Explosive - Page 100

God, please let that be true. Not for him, who had ripped into her peaceful world like a torrential storm.

For Sophie.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Sophie had resisted an urge to go after Thomas in her car. It would be a useless exercise. It’s not as if she could somehow overtake him on the road.

She couldn’t force him to trust her . . . couldn’t make him come back to her.

Would he be all right? Surely not. He wasn’t safe. Her only comfort was that Agent Fisk was there, guarding him. Fisk would have tailed Thomas. The FBI agent would protect him—maybe even help him come to terms with his poisonous memories—better than Sophie could.

She wandered out to the boathouse. Perhaps Guy sensed her helplessness and misery, because he didn’t start and go wary when she entered. The fox had been snuggled into a nest of blankets near his feeding dishes. When she sank down onto the dusty concrete floor of the dim boathouse and began to cry, the fox stood and began to inch toward her slowly.

The little animal finally stopped, his nose just inches from her knee. Laughter mixed with her sorrow when Guy lowered his head, allowing her to pet his neck and rub just behind

his ears.

He backed away after several seconds, but Sophie had never appreciated a gesture of sympathy more.

It gave her the strength to stand and brush off her dusty shorts.

“It’s going to be okay,” she murmured to Guy, attempting to brace herself. “It’s not over yet.”

A shadow moved across the sunlight shining through the opened door. She saw Guy flinch. Sophie started to turn.

Someone—someone large—came up behind her and pinned her right arm against her ribs and pushed her body weight back against his solid length, setting her off balance. The hard, ungiving bone of a forearm pressed against her trachea.

“It might be over sooner than you think,” a man rasped near her ear.

Thomas peered through the dusty window of the boathouse, struggling to see inside the shadowed interior. He saw a movement—Sophie’s pale T-shirt as she jerked in Newt Garnier’s hold. The dark outline of Garnier’s gun showed up starkly against Sophie’s belly. The sight sent a jolt of electricity through him. But what he heard made it worse. Garnier spoke in a low, rough voice while Sophie made choking sounds as she struggled.

He knew Garnier would just as soon strangle her than leave the evidence of a bullet behind.

Spots began to appear before her eyes. The intruder was cutting off her oxygen supply with his strangling hold. Just when she thought she would lose consciousness, however, he lessened the hold slightly, restoring a minimal amount of air to her burning lungs.

He began to question her again.

“Where’s Nicasio?” Sophie felt him press the hard barrel of a gun between her ribs. “Better tell me, Blondie, or I’ll shoot you point-blank in the gut. Very painful way to die, and it takes forever. You’d die out here all alone—”

A loud thwacking sound exploded into her ears. The hold on her trachea lessened, but then she was being pulled backward by a heavy weight. She twisted to get out of the man’s hold, throwing her elbow into his ribs. He cursed viciously. Just as she was lunging for freedom, he grabbed at her hair and pulled her back once again.

Sophie found herself staring at Thomas’s rigid face. Her heart leapt in her chest at the unexpected, welcome sight of him. Dread settled when she recalled the man’s gun. Thomas held one of the paddles from the canoe in both hands, his biceps flexing tightly beneath the arms of his T-shirt. He looked furious, but focused; his glare not on Sophie but on the man who held her and pressed the barrel of his gun to Sophie’s temple.

“You shoulda hit me harder, Nicasio,” the man behind her taunted. Her positioning was different than before, and she had a little more room to maneuver. She glanced up to see the face of the man who held her and saw the profile of a man in his fifties with steel-gray hair, a rough-hewn face, and a swollen nose. From her angle, she could see that blood trickled out of his right ear, a result of what had sounded like a vicious blow of the paddle against the intruder’s head.

Sophie also noticed that despite the man’s bravado, his speech was slurred. The blow to his head was having an effect, even if the man didn’t realize it. He blinked several times, as though trying to clear his vision.

“Most men’s heads aren’t quite so thick, Garnier,” Thomas muttered. His eyelids were narrowed so that Sophie could see nothing but two crescents of gleaming dark green. His focus on Garnier seemed absolute. “Let go of her. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

Sophie gritted her teeth in pain when the man shoved the barrel of the gun farther into her skull.

“Who says she’s got nuthin’ to do with this? She was here, wasn’t she? She got in my way. Just like your ma did all those years ago, huh Nicasio? I didn’t go there for her. Joseph just wanted James Nicasio dead. But seein’ as how she was stupid enough to throw herself in front of Nicasio, it was no sweat off my back to do her like I did your dad. Now . . . drop dat paddle, or I’ll do the same to this little girl—”

Several things happened at once. Garnier tried to shake Sophie in front of him for emphasis, but he stumbled slightly on his feet in doing so. Sophie seized the moment and put all of her energy into another backward jab with her elbow. She heard an animal growl from below and Garnier squalled.

Apparently, Guy had chosen the precise same moment to attack and bit Garnier’s leg.

“Don’t move, Garnier!” Fisk barked. The agent swung into the doorway, his weapon drawn and aimed near Sophie’s head.

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