From the way Grubbs’s leg hung, it appeared to be broken below the knee. Every move looked agonizing. Each time he hopped to propel himself a few inches, he grunted and grimaced. After one, maybe two minutes, he was propped up against the front side of his tree, facing them. He balanced himself on his good leg, then put his arms out to his side, cruciform.

“Got nothin’ on me,” he said. “I got nothin’—”

Caleb snapped his rifle up to his shoulder and shot Grubbs in the chest. The grunt was a bark this time as Grubbs collapsed straight down on his butt among the root tangle.

“Caleb!” Victoria shouted. “What did you do?”

“I put him out of his misery,” Caleb replied.

“You shot him in cold blood.”

Another rifle report shook the woods as Caine Foster fired another bullet into Grubbs. “Mine’s the one that killed him, though.”

“Bullshit,” said his brother, Kyle. He shot Grubbs in the head. “That’s what a kill shot looks like.”

George Simmons was next with another head shot. “All I saw was self-defense,” he said. He turned to the Fosters. “What about you, boys?”

“Caleb had no choice but to kill that son of a bitch.”

George walked around to address Victoria and McCrea, face-to-face, his back turned to the body against the tree. “What about you, folks?” he asked. “Didn’t you see it as self-defense?”

Victoria couldn’t form the words to reply. Instead, she nodded. “Thank you,” she whispered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

AdAM AND EMMA DROVE TWENTY MILES FROM TOP HAT MOUNTAIN and the bodies they left behind. They did their best to stash the Bronco in a patch of thick bushes at the side of the road, and then they hiked with as much stuff as they could carry to a spot near a stream, where Adam thought he might be able to build a shelter. It was impossible to tell distances with any accuracy, but he figured they were easily three-quarters of a mile off the road.

It felt like twice that far as he made four trips back to the vehicle to grab more stuff and take it to their new campsite.

No, it was their homesite. This was where they would have to make a go of things. At least until enough time had passed that people stopped looking for them as murderers. How long would that take?

Who the hell knew?

They’d been here for a month now, and work was progressing reasonably well with the shelter. Each night, it seemed, the mercury dropped a little further, reinforcing Adam’s desire to get the damn thing built. Without the Bronco as overnight shelter, their interim home every night was the camping tent. Adam didn’t mind, but Emma wasn’t sleeping well. Consequently, neither was he.