Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [100]
Don’t think.
Nora squeezed her eyes shut tight and silently repeated her mantra.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think…
Twenty-Seven
Three hours after he’d left the lodge, Elijah was well onto the north side of the mountain and figured Jo was probably fifteen minutes behind him. He’d spotted her a while back. She’d catch up with him eventually. She was fit as hell.
He remembered the feel of those strong legs of hers last night.
How to mess with a man’s situational awareness. He refocused on the steep, rough trail. Light, wet snow clung to the evergreens around him and slickened a stretch of exposed rock, but the storm was just starting. It would get worse. He’d be spending the night out in it.
He’d made good time and hadn’t run into anyone or seen any sign of anyone on the mountain. If Devin and Nora had taken another route and gone back to the lodge, all the better. Elijah figured he and Jo could have a snowball fight and heat up cocoa over a hot fire.
Given the conditions, he estimated he was still a half hour out from where his father had died. They’d come this way dozens of times when Elijah was a boy. Day hikes, overnight camping trips. His father could hike for hours without a break and could sleep anywhere—on rocks, roots, pine needles, in the middle of ferns, on the side of a mountain. Elijah had inherited—or learned—those same abilities, which had come in handy during his years of military service.
The trail leveled off and narrowed even further as it curved sharply along the base of a rock-faced knoll. With a near-vertical wall of granite to his right and a sharp drop to his left, Elijah decided to stop thinking about Jo’s legs and focus on not falling off the damn mountain.
He heard a scraping sound directly above him and then a hissing as small stones and dirt let loose and cascaded down onto him. He put up an arm, deflecting a baseball-size rock, and jumped back, maintaining his footing on the slippery ground.
More rock and dirt piled onto the trail in front of him.
He quickly retraced his steps back to where the trail had leveled off, then charged up through dense spruces to the top of the knoll. The mini landslide hadn’t started spontaneously, when he happened to be on a tricky section of the trail. One wrong move, and he’d have gone right off the trail—at least a forty-foot drop.
But Elijah didn’t see anyone, didn’t hear anyone over the sound of the wind. The falling dirt and rock and the noise of his own running through fallen leaves and evergreen needles had covered any sound his attacker had made in retreat.
He stepped over a decaying, moss-covered oak stump to the edge of the rock face where the rock-and-dirt slide had started and saw footprints—almost certainly from a man’s boots—fast disappearing in the accumulating snow.
He squinted out into the trees and falling snow, which was coming down faster, more heavily. Even in the storm, it was a hell of a view out across the mountain peaks from up here—and a perfect spot to lie in wait for someone down on the trail.
His hand stung where he’d bloodied his knuckles dodging the mini landslide. Served him right, he thought, for not wearing his gloves. He focused his attention on the scene and noticed a walking stick on the ground, partway beneath a knee-high boulder that, obviously, someone had tried to dislodge, setting off the rock-and-dirt slide.
Elijah picked up the walking stick. It was Devin’s—had to be. Had that skinny little bastard just tried to knock him off the mountain? But Elijah didn’t think so. He clutched the thick walking stick. Devin had left it behind before his tumble at the falls yesterday. Jo had just fetched his pack back to the lodge.
Pushing back a spark of fear for the teenager, Elijah concentrated on the immediate problem. The main purpose of the attack hadn’t been to kill or disable him—there were more efficient ways to accomplish either one—but, more likely, to interrupt him, delay