Page 49 of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

We go in, guns drawn and at the ready. Duke uses his chin to tell each brother which way he wants us to split off. We surround the cabin, cutting off any exits. Boss and I have Duke’s back. We keep to the shadows. It’s not hard, considering the setting sun has just about set, plunging us into a deceptively tranquil twilight.

I don’t get a good feeling seeing the front door cracked wide open. Animal prints and droppings everywhere. The smell. Oh, god damn, the smell. The stench of deathis notsomething I would ever forget. How could anyone?

It’s all I can do to keep from retching. Instinct wants me to cover my nose and mouth, but I keep prepared, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. When we get close enough, that’s when we see a tennis shoe sticking out the door, the shoe and the foot inside it half eaten away. There’s a trail of partially-eaten shoe rubber, chunks of flesh and intestines leading toward the trail of droppings.

Michael’s large, lifeless form lays a gray, cadavered mess in the entry. I’d recognize the man anywhere, even with half his head missing, and not missing from animals. His face had been blown clean off. A fitting end, considering what he did to that guard.

Carefully, I step over the body and pool of congealed blood, working my way slowly through the house. It’s not a large place, living room/dining/kitchen combine with only the table and a small set of cabinets, which jut out into a peninsula to separate the space from where the sofa, TV and coffee table sit. Duke and Boss come up close on my heels.

Liv has been here. Farther away from the decomp, I pick up traces, just subtle hints of Liv’s soap.

No exit off the back, the first door opens to a small, clean bathroom. The second, a bedroom. The comforter looks rumpled, but the bed doesn’t look slept in.

Opposite that room, the hints of Liv’s soap becomes stronger. My feet falter, but when I feel Boss’s hand on my back, I close my eyes, breathe in and out, and push forward. Inside this room, the bed has been slept in. Comforter messed. Indentation on the pillow perfectly fits the shape of Liv’s head.

I’ll never forget any detail of that woman. The shape of her head, her delicate fingers, the hourglass cinch of her waist. The feel of her long legs wrapped around my hips after we’ve finished making love and she doesn’t want me to pull out yet.

The way her eyes and her smile lights up whenever she sees me walk into the room. Even if she’s pissed at me. Even if the smile drops right after. It’s always there, greeting me.

No signs of a struggle. Well, thank fucking heavens for small miracles. The window curtain is pulled to the side, the window open along with the screen. “You think she escaped through this window?” I ask.

“Seems likely. But when? Escaping Michael or escaping when Michael was shot?” Duke pulls a cigarette from the pack he keeps in the front pocket of his cut, puts it between his lips but doesn’t light it. He catches me staring at him and shrugs. “Just found out I got me a kid coming. Doc, Peaches and the new baby don’t need to be breathing in my smoke. Trying to quit.”

“Congratulations, brother,” I mumble. A little gleam of light in this dark situation. Then I turn back to look at the bed again. The last place Liv had lied. “She’d know I’d be coming for her. Michael wanted her, not to hurt her. My guess, she escaped when Michael was shot.”

Not filling them in on my next move, I climb through the window and stand outside, trying to connect with Liv, what her next move would be. Hero joins me along with Blood.

“I got a feeling she went this way.” Hero starts moving. The kid’s got instincts. We move from the back side of the house. She’d have checked the SUV for keys. But there are two sets of tire tracks. One that leads to Michael’s black SUV and one from a vehicle which must have belonged to Houdini.

We follow a trail to the edge of the woods. Dainty toe and heel prints captured in the mud clue us in we’re headed in the right direction. The muddy ground makes following her trail easy. Which made it easy for Houdini, too.

About ten minutes into the woods, Hero moves off the trail. Her pursuer must have been close for her to veer into the underbrush. But we’re definitely on the right path. The snapped twigs and thin broken branches prove that. Eventually, we stumble on a shattered hive, probably wasp, and a large branch lying next to the mess. She’d caught the bastard off guard. Good for her.

I can’t help be proud of my woman.

The trail continues on a little ways, bare feet and boot prints. Then what looks like knee prints in the mud.

“Is that… blood?” I squat down to run my fingers through it, rubbing the brownish-red substance between my fingers and thumb.Yeah, blood. Dried and moistened from the air or ground.

“Shit.”

I hear Hero and follow his gaze. No more bare feet. Only a boot trail. This is where he caught her. He didn’t appear to even try to cover up the trail and the boot prints don’t double back.

We head out in the direction of the prints, careful not disturb any we see or potentially ruin any we don’t. The woods get thicker, darker—making it harder to track the prints—before it gets lighter. Though Hero never loses the trail and eventually we emerge into a large clearing where the mountain flattens out. We’re lower than we’d been where Liv got caught.

Standing in the center of the clearing, I can see energy towers running up a mountain pass to the left and a railroad track to the right. But as it’s a clearing, the moisture from recent rains dried up. No more boot prints.

“Which do you think is more likely?” I point to the energy towers, then turn. “Or the railroad?”

“Either would work,” Hero replied. “If it were me, I’d follow the railroad. Hard to know where the towers stop. The railroad’ll keep going.”

“Fuck.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Which way, you think? East or west?”

“That one, I’ll have to think about. Mark the position on GPS.”

Boss’s cell pings with an email. I turn slowly, woodenly as a sudden, overwhelming fear prevents me from moving any faster. He clicks the screen and the shrill scream of Liv’s voice full of pain fills the clearing.

“Which way?” I demand. She won’t make it through another attack. Even if we get her back alive, I’m on the brink of losing the only woman I’ve ever loved.Willever love.

Blood frantically clicks on his phone. “West, there’s a huge chasm. The bridge crossing was struck by lightning last year. It’s closed off. So my best guess, east.”

I take off full run in the direction of the railroad tracks, heading east. The brothers’ shouts call for me to stop. Duke, our president, demanding it.

Fuck that. I can’t stop now.

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