Page 35 of Light My Fire

She offered a tiny smile, and he met it before he lifted the glasses to his eyes. “I got hold of Seth. A couple of your guys came up from Anchorage, but they’re coming in on foot, so they won’t be here anytime soon. I told them where we are, but we need to keep our eyes on these guys until they get here.”

“They’re never going to get here in time. We need to get down there—”

“Are you kidding me?” He stared at her. “We’re two people. There’s a gang of five guys down there, and sure I’m angry enough to take on a few of them, but from what you told me about March, he’s not going to be shy about shooting you, or me. OrSkye.”

“So we just let them get away?” Stevie’s voice emerged low but sparked. “I’m a federal marshal. Our job is to track down fugitives. And let’s not forget that my dad is down there—he’ll help us.”

“You hope.”

She blinked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Aw, shoot. He didn’t want to go there. “I’m just saying…of all the places for these guys to find, they go to a place you know.”

She stared at him, her mouth agape. She closed it. Shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Stevie—”

“No. You’re…you’re right.” She pressed her hand to her mouth. “What if he was in on this?”

“Stevie—”

“No.” She held up her hand, as if to stop his words. “He’s a criminal, just like the others, and yeah, you’re right. I don’t know what happened.”

“Actually, I think you should give him the benefit of the doubt here. I mean—I was just saying, we’re up against some big odds, so we need to be sure about what we do. Your dad could have gone along with them to track them, make sure they didn’t all just vanish into the mountains.”

She nodded, as if she wanted to believe that. “But we can’t just sit here and let them get away.”

“I agree. So…I have an idea.” He reached over to his pack. “I have a couple fusees in here. I don’t normally keep them in my PG pack, but we deployed so fast, I shoved them in here.”

“What’s a fusee?”

“We fight fire with fire sometimes—like we did yesterday. And a fusee is a firing device, something like a flare. It’s made of phosphorous and is very, very hot. It’ll ignite grasses and leaves and light fuels.”

“So it won’t burn the cabin down?”

“Not if I throw it into the far side of the yard, where there’s mostly grasses. It creates a lot of smoke, hopefully panic—”

“And in that panic, I take down March and you grab Skye.”

He hated the way she said that, because the idea of her grappling with March, alone…except, if they took down March together, Skye would be free. “Wetake down March.”

“And the others? What if they run off?”

“I dunno. I just know Skye is in danger. And I have to save her.”

Stevie offered a slow nod. “We have to get much closer.”

* * *

This was never goingto work, she could feel it in her gut. And if her father, let alone her cohorts back in the office, knew she was crouched behind a pile of firewood with a smokejumper who was just about to light a fire bomb, they’d wave her off.

Maybe. Because just twenty feet away, Eugene March stood, a bear gun—Seth’s?—trained on his fellow prisoners, the redhead and Thorne, who had both turned into mechanics. It looked like they were trying to reattach the now cleaned carburetor into the rusty Bronco.

Hopefully that hadn’t been her father’s suggestion, either.

No. She simply couldn’t bear the idea that her father might be a mastermind, or even a willing participant, in this jail—or rather, chain gang—breakout.

Tucker’s suggestion had rattled her, however.

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