Lawman On The Hunt. Cindi Myers

pockets. He found a wallet with three different driver’s licenses, identifying him variously as Bradley Simons, Brent Sampson and Bartholomew Spietzer. He had a couple of credit cards and twenty-three dollars in cash. Travis replaced the wallet and riffled through his other pockets, coming up with a pack of breath mints, some change, a Ruger .45-caliber pistol and an extra clip of ammo, and finally, in his front jeans pocket, a cell phone.

      “He has a phone,” he said.

      Leah knelt a short distance away. “Can you call someone to come and get us?”

      He tapped the phone to waken it, relieved to discover Buck hadn’t bothered locking it, then punched in the direct number to his supervisor, Special Agent in Charge Ted Blessing. The screen almost immediately went black. He frowned and checked the display again. “We don’t have a signal,” he said.

      Leah sat back on her heels. “I should have thought of that,” she said. “Wilderness areas don’t have cell towers. Plus all these trees...” She tilted her head back to regard the pines and firs that towered overhead.

      “Maybe we can climb to a better signal.” He pulled the water bottle from the pack and drank deeply, then offered some to her.

      She shook her head. “I’m okay. But I’d like to know if there’s any food in there.”

      “We should move to a safer location before we check it out,” he said. He stood and shouldered the pack. “Whatever is in here, it’s heavy enough.” Anything they didn’t absolutely need, he would discard at the first opportunity. They had to move quickly, and that meant not taking anything that would weigh them down.

      He led the way back into deeper woods—not taking the path they had followed to get here, but moving, he hoped, closer to the road. Leah followed, saying nothing. After a while, he noticed she still carried the two empty soda cans. “We might need them,” she said when she saw him looking at them.

      “Good idea.” She had come up with a lot of good ideas so far during this ordeal. Another civilian might have been a burden, but she was turning out to be a capable partner. As much as he had loved her before, he wasn’t sure he had ever respected her the way he did now.