Cold Wind - C. J. Box [33]
“That’s what I was told.”
“Who told you?” Johnny asked. “Who else knows about this?”
She shook her head. “Someone who knows the situation, and who knows Nate Romanowski.”
Johnny grimaced, but seemed to accept it.
“There’s something very important you need to know,” she said, looking from Johnny to Drennen and back again, making sure she had their full attention. “You’ve got to make the shot count. If you miss or screw up, we’re all in deep shit.”
Drennen sat back against the passenger door, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”
“This guy we’re after,” she said. “He’s got a reputation. Have you ever heard the line, ‘When you strike at a king, you must kill him’? Some guy named Emerson said that.”
“Who the fuck is Emerson?” Drennen asked. “Is he somebody big?”
“Never mind,” she said, sorry she’d repeated the line from her adviser since she didn’t have a clue, either. “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t miss. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
They each took another beer with them and stuffed another in the back pockets of their Wranglers. She climbed back into the pickup cab. Her knitting bag was behind the seat and she pulled it out. She’d taken to storing her knitting needles in the shafts of her tall cowboy boots, and she drew them out. She was a piss-poor knitter, but she was nervous and needed something to do with her hands. Since she’d taken up the craft, all she’d managed to complete was a piece that was twelve inches wide and fifteen feet long. It had no purpose. It was the longest scarf in the world, she thought, and she didn’t know how to end it.
She watched them walk down the path with the rocket launcher, trading it back and forth to get the feel of it. She’d made them repeat the firing procedure back to her before they left and they seemed to recall it. Men were intuitive when it came to weapons, she thought. Maybe it was the only thing they were intuitive about. She recalled how Chase was with his handguns, like they were an extension of him. She got edgy even looking at one, and rarely handled the .38 she kept hidden away in her knitting bag.
She had given them the drawing so they wouldn’t fire at the wrong place.
Johnny and Drennen were in view for five minutes before they found the trail that would lead them down into the canyon. She’d been assured that it wouldn’t be booby-trapped on the top half of the trail, so she didn’t even mention it to them.
When they were out of sight, she knitted furiously, waiting for the explosion.
She was looking forward to feeling cleansed.
10
“Faster, faster,” Nate said to Alisha, who was throwing her clothing into her bag.
She looked up with fear in her eyes and swept her arm around the interior of the cave. “What about all this? You can’t just leave it.” She meant the furniture, gear, books, and electronics he’d amassed in his three years there.
He shrugged as he took his shoulder holster and the .454 down from a peg in the wall and put them on the table. “All I need is this,” he said. Then: “And my birds. In fact, I’m going to go get them hooded up so we can take them with us.”
She rolled her eyes. “You need more than a gun and your birds.”
“And you,” he said, misunderstanding.
“No,” she said. “You need clothes. And your satellite phone. Here,” she said, grabbing an empty duffel bag and placing it on the table. “I’ll pack them while you get the birds ready.”
He nodded, and turned for the opening. As he did, the receiver for one of his motion detectors chirped. Nate froze and stared at it. It was the uppermost sensor.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry.”
Johnny said, “I think I see it.”
“Where?”
“Over there. On the other side. Follow my arm.”
Drennen stood shoulder-to-shoulder to Johnny and bent so he could rest his cheek on Johnny’s bicep. He squinted down the arm, past the pointer, across the canyon.
“It’s kinda dark,” Johnny said. “It looks like a half-moon behind some bushes. It don’t look like one of those caves in the cartoons. It’s more like a slash in the rocks.”
After a beat, Drennen said, “Okay, I think