St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

a second vehicle somewhere,” the driver said.
    “Ignore it unless it gets in your way,” Zach said.
    “And if it does?”
    “Ram it.”
    The driver waited, but Faroe didn’t override Zach’s command.
    “Zach, you don’t have body armor,” Grace’s voice said. “Let the other ops take care of it.”
    Zach didn’t answer.
    “Zach?”
    The driver looked sideways at her passenger’s face, then looked away. Zach was in the kind of mental space where she never wanted to go.
    Headlights flared near the ranch. The second Red Hill SUV didn’t even try to play chicken—it just took off into the desert, cutting a wide arc around the St. Kilda vehicle before getting back on the dirt road and speeding toward the highway.
    An executive helicopter lifted and banked away, lights blinking, climbing fast, heading toward Las Vegas.
    The driver put the Navigator into a power slide that ended at cabin number four. While the SUV was still moving, Zach opened the door and bailed out in a hail of rocks and sand. He hit the ground running, gun at the ready.
    A shot rang out from number four. Then another.
    The scream of pain was female.
    A bulky male figure dashed out of number four and turned the corner, heading toward the back of the cottage, running hard. The gun in his hand had a surly gleam in the headlights. He held the weapon one-handed, fired the same way.
    Like the shooter in Taos.
    Bullets gouged dirt inches from Zach. He stopped and fired two closely spaced shots.
    The man jerked, reeled, and scrambled around the back of the cabin. As he ran, he dropped a spent magazine and slammed another one into the butt of his pistol.
    Zach went low through the front door of the fourth cabin, sweeping the room over his gun, remembering the driver’s words.
    She looked for a back way out. Didn’t find one.
    “Jill!” he called. “It’s Zach!”
    Silence answered.
    Gun at the ready, Zach took three gliding steps and saw the bathroom door. The breaks streaking through the cheap paint and the bullet holes like black eyes made his stomach clench.
    One kick finished what somebody else had started. The door screamed and broke away from its handle, taking the ice cream chair with it.
    The bathroom was empty.
    The toilet window gaped. Khaki shreds hung from it.
    Jill was alive.
    And so was the killer chasing her.

88
    BEAVER TAIL RANCH
SEPTEMBER 17
6:40 P.M.
    P ain was a living, wild creature clawing at Jill.
    She accepted it and kept running, long legs driving hard, as wild and alive as the pain itself.
    The blood flowing down her right arm made the briefcase handle slippery and sticky at the same time. She switched hands. She thought about the gun in her belly bag.
    Not now.
    Later.
    If I’m trapped again.
    The first thing her great-aunt had taught Jill was not to waste bullets on a target she couldn’t hit. Sprinting flat out the way she was, her right hand bloody from a wicked cut, she would be lucky not to shoot herself.
    Don’t look over my shoulder.
    He’s either behind me or he isn’t.
    A shot screamed off a nearby boulder. She flinched at the spray of rock chips.
    He’s behind me.
    She kept running, turning unpredictably every few steps, like arabbit chased by a coyote. Pain was a whip forcing her body to hold the sprint that was her best chance of saving her own life.
    She’d hoped that the other shots she’d heard had been St. Kilda arriving and taking down Ski Mask. She’d hoped, but she hadn’t expected. Even though it felt like she’d been running forever, she knew it had been only a few minutes. Three at most. Quite probably only two.
    St. Kilda hadn’t had time to arrive.
    You’re on your own.
    Keep running.
    Her heart felt like it was going to hammer out of her chest, her breath was starting to burn, but she didn’t slow down her headlong sprint. She didn’t take her concentration off the dusk-shrouded desert in front of her and the shoulder-high, brittle brush.
    The lay of the land told her there was a ravine ahead. She didn’t know where or how far.
    She only knew that that ravine was her best chance of survival.

89
    BEAVER TAIL RANCH
SEPTEMBER 17
6:41 P.M.
    Z ach turned and raced for the front door of the cabin, blowing through the St. Kilda ops that had followed him inside.
    “Stay here,” ordered a male op. “You don’t have body armor.”
    “Neither does she,” Zach snarled, shouldering the op aside.
    An op in the bathroom yelled, “Two people, running east. Client is first. Target