Lee Child - MatchUp

There was a snapping sound in the woods, and Joe whirled again.

Still nothing visible.

The roar of the falls in the distance had seemed to quiet, and the temperature was dropping fast. The blackness of night was rising even faster. The moon fought through the clouds, casting eerie white light on the snow. He’d never wanted to get away from a place more than this one.

“We’re going to need shelter,” Joe said.

He was trying to remember old survival priorities. First aid was priority number one, but the only member of the group who was hurt was Antonio, and there wasn’t anybody in the group who was qualified to set broken legs. So let Antonio suffer a little longer, and move on down the list.

Shelter was next.

“Let’s go back to the car, dig it free, and get the hell out of here,” Tolliver said. “I don’t want to sit and wait. Let the locals handle Double Simpson.”

Nobody contested that advice.

Tolliver and Perry dragged Antonio through the snow, his bleeding, broken legs leaving a trail.

They’d made it halfway back to the car when headlights lit up the snow behind them.

6:13 P.M.

JEFFREY FROZE IN THE GLARE of the lights.

He glanced over his shoulder. The lights were high beam, casting everything behind them in shadow, but he could still make out exactly what he was expecting to see.

The black truck, and a figure holding a sawed-off shotgun.

Not Paulson, because Paulson was the circumference if not the height of a flag pole. This guy was solidly built, shorter, and had a hell of a lot more confidence about the weapon in his hand.

Had to be Double Simpson.

“Leave the black fella with me and I’ll let you walk off this mountain,” Simpson called out.

Pritchard, who came across as pretty cerebral for a Cleveland cop, asked, “Or we don’t drop him and then what?”

Double slapped the short muzzle of the shotgun against his palm. The smacking sound echoed in the snowy silence.

Pritchard said, “Seems like we have no choice.” His tone was convincing, but Jeffrey gathered the guy was like every guy on the Birmingham force, which meant two things. He was a consummate liar and he was never, ever going to let some thug tell him what to do.

Double said, “I’ll give you sixty seconds to get back to your car and get the hell out of here.”

Jeffrey let Antonio drop, which meant Perry had no choice but to do the same, and also meant that everyone had their hands free now.

Pritchard got it.

And gave Jeffrey a nod, moving toward the car, which was on his right. Jeffrey inched left, which was away from the car and toward a thick stand of trees twenty feet away.

Pritchard told Double, “You can have him. Just let us know where the body is when the thaw comes.”

“What?” Antonio, who’d been content to play dead while they dragged his two-hundred-pound ass through the forest, was suddenly coherent. “No, man. You can’t do that to me. This cracker’s gonna—”

“Sorry about your luck,” Pritchard said, and he kept making his way in the thick snow toward the car.

Perry seemed to be itching to make a stand, but he finally got with the program when Jeffrey moved left, following their lead. He understood that the plan wasn’t to get to the car and go. The plan was to get out of the range of the shotgun because no matter what Double said, none of them were stupid enough to believe he was going to let them walk off this mountain.

“Please,” Antonio begged. “Come on, man. You can’t—”

Pritchard slipped around the side of the car.

Jeffrey darted into the woods. He heard a gun blast as he dove to the ground, the air cracking like lightning from the sky.

Perry oofed as he landed beside Jeffrey. He didn’t move for a few seconds, and he wondered if the kid had been hit, but then Perry whispered, “Is Joe clear?”

He knelt on the lee side of a large oak, checking for Pritchard.

The moon gave off just enough light to make out shapes, but only if you knew what you were looking for. Pritchard was behind the Malibu’s engine block, gun drawn. No eye contact was needed. Pritchard was doing his job and he expected everyone else to be doing theirs.

Perry said, “We need to surround this asshole. That’s a double-barrel shotgun. He’s already wasted one round. That leaves one shot left against three people. I like those odds.”

“The shotgun’s been modified,” Jeffrey said, because young guys in small towns hack up their guns the same way they hack up their cars. “That second round couldn’t hit a brick in a bucket, but we don’t know what else he’s got on him.”

As if to illustrate the problem, a handgun was fired.

The bullet snicked into the trunk of the oak, about four inches above Jeffrey’s head.

Perry hugged the ground again.

So did Jeffrey.

The snow was so deep and so wet that he had trouble pushing himself back up. He sneaked a look at the black truck. Double still held the shotgun, but he also now had a handgun. Nine millimeter by the shape of it. The magazine hung way down like an extra set of balls. He’d modified the stack so that he could double the ammo.

Perry had seen the extended magazine, too. “That ain’t good.”

Jeffrey said, “And Paulson’s out there, too.”

“Probably backing him up.”

“Paulson’s not so easy with a gun. If he’s backing up Double, it’s from behind. Way behind.”

“I’ll remember to watch my six,” Perry said. “You go up the hill, I’ll go to Double’s rear. Joe’s got the third corner of the triangle.”

Those were good odds, because trying to sneak behind Double, maybe facing Paulson along the way, was clearly the more dangerous path.

He told the kid, “Wrong way around,” and took off, heading away from the hill, parallel to Double and his truck. It wasn’t the plan Perry had favored, but Jeffrey trusted he would move quickly to get into position.

Quietly, Jeffrey walked a wide circle around Double’s truck, trying to slip behind him. He kept an eye peeled for Paulson, but he had a gut feeling that Paulson would piss himself before he took a stand. Two against three was more like one against three, and Jeffrey liked the odds of the three who were highly trained law enforcement officers.

Then again, maybe the playing field was evened out by the deep snow. His breath started to come in pants as he picked up his feet from thirty-inch drifts. He and Perry were around the same age. Jeffrey was probably in better shape, then again, he always assumed he was the guy in better shape. But Perry was probably more accustomed to moving in snow. Then again, Perry had said he was more accustomed to driving in snow too and look how that had ended.

There were too many then agains in this mix, and if any one of them went wrong, it was going to be a fucking bloodbath.

If they were lucky, they would get to their opposite ends of the triangle about the same time. Then it was just a matter of making Double listen to logic. Having three Glocks pointed at your head could make even the stupidest man see reason. The problem was, maybe Double was too smart to be stupid. The thug seemed to realize a move was being made. He turned off the lights on his truck and everything went black. Jeffrey felt his eyes squint in protest, but he kept them open, tracking Double as the man crouched down low, pulled the hood up over his head and somehow disappeared into the shadows.

He felt his heart thumping inside his throat.

Their bad situation had turned worse.

His gun was frozen in his ice block of a hand. He couldn’t see Perry. He could barely make out the Malibu stuck in a snowdrift, let alone pick out Pritchard’s location.

There was nothing to do but stick with the plan.