“Colonel,” Jake said as the older man approached. “What’s the situation down there?”
“Fire department is coating the place in foam,” he said in a brusque tone. “On the upside, we have twelve devices accounted for. By my count, we have seven detonated, four located, one disarmed.”
She watched as Jake tallied the devices up in his head then nodded. “Yes.”
“You just had to throw backpack in there,” the colonel groused.
Jake grimaced and Cassidy felt compelled to rush into the fray. “It was my idea,” she said, but the claim sounded false even to her own ears. “I mean I agreed with Agent Donovan. The area was already torn up, so there was no point in carrying it to another location.”
Colonel Aronson shook his head in the affirmative. “You are correct. It means we’ll have to wait for our friend to set it off though.”
“Not if we find him first,” Jake said, rolling off the cart onto his feet. “We suspect he’s been holed up in the amusement company’s command post over in the RV park.”
“I doubt he’s still there,” Aronson said.
“If he isn’t, there may be clues as to where he would go,” Cassidy chimed in. “But I have a feeling he hasn’t bailed yet.”
Colonel Aronson turned to look at her, eyes narrowing. “Why do you say that?”
“Has he texted?” Jake demanded, speaking over his superior.
“What? No.” Cassidy wagged her head, but a pang of guilt shot through her. “I don’t know.”
She hadn’t even thought to check the mobile phones she’d retrieved from the rubble. The moment they’d seen Max was hurt, everything else had fallen by the wayside. She extracted the devices from the pocket of her rumpled blazer.
She had unread messages on both.
Cassidy’s hands shook as she opened her personal cell. The first message read simply:
You’d better be on that ride.
Then there was another sent two minutes after the first.
I mean it. You move, I blow this thing.
She handed Jake the phone, incredulous. “Does he really think I’ll continue to sit there with the whole thing falling down around me?” She waved an arm in the general direction of the midway. “You were right. There’s no way for us to salvage this.”
“But now we know he lost track of you. We also know he’s triggering the devices manually.” He surveyed their immediate vicinity. “We have four active IEDs on site,” Jake reminded her. “And a guy who has an ax to grind running loose around here.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had enough,” Cassidy announced. She marched back to the cart.
“What are you going to do?” Jake asked.
“I’m going to start searching the RVs,” she said, plucking the heavy light from its holster. Dropping into the driver’s seat of the golf cart, she swiveled to look back at Jake and Max. “I’m taking the cart.”
The lines bracketing Jake’s mouth deepened when he frowned. “I don’t know if—”
But she cut him off by twisting the key. Reaching down, she switched the toggle to put it into Reverse. A high, hollow warning signal proclaimed her intention to back up. She quirked an eyebrow at Jake when he made no move to remove himself or take his dog from the rear deck.
“You guys coming with me?”
“Cass, you can’t go running off—”
“Watch me.”
She pressed the brake to the floorboard then released it. The cart began to roll without so much as a tap to the accelerator. The group assembled behind them scattered like chickens. She stomped the brake and the cart jerked to a halt.
“It could be dangerous,” he argued.
