2 Blood Trail Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be a long night.
     
    The tape ended and Rose fumbled between the seats for a new one with no success. The long drive back from Toronto had left her stiff, tired, and too tense to take her eyes off the road—even if it was only an empty stretch of gravel barely a kilometer from home.
    “Hey!” She poked her brother in the back. “Why don’t you do something useful and dig out. . . . Storm, hold on!” Her foot slammed down on the brake. With the back end of the small car fishtailing in the gravel and the steering wheel twisting like a live thing in her hands, she fought to regain control, dimly aware of Peter, not Storm, hanging on beside her.
    We aren’t going to make it! The shadow she’d seen stretched across the road, loomed darker, closer.
    Darker. Closer.
    Then, just as she thought they might stop in time and relief allowed her heart to start beating again, the front bumper and the shadow met.
     
    Good. They were unhurt. It was no part of his plan to have them injured in a car accident. A pity the change in wind kept him from his regular hunting ground, but it need not stop the hunt entirely. He rested his cheek against the rifle, watching the scene unfold in the scope. They were close to home. One of them would go for help, leaving the other for him.
     
    “I guess Dad was right all along about this old tree being punky. Rotted right off the stump.” Peter perched on the trunk, looking like a red-haired Puck in the headlights. “Think we can move it?”
    Rose shook her head. “Not just the two of us. You’d better run home and get help. I’ll wait by the car.”
    “Why don’t we both go?”
    “Because I don’t like leaving the car just sitting here.” She flicked her hair back off her face. “It’s a five minute run, Peter. I’ll be fine. Jeez, you are getting so overprotective lately.”
    “I am not! It’s just. . . .”
    They heard the approaching truck at the same time and a heartbeat later Rose and Storm came around the car to face it.
     
    Only the Heerkens farm fronted on this road. Only the Heerkens drove this road at night. His grip tightened on the sweaty metal.
     
    “They spray the oil back of the crossroads today. Stink like anything.” Frederick Kleinbein hitched his pants up over the curve of his belly and beamed genially at Rose. “I take long way home to avoid stink. Good thing, eh? We get chain from truck, hitch to tree, and drag tree to side of road.” He reached over and lightly grabbed Storm’s muzzle, shaking his head from side to side. “Maybe we hitch you to tree, eh? Make you do some work for your living.”
     
    “There are none so blind as those who will not see. . . .” There would be no chance of a shot now.
     
    “Thanks, Mr. Kleinbein.”
    “Ach, why thank me? You do half of work. Truck did other half.” He leaned out of the window, mopping his brow with a snowy white handkerchief. “You and that overgrown puppy of yours get home now, eh? Tell your father some of the wood near top is still good to burn. If he doesn’t want, I do. And tell him that I return his sump pump before end of month.”
    Rose stepped back as he put the truck into gear, then forward again as he added something over the sound of the engine that she didn’t catch. “What?”
    But he only waved a beefy arm and was gone.
    “He said,” Peter told her, once the red banner of taillights had disappeared and it was safe to change, “Give my regards to your brother. And then he laughed.”
    “Do you think he saw you as he drove up?”
    “Rose, it’s a perfectly normal thing for him to say. He might have meant me, he might have meant Colin. After all, Colin used to help him bring in hay. You worry too much.”
    “Maybe,” she acknowledged but silently added as Storm’s head went out the window again, Maybe not.
     
    He remained where he was, watching, until they drove away, then he slipped the silver bullet from the rifle and into his pocket. He would just have to use it another