The black spot didn’t move for a moment. “They’re right behind us,” it finally muttered. “Maybe a couple hundred yards. That’s all.”
“But what are we going to do?” Ron insisted.
“I think they’ve got night scopes,” Crane said matter-of-factly. “We’ll be sitting ducks when they catch up to us.”
“What do you suggest?” Ron hissed. He was losing what remained of his cool.
“There’s a shallow ravine about a hundred feet ahead of us. I was hoping we’d just go through it and head toward the river. But now I don’t think we can make it. We’ll have to try to hide there, ambush them from cover.” And then Crane turned and strode off at the same pace as before.
“Wait up,” Ron started to say, but Mary suddenly straightened and trotted past him. After all, they only had a short way to go. “Damn.” He followed them.
As Crane had said, they came to a low, narrow furrow in the otherwise flat landscape. Pines and pin oaks grew out of it, leaning at crazy angles and making a strange maze-like apparition in the night. At a point where the wall of the ravine fell sharply off, Crane eased into it and then lay against the slope, snaking down until his head was just beneath the lip.
“Do the same,” he said to Mary. “You just squat down behind us,” he told the unarmed Riggs.
The three prepared themselves. “When I hear them coming, I’ll hiss,” Crane said. “Don’t shoot until I do. The chances of you hitting anyone from more than a few feet away with that .357 are slim so don’t bother until you hear someone coming right up. My twelve gauge will have to do until then.”
And with that the Seminole clammed up. Mosquitoes and gnats soon found where they were crouching and took them to task. Hearing only the continuous hungry whine of bloodsuckers, they prepared themselves for the approach of human hunters.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Kate woke up.
She was lying in the fescue where Mary Niccols had slugged her, knocking her unconscious. Reaching back, she put her hand over the enormous lump on the back of her head. Running her fingers over it, a disturbing rise of livid flesh that connected the base of her skull to her slim neck. She shuddered, feeling nausea rising. Mary had not pulled the punch, at all. In fact, she thought that she was probably lucky to be alive. The bitch had really been afraid she was going to see her male companion get blown away. Ha. Kate had known from the moment she saw Mary looking at Ron that the woman was madly in love with the idiot. She didn’t know who was dumber: the doe-eyed female or the stupid male who didn’t want to return the affection. She didn’t know if it was that saccharine image or her injury that was making her sick.
Knowing that it was likely not wise to stand, she just lay there, and in a little while turned her head. The view she’d had was of the brick wall to her right, dim light spilling out of the compound to illuminate the lawn. As soon as she turned her face, she wished she hadn’t. Adam’s body was on the ground, less than a dozen feet from where she was. His face was even turned toward hers, his eyes wide in death. A great number of flies had already found him, and they were crawling all over his lips, into his nostrils, over the opaque glaze of his dead eyes.
She sobbed.
It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. By the time Grisham’s men had arrived, she was to have been ready to leave. All she was originally to have done was let them in and thereafter retreat to let them do the wetwork. Holcomb was to have been taken out, along with the others, and she was going to just disappear with her reward: a breathtaking sum of cash assets that were already sitting in various accounts under her name in a number of banks.
But she had not reckoned with Adam and Kinji’s desperation. She had also not reckoned with that monkey wrench situation concerning Ron and his resourceful sidekick, Mary. Squinting both in pain and to hide the view of Adam’s dead face, Kate put her hands out and braced herself to rise. Going slowly to her knees she got her legs under her. And she promptly vomited.
In a while, she felt well enough to stand. She went over to the wall, to