Page 45 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

His flashlight’s beam pierced the darkness.

Haloed in a wash of silvery light, a woman slumped, cross-legged, against a boulder.

At first, she seemed not to notice the light at all.

Her head hung. Her hair, matted with grime, fell in a thick curtain and hid her face.

She was bundled in a tatty man’s sheepskin coat and an ill-fitting assemblage of odds and ends, as if snatched at random and from whatever was lying around.

Even her boots were different colors: one brown, one black.

There was also something very wrong with her.

Her arms weren’t still. They moved in restless, herky-jerky movements.

Her fingers, painted a dull copper with tacky blood, twitched, cleaned into fists, then spasmed opened again.

Every now and again, her head wrenched itself over to one side and then the other and so violently her hair swished and swayed to one side and the bones of her neck crackled.

A man was draped in her lap. He wasn’t moving, although Poya saw his chest struggle up and then collapse.

So, he was breathing. His head was flung back far enough that the knob of his Adam’s apple stood out, but the curtain of the woman’s hair and the welter of shadows in the poor light hid his features from view.

If the splotch on the man’s coat and puddle of congealing blood on the stone floor were any indication, at least one of those shots from that morning had found its mark.

They both smelled very bad, as if they’d taken a tumble into a sewage ditch.

Unlike the woman, however, the man wasn’t twitching or moving.

But…Poya squinted…there was something resting in his right hand: a small device, boxy and black and with a short antenna.

A phone? Poya didn’t know. But the other weird thing: there was something familiar about him.

As if I know him.

“Hello?” The word came out as a whisper. Swallowing back a lump of fear, Poya shuffled a step closer. “Hello,” he said, more loudly, “can you?—”

“Ah!” Gasping, the woman reared back. Her left arm flew to shield her eyes and her features went taut, her lips skinning back from her teeth in a ferocious snarl.

She fumbled for something lying on the stone next to her right thigh, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate.

The fingers splayed and kinked, and her right elbow jack-knifed. Something clattered on stone. “Gaah!”

“No, no, it’s okay!” Poya shifted the flashlight away from her distorted features. What was wrong with this woman? Maybe she was afraid of his hammer? Slipping that under his belt, he patted the air with his free hand. “I’m sorry. Don’t be afraid, I won’t?—”

“Bwah!” Her panicked eyes were wide as full moons and she was twitching all over, her neck writhing and jaws working. Spit foamed on her lips. As she jerked and churned, the man on her lap flopped and groaned.

“Gah!” she spluttered. “Ung!”

What was she saying? He couldn’t handle this on his own. He would have to go to Amu and confess. If he was lucky, Amu might only beat him later.

Because if I go, if I get help, I’ll lose this place.

But there was a life at stake. Two lives, assuming the man didn’t die before he got back.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, backing up as the woman pawed at the stone. What was she doing? He didn’t want to turn his back on her. “I’m going, but I’ll be back. I’m going to get?—”

The rest fizzled on his tongue—and not only because she had managed to raise what lay by her side. Nor was it only because he was staring at the business end of a short, black, double-barreled shotgun.

He stopped talking because now he had a very clear view of the man’s face.

“Mr. White?” Poya said. “Mr. White ?”