Hunted. Beverly Long

highway, straight toward the edge.

      She slammed on the brakes. And started spinning.

      She was going over.

      And all she could do was hang on and wait to die.

      When her car came to a stop, it was jarring. She pitched forward at the same time her air bag inflated.

      It slapped her back in the seat, pushing hard against her face and chest. Her shoulder belt jerked tight. She felt a burning sensation arch across her cheekbones and settle on the bridge of her nose.

      She stayed conscious, at least she thought she did, aware of the deflating air bag and the strong chemical smell it left behind. She also was aware that her neck hurt when she tried to turn her head.

      Knew that she was in a hell of a mess.

      But she was alive.

      She had to get out. Now. It was the only thought in her head.

      She fumbled to unclasp her seat belt. It sprang free and she pitched forward. It took effort to keep her spine pressed back against the seat.

      Her car was upright but not level. No, definitely not. The front was way lower than the back.

      She couldn’t see much but what she could see wasn’t encouraging. By some miracle, one of her headlights appeared to still be working. That, combined with the moonlight, allowed her to see that her windshield was cracked in multiple places and the front of her vehicle was badly damaged. She could feel the cool night air on the back of her neck. She turned her head, half expecting to see that the back of the car had been sheared off. But it was still intact, although the back window had been blown out.

      And there were branches poking in.

      Her car had somehow gotten hung up in the trees. She had no idea how far she’d fallen, how many times the car had rolled. She also had no idea of how much farther the car might tumble if it lost its perilous perch.

      And that paralyzed her, until she finally forced herself to move. She carefully reached out and patted the seat next to her. Nothing. Her backpack, her purse and the cell phone that was in it had gotten tossed somewhere.

      She extended her arm over the seat and waved it around, frantically hoping to hook a strap by some miracle. She could feel the car shift beneath her and heard the soft creak of a tree limb. She stopped, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe.

      Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a patch of light. Bobbing and fading. Someone up on the road had a flashlight.

      She wanted to weep with joy or scream for help. But she did neither.

      She’d met only one vehicle. Minutes after it had passed, there had been someone following her.

      Was it possible that the car had passed, realized it was her, turned around, and hurried to catch up? Then deliberately rammed into her. Three times.

      What was the likelihood that they now wanted to help?

      Deciding that playing dead was the best course of action for the time being, she forced herself to slump over the steering wheel with her eyes closed.

      She listened, knowing that voices carried in the night air.

      It was quiet for several minutes. Finally, she heard a man say, “There. Happy? Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

      There was a response, but it was too faint for her to distinguish the words. She couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.

      “Oh, she’s dead,” the first man said, his voice booming with confidence. “Nobody could have survived that fall. Let’s go.”

      Chandler heard the slam of two car doors. Then the sound of an engine starting. The noise faded as her attackers drove away.

      She felt cold and battered and the urge to vomit came on with a vengeance. Someone had tried to kill her. The notion of it was so absolutely terrifying that her mind went blank.

      But only for about ten seconds. Then she got furious. And determined.

      Moving slowly and carefully, she leaned back in her seat. She took a deep breath, then another. The ability to think, to reason, started to come back as she flooded her brain with oxygen.

      Nobody could have survived that fall.

      She had. And from what she could tell, all her fingers and toes and all the parts in between were working.

      Now she just needed to get out before the car took a final plunge.

      * * *

      ETHAN MOORE HAD just turned the last page of his book when he heard a noise that didn’t belong to the quiet Colorado countryside. He raised his eyes at the same moment his dog, Molly, raised her head. “What do you make of that, girl?”

      Molly started to whine and turn circles on her rug.

      “You just went out,” he said. She did another circle.

      The temperature had been dropping all day. What had started out as a pretty October morning had become a windy, cold night. Snow was coming. He could feel it. He had no desire to be outside when it happened.

      But Molly was dancing by the door.

      He placed the hardcover he’d been reading on the ottoman, stood up and stretched. Better to do this now than in the middle of the night. He opened the cabin door. Molly wriggled her lean, strong body past his legs. He lost her in the darkness as her black fur blended into the tree line.

      “Molly, damn it,” he said. “We already played this game once today.”

      The black mutt, more nothing than Lab, was just shy of a year and still had some puppy in her sixty pounds. By morning, she could be halfway to Grand Junction.

      He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door and his big heavy flashlight from the shelf, and stepped outside to follow her. The dog had grown on him. Four weeks ago, he’d only been back in the States for three days when he’d gone to the local animal shelter. Forty-five minutes later, Molly was sitting next to him in the truck, her head hanging out the window. An hour later, he and his new sidekick had made his first big-box-store run and had a coffee pot, an electric fry pan and an oscillating fan.

      A week later, he’d moved his meager belongings to the Donovan cabin, which sat three hundred yards down a dirt road, high in the Rocky Mountains.

      It was as close to off-the-grid as one could get. The nearest town, which was being generous because it was less than five hundred people, was forty minutes away. The nearest city was twice that.

      The isolation felt good after spending the past twenty years in the company of mostly men, many of whom had felt the need to talk. About their families, the jobs they’d left behind, their favorite places to eat back home. And he’d listened.

      Most hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t reciprocated with his own stories.

      He’d always assumed that once he retired after twenty years in Uncle Sam’s army, there’d be a few fellow soldiers he’d want to catch up with. Share some stories about acclimating back to civilian life. Had never dreamed that he’d come home with a cloud of suspicion hanging over his head. Certainly hadn’t been prepared for the hostility that he’d encountered when he’d run across men who not so long ago had called him friend.

      It was a damn mess. He didn’t know whom he could trust and whom he couldn’t.

      So he’d come to a place where he’d always felt safe. Crow Hollow. Freshman through junior years in high school, he’d spent his summers here, running between the two cabins that graced the wilderness. The McCanns’ and the Donovans’. Mack McCann and Brody Donovan had been his best friends. Rich kids who hadn’t seemed to understand the difference that money made.

      Maybe it was only the poor kids who knew that.

      It had been the happiest three years of his life. And if he’d been inclined to reminisce about his youth,