Jess and Burke went back down to the shoreline where they’d stashed the duffel bag full of guns. Kicked at what remained of the skiff until they both agreed it was perforated beyond hope. Out in the cove, the Better Days lay half-sunk and listing, the whole stern underwater and half of the back deck, the wheelhouse collapsing in on itself. It might have been a sad sight to Jess, but it wasn’t; Ty’s boat had brought them this far, and she was maybe actually glad it wouldn’t take them any farther.

There was no running now. Only fighting.

She laid out the guns for Burke and let him fire for a while, not long enough to use up too much ammunition, but enough that he’d stand a fighting chance in the woods against the likes of Dale Whitmer. He wasn’t ever going to be Annie Oakley, but then, Jess didn’t need a sharpshooter. What she needed was distraction.

“We’ll put you at the entrance to the pass, north side, across the water from me,” she told him after she’d laid out her plan. “You’ll stay hidden until the boys are well into the pass and you hear me start firing. Your jobs are to harass that helicopter and to make sure those boys in the boat don’t make it out of the kill zone and back into open water. I’ll handle the rest.”

Burke was breathing heavy from the shooting, not the exertion necessarily but the visceral thrill. She’d seen it before, knew the adrenaline was running, the heart pounding, the brain caught up in some lizard burst of pleasure, unable to really focus. You couldn’t teach focus under pressure, not in a couple of hours, but Jess hoped to keep the plan simple and direct, give Burke something easy to take care of.

“Most important thing is you stay hidden until they’re in the pass,” she said. “If they see you too early, they’ll realize what they’re in for and bug out, and we’ll lose them. And we really don’t want that to happen. Understand?”

He nodded. “Understood.”

“Second most important thing is you take care of that chopper. You don’t have to shoot the thing down, but you do need to scare the pilot enough he stays out of grenade range. If not, we’re both fucked.”

Burke nodded again.

“Any questions?”

“No, ma’am.” He looked at the pistol in his hand and rubbed his chin. “Heck, I’m sure glad you’re here,” he said finally. “I’d have been proper hooped if you’d asked me to ward off these assholes by myself.”

“Yeah well,” she said. “You wouldn’t even know these assholes if it wasn’t for me.”

“Still,” he said.

“I had a lot of practice.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you did.”