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Entry tags:
White Collar fic: Survivor
Title: Survivor
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Peter/Elizabeth (basically gen plot, though)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,000
Summary: This isn't how Elizabeth planned her vacation: stranded in the woods with a badly injured husband, below-freezing temperatures, and a killer in pursuit, her nearest ally -- Neal -- a hundred miles away at the other end of a cell phone.
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
girlsavesboyfic. This also fills the "stranded/survival scenario" square for my ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
hc_bingo card.
Cross-posted: on AO3 | on Livejournal (2 parts)
Looking back on it later, Elizabeth remembered that she'd had no idea, no premonition, that things were about to go so very wrong. They'd just left the interstate for the little country highways that would take them to her sister's place, hopefully not too long after midnight. She'd already spelled Peter on the driving once, and now she rode with her shoes off and one foot tucked up under her, sleepily giggling as Peter tried to stump her on "20 Questions." Satchmo slept on a blanket in the backseat.
After falling silent for a moment, watching the mirrors, Peter said, "I hope Neal doesn't do anything while I'm out of town."
El poked him in the arm. "He probably has plans too, right? It's Thanksgiving. He'll be too busy with June and her grandkids to rob every art gallery in Manhattan while you're gone, don't you think?"
Peter gave her a sheepish answering grin. "I know, it's just -- it's Neal."
"Who is an adult with his own life," El pointed out. "Can we make a pledge, please? No more talking about Neal until Monday."
"Cross my heart." But his voice was a little distracted, and Peter's eyes went to the rear-view mirror for the fourth or fifth time in the past couple of minutes.
"Something wrong?"
"I don't know. Those headlights back there ... I swear that guy's been following us ever since we left the freeway."
El laughed. "Of course he has. This is probably the only highway going this way."
"I know. But he's been following us at the same distance, about a mile. Never faster. Never slower."
"It's called the speed limit." On a night like this, with the road a minefield of black ice interspersed with long stretches of dry pavement, no prudent driver would be going any faster.
Peter shrugged. "I don't know. Probably nothing."
"How do you know it's the same car?"
"The brightness and spacing of the headlights," Peter said as if it was obvious. Maybe for him, it was.
El checked the mirror herself. The headlights behind them were the only lights in sight. The forecast had called for possible snow upstate, and while the holiday traffic had been heavy closer to the city, this far north and this late it had grown very sparse.
"He's probably just the same as us, someone driving to see family for the holiday weekend."
"One way to check." Peter tapped the brakes. The Taurus slowed smoothly to forty-five, then forty.
El kept watching the mirror. The headlights began closing on them. "See," she said. "He's going to pass us. No problem."
"Okay, okay," Peter conceded, then squinted as the bright light filled the car. "Buddy, do you know what your dimmer switch is for?" he snapped at the rear-view mirror.
El grinned -- you can take the aggressive city driver out of the city, she thought, but not the other way around. Then she stopped smiling as the lights filled the mirror. She could only glimpse the vehicle behind them: something much bigger than the Taurus, a van or, more likely, some kind of large SUV. "Honey, he is going to pass us, right?"
"If he is, sonuvabitch doesn't know how to signal either." Peter's voice was tense. He began to accelerate, and then the whole car jerked and shuddered. In the backseat Satch's head went up.
"Did he just clip our bumper?" El said in disbelief, too shocked for the moment to be afraid.
The SUV fell back briefly, but only a few yards, and then put on a burst of speed, closing fast.
"Seat belt?" Peter said tightly, and El nodded, glancing sideways to see her husband's face settle into hard lines: his FBI game face, which she rarely saw. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
The other vehicle's headlights raked across the interior of the Taurus. Now he's passing us, El thought. Perhaps it really had been a mistake -- the SUV's driver hadn't been paying attention on the country highway, and had rear-ended them by accident.
Then Peter wordlessly jerked the wheel, and the Taurus bolted forward and wrenched sideways just as the SUV tried to sideswipe them. Despite the evasive maneuver, it clipped the back of the car anyway, and they fishtailed wildly. El clung to her seat.
Peter was still in control of the car and probably would have been able to pull out of their wild swerve if they hadn't hit a patch of black ice. The car whipped around a full 360 degrees, nearly hitting the SUV head-on, and went off the side of the road and over the embankment.
Satchmo yelped. El screamed. And that was the only thing she remembered clearly later.
*
El blinked and touched her face and hair. Her head didn't hurt but there was a gap, a break in her memories where there was nothing but a wild jumble of confused spinning and falling and things hitting her.
Satchmo whimpered and El came back to herself with a rush: resettling herself in her body was the only way she could describe the sensation. Pain came with it. She hurt all over in different ways, mostly the dull aches of bruises and scrapes and a whiplash pain in her neck and shoulders. Her left wrist stabbed viciously when she tried to move it and she stopped with a gasp. The seat belt was cutting into her chest and throat, and she realized that it was because the car was resting on the driver's side, so that the seat belt was the only thing stopping her from falling on top of Peter.
"Peter?" she said. Her voice shook. "Honey?"
He didn't answer.
Satchmo whined again. Cold air swept El's face -- the windshield had shattered, the safety glass holding together in a fragile net that sagged inwards, with branches poking through here and there. The Taurus appeared to be resting in a tangled nest of brush and trees, probably at the bottom of the embankment along the road. Their engine had died but their headlights were still on, sparkling from the many edges of the windshield's loosely connected fragments. Through the damaged glass and the branches pressing into the windshield, little light made its way into the car, only enough to turn the car's interior into a patchwork of fractured shadows.
Somewhere nearby came the familiar whunk sound of a car door slamming. There was also the deep thrum of an idling engine.
Oh thank God, help, was El's first thought, and then, Oh no. Because the only car on the road had been the SUV, and that meant --
"Peter," she whispered, and reached for him, feeling her way up his arm with her good hand. She felt the hot stickiness of blood, but had no idea where it was coming from. His throat was warm, the pulse jumping under her fingertips -- Oh thank you, thank you God. His head was twisted to the side, pressed against the driver's-side window. El shook his shoulder. He didn't move.
Footsteps crunched on the frozen grass somewhere above the car.
Elizabeth fumbled with the steering wheel and dashboard -- it was so different trying to do it sideways, and from the passenger seat -- until she found the switch to flick off the headlights. Sudden darkness filled the car. A part of her mind, the part that obeyed every law and never hesitated to ask directions of strangers or borrow a cup of flour from a neighbor, told her that she was being paranoid and stupid. What they needed right now was to be found, not to hide. But she couldn't stop thinking about the headlights closing in the rearview mirror, the sickening slewing of the Taurus as the SUV hit it. Someone had tried to hurt them. She couldn't understand who or why, but if that someone was still after them, then they had to hide. Peter, no matter what shape he was in, was clearly not capable of protecting her at the moment, so she would have to hide them.
The terrible weight of it pressed down on her in the dark. She hung from her seat belt, bruised and scared, listening to the little crunching and rustling sounds of someone climbing down the embankment from the road above. The car might be hard to find in the pitch-black night, but surely whoever it was had seen their headlights shining through the brush, and would know their approximate location already.
If that person means us harm, we have to leave the car. It went against her every instinct, which screamed at her to stay in the car for rescue workers to find. It was warm in the car, and very cold in the early winter night outside. They also had their luggage and emergency supplies in the trunk. But if this person meant to hurt them, they didn't have a choice but to leave.
In the darkness, she touched Peter's face and patted his cheek lightly. There was so much blood, tacky and warm all over his face -- Head wounds bleed a lot, isn't that what they say on TV? But she couldn't tell where it was coming from, just that there seemed to be blood everywhere.
As she continued prodding at him, Peter groaned. It was the sweetest sound she'd ever heard. In the backseat she heard Satch's tail thumping.
"Peter." But his only response was another soft groan, which was good as far as it went -- he was alive, and at least sort of responsive -- but helped not at all with her main problem, which was the small rustling sounds on the embankment, growing louder.
Maybe, she thought, it was someone who had seen the crash and meant to help them. Or maybe it was the person who, for no reason that El could fathom, had run them off the road on a deserted stretch of highway.
Her cell was in her purse, and she had no idea where her purse had gone. It had been on the floor under her feet, and everything was all jumbled around and sideways, every loose item flung about the interior of the car. But there was one thing in the car that she did know how to find. She felt for the glovebox and opened it, still only able to use one hand, cradling the other against her chest. Peter's gun was cold and heavy, resting on top of the vehicle registration paperwork. El touched it, closed her hand around it, pulled it out --
-- and realized that with only one good hand, she couldn't do anything else and hold the gun too.
"Damn it," she muttered and leaned over to set the gun carefully against Peter's thigh, resting between the door and the seat. Then she unbuckled her seatbelt, which resulted in a (mostly) controlled fall on top of Peter, jarring her injured arm and bringing tears of pain to her eyes. He made a small hurt sound and she whispered, "Oh baby," patting anxiously at his hair and the side of his jaw.
Something cold and wet jammed into the crook of her shoulder. El stifled a scream and then reached up to touch Satchmo's head. The anxious dog tried to crowd into the front seat with them, which, with El and Peter already tangled up on the downhill side of the car, was the absolute last thing they needed. "Satch, get back, stay," she whispered, trying to push him into the backseat.
The car wasn't flat on the driver's side, but canted at an angle, nestled in the brush. Reaching past Peter and patting along the door, El discovered that the glass was still intact and the door seemed to be likewise. She slipped her hand under Peter's arm, grasped the door handle and gave it a try. It opened a foot or so, and then stopped. Reaching her hand out the door, she tried to shove branches out of the way without making too much noise.
Satch sensed freedom, and it was too much for him. El suddenly had a lapful of panicked dog, and then he was out the door into the bushes with a great crashing. Just behind the car, not ten feet away, she heard someone -- a man -- give a shout of surprise and then curse.
El froze. Then she heard the footsteps move away -- pursuing the dog.
Oh Satch. But there was nothing she could do to help, and, feeling deeply disloyal, she decided to see if she could take advantage of Satchmo's distraction. Feeling around, she found that Satchmo's exit had forced the door open another foot or so. They could probably get out on the downhill side now.
"El?" Peter whispered thickly against her ear.
"Honey," she whispered back, and kissed the side of his mouth, tasting the copper tang of blood. "Can you walk?"
"I don't ..." His voice was dazed and slurred. She couldn't tell if he was trying to answer her question or just expressing general confusion. "I can't ..."
"Shhh. We'll figure something out." She still didn't know how badly he was hurt -- was afraid to know. "I'm going to unfasten your seatbelt now," she murmured against his ear. She wished she had a hand to brace him with, to keep him from falling and maybe hurting him worse when the belt came free, but her left arm hurt all the way up to the shoulder, throbbing in nauseating waves with each beat of her heart. She couldn't do anything with it. So she braced him as best she could with her thigh and undid the buckle. They both slid sideways against the door. Peter gasped and then went very quiet. But they were halfway out of the car already.
She could hear something or someone -- Satchmo? the stranger? -- crashing through the brush not too far away. If the stranger meant to help them rather than hurt them, El thought he would surely have called out to the car, and wouldn't have been drawn away by a running dog. If he meant well, he'd have no reason to think the strangers in the car would run from him. He'd have called out and gone to the car to see if anyone needed help, right? At least, that's what she would have done. That, she thought, was what any sensible, well-intentioned person would have done.
Instead, this person was thrashing around in the brush pursuing a panicked dog.
A sudden boom echoed in the night. Elizabeth jumped hard, jostling both Peter and her wounded arm. The pain made her ill.
"Shotgun," Peter muttered. She hadn't even realized he was still conscious. "Twelve gauge."
"Shotgun?" El repeated in shock. Her dazed brain floundered to cope with this new input. Someone nearby had a gun. They'd shot at Satchmo. Maybe killed him.
Someone was after them with a gun.
They had to get out of the car.
They were both lying on top of the door. Cold air stroked her face, refreshing her and helping clear her head. They were almost out of the car already. "Sorry, honey, sorry," El whispered, wriggling past Peter and squirming into the brush as quietly as possible. Her feet sank into very cold ground with stiff twigs jabbing her, which was what made her realize that she'd never put her shoes back on. All she had on were a pair of socks. But she couldn't take the time to hunt for her shoes; they'd been on the floor in front of her seat, and could have been thrown anywhere in the car. She'd just have to deal.
It was also quite cold, definitely below freezing. El shivered as she got an arm around Peter and helped him out of the car. He came willingly enough, moving a little, trying to help her, though she still couldn't tell if he was aware of his surroundings at all, or just focusing all his attention on staying upright. His breath hissed through his teeth in harsh gasps. She could tell that she was hurting him, but he didn't make a sound except for, at one point, a small pained gasp that cut through her heart.
"Come on," she whispered, and began helping him away from the car. He leaned on her, limping heavily. They'd gone about ten feet when she remembered Peter's gun. She looked back at the car. It was a dark hulk in the tangle of brush at the bottom of the embankment. She would have to leave Peter to go look for the weapon.
I can't. I just can't. We have to get farther away first. Maybe I can come back for it later.
She helped Peter across the ditch at the bottom of the embankment, soaking one of her socks in icy, muddy water in the process, and up into the trees on the other side. Here the going was easier; the trees were large, with a carpet of soggy, half-frozen dead leaves underneath.
Under the trees she paused to catch her breath and listen. The crunching and rustling was now located in the vicinity of the car they'd left behind. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the thin beam of a flashlight stabbing around the wreck of their car. Above their car, at the top of the embankment, a large parked vehicle hulked against the marginally brighter sky. Its headlights stretched down the length of the road and she could still hear the low throb of its engine. If it wasn't the SUV that had run them off the road -- a vanishingly small possibility, growing smaller all the time -- then it was a similar size and shape.
Anyone who meant to help us would have said something by now. She squinted at the figure moving around their car. There was no moon and clouds hid the stars; the night was so black that she could only make out the dimmest shapes of the trees around them. Light reflecting back from the flashlight's beam gave her glimpses of the person searching the car -- a big guy in a coat -- and gleamed on the barrel of the shotgun in his other hand.
The flashlight came up and the light stabbed her eyes. El gasped and pulled back, drawing Peter behind the bole of a big tree. He was shivering, barely conscious as he slumped on her shoulder. She peeked around the tree and saw the light playing across winter-dead branches and tangles of brush.
It would have been easier to hide in the summer, with leaves to conceal them. Not to mention warmer. Her light sweater was doing little against the night's chill, and Peter had been wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, now torn and soaked with blood as well as mud from the ditch crossing. At least he had shoes. Her feet were going numb; El curled her toes and chafed her wet foot against the calf of her other leg.
Peter always refused to leave the city without abundant winter gear in the car: warm coats, blankets, bottles of water and emergency food. And it was all back there, out of reach, along with the gun and their cell phones and anything else that could be used to bring help or defend themselves.
Which way? El thought in panic, as the slender beam of light continued to strobe across the trees. Sooner or later, the man in the SUV would grow tired of searching the car and enter the woods. She and Peter could try to hide where they were, depending on the night's darkness to conceal them, but all it would take would be a small sound to give them away. Between her chattering teeth and her uncertainty about Peter's condition, she had no hope that they could remain still and silent -- at least not without freezing to death. The man with the shotgun had a coat and a warm car to retreat to. He could search all night.
Their choices, then, were heading deeper into the woods or along the road. El had only the vaguest idea where they were; she couldn't even remember how long ago they'd turned off the freeway. There had been no need to pay close attention. Peter was driving, she trusted him, and they'd done the drive to her sister's dozens of times. So if there was a town nearby, she had no idea. The road map was yet another thing beyond her reach in the wrecked car.
She wished desperately that she could ask Peter for his opinion. Peter must have a plan. Peter always had a plan. But when she breathed "Honey?" into his ear, she got no response. And she didn't dare make any more noise than that.
Her decision was forced when the man with the shotgun came around the nose of the wrecked car and started down into the ditch. Got to get away, El thought, and she nudged Peter gently but firmly to get him moving again. She didn't want to get lost, but staying too close to the road seemed unwise. Probably the man with the shotgun wouldn't want to do too much wandering around in the dark, either. He couldn't know how badly they were hurt -- though he would have seen the blood in the car -- or whether they were armed. So she angled deeper into the woods, until the road and even the SUV's headlights were swallowed by the dark night.
The land sloped gently upwards. This made it more exhausting to climb, but struck El as a hopeful sign. Surely from the top of a hill they could see the lights of a town or houses where they might go for help. At the very least, it would be harder to get lost on a hilltop than down in a bog.
How long until they miss us and send out a search party? But the answer was not heartening. She'd called Barb to give her sister a heads'-up when they'd left the city, but she'd also said that they might get a hotel along the way if the weather got bad or they were getting too sleepy to drive. Barb might wonder if she couldn't get through on the phone, but cell service was spotty along a lot of these roads. Barb and Mike wouldn't start getting really worried until midmorning.
She wished she dared call for Satchmo. She refused to believe that he was dead. Poor dog is probably going to keep running 'til he hits the Canada border, she thought. And for some reason that thought was enough to subsume her weariness and fear beneath a hot tide of anger. Trying to kill them was bad enough -- perhaps the man in the SUV had a reason; perhaps he was an enemy of Peter's, someone Peter had put away -- but shooting at a helpless dog who had never done anything but try to make friends with everyone he met ... anyone who would do such a thing was a horrible person who deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his life.
Peter had been leaning more and more of his weight on her, until he gave a soft moan and went boneless. She was caught off guard and they both went down in a heap. The sharp jolt of pain through her arm brought tears to her eyes, and for a moment she could only sprawl in the cold mat of dead leaves, shaking with cold and pain. I just want to lie here forever and never get up again.
But she couldn't. There was no one to fix this, no one but her. This will make a fantastic story to tell Barb and Mike and the kids, she told herself firmly. We'll all laugh about it and they'll say how brave I was. That's what's going to happen.
When she tried to get up, though, she groaned and slumped back down. Every part of her body hurt. Her arm was the worst, a hot throbbing centered somewhere around the lower part of her forearm, but her entire body was a mass of strains and bruises. Just moving her head was torment for her neck and shoulders. The only part of her that didn't hurt was her feet, and that only because she couldn't feel them, which did not strike her as a good sign.
And I'm the healthy one. The thought made her want to laugh.
She could feel Peter breathing against her, small shallow breaths. It was time, she knew, to do what she'd been putting off and figure out where he was hurt and how badly. They'd put enough distance between themselves and their pursuer that, even if he could track them through the woods, it ought to take him a long time to find their trail in the black night and follow it. They had a little time, at least. And she needed to use it.
"Peter," she whispered, touching his face.
She turned him over gently and rested his head in her lap. His face was a slightly paler blur in the darkness. This would have been hard enough in the daytime -- El had taken first aid and CPR classes, at Peter's insistence, but usually her doctor skills were needed for nothing worse than putting on band-aids or giving pills to the dog. This was far beyond her abilities, and her inability to see anything beyond the vaguest outlines took the task from very difficult to impossible.
Still, she did her best, feeling his arms and legs with her good hand while holding her bad one, as usual, tucked against her chest where it wouldn't get bumped. She wasn't even sure what she was feeling for -- a broken bone sticking through the skin, maybe, or blood spurting from an injury. Anything so severe that it had to be fixed right now or Peter would die.
She could tell that one of his knees was messed up somehow -- it felt hot and swollen to her probing fingers. His hair was matted with blood, now starting to dry in stiff clumps. When she probed around his chest and torso, something shifted under her hand and Peter's body jolted. El jerked her hand away in horror, then patted gently down his side, feeling his sweatshirt sticky and wet with blood. It didn't seem to be gushing from anywhere specific, but it was all over the place.
She blinked away tears. He's going to be all right. There's nothing on him anywhere that I can do anything about, so I just have to try to move him as little as possible -- ha, that was a laugh, at this point -- and trust that he can tough it out 'til we can get help somehow.
"Hon," Peter whispered, and El jumped. She hadn't realized he was conscious.
"I'm here," she said softly, bending over to brush his lips with hers.
"You okay?" he asked, and her heart broke just a little.
"I'm fine," she said, trying to push away the throbbing in her arm, the sick fear that she'd done something awful to her numb feet. "I'm just fine. How are you?"
A soft, breathy laugh. She halfway expected him to say that he was fine too -- it would have been typical Peter -- but instead he whispered, "Been better. My gun -- do you have --"
El bit her lip. "It's in the car. Everything is in the car."
"Phone."
"My phone's in the car, too, honey."
"My phone," Peter mumbled. "Pocket."
"Oh," she said, and slipped her hand into his pocket, finding his cell after some digging. The sight of the little screen lighting up in her hands kindled a warmth in her heart. They weren't going to die out here after all. There was a link to civilization right here in her hands.
Reception flickered between one and two bars, depending on how she turned the phone, sometimes dropping to none. The battery was fully charged, though: typical "be prepared" Peter Burke. Her first inclination was to dial 911, but they were in the middle of nowhere; would that even help?
Paging to Peter's address book, she found a bunch of presets for different people at the FBI. It was the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, though. El wasn't sure who to turn to, who was staying in town or even in the state. Except one.
She turned the phone for the best possible reception, and dialed Neal.
He answered after just a couple of rings. "Hey, Peter." He sounded a little sleepy, relaxed and content. Closing her eyes, El could picture him in the loft, dressed as casually as Neal ever got, a glass of wine in his hand. "I thought you were leaving town. Miss me?"
"Neal," El said. "It's me," and then tears choked her, a rush of emotion she couldn't control.
"Elizabeth?" The laziness dropped instantly from his voice. "Elizabeth, what's wrong? Don't cry. Where's Peter? Did something happen?"
"Peter is --" She took a deep breath, forced down the urge to collapse and hand off responsibility to someone else. There was no one else; Neal was more than a hundred miles away, and just because she'd managed to get him on the phone didn't mean that they were safe yet. "We had an accident. Someone forced our car off the road and now we're in the woods. They have a gun. Neal, you need to call the police for us."
She could hear rustling in the background. "Where are you?"
"I'm not entirely sure. We left 87 at Kingston and we're somewhere west of the reservoir, I think, but I wasn't paying attention to how far we came. I'm sorry I can't be more specific --"
"That's okay," he said soothingly. Static blurred his next words, but she caught "-- probably get a GPS location off your phone. What about you and Peter? Are you two okay?"
"No." She swallowed, again, the threatening tears. "He's -- we need help, Neal. We both do."
There was the briefest pause. "El, there's no landline in here, so I'm going to hang up and call Hughes. We'll get help to you. Okay?"
"No," she said, "no, please --"
"It's okay, I'll call you right back. Two minutes. Okay? We'll get helicopters, search dogs -- the works."
"Dogs," she said, and tears forced their way into her voice again. "Satchmo -- I think they killed Satch."
"Don't think about it," Neal said. "Be calm. Be safe. I'll call you back in a minute. Okay?"
"Okay," she said in a small voice, and hung up.
Severing that tiny connection to civilization made her feel even more alone and miserable and cold. She and Peter were a tiny oasis of life in a great dark wilderness. The wind blew through her sweater, and she shivered, clinging to the phone so tightly that her fingers ached.
"Sorry," Peter whispered. "Sorry, hon. So sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for," she told him, and bent down again, though it hurt her arm, to brush his cold lips with her own.
"No --" Peter rallied a bit, opened his eyes and shifted in her lap, trying to push himself a little more upright. He subsided with a gasp. "I know who's after us. Mine -- one of mine. Sorry."
"Someone you arrested?" she guessed. She'd already thought as much.
Peter moved his head in a slight nod. "Saw him at the car. Trying to think of his name -- finally got it. Roy Lacey. Mob guy. Caught him a few years ago, guess he plea-bargained." He swallowed, cleared his throat, and said in a slightly stronger voice, "No more cushy mafia job. Just a lot of mob hitters gunning for him because he turned state's evidence against them. Swear to God, hon, I never thought he'd come after me. At work, maybe. Not here."
"You couldn't have known," she told him, and lowered her hand with the cell phone clutched in it to brush the back of her fingers along his jaw.
"Sorry," he said again. "Never wanted you to --"
"Peter." She laid a finger on his lips. "We're in this together. For better or for worse, remember? I'm a big girl." She kissed the tip of his nose. "I have no one but myself to blame. It's not as if you kidnapped me and hauled me off to your cave."
"No cave."
"Well, that would be problematic."
She couldn't see it, but she felt his lips move against her hand -- he kissed her knuckle and then smiled.
"If you really need to make it up to me later, you can take me out to that new five-star restaurant that just opened in Midtown."
"Waiting list's a month long," Peter whispered.
"So? All the best things are worth waiting for. Besides, Neal probably knows somebody who knows somebody --" The phone vibrated in her hand. "Speak of the devil."
"Elizabeth?" Neal sounded anxious, bordering on desperate.
"I'm here," she said. Peter stirred against her leg. "We're here."
"Good. Good. Hughes and Diana are scrambling a response right now. They're going to try to get a GPS fix on Peter's cell phone, so keep it on. You're breaking up --"
"You too. Cell coverage is really bad out here."
"Well, don't --" She lost him for a minute, and when she could hear him again, he was saying her name.
"I'm still here," she said.
"Can I talk to Peter for a minute?"
She passed the phone down and helped him hold it. "Neal," Peter whispered hoarsely, and El could feel him tense, marshaling his strength and his thoughts. "Have Diana pull the Lacey files. Year or so before I started working with you. Pretty sure it's the same guy. She'll remember."
Neal said something El couldn't hear. "Not ordering you around." Peter sounded irritable. El caught herself smiling, a real grin, the first one she'd worn since they'd gone off the road. Trust Neal to find a way to distract him from his injuries and the desperate situation they were in. And, she thought, hearing Neal's voice must be having the same effect on Peter that it had on her: it was a reminder that they weren't alone, that this dark cold forest wasn't the entire world. There were friends out there looking for them.
Off in the woods, a twig snapped. El went still, tuning out Peter's one-sided, friendly argument with Neal. She heard more crashing, and as little she knew about woodcraft, she could tell that something big and careless was moving through the trees somewhere near them.
"Peter," she said, and he went quiet.
In the sudden stillness, she could hear Neal's small, tinny voice on the phone. "Peter -- Peter? Elizabeth? Damn it, you guys, say something. Please." His voice cracked.
El groped through the masses of wet leaves on the forest floor until her hand closed around a moss-covered stick. It was probably useless as a weapon: soggy and rotten, no more than a foot long. But clinging to it made her feel better.
A light-colored blur erupted out of the woods. El figured out what it was an instant before it hit her with sixty pounds of wet, muddy, desperately happy Labrador retriever. "Satchmo," she said, trying to fend him off one-handed. "Satch, it's okay, good boy, down. Oh, Peter, look, look who's back."
She managed to successfully push Satchmo off Peter, and retrieved the phone, which had fallen into the leafy litter on the forest floor.
"Did I hear you say Satchmo?" Neal said, his voice back to its normal register.
El stifled a slightly hysterical burst of laughter, all too close to a sob. "Satch is back. I don't think he's hurt."
"That apparently makes one of him," Neal said. "Peter sounds bad."
El glanced down at her husband. His eyes were closed as if the conversation with Neal, not to mention being jumped on by the dog, had exhausted whatever scraps of energy he'd managed to pull together. "Mmm-hmm," she said as neutrally as possible.
"Right," Neal said with a sigh. El heard a door slam in the background. "On the phone with me right now," Neal said, clearly speaking to someone else in the room.
Satchmo, who had been snuffling at Peter's face and hair, raised his head and gave a soft whuff. His tail lashed a few hesitant swipes and he looked off into the woods.
"Oh no," El whispered.
"What's wrong?" Neal asked sharply.
El gently lowered Peter's head to the ground and stood up, looking off into the woods in the direction that Satch was looking. At first she thought the flicker of light was her imagination, but then it flashed again, moving between the black bars of two tree trunks.
"Neal, there's someone out here in the woods with a flashlight. The police wouldn't have had time to get here, would they?"
Rather than Neal, it was Diana's voice that answered, a little farther away from the phone than Neal's had been. "You're on speaker now, Elizabeth. No, we're still trying to pinpoint your exact location and get choppers in the air."
"Then --" El swallowed. "Then he's found us and we need to get moving." Satchmo chuffed softly again, and El gave the dog a fierce nudge with her knee. "Satch, no, shut up. I -- I only have one hand to hold the phone and I need it now to get Peter up. I'm going to have to ..."
"Elizabeth --" Neal said, but Diana spoke over the top of him.
"Elizabeth, don't hang up yet. What's the terrain like where you are? Is there anywhere to take cover and maybe wait this out?"
"We're outside, on the side of a hill. There aren't any buildings or anything." The flashlight was definitely closer, and El thought she heard the snap of a branch breaking. "I really have to go --"
"A hill. Try to get to the top of it and stay there if you can. You'll be more visible to the rescue helicopters."
"Okay, I'll try, but I -- I have to --"
"Yes, go," Diana said. "Check in with us as often as possible. Believe me when I say that we have half the law enforcement personnel in the southern half of the state converging on your location."
None of which matters if we get caught in the next five minutes, El thought. "Okay," she said.
"Be safe," Neal said, in a tone she'd never heard from him before: gentle and urgent and raw. And then the other end of her lifeline was dead, and it was just her and Peter again.
She put the phone away in her pocket with the greatest of care -- it was everything right now, safety and information and a GPS transmitter; maybe life itself. Then she knelt and slid her good arm under Peter's shoulders. "Honey, can you hear me? You have to get up."
She managed to get him vertical from the waist up, but he was little more than a deadweight slumped on her shoulder. "El, don't ..." He caught his breath with a sharp gasp. "You can move faster without --"
"I wondered how long it would take us to get to that argument. Let's just pretend we already had it and I won." She tried to lift him by brute force, but she might as well have been straining against a boulder. "Honey, you're a lot heavier than I am, and that's not vanity talking. I don't plan on doing all the work here. This marriage thing is a partnership, remember?" She knew she was teetering on the verge of helpless babbling, but it was better than disintegrating into panic.
Somehow she got him on his feet again, though he was mostly unresponsive, his head lolling on her shoulder. They started up the hill with Satchmo sticking close to her heels, ill at ease in the nighttime woods. Every so often he stopped and looked back, lashing his tail; clearly he could not understand why they weren't going to acknowledge the other person that he could hear and smell. If Satch realized that this was the same person who had shot at him, El didn't think it mattered to him -- in his dog brain, "human" equaled "petting and treats", and if anyone had been cruel to him, then it must be only a temporary misunderstanding that could be cleared up with sufficient amounts of dog-wagging.
If only life were so simple.
The wind picked up as they climbed. Her feet felt like blocks of wood, and El tried desperately not to think about the damage she must be doing to them. You'll be the original Iron Woman if you tell your friends in Manhattan that you lost a toe to frostbite, she counseled herself, which turned out to be very little help.
It was getting harder to keep her spirits up. In fact, it was getting harder to keep herself going at all. She was unable to stop shivering, her damp, muddy, bloodstained sweater doing little more to protect her from the wind than a wet T-shirt. Peter was hardly shivering at all; she wasn't sure whether that was good or bad.
"Hot cocoa," she muttered under her breath as she climbed. "Hot coffee. Hot tea. Hot baths with raspberry-scented bubble bath. That soft fuzzy sweater that Aunt Rose gave me. Warm little Satchmo on my feet, my perfectly warm, unhurt feet ..."
A snowflake whirled past her nose.
El stopped walking, jolted out of her weary reverie by a new surge of fear and indignation. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said, tilting her face to the sky. Another snowflake landed on her eyelashes before melting into a drop of cold water. "We couldn't get a break just this once?"
Maybe the snow would cover their trail. She had read something like that in a Louis L'Amour western once. But it will also cover us, she thought, and her flagging willpower began to crumble. She eased Peter to the ground; he went down limp as a sack of laundry, and she wondered if she was ever going to be able to get him up again. At the moment, she didn't really care. She sank down after him and pulled his head and shoulders into her lap, for all the comfort that she was able to offer.
Satchmo whined and tried to crawl into her lap after his master. "Lay down, Satch. Keep Peter warm," El urged, until she got the dog curled up against Peter's side and her own. He was, indeed, warm. Actually, she thought, of the three of them, Satch was the one most likely to survive. He wouldn't be able to live by himself in the wilderness, but the rescue workers would find him. Maybe Neal would take care of him.
I should call Neal, she thought, but it was hard to work up the urge to move any part of her sore, exhausted, shivering body.
The phone vibrated against her leg. El smiled despite herself, and carefully worked it out of her pocket. "Yes," she said.
"Elizabeth, thank God." Wherever Neal was, it was noisy, with voices in the background and the rumble of a loud engine. "How are you two doing?"
"I can't wake Peter. I don't know, Neal. It's starting to snow."
"You're kidding me; snow? On top of everything?"
El managed a miserable little laugh. "That's pretty much what I said."
"Look, Elizabeth, I'm about to get into a search and rescue helicopter. Talk about getting out of my radius, right? But I won't be able to call you while we're in the air. Jones is our contact on the ground. Stay in touch with him, okay?"
"Okay," El said. She thought she probably ought to have had a stronger reaction to the idea of losing her link to Neal, but all the emotion had drained out of her. She felt like an empty shell of a woman.
"We're going to find you, Elizabeth. Hang on. Both of you."
"We're hanging," El said, trying to smile. "Oh, Neal, wait. Someone should call my sister Barb and tell her that we're not going to be there tonight, so they don't worry."
There was a brief pause on Neal's end. "So they don't worry?" he repeated, sounding incredulous.
"They'll probably get worried when we don't show up on time."
"Yes, but Elizabeth, I don't think knowing the particulars of your current situation would worry them any less."
"Maybe not. I'm ... I guess I'm not thinking really clearly right now, Neal."
"I don't think anyone blames you for that," Neal said. "Hang on, Diana wants to talk to you."
She heard the rustling of the phone being passed to someone else, then, "Elizabeth?"
"Hi, Diana."
"Hi. Listen, I wanted you to know that Peter could be right, Organized Crime says Lacey's been out of prison for about two months and dropped right off their radar. Do you have any weapons?"
"We left Peter's gun back at the car," El said. "I mean, I did. I should have kept hold of it, but I only have one hand --"
"Don't worry about it. What I want you to do, if you can, is get on top of that hill you were talking about, to a clearing if possible, where the helicopters can find you. We have your cell located and you're right on the edge of the Catskills. If you get too deep into the wilderness, it's going to be much harder to get you out, and we'll probably lose cell contact completely."
"No wilderness. Okay."
"You're going to be all right, Elizabeth," Diana said firmly. "Could you pass the phone to Peter for a minute, please?"
"No," El said, looking down at Peter's face. He was a dead weight in her lap. She was afraid even to check if he was still breathing; the uncertainty was better than knowing the worst. "He's not -- no, I can't."
Diana's pause was very brief, but noticeable. "All right. Stay focused, Elizabeth. I have to go. Jones is going to call you in a minute, okay? -- Neal, what now?"
More rustling of the phone exchanging hands. "Elizabeth," Neal said. "I ..."
He trailed off, and El didn't know what to say, either. Yet somehow the silence was comfortable. Warm.
"Thank you," Neal said at last. "For, you know, everything. I have to -- I have to go now."
"I know," El whispered. "Neal -- thank you, too."
She sat in silence for a few minutes, stroking Peter's face, while the snowflakes grew thicker. El had never realized that falling snow made a sound, but it was so quiet out here that she could hear the tiny whispers of the flakes touching down on her shoulders and hair, on Peter, on Satchmo and the dead leaves around her.
If they hadn't gone off the road, they'd be at Barb's now, probably sitting with Barb and Mike, having a drink before bed. They'd be looking out the window at the falling snow, exclaiming in delight, looking forward to a crystalline white morning.
The phone vibrated on her thigh, and went skittering into the leaves. El retrieved it and checked the caller ID. "Hello, Jones."
"Hi, Mrs. Burke. I'm at our command center here. We have a lock on your phone's GPS signal -- I'm looking at it on my screen right now. There are helicopters in the air, and we're going to have you out of that place as soon as we can."
Elizabeth tipped her head back and watched the snowflakes swirl down out of the dark sky. "The weather's getting bad."
"Pfft," Jones said. "A little snow won't even slow those big birds down. You doing okay?"
"Yes," El said quietly, shifting her legs a little to make a more comfortable nest for Peter on her thighs. "I could use some hot coffee, maybe."
"Never seen a rescue chopper yet that didn't have a thermos of hot coffee somewhere on board."
"Well, that'll be okay, then." She wanted to give him a laugh, at least, but she was just too tired and too cold to pretend. In fact, the effort of keeping the conversation going was sapping energy she did not have to spare. "Clinton, I'm going to go look for a place where the helicopter can land to pick us up."
"They don't have to land, Mrs. Burke, if the terrain's too rough for it. They can lift you right out of there, just as easy as you want."
"I know," she said, though she hadn't. "But I need something to do."
"Hang in there," Jones said. "We'll stay in touch."
She was loathe to leave Peter, even for a minute, but Diana had said to get on top of the hill and find a clearing, and she needed to know how close they were. They'd been climbing for what felt like hours. Days. And she had a feeling that the longer she stayed here, the less likely she was to ever get up again.
"Stay with Peter, Satch." When the dog rose and tried to follow, El held out her hand, palm forward, the visual "stay" command that he'd learned in obedience school when he was a puppy. "Stay, Satchmo."
Satchmo whined and lay down again.
El kissed Peter's forehead, tucked the cell phone into his hand and curled his limp fingers around it. Then she began a slow, limping climb up what remained of the hill. To her gratified surprise, it turned out that they'd been almost to the summit when she'd stopped. The slowly rising land flattened off and then dropped away in a much more sudden decline than the gentle slope she'd just been climbing.
Beyond the hill, there was nothing but darkness -- a sea of darkness stretching to merge into the impenetrable blackness of the clouds. El stood on the brow of the hill in the wind's harsh teeth, and she knew that they would never have found help this way. If they hadn't had the cell phone, they'd have just kept going, never coming to a house or a town or a road.
Shivering with more than just the cold, she turned away. The snow was starting to collect in the open places between the trees around her. It lent a little extra brightness to the night, and made it easier to walk without stumbling. It should have been painfully cold, but it didn't feel that cold to her. El touched her fingers to her lips and found them swollen and painfully stiff.
Looking back the way she'd come, she discovered that the far-off road was visible from up here, marked by distant headlights like tiny sparks. Here and there, through the falling snow, she caught the glimmer of a house or two, and even one cluster of lights that might be a small town. She was amazed at how far she and Peter had come from the road, fueled by fear and adrenaline -- amazed and appalled, because there was no way they could walk back that way, even though it was the only direction in which help was to be found if the cavalry couldn't get to them in time.
She strained her ears for the sound of helicopters. She could hear distant engines, but had no idea how to tell if they were helicopters or not. Jets above the clouds, or cars on the highway -- it all sounded alike to her.
But they were coming. She had to believe in them. All she had to do was wait, and keep them both alive.
As she listened to the still night, El realized that she could hear more than just the distant hum of engines on the edge of the world, more than the soft patter of snowflakes touching down. She could also hear distant rustling and the sound of breaking twigs. Then, very distinctly, she heard a man's voice, with the cadence of someone cursing to themselves.
She swiveled in that direction -- down the hill and off to her right. And there it was: the firefly glimmer of a flashlight on the dark slope of the hill. She wasn't sure how to judge distances in all this featureless darkness, but it was definitely much closer than the headlights she'd seen earlier.
For a moment's blinding panic, she couldn't figure out how to get back to Peter. Down the hill -- but there was a whole lot of hill, and she wasn't sure if she'd gone straight up the hill when she'd left it, or climbed at an angle. And had she walked left or right when she reached the top? She couldn't remember, and horror washed over her: what if she never found him again, what if he had to lie on the cold ground until he froze to death?
The only thing she could think to do was to call out to Satchmo, try to get him to bark. But that would give away both her own position and Peter's.
Excellent woodcraft, Elizabeth Burke. Louis L'Amour would not approve.
But a moment after that, she realized that she must have left tracks in the snow. There was not a whole lot of snow yet, but that turned out to be even better, because looking behind her, she could clearly see a dark trail of scuffed leaves through the dimly reflective whiteness. Her slow, staggering gait, scuffling the leaves as she walked, had blazed a trail that was plain even to her city-girl, non-tracker self. The snow was covering it even as she stood there, though, so she hurried to backtrack herself as quickly as possible. By the time she made it back to Peter and Satch, the trail was all but gone.
El sank down beside Peter, and listened again, absently rubbing Satchmo's head and then burying her numb hand in the damp but warm fur of his belly. She heard a twig break, a loud carrying snap. Lacey, if it was Lacey, was not far away from them.
"Peter," she said, leaning over him and rubbing his shoulder. "Honey, we have to go. Honey?"
She refused to believe that he would never open his eyes again. His breathing was shallow and rapid, but he was still breathing, so she decided to go the Sleeping Beauty route. El closed her lips over his cold, slack ones, and kissed him long, hard and deep. For the first instant it was horribly like kissing a corpse, but then he began to respond, and they necked quietly on the leaves in the falling snow until El opened her eyes and found his soft brown eyes looking back into hers.
"Hey, hon," she whispered against his mouth.
"Hey, hon," he whispered back, and then, in a tone of mild confusion, "Are we at your sister's?"
Fear rose in the back of her throat. "No. We're still in the woods. We have to get moving again."
Peter made a valiant attempt to get on his feet with her help, but El could tell from the beginning that it wasn't going to work. They both went down in a heap. Satchmo barked once, and Elizabeth shushed him frantically. Peter was unconscious again. She managed to coax him back to some semblance of consciousness with petting and perhaps a little judicious slapping -- love taps, she would have informed anyone who was unwise enough to ask -- but he was dazed and confused, and didn't seem to understand anything that she said to him.
Finally she gave up the struggle and settled back into the leaves. Here they were and here, apparently, they were going to stay. Satchmo pressed against her side, blessedly warm. She put her arms around Peter -- the hurt and the unhurt arm; at this point she'd lost track of which was which anyway -- and cuddled him against her chest, burying her face in his hair.
"You take me to the nicest places, Peter Burke," she whispered, and kissed his neck.
Silence settled around them once again. She could hear the crashing of Lacey forcing his way through the forest very clearly now. And she could also hear something else, a low rhythmic drumming. She was so tired that it took her a little while to figure out what it was. Then she raised her head in startled gratitude.
"That," she said to Peter and the dog, "is a helicopter."
Satchmo thumped his tail against her leg, more in response to her tone than her words, she knew, but it still seemed as if the dog shared her excitement.
The thrumming of the helicopter vibrated behind her breastbone. It wasn't far away. They weren't going to lie out here until they froze to death. They were getting off this godforsaken hillside.
"Well, well," said a stranger's voice, and light turned the blackness behind her closed eyelids to red.
Elizabeth opened her eyes and squinted against the blinding brilliance of the flashlight pointed at her. I forgot him. How could I forget him? But she had. In her thrilled excitement at the sound of the helicopter, she'd completely forgotten that Lacey was on the same hillside with them.
Satchmo jumped to his feet, his tail whipping against El's arm. As far as he was concerned, their ticket home, back to his warm comfortable dog bed, had just arrived.
El squinted against the light. All she could make out was a big dark blur -- and the gleaming barrel of a shotgun pointed at her and Peter.
"You two have been a real pain in my ass today," Lacey said. Satchmo's wagging tail hesitated and began to droop.
"Please," Elizabeth said. She tightened her arms around Peter, trying to cover as much of him as possible. "We never meant you any harm. Just go away, please."
"Never meant me any harm?" Lacey let out a sharp laugh. "Your husband ruined my life, Mrs. Burke." He walked forward a few steps. Satchmo wasn't wagging at all now. "Is he dead? That would make my life a bit simpler. Of course, there's still you to deal with."
"Yes," El said. "He's dead. Thanks to you." Gently, she lowered Peter and let him rest on the snow-free ground where she had been sitting. The snow was falling heavily now, fat heavy flakes covering the ground to a depth of an inch in places and muffling the helicopter's thumping until she could barely hear it. This snowfall wouldn't even last the next day, not this early in the year, but right now the world seemed to be swallowed in a winter that would never end. "It's just you and me."
"Yeah, like I'm going to take your word for that. Step back." Lacey gestured with the barrel of the shotgun.
Satchmo pressed close to El as she crouched beside Peter. El looked at the dog and then up at the man with the gun. There was a game that Peter and Neal sometimes played with Satch, holding a stick or a toy and making the dog jump to get it, to the command "rocket dog". She kept trying to make them stop, because having Satchmo unexpectedly jump and knock things out of her hands was much more of a hazard than a pleasant diversion.
But giving him the command now would mean sending her sweet little friend into a danger that he couldn't understand, and she wasn't sure how much time it could buy them anyway.
The sound of the helicopter seemed to fade, changing pitch and growing softer. No, she thought, please don't go away! Maybe it was nothing to do with them. But she had to believe that help was only minutes away. All they had to do was hang on that long.
And she could only think of one thing to do.
"Satchmo," she murmured, and the dog pricked up his ears. "Rocket dog."
Satchmo's ears and tail went up happily. Finally, in this entire strange, confusing situation, one of his humans had given him something fun to do. He was off like a shot, leaping towards the hand holding the flashlight, which must have looked like a more appealing target to him than the shotgun.
Lacey yelled, spun to confront the onrushing dog and fired reflexively. The shotgun's blast was deafening at this close range. The slugs kicked up a fountain of snow and leaves a few feet from Peter's leg, completely missing Satchmo.
The dog, though, gave a wild yelp of dismay and reversed direction so suddenly that he left skid marks in the snow. He had no way to know that the gun was dangerous; all he knew was that it was loud and unpleasant and scary, and he didn't like it any better this time than the last time. Too panicked to think of anything but escape, he dashed off into the woods.
As soon as Satchmo lunged for Lacey's hand, El scrambled to interpose herself between Lacey and Peter. A steely determination formed in the pit of her stomach: if this man wanted her husband, he would have to go through her first. She scraped up a loose snowball and flung it while he was distracted. She and her sister were veterans of many a childhood snowball war, and the snowball struck right on target, splattering across his face. She followed it up with more, as fast as she could pack them, not even sure what she was trying to accomplish, just that the most important thing in the world was buying time, second by second, until the helicopter could reach them.
"Bitch, you're dead," Lacey yelled, dashing snow from his eyes.
And then the helicopter was upon them without warning -- either it had come over the ridge or she'd been too distracted with Lacey to notice the noise escalating. It skimmed over at treetop level through the falling snow, the thump of the rotors rattling her teeth. A searchlight swept across the trees and for a second their shadows stood out stark and black against the snow. Then the light was gone and they were plunged back into darkness again, and just as El had time to think, Oh no, they didn't see us --, the timber of the rotors changed and the helicopter circled to spear them with the floodlight again.
"This is the FBI." Diana's amplified voice echoed off the hill; it seemed to fill the night around them. "There are rifles on you right now. Drop your gun or we will shoot."
El shielded her eyes and squinted up at the belly of the helicopter hovering above them. She could make out small figures leaning out of it, and the long slender barrel of a sniper rifle. The wind of the rotors whipped her hair wildly and raised a cloud of snow-devils swirling up through the trees.
Lacey stared up at the helicopter, then at Elizabeth, his snow-crusted face twisted with rage. She thought he was about to shoot her anyway, out of spite, but then Diana bellowed, "Hands in the air, weapon on the ground, or we open fire!" and he threw the shotgun into the snow and raised his hands.
El's legs turned to water and she crumpled to the snow beside Peter. "Oh honey," she gasped, wrapping her hand around his. "Oh honey."
Someone dropped a line from the helicopter, and the first person to touch down was Diana, in body armor with a gun in her hands. As soon as she unclipped herself, two paramedic-type people came down next, followed by Neal. He was, as usual, impeccably dressed in a suit and vest, with a garish orange windbreaker slung around his shoulders that one of the paramedics must have given him.
He crossed the snow to her in a couple of bounds, went to his knees and put an arm around her. El sagged into him, after making a single feeble attempt to push him away. "Your suit -- I'm a mess, Neal, I'm ruining it --"
Neal laughed and pulled her in tighter against him. He was warm, so warm. "June has a whole closet full of them. And I wouldn't care if it was the last Devore on Earth, anyway."
"Yes, you would," El said, trying to laugh and swiping at her eyes with her cold, muddy hand.
"Okay, maybe I would, but I'd at least have the decency to get out of your earshot before complaining."
El laughed helplessly and let him hold her, accepting the comfort and the warmth. Someone handed Neal a military-green coat and he wrapped it around her. El huddled into it with a tiny whimper of gratitude.
"Ma'am, you're going to have to let go," one of the paramedics said, and El looked down to discover that her fingers were still twined tightly with Peter's -- the fingers on her injured side, actually, and when she let go, the jolt of pain that shot up her wrist made her cry out. The lower part of her arm was so swollen that it looked like a softball shoved under the sleeve of her sweater. She hadn't even noticed that before.
"Elizabeth, let them take care of you," Neal said. His eyes kept going to Peter, who was very still as the paramedics strapped him onto a stretcher with clips on the sides to fasten to the lines from the helicopter. The harsh glare of the helicopter's floodlight made him a study in black and white: dead-white skin, black blood forming inkblot patterns on his face and throat.
El tore her eyes away from him. "Satchmo," she said, gripping Neal's arm. "Neal, he ran away into the woods when that man shot at him. I don't know where he's gone. And the helicopter will be scaring him even more --"
"I'll get him," Neal said. From the eagerness in his voice, he'd hated being sidelined and wanted something to do anyway. "Which way did he go?"
El pointed. Neal gave her a final one-armed hug and jogged off into the woods, slithering on the snow in his impractical shoes.
"Where the hell is Caffrey going?" Diana demanded as she and someone else in an FBI jacket secured Lacey to one of the lines from the helicopter.
"To get Satchmo." Without Neal to prop her up, El felt herself on the verge of collapse. Diana caught her by the elbow.
"That's all we need -- hunting for Neal in the woods, too. Blake, get Caffrey," Diana ordered over her shoulder, and began snapping a harness around Elizabeth. "Was there anyone else with Lacey, or was he working alone?"
"I -- don't know, alone, I guess? We can't leave without Satchmo. Or Neal." El huddled in the coat, shaking.
"We're not leaving without anybody," Diana reassured her. "Okay, we're going up together now. I'll hold onto you. Don't look down."
Under any other circumstances, El thought she would probably have found the ascent into the helicopter one of the most terrifying, dizzying experiences of her life. Right now, though, her capacity to absorb new trauma was so thoroughly overloaded that she felt nothing as Diana deposited her on the floor of the hovering helicopter.
With the side door open and the rotors whipping, it was as cold inside the helicopter as outside. It was bigger than El expected, but crowded. She glimpsed Lacey in a corner, handcuffed and under heavy guard. Most of her attention, though, was reserved for Peter, on the floor with an oxygen mask and IV, and paramedics wrapping blankets around him.
"Mrs. Burke?" One of the paramedics knelt in front of her. "I'm going to put a temporary sling on your arm to keep it immobile, all right? It looks like you've got some fractures, but we won't know for sure until we get it X-rayed."
El nodded. Someone else settled a blanket around her shoulders. She looked up again when Neal arrived along with a squirming, wild-eyed Satchmo. Catching sight or scent of El, the dog gave a great heave of his body and twisted out of Neal's arms, bolting to wriggle against her.
"Does he bite?" the paramedic asked nervously.
"Not under normal circumstances," Neal said. He eased through the crowded interior of the helicopter to settle next to Elizabeth and Peter. When his shoulder pressed against hers, El could feel him shivering. "It's miserable out there. I don't know how the two of you --" He shut his mouth, fast, cutting off anything else he was going to say.
"All in, right?" Diana yelled. She hauled on the side door and it slammed, cutting the wind and some of the noise. El felt the helicopter rotate, swinging into motion. Her feet, tucked beneath the blanket, were beginning to burn and sting, and her arm throbbed miserably where it rested against her chest. She was so tired. She worked her good hand under the blankets wrapped around Peter until she could take hold of his limp hand, which made her feel a little better. She leaned her head against Neal's shoulder.
Diana said something to Neal, who broke into a wide grin and nudged El. "Is it true you fought that guy off with snowballs?"
"I didn't have anything else," El said, embarrassed. "I wouldn't have been able to do even that much if you two hadn't taught Satchmo to play 'rocket dog.' I'll never complain about that game again." She looked down at Satchmo's head resting in her lap.
"Never tangle with a Burke," Diana said to Neal. She was smiling, too. One of her hands rested on Peter's leg.
"Words to live by," Neal agreed, nodding.
El chafed the back of Peter's hand gently with her thumb. "Peter was worried you'd get up to something while he was gone."
Neal grinned again. "Well, look at me now. So far out of my radius you can't even see it from here. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way."
"This is not how I'd planned to spend it," El said weakly, leaning into him.
The limp hand twitched in hers, and Peter's fingers curled around her own. Elizabeth lifted her head off Neal's shoulder. "Honey?" she said, bending over him.
Peter's eyelids fluttered and then his body jackknifed. El recoiled, thinking he was having a seizure, but his eyes had opened wide and he seemed to be having a panic attack. He was saying something under the mask, but El couldn't make it out. Neal obviously could, though. He leaned past her and shook Peter's shoulder. "Peter, for God's sake, she's right here. She's holding your hand, actually."
Peter blinked at him, and then at her. Then he smiled, and his eyes closed. His cold fingers remained tight around hers.
"Control freak," Neal said fondly. He left his hand on Peter's shoulder.
Diana touched her radio headset. "Pilot says we're almost to the trauma center. Wants to know if everyone is doing okay back here."
"We're doing great," El said, and she leaned into Neal's shoulder again, and stayed there, gripping Peter's hand with all the strength remaining in her, until they touched down.
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Peter/Elizabeth (basically gen plot, though)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,000
Summary: This isn't how Elizabeth planned her vacation: stranded in the woods with a badly injured husband, below-freezing temperatures, and a killer in pursuit, her nearest ally -- Neal -- a hundred miles away at the other end of a cell phone.
Notes: Written for
girlsavesboyfic. This also fills the "stranded/survival scenario" square for my hc_bingo card.Cross-posted: on AO3 | on Livejournal (2 parts)
Looking back on it later, Elizabeth remembered that she'd had no idea, no premonition, that things were about to go so very wrong. They'd just left the interstate for the little country highways that would take them to her sister's place, hopefully not too long after midnight. She'd already spelled Peter on the driving once, and now she rode with her shoes off and one foot tucked up under her, sleepily giggling as Peter tried to stump her on "20 Questions." Satchmo slept on a blanket in the backseat.
After falling silent for a moment, watching the mirrors, Peter said, "I hope Neal doesn't do anything while I'm out of town."
El poked him in the arm. "He probably has plans too, right? It's Thanksgiving. He'll be too busy with June and her grandkids to rob every art gallery in Manhattan while you're gone, don't you think?"
Peter gave her a sheepish answering grin. "I know, it's just -- it's Neal."
"Who is an adult with his own life," El pointed out. "Can we make a pledge, please? No more talking about Neal until Monday."
"Cross my heart." But his voice was a little distracted, and Peter's eyes went to the rear-view mirror for the fourth or fifth time in the past couple of minutes.
"Something wrong?"
"I don't know. Those headlights back there ... I swear that guy's been following us ever since we left the freeway."
El laughed. "Of course he has. This is probably the only highway going this way."
"I know. But he's been following us at the same distance, about a mile. Never faster. Never slower."
"It's called the speed limit." On a night like this, with the road a minefield of black ice interspersed with long stretches of dry pavement, no prudent driver would be going any faster.
Peter shrugged. "I don't know. Probably nothing."
"How do you know it's the same car?"
"The brightness and spacing of the headlights," Peter said as if it was obvious. Maybe for him, it was.
El checked the mirror herself. The headlights behind them were the only lights in sight. The forecast had called for possible snow upstate, and while the holiday traffic had been heavy closer to the city, this far north and this late it had grown very sparse.
"He's probably just the same as us, someone driving to see family for the holiday weekend."
"One way to check." Peter tapped the brakes. The Taurus slowed smoothly to forty-five, then forty.
El kept watching the mirror. The headlights began closing on them. "See," she said. "He's going to pass us. No problem."
"Okay, okay," Peter conceded, then squinted as the bright light filled the car. "Buddy, do you know what your dimmer switch is for?" he snapped at the rear-view mirror.
El grinned -- you can take the aggressive city driver out of the city, she thought, but not the other way around. Then she stopped smiling as the lights filled the mirror. She could only glimpse the vehicle behind them: something much bigger than the Taurus, a van or, more likely, some kind of large SUV. "Honey, he is going to pass us, right?"
"If he is, sonuvabitch doesn't know how to signal either." Peter's voice was tense. He began to accelerate, and then the whole car jerked and shuddered. In the backseat Satch's head went up.
"Did he just clip our bumper?" El said in disbelief, too shocked for the moment to be afraid.
The SUV fell back briefly, but only a few yards, and then put on a burst of speed, closing fast.
"Seat belt?" Peter said tightly, and El nodded, glancing sideways to see her husband's face settle into hard lines: his FBI game face, which she rarely saw. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
The other vehicle's headlights raked across the interior of the Taurus. Now he's passing us, El thought. Perhaps it really had been a mistake -- the SUV's driver hadn't been paying attention on the country highway, and had rear-ended them by accident.
Then Peter wordlessly jerked the wheel, and the Taurus bolted forward and wrenched sideways just as the SUV tried to sideswipe them. Despite the evasive maneuver, it clipped the back of the car anyway, and they fishtailed wildly. El clung to her seat.
Peter was still in control of the car and probably would have been able to pull out of their wild swerve if they hadn't hit a patch of black ice. The car whipped around a full 360 degrees, nearly hitting the SUV head-on, and went off the side of the road and over the embankment.
Satchmo yelped. El screamed. And that was the only thing she remembered clearly later.
El blinked and touched her face and hair. Her head didn't hurt but there was a gap, a break in her memories where there was nothing but a wild jumble of confused spinning and falling and things hitting her.
Satchmo whimpered and El came back to herself with a rush: resettling herself in her body was the only way she could describe the sensation. Pain came with it. She hurt all over in different ways, mostly the dull aches of bruises and scrapes and a whiplash pain in her neck and shoulders. Her left wrist stabbed viciously when she tried to move it and she stopped with a gasp. The seat belt was cutting into her chest and throat, and she realized that it was because the car was resting on the driver's side, so that the seat belt was the only thing stopping her from falling on top of Peter.
"Peter?" she said. Her voice shook. "Honey?"
He didn't answer.
Satchmo whined again. Cold air swept El's face -- the windshield had shattered, the safety glass holding together in a fragile net that sagged inwards, with branches poking through here and there. The Taurus appeared to be resting in a tangled nest of brush and trees, probably at the bottom of the embankment along the road. Their engine had died but their headlights were still on, sparkling from the many edges of the windshield's loosely connected fragments. Through the damaged glass and the branches pressing into the windshield, little light made its way into the car, only enough to turn the car's interior into a patchwork of fractured shadows.
Somewhere nearby came the familiar whunk sound of a car door slamming. There was also the deep thrum of an idling engine.
Oh thank God, help, was El's first thought, and then, Oh no. Because the only car on the road had been the SUV, and that meant --
"Peter," she whispered, and reached for him, feeling her way up his arm with her good hand. She felt the hot stickiness of blood, but had no idea where it was coming from. His throat was warm, the pulse jumping under her fingertips -- Oh thank you, thank you God. His head was twisted to the side, pressed against the driver's-side window. El shook his shoulder. He didn't move.
Footsteps crunched on the frozen grass somewhere above the car.
Elizabeth fumbled with the steering wheel and dashboard -- it was so different trying to do it sideways, and from the passenger seat -- until she found the switch to flick off the headlights. Sudden darkness filled the car. A part of her mind, the part that obeyed every law and never hesitated to ask directions of strangers or borrow a cup of flour from a neighbor, told her that she was being paranoid and stupid. What they needed right now was to be found, not to hide. But she couldn't stop thinking about the headlights closing in the rearview mirror, the sickening slewing of the Taurus as the SUV hit it. Someone had tried to hurt them. She couldn't understand who or why, but if that someone was still after them, then they had to hide. Peter, no matter what shape he was in, was clearly not capable of protecting her at the moment, so she would have to hide them.
The terrible weight of it pressed down on her in the dark. She hung from her seat belt, bruised and scared, listening to the little crunching and rustling sounds of someone climbing down the embankment from the road above. The car might be hard to find in the pitch-black night, but surely whoever it was had seen their headlights shining through the brush, and would know their approximate location already.
If that person means us harm, we have to leave the car. It went against her every instinct, which screamed at her to stay in the car for rescue workers to find. It was warm in the car, and very cold in the early winter night outside. They also had their luggage and emergency supplies in the trunk. But if this person meant to hurt them, they didn't have a choice but to leave.
In the darkness, she touched Peter's face and patted his cheek lightly. There was so much blood, tacky and warm all over his face -- Head wounds bleed a lot, isn't that what they say on TV? But she couldn't tell where it was coming from, just that there seemed to be blood everywhere.
As she continued prodding at him, Peter groaned. It was the sweetest sound she'd ever heard. In the backseat she heard Satch's tail thumping.
"Peter." But his only response was another soft groan, which was good as far as it went -- he was alive, and at least sort of responsive -- but helped not at all with her main problem, which was the small rustling sounds on the embankment, growing louder.
Maybe, she thought, it was someone who had seen the crash and meant to help them. Or maybe it was the person who, for no reason that El could fathom, had run them off the road on a deserted stretch of highway.
Her cell was in her purse, and she had no idea where her purse had gone. It had been on the floor under her feet, and everything was all jumbled around and sideways, every loose item flung about the interior of the car. But there was one thing in the car that she did know how to find. She felt for the glovebox and opened it, still only able to use one hand, cradling the other against her chest. Peter's gun was cold and heavy, resting on top of the vehicle registration paperwork. El touched it, closed her hand around it, pulled it out --
-- and realized that with only one good hand, she couldn't do anything else and hold the gun too.
"Damn it," she muttered and leaned over to set the gun carefully against Peter's thigh, resting between the door and the seat. Then she unbuckled her seatbelt, which resulted in a (mostly) controlled fall on top of Peter, jarring her injured arm and bringing tears of pain to her eyes. He made a small hurt sound and she whispered, "Oh baby," patting anxiously at his hair and the side of his jaw.
Something cold and wet jammed into the crook of her shoulder. El stifled a scream and then reached up to touch Satchmo's head. The anxious dog tried to crowd into the front seat with them, which, with El and Peter already tangled up on the downhill side of the car, was the absolute last thing they needed. "Satch, get back, stay," she whispered, trying to push him into the backseat.
The car wasn't flat on the driver's side, but canted at an angle, nestled in the brush. Reaching past Peter and patting along the door, El discovered that the glass was still intact and the door seemed to be likewise. She slipped her hand under Peter's arm, grasped the door handle and gave it a try. It opened a foot or so, and then stopped. Reaching her hand out the door, she tried to shove branches out of the way without making too much noise.
Satch sensed freedom, and it was too much for him. El suddenly had a lapful of panicked dog, and then he was out the door into the bushes with a great crashing. Just behind the car, not ten feet away, she heard someone -- a man -- give a shout of surprise and then curse.
El froze. Then she heard the footsteps move away -- pursuing the dog.
Oh Satch. But there was nothing she could do to help, and, feeling deeply disloyal, she decided to see if she could take advantage of Satchmo's distraction. Feeling around, she found that Satchmo's exit had forced the door open another foot or so. They could probably get out on the downhill side now.
"El?" Peter whispered thickly against her ear.
"Honey," she whispered back, and kissed the side of his mouth, tasting the copper tang of blood. "Can you walk?"
"I don't ..." His voice was dazed and slurred. She couldn't tell if he was trying to answer her question or just expressing general confusion. "I can't ..."
"Shhh. We'll figure something out." She still didn't know how badly he was hurt -- was afraid to know. "I'm going to unfasten your seatbelt now," she murmured against his ear. She wished she had a hand to brace him with, to keep him from falling and maybe hurting him worse when the belt came free, but her left arm hurt all the way up to the shoulder, throbbing in nauseating waves with each beat of her heart. She couldn't do anything with it. So she braced him as best she could with her thigh and undid the buckle. They both slid sideways against the door. Peter gasped and then went very quiet. But they were halfway out of the car already.
She could hear something or someone -- Satchmo? the stranger? -- crashing through the brush not too far away. If the stranger meant to help them rather than hurt them, El thought he would surely have called out to the car, and wouldn't have been drawn away by a running dog. If he meant well, he'd have no reason to think the strangers in the car would run from him. He'd have called out and gone to the car to see if anyone needed help, right? At least, that's what she would have done. That, she thought, was what any sensible, well-intentioned person would have done.
Instead, this person was thrashing around in the brush pursuing a panicked dog.
A sudden boom echoed in the night. Elizabeth jumped hard, jostling both Peter and her wounded arm. The pain made her ill.
"Shotgun," Peter muttered. She hadn't even realized he was still conscious. "Twelve gauge."
"Shotgun?" El repeated in shock. Her dazed brain floundered to cope with this new input. Someone nearby had a gun. They'd shot at Satchmo. Maybe killed him.
Someone was after them with a gun.
They had to get out of the car.
They were both lying on top of the door. Cold air stroked her face, refreshing her and helping clear her head. They were almost out of the car already. "Sorry, honey, sorry," El whispered, wriggling past Peter and squirming into the brush as quietly as possible. Her feet sank into very cold ground with stiff twigs jabbing her, which was what made her realize that she'd never put her shoes back on. All she had on were a pair of socks. But she couldn't take the time to hunt for her shoes; they'd been on the floor in front of her seat, and could have been thrown anywhere in the car. She'd just have to deal.
It was also quite cold, definitely below freezing. El shivered as she got an arm around Peter and helped him out of the car. He came willingly enough, moving a little, trying to help her, though she still couldn't tell if he was aware of his surroundings at all, or just focusing all his attention on staying upright. His breath hissed through his teeth in harsh gasps. She could tell that she was hurting him, but he didn't make a sound except for, at one point, a small pained gasp that cut through her heart.
"Come on," she whispered, and began helping him away from the car. He leaned on her, limping heavily. They'd gone about ten feet when she remembered Peter's gun. She looked back at the car. It was a dark hulk in the tangle of brush at the bottom of the embankment. She would have to leave Peter to go look for the weapon.
I can't. I just can't. We have to get farther away first. Maybe I can come back for it later.
She helped Peter across the ditch at the bottom of the embankment, soaking one of her socks in icy, muddy water in the process, and up into the trees on the other side. Here the going was easier; the trees were large, with a carpet of soggy, half-frozen dead leaves underneath.
Under the trees she paused to catch her breath and listen. The crunching and rustling was now located in the vicinity of the car they'd left behind. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the thin beam of a flashlight stabbing around the wreck of their car. Above their car, at the top of the embankment, a large parked vehicle hulked against the marginally brighter sky. Its headlights stretched down the length of the road and she could still hear the low throb of its engine. If it wasn't the SUV that had run them off the road -- a vanishingly small possibility, growing smaller all the time -- then it was a similar size and shape.
Anyone who meant to help us would have said something by now. She squinted at the figure moving around their car. There was no moon and clouds hid the stars; the night was so black that she could only make out the dimmest shapes of the trees around them. Light reflecting back from the flashlight's beam gave her glimpses of the person searching the car -- a big guy in a coat -- and gleamed on the barrel of the shotgun in his other hand.
The flashlight came up and the light stabbed her eyes. El gasped and pulled back, drawing Peter behind the bole of a big tree. He was shivering, barely conscious as he slumped on her shoulder. She peeked around the tree and saw the light playing across winter-dead branches and tangles of brush.
It would have been easier to hide in the summer, with leaves to conceal them. Not to mention warmer. Her light sweater was doing little against the night's chill, and Peter had been wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, now torn and soaked with blood as well as mud from the ditch crossing. At least he had shoes. Her feet were going numb; El curled her toes and chafed her wet foot against the calf of her other leg.
Peter always refused to leave the city without abundant winter gear in the car: warm coats, blankets, bottles of water and emergency food. And it was all back there, out of reach, along with the gun and their cell phones and anything else that could be used to bring help or defend themselves.
Which way? El thought in panic, as the slender beam of light continued to strobe across the trees. Sooner or later, the man in the SUV would grow tired of searching the car and enter the woods. She and Peter could try to hide where they were, depending on the night's darkness to conceal them, but all it would take would be a small sound to give them away. Between her chattering teeth and her uncertainty about Peter's condition, she had no hope that they could remain still and silent -- at least not without freezing to death. The man with the shotgun had a coat and a warm car to retreat to. He could search all night.
Their choices, then, were heading deeper into the woods or along the road. El had only the vaguest idea where they were; she couldn't even remember how long ago they'd turned off the freeway. There had been no need to pay close attention. Peter was driving, she trusted him, and they'd done the drive to her sister's dozens of times. So if there was a town nearby, she had no idea. The road map was yet another thing beyond her reach in the wrecked car.
She wished desperately that she could ask Peter for his opinion. Peter must have a plan. Peter always had a plan. But when she breathed "Honey?" into his ear, she got no response. And she didn't dare make any more noise than that.
Her decision was forced when the man with the shotgun came around the nose of the wrecked car and started down into the ditch. Got to get away, El thought, and she nudged Peter gently but firmly to get him moving again. She didn't want to get lost, but staying too close to the road seemed unwise. Probably the man with the shotgun wouldn't want to do too much wandering around in the dark, either. He couldn't know how badly they were hurt -- though he would have seen the blood in the car -- or whether they were armed. So she angled deeper into the woods, until the road and even the SUV's headlights were swallowed by the dark night.
The land sloped gently upwards. This made it more exhausting to climb, but struck El as a hopeful sign. Surely from the top of a hill they could see the lights of a town or houses where they might go for help. At the very least, it would be harder to get lost on a hilltop than down in a bog.
How long until they miss us and send out a search party? But the answer was not heartening. She'd called Barb to give her sister a heads'-up when they'd left the city, but she'd also said that they might get a hotel along the way if the weather got bad or they were getting too sleepy to drive. Barb might wonder if she couldn't get through on the phone, but cell service was spotty along a lot of these roads. Barb and Mike wouldn't start getting really worried until midmorning.
She wished she dared call for Satchmo. She refused to believe that he was dead. Poor dog is probably going to keep running 'til he hits the Canada border, she thought. And for some reason that thought was enough to subsume her weariness and fear beneath a hot tide of anger. Trying to kill them was bad enough -- perhaps the man in the SUV had a reason; perhaps he was an enemy of Peter's, someone Peter had put away -- but shooting at a helpless dog who had never done anything but try to make friends with everyone he met ... anyone who would do such a thing was a horrible person who deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his life.
Peter had been leaning more and more of his weight on her, until he gave a soft moan and went boneless. She was caught off guard and they both went down in a heap. The sharp jolt of pain through her arm brought tears to her eyes, and for a moment she could only sprawl in the cold mat of dead leaves, shaking with cold and pain. I just want to lie here forever and never get up again.
But she couldn't. There was no one to fix this, no one but her. This will make a fantastic story to tell Barb and Mike and the kids, she told herself firmly. We'll all laugh about it and they'll say how brave I was. That's what's going to happen.
When she tried to get up, though, she groaned and slumped back down. Every part of her body hurt. Her arm was the worst, a hot throbbing centered somewhere around the lower part of her forearm, but her entire body was a mass of strains and bruises. Just moving her head was torment for her neck and shoulders. The only part of her that didn't hurt was her feet, and that only because she couldn't feel them, which did not strike her as a good sign.
And I'm the healthy one. The thought made her want to laugh.
She could feel Peter breathing against her, small shallow breaths. It was time, she knew, to do what she'd been putting off and figure out where he was hurt and how badly. They'd put enough distance between themselves and their pursuer that, even if he could track them through the woods, it ought to take him a long time to find their trail in the black night and follow it. They had a little time, at least. And she needed to use it.
"Peter," she whispered, touching his face.
She turned him over gently and rested his head in her lap. His face was a slightly paler blur in the darkness. This would have been hard enough in the daytime -- El had taken first aid and CPR classes, at Peter's insistence, but usually her doctor skills were needed for nothing worse than putting on band-aids or giving pills to the dog. This was far beyond her abilities, and her inability to see anything beyond the vaguest outlines took the task from very difficult to impossible.
Still, she did her best, feeling his arms and legs with her good hand while holding her bad one, as usual, tucked against her chest where it wouldn't get bumped. She wasn't even sure what she was feeling for -- a broken bone sticking through the skin, maybe, or blood spurting from an injury. Anything so severe that it had to be fixed right now or Peter would die.
She could tell that one of his knees was messed up somehow -- it felt hot and swollen to her probing fingers. His hair was matted with blood, now starting to dry in stiff clumps. When she probed around his chest and torso, something shifted under her hand and Peter's body jolted. El jerked her hand away in horror, then patted gently down his side, feeling his sweatshirt sticky and wet with blood. It didn't seem to be gushing from anywhere specific, but it was all over the place.
She blinked away tears. He's going to be all right. There's nothing on him anywhere that I can do anything about, so I just have to try to move him as little as possible -- ha, that was a laugh, at this point -- and trust that he can tough it out 'til we can get help somehow.
"Hon," Peter whispered, and El jumped. She hadn't realized he was conscious.
"I'm here," she said softly, bending over to brush his lips with hers.
"You okay?" he asked, and her heart broke just a little.
"I'm fine," she said, trying to push away the throbbing in her arm, the sick fear that she'd done something awful to her numb feet. "I'm just fine. How are you?"
A soft, breathy laugh. She halfway expected him to say that he was fine too -- it would have been typical Peter -- but instead he whispered, "Been better. My gun -- do you have --"
El bit her lip. "It's in the car. Everything is in the car."
"Phone."
"My phone's in the car, too, honey."
"My phone," Peter mumbled. "Pocket."
"Oh," she said, and slipped her hand into his pocket, finding his cell after some digging. The sight of the little screen lighting up in her hands kindled a warmth in her heart. They weren't going to die out here after all. There was a link to civilization right here in her hands.
Reception flickered between one and two bars, depending on how she turned the phone, sometimes dropping to none. The battery was fully charged, though: typical "be prepared" Peter Burke. Her first inclination was to dial 911, but they were in the middle of nowhere; would that even help?
Paging to Peter's address book, she found a bunch of presets for different people at the FBI. It was the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, though. El wasn't sure who to turn to, who was staying in town or even in the state. Except one.
She turned the phone for the best possible reception, and dialed Neal.
He answered after just a couple of rings. "Hey, Peter." He sounded a little sleepy, relaxed and content. Closing her eyes, El could picture him in the loft, dressed as casually as Neal ever got, a glass of wine in his hand. "I thought you were leaving town. Miss me?"
"Neal," El said. "It's me," and then tears choked her, a rush of emotion she couldn't control.
"Elizabeth?" The laziness dropped instantly from his voice. "Elizabeth, what's wrong? Don't cry. Where's Peter? Did something happen?"
"Peter is --" She took a deep breath, forced down the urge to collapse and hand off responsibility to someone else. There was no one else; Neal was more than a hundred miles away, and just because she'd managed to get him on the phone didn't mean that they were safe yet. "We had an accident. Someone forced our car off the road and now we're in the woods. They have a gun. Neal, you need to call the police for us."
She could hear rustling in the background. "Where are you?"
"I'm not entirely sure. We left 87 at Kingston and we're somewhere west of the reservoir, I think, but I wasn't paying attention to how far we came. I'm sorry I can't be more specific --"
"That's okay," he said soothingly. Static blurred his next words, but she caught "-- probably get a GPS location off your phone. What about you and Peter? Are you two okay?"
"No." She swallowed, again, the threatening tears. "He's -- we need help, Neal. We both do."
There was the briefest pause. "El, there's no landline in here, so I'm going to hang up and call Hughes. We'll get help to you. Okay?"
"No," she said, "no, please --"
"It's okay, I'll call you right back. Two minutes. Okay? We'll get helicopters, search dogs -- the works."
"Dogs," she said, and tears forced their way into her voice again. "Satchmo -- I think they killed Satch."
"Don't think about it," Neal said. "Be calm. Be safe. I'll call you back in a minute. Okay?"
"Okay," she said in a small voice, and hung up.
Severing that tiny connection to civilization made her feel even more alone and miserable and cold. She and Peter were a tiny oasis of life in a great dark wilderness. The wind blew through her sweater, and she shivered, clinging to the phone so tightly that her fingers ached.
"Sorry," Peter whispered. "Sorry, hon. So sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for," she told him, and bent down again, though it hurt her arm, to brush his cold lips with her own.
"No --" Peter rallied a bit, opened his eyes and shifted in her lap, trying to push himself a little more upright. He subsided with a gasp. "I know who's after us. Mine -- one of mine. Sorry."
"Someone you arrested?" she guessed. She'd already thought as much.
Peter moved his head in a slight nod. "Saw him at the car. Trying to think of his name -- finally got it. Roy Lacey. Mob guy. Caught him a few years ago, guess he plea-bargained." He swallowed, cleared his throat, and said in a slightly stronger voice, "No more cushy mafia job. Just a lot of mob hitters gunning for him because he turned state's evidence against them. Swear to God, hon, I never thought he'd come after me. At work, maybe. Not here."
"You couldn't have known," she told him, and lowered her hand with the cell phone clutched in it to brush the back of her fingers along his jaw.
"Sorry," he said again. "Never wanted you to --"
"Peter." She laid a finger on his lips. "We're in this together. For better or for worse, remember? I'm a big girl." She kissed the tip of his nose. "I have no one but myself to blame. It's not as if you kidnapped me and hauled me off to your cave."
"No cave."
"Well, that would be problematic."
She couldn't see it, but she felt his lips move against her hand -- he kissed her knuckle and then smiled.
"If you really need to make it up to me later, you can take me out to that new five-star restaurant that just opened in Midtown."
"Waiting list's a month long," Peter whispered.
"So? All the best things are worth waiting for. Besides, Neal probably knows somebody who knows somebody --" The phone vibrated in her hand. "Speak of the devil."
"Elizabeth?" Neal sounded anxious, bordering on desperate.
"I'm here," she said. Peter stirred against her leg. "We're here."
"Good. Good. Hughes and Diana are scrambling a response right now. They're going to try to get a GPS fix on Peter's cell phone, so keep it on. You're breaking up --"
"You too. Cell coverage is really bad out here."
"Well, don't --" She lost him for a minute, and when she could hear him again, he was saying her name.
"I'm still here," she said.
"Can I talk to Peter for a minute?"
She passed the phone down and helped him hold it. "Neal," Peter whispered hoarsely, and El could feel him tense, marshaling his strength and his thoughts. "Have Diana pull the Lacey files. Year or so before I started working with you. Pretty sure it's the same guy. She'll remember."
Neal said something El couldn't hear. "Not ordering you around." Peter sounded irritable. El caught herself smiling, a real grin, the first one she'd worn since they'd gone off the road. Trust Neal to find a way to distract him from his injuries and the desperate situation they were in. And, she thought, hearing Neal's voice must be having the same effect on Peter that it had on her: it was a reminder that they weren't alone, that this dark cold forest wasn't the entire world. There were friends out there looking for them.
Off in the woods, a twig snapped. El went still, tuning out Peter's one-sided, friendly argument with Neal. She heard more crashing, and as little she knew about woodcraft, she could tell that something big and careless was moving through the trees somewhere near them.
"Peter," she said, and he went quiet.
In the sudden stillness, she could hear Neal's small, tinny voice on the phone. "Peter -- Peter? Elizabeth? Damn it, you guys, say something. Please." His voice cracked.
El groped through the masses of wet leaves on the forest floor until her hand closed around a moss-covered stick. It was probably useless as a weapon: soggy and rotten, no more than a foot long. But clinging to it made her feel better.
A light-colored blur erupted out of the woods. El figured out what it was an instant before it hit her with sixty pounds of wet, muddy, desperately happy Labrador retriever. "Satchmo," she said, trying to fend him off one-handed. "Satch, it's okay, good boy, down. Oh, Peter, look, look who's back."
She managed to successfully push Satchmo off Peter, and retrieved the phone, which had fallen into the leafy litter on the forest floor.
"Did I hear you say Satchmo?" Neal said, his voice back to its normal register.
El stifled a slightly hysterical burst of laughter, all too close to a sob. "Satch is back. I don't think he's hurt."
"That apparently makes one of him," Neal said. "Peter sounds bad."
El glanced down at her husband. His eyes were closed as if the conversation with Neal, not to mention being jumped on by the dog, had exhausted whatever scraps of energy he'd managed to pull together. "Mmm-hmm," she said as neutrally as possible.
"Right," Neal said with a sigh. El heard a door slam in the background. "On the phone with me right now," Neal said, clearly speaking to someone else in the room.
Satchmo, who had been snuffling at Peter's face and hair, raised his head and gave a soft whuff. His tail lashed a few hesitant swipes and he looked off into the woods.
"Oh no," El whispered.
"What's wrong?" Neal asked sharply.
El gently lowered Peter's head to the ground and stood up, looking off into the woods in the direction that Satch was looking. At first she thought the flicker of light was her imagination, but then it flashed again, moving between the black bars of two tree trunks.
"Neal, there's someone out here in the woods with a flashlight. The police wouldn't have had time to get here, would they?"
Rather than Neal, it was Diana's voice that answered, a little farther away from the phone than Neal's had been. "You're on speaker now, Elizabeth. No, we're still trying to pinpoint your exact location and get choppers in the air."
"Then --" El swallowed. "Then he's found us and we need to get moving." Satchmo chuffed softly again, and El gave the dog a fierce nudge with her knee. "Satch, no, shut up. I -- I only have one hand to hold the phone and I need it now to get Peter up. I'm going to have to ..."
"Elizabeth --" Neal said, but Diana spoke over the top of him.
"Elizabeth, don't hang up yet. What's the terrain like where you are? Is there anywhere to take cover and maybe wait this out?"
"We're outside, on the side of a hill. There aren't any buildings or anything." The flashlight was definitely closer, and El thought she heard the snap of a branch breaking. "I really have to go --"
"A hill. Try to get to the top of it and stay there if you can. You'll be more visible to the rescue helicopters."
"Okay, I'll try, but I -- I have to --"
"Yes, go," Diana said. "Check in with us as often as possible. Believe me when I say that we have half the law enforcement personnel in the southern half of the state converging on your location."
None of which matters if we get caught in the next five minutes, El thought. "Okay," she said.
"Be safe," Neal said, in a tone she'd never heard from him before: gentle and urgent and raw. And then the other end of her lifeline was dead, and it was just her and Peter again.
She put the phone away in her pocket with the greatest of care -- it was everything right now, safety and information and a GPS transmitter; maybe life itself. Then she knelt and slid her good arm under Peter's shoulders. "Honey, can you hear me? You have to get up."
She managed to get him vertical from the waist up, but he was little more than a deadweight slumped on her shoulder. "El, don't ..." He caught his breath with a sharp gasp. "You can move faster without --"
"I wondered how long it would take us to get to that argument. Let's just pretend we already had it and I won." She tried to lift him by brute force, but she might as well have been straining against a boulder. "Honey, you're a lot heavier than I am, and that's not vanity talking. I don't plan on doing all the work here. This marriage thing is a partnership, remember?" She knew she was teetering on the verge of helpless babbling, but it was better than disintegrating into panic.
Somehow she got him on his feet again, though he was mostly unresponsive, his head lolling on her shoulder. They started up the hill with Satchmo sticking close to her heels, ill at ease in the nighttime woods. Every so often he stopped and looked back, lashing his tail; clearly he could not understand why they weren't going to acknowledge the other person that he could hear and smell. If Satch realized that this was the same person who had shot at him, El didn't think it mattered to him -- in his dog brain, "human" equaled "petting and treats", and if anyone had been cruel to him, then it must be only a temporary misunderstanding that could be cleared up with sufficient amounts of dog-wagging.
If only life were so simple.
The wind picked up as they climbed. Her feet felt like blocks of wood, and El tried desperately not to think about the damage she must be doing to them. You'll be the original Iron Woman if you tell your friends in Manhattan that you lost a toe to frostbite, she counseled herself, which turned out to be very little help.
It was getting harder to keep her spirits up. In fact, it was getting harder to keep herself going at all. She was unable to stop shivering, her damp, muddy, bloodstained sweater doing little more to protect her from the wind than a wet T-shirt. Peter was hardly shivering at all; she wasn't sure whether that was good or bad.
"Hot cocoa," she muttered under her breath as she climbed. "Hot coffee. Hot tea. Hot baths with raspberry-scented bubble bath. That soft fuzzy sweater that Aunt Rose gave me. Warm little Satchmo on my feet, my perfectly warm, unhurt feet ..."
A snowflake whirled past her nose.
El stopped walking, jolted out of her weary reverie by a new surge of fear and indignation. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she said, tilting her face to the sky. Another snowflake landed on her eyelashes before melting into a drop of cold water. "We couldn't get a break just this once?"
Maybe the snow would cover their trail. She had read something like that in a Louis L'Amour western once. But it will also cover us, she thought, and her flagging willpower began to crumble. She eased Peter to the ground; he went down limp as a sack of laundry, and she wondered if she was ever going to be able to get him up again. At the moment, she didn't really care. She sank down after him and pulled his head and shoulders into her lap, for all the comfort that she was able to offer.
Satchmo whined and tried to crawl into her lap after his master. "Lay down, Satch. Keep Peter warm," El urged, until she got the dog curled up against Peter's side and her own. He was, indeed, warm. Actually, she thought, of the three of them, Satch was the one most likely to survive. He wouldn't be able to live by himself in the wilderness, but the rescue workers would find him. Maybe Neal would take care of him.
I should call Neal, she thought, but it was hard to work up the urge to move any part of her sore, exhausted, shivering body.
The phone vibrated against her leg. El smiled despite herself, and carefully worked it out of her pocket. "Yes," she said.
"Elizabeth, thank God." Wherever Neal was, it was noisy, with voices in the background and the rumble of a loud engine. "How are you two doing?"
"I can't wake Peter. I don't know, Neal. It's starting to snow."
"You're kidding me; snow? On top of everything?"
El managed a miserable little laugh. "That's pretty much what I said."
"Look, Elizabeth, I'm about to get into a search and rescue helicopter. Talk about getting out of my radius, right? But I won't be able to call you while we're in the air. Jones is our contact on the ground. Stay in touch with him, okay?"
"Okay," El said. She thought she probably ought to have had a stronger reaction to the idea of losing her link to Neal, but all the emotion had drained out of her. She felt like an empty shell of a woman.
"We're going to find you, Elizabeth. Hang on. Both of you."
"We're hanging," El said, trying to smile. "Oh, Neal, wait. Someone should call my sister Barb and tell her that we're not going to be there tonight, so they don't worry."
There was a brief pause on Neal's end. "So they don't worry?" he repeated, sounding incredulous.
"They'll probably get worried when we don't show up on time."
"Yes, but Elizabeth, I don't think knowing the particulars of your current situation would worry them any less."
"Maybe not. I'm ... I guess I'm not thinking really clearly right now, Neal."
"I don't think anyone blames you for that," Neal said. "Hang on, Diana wants to talk to you."
She heard the rustling of the phone being passed to someone else, then, "Elizabeth?"
"Hi, Diana."
"Hi. Listen, I wanted you to know that Peter could be right, Organized Crime says Lacey's been out of prison for about two months and dropped right off their radar. Do you have any weapons?"
"We left Peter's gun back at the car," El said. "I mean, I did. I should have kept hold of it, but I only have one hand --"
"Don't worry about it. What I want you to do, if you can, is get on top of that hill you were talking about, to a clearing if possible, where the helicopters can find you. We have your cell located and you're right on the edge of the Catskills. If you get too deep into the wilderness, it's going to be much harder to get you out, and we'll probably lose cell contact completely."
"No wilderness. Okay."
"You're going to be all right, Elizabeth," Diana said firmly. "Could you pass the phone to Peter for a minute, please?"
"No," El said, looking down at Peter's face. He was a dead weight in her lap. She was afraid even to check if he was still breathing; the uncertainty was better than knowing the worst. "He's not -- no, I can't."
Diana's pause was very brief, but noticeable. "All right. Stay focused, Elizabeth. I have to go. Jones is going to call you in a minute, okay? -- Neal, what now?"
More rustling of the phone exchanging hands. "Elizabeth," Neal said. "I ..."
He trailed off, and El didn't know what to say, either. Yet somehow the silence was comfortable. Warm.
"Thank you," Neal said at last. "For, you know, everything. I have to -- I have to go now."
"I know," El whispered. "Neal -- thank you, too."
She sat in silence for a few minutes, stroking Peter's face, while the snowflakes grew thicker. El had never realized that falling snow made a sound, but it was so quiet out here that she could hear the tiny whispers of the flakes touching down on her shoulders and hair, on Peter, on Satchmo and the dead leaves around her.
If they hadn't gone off the road, they'd be at Barb's now, probably sitting with Barb and Mike, having a drink before bed. They'd be looking out the window at the falling snow, exclaiming in delight, looking forward to a crystalline white morning.
The phone vibrated on her thigh, and went skittering into the leaves. El retrieved it and checked the caller ID. "Hello, Jones."
"Hi, Mrs. Burke. I'm at our command center here. We have a lock on your phone's GPS signal -- I'm looking at it on my screen right now. There are helicopters in the air, and we're going to have you out of that place as soon as we can."
Elizabeth tipped her head back and watched the snowflakes swirl down out of the dark sky. "The weather's getting bad."
"Pfft," Jones said. "A little snow won't even slow those big birds down. You doing okay?"
"Yes," El said quietly, shifting her legs a little to make a more comfortable nest for Peter on her thighs. "I could use some hot coffee, maybe."
"Never seen a rescue chopper yet that didn't have a thermos of hot coffee somewhere on board."
"Well, that'll be okay, then." She wanted to give him a laugh, at least, but she was just too tired and too cold to pretend. In fact, the effort of keeping the conversation going was sapping energy she did not have to spare. "Clinton, I'm going to go look for a place where the helicopter can land to pick us up."
"They don't have to land, Mrs. Burke, if the terrain's too rough for it. They can lift you right out of there, just as easy as you want."
"I know," she said, though she hadn't. "But I need something to do."
"Hang in there," Jones said. "We'll stay in touch."
She was loathe to leave Peter, even for a minute, but Diana had said to get on top of the hill and find a clearing, and she needed to know how close they were. They'd been climbing for what felt like hours. Days. And she had a feeling that the longer she stayed here, the less likely she was to ever get up again.
"Stay with Peter, Satch." When the dog rose and tried to follow, El held out her hand, palm forward, the visual "stay" command that he'd learned in obedience school when he was a puppy. "Stay, Satchmo."
Satchmo whined and lay down again.
El kissed Peter's forehead, tucked the cell phone into his hand and curled his limp fingers around it. Then she began a slow, limping climb up what remained of the hill. To her gratified surprise, it turned out that they'd been almost to the summit when she'd stopped. The slowly rising land flattened off and then dropped away in a much more sudden decline than the gentle slope she'd just been climbing.
Beyond the hill, there was nothing but darkness -- a sea of darkness stretching to merge into the impenetrable blackness of the clouds. El stood on the brow of the hill in the wind's harsh teeth, and she knew that they would never have found help this way. If they hadn't had the cell phone, they'd have just kept going, never coming to a house or a town or a road.
Shivering with more than just the cold, she turned away. The snow was starting to collect in the open places between the trees around her. It lent a little extra brightness to the night, and made it easier to walk without stumbling. It should have been painfully cold, but it didn't feel that cold to her. El touched her fingers to her lips and found them swollen and painfully stiff.
Looking back the way she'd come, she discovered that the far-off road was visible from up here, marked by distant headlights like tiny sparks. Here and there, through the falling snow, she caught the glimmer of a house or two, and even one cluster of lights that might be a small town. She was amazed at how far she and Peter had come from the road, fueled by fear and adrenaline -- amazed and appalled, because there was no way they could walk back that way, even though it was the only direction in which help was to be found if the cavalry couldn't get to them in time.
She strained her ears for the sound of helicopters. She could hear distant engines, but had no idea how to tell if they were helicopters or not. Jets above the clouds, or cars on the highway -- it all sounded alike to her.
But they were coming. She had to believe in them. All she had to do was wait, and keep them both alive.
As she listened to the still night, El realized that she could hear more than just the distant hum of engines on the edge of the world, more than the soft patter of snowflakes touching down. She could also hear distant rustling and the sound of breaking twigs. Then, very distinctly, she heard a man's voice, with the cadence of someone cursing to themselves.
She swiveled in that direction -- down the hill and off to her right. And there it was: the firefly glimmer of a flashlight on the dark slope of the hill. She wasn't sure how to judge distances in all this featureless darkness, but it was definitely much closer than the headlights she'd seen earlier.
For a moment's blinding panic, she couldn't figure out how to get back to Peter. Down the hill -- but there was a whole lot of hill, and she wasn't sure if she'd gone straight up the hill when she'd left it, or climbed at an angle. And had she walked left or right when she reached the top? She couldn't remember, and horror washed over her: what if she never found him again, what if he had to lie on the cold ground until he froze to death?
The only thing she could think to do was to call out to Satchmo, try to get him to bark. But that would give away both her own position and Peter's.
Excellent woodcraft, Elizabeth Burke. Louis L'Amour would not approve.
But a moment after that, she realized that she must have left tracks in the snow. There was not a whole lot of snow yet, but that turned out to be even better, because looking behind her, she could clearly see a dark trail of scuffed leaves through the dimly reflective whiteness. Her slow, staggering gait, scuffling the leaves as she walked, had blazed a trail that was plain even to her city-girl, non-tracker self. The snow was covering it even as she stood there, though, so she hurried to backtrack herself as quickly as possible. By the time she made it back to Peter and Satch, the trail was all but gone.
El sank down beside Peter, and listened again, absently rubbing Satchmo's head and then burying her numb hand in the damp but warm fur of his belly. She heard a twig break, a loud carrying snap. Lacey, if it was Lacey, was not far away from them.
"Peter," she said, leaning over him and rubbing his shoulder. "Honey, we have to go. Honey?"
She refused to believe that he would never open his eyes again. His breathing was shallow and rapid, but he was still breathing, so she decided to go the Sleeping Beauty route. El closed her lips over his cold, slack ones, and kissed him long, hard and deep. For the first instant it was horribly like kissing a corpse, but then he began to respond, and they necked quietly on the leaves in the falling snow until El opened her eyes and found his soft brown eyes looking back into hers.
"Hey, hon," she whispered against his mouth.
"Hey, hon," he whispered back, and then, in a tone of mild confusion, "Are we at your sister's?"
Fear rose in the back of her throat. "No. We're still in the woods. We have to get moving again."
Peter made a valiant attempt to get on his feet with her help, but El could tell from the beginning that it wasn't going to work. They both went down in a heap. Satchmo barked once, and Elizabeth shushed him frantically. Peter was unconscious again. She managed to coax him back to some semblance of consciousness with petting and perhaps a little judicious slapping -- love taps, she would have informed anyone who was unwise enough to ask -- but he was dazed and confused, and didn't seem to understand anything that she said to him.
Finally she gave up the struggle and settled back into the leaves. Here they were and here, apparently, they were going to stay. Satchmo pressed against her side, blessedly warm. She put her arms around Peter -- the hurt and the unhurt arm; at this point she'd lost track of which was which anyway -- and cuddled him against her chest, burying her face in his hair.
"You take me to the nicest places, Peter Burke," she whispered, and kissed his neck.
Silence settled around them once again. She could hear the crashing of Lacey forcing his way through the forest very clearly now. And she could also hear something else, a low rhythmic drumming. She was so tired that it took her a little while to figure out what it was. Then she raised her head in startled gratitude.
"That," she said to Peter and the dog, "is a helicopter."
Satchmo thumped his tail against her leg, more in response to her tone than her words, she knew, but it still seemed as if the dog shared her excitement.
The thrumming of the helicopter vibrated behind her breastbone. It wasn't far away. They weren't going to lie out here until they froze to death. They were getting off this godforsaken hillside.
"Well, well," said a stranger's voice, and light turned the blackness behind her closed eyelids to red.
Elizabeth opened her eyes and squinted against the blinding brilliance of the flashlight pointed at her. I forgot him. How could I forget him? But she had. In her thrilled excitement at the sound of the helicopter, she'd completely forgotten that Lacey was on the same hillside with them.
Satchmo jumped to his feet, his tail whipping against El's arm. As far as he was concerned, their ticket home, back to his warm comfortable dog bed, had just arrived.
El squinted against the light. All she could make out was a big dark blur -- and the gleaming barrel of a shotgun pointed at her and Peter.
"You two have been a real pain in my ass today," Lacey said. Satchmo's wagging tail hesitated and began to droop.
"Please," Elizabeth said. She tightened her arms around Peter, trying to cover as much of him as possible. "We never meant you any harm. Just go away, please."
"Never meant me any harm?" Lacey let out a sharp laugh. "Your husband ruined my life, Mrs. Burke." He walked forward a few steps. Satchmo wasn't wagging at all now. "Is he dead? That would make my life a bit simpler. Of course, there's still you to deal with."
"Yes," El said. "He's dead. Thanks to you." Gently, she lowered Peter and let him rest on the snow-free ground where she had been sitting. The snow was falling heavily now, fat heavy flakes covering the ground to a depth of an inch in places and muffling the helicopter's thumping until she could barely hear it. This snowfall wouldn't even last the next day, not this early in the year, but right now the world seemed to be swallowed in a winter that would never end. "It's just you and me."
"Yeah, like I'm going to take your word for that. Step back." Lacey gestured with the barrel of the shotgun.
Satchmo pressed close to El as she crouched beside Peter. El looked at the dog and then up at the man with the gun. There was a game that Peter and Neal sometimes played with Satch, holding a stick or a toy and making the dog jump to get it, to the command "rocket dog". She kept trying to make them stop, because having Satchmo unexpectedly jump and knock things out of her hands was much more of a hazard than a pleasant diversion.
But giving him the command now would mean sending her sweet little friend into a danger that he couldn't understand, and she wasn't sure how much time it could buy them anyway.
The sound of the helicopter seemed to fade, changing pitch and growing softer. No, she thought, please don't go away! Maybe it was nothing to do with them. But she had to believe that help was only minutes away. All they had to do was hang on that long.
And she could only think of one thing to do.
"Satchmo," she murmured, and the dog pricked up his ears. "Rocket dog."
Satchmo's ears and tail went up happily. Finally, in this entire strange, confusing situation, one of his humans had given him something fun to do. He was off like a shot, leaping towards the hand holding the flashlight, which must have looked like a more appealing target to him than the shotgun.
Lacey yelled, spun to confront the onrushing dog and fired reflexively. The shotgun's blast was deafening at this close range. The slugs kicked up a fountain of snow and leaves a few feet from Peter's leg, completely missing Satchmo.
The dog, though, gave a wild yelp of dismay and reversed direction so suddenly that he left skid marks in the snow. He had no way to know that the gun was dangerous; all he knew was that it was loud and unpleasant and scary, and he didn't like it any better this time than the last time. Too panicked to think of anything but escape, he dashed off into the woods.
As soon as Satchmo lunged for Lacey's hand, El scrambled to interpose herself between Lacey and Peter. A steely determination formed in the pit of her stomach: if this man wanted her husband, he would have to go through her first. She scraped up a loose snowball and flung it while he was distracted. She and her sister were veterans of many a childhood snowball war, and the snowball struck right on target, splattering across his face. She followed it up with more, as fast as she could pack them, not even sure what she was trying to accomplish, just that the most important thing in the world was buying time, second by second, until the helicopter could reach them.
"Bitch, you're dead," Lacey yelled, dashing snow from his eyes.
And then the helicopter was upon them without warning -- either it had come over the ridge or she'd been too distracted with Lacey to notice the noise escalating. It skimmed over at treetop level through the falling snow, the thump of the rotors rattling her teeth. A searchlight swept across the trees and for a second their shadows stood out stark and black against the snow. Then the light was gone and they were plunged back into darkness again, and just as El had time to think, Oh no, they didn't see us --, the timber of the rotors changed and the helicopter circled to spear them with the floodlight again.
"This is the FBI." Diana's amplified voice echoed off the hill; it seemed to fill the night around them. "There are rifles on you right now. Drop your gun or we will shoot."
El shielded her eyes and squinted up at the belly of the helicopter hovering above them. She could make out small figures leaning out of it, and the long slender barrel of a sniper rifle. The wind of the rotors whipped her hair wildly and raised a cloud of snow-devils swirling up through the trees.
Lacey stared up at the helicopter, then at Elizabeth, his snow-crusted face twisted with rage. She thought he was about to shoot her anyway, out of spite, but then Diana bellowed, "Hands in the air, weapon on the ground, or we open fire!" and he threw the shotgun into the snow and raised his hands.
El's legs turned to water and she crumpled to the snow beside Peter. "Oh honey," she gasped, wrapping her hand around his. "Oh honey."
Someone dropped a line from the helicopter, and the first person to touch down was Diana, in body armor with a gun in her hands. As soon as she unclipped herself, two paramedic-type people came down next, followed by Neal. He was, as usual, impeccably dressed in a suit and vest, with a garish orange windbreaker slung around his shoulders that one of the paramedics must have given him.
He crossed the snow to her in a couple of bounds, went to his knees and put an arm around her. El sagged into him, after making a single feeble attempt to push him away. "Your suit -- I'm a mess, Neal, I'm ruining it --"
Neal laughed and pulled her in tighter against him. He was warm, so warm. "June has a whole closet full of them. And I wouldn't care if it was the last Devore on Earth, anyway."
"Yes, you would," El said, trying to laugh and swiping at her eyes with her cold, muddy hand.
"Okay, maybe I would, but I'd at least have the decency to get out of your earshot before complaining."
El laughed helplessly and let him hold her, accepting the comfort and the warmth. Someone handed Neal a military-green coat and he wrapped it around her. El huddled into it with a tiny whimper of gratitude.
"Ma'am, you're going to have to let go," one of the paramedics said, and El looked down to discover that her fingers were still twined tightly with Peter's -- the fingers on her injured side, actually, and when she let go, the jolt of pain that shot up her wrist made her cry out. The lower part of her arm was so swollen that it looked like a softball shoved under the sleeve of her sweater. She hadn't even noticed that before.
"Elizabeth, let them take care of you," Neal said. His eyes kept going to Peter, who was very still as the paramedics strapped him onto a stretcher with clips on the sides to fasten to the lines from the helicopter. The harsh glare of the helicopter's floodlight made him a study in black and white: dead-white skin, black blood forming inkblot patterns on his face and throat.
El tore her eyes away from him. "Satchmo," she said, gripping Neal's arm. "Neal, he ran away into the woods when that man shot at him. I don't know where he's gone. And the helicopter will be scaring him even more --"
"I'll get him," Neal said. From the eagerness in his voice, he'd hated being sidelined and wanted something to do anyway. "Which way did he go?"
El pointed. Neal gave her a final one-armed hug and jogged off into the woods, slithering on the snow in his impractical shoes.
"Where the hell is Caffrey going?" Diana demanded as she and someone else in an FBI jacket secured Lacey to one of the lines from the helicopter.
"To get Satchmo." Without Neal to prop her up, El felt herself on the verge of collapse. Diana caught her by the elbow.
"That's all we need -- hunting for Neal in the woods, too. Blake, get Caffrey," Diana ordered over her shoulder, and began snapping a harness around Elizabeth. "Was there anyone else with Lacey, or was he working alone?"
"I -- don't know, alone, I guess? We can't leave without Satchmo. Or Neal." El huddled in the coat, shaking.
"We're not leaving without anybody," Diana reassured her. "Okay, we're going up together now. I'll hold onto you. Don't look down."
Under any other circumstances, El thought she would probably have found the ascent into the helicopter one of the most terrifying, dizzying experiences of her life. Right now, though, her capacity to absorb new trauma was so thoroughly overloaded that she felt nothing as Diana deposited her on the floor of the hovering helicopter.
With the side door open and the rotors whipping, it was as cold inside the helicopter as outside. It was bigger than El expected, but crowded. She glimpsed Lacey in a corner, handcuffed and under heavy guard. Most of her attention, though, was reserved for Peter, on the floor with an oxygen mask and IV, and paramedics wrapping blankets around him.
"Mrs. Burke?" One of the paramedics knelt in front of her. "I'm going to put a temporary sling on your arm to keep it immobile, all right? It looks like you've got some fractures, but we won't know for sure until we get it X-rayed."
El nodded. Someone else settled a blanket around her shoulders. She looked up again when Neal arrived along with a squirming, wild-eyed Satchmo. Catching sight or scent of El, the dog gave a great heave of his body and twisted out of Neal's arms, bolting to wriggle against her.
"Does he bite?" the paramedic asked nervously.
"Not under normal circumstances," Neal said. He eased through the crowded interior of the helicopter to settle next to Elizabeth and Peter. When his shoulder pressed against hers, El could feel him shivering. "It's miserable out there. I don't know how the two of you --" He shut his mouth, fast, cutting off anything else he was going to say.
"All in, right?" Diana yelled. She hauled on the side door and it slammed, cutting the wind and some of the noise. El felt the helicopter rotate, swinging into motion. Her feet, tucked beneath the blanket, were beginning to burn and sting, and her arm throbbed miserably where it rested against her chest. She was so tired. She worked her good hand under the blankets wrapped around Peter until she could take hold of his limp hand, which made her feel a little better. She leaned her head against Neal's shoulder.
Diana said something to Neal, who broke into a wide grin and nudged El. "Is it true you fought that guy off with snowballs?"
"I didn't have anything else," El said, embarrassed. "I wouldn't have been able to do even that much if you two hadn't taught Satchmo to play 'rocket dog.' I'll never complain about that game again." She looked down at Satchmo's head resting in her lap.
"Never tangle with a Burke," Diana said to Neal. She was smiling, too. One of her hands rested on Peter's leg.
"Words to live by," Neal agreed, nodding.
El chafed the back of Peter's hand gently with her thumb. "Peter was worried you'd get up to something while he was gone."
Neal grinned again. "Well, look at me now. So far out of my radius you can't even see it from here. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way."
"This is not how I'd planned to spend it," El said weakly, leaning into him.
The limp hand twitched in hers, and Peter's fingers curled around her own. Elizabeth lifted her head off Neal's shoulder. "Honey?" she said, bending over him.
Peter's eyelids fluttered and then his body jackknifed. El recoiled, thinking he was having a seizure, but his eyes had opened wide and he seemed to be having a panic attack. He was saying something under the mask, but El couldn't make it out. Neal obviously could, though. He leaned past her and shook Peter's shoulder. "Peter, for God's sake, she's right here. She's holding your hand, actually."
Peter blinked at him, and then at her. Then he smiled, and his eyes closed. His cold fingers remained tight around hers.
"Control freak," Neal said fondly. He left his hand on Peter's shoulder.
Diana touched her radio headset. "Pilot says we're almost to the trauma center. Wants to know if everyone is doing okay back here."
"We're doing great," El said, and she leaned into Neal's shoulder again, and stayed there, gripping Peter's hand with all the strength remaining in her, until they touched down.
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This is brilliant
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Re: This is brilliant
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(Anonymous) 2011-12-08 03:50 am (UTC)(link)What a terrific El-centred fic. You did her proud!
Lisa Paris
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