“No. It’s not,” said Rudd, backing up to make room for them. “Get her in the trunk and start looking at Google Maps satellite for some kind of semi-isolated rural property no closer than ten miles away, but no farther than a twenty-minute drive. We need to get off the road. Preferably a small farm with a few buildings. Definitely off the beaten path. We’ll be spending some time there. I want to be on the move in under two minutes.”

“I’ll find us something,” said Ward before grabbing Gray’s ankles.

Clark took her wrists, and the two of them hauled her deadweight over the guardrail. While they struggled with Gray, Rudd went to work scouring the scene. By the time the two additional bodies had been stuffed in the trunk and Walsh’s team had cleaned up the road, he’d collected twenty-five of the thirty-odd shell casings Gray had scattered near the guardrail. And two of the three immobilizer darts fired from their rifles.

Close enough. It just needed to satisfy a bored deputy creeping along and probing the darkness with a door-mounted spotlight. He pocketed the shells and made his way back to Gray’s car. Walsh lay on his stomach, scanning the pavement underneath the vehicle with a flashlight. Rudd took a look around, satisfied with the scene.

“Looks good,” said Rudd. “One of your guys will drive the car. If all goes well, we shouldn’t be on the road for more than five or ten minutes.”

Walsh rose to his feet. “Sounds like a plan. Do you want to space out the vehicles so we don’t draw too much attention? I don’t think these roads see more than three cars all night.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Rudd. “But not until we get clear of this little town.”

“All right. We’ll follow closely until—”

Walsh stopped midsentence, his attention drawn to something over Rudd’s shoulder. Their radios squawked simultaneously.

“We’ve got company. Single set of headlights to the west, moving toward the intersection.”

Rudd turned to face west, the distant lights flickering between the trees on the outskirts of town.

“Cop?” asked Walsh.

“I don’t see how,” said Rudd.

This little speck of a town didn’t have a police force. It was part of a rural administration district that relied on the county for emergency services. Something he had taken into consideration when planning the ambush site.

“Looks like they’re headed here in a hurry,” said Walsh.

“It sure does,” said Rudd.

“A cop kind of changes everything.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” he said, fiddling with the fake FBI credentials in his back pocket.

“How do you figure?”

“Same plan, but we’ll have to put some serious distance between here and our next stop,” said Rudd. “The whole county will be crawling with cops by sunup.”

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7