Blind Run (5 page)

The anguish rose up to choke her, closing around her throat with a strangled sob. He’d been so young, so full of life.

Why?

It was a question she’d asked a thousand times—a million—in the days following the accident. No one should have to suffer this, no parent should have to bury a child. But she had, and she needed to know why.

Clenching her fists, as if that action would somehow keep her from flying apart, she fought for control. There were no answers, she knew that. Her son was dead. She may never get over it, but she would have to live with it.

Again, she brushed at the tears, determined to get on with this, to move on with her life as Charles had suggested. Her hands trembled as she reached for a photo-shop envelope of pictures she’d always meant to put in an album. Now, she never would. She couldn’t handle having them around where she could look at them, where they’d be a constant reminder of the child she’d lost.

As she lifted the envelope, something dropped to the bottom of the box. Stunned, she stared down at the heavy silver band. She’d forgotten it was here, that she’d saved it, storing it with her memories of Nicky. Slowly, she set down the pictures and picked up the ring.

Ethan’s ring.

It, too, had the power to inflict pain. She remembered the first time he’d put it on her finger. It had been a beautiful April day, and they’d known each other less than a month. They’d taken a picnic lunch to the hill country west of Austin, and in a field of bluebonnets, they’d made love for the first time.

Later, on their way home, they’d stopped at an arts and crafts fair in Fredericksburg and held hands as they wandered among the booths. She didn’t remember what had attracted them to the display of silver and turquoise trinkets. On a woven mat before an old man, the inexpensive items were no different from a dozen other similar collections. But as Ethan crouched down to look, the stranger had pulled a small leather pouch from inside his shirt and offered it to them. The bag contained two matching silver rings, beautifully and intricately carved. Ethan had bought them on the spot and slipped one on her finger.

The memory brought fresh tears to her eyes.

It had been a foolish and spontaneously wonderful gesture. And so like Ethan. He’d never been one for planning or scheduling, whereas she’d always lived by the rules.

Before she’d met him, her life had been predictable. She’d had her whole future mapped out. She’d been twenty-five and almost finished with medical school. Another few years and she’d set up her practice. Then Ethan had exploded into her life, changing everything.

He’d been unlike anyone she’d ever met, handsome and charming on the surface, while possessing an underlying wildness that reminded her of leather jackets and motorcycles. She’d never stood a chance.

It was funny that a woman who’d grown up following the straight and narrow could fall so hard. But she had, and for the first time in her life she’d wanted something other than a career in medicine. She’d wanted Ethan Decker.

Holding the ring up in the light, she looked at the inscription.

Forever and Always. Ethan.

But it had been a lie. When she’d needed him most, Ethan had deserted her. They’d buried their son on a bright Texas morning, and by nightfall, Ethan was gone. The tears came hot and unbidden now, temporarily blinding her. But this time, it was anger that spurred them on.

Charles was right. She had to get on with her life. Their lives. She’d been holding on to the past just as she’d held on to this tiny circle of silver. No more. Clutching the ring, she headed for the front of the condo.

She’d loved Ethan unconditionally, but he’d betrayed her and their son’s memory the day he walked out on her. Turning off the alarm, she left the apartment and walked down the hall to the utility room. Inside, with her hand on the trash chute handle, she hesitated.

Ethan’s ring.

Then, before she could change her mind, she opened the lid and dropped the ring, hearing the ping of metal against metal as it fell twelve stories to the Dumpster in the basement.

By his own choice, Ethan had ceased to be a part of her life. It was time she accepted it.

CHAPTER FOUR

DANNY WATCHED
the hawk soaring above the desert.

He’d seen lots of birds before; blue herons and osprey were common in the San Juans, and the bald eagles used the islands as a breeding ground. But something about the solitary hawk, searching for his next meal, made Danny realize just how far he was from home. For a moment, he wished he could take back the last three days and return to Haven Island. Then he remembered all the lies and betrayals and knew he could never go back.

Besides, he kind of liked it here.

In school they’d learned about deserts, but this was nothing like those boring lessons. And it was so different from the island, with its damp evergreen forest hemmed in by the Pacific. Here there were no boundaries. The sand seemed to stretch forever, and the colors were almost nonexistent. Except the sky. He didn’t remember ever seeing anything so blue.

“Do you think he’ll catch her?”

Danny glanced back at his sister. “In that old truck? No way.” Walking over, he picked up his backpack and sat on the trailer steps. “How are you feeling?” Callie looked better, but he had to watch her. She got sick a lot and had been to see Dr. Turner the day they’d run away, which made Danny worry that she might be coming down with something.

“I’m okay.” She took another cracker from the package and handed him the rest. “What did you think of him?”

“Who? Decker?”

Callie nodded. “He’ll be back when he doesn’t find Anna.”

“Probably.” Danny rummaged through his backpack for the Game Boy Anna had bought for him. “But it won’t make any difference whether he comes back or not.”

Though that wasn’t entirely true. Anna had been bad enough. Danny knew he couldn’t trust her, but he also knew she wouldn’t send them back to the island. He wasn’t sure about Decker. It was pretty obvious he didn’t want anything to do with helping a couple of kids. What would he do if he didn’t find Anna? Would he even care what Danny and Callie wanted?

“We’ll be okay,” he said, as much to reassure himself as Callie. “The Keepers don’t know we’re here. So we’ll just rest up a bit, then walk out to the road. Someone will give us a ride.”

Callie looked toward the horizon, where the sun hovered just above the western mountains. “It’s gonna be night soon. Shouldn’t we wait until morning?”

Danny didn’t like the idea of being alone in the desert after dark, either, but he wasn’t sure they had a choice. Not if they wanted to get away. “We can’t stay here that long. If Decker returns and decides to hand us over to the police, they’ll send us back to the Haven. We’ll lose our only chance to find our parents.”

“He won’t do that. Anna said he’d help us.”

Danny laughed abruptly. “Anna said a lot of things. That doesn’t make them true.” She’d lied to him from the beginning, pretending to be his friend and promising to hide him and Callie from the Keepers on Haven Island.

What a jerk he’d been.

He’d thought he was so smart, smarter than any of the teachers. Even Anna. But she’d fooled him so easily it was almost funny. Though he didn’t feel much like laughing. He’d known the night they ran—even before they were off the island—that she had no intention of keeping her promise. Then before he could figure out what she
did
want with them, she’d dropped them off here, in the middle of nowhere, with a man who obviously wanted nothing to do with them. It didn’t make any sense.

“The Keepers will come after us,” Callie said.

Danny considered denying it. It would be easier than admitting the truth. But what was the point? If they were caught, there would be nothing he could do to protect her. Besides, Callie wasn’t stupid.

“Yeah. They’ll come after us.”

She accepted that calmly, probably because she’d already known it. He’d discovered in the last couple of days that his little sister wasn’t as fragile as she appeared.

“What will they do to us?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” That, too, was the truth, and something else he didn’t want to dwell on. The Keepers had never physically hurt Danny, nor had he seen them harm any of the others, but kids had a way of getting sick and disappearing. And there was the time he’d seen Sean in the infirmary, after he’d supposedly been taken to a mainland hospital. Danny shuddered at the memory and vowed he and Callie wouldn’t end up like that. “They have to find us first, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

He wasn’t sure how he would keep his promise, but he had to try. This was all his fault. He’d convinced Callie to run away and to trust Anna.

He searched the sky for the hawk and saw it gliding overhead. Then, flapping its wings in slow easy motions, it let out a screech, caught an updraft, and flew out of sight. Danny envied the big bird and its freedom. He wished he and Callie could just fly away as well.

“Danny.” The fear in Callie’s voice brought him back to earth. She’d deserted the chair and moved to the edge of the awning. “Someone’s coming.”

Danny looked toward the road, where a cloud of dust rose in the distance. Quickly, he moved to Callie’s side, fear tightening his stomach.

“Can you make out what kind of car it is?” His sister’s eyesight was better than his. “Is it Anna or Decker?”

Callie squinted, shading her eyes with her hand. “I can’t tell, it’s too far away. But I didn’t expect them back this quick.”

“Me, neither.”

“Could it be the Keepers?”

Without answering, Danny turned from the trailer to scan the surrounding desert. He couldn’t let them take him and Callie back. They needed to hide. Think, he ordered himself, desperate now, but he saw nothing but miles and miles of sand.

Callie slipped her hand into his, and she may as well have wrapped her small fingers around his heart. “I’m scared.”

Danny sucked in a breath. “Me, too.”

ETHAN WAS TOO LATE.

He stared at the empty chair beneath the awning where he’d left the girl and her brother. Next to it, on a plastic table covered with dust, sat an empty glass and the clear plastic wrapper from the crackers. As earlier, when he’d found Anna’s car, everything seemed entirely too quiet.

Without warning, another child’s face leapt before his memory’s eye, a laughing, blue-eyed boy. Ethan had been too late then as well. And too slow.

Though he fought it, the sudden upsurge of memories tore at him, making him look again at his failure. Nicky was what he saw, lying peacefully beneath a tree as if taking a nap. A little boy enjoying a hot summer day, while his father . . .

No.

Ethan shut down his thoughts, refusing to head down that road. It wouldn’t do them any good. Not him, not Nicky, and certainly not those two kids Anna had left behind.

Gripping her .38, he climbed out of his truck. The empty gun was useless, except as a bluff, but it was all he had. He made a quick visual sweep of the trailer and surrounding desert. Then he scanned the boulders and crumbled-down cliff face a couple of hundred yards behind the trailer, watching for the glint of sunlight on steel that would mark him as a target.

Nothing.

Except the silent, hulking trailer and endless sand, dotted with its sparse desert vegetation.

He checked the ground. No extra tire tracks. No signs of a struggle. Plus his instincts told him Ramirez hadn’t been here, and fourteen years of military and Agency work had taught him to trust those instincts.

Even if Ethan assumed the dark import on the highway belonged to Ramirez, he doubted whether the assassin would have had time to get to the trailer and back. It was at least a twenty-minute drive to the highway, forty minutes round-trip, not counting the time it would take to grab the kids and run. And Ethan was willing to bet the boy wouldn’t have gone easily. So maybe it would have taken fifty minutes.

Had Ethan been on the highway chasing Anna that long?

He didn’t think so. It definitely hadn’t been that long since he’d passed the other car. Besides, if Marco Ramirez had come for those kids, they wouldn’t be gone, they’d be lying facedown in the sand.

Like Anna.

Pushing the truck door closed behind him, Ethan moved to the trailer’s open window and put his back against the metal frame.

“Danny?” he called over his shoulder, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the desert. “You in there?”

No answer.

Ethan sidestepped to the door, stopped, and swung it open while keeping his back pressed to the wall. He counted to three, took a deep breath, and swivelled on the balls of his feet, leading with the .38 through the open door.

Again, nothing. No kids. And no sign of a struggle.

He moved a little deeper into the cramped space, past the narrow galley to the head, and flicked open the door. Empty. Then he took the few extra steps to the bedroom at the end of the hall, which was no more than an unmade bunk, a couple of built-in drawers, and a small closet. It was the last possible hiding place in the tin trap of a trailer, and it was as quiet as he’d left it.

Unable to escape the inevitable any longer, he shoved Anna’s unloaded gun into the waistband of his jeans, then reached beneath the bed and pulled out a metal box. Inside was the Glock he’d put away three years ago, telling himself he’d never take it out again.

He smiled grimly at his own naÏveté.

He’d spent most of his life with a gun in his hand, and he’d most likely die that way. Picking up the weapon, he checked the clip and headed back outside.

Again he scanned the desert, the throbbing in his head taking on a life of its own. Could he do this? So far he’d been acting on reflex, pulling out rusted skills that had once been as much a part of him as breathing, but his head ached and his hands trembled. The kids were gone. He couldn’t do a damn thing about it, and hadn’t that been what he’d wanted?

Not like this.

Then he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and whirled around, again leading with the gun. A small, dark head rose from behind a clump of boulders at the edge of the cliff. The boy cautiously stepped from behind the rocks. His sister appeared beside him, and together they started forward.

Relief swept through Ethan, followed by a surge of anger. He met them halfway. “What the hell are you doing?”

Danny glared at him. “How were we supposed to know it was you? I figured it was safer to hide.”

It had been a smart move, but Ethan wasn’t about to tell the kid that. Besides, he wanted answers. “What’s going on?” What could these two possibly know about the likes of Marco Ramirez? And what line had Anna been unwilling to cross? “Who’s looking for you?”

“No one. Anna rescued us,” Callie said quickly.

“From kidnappers,” Danny added. “And she promised to find our parents.”

“And then she got lost . . .” The girl threw a guilty look at her brother, realizing her mistake. Anna Kelsey lost?

The boy tried to cover for her. “And so she came looking for you. To help.”

What a load of bunk, Ethan thought as he studied the two earnest faces. He had to give them points for creativity and spunk, though not for honesty.

“Come on,” he said. His questions would have to wait. “We need to get out of here. You can tell me the truth later.”

To their credit, neither kid argued as they followed him toward the trailer. “Did you find Anna?” Callie asked in a quiet voice.

Ethan hesitated, looking into the child’s impossibly blue eyes. He couldn’t break her heart. “We have to hurry,” he said, instead of answering her question. “We may not have a lot of time.” He scanned the area for a flash of metal or other sign that Ramirez had found them.

“She’s dead, isn’t she.” Behind him, Danny’s voice was deadpan and certain.

Ethan glanced back at the boy, surprised at the slight quiver at the corner of his mouth. So he wasn’t as brave as he wanted the world to believe. For a while Ethan had forgotten Danny was just a kid, holding himself and his sister together by a thread.

Just a kid. Eleven, twelve maybe, a few years older than Nicky would have been if he’d lived. “Yes,” Ethan answered, steering his thoughts away from that particularly painful place. “She’s dead.”

“Did you—”

“No.” Ethan shook his head. “Not me. But whoever did may come here next. So we need to get going.”

The boy hesitated.

“I’m all you got, kid.” Ethan steeled himself against the uncertainty in the boy’s eyes and the long-buried instincts it awoke. “You come with me or . . .” He made a sweeping gesture at the dreary landscape. “Or you stay here.”

“Danny.” Callie tugged on her brother’s sleeve. “It’s okay. He’ll help us.”

Danny’s expression softened. “But, Callie, he’s—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “We have to go with him.”

Ethan suspected the boy knew that as well, so he gave the kid a break and didn’t force him to admit it. “I have something to take care of,” he said. “Meanwhile, take your sister and gather stuff from the trailer. There’s some bottled water, and get whatever nonperishable food you can find.”

“Where are you going?” Danny challenged.

Ethan suppressed the urge to snap at the boy, reminding himself that despite his show of bravado, the kid was scared. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Just do as I told you.”

Without looking back, Ethan headed out across the sand for the rock face behind the trailer. When he reached it, he stepped through a small hidden opening into the cool darkness of a cave.

Years ago, while still under the Agency’s yoke, he’d recognized the need for a refuge, a place only his team would know about, a sanctuary and rendezvous point where they could meet in case things fell apart. He and the five people he’d led had pledged their lives to their country, but none of them totally trusted the men who gave the orders.

Together, they’d chosen this desert valley for its seclusion and the ridge behind the trailer. It provided both privacy and a wall at their backs. Plus, limited access. There was only one way in and one way out of the canyon, unless you were partial to a two-day hike across hot sand.

It was a good choice, but they’d never come back after selecting the site. They’d never needed to—until the end. Then none of them had made it. Except Ethan.