Page 35 of Ozzie

Harding shakes her head. “He did. I have the bank records to prove it. And how the hell is he going to pick us up?” She motions to the street littered with abandonedcars. “No one is driving in this.” She tosses JB’s phone into the snow. “We need to go now.”

Instead of staying on the road we’re on, we weave through narrow streets, turning back and forth until we hit a main road littered with even more abandoned cars. Harding checks the doors of several cars until one opens.

“In here!” she says.

Fortunately, it’s a van, so we can file into the back. I glance back before I get in, relieved to see the heavy snow covering our footprints.

“Stay out of sight of the windows,” she says to JB. She turns to Lightning and me. “He not only sent his location, but he told the guy we are heading west to an airport.”

Which means we can no longer head to that airport, and we just walked an hour for nothing.

“I’m going to call my contact and see if we can unfuck ourselves here.”

She puts her phone to her ear. Then proceeds to speak in another language. Once her call is done, she pockets her phone.

“You speak Russian?” I ask.

“That was Romanian. And I have a new plan. The good news is that it’s a shorter walk. The bad news is we have to cross a bridge and will have no cover if someone thinks to look there.”

I shrug. “We’ve survived worse odds.”

JB shivers. “Let’s go. I need to move. I’m fucking freezing.”

“Not so fast. We have to stay hidden for a while untilwhoever you called gives up searching this area,” Harding says.

“How long will that take?” he asks.

Harding shrugs. “Could be a few hours. Could be all day.”

The kid’s stomach growls. “I can’t sit here all day. I need food.”

I pull the two protein bars from my pants pocket and break each in half. “Here, we each get half.”

“You’ve been holding out?” JB asks. “What else you got?”

“Nothing. And I haven’t been holding out. We didn’t need it until now.”

The kid scarfs down the bar like he hasn’t eaten in days.

“Do you hear that?” Lightning asks.

We all go silent. In the distance is the roar of an engine. It grows louder.

“Sounds like a snowmobile,” I say.

“Stay away from the windows, and everyone remain silent,” Harding says mostly to JB.

We all hunch down as two vehicles pass by. Harding rushes to the front of the van. Then she makes her way back.

“Two snowmobiles, each carrying two men. They aren’t checking the cars. Yet.”

“Who owns snowmobiles here?” JB asks.

“There’s a ski resort a couple of hours away. They could be from there,” Lightning says.

“They’re coming back,” Harding says. “Let’s get those machines.”

When Harding gets that look in her eye, there’s nostopping her. Forget that we have no weapons and those men are likely heavily armed. I move up to the front but stay low. I see what she means.

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