Obsession Falls Read online

  To attract their attention. To her.

  To give the kid a chance to escape.

  Stupid, stupid plan.

  She didn’t hear the flap of the papers.

  All she heard was the red buzz of fear in her ears.

  She zigged out into the meadow into plain sight of the gunmen, then zagged back behind the boulder.

  A gunshot. She heard the gunshot. Loud. Sharp. Cruel. Close. To her.

  So they’d seen her. Yay.

  “Run, kid!” she yelled.

  Shouts. She thought she heard shouts.

  She glanced behind her.

  Seamore “Dash” Roberts came around the boulder, pistol in hand. Moving fast.

  She had the lead.

  Good.

  But he was a running back. Big guy. Got the nickname “Dash” because he was fast.

  Bad. Very bad.

  To beat him, she had to run straight toward the trees as fast as she could.

  To live, she needed to zigzag.

  She ran straight.

  She ducked.

  A shot rang out.

  He missed.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. Please, God.

  He missed because he had a pistol. That was good for her. Pistols were meant for close work. Hard to aim. Best he could do was thirty to forty feet if he was skilled, and he’d have to stop to really get a bead on her.

  The forest. She had to get to the forest.

  Run as hard as you can.

  She reached the shelter of the trees.

  She’d made it!

  She glanced back.

  He stopped, braced his feet, raised his pistol.

  She ducked behind a tree.

  A shot shattered the bark beside her.

  This was okay. This was good. Because if he was shooting at her, he wasn’t killing the kid.

  Yeah. Real good.

  She ran again, glanced back.

  He sprinted toward her.

  No. She knew this place.

  He didn’t.

  She took a left.

  Another shot.

  She should be counting. He had only six shots … unless that was an automatic pistol, in which case—

  This was no time for math.

  Run, goddamn it.

  There. The foot of the mountain. She took another left, fast and hard, around the rock, and she headed up the steepest incline she’d ever seen. And she’d seen a few.

  Another shot. Close.

  God. Please, God.

  She leaped like a mountain goat over rocks. She ducked under brush.

  She couldn’t zig. She couldn’t zag. The path was narrow. It was curvy. It was damn near vertical. There was only one way up this mountain, and she was on it.

  So was he.

  She could hear him behind her, tearing up the ground as he gained on her.

  She had only one way out. One way to save herself.

  The cave. In the rock.

  Never, ever go in that cave. No one knows where it goes. You could fall. You could break your legs. You could never be found. Never go in. Never.

  Her father’s voice. He meant it.

  But it was his fault she was doing this. His fault he’d taught her to be responsible and do the right thing.

  She dove into the crack in the rock. She wiggled on her belly in the dirt. Fast. Without a whimper. Without a fear of what awaited her.

  She was too afraid of what was after her.

  The kid had run, too. He’d escaped, too. Because otherwise, this was all for nothing.

  Run, kid!

  The farther she went into the cave, the tighter it got. Finally there was nowhere else to go except through a passage so low and narrow it was nothing more than a splinter in the rock. But she went.

  Belly to the ground, head down, she crawled into darkness. She got stuck. Her butt didn’t fit. She gasped. She wiggled. She pulled. She tore skin off her chin. And she was in. Inside. In a cave, unexplored, where she could tumble and break her legs and die a slow death. She shimmied in, staying low—and fell into nothingness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Not nothingness. Taylor fell five feet onto … something. Something hard. Stone.

  Pain exploded in her right wrist. Blood trickled down her cheek. She covered her mouth and bit down on her scream of pain.

  Don’t scream. Don’t scream. He’ll hear you.

  But her wrist really hurt. Her cheekbone up by her eye socket—that hurt, too. She’d struck it on the way down. Every nerve throbbed. Every sense flared.

  The little boy … had she saved him? Had he seized his chance? Had he run away? Or was he even now lying in a puddle of his own blood, or propped against a rock for McManus to find?

  Tears filled her eyes.

  Dead. He was probably dead.

  Because all she had been able to think to do was toss her drawings to the wind in the hopes of distracting his killers.

  She cried. A little. Silently, curled into a fetal position, holding her hurt wrist with one hand, and with her fist over her mouth.

  She heard nothing from above in the shadows.

  Of course not. That monster would not fit. She hoped.

  Okay. Okay, she was safe. For the moment, she was safe.

  She worked on her breathing, trying to stop the gasping, the sobbing. She worked on her heartbeat, trying to calm the thump against her rib cage.

  She had never in her life felt like this, or been in the grip of such terror. She lived near Washington, D.C., one of the most violent cities in the United States, and she had to come back to the freaking primitive Sawtooth Mountains to get shot at.

  Did the boy live? Had he run away? Had he saved himself?

  Oh, please, God. Let him have run. Let him be alive.

  She groped around, trying to see where she was, where she had come to rest, to find a way farther into the cave, to find a safer place.

  She was on a ledge. It stuck out three feet. It was five feet wide. She lay on her belly, extended her good arm into thin air.

  Nothing. No way farther in. No way out.

  Cautiously, she sat up.

  She explored her arm. Bruised. She winced. Or cracked.

  She touched her cheek. More bruising, and the blood wasn’t much. Not too much. In here, there weren’t any wild animals to be attracted to the smell. Maybe some bats. These bats ate insects. No vampire bats lived in Idaho. She was almost sure she remembered that.

  Light trickled through the narrow opening above her. Not much light. Not enough. And with Dash out there, she didn’t dare activate her phone.

  In fact … she pulled it out of her waist pack and powered it down.

  Yes, she was in a cave. Probably no one could use her GPS to locate her. But she didn’t dare take the chance.

  If Dash had seen her, if he could somehow wedge his broad shoulders through the hole, he could look down at her and kill her like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  But if he had, surely he would have done it by now.

  She scooted to put her spine against the wall. She curled up, hugging her knees, listening for Dash, wondering if he saw her go in, if he knew where she hid, if he would come after her with his pistol—or if he would go away and return with dynamite and blast the entry and she would never, ever leave this place of absolute dark and sharp chill and the rustle of creatures unseen.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Finally … Taylor fell asleep, rolled onto her side, stretched out … and fell forever into the dark, onto the rocks.

  She woke with a gasp, sat up, terrified and trembling.

  She was fine. She was fine. She hadn’t fallen at all.

  It was nothing but a dream.

  But she couldn’t go to sleep again. Could. Not. Did. Not. Dare. It was too dangerous.

  It was dangerous to stay here, too.

  Her mouth was dry. Even her teeth felt dry.

  She hadn’t had a drink for hours. She was dehydrated. She needed water, and soon. Which meant … which meant sh
e had to leave.

  She could take heart in the fact Dash hadn’t followed her in. She’d seen no flashlight beam pierce the dark.

  Of course, she had barely made it through the crack. That broad-shouldered, muscular murderer of a football player sure as hell couldn’t do it.

  Seamore “Dash” Roberts. She leaned her head back against the rock. What did she know about him?

  Not much. She followed football with mild interest, and only her local teams. But Dash was special. He was a celebrity … of sorts. He’d played two and a half seasons for the Miami Dolphins, had been one of their hottest players. Then he’d beat up his model girlfriend so brutally he put her in the ICU for over a month, and broke her face so horribly she could never look in the mirror again, much less get work as a model. She committed suicide, and he served six months of a three-year sentence—he was a sports superstar, no reason to make him pay too much for brutality and mutilation. Then he was out on parole, confined to his home for two months, which gave him time to get picked up by the Detroit Lions. He was back on the field, fast as ever, a media darling, when he got photographed betting on his own game. That was the end of his football career. After that, there were some moments of glory in arena football, but he kept a low profile.

  Now she knew why. He was working for hire as a hit man, and apparently without a shred of conscience.

  A little boy. He was going to kill a little boy.

  And her, too. But really … what kind of monster killed a kid?

  She wanted to look at her phone. She wanted to check the time. It had been hours—she thought—since she’d crawled in here. Was it dark outside?

  Yes, because no more light leaked into the cave.

  Should she try to leave?

  Could she leave, or was she trapped here?

  Using her hands to sweep up the wall behind her, she stood, and at about five feet up, she located the outcrop that led to the entrance.

  She was five-seven. This was doable. She could climb up there. Somehow. If the rock didn’t break. If she didn’t fall backward and splatter her brains out on the stone ledge, or fall all the way down into whatever oblivion waited at the bottom of the cave.

  What if Dash was sitting out there, waiting?

  No choice. In her waist pack she carried her phone, some drawing pencils, a sharpener, a mini-pack of tissues, a fold-up cup, and an energy bar. She had more stuff in her rental car: a couple of bottles of water, a sandwich. But she hadn’t come equipped to camp. She hadn’t come to survive. She’d come out to sketch ingrown toenail mountains.

  She was a skilled furniture designer. She was a respected interior decorator. She liked her job. She liked the money she made. So why the hell had she decided she needed further fulfillment as an artist?

  She was such a schmuck.

  And she was stalling.

  She groped across the rocky surface. She found dust and gravel, but nothing to hang on to.

  She pulled on the ledge a little, wincing when a few chunks of stone crumbled and fell at her feet.

  She opened and ate the energy bar, and stuffed the wrapper back in her waist pack.

  She pulled out her phone. Held it in her hand and decided that since she was deep underground no one—that would be Dash or his mysterious boss—could trace her signal. She squatted down and huddled close against the wall, powered on her phone, and blinked at the sudden blaze of light.

  Three thirty-eight A.M. She had slept longer than she realized.

  She powered it down again, stashed it in her waist pack. She took a breath, and tried to hoist herself up.

  Pain shot through her wrist. She landed back on her feet, squatted down, and held her wrist. And rocked.

  Cracked. Yeah. Cracked for sure. And it couldn’t have been her left wrist. No. It had to be her right one, and she was most definitely right-handed.

  So what? She still had to get out of here.

  Standing, she took long, fortifying breaths, and tried to take heart in the fact that the shelf above her had held her weight. If she could work around that wrist and pull herself up there …

  This moment was why she had been working out with Brent, the physical trainer. If she could ignore the pain that sadist made her inflict on herself, she could ignore a few bruises and a cracked wrist.

  So she did it. She mostly used her elbows, whimpering and scrabbling for anything to hold on to, finding nothing, whimpering and scrabbling some more. It wasn’t graceful. She was glad no one watched her. But when at last she lay there in the narrow, tight place before the narrow, tight crack that would take her out of the narrow, tight cave, she was panting, sweating, trembling. She found herself torn between relief … and fear. Relief because she needed food and water, and fear that she didn’t have the energy to work her way out through the tiny crack in the rock. Plus, she still didn’t know if Dash was out there, and she had to crawl. He could smash her head as soon as she stuck it out.

  Cheerful thought.

  Wiggling around, she dug a sharpened pencil out of her waist pack.

  Hey. It was a weapon. Not much of a weapon, but her karate master had promised that after only twenty lessons, she would be able to kill a man with a sharpened pencil.

  Too bad she’d quit karate after lesson two, when she hit the floor and got the breath knocked out of her.

  She gathered her courage to make the first move toward freedom—or death.

  Beneath her knee, a chunk of rock broke off.

  It struck the ledge where she’d rested below, bounced off into oblivion. Her leg dangled in the air. The rest of the ledge started to crumble—and she found herself outside the cave and upright, clutching the pencil in her fist.

  And alone.

  No Dash.

  She wiped the perspiration off her forehead with her bare arm. Put the pencil back into her waist pack. Looked around and tried to evaluate her situation sensibly.

  Sensibly couldn’t change the facts.

  It was cold and dark. Really cold. She could see her breath. And really dark. Moonless, and the starlight could not pierce the canopy of the ancient trees.

  There were creatures out here. Not just harmless animals like bunnies and mice. Wolf packs lived in Idaho, and black bears, and she was under no illusions about those predators—as she weakened, they would rip her flesh and clean her bones.

  She needed to get to her car and get out of here as fast as she could. She needed to do it before dawn.

  Because in the cave, she had refused to face one truth.

  Every one of those drawings she had deliberately tossed to the wind—every one of those crappy, lousy, humiliating drawings—she had signed every one of them.

  Dash and his murderous cohort knew her name.

  She needed to find her car before they did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dawn was breaking when Taylor knelt beside a stream, opened her fold-up cup, dipped it in the freezing water, and took a long, grateful drink.

  She was already so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers, the icy water made her shiver uncontrollably, and she would probably get giardia from unclean water. But better that than dying of dehydration.

  Gritting her teeth, she slid her wrist under the surface and let the water numb the pain and, she hoped, bring down the swelling. She’d slipped more than once in the darkness, and caught herself, and every time agony almost brought her to her knees.

  But she kept going. She didn’t know she had it in her, but desperation did wonderful things for a woman’s stamina and courage.

  When she had calmed the throbbing, she leaned her back against a tall pine, pulled her knees into her chest in a vain attempt to get warm, cradled her arm, and faced hard reality.

  She hadn’t made it back to her car in time. Worse than that, she had done another thing her father had warned her not to do. She had gotten lost in the mountains. The Sawtooth Mountains. Not the kind of mountains they had in the East. Not sissy mountains. The Sawtooths were steep, with elevations toweri
ng upward to almost eleven thousand feet. Every night—every night—the temperatures dropped below freezing. People got lost here and never came out. Sometimes an unwary hiker found the body. Sometimes no one found any trace.

  For people who wanted to disappear, the Sawtooth Mountains were the place to do it, as long as they were prepared for cold and loneliness, hunger, wild animals, and winters that started early and ended late.

  Taylor wasn’t totally unprepared. She had a compass—on her phone, which she didn’t dare power up for fear the bad guys would track her.

  She knew how to use the constellations, find the North Star. Her father had taught her. But in these mountains, studded with sudden precipices, steep inclines, and unending trees, seeing enough of the sky to consistently find the Big Dipper was impossible. She could climb higher, out of the tree line, but that was going the wrong way, and she needed to eat. Which wasn’t going to happen soon. And she needed to sleep. That, she could manage. Because her father had taught her how to build a shelter.

  As she uncurled from the tight ball and stood, she said aloud, “Thank you, Daddy.”

  She wasn’t going to like this bed. She wasn’t going to be comfortable. The needles were going to poke her and the sap was going to stick to her skin. Inevitably, there would be bugs. But the branches would hold her up off the cold ground and provide cover to help her retain her body heat. And as the morning progressed, the air would warm and she wouldn’t be so terribly, horribly cold.

  Her father had taught her that anytime she went into the forest, to take a hatchet and a knife, preferably the Randall knife—which she still owned. At home. If she had that knife … but she didn’t, so she broke branches off the trees, piled them in a sunny spot, and arranged a nest for herself. She slid down, curled up, pulled more branches over herself, and despite the needles, the sap, and the bugs, she went immediately to sleep.

  She woke in the early afternoon. The sun was shining on her face. She itched. Everywhere. And something with creepy legs was crawling down her back.

  She flung the branches aside, did the bug-dance, and shook a beetle out of her shirt.

  She touched her nose. Sunburn. She had a rash on her arms from the pine needles. Still she felt better than she had when she went to sleep. She could think cognitively. She could make plans and know they made sense.