"Where are they?" he struggled to ask, choking.
"Don't know," she said, pulling him into a stand of bushes. He collapsed on his side, spitting and coughing. She looked him over carefully. He hadn't been hit.
They were joined by Trey and Jesse, both of them crouching, eyes gazing across the river, looking for their attackers.
Ned was still choking. "Fucking water. Tastes like shit."
The boat was slowly easing toward them, half submerged now.
"They're dead," whispered Jesse Corn, staring at the boat. "They have to be."
The boat floated closer. Jesse slipped his utility belt off and started forward.
"No," Lucy said, eyes on the far shore. "Let it come to us."
... chapter twenty-nine
The capsized boat floated into an uprooted cedar, extending into the river, and stopped.
The deputies waited a few moments. There was no movement other than the rocking of the shattered vessel. The water was ruddy but Lucy couldn't tell if the color was due to blood or was from the fiery sunset.
Pale, troubled Jesse Corn glanced at Lucy, who nodded. All three of the other deputies kept their guns on the boat as Jesse waded out and flipped it over.
The remnants of several torn water jugs bobbed out and floated leisurely downstream. There was no one underneath.
"What happened?" Jesse asked. "I don't get it."
"Hell," Ned muttered bitterly. "They set us up. It was a goddamn ambush."
Lucy hadn't believed that her anger could get any more consuming. But it now seized her like raw electric current. Ned was right; Amelia had used the boat like one of Nathan Groomer's decoys and ambushed them from the far shore.
"No," Jesse protested. "She wouldn't do that. If she shot it was just to scare us. Amelia knows her way 'round firearms. She could've hit Ned, she'd wanted to."
"Goddamnit, Jesse, open your eyes, will you?" Lucy snapped. "Firing from heavy cover like that? Doesn't matter how good a shot you are; she still could've missed. And on water? There could've been a ricochet. Or Ned might've panicked and swum into a bullet."
Jesse Corn had no response for that. He rubbed his face with his palms and stared out over the far shore.
"Okay, here's what we're doing," Lucy said in a low voice. "It's getting late. We're going as far as we can while there's still some light. Then we'll have Jim bring us some supplies for the night. We'll be camping out. We're going to assume they're gunning for us and we're going to act accordingly. Now, let's get across the bridge and look for their trail. Everybody locked and loaded?"
Ned and Trey said they were. Jesse Corn stared at the shattered boat for a moment then slowly nodded.
"Then let's go."
The four deputies started over the fifty yards of unprotected bridge--but they didn't walk in a cluster. They were in a long line so that if Amelia Sachs were to shoot again she couldn't hit more than one of them before the others got to cover and could return fire. The formation was Trey's idea, one that he got from a World War II movie, and because he'd thought of it he assumed he'd take the point position. But that was the spot Lucy Kerr insisted on taking for herself.
"You came damn close to hitting him."
Harris Tomel said, "No way."
But Culbeau persisted. "I said, scare 'em. You'd hit Ned, you know what kinda shit we'd be in?"
"I know what I'm doing, Rich. Give me a little credit, okay?"
Fucking schoolboy, Culbeau thought.
The three men were on the north shore of the Paquo, trekking along a path that followed the river.
In fact, while Culbeau was pissed that Tomel had fired too close to the deputy swimming out to the boat, he was sure the sniping had worked. Lucy and the other deputies'd be skittish as sheep now and would move nice and slow.