They found the Blazer in the parking lot shortly thereafter. Even from a distance, Mason could see something was wrong.
“Shit,” Rengo said, pulling the Toyota up beside it. “All four tires are flat, Burke.”
Not just flat but slashed well and good and unfixable, Mason discovered as he circled the Blazer with his hands on his knees. He could feel something cold in the pit of his stomach, some sense of all-encompassing wrong, and it made his knees weak and constricted his breathing.
Where is Jess?
“Stay in the truck,” he told Rengo. “Look after the dog.” Then he hurried down the path toward the beach.
But Jess wasn’t on the beach. The shingle was deserted, about a mile in either direction, just the wind whipping in off the water and further agitating his thoughts.
Mason ran the beach anyway. Had a nightmarish vision of Jess in the water, rolling facedown somewhere in the violent margin between the surf and shore. He thought she might be dead already, that whoever had found her here had killed her and dumped her body, and he ran west along the tide line as far as he could, until the beach turned to rock and there still wasn’t any sign of her. Then he ran back, past the parking lot and east toward Deception Cove, but she wasn’t anywhere. He was breathing hard when he slowed, and it wasn’t just exertion, and there were tears in his eyes, and it wasn’t just the wind.
Where are you? he thought, and wanted to scream it. Where the hell are you, Jess?
* * *
She was in no shape to fight, and though she hated to run, Jess had no other option.
The motors were close now, little Japanese engines strapped to dirt bikes or all-terrain vehicles, probably at least one of the latter. Pruitt was armed, and whoever he’d bring with him was bound to be carrying too, and here was Jess, tied up and most likely concussed, no weapon but her wits, and she hardly had those.
She hated to run. She wanted to stay and confront Pruitt, bash his head in for what he’d done to Lucy, but staying here was a death wish, and she wasn’t ready to die yet, not at least until she was sure she could take Dax Pruitt with her.
She crashed into the forest beside the Silverado, leading with her shoulder and tucking her head down, trying to avoid the thin, tangled branches that raked at her skin and tugged through her hair. She was making noise, and lots of it, but that didn’t matter; Pruitt and his buddy were making noise too, and right now all that was important was putting in distance.
The slope of the mountain was steep and her balance precarious. She didn’t dare follow the road, for fear they’d see her running and be on top of her quickly. She was banking on a few minutes of confusion back at the Silverado, hoping the men would scour the little clearing before they started their descent.
Anyway, if she stayed in the woods, there was no way they would find her. The forest was thick and it was vast and the men were bound to be impatient; they would stick to the trails, at least at first. The highway lay somewhere below her, stretched out like a ribbon along the coastline, and Jess knew if she could just keep dropping altitude, she would find it in time. Assuming she didn’t break her neck.
Jess bulled her way down the slope. Crashing, careening into tree trunks, losing her balance, and slipping in the mud. The angle was severe and if she fell wrong she’d topple into a minefield of stumps and root systems and rock, all waiting to arrest her fall at the expense of her bones, or her life.
She tried to switchback down the grade as best she could, leaning upslope and scrambling behind her with her bound wrists for handholds, anything she could find to slow down the drop. She couldn’t hear motors up above her anymore, but she was breathing too hard and making too much noise to hear anything anyway.
She couldn’t worry about the men. What mattered was that she keep moving. Keep dropping in altitude.
And then she did fall.
She’d glanced back, upslope—that was her mistake. There was no point to looking back, but she’d done it anyway, and she’d stepped forward without planning that step and touched down on a thick, wizened root, gnarled and slippery. The sole of her shoe skidded and her ass flew out from under her, and she landed hard on her back and those wrists bound behind her, and then she was sliding down a steep, muddy wall and there was no way she could stop herself.
It might have been fifty feet or it might have been more. God knows how fast she was going when she hit. But she saw the tree coming and she knew it would hurt, and reflexively she shifted her balance and tumbled onto her side, and then she was racing past the tree and continuing to fall.
It would have been smarter, she realized instantly, to have let the tree stop her. Because beyond the tree was more open ground, a slope of mountainside too steep and too slippery to permit any growth, and beyond that was a shallow gulch and a riverbed, and Jess could sense water, but she could see only rock, a low, jagged line of boulders, immovable and unforgiving, lying in her path as she careened downward at speed.
Jess tried to dig her heels into the dirt. Clawed with her fingers at the mud underneath them. She succeeded not at all; she continued to plummet. There was nothing to do but close her eyes and brace for impact, try to shield her head and hope against hope she survived.
The impact seemed to steal her consciousness before her mind could process the pain.