Stone Cold

Stone Cold Read Free Page B

Book: Stone Cold Read Free
Author: C. J. Box
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brush on the other side of the clearing. No doubt the motion detector had signaled the intrusion. Perhaps the camera had caught a fleeting look at the doe—his partner—as she bounded through its field of view.
    â€œThank you,” Nate said to the deer.
    Then he stepped back into the shadows of the willows and checked his watch and waited.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I T TOOK TWENTY-TWO MINUTES, much longer than he had estimated, before he heard the slamming of a door at the log house and heavy footfalls on their way down to the river. That it had taken the technician so long to realize his riverside camera was out confirmed to Nate that the man wasn’t anticipating trouble. Or he was simply incompetent.
That bodes well,
Nate thought to himself. He hoped the other thugs would be as thick.
    A harsh orb of white light from a flashlight moved down the sloping grass lawn in front of the technician. Nate squinted and turned his head and followed it in his peripheral vision. It was a trick he’d learned years before in the Third World for maintaining his night sight. A blast of the flashlight in his eyes would blind him momentarily if he let it happen, and he couldn’t risk it.
    He heard the footfalls stop less than twelve feet away, and heard a man say to himself, “What the
fuck
?”
    Meaning the technician was illuminating the black hood covering the camera with the beam of his flashlight and probably wondering what it was.
    Nate hurled himself from the willows like a blitzing linebacker going after the quarterback on his blind side. He dived low so his full weight would take out the legs of the technician.
    The man made an
umpf
sound as he was hit and his flashlight flew into the air. The butt of a shotgun grazed Nate’s shoulders as he took the man down, and he quickly turned and swarmed him and wrenched the long gun away and threw it aside.
    Before the technician could cry out, Nate jammed a spare black hood into his mouth with his left hand and chopped hard across the bridge of the man’s nose with his right. He heard the muffled crack of bone and smelled the hot metallic flood of blood.
    The technician didn’t put up much of a fight—that usually happened from the immediate result of a broken nose—and he went suddenly limp with shock and pain. Nate rolled the technician over on his stomach and bound his hands behind his back with one of the plastic zip-tie cuff restraints he kept in the side pocket of his pack. He pulled it tight. He did the same with the technician’s ankles, and used an additional thirty-inch zip tie to hog-tie the man so he couldn’t move. Nate had done it all very quickly, he thought, and with the speed and panache of a steer roper used to winning money at the rodeo.
    Nate rifled through the technician’s cargo pants and baggy shirt. There weren’t any more weapons, and Nate found a cell phone, a small walkie-talkie (turned off), loose change, a billfold, two loose marijuana joints—
the reason it had taken him so long to respond?
—and tossed it all into the willows. The technician’s clothing and thick hair smelled of weed.
    Nate rocked back on his haunches and surveyed the slope up to the log home and the outbuildings beyond it. There was no sound or movement, no lights suddenly coming on from Thug One’s level or from the guesthouse.
    He dragged the limp body of the technician out of the moonlight and left him in the shadows of the willows, then ducked inside the cover to circumnavigate the compound from the wooded right side.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    W HEN N ATE REEMERGED from the tangle of downed timber and river cottonwoods, the guesthouse was before him. He paused and let his breathing slow, noting the lack of movement, sound, or lights from within the building. It was a log-constructed home in the same style of the main house, only much smaller and on one level. He kept the

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