Doranna Durgin - Survival Instinct

The next step was pretty clear, too. He slid in behind the wheel, firing the engine up-but he didn’t crank the heat up. It wouldn’t do to get too comfortable. Not until whatever Ellen had slipped into his whiskey was totally out of his system, and the caffeine had kicked in. But he was a man with a mission nonetheless; he reached into the passenger seat and pulled out his laptop, putting it aside to boot up while he grabbed his USB receiver. Then he found his glasses, knowing better than to try to work without them when he could barely focus in the first place.

Oh, yeah, he’d felt guilty enough about that bug, even if at the time he was bugging her for her own protection and didn’t tell her only so she wouldn’t worry. As if she were still the old Ellen. Now his guilt dissipated somewhat, especially when the results of his two receivers-the GPS and the short-range RF-told her she was nowhere in the area. He took a closer look at the GPS map on his screen.

What the hell was she doing at the border of West Virginia? She didn’t know anyone there…had no ties to the area.

Running. Running like a rabbit.

No, he told himself quite suddenly, listening to the gut instinct that had been poking at him since his arrival. Not like a rabbit, not anymore. Like a fox.

But a fox who didn’t know she’d been tagged.

The receiver beeped; he almost dismissed it in his attention to the laptop. But the beep meant the automatic scanning receiver had found success, and that made no sense. There was no way its range extended over a hundred miles. Dave alt-tabbed his way to the open receiver window and stared at it.

Oh, shit.

It was him. This car. Somewhere in the back half of it, probably under the wheel well.

Barret’s man hadn’t given up at all. He’d just come back to bug Dave’s car, hang back and wait.

Dave pushed the laptop aside and slid out of the car, running cold fingers along the inner wheel well, the bumpers, the second wheel well…and there it was. He pried the thing free and took it back to the car, flicking on the overhead light to get a better view of his prize.

It was an impressive little device. Not as tiny as the beyond cutting-edge tech he’d planted on Ellen, but if the receiver was anywhere near this quality…

Then Longsford’s man would have picked up the motion-activated bug on Ellen. If he was alert, if he was in the car…he could easily have followed her, staying in range. And that meant Dave somehow had to reach her before it was too late.

God. I’m gonna need more coffee.

“Dear Ellen,” Karin said out loud, speaking into the darkness. The moon had set; dawn couldn’t be far away. “Your sister is in a mess.”

For one thing, she’d lost her hat, and then she’d lost most of her body heat through her uncovered head. She’d lost part of her scarf, too, but only because she’d used it to strap up her wrist. And then she’d ended up on a west-facing slope. This spot wouldn’t see warm sunlight until the day was half over.

It wasn’t as if she could keep moving to generate body heat.

The errand geek was right. She might last a day. If she was lucky.

Daylight. She just needed to stay functional until daylight, until she could truly assess her situation.

Helpless. Plain and simple helpless.

When was the last time that had happened?

Never, she told herself…but even to her mind’s inner ear, the protest came too strongly.

“It wouldn’t feel familiar if it was a first,” she said out loud, just in case it would make herself listen more carefully.

But it did feel familiar. In a sly way, a trickle of feeling that was oh-so-hard to identify. A feeling she wanted to ignore. Under other circumstances she would have sprung to her feet and found some busywork, if only pacing. Now…really not a good time to take up pacing.

So she kept her feet still, and she sat with her back against the earth and her face buried in her arms as she hugged her knees, trying to keep warm. Familiarity didn’t make sense. She’d never been helpless. She was the one who took to Rumsey’s games, at least until she realized the consequences of the games, from the charity scams to the good old ketchup-squirt scams. She’d been good at playing backup for Rumsey.

At first, just by being there. Just being a little girl, engaging their interest for the investment scams or charity scams-the long view, when Rumsey needed a whole cast of characters. As she got older she’d carried his messages, muling not drugs or money but information. She interacted with the marks themselves, filling in while Rumsey was busy with some other scheme. And she’d even handled fenced goods and bartered information with their more felonious acquaintances.

If Karin needed something, she got it. If she was in trouble, she got out of it.

Until today, anyway.

Now she had a wrist that was badly sprained if not broken, and she clung to the side of a mountain in the dark. And it felt…

Familiar.

And because she wasn’t afraid of anything, not even some damned elusive feeling, Karin shut her eyes and followed it. She let it well up inside her.

Until suddenly she was eight years old, waiting for Rumsey to fetch her, because he was preparing to make one of his special visits. And she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to go. How she wished her mother were still there! And she almost turned to Ellen to cry about it, but she already knew that Ellen wasn’t strong enough for Rumsey’s games, and if Karin didn’t go along then Ellen would have to do it.

Didn’t anyone know? Couldn’t any adults see what was going on, the lies he made her tell? The fake smiles he made her smile, pinching the back of her neck when it looked like he was putting a proud hand on her shoulder?

But no one had ever seen through the lies Rumsey told about her, about Ellen. No one had ever seen she wasn’t a perfectly happy, normal little girl with her perfectly normal family.

Helpless.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the best strategy for surviving-for thriving-was to put aside her reluctance. To become so good at scamming that Rumsey counted on her…that he did decently by her and Ellen in other ways. Food in the fridge, money for clothes…except later, when she really got good. She and Ellen had stolen their first bras together.

Karin shivered, wrapping her arms more tightly around her knees. An emotional as well as a physical huddle, with helplessness smothering her in a wave of unwelcome feeling. “Okay, it happened,” she muttered, ready to be through with it even if it wasn’t through with her. “I made choices. I got past it. I’m not eight any longer.”

No, she was twenty-six and she was stuck on a cliff.

I wonder if Rashawn feels this way. Helpless.

The thought came out of nowhere; it made her suck in her breath and then forget to breathe out again. No child should feel like this. It wasn’t something she could understand as an eight-year-old, but as a fully grown woman she understood plenty. None of that should have happened. Not to her; not to Rashawn.

But I’m not Ellen. There’s nothing I can do to help.

There’s nothing.

Dave bought coffee at every opportunity, filling his thermos. He therefore also stopped to get rid of coffee at every opportunity, grateful that the amazing scarcity of gas stations was offset by cover at the side of the road. It was harder finding enough shoulder in which to pull over…these two-lane roads ran narrow, ofttimes barely notched into the side of a ridge. The mountain rose on one side, dropped away on the other.

But Karin hadn’t moved, and he steadily gained on her, though he didn’t quite understand it. Unless Barret’s man had inexplicably lost her, he’d practically been on top of her all this time. But if he’d made a move, Karin’s tracking device would have reflected it.