Forged in Ash (13 page)

Suddenly she backed up fast, hustling out of his range. Still staring across the parking lot, she shrieked. It was a scream unlike anything he’d heard before. A wild, raw cry of primal agony and sheer, vicious rage. She raised the gun, pointing it toward the tennis courts. Shot after shot rang out.

The scream died. In its wake came the hollow clicks of an empty barrel, as she continued pulling the trigger.

Bracing himself against the door, Cosky hobbled forward, swearing when he stepped on another pebble and his leg twisted beneath him. The woman started and spun to face him.

Her face was twisted, lips slightly apart. Huge, wild eyes locked on him. Her mouth opened wide, but nothing emerged but a hoarse, ragged puff of breath. The gun rose, centered on his chest.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Cosky let go of the door and lurched forward. She jumped back.
Click. Click
. He chanced another wobbling step. With another of those soundless, breathless screams, she threw the gun at his head. He ducked, and it whistled harmlessly overhead.

By the time he straightened, she’d taken flight. Horns blared, tires squealing as she dodged traffic and sprinted across the boulevard in front of the apartment complex. She entered the park across the
street at a dead run, her woolen cape, or cloak, or whatever it was, flapping behind her like a muddy flag.

Bending over, he kneaded his screaming knee. That freakishly strange episode had just unraveled every damn bit of good Kait’s healing had done. He was back to stage one again: throbbing, stabbing, and unstable.

As helpless as an infant.

He watched her cut across the park and disappear down a side street. Frustration joined the furnace billowing away inside him, until he felt like he might explode from the pressure.

“Hey, Mister,” a weedy voice yelled from his right. “Are you okay?”

Cosky lifted his forearm to swipe the sweat from his forehead and eyes. A tall, gangly kid barely out of high school jogged up to him, and skidded to a stop in front of the pickup.

“I’m fine.” Cosky scanned the side street the woman had disappeared down. She was probably long gone by now. This time he didn’t bother to shove the irritation aside. It solidified across his chest, in a seething quagmire that threatened to suffocate him.

Damn it, he should have had her. She’d been an amateur. Bum knee or not, he should have been able to subdue her.

Scowling, he flapped his shirt a couple of times to try to cool his overheated body. “Who was she?” Mr. Chatty bounced from foot to foot, excitement boiling off him. The heat didn’t seem to affect him in the slightest. “Why was she shooting at us?”

Us
? Cosky gave the kid a quick once-over. This was who his mystery attacker had turned her rage on? Why? The kid was as harmless.

“You see her before?” Cosky asked.

“No. You?”

“No.” As he dug in the pocket of his sweats for his cell phone, he ran through the encounter in his head. She sure as hell seemed to
know him, though. Or thought she had. She’d called him by name, accused him of being a
lying, murdering bastard.
She’d said the attack was for her
babies
.

What the hell did he have to do with her babies?

He frowned, absently rubbing his temple against his shoulder to wipe away an annoying trickle of sweat.

She’d mentioned another name too. She’d said
Russ
.

He froze as the name finally registered.
Russ
?

Had she been talking about Branson? Russ Branson was the only person he knew who went by that first name. Could this strange woman be connected to Branson?

“This is for my babies.”

Her voice rang in his head. The livid rage. The echo of loss. Of grief. Had Branson been the father of her children?

He mulled her words over as he dialed nine-one-one and reported the shooting. Another question occurred to him as he disconnected the call and settled against his truck, waiting for the cops to arrive.

Why hadn’t she attacked in the mall’s parking lot? Maybe the delay had to do with her approach. At the mall they’d been face-to-face. Here, she’d been closing on his back. Maybe she’d wanted the advantage of his vulnerable position, so she’d eighty-sixed the first attack and redeployed when the circumstances were more advantageous for her.

“I’ve never been shot at before,” the kid said, exhilaration lighting his face and shining in his eyes.

He was so bouncy it made Cosky’s knee ache just watching him. Christ, he couldn’t remember ever feeling this euphoric because someone had painted a big red bull’s-eye on his back—not even in the old days when he’d been the greenest banana in the skiff.

“No kidding,” Cosky said, giving his shirt a couple more cooling flaps.

From the quick look the kid shot him and the sudden stillness to his feet, he must have picked up on the dryness in Cosky’s voice. Suddenly he felt about as jaded as a man could feel.

“Hey,” the kid took a step and bent. “She dropped her gun.”

“Leave it.” His voice must have emerged sharper than he’d realized, because the kid jumped back. He tempered his tone. “The cops will want to pull prints. We don’t want to smear them or add our own.”

“Oh, okay. Why do you think she shot at us? Just crazy?”

“Hell, who knows?” Cosky said, although the question was plaguing him as well.

The kid suddenly stopped moving long enough to sniff the air. “I wonder if she wore perfume. I keep getting this whiff of flowers.”

Cosky eased a step away, heat touching his face. He needed a shower.

In the distance the scream of a siren pierced the air.

If she was connected to Branson, why go after him? He hadn’t been the one to kill Branson; Zane had. Maybe she’d gotten the two of them confused. They were the same size, the same build, the same dark hair. It would be easy to confuse them.

Which would have made sense, except she’d called him by name. Obviously, she’d known who he was. The papers had identified Zane repeatedly as being the trigger man, so she must know Zane had taken the kill shot.

Why hadn’t she gone after Zane?

Probably because she’d known she had no chance of taking Zane down, so she’d gone after the easiest target, the gimp.

He swore beneath his breath and glared down at his knee. If he’d grabbed her, he’d know the answers to all these damn questions.

What a disaster.

If she was connected to Branson, she was the first lead they’d had in months. Their one shot at tracking down Branson’s true identity. If they could identify the man, they could zero in on his movements, find his associates, and maybe even lock on the people who’d funded the Sea-Tac Airport operation.

She just might be their only chance at clearing their names and exposing Chastain and McKay’s murderers.

And he’d let her get away.

Chapter Six

T
HEY
’
D FOUND HER
.

Those bastards had found her again.

A long face, with a gleaming dome of a head and muddy dead eyes swam across Jillian’s vision.

He’d been one of them…one of the men who’d kicked in her door and kidnapped her family. One of the men who’d dragged them into the woods and turned the guns on them. One of the men who’d stolen her life from her, who’d left her empty and aching and zombified.

Jillian darted across another street, ignoring the clash of horns and squeal of brakes, and fled down the adjacent alley. An army of green trash containers flew past her.

She shied away from the images reeling through her mind.

The cool dampness of the forest. The sharp scent of pine and decomposing vegetation. A huge, gold harvest moon gleaming overhead. The cough of guns. A child’s cutoff scream. Burning pain.

She shook the memory aside and tucked her chin, coaxing another burst of speed from her exhausted legs.

Was he behind her? Following? She strained to hear. Were those footsteps pounding behind her? Or her own heartbeat?

But her own gasping breaths plugged her ears. The urge to glance over her shoulder was overwhelming. She ignored it, focused on her body, and forced more speed from her burning legs and laboring chest. Looking would slow her down. Slowing down would give him the opportunity to grab her; and if he caught her, she was dead.

Which couldn’t happen.

Not yet.

Milking every ounce of strength she could muster, she raced across another street, flew down another alley. Another street. Another alley. Startled faces skidded past her peripheral view. She ran until her legs went numb and her heart threatened to explode. When she couldn’t run another step, she stumbled to a walk and glanced behind her.

Nobody was behind her. The street was empty.

To the west a siren started screaming.

Jillian stopped and braced her palms on her knees, drawing great gusting breaths. It slowly occurred to her, as she fed her starving lungs, that the siren was getting louder. Closer. Straightening, she staggered toward the mouth of another alley. Halfway down the alley she spotted an industrial garbage bin bristling with broken-down cardboard boxes. She forced her numb legs toward it. The container was huge and positioned at a slight angle, which created a wedge of space between the back of the bin and the brick wall behind it. The space would provide plenty of cover, clean cover, since it was stuffed with cardboard rather than restaurant refuse.

She took a second to shove broken boxes over the back of the container so they fell against the wall. Then she dropped to her knees and crawled into the space, pulling a couple of the loose boxes in behind her to close off the entrance. Once she was certain she couldn’t be seen from the alley or street, she rolled over onto her
back, and dragged more cardboard over her prone body. Once she was settled, she fought to catch her breath.

It wasn’t long before dampness chilled her back. She ignored the discomfort and worked on regulating her breathing. If someone had followed her, they could pinpoint her hiding place through her gasps. She needed to concentrate on calming herself and quieting down.

A dozen deep steady breaths later, and the panic dissipated. She’d fled on instinct and taken streets and alleys without paying attention to where she was going, so she had no idea where she was. She hoped
they
wouldn’t know where she was either.

She’d only seen the one killer, but the rest of them had to be near. They traveled in a pack, or at least they’d been together when they broke into her home, and…and…and…

…crack after crack of gunfire. Her babies falling beside her. The smell of spent fireworks…

No. No. No.

She flinched, dragged her mind back from the abyss, focused on the here and now.

The same five had staked out Russ’s condo, and swarmed the hospital looking for her. If the bald killer was in Coronado, the others must be too.

She’d been lucky. Four times lucky. If she hadn’t given in to the nurses’ insistence and taken a lap around the ward, she would have been trapped in her room when those bastards showed up at the hospital. If she hadn’t knelt to tie her shoe next to the nurses’ station, they would have spotted her in the hall. If she hadn’t stopped to greet Russ’s elderly neighbor, she wouldn’t have known her brother’s condo was being watched, and she would have walked into their trap. If she hadn’t turned at that young boy’s shout, she wouldn’t have seen that bald monster skulking by her car.

Yeah, she’d been lucky.

If you could call living with this endless abyss swallowing her from the inside out, lucky.

Wouldn’t lucky have been dying alongside her babies in that forest? Or drowning in the cold, murky depths of Lake Katcheca and sharing her children’s resting place?

What was lucky about living, when all the people who made life worth living had been taken from her?

If she were truly lucky, one of those bullets would have stopped Marcus Simcosky’s heart. And another would have killed that bastard next to her car. If she were truly lucky, they would both be dead now.

She frowned at the icy bite sinking into her spine and rolled to face the brick wall. Once the gun ran out of bullets she should have looked for another weapon instead of running. There must have been something she could have used against those two bastards.

The rumble of an engine entered the alley. She tensed and rolled to face it, peering beneath the bottom of the garbage bin. Had they found her?

Tires stopped in the middle of the street, just down from her hiding place. But they looked too big to be a police car, maybe a van or some kind of truck. Simcosky had been driving a truck, but from what little she could see from beneath the garbage container, this vehicle was a rusting white; his had been black.

Too bad she hadn’t had a bulky vehicle like this available to her in the parking lot. It would make a deadly weapon, and cause crushing, agonizing injury. They’d feel every second of the pain death dealt them. Like her babies had. Like Russ had.

Like she was feeling now.

Doors opened. She watched boots hit the pavement. But the engine continued purring.

“After this haul, let’s hit Barney’s. This day deserves a beer,” a deep male voice said as he slammed the driver’s door and walked around the front of the vehicle.

She relaxed when she didn’t recognize it.

“No shit,” another man responded. “What are we hauling, anyway?”

“A freezer.”

“You sure it’ll fit in the van?”

“Piece of cake, we’ll just have to slide it in on its side.”

The sound of a fist hammering against metal was followed by the creak of a door opening. Jillian stirred.

“You’re late,” a woman snapped. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

Jillian cocked her head and smiled. So far there had only been the two voices, and both were going into the store. What were the chances the van was unattended? It was worth checking out; if someone else was in the van, she’d slink away. Pushing the cardboard aside, she backed out from behind the container.