Page 77 of Travis
Chapter 20
Sera
Fifty-three miles. Maude fed me the route through the SUV’s speakers. I drove too fast on the empty Montana highway with the inhaler and gun on the passenger seat and his biometrics still feeding through Maude’s system. Heart rate was lower now but still elevated. Respiration irregular.
He was alive. That was the only number I cared about.
“His GPS position has been stationary for eleven minutes,” Maude said.
That wasn’t good. I pressed the accelerator harder.
The highway crested a rise, and the site opened up below me. A gravel turnoff near a cluster of outbuildings, the kind of nowhere structures that dotted the rural corridors between small Montana towns. A metal-sided equipment shed. A smaller structure that might have been a pump house. Gravel lot, no fencing, no signage. The kind of place that existed to be forgotten about, which was probably why Kindt’s people had chosen it.
I pulled over at the top of the rise and looked down. Maybe a quarter mile of slope between me and the lot. From up here I could see the whole scene laid out like a diagram.
Travis’s vehicle was pulled off the road at a bad angle, driver’s door hanging open. Travis was on the far side of it. On his feet, but barely. One arm braced against the hood, the other pressed against his left side. He was holding his position but he wasn’t moving, and even from this distance I could tell the reason—if he took his weight off that hood he was going down.
Shit.Shitshitshitshit.
Two men were on the ground near the front of the vehicle, neither moving. But two more were still active. One was circling wide to Travis’s left, trying to get an angle around the vehicle. The other was using the equipment shed for cover, working his way closer from the right.
Travis couldn’t cover both directions. Not braced against that hood with one hand pressed to his side. He was watching the one on the left, which meant the one on the right was going to get there first.
I grabbed my inhaler and took a puff and I made myself think.
I couldn’t outshoot anyone. I couldn’t outfight anyone. Driving straight down there with a gun I’d never fired was going to get both me and Travis killed.
But I could do something else.
Nobody down there was expecting a lost woman on a back road, pulling into a gravel lot to ask for directions. Loud, frantic, impossible to ignore. That would freeze everyone for a few seconds while they tried to figure out what they were looking at. And if I came in from the near side of the equipment shed, I’d cut off the man using it for cover and put myself between him and Travis.
A few seconds of confusion. That was the only advantage I was ever going to have. I prayed it would be enough.
I swung the SUV off the shoulder, back onto the road, and floored it down the hill.
I cut off the man coming from the shed, pulling across the access point at an angle the way I’d planned from the hilltop. He pulled up short, confused. I hoped the other bad guy did the same.
I tucked the gun into the back of my waistband the way I’d seen Travis do, got out, and started yelling.
“Oh, thank God, there’s actually people out here.” I made my voice loud, scattered, the frantic pitch of a woman who’d been lost on back roads for hours. “I haven’t seen a single sign since Elmo. Does this road connect to 93 or do I have to turn around? My GPS died twenty miles ago, and I swear this highway is trying to kill me.”
The man from the shed stared at me. He was trying to process what he was seeing—a woman in workout clothes climbing out of a civilian SUV, waving her arms and complaining about her GPS in the middle of whatever the hell was happening in this gravel lot.
“Ma’am, you need to leave.” He started toward me. Not running. Walking. The tone of a man dealing with an inconvenience, not a threat. “This is private property.”
“Private property? There’s no sign. There’s no signs anywhere on this road. Maybe this entire state. I’ve been driving for forty minutes and?—”
He was close now. Close enough to grab my arm and steer me back to the vehicle, which was clearly what he intended.
I stepped into him and drove the heel of my palm into his nose.
My form was terrible. My feet were wrong, my weight was wrong, I didn’t rotate my hips the way Travis had shown me. But I committed. Full force, no hesitation.
Power comes from your legs and hips.
The man’s head snapped back. He staggered, grabbed his face, and his focus left me for two or three seconds.
I hit him again. This time with my fist because I’d forgotten everything about palm strikes and open hands and proper technique. Just my fist, into the side of his head. Pain exploded through my knuckles, and he went down.
