Chapter 24

Back in the trees, I knocked into a branch, and a rivulet of warm rain slapped my neck to run down my back. The tickle made my skin crawl.

As if it wasn"t crawling enough already. What with the guy pointing a trank gun at naked me and equally naked Noah.

"The FBI isn"t cool about sexual harassment," I said. "But you still have a chance to save yourself. Join team good guy. Help rescue the quarterback."

"What sexual harassment?" he asked. "I"m not the one who told you to party naked out here."

"It"s the beach," I said. "We thought we were alone!"

"Yeah, yeah. You think a lot of things, don"t you, buddy?"

Noah said nothing. He was smarter than both of us put together.

The second guy was still knocked out, on his side, his good arm cradling his hurt one. In other words, he didn"t seem to have moved. Creepy.

"How long till he comes out of it?" I asked.

"You don"t have a need to know that, Mr. FBI."

The ankle was probably just a sprain, but the arm might be broken. There weren"t bones poking out or anything, but there was such a thing as fractures that could be made worse by moving him wrong. It didn"t seem to me that we should just slap him on a sheet to hump him down the hill.

"You think we should do something to brace the arm?" I asked.

The goon shrugged. "Who cares? Just get a move on, buddy. We ain"t got all night."

Noah breathed out heavily. "I honestly don"t know."

"It might help if all three of us helped carry him," I said slowly. "I don"t want to put any unnecessary stress on that break."

His face was in shadow under the headlamp, but I could see the eyeroll anyway. "Yeah, right. Save it for open mic night. You aren"t half as funny as you think you are."

He thought I was trying to trick him into putting down the rifle. Well, kinda. Why not?

"Can"t blame a girl for trying," I said.

"Don"t push me, bud. I could knock you out, leave all the hard work to the little guy. Think you"d look like such a badass then?"

What I thought was that he didn"t believe Noah had the strength to do the job alone. He was itching to trank me to the gills and would have already done it if he didn"t think he needed both of us to get his injured men loaded onto the chopper.

In the end, we had no option but to lift the injured man as carefully as we could onto the sheet. Moving downhill was more nightmarish because of the extra care I had to make to place my feet and avoid any little bumps. Maybe a better man would have been more brutal, but I could take no pleasure in hurting an enemy who was already unconscious. His colleague obviously didn"t care what condition he arrived in at the chopper as long as he arrived in one piece, but...

After we set him down softly on the sand, I jerked my chin at the helicopter. There were two chances out of three that I"d knocked out their pilot. "You know how to fly that thing?"

"It ain"t rocket science."

"Which means what? You don"t know, but you"re going to do it anyway?"

"We all get the training. You don"t need to worry your pretty head about it."

Noah asked him about a flight simulator game. The guy escalated by dropping the name of a different simulator. My eyes glazed over. I play real games. With real bodies.

I preferred not to think about the fact we were about to fly out over an ocean with a guy who"d trained on a jumped-up video game.

Out here on the beach, with no umbrella of leaves overhead, you could feel the drizzle turning to rain again. Both of the unconscious men were already soaked to the skin. Well, me and Noah were too, but being soaked to the skin is less unpleasant when you"re not wearing clothes.

"Keep moving." This time, our nasty friend nudged the rifle into my right kidney instead of Noah"s. "You can take a nice long nap when we"re in the air."

The threat wasn"t enough to distract me from the roll of a rumble that wasn"t all surf. Thunder. Peachy. Just what I needed to make the night complete.

"Is there really any hurry?" I asked the two armchair pilots. "Should we be flying into a thunderstorm?"

"These things are designed to fly through war zones," said Noah. That wasn"t the ringing endorsement he thought it was.

"It"s about to be real wet out here, boy." The goon switched back to nudging Noah"s right kidney. "I ain"t gonna tell you one more time to get those boys loaded."