The Christmas Clue. Delores Fossen

to her, Matt fired two more shots.

      “You said the guy on the roof is out of range,” Cass whispered.

      “He is. The guy behind the oak moved.”

      Oh, God. More heart-pounding adrenaline. But Cass stayed focused on her own task. There was no movement in the back of the woods. No sounds, other than those that should be there. So all she could do was wait and pray that Matt was as good a shot as she thought he was.

      It didn’t take long, mere minutes, for the winter to stake claim to her body. She was bone cold, and her butt had likely frozen. Oh, and her teeth were chattering. Audibly chattering. Cass clamped her teeth over her bottom lip and hoped it would help.

      Matt fired yet another round and then almost calmly readjusted his arm. “The guy behind the tree is injured. I shot him in the right hand, so he probably won’t be shooting at us anymore.”

      He’d said that so calmly that it took a moment to sink in. Cass hated that she felt nothing but elation over the injury of another human being. But it seemed appropriate, considering this man, this stranger, had been willing to kill them.

      “What about the one on the roof?” she asked.

      “Still there.”

      Wonderful. They couldn’t get him, but he could certainly do some damage to Matt and her.

      There was a cracking noise. A sound that caused both Matt and her to scurry to re-aim. But Cass saw no gunman. Instead, a dead tree limb swooped to the ground.

      Matt immediately went back to his original position so he could keep an eye on the roof. “We need to get to that clearing just to your right.”

      She glanced in that direction, and it was obvious that Matt and she did not share the same definition of a clearing. At best, it was a path. A narrow one. To make matters worse, there weren’t nearly enough trees or underbrush, and it’d be easier for the roof shooter to see them and gun them down.

      “Why do we need to be there?” she asked.

      “I have a truck parked at the end of the clearing.”

      Cass glanced in that direction. “How far can the roof guy shoot?”

      “Five hundred meters, give or take a meter or two.”

      “My butt and brain are too frozen to do the math. How far do we have to make it down that so-called clearing before we’re safe?”

      “About halfway.”

      This time Cass attempted the math, and she figured that was at least thirty running steps. In other words, it was way too far. “And how many bullets can he fire in thirty seconds?” she asked.

      He gave her a flat look. “You don’t want to know.”

      Cass groaned softly. “We can’t just lie out here. We’ll freeze to death. So, what do we do?”

      “The clearing,” Matt repeated. “First, though, scoop up those dead leaves and twigs around your feet and toss them on top of the makeshift bunker.”

      It seemed a strange request, but since there was nothing nonstrange about any of this, Cass did as he asked.

      Immediately, bullets came hailing down on them.

      “Keep moving those leaves,” Matt instructed. He returned fire with one hand and did some leaf arranging of his own.

      While keeping a grip on her gun and watching their backs, Cass hurried, scooping and tossing, until she’d gathered up everything that was gatherable.

      “Now, put your coat up there,” Matt added.

      Heck, she didn’t question that, either, even though once Cass had stripped off the jacket, she went from teeth-chattering to downright freezing. But she didn’t forget to remove the picture of Matt’s baby. She shoved that into her jeans.

      “Take the small black case from my pocket,” he continued. “And then help me out of this jacket so you can add it to the leaves.”

      Cass did that, too, and it required a lot more body touching than she’d anticipated. Specially, touching Matt’s chest, abs and arms. It wasn’t easy to get a man his size out of a jacket without her practically crawling all over him.

      When she’d finished removing his jacket, Cass opened the wallet-size case and found some small tools, cash and a book of matches. “I’m going to set fire to the leaves and coats?” she asked, not believing that was a good idea.

      He nodded, then shot at the guy on the roof, ejected the empty magazine and reloaded. “Literally a smoke screen.”

      Oh. It might work.

      But since Cass couldn’t come up with anything better, and since the guy was still shooting at them, she used one of the tiny tools to rip off the bottom of her cable-knit sweater to use as kindling. It wasn’t easy because of her shaky hands, but she struck the match, and she sheltered the tiny flame until she managed to get the wool-blend fibers to light. She tossed the lit hunk onto the leaves, twigs and coats.

      The cold wind actually helped. It fueled her scrawny fire and quickly whipped it into a pile of gray billowing and suffocating smoke.

      Cass coughed and turned her face from the fire.

      Matt didn’t turn his face, and he began to peel off his shirt. “There’s not enough smoke.”

      She disagreed but then realized the guy on the roof wouldn’t have much trouble seeing down past the smoke and flames. Matt was right. They needed more.

      Cass yanked off her sweater and immediately felt the harder sting of the cold. Her white silk camisole wasn’t much protection, and it wasn’t the best of days to be braless.

      Matt tossed his shirt onto one end of the fire; Cass added her sweater to the other end. Both garments caught fire, and both produced a slightly different-colored smoke. It was enough to create a six-foot-high wall that would hopefully conceal them if Matt didn’t stand up too straight.

      “Let’s go,” Matt said, and he pulled her to her feet.

      Cass didn’t even have time to catch her breath before they started running.

      Chapter Five

      Matt considered every step to be a victory. But of course the only victory that counted was for them to make it through the clearing without getting shot.

      He pushed Cass ahead of him so he could shield her as best he could and catch her if she fell. Yet despite the thorny underbrush and the limb-riddled ground, she not only stayed on her feet, she ran even faster than Matt imagined she could. But then, she had a huge motivation to run.

      A spray of bullets tore into the ground. They were close, but not close enough. Which told Matt one important thing—the smoke screen had worked. Because if it hadn’t, Cass and he would have been dead.

      With bullets zinging around them, Matt spotted the crest just ahead. “Hit the ground,” Matt ordered. “Slide down.”

      Cass did. Just as the bullets stopped. She dropped onto her butt and began the descent down the remains of the banks of a ravine. The dark-green rust-eaten truck was there, waiting for them. It didn’t look like much, but Matt knew that it worked, and it was their ticket to safety. It was literally his backup, a vehicle he’d placed in the woods in case the worst happened.

      “Don’t slow down,” Matt warned her when they reached the bottom. By now the gunman was probably off the roof so he could come after them.

      Cass raced toward the truck, jerked open the passenger-side door and jumped onto the seat. Matt got behind the wheel and used the key that was duct-taped beneath the seat to start the engine. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and got them out of there.

      “Stay down,” Matt insisted.

      She did, sort of. Cass slid lower into