Page 101 of Crosscurrent

The recording died on the last word. There was no telling whether he ended the call, or someone else did it for him.

Wade bolted upright in the seat behind Gabe. “Lord, You know what’s ahead, and You know what’s at stake. Keep our heads clear, our hands steady, and our people safe. This is about to get real.”

“Amen,” Cara answered, as did everyone else in the vehicle, Suzette Bennion loudest of all.

The cold started at the back of Cara's neck and went all the way down. “Hit it,” she ordered.

Gabe had the truck at eighty before she finished the sentence, the black marsh tearing past on both sides, frogs screaming in the dark. Two miles. Maybe three minutes.

Cara closed her eyes. Lord, please. Don't let us be too late.

44

Gabe mashed the brake pedal, bringing the truck around in a slither of crushed shells. The shoulder harness bit into his neck until he wrestled with the wheel hard enough to bring the rear of the truck back under control. He pointed it back the way they'd come and punched the accelerator.

"Nice move," Wade murmured. "Ten bucks says that woman's got eyes on the road. They'll pick us off like fleas."

"Agreed." Gabe set his jaw and drove, forcing himself to head away from their friends. "There's one road in, and they're sitting on it. We drive up it, we die on it, and so does everybody in that cabin."

It should have hit him the second Barrett's voice came over the line, and it hadn't, because the only thing in his head had been, get there. You didn't get there by walking up the front steps of a house full of people who'd come to kill you, and most of the people you cared about.

"What's the plan, then?" Cara had the dead handset against her ear, the way there'd been nothing the whole way back.

He made himself ease off the gas, because panic drove fast and stupid and they couldn't afford either. "We've got no comms and no way to know exactly what we’re facing."

"So we go in blind," Wade said. Not a complaint. A fact. "Against whatever she brought. I'll take those odds."

Four people in a truck and a bag of bandages. That was the army on their side. Not that Gabe needed to point that out.

Cara twisted around in her seat. "Then we don't come the way they expect. We come by water."

Wade made a sound. "They'll expect that, too."

"Yeah." Cara sighed. "Any better ideas?"

From the back, Bennion spoke. "I've been hiding in this swamp for months. You think I didn't plan five different escape routes?" She leaned up between the seats and pointed past Gabe's shoulder, down a cut he'd have driven right past. "Two miles back there's a launch nobody uses. There's a flatboat chained under the dock. Nobody'll miss it before morning. Take the east channel and you can come up on that cabin from the open bay, downwind in the dark. It's the side nobody watches, because nobody comes that way."

Gabe took the turn she pointed at.

It put Barrett's voice in a different light. Don't come back the way you went out. Minutes old, impossible to weigh, a warning from a man burning his cover to keep them breathing. Or a hand steering them into something worse.

"Barrett's telling us the road's covered," Cara said. She'd heard it too. They all had.

"Or telling Cartwright we'd run the second he said it," Wade said, flat. "We don't know what he is."

Gabe stared between the headlight beams, gaze fixed on the center of the rutted road. Vegetation crowded in on both sides, squeezing down on them. Hiding things. Hiding dangers. "Doesn't matter."

"Not even a little." Cara smiled grimly, two minds with the same thought. They were going in for their people. Period.

"Thibodeaux's team is still staged at Bennion's," Gabe pointed out.

"So move them," Wade said.

"To what? A hostage scene he's never seen, with deputies I've never met? Not my first choice."

The bayou crowded the road, green and wet and alive. Weeds slapped the undercarriage, vines snapped off the side mirrors, and broad leaves smeared muddy water across the windows as Gabe forced the SUV down the overgrown track. The smell hit hardest—stagnant water, churned mud, crushed vegetation, and a sour, fishy rot that pushed through the vents no matter how high he ran the air. The whole place smelled drowned. Like the road had been carved through something that wanted it back.

"Cole I'd trust with any of you,” he said. “The badges he brings I couldn't pick out of a lineup."