Page 43 of Outlaw Ridge: Ryker
Ryker kept one hand on the wheel, the evidence bag containing the phone resting on the console. The silence was familiar, but heavy. Emma sat beside him, scanning the tree line, her posture tense, alert.
Then she stiffened.
“Stop,” she blurted.
He hit the brakes without hesitation, bringing the cruiser to a fast, gritty halt. Emma leaned forward, her eyes locked on something just beyond the trees. Ryker followed her gaze and froze.
A man stood in the woods, half-shrouded by the sparse underbrush and winter-gray trunks. Still. Watching.
He wore a dark coat, a knit cap or hood pulled low over his head. From this distance, it was hard to make out details, but the build was too familiar. Broad shoulders. That particular stance. Like someone who thought he owned whatever ground he was standing on.
Then the clouds above shifted, just slightly, letting through a sliver of sun. Light filtered through the trees and struck the man’s face.
Just enough.
Emma whispered it before Ryker could. “Ethan.”
Ryker narrowed his eyes. “Maybe. Or it’s a mask again.” Just like the one on the dummy in the uniform.
The man turned and vanished into the trees, quick and deliberate, slipping behind the underbrush like he’d rehearsed the escape.
But she was already leaning forward, eyes locked on the tree line. “We have to go after him.”
Ryker hesitated, grip tightening on the wheel. His instincts were already firing off warnings, this could be a trap, a lure designed to pull them off the road, separate them, expose them. But it could also behim.Ethan. Or whoever the hell had been taunting them with threats and bodies and masks.
Their chance.
He cursed under his breath and pulled the cruiser off the side of the road, the tires bumping over frozen earth and wet gravel.
Please don’t let this be a bad mistake.
The second he shifted into park, Emma was out the door, and Ryker followed, his weapon drawn, boots hitting the ground with a crunch as they cut into the trees.
The woods swallowed the man’s trail almost instantly, but Ryker pushed forward, heart pounding, eyes scanning every shadow.
This time, they were close. And he wasn’t letting the bastard slip away without a fight.
Ryker moved through the trees with Emma beside him, each step measured, every sound amplified in the silence. A bird called out somewhere overhead. Branches crackled underfoot. But nothing human. Nothing familiar.
He kept scanning the trees ahead, eyes cutting through shafts of weak morning light. “Anything?” he asked in a low voice.
Emma shook her head.
Then she paused, crouched near a patch of damp earth. “Footprints,” she said.
Ryker stepped in beside her. Sure enough, mud pressed down in the shape of a boot tread, leading deeper into the woods.
He took out his phone and snapped a photo, making sure to catch the angle and depth. “We’ll get CSIs out here to cast it,” he muttered, filing the mental note.
They followed the prints in silence until the trees began to thin again, the brush breaking up just enough to reveal a narrow gravel road on the other side.
Then,an engine.
Low. Gritty. Fading fast.
Ryker and Emma broke into a sprint, weaving through the last few trees just in time to see the tail end of a black truck tearing off down the road. No plate. No decals.
Just speed and distance.
