if I were you I wouldn't mess with me."

"I figured that sooner or later you'd get around to blaming all this on me." The long-suffering-male tone of his reply made her long to bop him in the back of the head. Lucky for him she didn't have the energy.

"If the shoe fits..."

"You're the one with no better sense than to go driving into a deserted area all by your lonesome in the middle of the night."

"Well, you're the one who parachuted out of an airplane and crashed into the roof of my car and made me wreck and..."

"That was Skeeter," he interrupted mildly.

"Oh, that's right," she said with bite. "You just mistook me for poor Laura, and dragged me into a fouled-up drug bust I'd much rather not know anything about, and nearly got me murdered, and..."

"I'm also the one who saved your life. Who towed your fanny all the way across that river, hmm?"

"Who made me jump into it in the first place? And anyway, I saved your life first. Remember the snake?"

"Oh, yeah, I remember it. Does screaming and wrecking a car because a snake is crawling up your leg count as saving somebody's life, do you think?"

"You're alive, aren't you?"

"So are you. So I'd say we're even."

"Well, I wouldn't. And I'm tired of walking. My feet hurt, and I need to rest."

Having come to an overturned tree, Charlie plopped down upon it without further ado. She was tired and cross and frightened and freezing times about a thousand each, and all she wanted to do was go home.

Fat chance.

The handcuffs worked both ways, she discovered. He was forced to stop walking when she sat. He backtracked, and Sadie was abruptly plopped into her lap. He'd been carrying the little dog, because Charlie needed all her energy to walk and he feared, despite Charlie's assurances to the contrary, that Sadie might go running off and somehow give them away. Fed up with his attitude toward her and her dog, Charlie cuddled Sadie close. In a burst of mutual feminine pique, they both glared up at the man who towered over them.

"Damn it. . . ." He broke off, snapped his teeth together, and ran his hand through his hair. "Charlie, look: There's a cabin around here close. Just over the top of this ridge, I think. When we get there, you can rest. If we're really lucky, there might even be a telephone. We can call for help."

Charlie's eyes widened as she took that in. A fresh little bud of hope surfaced inside her like the earliest crocus nosing up against a still-thick layer of crusty snow. Cabin, rest, phone—it all sounded amazingly good—in fact, too good to be true.

"How do you know?" she asked suspiciously. It was probably just a ploy to get her on her feet again, and make her keep walking. She was beginning to know how he operated.

"Because I had this whole area scoped out as soon as I found out they meant to use it as a drop zone. Aerial photos, maps, the whole works. Sometimes knowing the lay of the land can mean the difference between life and death."

That was so obviously true in this case that Charlie didn't reply. Instead she rallied her uncooperative body enough to stand up. The lure of a cabin was irresistible.

"Lead on," she said.

"Attagirl."

He scooped Sadie up, his hand closed around hers again, and he was off, once again pulling her through the dark woods at a killer pace while she hobbled along in his wake as best she could. If there was pursuit, she could neither see nor hear it The darkness was breached by no more than an occasional glowing pair of eyes, and the only sounds besides the ones they made were the wind rustling through the treetops and the cries of nocturnal animals.

Just when Charlie thought she could not take another step, there it was in front of them, just as Jake had promised: a cabin, foursquare and solid, nestled at the foot of a trio of tall pines. It was small, dark, and deserted-looking, about the size, perhaps, of a one-story detached garage, with a dirt road or track approaching it from the north and ending right in front of where they stood. As eager as a starving man suddenly presented with a feast, Charlie was all for rushing right inside. Jake, curse him, had to circle the place twice, staying well back in the trees, studying it from every angle.

"I'm dying here," Charlie finally protested through chattering teeth when he seemed ready to begin the circuit yet again.

"Not if I can help it." His hand gripped hers more tightly, and he glanced down at her, then relented. "All right. Come on."

To her relief, he headed straight toward the front, and only, door. Two wooden steps led onto a narrow covered porch. The door, which seemed to be made of wood with a glass insert, was in the center. He passed Sadie over, then, while Charlie waited, jiggling with impatience, he knocked softly, then tried the knob. When that didn't work, he turned, and without a word drove his elbow through the lowest of the six glass panes. The sound of shattering glass made Charlie jump. By the time she recovered, he had already thrust his hand through the hole he had made, and was unlocking the door.

"Watch the glass," he said, opening it and heading inside.

"Isn't this called breaking and entering? What if there's a burglar alarm?" she asked nervously, not having previously considered this aspect of it. Shivering, wet clothes squelching with every step, stepping carefully because the last thing her poor feet needed was to be cut by broken glass, she followed him inside.

"We couldn't get so lucky."

Good point. The idea of a convoy of police cars converging on the cabin was enough to make her heart go pitter-patter. But it wasn't going to happen, of course. Frowning, she put Sadie on the floor. The little dog stayed close at her heels.

"Is there a phone?" Charlie asked, straightening.

"How can I tell? It's darker than hell. But I don't think so. In case you didn't notice, there weren't any utility lines around outside." He had stopped just a few feet inside the door, and seemed to be working on getting his bearings in the nearly pitch dark. Charlie was, perforce, right behind him.

A feint musty smell enveloped her, and it was even darker inside than out, but at least the cabin was warmer than the woods. Now that she was out of the wind, Charlie realized just how strongly it had been blowing. She shivered, then found she couldn't stop. If she didn't already have hypothermia, it would be a miracle. Never in her life could she remember being so cold. What she wanted more than anything else on earth— except to go home—was a hot bath and dry clothes.

"I don't think there's any electricity either." Her hand had been groping the rounded log surface of the wall beside the door, instinctively searching for a light switch, but she found nothing.

"I'm not surprised. I think whoever owns this must use it as kind of a hunting camp. I doubt if there's even running water, or any heat except maybe a woodstove."

"Can we ... ?" At the alluring image this brought to mind, she momentarily perked up.

"Nope. Smoke."

"Right." She drooped, wrapping her free arm around herself in a futile attempt to seek warmth. Since her arm was as wet and cold as the rest of her, it didn't help.

Jake closed the door, and started hauling her about the cabin after him as he subjected the premises to a search with the aid of the luminous blue dial of his wristwatch. It was no more than a single room, perhaps twelve by fourteen feet, lacking even a bathroom and furnished with what seemed to be the barest of necessities. Stumbling blindly in his wake, Charlie finally stubbed her toe on a metal furniture leg, cried out, and decided to call a halt right there. Feeling for the cause of her pain, she discovered a bed, and sank down on the corner of it, already anticipating the jerk on her wrist as he was forced to stop. She could sense rather than see his frown as he turned.

"That's it," she said, narrowing her eyes at him although she was aware that it was too dark for him to see her expression. "I'm not moving another inch. I stubbed my toe, and I'm putting you on notice right now that you owe me a pair of five hundred dollar, black, ostrich-skin cowboy boots."

"You want to blame me? Fine." His impatience was obvious in his tone.

Ignoring his looming presence, no longer caring one whit if he didn't like what she was doing, she pulled the thin trouser sock from her damaged foot and massaged her throbbing toe. Jake loomed for a second or two longer, then apparently abandoned all thought of intimidating her into motion and moved toward the head of the bed. He stopped before he had quite reached the end of his tether but far enough away to cause her arm to hang in the air. Ignoring this indignity, Charlie heard the sound of a drawer being opened. Not that she cared. Her toe really hurt.

"Bingo," he said.

A sudden brightness made her blink. Startled, Charlie glanced around. Jake had found a flashlight, and was aiming its beam at the floor. By its light, she could see several things: cheap gray-flecked linoleum rendered even more unappealing by Jake's muddy footprints smeared across it, his big feet in their black socks, and part of the metal bedframe, box spring and thin ticking-stripe mattress of the bare bed on which she sat.

"Oh, goody." If her response was unenthused, it was because she felt unenthused. She'd gotten excited when he said bingo, expecting some really momentous discovery such as a working telephone, and in that context a flashlight just didn't cut it. Looking at it disparagingly, she bethought herself of something and felt a renewed upsurge of fear. "Won't they see the light?"

"It's not bright enough. Anyway, the windows all have blinds." He had already moved on to a chest beside the bed. Charlie gave a long-suffering sigh as her arm was stretched in a different direction, and pulled the sock from her other foot. This one tingled and throbbed too, and ached as if deeply bruised when she rubbed it.

"Hey, look at this."

Something landed on the bed behind her. Charlie glanced around. After the flashlight, she didn't expect much. Jake was already walking toward her, and the flashlight played over his find: a pair of oversize brown plaid bermuda shorts, some ratty-looking gray sweatpants, a faded green flannel shirt big enough to serve as a tent, and a moth-eaten blue blanket.

"Feel like slipping into something more comfortable?"

Her upsurge of enthusiasm suddenly fell flat.

"You're forgetting the handcuffs," she said. Showing her dry clothes when she couldn't get them on was rather like strewing seed just outside a hungry bird's cage: cruel.

"No, I'm not. How could I?" He crouched in front of her, placing the flashlight on the floor so that the beam provided just enough illumination to allow them to see each other and the small circle of their immediate surroundings. With a flicker of surprise, Charlie watched him pull a screwdriver and a hammer from the pocket of his soaked black coat.

"They were in the drawer with the flashlight," he said in answer to her look. "There are more tools, too, but these are what we need. Get down here on the floor, and let's see if I can get these handcuffs off."

The thought was so alluring that, for the first time in quite a while, Charlie moved with alacrity. She slid off the bed onto her knees. Sadie, who'd been sitting at her feet, sidled under the bed, where she lay down, propping her muzzle on her paws and watching the proceedings with apparent interest. Jake paid no attention to their audience as he positioned Charlie's hand flat on the linoleum, then maneuvered the screwdriver until the business end was wedged into the place where the chain was linked with the cuff.

"Don't move now."

Before Charlie had quite worked out the implications of that, he brought the hammer down on the head of the screwdriver with enough force to jar her bones all the way from her wrist to her teeth—and split the link cleanly in two. She snatched her newly freed hand out of harm's way, shook it in an attempt to get rid of the tingly feeling that ricocheted back down from her teeth to the ends of her fingers, and stared at him with real approval.

"Jake," she said, impressed. "You're a god."

"Well, I like to think so," he replied with becoming modesty, then grinned and stood up, stretching his arms wide. She stood up, too, and immediately shrugged out of her soaked suede jacket. It landed on the floor with a wet-sounding plop. Getting rid of it felt wonderful. She had not realized how heavy it was until her shoulders were suddenly free of the burden.

Jake had stopped stretching and was frowning at her.

"You're as blue as a Smurf."

'Yes, well, freezing to death does seem to have that effect on people, I've heard."

Paradoxically, the tartness of her voice seemed to ease his concern.

"Here, get those wet clothes off and put these on." He reached behind her, picked up the shirt and sweats, and thrust them at her.

Charlie took them with fingers that felt clumsy because they were still so cold, then hesitated, glancing up at him. What was left was slim pickings. "What about you?"

"I'll make do with the shorts and blanket. That way, if we end up hitchhiking, it won't be any trouble for me to stick out a leg." He smiled then, a funny, charming smile, with his mouth turning up crookedly and his eyes crinkling. It occurred to Charlie with some force that he was one hot, sexy guy. "Don't argue. Strip."

She frowned. "Turn around."

Dazzling as the idea of dry clothes was, she was not stripping with him just standing there watching. Especially not after the unsettling little epiphany she'd just had.

There was the way he was looking at her, too. His gaze was moving over her with an arrested expression as if he were really seeing her for the first time. Glancing down at herself, she realized that her black T-shirt with the Sugar Babes legend was wet through, and clung to the firm globes of her breasts like a second skin. Her nipples were hardened and puckered from the cold, and thrust boldly through the stretchy cotton and the flimsy nylon bra that covered them. His gaze lingered on her breasts for a moment, she noticed, then slid swiftly down over her slim waist, narrow hips, and long, slender legs.

Charlie's eyes widened and her mouth went dry as it occurred to her that her partner in extreme survival was checking her out.

When his gaze lifted seconds later and their eyes met, the expression in his made her heart skip a beat. Raw sexual heat flared out at her before he abruptly turned his back.

"So strip already," he said in a tone that was faintly grim. "And hurry up. Under the circumstances it's not smart to spend too much time in one place."

1O

“Want to explain Sugar Babes?"

It was the first thing he'd said to her in the minute or so that had passed since he'd started undressing. During that time, he had shed his coat and shirt—it was a pullover sweatshirt, Charlie had discovered, watching with fascination as he tugged it over his head—and he was currently in the process of unbuckling his belt. The question was directed at her without his ever looking around. Charlie was so mesmerized by the striptease taking place in front of her that it took her a couple of seconds to realize that he was talking about the writing on her T-shirt.

"Oh—I'm a singer. My sister and I perform as the Sugar Babes." His back was magnificent, she thought. Really, really magnificent. Broad shouldered and deeply tanned, with muscles that flexed every time he moved, it was mouthwatering enough that just looking at it made her forget that she was supposed to be removing her own wet clothes as well.

"Older or younger sister?" His biceps flexed as he stood on first one foot and then the other to pull off his socks. They were great biceps, she thought. The kind of biceps that women salivate over.

"Older. There are only the two of us. And my mom. My dad died five years ago." Realizing that he was almost finished undressing and she hadn't even started, Charlie hurriedly pulled her T-shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor. Unbelievably, she was even colder without the soaked shirt than she had been with it. Fortunately her hair was very nearly dry. Shaking it back from her face, rubbing her hands briskly up and down her goose-pimpled arms, she cast him a quick look to make sure that his back stayed firmly turned—not that the idea of being naked in front of him didn't turn her on, because it did, but she barely knew the man, after all, and she didn't think she was quite ready to take that particular step—then discarded her bra and pulled on soft, dry flannel. It was pure bliss.

"So how old are you?" he asked.

"Twenty-seven. What about you?"

"Thirty-four."

"Old man." She said it teasingly.

With another quick look at him, she shed her jeans along with her panties, then quickly pulled her knees up to her chest inside the voluminous shirt, which covered her well enough in that position so that only her small bare toes peeked out.

"Try thinking of it as experienced."

Was that a subtle come-on? Charlie wondered, and at the idea her heart rate increased. She discovered that she liked the idea of him coming on to her. Then an unmistakable sound distracted her, and she looked up to find that he had unzipped his pants, and was shucking them with as much nonchalance as if he'd been alone, revealing an athlete's toned physique. He was wearing a pair of dark colored boxer briefs that clung to his narrow hips and muscular thighs like a second skin. Of course, they were probably as wet as the rest of him, she realized, which would account for how very faithfully they molded his flesh. He moved then, stepping out of his pants, and she had an excellent view of a tight, well-muscled masculine backside in motion.

She was, she realized, starting to feel a little warmer.

"Charlie." He glanced around then, frowning, and Charlie realized that he must have asked her a question she hadn't heard. She was, in fact, staring at his tush, and he had caught her at it. His eyes narrowed at her, and she frantically searched her mind for what he had last said. Whatever it was, if she had even heard it, it eluded her now.

"What?" she asked, defeated. She definitely was feeling warmer.

"I thought you and your sister trapped wild animals, or something.'' He was stepping into the oversize Bermudas.

"I don't. She does. I was just helping out for tonight," she said, hurrying to finish buttoning up the shirt before he could turn around and see that she was not quite done and guess the reason why. Really, getting all those little buttons into their holes was not easy with fingers made clumsy by—well, she preferred to think it was the cold, "Marisol—my sister—asked me to cover for her tonight so that she could celebrate her boyfriend's birthday."

"So you actually make a living by singing?" The Bermudas were so big that they threatened to drop straight back down to the floor the minute he let them go. Charlie looked on with interest as he bent to retrieve his belt from the soaked black pants. Really, watching all those muscles ripple was entertainment worth paying for.

It was only when he straightened and started threading his belt through the loops on the Bermudas that she remembered that he'd asked her a question. Exhaustion had to have something to do with her lack of concentration, she told herself. And her racing pulse and the weakness in the pit of her stomach that happened when she looked at him, as well. His wasn't the first male body she had seen, after all.

Although she had to admit that it might well be the best.

"Nothing very lavish." She grimaced, thinking of the small amount she actually took home each week. "I sing backup for various studio bands during the day, and at night I perform wherever I can get a gig, or wherever Marisol and I—the Sugar Babes—can get a gig. We're singing Saturday at the Yellow Rose."

A hint of pride touched her voice as she said that last. Along music row, a job at the Yellow Rose was considered pretty prestigious. Then she remembered that she might not be around to sing on Saturday at the Yellow Rose, and that effectively distracted her from the sudden attack of the hots she seemed to be experiencing for Jake.

"Maybe I'll come see," he said, turning around. The Bermudas clung to his hips by nothing more than the grace of God and the good offices of his belt and reached well below his knees. He would have looked utterly ridiculous if it had not been for his truly gorgeous physique. Just looking at his chest was enough to infect her with the hots for him all over again, Charlie discovered. Wide and well-muscled, with a thick wedge of black hair, it tapered in a classic vee-shape from his shoulders to his narrow athlete's hips.

She wanted to touch it, to run her hands over the firm muscles, to thread her fingers through the mat of hair so badly that her toes curled.

"Always assuming we'll be alive Saturday." She said it flippantly, partly to remind herself of the direness of their circumstances and partly to remind him. His words, plus the heated glint in his eyes as they moved over her, told her pretty conclusively that she wasn't the only one dealing with a sudden bad case of lust.

Not that good girl Charlie Bates was going to do anything about it, of course. It just wasn't in her to jump a sexy stranger's bones. She hadn't been raised like that.

Why did nothing in her life ever work out the way it was supposed to? This gorgeous guy had practically been handed to her on a plate, and there were half-a-dozen good reasons why she wasn't going to do anything about it.

"You forgot to put your pants on," he said, draping the blanket over his shoulders and picking up the sweatpants. Charlie was horrified to discover that he was right She'd been so involved in salivating over him that she had totally forgotten that she was freezing, exhausted—and only half dressed.

He moved around in front of her and bent, holding the sweatpants open for her as if she'd been a child.

"Put your foot in," he said, with a lurking half smile and that carnal glint in his eyes.

She did, first one, then the other, sliding her long legs into the cavernous depths of the wide-load fleece, conscious of his gaze on the slender curves of her calves and thighs all the while. He swept her with a single hot look as, kept decent by the length of the shirt, she stood to pull the pants up. Then he turned away to scoop the flashlight from the floor.

She watched him, and her heart pounded. Her mouth went dry. She was totally turned on, she realized, and the man hadn't even touched her. Yet.

She'd wished for excitement, hadn't she? Well, tonight she'd gotten excitement in spades.

The terrifying kind of excitement that came with stumbling across murderous drug smugglers she could do without, she thought. But the kind of charged sexual excitement that was sizzling between her and Jake— well, now she knew what had been missing from her life. She had never, ever, even when they had first started dating almost a year ago, felt that kind of excitement with Rick.

This was what she wanted.

"There must be kids in your life," Charlie said, glancing around to find Jake going through drawers behind her and striving to keep the conversation light until she could figure out what to do about him. The question about kids had sprung from the way he had held out the pants for her, as if it was a natural thing for him to do.

Then she realized what she had said. Kids in his life? Oh, God, she thought fervently, don't let him be married.

"Six nephews. I have three brothers, and they have two boys each. Actually, when I'm home I baby-sit a lot."

"Where's home?" Without even thinking about it, she moved a little closer to him, caught herself doing it, stopped, and crossed her arms over her chest.

"Memphis."

"That makes you a local boy." What she was really trying to find out was whether or not he had a wife, but so far she couldn't quite seem to phrase the question subtly.

"Close enough."

"So are you married?" Right, Charlie, just blurt it out.

He glanced around at her, smiling faintly, and again she was aware of the smoldering quality of that look. "Nope. You?"

Thank you, God, she thought, but managed not to say it aloud. "No."

"Good."

Without warning, the flashlight went out. The cabin was plunged into total darkness.

"Shit"

"Jake!" Charlie moved toward him, reaching out for him in sudden alarm. Her fingers encountered the soft hair on his chest, and brushed over the warm hard muscles beneath before being reluctantly withdrawn. The contact produced a tingling electricity that shimmied along every nerve ending she possessed. The strength of her own reaction made her catch her breath.

"It's okay. Nothing to worry about. Damn batteries."

"We don't really need it, do we?" It was an effort to make her voice sound normal. She had to resist the urge to touch him again. It was too soon, she didn't know him, the situation was about as inappropriate as one could get.

She could hear him doing something that involved metal, shaking it until it rattled, screwing and unscrewing a lid.

"If we do, we're out of luck, because it's not coming back on. Here, wrap this around yourself. It's cold out there, and we've got to get moving. I wish to hell we'd managed to hang onto our boots."

"Ostrich leather, black, size seven. If we get out of this, you owe me a pair." Her tone was severe, but Charlie was smiling faintly as she said it.

"Yeah, okay. Fine. Blame me. I don't care." He sounded as if he might be smiling, too. Charlie felt something settle over her shoulders: the blanket. The gift of it touched her. For all his obvious physical toughness, he was as human as she was and he would freeze outside without it. It also settled something: However unexpected her attraction to him might be, it was something that deserved to be explored.

For once in her life, she meant to take a chance. And good girl Charlie be damned.

"Jake." She reached out for him again, and this time touched his arm. Her hand curled around one of the biceps she had so admired. It felt warm and hard beneath her fingers. "You know what? I think you're a pretty great guy."

Heart pounding, she took a step closer, rose up on tiptoe and kissed him. His lips were warm, and firm, and tasted faintly of the river they'd just left behind. For a moment, as she pressed her lips to his, he did nothing, just stood immobile as if he would absorb the touch of her lips.

"God, I've been wanting to do that." He said the words against her lips. Then his arms came around her hard and he pulled her to him and bent her backward over his arm and slanted his mouth over hers with a greedy hunger that made her quake.

By way of a reply, she wrapped her arms around his neck and put her tongue in his mouth and kissed him back for all she was worth. But it was he who controlled the kiss now as his tongue thrust urgently into her mouth and his hand came up to cover her breast. Charlie thought she would die at how good it felt to have his hand there. Her loins clenched and throbbed. Her breasts swelled, and the one fortunate nipple thrust boldly against the palm of his caressing hand. Quivers raced up and down her thighs as he pressed his knee between them. Her knees went weak. The bed was pushing against the back of her calves as he turned her around, and she swayed against it, wanting to be horizontal with him in the worst way.

Whether she pulled him down or he pushed her she didn't know, but suddenly she was on her back on the mattress and he was coming down on top of her, pulling up her flannel shirt, cupping her breasts, running his thumbs lightly over the distended nipples, kissing her ravenously all the while. Charlie moaned into his mouth, sliding her hands over his chest, tugging at his ridiculous shorts, so hot her legs were already wrapping around him and she wasn't even naked yet, hotter than she could ever remember being for a man in her life.

"Let's get your clothes off." His voice was thick as he lifted his head to yank the huge shirt over her head. His mouth returned to claim her breast; he slid his tongue over her nipple, then sucked it. At the same time he reached down between their straining bodies to slide his hand inside her pants and caress the cleft between her legs. His thumb found the place where she most wanted to be touched, and pressed.

"That is so—incredibly—good." She was panting, squirming beneath the ministrations of his mouth and that knowing hand, on fire for him, wanting him inside her so badly that she felt like she'd die if he made her wait.

She couldn't wait. Her hands slid between them to caress him through the soft cotton shorts. He was huge and hard and so hot that she could feel the heat even through the cloth. Her hand closed around him and he groaned.

"Charlie. God, Charlie." He jerked down her pants, baring her to the knees, and she kicked the offending garment the rest of the way off. Her legs parted, eager for him to come inside her, but instead of shedding his own pants he bent his head and pressed his mouth to her. She cried out as his tongue found the very center of her, gasping his name and digging her nails into his shoulders. His mouth was wet and scalding hot and well versed in the ways of women, and Charlie thought that she would die with the sheer pleasure of what he was doing to her.

"Oh, Jake!" It was a shuddering sigh as she let go of the last of her inhibitions and clutched at his hair.

"Gently, baby," he murmured. She was arching herself against his mouth and trembling and begging silently for release.

"Please don't stop," she gasped when his mouth didn't return to finish what it had started. But then, before she could even really begin to miss him, she felt something even better, the thick burning length of him sliding against her, pushing inside her, filling her to bursting, causing her body to pulse with a million fiery tremors as he sought his own pleasure at last. She clung feverishly to him as he took her with hard deep thrusts until she was striving with him, until she came, until her body exploded into a fireball of sensation that rocked her world.

If there was such a thing as sexual nirvana, that was where she landed.

She was just floating back to earth when the cabin door opened and two men carrying flashlights and God knew what else stepped inside.

11

A number of things happened almost simultaneously.

Sadie erupted barking from beneath the bed. The flashlights found them. Jake hissed, "Get under the bed!" and shoved Charlie over the far edge, then launched himself off the mattress toward the newcomers in a low, fast dive. A gun boomed.

Charlie hit the floor hard on her hands and knees, and screamed as a bullet tore through the mattress to lodge with a thud just inches from her fingers.

The men were now engaged in a desperate struggle. They were cursing and grunting and thumping around, and to her horror Charlie recognized the voices of Woz and Denton. Oh, God, if she and Jake had left just a few minutes earlier, they would have escaped.

The most mind-blowing sexual experience she had ever had in her life was going to lead to her death. How ironic was that?

The sickening sound of blows came fast and thick.

Sadie barked frantically. Both flashlights had apparently hit the ground at around the same time Charlie did, dropped in the newcomers' surprise at Jake's assault. One was rolling away across the room, casting weird shadows as it went. The other lay near the men's feet. Its beam pointed toward her, illuminating the floor, the underside of the bed, her and Jake's abandoned clothes—and the screwdriver.

With no very clear idea of what she meant to do but knowing that in a crisis of this nature any weapon was better than none, Charlie snatched up the screwdriver and, crawling on her hands and knees, rounded the foot of the bed. The men were very near. It was easy to tell which one was Jake because he was barefoot and naked. Jake was grappling with Denton, who was taller and thinner than Woz. Jake had a choke hold on Denton's neck and a grip on his gun hand and seemed to be using him as a shield against Woz, who circled the writhing pair, darting this way and that and lashing out with his fists and feet in a kind of deadly dance, looking for an opening. Woz had his pistol ready, but unless he wanted to risk hitting Denton it was obvious that he was going to have to be careful how he used it. It was, however, clear to Charlie that it was just a matter of time before Jake went down. Naked and weaponless, he couldn't best two armed men.

"Get the girl!" Denton grunted. Woz glanced around.

"Damn it, Charlie, run!" Jake roared.

But it was too late. Even as Charlie backpedaled frantically, then tried to roll under the bed, Woz was upon her, knotting a fist in her hair, locking an arm around her neck, hauling her to her feet. Charlie didn't bother to scream, or fight. She hung limply in his hold, letting herself be dragged toward where Jake and Denton still struggled.

"Hey, asshole, I got your girlfriend!" Woz said in a taunting voice. His arm, in a bulky twill coat, was wrapped around her neck. He held her so that there was no possibility of escape, with his pistol pointed at her head.

Charlie clutched the screwdriver and prayed.

Sadie came running up, yapping frantically at this assault on her mistress, and launched herself at Woz's leg.

"Get out of here!" Sadie was too small to do much damage, but Woz glanced down, and angrily shook his leg. The pistol wavered and fell...

Charlie took a deep breath, and drove the screwdriver with all her might into his thigh. It pierced his pants, and sank deep, feeling like a fork going into tender meat.

He screamed, and let her go, and dropped his gun, clapping both hands to his punctured thigh and falling writhing to the ground.

"Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!"

"That was for Laura," she said, and went diving after Woz's dropped gun.

Jake did something violent to Denton, but Charlie didn't know exactly what because she was sliding across the floor just about then. When she came up with the gun, scrambling to her feet and gripping it in both shaking hands, it was to discover that the fight was over.

Denton was on the floor near Woz, and Jake, gun in hand, was taking careful aim...

"Oh my God, don't kill him!" Charlie gasped, knowing that she couldn't be a party to cold-blooded murder even though Woz and Denton deserved it. Jake didn't even look at her before he fired. Denton screamed, clutched his leg, and rolled around on the floor.

"I'm not going to kill them, just make sure they won't be coming after us," Jake said grimly, glancing at her before repeating the exercise with the already shrieking Woz. Then he turned to Charlie, and held out his hand. "Here, give me that gun, and grab us some clothes. Time to get the hell out of here."

It was only then that Charlie realized that she, like Jake, was as naked as the day she was born. Trying not to listen to the cries and curses of the men writhing on the ground, she snatched up what clothes she could find— the flannel shirt and sweatpants, both of which were still on the bed—and pulled the one over her head and tossed the other to Jake. As he juggled the guns in one hand and yanked the pants on, she scooped up Sadie. Then the three of them headed cautiously out the door.

Only to find, parked neatly in the driveway beside the cabin, Critter Ridders' own Jeep, smashed front end and all. Charlie was embarrassed to realize that she and Jake had been so engrossed in what they were doing at the time that they'd never even heard it pull up.

"Yee-haw, I think we're in business," Jake said when he saw it. "Let's go."

The bad news was, the smell of skunk was still so strong that, after stopping to call the state police and Jake's boss from the convenience store, they had to drive all the way to Nashville with the windows rolled down, and it was cold. The good news was, the snake was long gone. But the raccoon and the possums were still in their cages.

"I've got to go," Jake said, after driving her clear back home. An unmarked car was already waiting for him in front of her mother's house, where she had told him to take her after he'd refused to let her drive on from the convenience store alone. Two men in suits got out of the car as they pulled up. Jake, wearing nothing but too-large sweatpants, lifted a hand at the men in greeting and then turned to Charlie.

"Jake." But she couldn't say anything else, because she knew it was good-bye and her throat was suddenly aching. He leaned over and kissed her, quick and hard, on the mouth.

"See ya," he said, and bestowed a quick scratch on Sadie before getting out of the Jeep. Her mother came out of the house just then, standing on the porch and staring, but Charlie stayed where she was, watching as Jake slid into the back of the car, which promptly drove away.

Only then did she climb out, and, carrying Sadie, walk toward her mother, who hurried down the walk to embrace her.

Even as her mother exclaimed over her, and hustled her toward the house, Charlie couldn't rid herself of a terrible sense of loss.

She'd taken a risk, given him all she had to give, and now he was gone. The question now was, would she ever see him again?

12

BY nine o'clock Saturday night, Marisol was still trying to explain to her insurance company exactly what had happened to her Jeep. Parachuting drug smugglers and undercover DEA agents and ticked-off skunks did not seem to fit into any categories that would ensure a prompt payout. Marisol was growing increasingly exasperated, and, though she knew it was not Charlie's fault, some of that exasperation naturally was vented at her little sister. Especially since Charlie had made the gigantic error (in Marisol's opinion) of quite firmly breaking up with Rick. Charlie had to have dog food for brains, as Marisol told her. The man was good-looking, nice to kids and animals, and had a good job.

What more could Charlie want?

Something a little more exciting, Charlie answered stubbornly. And it was so unlike Charlie to be stubborn that Marisol was truly concerned.

Whatever had happened on the night the Jeep had been wrecked—and Charlie had told her, but the whole story sounded so fantastic that Marisol couldn't help but wonder if perhaps her sister had hit her head hard in the crash and imagined two-thirds of it—the bottom line was that Charlie, sweet, sensible Charlie, had been changed ever since.

Take tonight, for instance. Charlie never suffered from stage fright—she shouldn't, she'd been singing in public since she was a little girl—but she'd been jumpy as a cat at a dog convention getting ready for tonight's performance. She'd changed costumes three times, which meant that Marisol had had to change as well, because they had to match, then in the end had gone back to the one they'd originally decided on, the new gold-sequined evening dresses with the long white gloves. This appearance at the Yellow Rose was important, for God's sake, it could be their big break, and Charlie was in a dither.

Charlie never got in a dither.

They were getting ready to go on, the emcee was announcing them, and Charlie kept peeking around the curtain, looking out at the audience as if she was searching for somebody in particular.

Charlie hadn't really told her, but Marisol knew her little sister well enough that she was willing to bet she could even guess who: this Jake guy, this DEA agent who had, in some tangled fashion that Marisol still didn't quite have sorted out in her head, been responsible for the ruination of her Jeep.

For Charlie's sake, she hoped he showed up.

Then they were on stage, breaking into their opening song. Marisol was shaking her booty along with her tamborine and looking beautiful and Charlie was strumming her guitar and singing like an angel and looking beautiful, and everything was going just as it should, when Charlie's eyes fixed on something beyond the stage and she stopped singing and broke into this absolute shit-eating grin and missed two whole chords.

Horrified, Marisol tried to take up the musical slack even as her gaze followed Charlie's. In just a couple of beats Charlie was with her again, but not before Marisol spotted him.

Not that it was hard. He was the only gorgeous hunk in the place with a pair of ladies size seven, black ostrich leather cowboy boots sitting on the table in front of him.

About the Author

Karen Robards lives in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, Doug, and their three sons: Peter, sixteen; Christopher, ten; and Jack, four. Besides her family, books are the great passion of her life. The award-winning author of twenty-six novels describes herself thus: "I read, I write, and I chase children. That's my life!"