The Buried

CHAPTER 27

Quinn hadn’t expected to see Dani when he came around the turn. He’d told her to hide and assumed she’d done exactly that. But he also hadn’t expected to see the taillights of a car driving away. It was likely someone scared off by the lights and the smoke and the gunfire.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and said as loudly as he dared, “Dani?”

No response.

He tried again, knowing she couldn’t have gone very far. “Dani? It’s us.”

Still nothing.

“She’s probably too scared to come out,” Nate said.

Quinn wasn’t so sure about that. Though she’d been afraid as they made their escape, she hadn’t come close to freezing up.

“Dani!” he tried again.

She didn’t answer.

He looked behind them, knowing the woman with the gun would be coming soon. Dani would have to wait.

“Can you make it up the hill?” he asked Nate.

“I think so.”

“Come on, then.”

Up they went, Nate wincing with every step but keeping up with Quinn.

“This should be high enough,” Quinn said.

They lowered to the ground. Nate propped himself up a few inches so that his ribs didn’t touch anything.

When the female shooter came around the bend, she stopped, looked down the road, and started walking again, scanning side to side. She was still at it three minutes later when, in the distance, Quinn caught sight of a pair of headlights slowly heading their way. Since the woman didn’t have the benefit of his higher vantage point, it was another thirty seconds before she saw them, too.

She turned and walked back toward the curve, but stopped about a hundred feet from it at the base of the hill. Quinn couldn’t see what she was doing, but it became clear a moment later when he heard an engine kick on.

Her motorcycle must have been the one-eyed car they’d seen outside Waitsburg, he realized. More troubling was the fact she hadn’t found Dani, either.

“Stay here,” he told Nate.

He hurried down the hill and back to the Lexus. The trunk refused to open until he used one of the rifles to pry the lid loose. He grabbed their bags and carried them up the hill.

He was still several feet from Nate when the car he’d seen swung around the curve and skidded to a stop. He dropped down when he heard the door open, and watched the man who climbed out look around in surprise. A moment later, the guy jumped back in his car and reversed away.

Quinn double-timed it the rest of the way up and set the bags down next to Nate. The car’s taillights were receding, but the driver, no matter how spooked he was, would soon be calling the authorities, if he hadn’t already done so. As much as Quinn and Nate needed to get out of there, there was still the question of Dani’s whereabouts.

Quinn opened the tracking app on his phone and input the tracking ID number of the chip he’d hidden in Dani’s shoe. A map filled the screen, and then the dot representing Dani appeared. She was still on Route 124 but was over halfway back to Waitsburg, moving steadily away from them.

“How did she get all the way over there?” Nate asked.

Quinn glanced down the road. The taillights he’d seen, not of the car that had just left, but of the one that had been there as he’d first run around the corner. She had gotten into it. That was the only explanation.

“It doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “We need to put some distance between ourselves and this place fast.”

Traffic on 124 had picked up considerably since the discovery of the helicopter in the road and the bodies scattered around it. At first, the responders had been limited to police and fire department vehicles. In the last ten minutes, though, a convoy of a dozen military vehicles had passed Quinn and Nate’s position.

They were approximately four and a half miles east of the crime scene, hiding in a copse of trees in the large front yard of a farmhouse along the road. A few more miles and they would have made it to Prescott, but Nate had been hurting too much, and carrying all the gear wasn’t doing Quinn any good, either.

Another set of headlights appeared in the east at 4:12 a.m. As they neared the farm, the lights blinked twice. Quinn and Nate stepped out of their hiding place and Mr. Vo’s RV slowed to a stop.

The side door popped open and Daeng leaned out. “Are you the ones who requested a ride?”

Quinn handed him the duffels, then let Nate board first before climbing in himself.

“Good to see you,” Daeng said.

As they shook, Quinn said, “You, too.”

“So, where do you want to go?”

“East.”

“Consider it done.”

Daeng moved back into the driver’s seat and pulled them onto the road.

“You hurt, too?” Mrs. Vo asked Quinn. She and her husband had helped Nate into the chaise longue.

She scanned his face, looking for injuries.

“No, I’m all right.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What you do to Nate?”

“I didn’t do anything to him. He, um, fell down.”

Mr. Vo, in the process of cleaning the dry blood off Nate’s face, said, “Then he fall on pile of rocks, I think.”

“You need to eat?” The way Mrs. Vo asked Quinn the question, it sounded almost like an accusation.

“Only if there’s something handy,” he said.

“Everything handy. Is mobile home. I get you pork chop.” She looked him over. “Two, maybe.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Vo.”

She grunted and moved over to the kitchen.

Quinn made his way past her to the back where Orlando was sitting at the table. “Hey,” he said softly. He leaned down and kissed her.

“Sorry I didn’t get up,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you to.”

She sniffed the air around him. “You need a shower.”

“I missed you, too.” He put a hand on her belly. “How’s the little one?”

“Active,” she said. “Where’s Dani?”

He pulled out his phone and showed her.

“How long has she been stopped?” she asked.

“About twenty minutes.”

In the three-plus hours since he’d last seen Dani, her tracking chip had traveled the hundred and fifty miles to Spokane and then stopped — not just paused, but stopped dead.

“Maybe she’s asleep,” Orlando said.

“That’s what I was thinking. What I don’t understand is why she got someone to drive her that far. From what I could tell, her tracking chip made only one quick stop the whole time.”

“I’ll double-check the data.” Orlando opened the laptop version of the software. “Chip number?”

He gave it to her and sat down across the table. “Where’s Garrett?”

Orlando nodded toward the bed above the cab. “He knocked out a few hours ago. I don’t expect him to stir again until lunchtime.”

He scanned the rest of the interior. He’d never been in the RV before. “This place is…cozy.”

“I was thinking we could start taking it on jobs and using it as a mobile office.”

“You were?”

She looked at him over the top of her computer. “Don’t be stupid.”

She concentrated on her screen again. A minute later, she said, “You’re right. Whoever picked her up took her all the way to Spokane, with just one stop of two minutes and seventeen seconds.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I.” She paused. “What now?”

“Go to Spokane,” he said without hesitation.

“So we’re playing the white knight again.”

“Is that a problem?”

She squeezed his fingers. “When has that ever been the case?”

She started to lean forward to kiss him, but her belly kept her from getting very far, so she yanked on his arm and pulled him across to her.