Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [96]
Hill took another step and said, “Rocky, get inside, don’t let the dog go!”
She didn’t have time to pause. If he got closer, and if he had a weapon, neither of them could take him down. Everything was at stake. She had to do it quickly. She turned off all extraneous power routes in her body and nothing was left except the path from her brain to her arms, connected with a fiber optic line to her eyes. In one elongated moment she let the dog loose with her right hand, pulled the bow up with her left and pulled back with her right. She saw Hill jog to the right and her eye followed him like a missile. Breath exhaled and released. Hill dropped to the ground with a howl.
Cooper spent one moment barking on the deck, then burst off the planks. He was nearly even with Hill when the man fell to the ground. But the dog didn’t stop. His muscled body lowered several inches as he ran. Rocky had seen other dogs run like this when they were in competition, either with themselves or with other dogs. They streamlined themselves, like jaguars or leopards in the final moments of running down prey. But Hill wasn’t the prey. Cooper ran past Hill as if he were a tree stump and ran straight through the thicket of brush.
Rocky leapt off the deck, bow in hand, and came closer to Hill, keeping her legs flexed, not getting close enough to him that he could reach her. Hill lay in the dim light that ribboned out from the house. An arrow was embedded in his thigh and he grabbed his leg with both hands.
“Peter is out there,” he said with a grimaced face. “Get the hell in the house. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. I found where he’s been watching you.”
Rocky turned and looked at the place where Cooper had entered the brush. She still heard him.
She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Cooper!”
She knew what she had to do. She took one step closer to Hill. “I was wrong. I’m sorry and I do know what I’m dealing with. You’re not going to die.” She reached into Hill’s truck and saw what she prayed was there, his quiver of arrows. Thank God this man traveled with arrows. She hooked the bag around her left shoulder and ran into the brush, following the sound of the dog.
The darkness in the trail hummed with Cooper’s scent. Rocky reached for the primitive part of her brain that operated on smell. She ran as if she could see in the tangle of dark and branches. Her lungs opened wide with the call of urgency from her legs to pound faster.
Two high shrieks, and a dog’s scream cracked open the blackness. Then silence. Peter had hurt Cooper! He might have killed him. The sound came from the part of the trail closer to the ocean. Rocky stopped, notched an arrow, and let her body lead the way to the last sound that Cooper made. She no longer thundered through the brush; now she walked with soft steps, right hand on the string, arrow pulled halfway back, crouching, deadly. The wind was above her, unable to dip down into the dense tangle. She would not have to contend with the wind when she took her shot. There was nothing else but her heightened senses; she was no longer woman, but eyes, ears, nose…hunter. A dark coil of hair fell across her eye and she flicked her head to move it.
The scent of Cooper hit her first, the musk, his oily skin, and now another smell mixed in, urine, and a new scent carried to her by a tendril of moist air. Peter, he was close.
A voice from her right side said, “Drop what you’re carrying or I’ll give him a blast of this. And I don’t think the combination of this Taser gun will mix well with the tranquilizer dart.”
Rocky spun around and to her horror saw the dark outline of Cooper on the ground and Peter holding a Taser inches from the dog.
“I told you this dog was mine,” he said.
Rocky considered her options, with Cooper’s ability to withstand an assault from the Taser being her primary concern. She lowered the bow.
“Drop your little bow and arrow on the ground,” he said and Rocky heard a hint of pleasure in his voice, a sort of satisfaction. The bow dropped to the ground and she measured its