He knew the only official security in the small hospital was at the front entrance, so he didn’t bother alerting hospital staff. He got hold of Ethan three seconds later.
“…This nurse, Ethan, I swear to you she had a five-o’clock shadow. I know Agent Savich told you Grace was probably here. I know it sounds weird, but do you think Nurse Lapley was somehow Grace?”
Ethan thought his brains were going to scramble. “I suppose it had to be Grace. He got in through hospital security disguised as a nurse, only I guess he couldn’t quite make it realistic enough…A bad disguise? I sure hope so, because if it wasn’t a disguise…no I don’t want to think about that. Another couple of minutes and you would have suspected, but Grace was fast, got into the room and pulled off Blessed’s blindfold, and that’s why you don’t remember what happened…. Get all our people out to my place. That’s where Joanna and Autumn are. He’ll head there, you know it. I’m on my way right now.” A moment later, Ethan was back on his cell phone, and Joanna’s phone was ringing.
“Hello?”
“Joanna, this is Ethan. Blessed’s escaped, with the help of his brother Grace. Get Autumn out of there right now. Drive back toward town. I’ll meet you halfway.”
She didn’t say a word, punched off.
Five minutes later when he saw her rental car barreling toward him he honked and pulled his Rubicon over on the shoulder.
Joanna’s first words were “I should have killed him. Dammit, I should have killed him.”
Autumn was white-faced and silent, plastered to her mother’s side. “Get in.” He threw the passenger door open and Joanna lifted Autumn inside, jumped in beside her. “I don’t have a gun. We just ran.”
“I do; don’t worry.” That was about the stupidest thing he’d ever said. “There’s a rifle in the box under the front seat. I’ll take that; you can have my Beretta.”
He patted Autumn’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, kiddo.”
If Autumn didn’t believe him, he didn’t blame her. He pulled his Beretta off his waist clip, handed it butt-first to Joanna.
“Where are we going?”
He saw an ancient Ford Escort in his rearview mirror, closing fast. He didn’t have to see for sure who was in the car. It was Blessed and Grace. Had to be.
“Hang on,” he said, and pressed down hard on the accelerator.
The Rubicon pulled away smoothly on the windy two-lane highway, and soon they were far enough ahead so Blessed couldn’t see them around the turns. Ethan pulled off fast onto a potholed fire road that led straight into Titus Hitch Wilderness, not the front entrance with the ranger kiosk but a narrow dirty path barely wide enough for the Rubicon. It came to an abrupt stop at the Sweet Onion River. If they were lucky, it would take Blessed and Grace a good long time to find out where they’d gone. But they would find them, Ethan knew it.
“Let’s go.”
Joanna said, “You know where we are; that’s good. Where to?”
“We’re going to head on foot into the Titus Hitch Wilderness. We can’t go back where we came from, and going forward is better than staying here. I know these woods well, know a good spot to stop.”
“Ethan, what are we going to do in the wilderness?” Autumn asked him.
He looked at the mother, then at the daughter, and said, “We’re going hiking.”
He pulled his bolt-action Remington 700 out of his gun box. It was a gift from his father when he was twelve years old—to make a hunter out of him, his father had said. Ethan had learned to shoot the bolt action, loved the rifle as a matter of fact, but he hadn’t stayed with hunting. He preferred to paint animals and take their pictures rather than shoot them.
He grabbed two boxes of boattail bullets. He had only forty rounds. He had to be careful. He said, more to himself than to Joanna, “The clip is already loaded—ten rounds, so that gives us fifty rounds.” He looked up at her. “This baby is slow, but it’s really accurate at distance. Here’s two magazines, Joanna, fifteen rounds each, for the Beretta.”
He thought about setting up a blind, shooting Blessed from a good hundred yards away, far enough away to be safe. But what about Grace? Was he good at disguises, or was he something else entirely? Ethan was very afraid he knew the answer to that.
He walked to the back of his truck, opened a metal storage trunk, and hoisted on a heavy backpack. He passed a smaller one to Joanna. “Okay, guys, let’s get out of here.”