He kept swimming and she tried to hold on with all her might, even as he neared the very slides he’d pointed out earlier. “Diggs, shouldn’t you be swimming away from thatspot?”
“Do you see the side where the thick undergrowth thins out and there’s nothing buttrees?”
“Yes.” It was absolutely perfect for a landing spot in hermind.
“If we go up there, we’ll be completely exposed. The moonlight will highlight our bodies. We need to go out through the reeds, the same way we camein.”
Visions of black eyes and sharp white teeth flashed in her mind and Audra nearly lost what small grip on her panic she’d managed to attain after they’d rounded the bend. They were running from killers straight into an alligatorden.
“How’s Trigger?” Diggs’ question pulled her from her thoughts of death and she tilted her head to studyTrigger.
“I think he’s doing better than Iam.”
“I think that’s true,” Diggs responded in a nonchalanttone.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, but it’s the truth. As a matter of fact, I think Trigger’s enjoying our littleadventure.”
If the dog was anything like her brother, he definitely was enjoying this death-defying stunt. But not her. She liked the sure, the steady, the predictable. She always had. Even as a child she’d had her own routines that she stuck to without her parents’ assistance. Her parents saw it as being responsible. She saw it as being plain andboring.
But as an adult, she realized they were tools she used as comfort and still relied on them to this day. It wasn’t that she never got disorganized at times or out of whack, but she definitely operated better with the known, and since Jeremy’s death, her entire life had slipped into a completely foreignrealm.
“Almost there. When we get to the shore, keep your body completely in the water. There will be mud, and there might be some things hiding in that too. Whatever you do, stay low until we’re on the other side of the reeds. I’ll take care ofTrigger.”
Before Audra could question exactly what things Diggs was talking about, they were there. Diggs forcibly took her hand from his pack and pushed her up toward the shore. She felt the blades of grass on her head first and had to fight back the urge to panic and roll. Instead, she tried to remember his advice from earlier to keep her breathing under control. Slow andsteady.
Her shoulders were inside the grass now. She could feel the mud sliding beneath her shoulders. Still she didn’t roll over. She didn’t want to splash or alert the men across theshore.
Even when something bumped into her arm and her heart stopped beating, she didn’t make a sound. Her survival instinct was to scream, but she kept her lips shut. She wouldn’t let Diggs down now. Noway.
She could see her own feet floating out behind her, they were almost completely camouflaged now. When they were, she rolled onto her stomach and crawled up onto the muddy bank through the thick growth ofvegetation.
Somehow Diggs was already there, pulling Trigger out behind him. He stayed low, crouching, even though his legs and arms and chest were covered in mud. Audra glanced down and realized she didn’t look muchbetter.
The sound of engines roaring to life traveled across the lake. “They’re coming after us, aren’tthey?”
“Yes. And we need to be ready. Come here.” He scooped up some of the black sludge at his feet and held it in his hand. “I need to camouflage your face and arms. If they make it to this side of the lake, your skin will standout.”
She took a shaky step toward him. “They were going to kill me, weren’tthey?”
Diggs dug the fingers from his other hand into the pile of mud he held in his palm and began gently painting her face with soft featherlike strokes. “I think that was their plan, once you told them what they wanted to know,” he said with blunt honesty. Then he stepped back and surveyed her face, gave a nod of approval, rubbed his hands together, and slid them down both her arms, effectively coating her in the wet stinkymud.
He crouched down and grabbed his rifle, slung it across his back, and then proceeded to cover his own face with themud.
“Why? Why does he want to kill me? I don’t knowanything.”
Was it the men responsible for Jeremy’s death trying to take out her wholefamily?
The idea was just so far-fetched. She hadn’t even begun digging around, looking for the clues she planned on searching for. Somehow in her mind, she had it worked out that she would be like a grown-up Nancy Drew, following the clues until she found the men responsible. She’d take them to the police and stand proud in court as they were sentenced to life inprison.
But these men wouldn’t go with the police. They would kill the police and then her andTrigger.
AndDiggs.
The thought impacted her with the same force as when she thought of Jeremy beinghurt.
