Chapter Thirty-One

Evan Garner stared at himself in the mirror of the little bathroom attached to his office. He frowned at the dark circles under his eyes and splashed some cold water on his face. He looked haggard. His once impeccably pressed suit was wrinkled, and his usually clean-shaven face was marred by a shadow of stubble.

Garner couldn’t live like this much longer, cooped up in these few rooms. He’d been barking at everyone within range until he was hoarse from hollering. He took a long swallow of water, considering his next move. Something had to break soon. This infernal waiting was driving him nuts.

He returned to his office and summoned Thomas. The bodyguard responded within a minute, appearing in the doorway looking none too fresh himself.

"Anything?" was all Garner said, moving to look out the wall of windows, his back to his aide.

"No, sir. None of them has called in. We do have two signals coming from the area. Scout’s, which still hasn’t moved from the wreck site, and another one we believe is Otter’s. It’s in the same general area, but it’s still on the move."

"If Otter’s all right, then why the hell hasn’t he called in?"

"Well, sir, you remember Frank had trouble with his cell phone up there. He couldn’t get a signal most of the time," the bodyguard replied.

Garner doubted that was all there was to it. "Send someone up there to track down the second signal and find out what the hell is going on with Otter." He went to his desk, dropping into the plush chair with a yawn. "And I suppose we still have no more takers on the contract?"

"No, sir," Thomas confirmed. He didn’t add that he didn’t think there would be any more, either. Word had gotten around pretty fast for such a secretive organization. The news that the three people who’d gone after Hunter were now all missing was being whispered in ever-expanding circles.

Garner sighed. "Up the contract to a million and a half, Thomas," he instructed. Much of the reward would come from his own personal funds, but he didn’t hesitate committing the money. He just wanted to get rid of Hunter so he could begin living out in the open again.

"Whatever you say, boss," Thomas said, knowing that it would probably make little difference.

Jake lay awake in the dark long after Kat had gone. Her mind was working too hard for her to sleep, despite her injuries and exhaustion. How can I be a bounty hunter? her brain repeated over and over. It seemed so contrary to the inherent image she had of herself.

How many people have I killed? How could I forget that? Jake concentrated, trying to remember firing a gun, stealing a car. She couldn’t. She reached beneath the pillow to put her hand around the cold metal of the gun. It sparked no memory. It still seemed a foreign object to her.

Jake seemed to have many more reasons not to remember her past than she did to recall it. If she had taken lives, she didn’t want to have those memories haunt her the rest of her days. How could I have lived without a conscience? I seem to have one now. I don’t think I could kill anyone except maybe in self-defense. Or to save Kat. I think I would kill to do that.

Even if you did do all that, things can be different now. You can be whoever you want to be, can’t you? Isn’t that what this amnesia does? Gives you a second chance? More and more, Jake wanted never to regain her memory. The only thing pulling her emotions in the other direction was the memory she had of her brother. She did want to remember him.

Jake didn’t want to remember her spouse, if indeed she had one. She wanted to believe that she had used the wedding ring as a decoy, as Kat had suggested. Then why the engraving? her conscience nagged. You wouldn’t go to all that trouble for a prop. Unless maybe you bought it in a pawn shop?

She suddenly wanted to take off the ring, but her left hand was too swollen.

Jake thought of Kat and the incredible kiss they’d shared. She began to relax and her mind drifted to what the future might be like. She could do anything she wanted, couldn’t she? She knew that what she wanted most of all was just to be with Kat.

Kat seemed to want that, too. But she hadn’t said what all that meant in terms of her own future job plans. Will Kat continue to hunt down and kill people? Jake wondered. And how will I feel about that if she does?

Kat’s trip to Tawa in the hour before dawn was uneventful. Despite the rough terrain, she knew an indirect route that bypassed the worst of the hazards. She had taken it often enough that navigating it was no real problem even in the reduced visibility of the blowing snow around her. She was grateful for the conditions. Her track would be obscured within several minutes.

An added advantage of this particular route was that it took her well away from the site of Jake’s car wreck some three miles from the bunker. She believed Frank was telling the truth when he said that was the last place he’d been able to report in by cell phone to Garner. So that was probably as close as her old boss could get in pinpointing the position of her hideout.

She intended to make it even tougher for him to find her. She took a wide detour around the perimeter of Tawa into a wetlands reserve well south of town. She parked the snowmobile and set out a short distance on foot over a frozen bog.

In no time she found what she was looking for amid the dead and dying trees that pervaded the swamp. Woodpeckers had drilled dozens of good-sized holes in a large dead oak. She put Otter’s cell phone into one of the hollowed-out cavities, so that the homing device she’d found inside it would be protected from the worst of the elements.

She knew that Garner probably would not give up. Once he committed to something, he stuck with it. He would keep sending people after her, hoping one of them got lucky. He wouldn’t care how many died trying.

Thanks to the heavy snowfall and having this cell phone as an extra bit of diversion, she and Jake were probably safe for now. But the bunker had gotten too hot, and keeping Frank and Otter captive there was inviting disaster. They’d have to move soon. As soon as Jake was able. And somewhere down the line, she’d have to deal with Garner personally.

As she walked back to the snowmobile, Kat began to consider the logistics of where she and Jake should go when they left the bunker. She frowned, thinking of the rough terrain Jake would have to be transported over in order to reach the nearest cleared road. Kat added one more stop to her mental list of places she needed to visit while in Tawa.

She’d hit the small clinic before it opened. Then the grocery, and on the way back out of town, the little airstrip where Sam kept his helicopter. She’d get him to pick her and Jake up in a few days near the bunker. She would give him a GPS position as a rendezvous point. She’d drop Sam off back at the airstrip and helicopter Jake to their next destination.

So the next big decision, then, is just exactly where is that destination to be?

Kat was in and out of the clinic in four minutes, two hours before it was to open. It was a typical small-town med station set up to treat routine injuries and complaints. It had simple locks and no alarm system. And she had scoped out the layout of the place and the location of the drug cabinet several months earlier when she was there on a legitimate visit.

It was something she always did--studied the details of the world around her. The architecture of buildings, the layout of the rooms inside, the routines of guards and workmen, the hours of operation. It was mostly habit and exercise for her keen instincts and curious, analytical mind. And you just never knew when such information might come in handy.

She’d had to break into more than a couple of clinics and hospitals to get supplies to self-treat her wounds. So she’d memorized the Tawa clinic when she’d gone in for a shot after having an unexpectedly severe allergic reaction to multiple wasp stings.

Next stop was the grocery store, which had just opened. There were a few cars in the newly plowed parking lot out front, but they belonged mostly to employees.

Kat grabbed a cart and began wending her way through the aisles. She replaced the lost staples and stopped in frozen foods for a stack of TV dinners for Frank and Otter, thankful it was well below freezing outside. She also selected several items so she could whip up more elaborate fare for herself and Jake. She rather liked exercising her culinary talents for such an appreciative audience.

Kat’s mind flashed back unbidden to the seductive look in Jake’s eyes just before they’d kissed. It made her hurry her steps through the store to the checkout. She spent a few minutes securing her unwieldy load of groceries onto the snowmobile, then started up the machine and drove north out of town toward the isolated airstrip.

A pair of eyes followed Kat’s every movement from the time she left the store until her snowmobile was out of sight. Several minutes later, a second snowmobile emerged from behind the grocery’s Dumpster and began following the track of the first.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30