Free Nowhere to Run by C. J. Box Page A

satellite phone it means no one knows where I am. That’s not the case at all. You need to listen to me. Twice a day I call in my coordinates. I called ’em in just before I rode up on Caleb. I haven’t talked to dispatch since then, but they know exactly where I was and which way I was headed. They’ll be able to pinpoint this location within a mile or two, and they’ll be worried. Help is on the way, boys. It could be here anytime.”
    Joe glanced up into the sky as if looking for the helicopter he’d just made up. But all he could see were dark afternoon thunderheads tumbling slow motion across the blue sky. There wasn’t even a distant jet trail.
    “So let’s end the game,” Joe said, taking their silence as possible evidence of their contemplation.
    Camish said to Caleb, “You believe that, brother?”
    Caleb snorted, “Fuck no.”
    Camish said, “Language.”
    “Sorry.”
    “I don’t believe him either. He’s a liar.”
    “Another damned liar,” Caleb said with contempt. “After a while, a man starts to wonder if there’s a single damned one of ’em who doesn’t lie.”
    And the afternoon exploded. Joe threw himself to his belly and covered his head with his hands as his shotgun boomed from the left. From the right, Camish fired the .308, squeezing off rounds as quickly as he could pull the trigger. The thin tree trunks around him quivered with the impact of double-ought pellets and .308 slugs. Chunks of bark and dead branches fell around him and the last dry leaves in the aspen grove shimmied to the ground. The air smelled sharply of gunfire.
    The shots stopped. Joe did a mental inventory. He wasn’t hit, which was a small miracle. But the proximity of the brothers, and the metal-on-metal sounds of them furiously reloading, convinced him he likely wouldn’t survive another volley. An infusion of fear and adrenaline combined to propel him back to his knees, gun up.
    A pine bough shuddered to his left, and Joe fired.
    Pop-pop-pop-pop.
    Through the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard someone cry out.
    “Caleb,” Camish cried, “you hit?”
    Caleb’s response was an inhuman moan ending in a roar, the sound of someone trying to shout through a mouthful of liquid.
    Then Joe swung the Glock a hundred and eighty degrees to his right. The forest was silent, but he anticipated Camish to be at roughly the same angle and distance as his brother, since they’d entered the trees at the same time and with the same determination.
    Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
    No cries, no sounds. And it was silent again to the left.
    Maybe he’d backed them off. Caleb was wounded, maybe fatally. Camish? Who knew?
    A dry branch snapped to the left, and Joe wheeled and fired off three wild shots. Another snapped to the right and he pointed and started to pull the trigger out of malevolence and fear when he quickly lowered the Glock and cursed himself.
    “Not many shots left, by my count,” Caleb said clearly from the shadows. “Since your spare magazines were in those panniers, you may be out of luck.”
    The slide on the Glock hadn’t kicked fully back, which meant he had at least one round left. He tried to count back, to figure out how many live rounds he still had, but he couldn’t concentrate. At least two rounds left, he hoped. He’d need that many . . . His heartbeat pounded in his ears, making it hard to hear or think. He thought, The brothers were formidable before. Now that at least one of them was wounded . . .

    LURCHING FROM TREE TO TREE, blood flowing freely again from the wounds in his right thigh, Joe crashed through the timber back toward where he’d left Buddy.
    The Grim Brothers couldn’t be far behind.
    He’d find his horse, apologize, and spur him on. Push the horse down the mountain. Eventually, he’d hit water. He’d follow the stream to something, or somebody.
    Buddy weighed a thousand pounds and had nine gallons of blood. Joe weighed 175 pounds and had six quarts of blood. He didn’t know