to be going wild, way off the mark. Her scores on the range had always been just about perfect, and she’d never had a problem in the field.
She had no idea what was going on. Her vision was fine—until she looked at the two targets she was trying to hit. Then all bets were off, and it was like she was peering through a kaleidoscope. Everything was swimmy, fractured into separate pieces of light, and the view made her feel sick to her stomach.
She couldn’t back away from this. Cooper was counting on her. She squinted hard into the face of the mass of swirling colors and tried to pull them apart into separate shapes. It gave her a headache so bad it was like rusty teeth were sinking into her temples, but she could almost get it—
Then she tumbled forward, dry-heaving onto the ground.
She had a split second’s awareness that the whole top half of her body was now sticking out from behind the cover of the car door, and then Cooper grabbed a double-handful of her coat and pulled her back to safety. His face had gone ashen. He turned around, pressing Gretchen between him and the car, shielding her with his body. They were both crouched and shaking
He was so warm.
“I can’t see,” she managed to say. “I can’t see them at all.”
“Neither can I.” He leaned forward, resting his forehead briefly against hers. With his hands still cuffed in front of them, this was probably just the easiest way for him to comfort her; she couldn’t even know that it meant anything to him. But the intimacy and tenderness of it shook her to her core.
This was a bad time to be shaken to her core, considering the situation. She tried to clear her head. “If we can’t hit them, we can’t fight. That leaves flight.”
“Flight,” Cooper repeated. He looked almost wistful. Then he nodded, back to normal again. “Got it. You get back in and I’ll follow you.”
“They’re running!” one of the men yelled, and the barrage of gunfire only intensified. The dizzy, muddled part of her vision got closer and closer as she heard footsteps grate across the snowy asphalt.
The shooters were coming for them.
“Don’t wait for me,” Gretchen said. She moved in a duck-walk towards the driver’s side door.
Cooper completely refused to get in before her. He was still covering her, making sure any bullet meant for her would have to go through him first.
She slammed the car door behind her and saw Cooper fling himself in the backseat.
Something was strange about all this. Well, everything was strange about all this, but there was something that was on the tip of her tongue:
The men in the car had her in plain sight before she’d been able to get behind the car door. Unless they were the world’s worst shots, they should have killed her by now. And they weren’t the world’s worst shots. She wasn’t riddled with bullets, but the car door was. If it hadn’t been reinforced for law enforcement work, it would have given up the ghost already.
These men were perfectly good shots—which meant that she hadn’t been who they were aiming at.
Cooper.
Someone had tried to kill Cooper in prison—and they were still trying to kill Cooper. This was all about him. Their plan hadn’t worked inside prison, so now they were trying it on the outside, and considering the length of the drive, they had a nice, long time to make it work.
She shifted into drive and slammed on the gas. The car fishtailed as it lurched forward, the smell of burning rubber filling the air as the tires screeched against the road.
“They’re getting back in their car too,” Cooper reported, craning his neck to look out the back window.
“Let them. I have the best pursuit record in the whole office.”
“We’re going fast,” Keith observed. By the look of him, he’d tried and failed to get his gun out of its holster. The head injury had been even worse than she’d thought: his face was covered with blood, and he sounded like he was dreaming.
To her surprise, Cooper was the one to answer him, and he sounded gentle, as if he were talking to a little kid. “Yeah, we’re breaking all kinds of speed limits.”
Keith nodded as if that satisfied him. “Good. We can outrun the snakes.”
“Sure, buddy,” Gretchen said.
She liked him a lot more with the concussion, actually. He was kind of adorable.