Chapter 16 - The Ambush at the Crossing
The logging road narrowed to a single lane of frozen bedrock, bordered on the right by a sheer rock wall and on the left by a two-hundred-foot drop down into the churning waters of Blackwood Creek.
The chase was relentless. The lead pursuer—a customized black heavy-duty pickup with a reinforced bull bar—was closing the gap with reckless speed.
"They don't want to capture us," Ella whispered, clutching the dashboard as Miller wrestled the wheel against an icy skid. "They're going to push us over the edge, just like they did to Aunt Sarah."
"Not tonight they're not," Miller said between gritted teeth.
Ahead of us lay the narrow single-lane wooden trestle bridge crossing Blackwood Creek—an ancient timber structure built for logging trucks forty years ago. As our headlights hit the bridge timbers, another pair of headlights snapped on from the far side of the crossing, blinding us.
A vehicle was parked sideways across the exit of the bridge, blocking our path entirely.
"We're boxed in!" Ella cried.
Miller slammed on the brakes, the Suburban sliding sideways across the frozen gravel, coming to a halt twenty feet from the entrance of the wooden bridge. Behind us, the pursuer skidded to a stop, sealing the road behind us.
The driver of the vehicle blocking the far side stepped out into the glare of his own high beams.
It was Ryan Keller.
He stood in the glare of the lights, wearing an expensive sheepskin coat that Marcus Vance had undoubtedly paid for, holding a high-caliber deer rifle across his chest. His face was twisted with a manic, cornered desperation—the look of a dog that had bitten its master and now had nowhere left to run.
"Aunt Heather!" Ryan's voice echoed through the freezing gorge, magnified by the cold wind. "Throw the bag out of the truck! Marcus said if you give up the Swiss drive, the warehouse arson gets ruled an electrical accident! You get the insurance payout! You take Ella and you leave the state! That's the deal!"
"Ryan, you idiot!" I shouted, rolling down the window an inch against Miller's warning hand. "Marcus Vance had your mother sent to prison! He used you to cover up your own mother's sister's murder! Do you really think he's going to let you walk away from this?"
"He gave me half a million dollars!" Ryan screamed, his voice cracking with hysteria. "He gave me a clean slate! You ruined my life, Heather! You took the company! You took my house! You took everything that Arthur built!"
"Arthur built nothing on blood money!" I screamed back.
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From the truck behind us, two men in tactical gear stepped out, both armed with suppressed submachine guns. They didn't look like county deputies; they were private corporate security contractors hired to do what Marcus Vance could never put on paper.
They didn't negotiate. They raised their weapons toward our Suburban.
