Heartbreaker (16 page)

“Ouch!” he said, choking on what must have been a too-greedy gulp.

“It’s stuck.”

“Well, don’t yank! Here!” He poured some of the water over the problematic spot. Lynn wasn’t sure that he was doing the right thing, but sure enough, her searching fingers told her that the water seemed to work, liquefying the drying blood.

“Ouch!” He gasped this time as she succeeded in pulling his shirt free of the wound.

“I thought it was unstuck,” Lynn said.

“You thought wrong.”

“I need you to raise up so I can get your shirt off. Rory, help me lift him.”

“I can sit up.”

He suited the action to the words before Lynn could stop him.

“Can you lift your arms?”

“Not the right one.”

Lynn eased the T-shirt up his left arm and over his head, then pulled it down his right arm.

Before the operation was completed, Jess was leaning heavily against her, his good shoulder pressing into her breasts, breathing harder than ever. She could feel the increasing heat of his body, smell his sudden outbreak of perspiration, and she realized that he was in more pain than he was letting on.

The T-shirt came off at last. He sighed with relief as she let it drop to the ground.

“My head hurts,” Rory said, her voice subdued.

“I know, baby. Why don’t you lie down for a minute and see if that helps?” Lynn’s hands were on Jess’s back, feeling their way around. It, too, was warm and wide and hard of muscle—and wet with blood.

A rustling sound told Lynn that Rory was complying with her suggestion. Under the circumstances a headache was only to be expected, Lynn reassured herself. Anyway, there was nothing she could do for Rory at the moment.

Jess, on the other hand, needed her help urgently.

“Can you lie on your side? Your left side,” she specified to Jess.

He grunted by way of a reply. Lynn kept her hands on him as he lay back down, on his uninjured side as requested. Once he was settled she reached for the first-aid kit.

During her earlier search for cigarettes she had opened the small plastic box to check out the contents. Now she was profoundly glad that she had. She knew what was in there, basically, and could identify the contents by feel: sterile pads in their paper wrappers, a roll of gauze, a tube of antiseptic ointment. Scissors. Tape. Even Tylenol.

“Maybe you should take a couple of Tylenol,” Lynn suggested, rattling the bottle.

Jess snorted. “Honey, I could take the whole bottle and it wouldn’t make a dent.”

“Do you hurt a lot?” Rory asked.

“Some.”

That Jess was admitting to hurting at all told Lynn that her suspicions were correct: He was in a great deal of pain. She wrestled with the lid of the childproof bottle.

“Rory, can you open this?” Lynn gave up and passed the bottle to her daughter. From the age of three onward, Rory had managed to open every childproof container that had come her way. Lynn, on the other hand, was hopeless at it. While Rory worked on the bottle cap, Lynn fished another water bottle from the pack.

“Here, Mom.” Rory returned the open bottle, along with the lid. Lynn positioned the lid on her knee and shook two gel caps into her palm.

“You take these, for your head.” She passed the gel caps to Rory, along with the water, and shook out two more.

“And you”—she prodded Jess’s mouth with an index finger—“open up.”

He obeyed, and she popped the pills in. As she twisted the lid back on the bottle and returned it to the first-aid kit, she heard him swallowing water again.

Rory was quiet—resting, probably. Lynn freed a gauze pad from its packaging, smeared antibiotic on it, and gingerly felt Jess’s shoulder to locate the wound.

“Ouch!” He flinched. The swelling flesh all around it helped Lynn to find the raised edge of the bullet hole. It was high on his shoulder. Good. Given its location, the bullet had hit nothing vital.

She pressed the gauze pad firmly against it.

“Yeow!”

“Shh!” The sudden yelp made Lynn jump. “Don’t be such a baby,” she added crossly.

“Baby, my ass,” Jess muttered. “That hurt!”

“Hold this for a minute. I need to see if there’s a hole in your back.” She found his left hand, guiding it to the pad.

“Can’t you just bandage it up?”

“You already passed out once,” Lynn reminded him, her fingertips feather-light as they moved over his bloody shoulder blade. “From blood loss, I’m sure. If I don’t bandage this up right, who knows? You might even bleed to death.”

Jess was silent.

“I’ve got it.” She found another raised edge, sticky with gore. The bullet had passed all the way through, which, she thought as she smeared a second pad with antibiotic, was a good thing. She couldn’t imagine herself performing emergency surgery on Jess to remove the bullet—especially in the dark.

She had an even harder time imagining him letting her. At the thought of what his reaction to such a suggestion would be, Lynn had to smile.

“Could you hurry up?”

“Sure,” Lynn said, and pressed the pad to the wound with a tad more force than was strictly necessary.

“Ow!”

“You can move your hand.” She slid her hand under Jess’s. Palms flat, she applied direct pressure to both sides of the wound at once.

“Damn, that hurts.” He sounded like he was having trouble catching his breath.

“It’ll be over in a minute. Stay still.”

Blood soaked both pads. Lynn could feel the sticky wetness against her palms. She layered on more pads and applied pressure again. When the bleeding started to let up, Lynn taped the pads in place and wrapped Jess’s shoulder and chest in layers of gauze.

“There,” she said, finishing at last. “All done.”

“Thank God.”

Lynn had not realized how tense Jess’s muscles were until she felt them relax.

“Is it safe for us to go to sleep, do you think? For a little while?” Rory’s voice was small and tired.

“Absolutely.” Jess’s reassurance sounded too hearty to Lynn, but she hoped her daughter was too young or too tired to pick up on the false note. “We’re going to be okay, Rory, I promise. We’ll sleep the rest of the night, meet the Jeep tomorrow, and be safe on the ranch this time tomorrow night.”

You hope, Lynn added silently, but she didn’t say it.

There was no point in scaring Rory any more.

“What if they find us?” Rory’s voice was smaller yet.

“They won’t,” Lynn said, proud of how certain she sounded.

“Your mom’s right,” Jess said. “The forest is too wild and the entrance to this place is too well hidden. You have to know where it is.”

Rory yawned, hugely, the sound so familiar that it made Lynn ache.

“I’ll get the sleeping bags,” she said. There were two, tied to the bottoms of the packs. Lynn presumed three would have been too cumbersome to carry. Not that it mattered, she thought as she rolled them out side by side. They were plenty big enough for her to share one with Rory.

She unzipped Jess’s for him and would have bundled him into it if he had not spurned her offer of help.

“I can manage,” he said. “Get some sleep yourself.”

Lynn suddenly realized how exhausted she was. Rory was already snug in their bag. As Lynn pulled off her boots and squirmed in beside Rory, she welcomed her daughter’s warmth.

She kissed her daughter’s cheek, then fell asleep to the sound of Jess’s sleeping bag being zipped up.

“N
o! Christ, no!”

Lynn woke to those words. They weren’t loud, more of a thick mutter that trailed off into incoherence. But under the circumstances they were enough to blast her from sleep.

For a moment she lay paralyzed, staring wide-eyed into the oppressive blackness and seeing nothing. Sounds assaulted her: anguished mumbling, soft thudding movements, heavy breathing.

Was Jess being attacked?

He was close; his sleeping bag was right beside the one in which she and Rory lay. If he was fighting off an attacker, there was no way she could be unaware of the intruder’s presence.

Jess was having a nightmare.

After the day they’d had, she wasn’t surprised.

Lynn turned on her side, careful not to disturb Rory, whose even breathing spoke of deep sleep. Unzipping the bag enough to get her hand out, she reached out to Jess.

What she touched was his chin, sandpaper-rough. She lost contact as his head moved. The murmurs grew louder.

She unzipped her sleeping bag, scrambled out, and leaned over him.

Though she could see nothing she could hear his restless movements. His hair was surprisingly soft, she found as she tried to awaken him by touch. When her gentle nudge had no effect she ran her fingers over his face, trying to determine if he was awake, asleep, or unconscious. His forehead was warm and damp with sweat. His brows were thick. The bridge of his nose was hard and finely chiseled. His cheekbones were hard, too, and prominent. His lips were soft, his cheeks and chin whiskery.

His breath fluttered past her hand. His head tossed from side to side. He said something that she could not understand.

“Jess.” Whispering, she patted his cheek. “Jess.”

Without warning her wrist was seized in a grip like iron. She jumped.

“Jess!”

“Oh, it’s you.” He didn’t sound particularly thrilled about the idea. “What?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

“So?” The single-word question was surly.

“So you were talking in your sleep.”

“So?”

“So shut up,” Lynn said, goaded. “And let go of my wrist.”

He let go. “Is Rory awake?”

“No.”

“Then go back to sleep. We’ve got a little while yet before we have to get moving.”

“Will they still be looking for us do you think? In the morning, I mean?”

“Yes.”

Lynn shivered. She’d known that, of course, but she hated having him confirm it. The danger had begun to seem like nothing more than a horrible bad dream. Now it was real again.

“Are you in pain?”

“What do you think?”

“Do you want another Tylenol?”

“No.”

Lynn was silent for a moment.

“Jess?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you have some kind of plan for getting us out of this alive?”

“What, are you planning to sue Adventure, Inc. if I don’t?”

“Yes.”

“Posthumously, I guess. Big on plans, aren’t you?”

“Do you have one, or not?”

“Yup.”

“What?”

“If we come across those guys again, we run like hell.”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I.”

Lynn glowered, though of course he couldn’t see her expression in the dark. He couldn’t see her, period. And she couldn’t see him, though she was kneeling beside his sleeping bag, her knees nudging his body through the soft padding.

Clearly, if there was to be a plan she was going to have to come up with it herself. If she left it to this big dumb cowboy, she deserved what she got.

“What we have to do is get to where your brother will be waiting with the Jeep. Once we’re on the road we’ll head straight for a phone and call the police.” She was thinking aloud.

“Brilliant.” Sarcasm came through loud and clear.

“You’re welcome to come up with an alternative.” Under the circumstances Lynn didn’t appreciate his tone. His life was on the line here too. “If you can.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Okay.” Lynn took a deep breath. “How far do we have to go? To where we meet the Jeep, I mean.”

“About eight miles.”

“That far?” Lynn chewed her lower lip. “The problem is that they’re still out there looking for us.”

“Brilliant again.”

“You’re a big fat lot of help.”

“I’ve got it covered, okay? I’ve got a
plan
. So relax and go back to sleep.”

“You do?”

“Yup.”

“What?” Her distrust came through loud and clear.

“Christ, are you anal or what? I bet you make lists. I bet you get up every freaking morning and write down everything you have to do for the day and check it off when it’s done. I bet you set aside a certain time to return phone calls. I bet your closet is organized by color. I bet your
bookshelves
are alphabetized.”

That was so close to the truth that Lynn flushed.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked defensively.

“Not a thing. Trust me, will you? I can get us to the Jeep without being seen.”

“Sure?”

“Guar-an-teed.”

Lynn said nothing. She didn’t believe him, though she wanted to badly. He couldn’t guarantee their safety. No one could. But since he knew the area and she didn’t, since he was more at home in the wilderness than she was, since he was part owner of the outfit responsible for her and Rory’s safety, she was going to follow his lead.

For the time being anyway. She was quiet for a few minutes, coming to terms with that.

“Jess?”

“What now?”

“The man on the cross—” Lynn shuddered at the memory. “What do you think that means?”

“That there are some real sickos in the world.”

Lynn shot him a disgusted glance, which he could not see, of course. “It must have been some kind of ritual killing, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Look, go back to sleep, would you?”

“I can’t sleep. I keep seeing that man—and that woman. And the boy.”

“
I
can sleep.”

“No, you can’t. You were having a nightmare. That’s not sleeping.”

“Works for me.”

Lynn didn’t answer, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. Having slept off the worst of her exhaustion, she no longer had any inclination to close her eyes. If she did, images of the murders would only rise up to haunt her. They were horrifying; it was too easy to imagine herself and Rory in the victims’ places.

She needed distraction to keep her from remembering and then degenerating into a trembling puddle of incoherent fear as she acknowledged that she and Rory—and Jess—were in terrible danger of joining those victims still.

For all their sakes she needed to stay calm. Jess might have the brawn necessary to get them to safety, but she doubted that he had the brain. If, as she had learned on the job, anxiety was crippling to creative thinking, consider how much more crippling abject terror must be.