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White Collar fic: Survivor (1/2)
Title: Survivor
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Peter/Elizabeth (basically gen plot, though)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,100
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 hc_bingo card.
Crossposted: on AO3 | on one page at Dreamwidth
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.
Part 2
Fandom: White Collar
Pairing: Peter/Elizabeth (basically gen plot, though)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,100
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.Crossposted: on AO3 | on one page at Dreamwidth
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.
Part 2
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YES.
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