Smart. Really smart girl.
She wasn’t completely invisible yet, though. He could still make out the trampled grass she had left in her wake.
He turned to follow that trail now when he stopped and almost fell. He stuck out his hand and by a stroke of luck found a tree nearby to keep himself upright. A wave of nausea rushed through him, followed by lightheadedness.
The pills. He had taken too many of them.
He tried to shake it off, but that only made things worse. Beckard sat down, leaned against the gnarled face of the tree, and snapped his eyes shut to rest.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, not moving. It could have been a few seconds, a few minutes, or maybe — an hour? No, it couldn’t have been an hour. When he opened his eyes again, it was still dawn and sunlight was still fighting to spread across the sky above him.
Still early morning, so it hadn’t been that long.
He pushed up from the ground and stumbled forward, gripping the Glock in his left hand. His right was held together by stitches underneath the almost cast-like bandages and was numbed all over. His face, thank God, had stopped hurting. Or, at least, he couldn’t feel the broken nose anymore. He wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing, but at the moment he was grateful for one less pulsating pain to worry about.
Beckard pushed on. It was almost over anyway. Once he found her, he’d finish it. He had wanted to prolong this, savor his last hurrah, but there was no chance of that now. She was becoming too dangerous and too time-consuming.
“Allie!” he shouted. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. Let’s talk this out! That highway’s not going to get any closer!”
There was no response. But then, he didn’t expect her to answer him. She’d be making her way toward the road at the moment. How much of a head start did she have on him? It depended on how long he had actually slept when he closed his eyes a few minutes ago.
“Fine!” he shouted. “Have it your way!”
He continued following the obvious signs across the trampled grass. He was actually a little surprised she hadn’t taken more care with her footsteps. Maybe he had overestimated her. She had probably lived in the cities all of her life, after all. So did all the other women he had taken over the years. They were delicate things, bred for busy sidewalks and intersections and cafés and offices. Most of them were tough, yes, but city tough was different from country tough. They had all found that out eventually.
Even Allie, for all her preparations. When you got right down to it, she was more equipped to survive in the cities than out here. In the woods, she might as well be a drunk babe walking around trampling everything in sight. As smart as she clearly was, he had no trouble picking up her trail.
In fact, it almost felt as if she wasn’t even making any efforts to disguise herself, almost as if she was doing it on purpose—
He froze.
No.
Could it be? Could she really be that smart?
Had he overestimated her intelligence, or underestimated it?
Could all of this just be…
Oh, shit.
Chapter 23
It was the biggest weapon she could find in the little time that she had. Two feet long (or, well, twenty-six inches, if she wanted to be terribly specific about it) and four inches wide. It was heavy enough that when she broke it off the biggest tree she could find in the immediate area, she almost dropped it because its heft surprised her.
Her bloodied hands, despite being swaddled in ripped pieces of the dead state trooper’s shirt, screamed like wildfire as she tightened her double grip along the lower half of the branch, choking up on it as if she were about to wield a baseball bat.
Swing for the fences, girl.
For Carmen…
And he walked right past her, just like she knew he would. He might have been stumbling a bit, maybe even swaying slightly. That might have been the result of the pills he was wolfing down like candy to stave off the pain of last night. Either way, she took it as a good sign that he was unsteady on his feet, which did wonders to convince her that they were on almost equal ground.
If only she could get that gun out of his hand…
He couldn’t see her because she was well hidden, having circled back from the trail she had left in her wake to crouch behind a bush. A series of big and obvious (and oh so very “loud”) footsteps that led him here.
When he stopped ten feet in front of her and stared down at her tracks, she knew almost instantly that he had figured it out. He was lifting his head and starting to look around when she jumped to her feet and burst out of the bush, both hands cocking the heavy branch back, back, back—
He saw her and his eyes widened, and he might have even started to say something, but he never got it out because she hit him square in the right leg. She was aiming for the kneecap, but she landed just a bit too high and hit his thigh instead. The blow was still effective and he looked as if he was going to topple. Somehow, he managed to remain upright.
For a while, anyway.
She swung again and heard the very satisfying crack! as the branch hit and shattered against the Glock in his left hand. He had been in the process of raising it to shoot her when she landed the second swing. The gun flew out of his hand and he grunted, clenching his teeth in either frustration or pain; she didn’t know or care at the moment.
She expected him to leap for the fallen gun, or turn and flee. After all, she had the upper hand.
She was wrong, because he attacked instead.
He moved pretty fast for a man whose right arm was hanging at his side like a useless piece of meat. Then again, he was swinging with his left hand, the fingers tightening into a ball at the same moment it smashed into her chest.
Pain exploded across Allie’s vision. Beckard might have been operating at only fifty percent (or below), but she had clearly underestimated the man’s strength because the blow stunned her and she staggered back, fighting to regain her balance. She had taken three steps backward when Beckard let out a ferocious scream and lunged at her.
She swung again with the branch. It was mostly a defensive reaction on her part, but it prompted him to instinctively lift his right arm in an attempt to ward it off. The branch cracked! on contact and broke in half.
Beckard let out a howl that sounded more animal than human.
Allie thought he would retreat after that, but again, she was very wrong. The man must have been drawing from some deep reservoir of willpower, because he kept coming. She didn’t know if he couldn’t feel the pain that must have been rippling through his right arm at the moment or if he had just somehow chosen to ignore it.
He rammed his shoulder into her chest like a bulldozer. There was nothing elegant or strategic about it. He was bigger and heavier, and he was probably overconfident that he could knock her down with sheer brutality. And he was right.
They both tumbled to the ground with his much heavier body collapsing on top of her. A split second after her back slammed into the earth, the sky seemed to cave in on top of her in a blinding rush.
He was crushing her with his body, and she knew right away that physically grabbing and throwing him off wasn’t going to be possible. She had learned a long time ago that regardless of how prepared she was for a fight — physically and mentally — a man would always have the advantage over her when they were in close proximity. Which was why she didn’t bother wasting energy trying to push him off her and instead began whaling on his head with the remaining piece of branch still clutched in her hand.