* * *
AMBER FOUGHT DOWN her panic and paddled her canoe toward shore. The pilot in that fancy little green-and-white plane had waved at her. But that didn’t necessarily mean that he’d recognized her. Maybe he was the friendly type. It wasn’t like there was an airport in Mystic Glades, so he was probably just a stranger passing overhead. She’d hidden out here for over two years without anyone finding her. There was no reason to fear the worst now.
Tell that to her shaking hands.
She reached the shore and realized she could no longer hear the plane’s engine. The noise had stopped suddenly instead of fading away. A sickening feeling shot through her stomach. She hopped out of the canoe and ran around a clump of trees to look up at the sky in the direction where the plane had gone. It was a small spec now, probably more than a mile away. As she watched, the wings dipped back and forth and the plane dropped alarmingly low. Then it lifted, as if it were gliding and had caught a rush of air, before tilting crazily and disappearing behind a line of trees.
She clenched her hands together, waiting for the plane to rise above the trees again. Come on, come on. A full minute passed. Nothing. No plane. No sounds but the usual insects and frogs that created a constant low buzz that rarely ever stopped. He couldn’t have crashed. There would have been smoke, wouldn’t there? But if he hadn’t crashed, she’d have seen the plane again.
Maybe he was one of the drug runners who used the Everglades as their own private highway to ferry their poison from city to city. But usually they used boats to get through the canals. And the plane she’d seen couldn’t land on the water. It was sleek and expensive looking, like a minijet with a propeller—without a pontoon in sight.
She started forward, then stopped. No. Don’t try to help him. People who can afford planes like that don’t just disappear. Someone will notice that he’s missing. They’ll send a search party. At the most, he’ll be out here a couple of hours while they figure out how to reach the crash site.
If he’d even survived the crash.
Outsiders would need guides through the swamp. Guides meant hiring locals, most likely from Mystic Glades, which meant soon the place would be crawling with people who would recognize her.
She ran to the canoe. Grasping the sides, she put one foot on the bottom, ready to shove off with the other.
What if he survived the crash? What if he’s hurt? What if he’s hurt so badly that he needs immediate care?
She couldn’t help him. That wasn’t something she did anymore. She’d learned that lesson the most painful way possible. A familiar stab of grief and guilt threatened to overwhelm her. But she ruthlessly locked those useless emotions away.
Okay, assume he’s not hurt. He can find his own way to Mystic Glades. But he could just as easily wander into the swamp and get lost. He could stumble into a nest of alligators or step on a snake. The Glades might be beautiful but they were dangerous, teeming with wildlife, emphasis on wild. Only those who understood its dangers—and respected them—could avoid them and thrive out here.
He’s not your responsibility.
But he’s still a human being.
Her shoulders slumped. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know he was there. She had to at least check on him.
She stepped out of the canoe and tugged it up onto a muddy rise beneath some trees. Too bad he’d gone down in one of the areas unreachable by boat. She had a good, long hike ahead of her. She grabbed her walking stick, double-checked that her hunting knife was sheathed at her waist and then headed out. She hoped she wasn’t making a horrible mistake. But, then again, no mistake could be worse than the one she’d already made.
Dex drew a shaky breath. He was still breathing— definitely a plus. His heart was still beating, adrenaline making it pound so hard it seemed to be slamming against his rib cage. And the plane wasn’t on fire—yet. Two more pluses. But the big minus was that he was hanging upside down, strapped to what was left of his seat, with jet fuel dripping down the ruined fuselage onto his shirt. And he was pretty sure he’d cut his right leg, since sharp pain shot up his calf every time he tried to maneuver his foot out of the tangled mass of metal above him.
His main concern was the jet fuel. The noxious smell made it difficult to breathe. But more worrisome was that if any of the fuel made contact with the hot engine, he was going to go up like a human torch. He had to get out of the plane and out of his fuel-soaked shirt.
Without taking off his seat belt, he couldn’t reach his trapped leg to free it. But he didn’t want to unclip the belt and fall to the ground. No telling what damage that might do to his leg or what he might land on. He tilted his head up—or down, depending on how he looked at it—to see what was beneath him.
The plane had gone sideways and then turned over as it went down. A massive tree had peeled the top back like a can of tuna before dumping him and the Cessna onto the ground below. He supposed he should be grateful to that tree, since it had slowed his descent and saved him from diving nose first into the mud. The thick, now-broken branches had cushioned the fall and were now suspending the cockpit a few feet above the mud. All in all it was a miracle that he’d survived.
The muddy grass a few feet beneath his head appeared to be clear of debris. If he could work his leg free he could drop down without doing too much more damage. He used his free leg to kick at the metal trapping his right foot. Once, twice, three times. Another sharp pain in his calf was the price of freedom as the metal snapped and broke away. He pulled his knees up to his chest, put his left hand over his head to protect himself, then released his seat belt. He dropped and rolled, coming to rest on his backside.
He hurriedly shed his shirt and tossed it toward the plane as he shoved himself to his feet. After a quick look around to assess his surroundings, which basically consisted of cypress trees and saw grass, he clopped through the semi-firm ground to the one body of water he could see—a large puddle. Whenever it rained he imagined this whole area would probably be underwater. Right now it was a mixture of soft dirt and soggy bog. He dropped to his knees and sniffed the water to make sure it wasn’t jet fuel. The putrid smell wasn’t pleasant but at least it was biological, not man-made.
Hating the necessity of it, he cupped the water and used it to scrub his arms and chest and as much of his back as he could reach, ridding himself of the dangerous jet fuel that had coated his torso. Then he sat and yanked his pant leg up to see what, if anything, he could do about his injuries. Blood smeared his skin, but after washing it away he wasn’t all that worried. The bleeding had mostly stopped and the cuts didn’t look too deep. Except for one small puncture wound, mostly his leg had just been scraped, no worse than skinning a knee.
He dropped his pant leg into place. Now that he was out of danger of being roasted alive, time for his second priority. Getting the heck out of Dodge. He pulled his cell phone out of the clip on his waistband and sent up a silent prayer that the phone wasn’t broken as he typed his pass code to unlock it. But a few minutes later, after turning in every direction, holding the phone up above his head, then down toward the ground, the screen still showed the same thing.
Zero bars. No service. Useless.
He shoved it in the holder. Might as well face what he’d so far been avoiding. He drew his gaze up to his plane and groaned. Even though he’d known it was beyond being salvaged from what he’d glimpsed while hanging from the pilot’s seat, seeing the whole thing now was devastating.
The fixed landing gear pointed up at the sky. One wing was completely sheared off. He didn’t see it anywhere. The other, still attached, was snared in a pile of broken branches. The tail had snapped off and had landed in the mud behind the fuselage. He shook his head in disgust. Not because of the money this would cost him. He could easily absorb the loss. But to see a piece of beautiful machinery destroyed like that was akin to a Monet being wadded up