kind of tactician.” He thought for a moment. “Let me give you an example. Let’s say you and I came across three men who wanted to eat us for dinner.”
“That’s nasty,” she said with a disgusted look.
“What do you think I’d do?”
She furrowed her brow.
“Is this some kind of trick question? You’d smash their heads in, and probably take their wallets too.”
“Oh, you know me so well,” he said, grinning. “Mason would handle it differently. He’d probably lure one man away to an ambush, instigate a fight between the other two, and then shoot the lone survivor. When it was all said and done, they’d all be just as dead, but he would have been able to fight each one on his own terms.”
“Ah, I see,” she said, nodding. “So, he’s smarter than you too.”
He growled softly.
She giggled, and Tanner couldn’t help but chuckle too.
“You sure you’re ready to go back out there?” he asked. “You’ve seen how ugly it is.”
“I think we need to.”
“Why? Don’t tell me you’re getting tired of my charming company.”
She gave him a little smile.
“It’s not that.”
“What then?”
“I want to ask you for a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” he said, squinting with suspicion.
She reached under the blanket and brought out a small slip of folded paper. It looked like it had been folded and unfolded dozens of times. Tanner recognized it immediately as the note that Booker Hill had left behind. In it, Booker had asked that whoever found the note pass along one final message of love to his young daughter living in Salamanca, New York.
“Salamanca is hundreds of miles away,” he pointed out.
“Six hundred, but they’re not all out of our way.”
“And how exactly would you know that?”
“I looked at one of your maps in the cabin before going to bed last night.”
“Ah,” he said, turning back to look out at the trees. “You’ve given this some thought.”
“My mom will have more important things to worry about than this note. If we don’t deliver it ourselves, his daughter’s never going to see it. Not ever.”
“It would mean not getting back to your mom for a while longer.”
“I know,” she said, staring at him. “But what’s a few more days either way?”
Tanner studied her for a minute. Young Samantha was becoming a very different person than the awkward eleven-year-old he had met just a few weeks earlier. Things like courage, strength, and purpose were becoming more than just spelling words.
“All right then,” he said. “We’ll go to Salamanca.”
“Just like that?”
“You’d rather I throw a big fuss? Maybe stomp my feet and shout like an ogre?”
“You do look a bit like an ogre,” she said, laughing.
“You trying to butter me up?”
“It’s just that I thought you’d say no. You didn’t want to go before.”
“True.”
“So, what changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. I’m rested. My belly is full of food. And my wounds are healing.” He touched the two-inch gash on his forehead that had been stitched with fishing line. “Being back at nearly a hundred percent has improved my already sunny demeanor.”
“Now that you mention it, you do seem like a happy ogre,” she said, grinning.
“Besides,” he added, “if it’s important to you to deliver Booker’s message, who am I to say otherwise? You’re half of this team, right?”
She nodded. “I am.”
“But I do have one condition,” he said, holding up an enormous finger between them.
“What’s that?”
“After we hand over the note, we head straight to Virginia to see your mom.”
She raised her hand as if making a solemn pledge.
“Deal.”
By noon, they were almost ready to leave. The Escalade they had taken from a house in northern Atlanta was loaded with freeze-dried food from the pantry, as well as six gallon-sized jugs of water. Given their previous challenge of finding drinking water, Tanner would have taken even more, had he
Terry Ravenscroft, Ravenscroft