Manna From Heaven (8 page)

At that point, the combined plagues of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn’t have forced her to let go.

Caught up by the current, she—they—were heading straight for what was to all intents and purposes a tiny island. The centerpiece of it appeared to be a large rock, visible because it was a solid, unmoving charcoal triangle above the oil-black water, and because of the foam that leaped and curled against its base. Logs and a variety
of miscellaneous debris had been trapped against it, making it into a small, precariously put together oasis—and their only chance. Latching onto it in their previous position would have been almost impossible. But in their present butterfly formation, they might, just might, be able to snag it.

Another strand of the current caught them up, carrying them wide. Suddenly they were being swept too far to the left.

“No!” Charlie cried.

“Kick! Kick!” The roaring of the water all but drowned out Jake’s words. He surged toward the rock with a mighty one-armed stroke, towing her after him. She kicked frantically in an effort to do her part. All at once, while still about three feet short, they were level with the rock, passing it, going to miss it altogether. …

Jake hurled himself across the surface of the water like a flying fish and latched on to the outermost branch of the outermost log. Charlie could see the paleness of his hand closing around the dark wet bark as, despite kicking for all she was worth, she was carried on downstream. Would his one-handed grip be strong enough to hold them? Would the forearm-sized branch break? The falls were so close she could have thrown a rock and it would have gone over, she discovered with a single terrified glance over her shoulder. She could feel the current tugging at her like a giant vacuum, intent on sucking her down.

Sadie, still paddling frantically upstream, swept past.

“Sadie!” Without thought, Charlie lunged for her pet, knowing the dog faced almost certain death if she did not catch her. Her clutching hand closed over one
fragile front leg. The branch wedged under her armpit shot free and was gone, just as quick as that. Charlie didn’t even have time to feel horrified. Gasping, kicking, flailing, hanging onto Sadie with every scrap of determination she possessed, she sank. The water was merciless, swallowing her up like a giant mouth, shutting off air and hope. She clawed for the surface, for air—and felt a powerful jerk on her right arm.

Jake! Thank God for Jake! He was reeling her in. Her head broke the surface, and she gulped in sweet, blessed, lung-filling air as he pulled her toward him. Kicking for all she was worth, still maintaining her death grip on Sadie, she wrapped her fingers around the reassuringly thick bones of Jake’s wrist and then, when she was close enough, practically swarmed atop him, locking her free arm around his neck. He felt reassuringly big and solid, her own private rock, and she was never, ever going to let him go again this side of dry land.

“You almost got us killed! Over a damned dog!” With one arm hooked over the branch, he kept them both afloat as she pressed her shaking body to his. He was as wet and cold as she was, and in as precarious a position, too, but his shoulders were broad and his chest was wide and his arms were strong, and, reasonably or not, Charlie felt safe in his hold. She pressed her cheek to his wet bristly one and clung, coughing and sputtering, as she fought to clear her lungs. Sadie, dear Sadie, scrambled free of her grip and up over her arm and shoulder to stand, trembling, completely clear of the water, on the uprooted tree which had saved them.

“She would have drowned if I hadn’t grabbed her.”
Each word was punctuated by a choking cough. She was numb with cold and boneless with exhaustion, and if he hadn’t been holding her up she feared she would have just slithered down into the water like not-quite-set gelatin.

“Better the dog than us. For your information, when you grabbed her, I almost lost my grip on this tree. If I had, we would have gone over the falls.” His voice was grim, but his breath fluttering past her ear was surprisingly warm and comforting.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Charlie coughed some more, pressing her cheek closer to his, greedy for even the meager warmth generated by this small area of skin-to-skin contact. Sadie, secure in the knowledge that the worst of the ordeal was now behind them, chose that moment to shake the water from her coat. Unfortunately, Jake got the brunt of the shower right in the face. When he opened his eyes again, he was scowling.

“I think that’s called adding insult to injury. You’re pushing your luck, dog.”

This was addressed to Sadie, uttered half under his breath and on such a sour note that Charlie, feeling safer than she had for some minutes, almost smiled.

And why not? The situation wasn’t good, but it was at least stable. The man she clutched was reassuringly solid, the thugs were off on a wild-goose chase somewhere downstream, and suddenly the odds of surviving the night appeared to have improved to something at least a little better than zero. As ridiculous as it seemed, that combination of factors made her suddenly feel almost euphoric.

The thought that she might actually be going to live was intoxicating. Maybe she would get a chance to wear that new dress and sing with Marisol at the Yellow Rose after all.

Or maybe not. Reality hit right along with a cold splash of water in the face. Charlie was reminded that her nonswimming self was still trapped in the middle of a rushing river only a few hundred yards above a deadly falls, hanging on for dear life to a stranger whom a pair of really bad guys were doing their best to kill.

If her odds of survival had increased, it was only because they had been so low to begin with. They were still so bad that no gambler worth his salt would touch them with a ten-foot pole.

“What now?” she asked, pulling her head back so that she could look at him. She couldn’t see much of him in the darkness, but what she could see—and feel—gave her a tiny spurt of hope. He was exactly the kind of hard-muscled man’s man who would know what to do in all manly situations. She bet he knew how to fix car engines and repair roofs and grill steaks outdoors. She knew for a fact that already tonight he’d jumped out of a plane, dodged a hail of bullets and swum more than halfway across a river with her dead weight attached. Right at this very moment, he was probably formulating a plan for their salvation.

“Got me,” her hero answered.

“Great.” Her bubble of burgeoning hope deflated like a pricked balloon.

“If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m all ears.”

Charlie glanced around. The utter impossibility of remedying their situation was clear. “I don’t.”

“Look on the bright side: We’re not dead yet.”

“Yet
is the key word here, I think.”

“Regular little optimist, aren’t you? All right, let go of my neck and hold onto the tree instead. I want to see what’s on the other side of this rock, and to do that we have to move.”

8

C
HARLIE WASN’T HAPPY
about letting go, but it was beginning to occur to her that hypothermia could probably be added to the list of ways she might reasonably expect to die tonight, right up there along with being shot and drowning. They had to get out of the water soon. She wasn’t even shivering much any longer, and that, she knew, was a bad sign. With Jake’s support she turned, hooked the arm that had been around his neck over the branch, then inched herself along in his wake. The tree seemed to be solidly wedged, she noted gratefully. It didn’t budge despite their shifting grip, or the force of the water pushing against it. Sadie trotted along above their heads, careful to stay well clear of the water while keeping pace.

“Are you really a cop?” Charlie asked, grasping at any straw of hope she could think of as they made it to the other side of the pile of trapped debris. Jake was looking toward the bank as if he were contemplating the possibility of swimming for it. Not in this life, Charlie
thought, and definitely not with her attached. No way. No how. In her opinion, dying of exposure was better than drowning. Anything was better than drowning.

“DEA.” His tone was absent. He was still looking in a measuring way toward shore.

“Then don’t you have any little DEA buddies around here somewhere who might come charging to the rescue about now?”

“Nope.” He glanced around at her then, and grinned suddenly. She could see the faint gleam of his teeth through the darkness. “Sorry, Charlie.”

“Oh, funny.” She had heard that one so often that it had ceased to amuse about ten years back. “Why not?”

“Because none of my little DEA buddies, as you call ’em, has any idea that anything’s gone wrong here. As far as my guys know, this operation is going down exactly as planned.”

“Fantastic,” Charlie said. “Were you supposed to be undercover or something? What were you going to do if something went wrong—as it obviously has? Didn’t you have a Plan B?”

“Working on it.”

“Care to share your thoughts?”

“You ever hear that old saying about curiosity killing the cat?”

Charlie snorted, and glanced meaningfully around. “Curiosity’s going to have to get in line.”

He grinned again. “Yeah, well, being in the wrong place at the wrong time works, too. Do you always drive alone through remote areas of the country in the middle of the night, by the way? It’s just a suggestion, but you might want to rethink that.”

“I was working,” Charlie said through lips that were starting to feel alarmingly stiff.

“What do you do, run a traveling animal act? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but driving around with a snake and a skunk—to say nothing of that pitiful excuse for a dog—doesn’t sound like any job I ever heard of.”

“I was releasing animals into the wild.” That sounded commendably noble. It was also the literal truth. But Charlie had been brought up to tell the whole truth, so she reluctantly continued. “My sister just bought a company called County-wide Critter Ridders. People hire them to rid their houses, or barns, or whatever, of wild animals that have somehow managed to get in. Tonight Marisol—my sister—had something else to do, so she asked me if I’d drive the animals to Cheatham Wildlife Management Area and let them go. That’s what I was doing. Getting involved with this—with
you
—was just bad luck.”

“Yeah, well, your luck doesn’t seem to be getting any better.” Surprisingly, his voice was grim again. “Look upriver.”

Charlie did, and her eyes widened. A bright light, the same kind of light that had first attracted her attention on the road, was just visible through the trees. It obviously came from some kind of aircraft, and it was just as obviously scanning the river.

“Could somebody have called the police?” she asked on a last, forlorn hope.

“’Fraid not. Woz must have called for reinforcements. That’s a helicopter.”

“Looking for us?”

“Yep. They can’t afford to let us get away, you know. We know too much, and they’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we don’t live to tell the tale. I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a boat coming, too.”

Charlie glanced wildly all around. Where they were, the river was about a quarter of a mile wide. The light seemed to be moving methodically from side to side. There was no way it wasn’t going to see the rock jutting up from the glossy black surface of the water—and if it found the rock, it would find them.

“Oh, my God, what do we do?” Panic sharpened her voice.

“Only one thing to do: Swim for it.”

“No! Oh, no!” She shook her head vigorously. “You know we can’t make it to shore. The waterfall’s too close and …”

Her voice broke off abruptly as Jake took a deep breath and disappeared underwater. For a moment Charlie could only stare in horror at the place where he had been. At any second she expected him to yank her down, too. There were several tugs on her handcuffed arm, but they were relatively benign, as though he was moving around. After the first one, she stopped paying attention anyway. She hung onto the branch like a monkey in a hurricane while her gaze fastened on the spotlight which was drawing ever closer. As she watched, wide-eyed, the helicopter itself appeared around a bend in the river. It was flying low, perhaps only a few hundred feet above the surface, and the whirr of the blades could now be heard distinctly even above the rushing water. The spotlight moved from side to side like a great all-seeing eye. In minutes it would be upon them. With
her heart pounding so fiercely that she could feel each slamming beat, Charlie gave a sharp tug on the chain linking her to Jake. Seconds later he popped back into view, shaking water from his head and sucking in air.

“Jake, Jake, look! They’re getting really close. There’s no way they’re going to miss us. We’re out of time.”

“Yeah, I see.” He barely glanced at the oncoming helicopter. Instead, his gaze fixed on her face. “Charlie, listen: There’s a tree wedged against this one that stretches out toward the bank. We’re going to go underwater and hang on to it as far as we can, and then we’re going to shove off hard with our feet and hope that the little extra boost that gives us brings us close enough to the bank so that we can make it. We’re going to stay under until the helicopter passes, and we’re going to have to take the dog under with us. If we leave it here, they’ll spot it and it will give us away. All I want you to do is hang on to the dog, and leave everything else to me.”