Texas Outlaw (Rory Yates #2) - James Patterson Page 0,81

of Kyle’s trustworthiness, but he quickly wins them over.

He shakes Ariana’s hand and congratulates her on a job well done.

“You started this investigation all by yourself,” he says. “There are about to be a hundred detectives on this from half a dozen agencies, but no one will forget that you’re the one who started it all. I’ll see to that.”

When he meets Dale, Kyle claps him on the back and says, “Coming forward must have been very hard, but you’ve done the right thing. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you’re a protected witness through the whole legal process.”

Dale, embarrassed, smiles and adjusts his ball cap.

For a moment, it feels like everything is going to work out. We’ve finally broken the case open and it’s just a matter of time before all the bad guys are in jail and all the good guys are safe.

But then Dale opens his mouth to speak and instead of words coming out, blood and teeth explode from his lips. His body collapses into the dirt, blood spilling out of a hole in the back of his skull.

His Dallas Mavericks cap lies in a growing pond of gore.

As I stare in disbelief, I finally hear the shot, trailing at least two seconds behind the bullet that killed Dale Peters.

Chapter 85

I SCAN THE hillsides, looking for the sniper, but all I can see is sagebrush and rocks and the occasional desert tree.

Gareth could be anywhere.

I feel panic around me—Ariana and Kyle are shocked and unsure what to do—and I tear my eyes away from the landscape.

“Take cover!” I shout at them. “Underneath the tanker!”

Ariana and Kyle move in that direction, and as I’m backing that way myself, I let my eyes dart back to the hillsides.

I spot a tiny spark of light on a hillside at least a thousand yards away. And then it’s gone.

My brain has time to process that it’s the muzzle flash from Gareth’s rifle, but my body seems to be frozen in place. I have a second or two to act—it will take the bullet that long to get here—but I can’t move.

Just like in my nightmares, I’m paralyzed.

Strong hands grab my shoulders, hauling me downward. I hear the whine of the bullet soar just over my head as I’m falling. My hat flies off my head.

The next thing I know I’m lying in the dirt, with Ariana on top of me.

“Come on,” she says, pulling my arm.

We hear the report of the rifle as we crawl into the shelter of the oil tanker. Kyle is there, kneeling, with his gun drawn. We crowd underneath the tanker, trying to catch our breath and orient ourselves. My eyes spot the rifle lying next to Dale’s body. Ariana must have dropped it when she grabbed me. Then my eyes catch something else: my Stetson. There’s a bullet hole through the crown of the hat, almost identical to the one shot off my head in the bank.

I came that close to dying.

Again.

The only difference is this time it was someone else who saved my life. But there’s no time to thank her. We have to figure out what the hell we’re going to do.

“Did you tell anyone where you were going?” I ask Kyle.

“No one,” he says. “I swear.”

That means there must be a tracking device on the truck that I couldn’t find. Or there might be another possibility. Maybe McCormack figured all along that Dale would betray them. Maybe they knew him better than he knew himself and they sent him on the drug run by himself so he could unknowingly set a trap for us.

“I saw the muzzle flash,” I say. “I have a rough idea where the shots are coming from.”

But this information doesn’t do us much good. Between the three of us, we have two SIG Sauers and nothing else. The .223 M4 is lying in the dirt, and Kyle and I both have more guns in our trucks—if we could get to them—but they don’t have the kind of range Gareth’s M24 does. Even if we knew Gareth’s precise location, we could never hit him.

The good news is that we have a ten-ton tanker truck to take shelter beneath.

A bullet zips into the ground next to the tanker, puffing a cloud of dirt into the air, followed a couple of seconds later by the sound of the gunshot.

“Think we can make it to the truck?” Kyle says.

His truck is closest, about fifteen feet away. If we could