slipped into his black FBI windbreaker to protect his white shirt, but he still complained. “Why do I get the messy end of the body?”
“Don’t be such a wuss. You’re stronger than me and the top half of the body is heavier.”
Also, she intended to use the few minutes when she was alone by Morrissey’s car to shove Wade’s copper-handled revolver under the seat. Removing evidence would be wrong. She was certain about that. Hiding the evidence might be kind of, maybe, a little bit acceptable. It’s not. I know better.
But she needed a couple more minutes to figure out what to do about a gun that should have been locked in a case at her house. It could be the murder weapon. Maybe she’d tell Ty about it before Morrissey’s supervisor got here. She definitely didn’t want Lieutenant Natchez to use her husband’s fancy revolver to tie her to a murder scene.
When Ty pulled Morrissey away from the seat, the man’s head flopped forward against the steering wheel. Seeing him was different than touching. The stench of death cut through the smoke as she helped Ty manipulate the dead weight. Morrissey’s arms dangled. His legs were as floppy as a rag doll. There wasn’t anything she could do about the revolver until Ty had the body halfway out of the seat.
In a quick move, she ducked inside the car, shoved the weapon under the passenger’s seat, emerged and slammed the driver’s-side door. She faced Ty. “Okay, let’s roll.”
He held Morrissey under the armpits with his legs sprawled. “What the hell was that dance about?”
Instead of replying, she grabbed the dead man under the knees. “I won’t be carrying my share of the weight like this. Let me get him around the middle.”
Morrissey’s blood smeared her khaki uniform. She should have put on her windbreaker; Ty was smart to do that. They stumbled a few steps toward her vehicle.
A burst of gunfire echoed against the canyon walls. She looked over her shoulder toward the road in front of them. Through the smoke, she saw the shapes of two men diving across from the right side to the left where the green sedan had run into the cottonwood trunk.
Ty’s reaction was immediate. He dropped Morrissey, ducked behind her car and yanked his Beretta from the holster. “Take cover, Sam.”
Her brain wasn’t so agile. It took a few beats to register the obvious. Somebody was shooting at them. She needed to return fire, needed to find cover, needed to move. Move! But she stood there like a statue, holding the lower half of Morrissey’s legs. She looked down. His sneakers were untied.
Ty’s voice wakened her. “Sam, move! Damn it, move!”
She dropped Morrissey and bolted like a jackrabbit, dashing to her SUV, where she whipped open the driver’s-side door to use as a shield. A bullet pinged against the door. If she’d been standing in the open, she would have been hit in the center of her bulletproof vest. Thank God she was wearing it today.
In the academy and during other training exercises, she’d been in dozens of simulations. But this was her first real-life firefight. As she drew her Glock, her focus tightened. Time seemed to slow. She remembered what was supposed to be done. I can do this. Her confidence returned and with it came courage.
When she spotted a backpack in the middle of the road where the two men had been, she yelled to Ty, “The hikers, these guys have got to be the hikers. The marshal said there were three.”
From the opposite side of her SUV, he shouted, “I saw only two.”
The hikers continued to lay down a steady barrage of gunfire. That was a lot of ammo. She regretted using her storage for a second ammo magazine as a carryall for latex gloves. Ty was aiming at a big, chunky boulder that was about ten yards down the road. She guessed the hikers would try to move toward the wrecked sedan, where they’d have a better angle.
Bracing her gun hand against the window frame of her vehicle, she popped a bullet into the space between the rock and the sedan. The action of her Glock felt good in her hands. She was a fairly good shot, the best in the Swain County Sheriff’s Department...which wasn’t saying much, given that Caleb was second best.
“Cover me,” Ty yelled.
Peering through the space between her car door and the windshield, she fired in the direction he’d been shooting. Every bullet counted. She squeezed the trigger seven times, rapid-fire. Her ears rang with the percussive noise.
In a low crouch, Ty darted to the right side of the road, concealed himself in a ditch and took aim. He fired several times in quick succession.
A man staggered out from behind the boulder into the road. With one hand, he clutched his gut. Blood spilled through his fingers. With the other, he tried to steady his weapon. Ty fired again. The man crumpled to the dirt.
One down, two to go. She saw the second man run from the cover of the boulder toward the cottonwood tree where he could hide in the shrubs behind the car. He was closer to her than to Ty. Keeping her head down, she maneuvered toward the sedan.
The heavy smoke hanging over the trees made her think of a battlefield. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. She was on high alert, shivering and sweating at the same time. She dodged around the body of Morrissey on the ground. Her gloved hand touched the trunk of the sedan. She saw the hiker beside the tall cottonwood.
Ty ran toward the sedan, blasting as he came. She raised her weapon, took aim. She had the best angle—a head shot that was perfectly aligned. Before she could squeeze the trigger, the hiker was hit. He threw both arms in the air as he fell. Two down, one to go.
She could have sworn that shot came from behind her, uphill to her left. But when she looked, she didn’t see anything but a couple of ragged-edged boulders and a dark wall of pine trees. Squinting, she tried to catch the glint of sunlight off a rifle barrel. If there was a mysterious marksman, he’d have to be using a high-powered rifle. A handgun wouldn’t be accurate from those trees.
“Are you okay?” Ty called out.
“I’m fine. You?”
“There’s another hiker, right?”
When the wind rippled the tall buffalo grass, she glimpsed him in her peripheral vision. He was half up the hill toward the trees. His pistol aimed directly at her.
She wheeled to face him. Somebody else fired first, and his bullet hit the hiker in the upper right chest. The hiker let out a fierce scream. He turned on wobbly legs and stared uphill to the point where she’d been looking. Then he went to his knees and curled up on the ground, moaning.
She rushed toward him, kicked his gun out of his reach and unhooked her handcuffs from her belt. With his shoulder wound, it seemed cruel to force the hiker onto his belly, but she wanted to be sure he was subdued and no longer a threat.
Breathing heavily, she got a lungful of smoke and coughed before she called out, “Ty, have you got the other two?”
“The one in the road is dead. The other is unconscious. I secured his wrists with a zip tie.”
Her attack tally turned to a roster for emergency care: two wounded and two dead, including Morrissey. It was time to call for an ambulance. Proper procedure would have been to dial up the EMTs when they first discovered Morrissey’s body. But she’d figured that the local emergency personnel
