The breeze ruffled her hair as she focused on moving up the mountain. Silence surrounded her.
Then Jesse dived to the earth, taking her with him. Her stomach collided with the hard ground. She felt the weight of his hand on her back. “What’s the big idea?”
“They’re down there,” he whispered. He rolled away from her and crawled toward a juniper tree, peering through its branches.
She slipped in beside him. Two of the three men, Eddy and the blond man, huffed up the mountain at a steady pace. Eddy still held his rifle. She didn’t see the dark-haired man.
Her heart squeezed tight. Growing up and in her line of work, she’d stared down a grizzly bear and an angry moose. But the terror that invaded every molecule of her body right now was more intense than anything she’d ever experienced. Fear threatened to paralyze her. She couldn’t take a deep breath or think of what their next move should be.
They’d be spotted as soon as they left the cover of the juniper tree.
Jesse glanced one way and then the other, then looked up toward the mountain peak. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go for it.” He locked her in his gaze for a moment.
She saw courage in those brown eyes. He gave her a half nod and then patted her shoulder as if to say “you can do this.”
He burst to his feet. She did the same. He ran in a zigzag pattern, making his way toward a rock outcropping that might provide a degree of protection.
Abby pumped her legs as her lungs filled with air.
It took several minutes before the first rifle shot shattered the mountain silence. Judging from the sound, the bullet had come from pretty close to her left.
Inwardly she cringed, but she kept running, pushing up the mountain.
The sound of a bullet propelled out of the barrel of a rifle and moving through space, which she had heard a thousand times in her life, sent an unfamiliar wave of terror through her. She had never been shot at. She had never been the prey. She had been with her brothers when they went hunting and had witnessed the terror an animal felt when it thought it would die. A deer wounded by a bullet, normally a passive animal, would charge you to save its life.
Now she understood what it meant to battle against a death that seemed imminent. How intensely she felt the need to survive, to stay alive.
She lifted her head as she headed up the mountain. She could see the peak, twenty steep yards above her.
Jesse maneuvered so he was between her and Eddy. Was he doing that to protect her from the incoming bullets?
Another shot zinged through the air.
She kept running, praying that the bullets would not find their target. Once they were down on the other side of the mountain, they’d have a measure of safety until Eddy got to the top of the peak.
When she glanced over her shoulder, Eddy and the blond man were closing the distance between them. Both men seemed to be in good shape and weren’t tiring at all.
The peak drew closer. They might make it after all. She willed herself to run even faster.
She darted out, separating from Jesse as she scrambled up the mountainside.
Another shot broke the silence around them. This one seemed to have gone wild.
She reached the peak. Jesse was right at her heels.
“There.” He pointed down at the other side of the peak, at the tree line where the forest butted up against a flat meadow.
She wasn’t sure what he was indicating. She didn’t see anything that looked like an airplane. They made their way down the mountainside and sprinted across the meadow. As they got closer, she saw now that there was a small plane camouflaged by evergreen branches.
Jesse arrived at the airplane first. He pulled away enough branches to open the cockpit door. She continued to yank away the branches to allow visibility through the front windshield. The plane was a small bush model designed to land in less-than-perfect conditions and terrain.
Movement at the top of the mountain peak drew her attention. Eddy had made it to the top and was lining up another shot, while the blond man jogged down the mountain toward them.
Jesse climbed into the plane.
She ripped away several more branches before yanking open the copilot door and slipping into the seat.
Jesse had flipped several switches. Lights on the control panel blinked on, but she did not hear the rumble and whir of an engine firing up.
Abigail was out of breath from running so hard. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
Jesse continued to flip switches on the control panel. “I have a pilot’s license. This thing hasn’t been fired up for a long time. It’s gonna take a minute.”
Through the windshield, she could see that the blond man had made it to the base of the mountain and was now running across the meadow. He’d have to get within feet of them to make a shot with a handgun count. Eddy, who was halfway down the mountain, lifted the rifle and peered through the scope.
Her heartbeat drummed in her ears and she gripped the armrest a little tighter.
The engine roared to life and Jesse taxied forward. The plane wobbled a bit on the uneven ground.
Eddy gave up on making the shot from where he was perched and jogged toward a rock, where he propped his rifle to steady it.
The blond man was less than ten yards from them.
Jesse pulled a handgun from inside his jacket. “You know how to shoot, right?”
“Of course.” Perhaps it was the severe tension of the moment, but she almost laughed out loud. “My dad taught me.”
He handed her the gun. “Pretty Boy is coming up on your side.”
“Is that what you call him?” She looked again to see that the blond man, Pretty Boy, had drawn even closer. As the plane gained speed, Pretty Boy took aim at her window. The plane bumped along. She opened the copilot door and fired off a shot that sent Pretty Boy to the ground. He got right back up. He must not have been hit.
The plane lifted off. When they were about forty feet off the ground, they flew right over Eddy, who was scrambling to line up a shot.
The plane was slow in gaining altitude. Jesse eased the throttle on the pedestal. When she peered out the front windshield, it looked like they wouldn’t clear the tops of the trees.
Jesse stared straight ahead. “Come on, baby. You can do this for me.”
As they flew over the tops of trees, she thought she heard branches brushing the underside of the airplane.
Abby let up on the death grip she had on the armrest of the seat and released the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “We made it.”
He turned to her. She liked the way a spark came into his brown eyes when he smiled. “Yes, we made it.”
She unclicked her seat belt and turned around to see what kind of cargo was in the plane. A tarp had come off what looked like neatly stacked rectangles of something. She leaned over the seat to get a better look.
Jesse’s face blanched. “It’s not what you think.”
Her breath caught in her throat. The tarp had been covering what looked like bricks of some kind of drug. A mixture of fear and anger swirled through her. “And what am I supposed to think?” Men couldn’t be trusted on any level. She was in an airplane with a criminal.
“Abigail, I can explain,” he said.
She slammed a hand on her hip. “I just bet you can explain.” All the anger she felt over Brent’s betrayal flooded back through her. What Jesse had done was even worse. Why was this happening? Did she have a sign on her forehead that said she