Alaskan Mountain Pursuit Elizabeth Goddard (best short novels .TXT) 📖

she was figuring out how it had all worked, how the man had met her and the other victims. It was clear she knew him and he thought he’d heard her say something about an outdoor store.

He took a quick glance in the window he was crouching under. Summer was standing at the rear of the living area of the cabin, her back to a wall. The man was at the door, barely inside.

As far as Clay could tell, he didn’t have a firearm on him, but he wasn’t willing to bet their lives on that. If Clay chose the wrong time to attack him and this man did have a gun, everything would escalate too quickly for him to keep the situation under any sort of control.

At least he had a gun he could use if he needed it, though he couldn’t in good conscience take the guy out when he was just standing there. But if it was clear he was trying to kill Summer, and Clay could get a shot...

He felt his hip for his weapon. Closed his eyes tight and rubbed his head.

The holster was empty.

The killer must have taken it when Clay blacked out. Had it been longer than a second or two? But if it had, why had it taken so long for the other man to walk away from him? And why hadn’t he shot Clay?

He knew he might not get answers to those questions even if the guy ended up in police custody. Sometimes there were no answers.

Knowing the killer had Clay’s weapon changed the plan. Now he had to wait for just the right moment. He’d only have one chance.

And if he picked the wrong time, they’d all end up dead.

“You’re on that hiking Facebook group, aren’t you?” She was surprised at how the question came without hesitation. Her voice wasn’t even shaking. It was like Summer was watching herself from somewhere outside her body. Shouldn’t she be too scared to speak?

She didn’t know. All she knew was that she was terrified, sure, but she was also mad. How dare this man steal the lives of those other women? How dare he try to steal hers, both by trying to kill her and by making her too scared to do the things she loved and enjoyed?

Really live.

That was what she wanted to do. Really live. And she was sick of this man getting in the way of that. Tired of the lack of justice.

“I’m surprised you figured that out.” The look of admiration he turned on her had an element of creepiness that did make goose bumps run down her arms, but she kept staring him down. Summer had no idea where this bolder version of herself had come from, but she felt more like the Summer she’d been before she’d run away with Christopher. Before...everything.

But it wasn’t just that. She felt like a stronger, braver version of that woman.

Is that because of You, God?

She didn’t have time to wait for an answer to her quick prayer. She took a deep breath and stared at him. “So you watched people’s conversations to learn where they would be and found places to lie in wait for them.” She didn’t bother to hide her disgust and his expression twisted slightly. It bothered him that she was disgusted. Interesting.

She’d stopped posting her favorite hikes on that site last year, stopped posting anything other than the occasional unlabeled picture after Noah found out and told her that it wasn’t safe to give complete strangers so much information. He’d said it wasn’t just because she was a woman who often hiked alone, but also that her name recognition played into it.

She’d agreed and stopped posting.

But it had apparently been too late. She’d already said too much.

“So that’s how you knew where I’d hike.” She restated it, piecing the other elements they’d wondered about together in her mind as they came to her. “How did you know exactly where I’d be the other times? When you tried to run us off the road, when you shot at us...”

He laughed. “GPS tracking really has come a long way.”

Of course. The Anchorage Police Department still had her car, but as far as Summer knew they hadn’t been able to process it yet. She was sure they’d find the tracker, but knew that it wasn’t suprising that Moose Haven hadn’t been able to. They simply didn’t have the resources to scan for trackers electronically and the new ones were so tiny and so easy to hide that it wasn’t something they’d have been able to readily identify even in a thorough search.

“How did you find this place?”

He shook his head. “Small towns talk. It wasn’t too hard to find out your family owned more property than just the lodge.”

She wanted to ask him about his background, to see if he had spent time in the military or hunting, the way Clay had suggested, to become such a good shot. But she didn’t know if it was better to keep him talking or to start trying to figure out exactly how she was going to get out of this alive.

Because she had to get out alive. The edges of her eyes stung and she blinked, refusing to show any sign of weakness. She hated feeling like prey. Animals in the wild chose the weak ones, the ones with wounds to attack. Any sign of weakness attracted predators.

While she didn’t for a second believe that this human predator had chosen his victims with any kind of logic—none of the women had done anything to deserve his fixation, his desire to see them dead—she still refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her afraid.

Even if the thought of dying, of not seeing Clay again, made her throat tighten until she could barely breathe. She wanted to look into his eyes again, see him smile. Tell him that if she was going to live her life to the fullest, really live, then