LITMIR.BIZ

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      North grinned at her suddenly. “You’ve got the prettiest eyes. Why haven’t we ever dated?”

      “What?”

      As much as his question surprised her, he’d managed to penetrate the fear that seemed to saturate her, and when he took her hand, she ran with him without hesitation, using trees and boulders as cover, zigzagging down the hill, up another small, rounded hill. They ducked behind a stone wall above the leaf-covered stream she’d photographed earlier. Carine was breathing hard, her head pounding from fear and pain, the cut on her forehead bothering her now. They were getting closer to the main road. Her car. A place where she could call the police. She had a cell phone in her pack, but there was no service out here.

      Leaves crunched nearby, and Hank Callahan joined them, exchanging a quick smile with Carine. He was square-jawed and blue-eyed, distinguished-looking, his dark hair streaked with gray. He had none of the compact, pitbull scrappiness of tawny-haired Tyler North.

      “Christ, Ty,” Hank said in a low voice, “she’s hurt—”

      “She’s fine.”

      “I’m scared shitless! Those bastards were shooting at me!” Carine didn’t raise her voice, but she wasn’t calm. “Yahoos. Hunters—”

      Hank shook his head, and Ty said, “Not hunters. A hunter doesn’t take a three-shot burst into a boulder, even if he’s using a semiautomatic rifle. These assholes knew you were there, Carine.”

      “Me? But I didn’t do anything—”

      “Did you see anyone?” Hank asked. “Any idea how many are out there?”

      “No, no idea.” Her teeth were chattering, but she blamed the cold, not what Ty had said. “There’s an old hunting shack not far from where the bullets started flying. It looked abandoned to me. I took pictures of it. Maybe somebody didn’t like that.”

      “I thought you took pictures of birds,” North said with a wry smile.

      “I’m just most known for birds.” As a child, she’d believed she could see her parents as angels, soaring above Cold Ridge with a lone hawk or eagle. Ty used to tease her for it. “I was just trying out my digital camera.”

      But she was breathing rapidly—too rapidly—and Ty put his hand over her mouth briefly. “Stop. Hold your breath a second before you hyperventilate.”

      Already feeling a little light-headed, she did as he suggested. She noticed the green color of his eyes. That wasn’t a good sign. She’d never noticed anything about him before. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen him last. Fourth of July fireworks? They were neighbors, but seldom saw each other. His mother had moved to the valley just before Ty was born and bought the 1817 brick house that Abraham Winter, the first of the Cold Ridge Winters, had built as a tavern. She’d called herself Saskia, but no one believed that was her real name. If she had a husband, she’d never said. She was a weaver and a painter, but not the most attentive of mothers. Ty had pretty much grown up on his own. Even as a little boy, he’d wander up on the ridge trail for hours before his mother would even realize he was gone. She died four years ago, leaving him the house and fifty acres of woods and meadow. Everyone expected him to sell it, but he didn’t, although, given the demands of his military career, he wasn’t around much.

      Hank Callahan shifted. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to put some serious mileage between me and the guys with guns.”

      Carine steadied her breathing. “What about your other friend Manny—”

      “Don’t worry about Carrera,” Ty said. “He can take care of himself. What’s the best route out of here?”

      “We could follow the stone wall. There’s an old logging road not far from the shack—”

      He shook his head. “If the shooters are using the shack, that’s the road they’d take. They’ll have vehicles.”

      She thought a moment. “Then we should follow the stream. It’s not as direct, but it’ll take us to where we parked.”

      “How exposed will we be?”

      “From a shooter’s perspective? I can’t make that judgment. I just know it’s the fastest route out of here.”

      “Fast is good,” Callahan said.

      Ty nodded, then winked at Carine. “Okay, babe, we’ll go your way.”

      She didn’t remember him ever having called her “babe” before today.

      Thirty minutes later, as they came to the gravel parking area, they heard an explosion back in the woods, from the direction of the shack and the shooters. Black smoke rose up over the trees.

      Hank whistled. “I wonder who the hell these guys are.”

      Manny Carrera emerged from behind a half-dead white pine. He couldn’t have been that far behind them, but Carine hadn’t heard a thing. He was another PJ, a dark-haired, dark-eyed bull of a Texan.

      “Good,” Ty said. “That wasn’t you blowing up. The shack?”

      “That’s my guess.” Manny spoke calmly, explosions and shots fired in the woods apparently not enough to ruffle him—or North and Callahan. “There are two shooters, at least one back at the shack. I couldn’t get close enough to any of them for a good description.”

      “I have binoculars you could have borrowed,” Carine said.

      He grinned at her. “But they were shooting at you, kiddo.”

      “Not necessarily at me—”

      “Yes. At you. They just didn’t want you dead. Scared, paralyzed, maybe. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have missed, not that many times. They were using scoped, semiautomatic rifles.” His tone was objective, just stating the facts, but his eyes settled on her, his gaze softening slightly. “Sorry. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t target practice gone awry. They didn’t mistake you for a deer.”

      “I get it.” She tried to be as clinical about her near-death experience as the three men were, but she kept seeing herself crouched behind the boulder, hearing the shots, feeling the rock shard hit her head. The bullets had been flying at her, not them. “Maybe they saw me taking pictures, but—” she took a breath “—to me it was just a hunting shack.”

      “That’s enough for now,” Ty said. “We can speculate later. You have a cell phone on you?”

      Carine nodded. “I doubt there’s any coverage out here.”

      She took her day pack from him and dug out her phone, but she was totally spent from dodging bullets, diving behind trees and boulders, charging through the woods with two military types, all after tramping around on her own with her camera. She hit the wrong button and almost threw the phone onto the ground.

      North quietly took it and shook his head. “No service. Hank and Manny, you take my truck. I’ll go with Carine.” He turned to her, eyeing her pragmatically. “Can you drive, or do you want me to?”

      “I can do it.”

      There was no cell coverage—there were no houses—until they came to a small lake on the notch road north of the village of Cold Ridge. Even then, Ty barely got the words out to the dispatcher before service dropped out on him.

      He clicked off the phone and looked over at Carine. “I’m serious,” he said. “Why haven’t we ever dated?”

      She managed a smile. “Because I’ve always hated you.”

      He grinned at her. “No, you haven’t.”

      And she was lost. Then and there.

      

      By the time state and local police arrived on scene, the shack was burned to the ground and the shooters were gone. According to various law enforcement officers, Carine had likely

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