Page 4 of Sniper's Pride

The idea of a video made her laugh a little. She already knew what her mother would do in this kind of situation. Country folks weren’t society folks, and McKennas were a whole different level still. Back in the day, Rose Ellen had reacted to Mariah’s father’s infidelities by throwing his drunk, cheating butt out. She’d never let him back in.

That was when it came to her.

It wasn’t the family legend of her mother tossing her naked father out of the house at gunpoint, then all his belongings after him, though that was one of Mariah’s most tender childhood memories. It had to do with all those videos she’d watched so obsessively over the past ten years. Her own private version of higher education.

And then it clicked. Just the trickle of a memory of one of those late nights she’d sat up, pretending not to wonder where her husband was—or who he might be with, which was better than when she hadn’t needed to wonder because he’d made sure she knew. She’d clicked through video after video on her phone, careful to leave all the lights out in the bedroom so she could pretend she was sleeping and David’s spies could report back to him accordingly.

She’d found herself watching an unhinged conspiracy theorist ranting about satanic signs he alone had found in a children’s television program. Maybe she’d found a little comfort in the fact that there were people out there a whole lot crazier than a lonely Buckhead trophy wife whose husband openly hated her. She might have been the one staying in a marriage gone bad, but at least she wasn’t broadcasting her every paranoid notion with a video camera.

But the man had said something interesting at the endof his garbled insistence that the end was nigh, and in puppet form. He’d mentioned a group of superhero-like men off in the wilderness somewhere. Like the A-Team, Mariah had thought at the time. But not illegal. Or faked for television.

Mariah cracked open her laptop now and got to work. It took a while for her to find her way back to that odd video. And yet another long while to try to figure out whether anything in that video was real.

But eventually she found her way to a stark, minimalist website that had a name emblazoned across the top of the page.Alaska Force.And a choice between a telephone number and an email address. Nothing more.

Mariah didn’t overthink it. She typed out an email, short and sweet.

My husband is trying to kill me. He’s already come close twice, and if he gets a third try, he’ll succeed. I know he will.

Help me.

Two

As soon as she hit send, Mariah felt silly.

When was she going to learn? There was no use believing in things that might as well be magic. Fairy tales were fairy tales, whether she was telling herself lies about Prince Charming in a backcountry diner or larger-than-life, military-trained superheroes who could save a damsel in distress.

Even if such men existed, why would they saveher?

“You got yourself into this mess,” she told herself sternly, the way she knew her own mother would. With absolutely no sympathy, only that hard certainty that Mariah was going to figure it out herself. Because she had to. “You’re going to have to find a way to get yourself out.”

Mariah sat there in front of her laptop, clicking around aimlessly until she found herself on a crafting blog, frowning with great concern over something calledmindful making.One more thing she wasn’t doing, apparently. She concentrated on her breathing. On the factshecouldbreathe. She reminded herself that she was alive, and that was what mattered.

It could have been hours or mere minutes. She couldn’t tell. But when her email beeped to indicate an incoming message, she jumped like she’d been shot. Her heart clattered, the way it kept doing, as if her natural state these days was panic. When her airway didn’t close up tight as a fist—panic wasn’t anaphylactic shock—she took a few more deep breaths and made herself click over to her email, certain she would find yet another mailer from some clothing company.

But it wasn’t one of the approximately nine thousand online catalogs that were emailed to her daily, urging her to buy more stuff. It was an email from that same address she’d written to earlier. It was direct. To the point.

Almost terse.

Get to Juneau, Alaska, in time to catch the Friday morning ferry to Grizzly Harbor.

If you are not on the Friday ferry, consider this offer rescinded. Further communications will be ignored.

If you can’t leave your current situation unassisted, advise us and we will consider options.

Mariah could hear her heart drumming in her temples and the same kick in her throat, her gut, even her feet—but she knew it wasn’t panic or shellfish this time. It felt a lot more like relief. Possibly even hope.

No wonder she didn’t recognize it. It had been a long, long time since she’d felt anything similar.

I’ll be there,she typed in reply, hoping no one could read her giddiness through the screen.

So much giddiness, in fact, that she had to sit there a moment, in case moving too fast made her dizzy.

When she shut her laptop, she felt that same, drumming sense of purpose she’d felt when the McKenna spirit in her had dusted itself off and marched her straight out of that house she’d shared with David and the staff he apparently sampled at will.

Mariah had been out of the hospital for a total of five hours when she left her apartment again.

She tried to convince herself she was on an adventure. Not a life-or-death race toward the unknown thanks to a random email. Not because she was afraid she would die before the week was out, accidentally eating something dressed up with essence of crab, or eating nothing at all out of fear and starving herself to death.

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