Clive Cussler - Thriller 2 - Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

Morgan was very much afraid that she was riding in a murderer’s car-with his wife. Did the woman know what her husband had done? Was she an accomplice? Morgan realized she might have made a mistake getting into the car. “Do you have a cell phone I could use?”

“Sorry,” the woman said, shaking her head. “There’s a pay phone at the convenience store where we’re headed.”

The woman’s cell phone rang.

Morgan’s neck hurt when she jerked it toward the woman, who reached into the pocket of her fur-trimmed coat and retrieved a cell phone, flipped it open and said, “You were right. There was someone on the road. Yeah, she’s in the car with me now.”

Morgan didn’t think, she simply grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard. And found herself headed for another large tree trunk.

“Let go of the wheel!” the woman cried.

Morgan heard the shriek of tearing metal. And a woman’s scream.

The police would eventually have checked out the GPS on Morgan’s cell phone, but Nash was able to access the information immediately. Thank God she’d left it on. If she was still in possession of her phone, she was about an hour north of Chevy Chase, somewhere along Route 40 northwest of Frederick, Maryland.

Nash made good time on I-270 north and merged onto US-40. The coordinates he’d put into his GPS sent him to Hamburg Road. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the sudden chill had created patches of fog, making visibility iffy.

He stopped at a convenience store before he headed up the mountain and showed a picture of Morgan and described her vehicle to the clerk.

The man shook his head. “I’d have remembered a woman like that.”

He showed the picture to another man in the store and said, “Have you seen this woman?”

The man shook his head.

There would be no moonlight for hours, and even then, Nash wondered if it would penetrate the thick undergrowth on the sides of the road. The pavement ended and he found himself driving on a rough rock-and-gravel road. Except where humans had carved hiking trails, the mountain terrain seemed impenetrable.

What the hell had she been doing up here? It seemed impossible he could find a lone woman in this vast wilderness. Except he had precise GPS coordinates that told him where to find her cell phone.

Nash stopped when his headlights picked out the torn-up grass where Morgan’s Jeep had apparently left the road. His heart was in his throat as he grabbed a flashlight and headed off into the undergrowth.

The trail of destruction left a clear path to follow. He found Morgan’s cell phone near a crushed elderberry tree. He hurried forward, but when he reached her car, it was empty.

“Morgan!” he shouted, feeling frantic. “Morgan! Are you out here?”

He was greeted by an eerie silence.

He turned in a circle and saw a light down the hill in the distance, on the opposite side of the road, moving through the underbrush. That must be her! He ran back to his SUV and raced down the winding road, despite the fog that had gathered in the hollows, afraid the moving light wouldn’t be visible when he got to where he’d seen it from above.

When he reached the bottom of the hill, he found a rusted-out Chevy pickup parked where he’d seen the light. But the light he’d seen from above had disappeared.

He heard the engine ticking on the pickup, so he knew it hadn’t been there long. He shined his flashlight in the front seat of the truck. When he tried the doors, they were locked. Then he checked the truck bed and saw blood. Dried blood. Had Morgan been lying in the bed of that truck sometime during the past eighteen hours?

Nash swore in frustration as he tried to find a way through the thick undergrowth on the side of the road. There was a lot of blood in the bed of that truck. Was he too late?

“Is anybody out there?” he shouted. There was no sound, not even a breath of wind to rustle the trees. He fought back his fear and shouted again, “Morgan! It’s Nash. Are you out there?”

He heard branches crackling as though someone was moving through the underbrush. He shined his flashlight toward the sound but couldn’t see much beyond the first colorful layer of bushes. As he was lowering the light, he caught sight of a broken branch. More than a few broken branches. And realized the swath of destruction was wide enough to have been made by a vehicle.

Another accident? He was confused for a moment, but he knew from the light he’d seen-and the truck on the side of the road-that someone was here. He followed the trail, shouting as he ran, “Morgan, I’m coming. Hold on, baby, I’m coming!”

If he’d been in another line of work, Nash would have died a moment later. Some instinct caused him to duck as he felt a rush of air near his ear, and the thick branch that would have brained him made contact with his right shoulder instead, causing him to drop his flashlight. He grunted in pain and turned to confront his attacker.

The man was swinging the branch in the opposite direction when Nash stepped under it and hit him in the solar plexus, doubling him over. Nash followed with an uppercut that rocked the man’s head back. Arms flailing, his attacker fell over backward. Nash followed him, grabbing two handfuls of the man’s corduroy jacket and dragging him upright to hit him again.

The heavyset man put his hands up and cried, “Stop! Stop!”

Nash frisked him one-handed, then dropped him on the ground and retrieved his flashlight. He shined it on the man’s face and realized he’d seen him before. At the convenience store.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“My wife is missing. She went out last night to get some cigarettes and never came back. We had an argument, so I thought maybe she spent the night with her mother. When she never showed up this morning, I thought maybe she had an accident. I’ve been looking for her along this road most of the day.”

“Why did you attack me?”

“I was afraid. People are always dumping stuff up here at night. That’s illegal, you know. So I thought maybe…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged sheepishly.

“There’s dried blood in the back of your pickup.”

“Oh. That’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” Nash shot back.

“I found a deer on the side of the road-hit by a car, I guess. I put it in my truck, figuring I’d butcher it. But it wasn’t dead and it woke up and jumped out.”

Animal blood. Nash shook his head in disgust. He turned and followed the trail of broken branches and car wreckage to a dark-colored Toyota. It had run head-on into a sycamore.

His heart began thudding hard when he spied the bloodstained windshield on the driver’s side. His flashlight reflected something on the passenger’s window. A bloody handprint.

Then he saw the long-legged female body lying on the leaf-strewn ground. The head and shoulders were covered with a black leather jacket. He recognized the distinctive silver buttons.

The jacket belonged to Morgan.

He gave a cry of anguish as he ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the body. He gently eased the jacket away, even though the woman was apparently dead. And swallowed the sob that erupted as he realized…it isn’t Morgan!

This must be his attacker’s wife. But who had covered her dead face with Morgan’s jacket? And where was Morgan?

“Nash.”

His name came as a whisper on the wind. He felt his heart surge with joy as he called into the darkness, “Morgan! Where are you!”

Equally quiet, a ghostly warning, “Look out!”

Nash whirled and rose in one motion and found himself facing a Colt.45 automatic.

“Where the hell is she?” the stranger said in a harsh voice. “That bitch killed my wife!”