Big Sky Showdown. Sharon Dunn

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       FIVE

      Zane jumped down from his hiding place and pounced on the man, knocking the wind out of him. Zane grabbed the flashlight where it had rolled away from the temporarily disabled man. By then, Heather was halfway down the tree. She ran the remaining ten feet to rush to his side.

      Between the two other searchers on foot and the ATVs coming back this way, there was only one direction to go. Both of them took off running. Zane led them in an erratic path around the trees, hoping to make them harder to follow.

      He caught glimpses of bobbing lights in the forest. They needed to shake these guys before they had any chance of getting back to the river.

      He pushed deeper into the forest where the undergrowth was thick. The roar of the ATVs never let up. They skirted around some brush, coming face-to-face with a kid on foot who didn’t look to be more than twelve years old. When he saw them, the kid’s eyes grew wide with fear. He showed no sign of pulling any kind of a weapon on them.

      “I won’t tell if you don’t,” said Zane as he darted off in a different direction with Heather close on his heels.

      They sprinted through the darkness of the forest, dodging lights and sounds that seemed to come at them from every direction, feet pounding the ground, breath filling their lungs and coming out in cloudy puffs as the night grew colder.

      He dismissed any thought of returning to the river just yet. The river was probably patrolled anyway.

      They ran until twenty minutes passed without seeing a light or hearing a human noise. Both of them pressed against tree trunks in an aspen grove, the sounds of their heavy inhales and exhales the only noise around.

      They couldn’t keep dodging these guys forever. Granted, it looked like Willis had sent the B team, younger men and boys with less high-tech equipment and experience, to track them down, but if Willis was serious about kidnapping Zane and Heather, he’d send the A team or come out himself sooner or later.

      Heather pushed off the tree and moved toward him as if to talk to him.

      In his peripheral vision, he saw the vapor cloud of someone exhaling by a tree. His heart skipped a beat as he held up his hand, indicating to Heather she needed to stand still.

      He watched as the person behind the tree let out another breath from maybe twenty feet away.

      Seconds ticked by.

      Though her face was covered in shadows, he picked up on the fear in Heather’s posture. Both of them stood as still as rocks. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. Whoever was behind the tree took a single step, feet crunching on snow.

      Heather turned her head ever so slightly as if to indicate that she thought they should run. He shook his head. He didn’t think they’d been spotted yet, but any noise at all would alert the stranger to their whereabouts.

      The stranger took another step. Through the prism of the narrow white and black aspen trunks, Zane discerned the silhouette of a man, standing still for a long time as though he were taking in his surroundings. Probably listening for any noise that might be out of place.

      Zane swallowed as his heart raged in his chest and sweat trickled down his back. His mouth was dry.

      With the next footstep, the stranger moved away from where he and Heather stood. The footsteps came one after the other before finally fading into the distance.

      When the man got far enough away that they could no longer hear him, Heather let out a breath, and her shoulders slumped, but she didn’t move until Zane took a step toward her.

      She closed the distance between them so she could talk in a whisper. “Who was that?”

      “I’m not sure,” he said.

      Another hunter? Maybe. More likely it was someone in Willis’s crew who was out in the woods for some reason other than capturing them. Or someone who was supposed to catch them but who didn’t want to get into a wrestling match.

      Zane ran his hand over the pistol he’d gotten off the teenager, grateful that he hadn’t needed to use it.

      “Follow me,” he said.

      They walked for a distance through the darkness. It was too much of a risk to turn on the flashlight, and the moonlight provided enough light to see the ground. He stopped at the top of a knoll and stared down at the cluster of trees below. He turned the flashlight on and off just to get a glimpse. Something about the arrangement of the underbrush looked unnatural.

      Heather followed him down the hill and into the evergreens. Hidden from view from the outside, he saw piles of pine boughs covering some sort of structure. He pulled several of the branches off until he found a small door. The structure was made of heavy duty plastic stretched across PVC pipe and it was not more than four feet high.

      “It’s like a hobbit house,” said Heather.

      He poked his head in. A gust of warmth surrounded him. “Actually, it’s a little more sinister than that.” He pulled out the flashlight and turned it on. As he’d suspected, they’d stumbled on someone’s pot farm. “Might as well come in, it’s warm inside.”

      The plants were spaced to allow a single person to get around to tend them. Heather slipped in after him. “Someone has a serious need to support a habit.”

      “This kind of operation isn’t about personal use. Someone is growing this stuff to sell.”

      And from the look of the empty shelves, much of it already had been sold. He’d received letters from law enforcement telling him to be on the lookout for the pot farms in the high country because it was such a good place to hide an operation. As much time as he spent up here, he was bound to stumble across one СКАЧАТЬ