Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page A

on.”
    Together they pulled him to his feet, though his face whitened from pain and he seemed about to pass out again. Jessie insisted he loop his arm around her shoulders, and she put her arm around his waist to assist him. The broken ribs were all on his left side, so she stayed on his right.
    He glanced over at her once, his face next to hers, and his eyes widened in recognition. He looked away quickly, before Jessie could look back at him, and he felt his heart hammering in his chest. He remained silent, too caught up in breathing as shallowly as possible and trying to walk as evenly as he could to avoid the pain in his side. Jessie led them across the ground, then froze when she thought she heard something.
    “ What was that?” Tanya asked, only a few paces off to Dustin’s left in case he needed her.
    “ Down!” Jessie hissed, lowering her charge to the ground carefully but still painfully to the desert floor. Sagebrush, cactus, and other weeds grew enough to provide them with some cover, but nothing would hide them from a dedicated searcher.
    They listened and heard voices, then a few moments later an engine fired up and multiple voices cried in triumph. Jessie’s eyes were wide with fear – she recognized the sound of the engine, it was Andres’ car. Her car now. Their car, now.
    “ What’s that?” Tanya asked, her voice a whisper.
    “ That was our ride out of here,” Jessie said.
    “ Great, now what? Maybe they’re here to help?”
    “ If they wanted to help you think they’d have hotwired my car?”
    “ Oh,” Tanya said, crestfallen.
    “ Dustin, you’re not going to like this, but we have to get out of here,” Jessie told him, not sure how they were even going to manage it. She figured the best thing to do would be to leave the boy and take Tanya. She was the money anyhow, she figured. Problem was there was no way Tanya was going to let her leave Dustin behind.
    “ How? He’s hurt!” Tanya protested dangerously loud.
    Jessie glared at her, reminding her to keep her voice down. Tanya had the decency to look properly chastised, and repeated her question softly.
    “ It’s cool,” Dustin said, feigning indifference. “I can make it.”
    “ Dus, there’s no way!”
    “ I can make it,” he assured her. “They know somebody’s here now, they’ll be looking for us.”
    “ He’s right,” Jessie added, silently thanking the kid for having a solid set of balls. “They found my car, they’ll know someone is here.”
    Jessie pulled the pistol out and slid the action back just enough to see the bullet was still in place. She reseated it quietly, to the wide eyes of the Kurkova siblings, then whispered, “Stay low and don’t move until you see me signal you.”
    Tanya opened her mouth to respond, but Jessie was already moving and thinking. She moved, hunched over, through the sharp grasses and gritted her teeth when she brushed against a cactus or other thorny bush. She moved north, parallel to the wash that she had parked next to, and tried her best to spot the scavengers that had happened across her car. They were too far away, but she could still hear occasional shouts as they talked or argued. She motioned for Tanya and watched as the girl tried her best to help her wounded brother make the crawl. It took forever, to Jessie, and she caught herself wondering what she was going to do now that she had lost the car.
    Even beyond getting back to Mexicali, all of her and Andres’ camera equipment was in the truck. Replacing that would be damned hard to do. She would have to hook up with another studio, nobody was making new camera gear in the area. She almost cursed aloud at the thought, then caught herself and brought her mind back to the present. She shook her head once, briefly, to try and focus. She was spacing out and she knew it. She needed a fix, dealing with the world straight on was way too fucking difficult!
    “ Now what?” Tanya asked while her brother just gasped shallowly