of hurried footsteps that brought the inmate to the door of the motel room. “This asshole kidnapped a girl!”
“What?” Cole asked.
Jessup stomped across the room toward the door. Although Lambert steeled himself to stand in his way, he changed his mind when he saw the tomahawk clutched in Jessup’s fist. “Did she get away?” Jessup asked. After shoving Lambert aside, he started cursing in a raspy snarl.
“Check that,” Lambert said. “He didn’t kidnap her. Just hunted her down . . . again.”
“What are you?” Jessup grunted. “Psychic?”
“Yeah.”
“Then tell me which way she went.”
Lambert screwed his face into a defiant, jailhouse sneer and looked to Cole. “Remember that young one the Full Blood was talking about? That’s her.”
“Take the car and get out of here,” Cole said to the inmate.
The older man seemed to be favoring his left leg, but that turned into a more pronounced limp as Jessup circled around to the driver’s seat of a pickup truck parked next to the businessman’s car. “Best get out of town altogether,” he said. “No tellin’ if those cameras are workin’ or who was watching when this one here decided to assault a paying customer.”
Cole looked up and around to find a few clunky surveillance cameras mounted to the corner of the overlap of the motel’s roof. Not even the painful hunger he’d been feeling was a good enough excuse for that kind of recklessness. Tossing the car keys to Lambert, he grabbed the passenger door of the pickup that was still swinging on its hinges.
“Where the hell am I supposed to go?” Lambert asked.
Before Cole could come up with something, Jessup said, “Raton. It’s about two hours from here, just across the New Mexican border. Just take 69 to I-25 and head south.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jessup’s pickup was a Ford. If Cole had missed the emblem on the front or the back of the vehicle, he still would have gleaned that fact from the Ford mud flaps, Ford visor, and air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. There was a passenger seat directly behind him that was piled high with tackle boxes, tool kits, and rifle cases that Cole guessed contained much more than tackle, tools, and rifles. Because of the air freshener, he could smell a touch of pine mixed in with the pungent varnish used to treat Skinner weaponry. Ford pine.
“What’s so funny?” Jessup asked from behind a wheel that was wrapped in a leather cover emblazoned with faded oval symbols.
Cole sat on the far end of the bench seat, with maps, atlases, and several spiral notebooks sandwiched between him and the other Skinner. His arm rested on the edge of the door, hanging partially out of the lowered window. It was getting dark, so the air was cooling down considerably. The more that blew across his face, the wider he smiled. “Nothing’s funny,” he replied. “I just never thought a Skinner could afford to be a germaphobe.”
Jessup turned to look at Cole as if he didn’t realize he was pushing the gas pedal down almost far enough for the truck to fly into orbit. The bottom portion of his face was covered by what looked to be an old surgical mask tied around his neck and ears by elastic bands. “Germ a what?”
“What’s the deal with the mask?”
Jessup looked at the road and then leaned over to stick his face partially out the window. As soon as he leaned back in, he slammed his foot on the brake and twisted the wheel to send the truck into a controlled spin that pointed its nose back toward a dirt road leading away from Highway 69. “Here,” he said while removing the mask and tossing it over to Cole. “See for yerself.”
With the mask resting in the palm of his hand, the next logical thing for Cole to do was place it on the spot on his face where it was meant to go. Before it got close enough to touch his nose, his sinuses were flooded to capacity. The scents were pleasant at first. Trees, fresh air, oil from the truck, mildew from old lawn furniture that had been dumped on the side of the road about a hundred yards back, even the gritty scent of dirt—all of it washed through him like a torrent. It wasn’t long before the combined odors were enough to make him pull the mask away.
“Takes some gettin’ used to, don’t it?” Jessup asked.