Page 41 of No Safe Place

“What if we left the truck and walked out? The road’s right there,” Colleen said.

“No,” I said. “That wouldn’t work. We’d get picked up as soon as they found the truck. And they may have already seen it. We passed a camera on the spillway bridge back there.”

“C’mon, Mike. We need to do something. Let’s leave the truck. We’ll hide in the woods or something,” Colleen tried again.

I thought about that. If I were on my own, I’d already be on foot, completely in the wind. But with the SEALs, I’d had the privilege of being personally trained by an old man who had founded the notorious LRRP Recondo school in Vietnam. Put to the test, no one would find me with all the bush tricks I’d been taught. Not in this kind of forest cover. Not even Rambo himself.

Well, maybe Rambo. Or Colonel Trautman. But they were about it.

But I wasn’t alone, was I?

I looked at Jodi behind me, then back at Colleen.

Call me crazy, but my lady friends didn’t look like they’d take to sleeping in the mud and brunching on bark moss and swamp water too well.

“So, what are we going to do now?” Colleen said as I did a backward K-turn.

“We go back to town,” I said. “There’s still a heck of a lot of haystack for these clowns to find the needle in. The ball’s still in our court. Time to go back and be patient and see what they do next.”

“What they’re going to do next won’t be good,” Jodi said quietly from the back seat as we passed over the top of the spillway.

I looked at her in the rearview. Then out over the expanse of moonlit water.

“I guess we’ll just have to see about that, now won’t we,” I said.

36

“Back again?” Daisy the waitress said as we piled into The Forge.

Over her head, I saw there were more people here now than when we had left. The dining room was lined on both walls with mostly white-haired pensioner couples and what looked like two teens on a date. The party of construction workers were howling now as Scotty and another younger waitress came out of the kitchen door beside the bar, wheeling a rolling cart with a giant ice cream cake with sparklers on it.

“Yep, Daisy. Back again,” I said, smiling as we slid into the same booth from earlier.

That it was more crowded was good, I thought. If the jokers after Jodi and Colleen were still on the fence about actually doing this, this would at least stall them. They didn’t want so many witnesses to something like this.

Whatever this was, I thought as I watched the dining room and the door.

“So, what can I get you guys?” Daisy said.

“Let’s go with the two dozen hot wings to start,” I said. “And I’ll have the steak sandwich.”

“With peppers,” Daisy said.

“But of course,” I said.

I smiled over at Colleen and Jodi, who looked back as if I were nuts.

“Where are my manners, ladies? Please order,” I said.

“Order?” said Jodi, wide-eyed.

“Of course,” I said, smiling like an idiot. “We’re here to eat, ladies, right? It’s dinnertime so you need to order.”

Colleen ordered a burger and Jodi got a Caesar salad.

“What the hell are we doing, Mike?” Jodi said when Daisy left. “They’re going to come in here in five seconds and—”

“Listen to me,” I said quietly. “You’re damn right they might come for us. We’re going to be looking at—I’m not even sure what—but it could get bad. We just can’t let anyone here know we are the target, okay? It’s not a good idea. You want to get out of here, we have to hide in the crowd and play as stupid as possible and keep it cool. Just follow my lead.”

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