Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

3. I realized it was a man.

4. He and I locked eyes in a moment of mutual shock.

5. We agreed not to be friends.

CHAPTER 11

HE WAS A mercenary. In what felt like one millisecond after our collision, he decked me across the jaw, hard . I recoiled backward. If Mr. SUV Driver was a dangerous man, this second guy was a nuclear war.

You could see it in his eyes: this wasn’t a person, this was a professional killer. He was dressed for attacking things—soldier pants, Kevlar vest, handgun, hiking boots.

I was on my back. I’d never been hit before. Not even my older sister, Valentina, would punch me. We were slappers and that ended at age nine.

I had surprised him, but well-trained instinct enabled him to regain the upper hand. I would’ve assumed, prior to this moment of my life, that it would hurt to get hit; but it actually was too shocking. I hadn’t read the “So You’re About to Be Punched in the Jaw” orientation brochure, but it might explain that with the hit, your grasp on reality vaporizes. You get stupider.

So there I was, on the dirt, catching up with my current reality. He was slowly approaching me but I was too cloudy to even scoot myself backward. I just stayed there. Done.

And then my enemy noticed something, at the same moment that I did.

He stopped in his tracks, a bewildered expression now on his face, replacing the steel of a moment before. He was looking down at his left hand, palm-up as if checking for raindrops. The raindrop was red, and it had come from his shoulder.

He had been shot. By me.

CHAPTER 12

I VAGUELY REMEMBERED hearing a pop. That was the sound of my gun going off, though I hadn’t realized it way back seven seconds ago. I’d been carrying my rifle, running along rather blithely with my hand loosely on the trigger, when I slammed into the back of him. A car rear-ending another car. Thrown to the ground when he punched me, I must’ve pulled the trigger.

The whole transaction had taken place in the blink of an eye. The bullet must have entered him in the shoulder and exited in the upper part of his back. I’d been quite certain I’d walked into my own execution just now. Yet here we were, both motionless, both in shock.

He began to inspect himself beyond his palm, noting the expanding circle of blood on his shirt. His injury looked severe.

But not crippling.

“ Now ” flashed in my mind. I scrambled for the gun (who is this new Miranda, operating my body?), which had fallen to my side. I fumbled, grabbed it, and spun to take aim. He dove forward, right at me. I got lucky once, but rifles are not effective close-range weapons, which he proved by diving on me.

Our fight wasn’t over. Our fight had just begun.

Thank God there was a bullet in him, or through him, because this was the strongest living organism I had ever put my hands on. I used to playfight with Aaron in bed, knew his contours and weaknesses. These muscles here, from Mr. Kevlar, were unbelievable. Hard as rock. Huge. And trying to kill me.

I desperately curled into a fetal position and received a hit in the ribs that took my breath away. Oh, God . I caught his wrist and clung to it, in a weak attempt to disable one of those bionic arms. This would be painfully fast—I’d be knocked out with two more punches. But I dimly realized we had begun rolling.

Toward the river.

He pulled me into him, trying to bring my head down to knee my face like it was a martial arts fight on TV, but I used all my strength to turn away from his right side. I was, in effect, cranking the two of us in a sideways tango downhill, toward the river.

We rolled at first slowly, quarter turn by quarter turn, as he battered me with his fist. Before, I’d been too shocked for his hits to register. Well, now, I was exquisitely feeling them. Every single one. The head, the neck, the head again, the ribs, trying to get me to release my grip.

My grip?

I somehow had my hands gripped around his throat now.

My fingers clutched as hard as they could, a relentless hold on his nape, with my thumbs pushing into his voice box. My own strength surprised me. Call it rage, call it maternal instinct, call it whatever you want—I was operating under the influence of pure adrenaline. I was much smaller than this man, but he was now up against a climber’s hands. My grip was life or death.

“Who are you?” I said through gritted teeth. Our faces were close enough that I could see the vessels around his pupils.

Then the horizon began to flip over behind him. We were rolling. But I didn’t care. I was peering deep into his eyes.

“ Who are you?! ” I repeated as the horizon continued to turn, as we tumbled toward the last ledge on the cliff.

He didn’t blink, even more of an automaton than Mr. SUV Driver.

He hit me again. I withstood it. I don’t know how. Simply adrenaline? I knew that my gun was on the ground, back up where we started rolling. If he would just be so kind as to cooperate by letting go of me, I could go get it and shoot him again.

“Are you Drake?” I asked him, grunting as we grappled. I asked again, “Are you Drake Oil?”

It felt like I’d been on the ground with this man for a full year of my life, yet there I was—still alive, still a contender. In my favor was the fact that his bullet wound wasn’t just one hole, it was two. I knew because I was covered in his blood from rolling in the dirt. I was beginning to see I had hope.

Until we splashed in the river.

I didn’t register being midair, but I definitely noticed when the free fall finished and we plunged into turbulent, cascading water. My world went cold as we were dunked under and instantly swept along.

His grip softened just a bit; it was all I’d hoped for in these interminable minutes. Let that be printed on my tombstone: SHE GOT HIM TO SOFTEN HIS GRIP.

But he was on top still, his formidable body weight shoving me deeper down. We banged limbs for what seemed like the entire month of June. I suppose I should’ve been worried about upcoming rocks, but he’d introduced a new variable into the equation—not sure when that was exactly. He had a knife.

Underwater, amid murky eddies, I didn’t have his throat anymore. I had both of my hands on his wrist. My instincts had rerouted all my physical focus from his esophagus to the jagged, murderous blade in his fist.

One swipe, one cut, and I would’ve been done.

With rocks on all sides, we were getting up close and personal with the unforgiving wrecking balls of the rapids. My one goal was to try to swim upward, break free of his iron grip, and get to the surface. I could engage instead, try some kung fu moves on his face—but I’m not the fastest thinker when it comes to underwater close-quarters death-match combat.

Didn’t matter. The game ended on its own.

His size was his advantage on land, but it became his Achilles’ heel in the rapids. He was too big to make it safely through the rocks unscathed. The riverbed did its job.

Poonk . A muffled thud. I could hear the blow his head took from a cluster of granite. He swung his last two punches at me in a halfhearted, half-conscious motion.

His grip on me faded.

The surface seemed to rush down toward my face, and my body emerged like a clumsy rocket. I had been treading so hard, I actually got my full torso up above the waterline before being beaten back down by the current. I was floating. I tried to glance behind me to see if he’d surface, too. We’d both been under for what felt like a decade. I scanned the surface behind me but he’d been consumed. I assumed, given the gunshot and blood loss, that he was dead.

And I was adrift.

I slowly took inventory of the situation: where I was heading, where I’d been, and what I now had in my possession.