“When we’re rescued—” she began, but he shook his head, interrupting her.
“Bailey…no one’s coming for us. No one knows where we are.”
“The ELT. You said the ELT—”
“It’s dead. The battery’s dead. Or the ELT was tampered with, too. Either way, it isn’t working. I’m not even sure my radio was working, there at the end. I know it was at the beginning, but thinking back, I can’t remember exactly when I last heard radio traffic.”
“But how can that be timed?” she demanded. “How do you make a radio stop working at a certain time? How could anyone know where we’d be when we ran out of fuel?”
“Our location would be simple math. A weather report would give the winds, I’d be flying at normal power, the Skylane has a known range. Our exact location couldn’t be pinned down, but someone smart could figure out how big the plastic bag should be to displace X gallons of fuel, and make sure we had enough to reach the mountains.” He lifted his head and looked around him, at the silent, majestic, unbelievably rugged landscape. “I’d say getting to the mountains would be critical to the plan—somewhere remote, where the plane wreckage likely wouldn’t be found. Hell’s Canyon is pretty damn remote. The hiking trails don’t even open for another month, so there isn’t anyone in these mountains to maybe spot the plane coming down and give searchers an idea where to look.”
“How do you know I’m the target?” she asked miserably, because she was dying inside. “How do you know it isn’t you?”
“Because Bret was supposed to take the flight,” he pointed out. “He was going to take it even though he was sick. Karen called me at home at the last minute to take his place, because he was too stubborn to admit he shouldn’t be flying. Face the facts, Bailey,” he finished with an undertone of impatience.
“So you—” Her throat closed on the words, nausea rising in her throat. She swallowed, tried to get control of her voice. “So you’re the—”
“I’m the unlucky bastard who got to die with you, yeah.”
She flinched at the words, the hated tears burning her eyes. She wouldn’t cry, she would not.
“Hell,” he said roughly, cupping her chin in his cold hand and tipping it up. “I meant that he would look at it that way, not that I do.”
Bailey managed a tight little smile that didn’t waver too much, though hurt had congealed in her like a giant ball. She handled it the way she always had, by locking it away. “You have to look at it that way; it’s certainly how I would. You had the bad luck to fill in for a friend, and you almost died because of it.”
“There’s another angle.”
“Oh, really? I don’t think so.”
She was completely unprepared for the way his expression changed, morphing from the cold, set anger of the past several minutes to something that was almost more alarming. His gaze grew heated, the curve of his mouth that of a predator closing in on his prey. He adjusted his grip on her chin so that his thumb probed at her bottom lip, pulled it open a little. “If I hadn’t almost died,” he drawled, “I might never have found out that cold-ass bitch act you put on is just that: an act. But you’re unmasked now, sweetheart, and there’s no going back.”
21
BAILEY SNORTED, GLAD FOR THE MOMENTARY DISTRACTION, which she suspected was why he’d changed the conversation. “For that matter, I thought you were a stick-up-your-ass sourpuss.” She knew the subject of someone trying to kill her wasn’t finished, but she needed some time to absorb the details, time for her emotions to settle.
“You did, huh?” He tweaked her lower lip, then released her. “We’ll discuss that later. God knows we’ll have plenty of time, because we won’t walk out of here in a day—or even two days.”
She glanced around the site; strange how familiar it had become, how safe she felt here in comparison to how she felt about striking out on their own. For one thing—the shelter. They couldn’t take it with them, and the thought of building another one every day was daunting. On the other hand, there was no food here. If no one was coming for them, they had to save themselves, and that meant getting off this frozen mountainside before they became so weak they couldn’t.
“All right,” she said, bracing her shoulders. “Let’s get packed up.”
His lips quirked a little in that way he had. “Not so fast. I don’t think I could make it very far today, and we could probably both use another day to get acclimated to the altitude.”
“If we wait another day, we’ll be out of food before we even start,” she pointed out.
“Maybe not. If we could find my suit jacket, I put a couple of trail mix bars in the pocket. I haven’t mentioned it before because neither of us was capable of looking for the coat, plus I expected we’d be rescued and wouldn’t need it.”
A couple of bars would double their food supply, and could well make the difference between living and dying. He also needed a coat, any coat, before they started out. Thinking of clothing sent her thoughts down another path. “You can’t walk out of here with those shoes.”
He shrugged. “I have to. They’re all I have.”
“Maybe not. We have the leather I cut from the seats, plus plenty of wiring to use as laces. How hard can it be to make some moccasin-type coverings for your shoes?”
“Probably harder than you think,” he said drily. “But it’s a great idea. We’ll take today to get ready. We need to drink as much as possible, to get ourselves hydrated before we start out. If we could melt the snow faster, we could drink more.”