Page 90 of Deadly Evidence
“Please—we’ve got to hurry. Lacey must be so scared!” Anna cried as he pulled to a stop well off the highway.
“But we can’t chance alerting anyone to our arrival, either.” He studied the landscape, then pulled forward and parked between two towering piles of fragmented rock. “Any more word from the pilot, Tom?”
Tom spoke into his cell phone as Anna, Dante, and Brady began unloading the horses. “Wind’s picking up again,” he said after a moment. “Joe says he’ll stay in the sky as long as he can to direct us, but he’ll have to leave if the gusts get any worse.”
Brady handed Tom the reins for a small mare. “Tell him not to take any chances. Where do we start?”
“He has us on his screen—says we should head two miles due west. When we get there, he’ll guide us northwest for the last half mile or so. He thinks the suspects are in some sort of shallowcave or are beneath an overhang. Now and then a couple of them step out and the images intensify.”
“I can’t stop thinking about what those men could do to Lacey. Being kidnapped is terrifying enough.” Anna’s face was ghost-white as she led her horse across the highway and pulled open the pasture gate, then closed it behind her when everyone had ridden through. “If they so much as lay a hand on her...”
“These guys aren’t the brains behind this trafficking setup,” Brady said, wishing he felt as confident as his words. “They’re probably too nervous to think about anything beyond making the trade and running for safety.”
But being armed and nervous could be a very bad thing. Given too much time to sweat over the prospect of prison—or worse—there was no telling what they might do.
The sliver of moon overhead offered pale illumination as the horses rounded sharp-edged boulders and picked their way over the rocky ground.
“Easy,”Tom muttered to his horse when it stumbled and went down on its knees. “I think I’d be better off on foot.”
Anna looked over her shoulder. “Any word from the pilot?”
Tom talked into his phone, then dropped it into his shirt pocket. “Still another good mile and a half west, and it’s gonna get rougher. We’ve got a climb ahead of us.”
“Maybe the pilot sees the overall distance from up there, but that doesn’t mean we can take such a straight route.” Brady touched his watch to illuminate the dial. “I just hope we can get there well before dawn, or we won’t have much of an element of surprise.”
Forty-five minutes later, Brady signaled a halt. The wind gusts were picking up now, tossing the horses’ manes and tails and making them skittish. Far to the west, lightning crackled across the horizon.
Tom pulled out his phone again. “’Copter’s gotta take off,” he said after a minute. “He’s got twenty-nine-mile-an-hour gusts up there.”
“But he can’t leave! We’ll never find my daughter.Please—tell him to stay.”
Her face was a mask of fear, and Brady knew how she felt.
Without air support, finding anything out here in the dark would be impossible. “He won’t do us any good if he ends up crashing that bird into the side of a hill. But don’t worry. I’m not leaving without finding her. I promise.”
“We’re almost there,” Tom announced. “Joe says we turn along this ridge and go another hundred yards or so. He thinks the cave is up maybe sixty feet or so, on the west face of a cliff.”
Brady dismounted and handed his reins to Anna. “You and Dante stay here—maybe in that little draw a quarter-mile behind us. Just keep the horses quiet. We should be back with Lacey in an hour or less.” He dropped a swift kiss on her forehead, then gave her a hug. “I promise.”
“Please—I’vegotto come along. My daughter is out here.Please.”
She’d been all business and ready for action when hitching up the trailer and getting the horses ready. But now that she faced the prospect of staying behind, her hands were shaking.
“I need you to stay here. If you got in the way, things could go wrong. You’ve got your rifle, right?”
“There’s a scabbard on every saddle.”
“Don’t worry—the pilot said there were no other infrared images on his screen. The only people within a several-mile radius are the four of us and four up in that cave, so we’ll have everything under control in no time. You and Dante will be safe here while we’re gone.”
“I don’t care about me. I just want my little girl.Hurry.”
Five minutes stretched into ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Dante, clearly exhausted, sat on his horse with one leg cocked over the saddle horn, his chin dropped to his chest and his hat pulled down over his eyes.
Anna could barely sit still.
An owl hooted from some distant place, but otherwise the night was eerily quiet—all the more so because somewhere, not too far away, Brady and Tom were seeking some hidden cave and getting into position to rescue her daughter.
