Page 5 of Sniper's Pride

Whatever waited for her on the other side of that email didn’t matter, because it wouldn’t be David.

Mariah could handle pretty much anything but another dose of David.

She raced downstairs, ignoring how terrible she felt, and got into her car. She checked the back and then tossed her bag on the passenger seat beside her. And then she drove, making her way through the typical Atlanta traffic until she hit I-85. She pointed the car north and east, heading for the coast.

You might feel lethargic,the doctor had told her. It was a whole lot more like being run over by a very heavy truck. Twice. But she could drive her car, so she did.

David had always mocked the thrillers she liked to read, but Mariah put them to good use that day. She deliberately laid a trail. She drove through the Georgia countryside up into South Carolina, then continued straight into Virginia, filling up her car along the way andbuying snacks she knew no one could have doctored. She continued out to the coast, and some ten hours after she’d gotten that email, locked herself in a motel room with a lurid green carpet and a view of the Virginia Beach Boardwalk. And the ocean beyond it, which she could hear but not see.

She paid for three days on her credit card but left the next morning, after she’d fallen asleep exhausted and woken up too many times with her heart pounding, certain that someone was in the room with her. Before she climbed back into her car, she took her coffee down to the water’s edge and stuck her feet in the ocean. She might not have felt quite like herself just yet, but she was out of Atlanta.

Whatever else happened, she’d made it out in one piece. And for the moment, anyway, with her cell phone firmly switched off, no one on earth knew where she was.

She drove back inland, then turned north, leaving a trail of receipts along the I-95 corridor from Richmond through Baltimore, then on into New Jersey. She crossed the bridge over the Hudson River, sneaking glimpses of New York City standing proud in the spring sunshine, then drove on to Connecticut. She stopped in a town called Fairfield that she’d located on the map the night before, found another hotel, then settled in for the night.

She ordered room service, deliberately. She went online and bought a plane ticket for the following evening, from New York to Athens, Greece, because she’d always wanted to see Greece. The following morning, she bought a one-way Metro-North train ticket back down to New York City.

But she didn’t get on the train. Instead, she got in the car again and drove up the coast to Providence, RhodeIsland. She stayed over that night in a motel on the outskirts of the city that took cash and didn’t ask for ID. She took out the cash maximum from ATM machines every day—because she was sure David would cut her off at any moment, the way he liked to. And she needed more time to access the accounts he didn’t know about, which she hadn’t set up with a debit card. Early on Thursday morning, she drove her car to a different hotel in the center of Providence and left it there.

Then she got on a bus to Boston Logan Airport. She bought herself a ticket to Juneau, Alaska, with her cash, and boarded it a little before noon.

Mariah was feeling pretty pleased with herself by the time she landed in Juneau that night.

Spring in Atlanta had already been warm. All the flowers in bloom and temperatures in the seventies. Mariah had only taken clothes appropriate for that same kind of weather, in case whoever would be breaking in to her apartment would take stock of her wardrobe and be able to figure out where she was headed by what she took with her. Luckily, she’d had a layover in Seattle, and she’d outfitted herself there for whatever spring looked like so much farther north.

Friday morning, as she found her way to the only ferry that headed to Grizzly Harbor—a village on an island out in the moody Alaskan sea—it was cold. Crisp and clean and almost unbelievably beautiful, but cold.

Colder than Mariah had ever been in her life, though she tried to wrap the woolly things she’d bought in Seattle around her twice to combat it.

The chill in the air was sharp and sweet, and it slapped her awake.

It felt like hope.

When she finally boarded the ferry, she took a seat near a window and tried to take it all in. She’d spent the better part of the last week on interstate highways or in motels nearby. She’d seen a lot of truck stops. Grimy fast food restaurant bathrooms with that cloying, astringent smell to mask the more unpleasant smells beneath. More construction than should have been possible, all kinds of traffic choking the different eastern cities, and, apart from the glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean she’d had here and there, there had been tarmac, concrete, and steel as far as the eye could see.

Alaska was like an antidote.

There were mountains everywhere, some draped in white with a comforting canopy of dark green pines and imposing rock faces. Some pasted across the horizon, so stark and white she’d assumed they were clouds at first. Everywhere she looked, mountains sloped down into the mysterious blue inlets and sounds, beckoning and beautiful.

It had been downright cold outside at the ferry terminal, despite the sun. In the course of the ride across the water, with stops at tiny Alaskan villages bristling with the masts of boats and the hint of wood smoke, there was rain. Then fog. Then more sun when Mariah least expected it, doing its best to burn the fog away.

When the ferry finally reached Grizzly Harbor, Mariah moved to the outer deck with some of the other passengers, smiling her apologies when a woman with a young boy bumped into her at the railing. She felt the wind on her face, a sharp slap that left salt behind. The water below the ferry boat looked dark in the fog, andshe could smell the rich scent of ocean life. It was the same as it had been in Virginia Beach—only deeper. Wilder and unspoiled by high-rises and too many people.

David had taken her to exotic places—or, at least, they had been exotic to a girl from the middle of nowhere, who’d gone nowhere and seen nothing. New York City. Paris. A yacht on the Caribbean.

But she’d never seen anything quite like Grizzly Harbor. The spring sunshine danced in and around the clouds, lighting up the hardy fishing village, which clung to the steep sides of another imposing mountain. All the buildings clustered together there, above the water’s edge, were painted in different bright colors, most of them peeling and weathered—though that in no way took away from their appeal. There were boats at the docks, pleasure boats and fishing vessels alike. Mariah had never given Alaska a whole lot of thought, but she discovered it looked exactly the way she’d imagined it would. All it needed was a moose cantering down from the woods or a bear roaring up on one of the narrow streets, and the image would be complete.

She was smiling to herself as she walked off the ferry, swept up with the rest of the passengers getting off here. The whole town had come out to meet the boat and were applying themselves to helping unload supplies or greeting returning locals. Maybe everyone was as charmed as she was, she thought, as a bearded man in made-to-order Alaskan flannel jostled her slightly as they disembarked, as if he were rushing to get out into all that goodness.

Mariah couldn’t blame him. It was like walking into a postcard.

A postcard that highlighted the adorable wooden boardwalks that made up some of the streets climbing upthe hill—as well as what had to be the most lethal man she’d ever laid eyes on in her life.

She could have sworn he hadn’t been there a moment earlier. He stood apart from the rest of the crowd gathered at the dock, his back to a weathered shack Mariah assumed belonged to the ferry company. Or maybe it was for fishermen, given the number of fishing boats she could see in the harbor.

But she was only looking at the shack becausehewas in front of it. And he was... too much to take in.

Too much of too many things Mariah didn’t know how to feel.

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