front, where he could put his hand on the hood. It must have been warm, because he nodded to her.
Both of them turned and scanned the area.
I did, too, from where I was sitting inside the SUV.
There was nothing to see or hear, just the soft rippling of the water as it brushed along the edges of the river.
Until a protesting shriek cut through the silence, and was abruptly shut off.
Rafe took off running. Grimaldi did, too.
“Move,” Curtis told me, his voice panicked.
I scrambled out of the car as he slid, snakelike, over the back of the seat and oozed through the door and onto the grass. He took off after the others.
I hesitated for a second before I ran around the car and started wrestling Carrie, protesting at the rough handling, out of the seat.
Then a gunshot rang through the air, blasting my eardrums, and my fingers fumbled.
Rafe and Grimaldi both had guns. Jacob Drimmel had a gun. Hell—heck—Agent Yung had a gun. That bullet could have come from any of them, and could have hit any of them, but my first thought was that Rafe had been shot. Again. He wasn’t wearing body armor today, and a bullet now—unlike last month—could have killed him.
There were sounds from the woods, as if a body—or more than one—was crashing through the trees.
I ducked down behind the car, still trying to unfasten Carrie, but the straps and buckle were fighting me, probably because my fingers were shaking.
Then Jacob Drimmel burst out of the trees and I saw him for the first time.
There was absolutely nothing of Curtis in him, although Laura Lee might have had his height, if nothing else. He was a big guy, and looked something like an overgrown, aging Howdy Doody. The hair must have been flaming red at some point, and there were still streaks of faded ginger among the silver. His face was ruddy and broad, fair-skinned, and I imagined as a young man, he’d probably had freckles. At the moment, the color was florid, and he was baring his teeth in a snarl. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his forearms were still muscled in spite of his age.
He ran for the truck, but when Rafe burst out of the trees on the left, Jacob changed direction and made for cover behind the truck instead. At the same time, Curtis came out of the woods a few strides behind Rafe. “Granddad!”
I didn’t see Grimaldi, so I figured—if I were thinking clearly at all at that point, and I’m not sure I was—that she was taking care of Leslie Yung. Hopefully that meant that Yung was alive, and that Jacob hadn’t had time to kill her.
He hesitated for a second at the sound of his grandson’s voice, just long enough to look in Curtis’s direction. That in turn caused him to notice me standing there on the far side of the SUV. When he moved toward me, I shoved the lock down and slammed the door, shutting Carrie inside. It took a couple of crucial seconds, but it put a locked door between him and her. Then I did the same with Grimaldi’s door, that she had left open.
All this locking and shutting only took a couple of breaths, but it was long enough that Jacob was on me before I could get away. He reached out and twisted a hand in my hair, and yanked me backward.
I shrieked—being pulled by the hair like that hurts—and then my back slammed into his chest and drove the rest of the breath out of my lungs. He wrapped a meaty arm around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides. With the other, he pressed the muzzle of the gun in his hand to my temple.
“One more step and she gets it!”
It was such a horrible movie-cliché, but I didn’t doubt for a second that he meant it. I froze, and everyone else did the same.
“That’s my wife,” Rafe told him, and his voice had that same soft rumble a big cat’s growl has just before it jumps.
Jacob chuckled, and I could hear the edge of excitement in it. It made all the little hairs on my body stand up. “Then you’d best be careful what you do with that weapon.”
He met my eyes, and I knew what he was thinking. He was a good enough shot to put a bullet in the middle of Jacob’s forehead