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

As for Summer, they offered her a safe house in Anchorage, but she refused, as he’d known she would. Clay didn’t know if she didn’t fully grasp the severity of the danger or if she just didn’t want to live that way no matter what. But he understood.

“Be careful.” One of the officers told him as he left the building with Summer.

“I will be.”

I’m running out of time to solve this, God. We all are, I can feel it. Clay prayed as they walked to the car, which was still mechanically sound, just a little dented from their hair-raising ordeal. Help us figure this out before anyone else ends up hurt, or dead.

He looked over at Summer. Much as he might want to deny it, it wasn’t just professionalism that made him pray that prayer with her in mind specifically.

His heart couldn’t handle losing her.

Summer closed her eyes in the car, letting Anchorage disappear in the rearview mirror without her paying attention. She felt the curves of the road as the car swung around the Seward Highway between the mountain cliffs and Turnagain Arm. She’d had friends in Anchorage back when she was a competitive mountain runner, and had made the drive many times to visit them and to train on some of the nearby mountains—O’Malley, Wolverine, Ptarmigan and the like.

Now this drive that was so familiar, which should have been relaxing, was another source of tension for her. She hadn’t put any of it into words for Clay, but the knowledge that there were two hours of no-man’s-land ahead of them scared her—nothing but the road, with no houses, no stores and no cell phone reception.

There, she’d said it. She was scared of something.

Scared that the man who wanted her dead would succeed. Scared of how much she was getting used to Clay’s presence. Scared of the fact that one way or another, this arrangement with him as her bodyguard couldn’t last forever, and then what was she going to do? Tell him that despite the fact that she didn’t deserve a man like him, she was starting to...

What? Fall in love with him?

She shook the thoughts away. Surely it was too soon for that, even for someone like her who felt so deeply, gave her heart away so freely. Summer would have laughed aloud at the ridiculousness of the situation, except she wanted Clay to think she was asleep. She didn’t trust herself to have a normal conversation right then. The sky was dimming as the clouds moved in and it grew closer to midnight. Even though the sun wouldn’t disappear completely, there was something about the end of the day that made her relaxed and vulnerable. Made her want to answer Clay’s unspoken questions about why she’d stopped competitive mountain running. About her past.

And that couldn’t happen.

It just couldn’t.

She shifted in her seat slightly so she’d have a view out of the window. The water was calm today. She’d seen it before when the rain was falling and it churned in slate gray that looked more like some kind of molten lava than water. Angry. Thick.

Today it was calm, the exact opposite of how her heart felt.

She turned her thoughts somewhere productive, wondering once again who could be after her. Even though she’d been attacked in Moose Haven, it seemed more likely the culprit was someone from Anchorage since his first victims had been from there. What had made him come to Moose Haven? Had he come specifically to target her, or had he found her after he arrived? Which had come first? Knowing that would give them somewhere to start.

The problem with trying to put together any kind of suspect list was that there was no knowing how the serial killer’s mind worked—what connection he saw between the women he made into his victims. Summer didn’t know if this particular killer was targeting people he knew well—she hoped it wasn’t that one; she only knew a few people in Anchorage, and she couldn’t picture any of them being behind this.

If he was someone who killed people he’d only seen in passing, then the possibilities were limitless. It could be someone she’d passed at Costco in Anchorage, someone who got gas at a gas station where all of the victims and Summer had been before.

Another impossibility to think through.

The third option was the one that intrigued Summer. If the killer was killing acquaintances...that was something she needed to think through. What acquaintances did she have who might have run across the other women as well? She’d been preparing a list to share with law enforcement if they were interested in it, though so far it was limited to mountain running friends and the barista at her favorite coffee shop, who she very much doubted had a mean bone in his body. Not to mention, the body type didn’t match her attacker at all. Summer could probably bench-press the barista—he was tall and thin and the essence of a hipster right to the thick glasses that sat on the end of his nose.

Yeah, it wasn’t him.

She kept thinking. If this option was right though, it had to be someone. She went to the post office often. Anchorage Outdoor Gear. A local knife shop that carried her favorite kind of custom knives, which she carried with her on hikes when she took tourists, because they were so useful to have in the woods.

The last one caught her attention the most. She tapped out a quick text to Noah, hoping it would send when they came back into service. For now they were entering the longest dead zone of the trip. Summer shuddered. The word dead wasn’t her favorite lately.

She looked over at Clay, who had kept quiet, giving her space to think. She almost said something but then she closed her eyes again and pretended to sleep.

It was probably better for both of them if she kept pretending. Not