Chapter Thirty-Five

THE LITTLE GUY pulled the trigger. I felt the gun buck in both our hands, the sound of the blast beside my eardrum like a punch to the side of the head. There was no time to react. In a world filled with a high-pitched ringing noise, I kicked out as hard as I could, landing my boot hard in the little guy’s hip, sending him sprawling. By now the big guy was up and firing at Susan. I saw the flash but heard nothing but the ringing. I fired back, splinters of tree flying as the two guys took off toward their truck.

My heart was in my throat when I got to Susan. The broken nose had covered her in blood. I just about fell on her, searching with my shaking hands, the gun dropped, forgotten.

“Are you hit?”

Her tone was muffled, my hearing slowly returning.

“No! No! I’m fine! I’m fine!”

I crawled back to get the gun. More shots from the truck. I gave up, scrambled back, tucked myself behind a tree, made sure Susan was doing the same across the tiny clearing where the men had walked us. From my vantage point, I could see into the suitcase the man had flipped open.

A gunshot slammed into the tree behind which I crouched. I hardly noticed. I was so focused on trying to make sense of the object curved into the shape of the bag’s interior. The naked body was in the fetal position, arms tucked into the space between the thighs and chest. There didn’t seem to be a head. There was fluid, reddish brown, sunken into the creases and crevices of the figure’s hips and shoulders, sucked into wrinkles in the surface of the vacuum-sealed bag that contained it. I’d seen plenty of bodies in my life. Never one housed so neatly in plastic, airless, white, unmoving, perfectly fitting into the bag as though it had been designed for her.

I put my head against the tree trunk and fought the urge to be sick. Susan ducked out from her hiding place, arrived beside me, eyes wild.

“No time,” she said.

“Do you see—”

“Yeah, I see it.” She glanced toward the body in the bag, grabbed my biceps. “We can talk about that later. Right now, we gotta run, Bill. We gotta run.”