Page 95 of Return of the Spider

My survival instincts told me to get my gun up and fire at him.

But his bow was at full draw, and I was holding my gun waist high, muzzle pointed down. Still looking at that broadhead, I tossed the gun and said, “I’m a cop, Eamon. Just wanted to talk—”

Diggs squinted. He made a shrugging motion with his right shoulder.

I caught a flash of yellow a split second before his arrow hit me square in the chest and sent me staggering. My feet got tangled and I fell.

The back of my head struck something hard, and everything went wavy and then black.

CHAPTER

78

I don’t know howlong I was out. A minute? Ninety seconds?

All I know is when I came to, I felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. Eamon Diggs’s arrow jutted from the low center of my chest, that nasty broadhead embedded in my body armor; the shaft and yellow vanes danced above me as I struggled for air.

“Goddamn it!” Diggs cursed. “Goddamn it to hell!”

I looked up to see him still twenty feet up but free of his safety line and getting off his stand, arms wrapped around the tree, his thighs and upper body scraping against the bark as his right foot groped for a climbing peg screwed into the trunk.

He found the steel step and came down the tree, still cursing, his bow hanging from a hook at his left hip.

I heard Maria’s voice in my head:He’s going to kill you, Alex. The white-van psycho is going to come down and finish you off.

Dazed, struggling to breathe, I knew I had to get to my gun. I started to roll over and get to my knees, but the nock of the arrow in my chest snagged the damp ground and hindered me.

I grunted against it, feeling the bruise building beneath my armor, and gasped against the pain; the aluminum shaft bent and I got to my knees. My head was too foggy for me to stand. I started crawling along the trail when Diggs was halfway down the tree.

I saw my pistol on the other side of the path, its handle sticking out from the leaves. The throbbing in my chest was so acute, I did not know if I could go on.

But then I saw Maria and Damon in my mind, and the pain was overwhelmed by my love for them and for my unborn child and the knowledge of how crushed they would be if I died here in the woods. I crawled faster, ignoring the arrow flopping and catching on the roots and sticks under me, my focus on my weapon, now fifteen feet away, and now ten.

I caught a flash of something in my peripheral vision and could not help but glance over. Diggs was almost at the bottom of his tree.

Get to the gun! Get to the gun, Alex!With Maria’s voice screaming in my head, I scrambled forward and lunged for the pistol at the same time I heard the thud of Diggs’s boots hitting the ground. I got hung up on the bent arrow for a second before it snapped.

But the holdup was enough to leave me four inches short of my weapon.

“Don’t! Don’t, goddamn it!” Diggs yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”

I looked over and saw him standing there not fifteen feet from me, his bow raised and drawn, another nasty broadhead nocked and aimed right at me. I glanced back at my gun and knew I could not reach it before he shot.

This close, he could shoot me in the throat. No armor would save me there.

But before I could raise my hands, I heard John yell behind me, “Police, Diggs! Drop the bow, or I will shoot!”

Diggs glanced over. I peered back and saw Sampson in the trail about fifty feet away, crouched in a combat-shooting stance, weapon up, ready to fire.

“Goddamn police,” Diggs said in a resigned voice. He lowered the bow and tossed it and the arrow aside.

He gazed at me and said, his voice shaking, “I swear to Jesus Hisself, man, I did not mean to shoot you.”

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79

Sampson told diggs tolie facedown in the leaves, fingers laced behind his head. A beaten man, he complied.