Peter had none of those things. All he had were his wet clothes and the good folding knife he kept clipped inside his pants pocket. But he did have one advantage. He felt fairly certain now that the other man hadn’t seen him leave the water. Although a good scope might allow him to see the damp trail Peter had left on the sandy bank, it would dry before long. Peter wondered how far it was to the nearest bridge.

Upstream across the river, the tops of the hills looked different. Softer, as if they’d faded somehow. But downstream, the colors were still bright and sharp. He looked higher, examining the vivid shoals of clouds lowering in the southern sky, and found the faint dusty outline of a gravel plume. The black truck was in motion over there somewhere.

He looked back toward the distant bluff where he’d left his pickup. Because he’d been carried around a curve in the river, he could no longer see the cut where he’d been ambushed. But he could see beyond it, where two sets of headlights appeared, headed downriver. The Chevy’s lights were distinctive enough. He’d left his engine running.

Bad enough they’d tried to kill him, now they were taking his pickup.

With his wallet and phone in the glove box.

The shivering in his stomach muscles had spread to his chest and shoulders and back. He was tempted to build a fire, but knew it was a bad idea. Lacking a lighter or flint and steel, it would take time he didn’t have, and the flames would be a beacon for the pregnant girl’s husband.

Instead, as the dust cloud slowly billowed and his truck’s headlights bounced along the bluff top, he leaned against a tree and laced up his boots.

He had twenty miles of open country to cover before daylight.

While four strangers were trying to find him and end his life.

Was it wrong that he might be having a little bit of fun?

13

Peter began to climb the high north bank of the Missouri, which rose in broken hills covered with cedar and pine seedlings, serviceberry thickets, banks of spiky thistles and Queen Anne’s lace and a hundred kinds of grass. Taller cedars, along with still-bare oaks and maples, grew in the dense, brushy drainages where water remained in the soil over the long dry season.

Staying in the evergreen cover of the nearest ravine, Peter warmed with the climb. More than halfway up, he came to the ghost of an old road visible only as twin depressions in the soft sandy soil. The tracks rose from a flat spot in the drainage, maybe some long-dead farmer’s summer picnic spot, to cross the hill in an upward arc. Following the ghost track was the easiest way to walk out of the river basin to the plains above, but it also would mean leaving the protection of the trees.