Surprise and the ability to hit fast and hard were then Ricci’s best assets. He’d abandoned his scuba tank, fins, and mask in the woods, and left himself wearing only the dry suit and knife rigs. The urchin knife would be of marginal use offensively and was in its scabbard. The pointed, double-edged blade was in his right hand. That baby had the meanness in it.
A breeze fluttered through the woods, and Ricci eased partially out of his crouch using the rustle of leaves, branches, and weeds to cover the sound of his movement. When the wind died down he stopped, then waited for another gust to stir the foliage and stole forward, falling back on his SEALs training again, obeying tried and proven fundamentals of stalking one’s quarry. Registering one leg in front of the other. Touching the ground with the ball of his foot and slowly lowering his heel while scanning for rocks, fallen leaves, anything that might trip him up or be disturbed by his weight. Shifting direction every few steps so that the brush wouldn’t sway unnaturally and attract attention.
The wind quieted. He paused. The two men were still talking. Cobbs’s back was now less than three feet in front of him through the brush that constituted Ricci’s self-designated skirmish line. Another draft of wind and he would launch from his concealed position, tackle Cobbs from behind, and hopefully disarm him before he could get off a single shot.
It was the squirrel that screwed things up.
“… want to make it look good, you ought to wait another couple hours, then phone in a diver emergency to me and the sheriff’s office,” Cobbs was saying. “I’ll handle it like any other—”
He stopped talking and gave Dex a questioning glance.
Dex had suddenly cast his eyes toward the maple tree on which he’d noticed the munching squirrel a short while before. Already on heightened guard because of his and Cobbs’s near proximity, it had been startled from its perch and abruptly gone bounding up the tree amid a loud rattle of branches, dropping the seed pod it had been clutching in its obvious fright. This instigated a sort of chain reaction, the commotion sending a jolt through Dex’s tightly wound nerves, prompting him to jerk his head up toward the squirrel, then drop his gaze to the creeping junipers below it — and just a few feet behind Cobbs — to find out what could have sent the little animal fleeing
That was when he saw a dead man about to spring from between two of the bushes in a semi-crouch, his fist clenched around the haft of a long knife.
His face all at once draining of color, his mouth yawping open, too shocked to utter more than a wordless cry of alarm and incomprehension, he thrust out his arm to frantically gesture in Ricci’s direction.
Without knowing what was going on except that something had scared the living daylights out of Dex, Cobbs spun on his heels, raised his shotgun, and brought its barrel around to where he was pointing.
Ricci was about to make his move when he heard the spooked squirrel in the treetop, then saw Dex turn to investigate its racket, his eyes sweeping up the tree, then down to land directly upon him and widen with stunned confusion.
There was no time to hesitate. Even as Dex began gesturing wildly — and a split second before Cobbs swiveled his upraised shotgun around toward him — Ricci broke from cover and came at the warden in a scrambling, straight-ahead run, ducking below the shotgun’s muzzle.
The gun roared above his head, its load gouging into the tree trunk behind Ricci and flurrying the area with shaves and splinters of bark. Cobbs rocked backward from the weapon’s kick, but was surprisingly quick to recover, and managed to chamber another round before Ricci could reach him. Ricci heard the chock-chock of the Remington’s pump action and saw Cobbs swing it down at him, and charged in underneath it with his knees bent, then sprang to his full height, grabbed the middle of its barrel with his left hand, and forced the muzzle upward. Cobbs squeezed the trigger on reflex and shot a second load of steel pellets harmlessly into the air.
Without releasing the weapon’s barrel, Ricci smashed his right forearm against Cobbs’s neck, then hit him twice on the jaw with his elbow while jerking the shotgun around hard to the left.
Cobbs’s chin snapped to the side and blood instantly began streaming from his mouth. His lips stretched into a grimace of fury and pain, he managed to hang onto the gun, but Ricci pushed close against him, using both his hand and body to keep the barrel angled upward and sideways. Cobbs hung on. Ricci had not thought he would have as much fight in him, but anger and adrenaline could give people the strength to stay committed. Still, he had to finish him before Dex got involved.
Ricci shoved against him with his chest, forcing him to stumble backward. The moment he had him off balance, Ricci jammed his right elbow into Cobbs’s stomach and, as he doubled over with a groan, finally got the shotgun out of his hands.
A moment later Ricci dropped down into a squat and shoved his dive knife into the top of Cobbs’s boot, putting his arm and shoulder into the blow, driving in the blade until all six inches of it had penetrated his foot and sunk into the dirt beneath him.
Cobbs released a howling, animalistic scream that grew in volume and shrillness as he tried to lift his impaled foot off the ground and realized that he couldn’t. His face bright crimson, the whites of his eyes enormous, he looked down at himself and saw blood swell up around the knife handle projecting from the upper part of his boot, simultaneously draining from where the blade had cut through its treaded rubber sole. His screams reached a ragged peak of hysteria and cracked apart, dissolving into moist snuffles.
“Look what you done to me!” he whimpered, and sank to his knees, looking up at Ricci, water gushing from his eyes. Blood smudged his lips and chin like grotesque stage makeup, and there was a slurry thickness to his speech that told Ricci his jaw had either been dislocated or broken. “Oh, fuck Oh, oh, sweet God, look what you fucking done!”
Ricci ignored him. He had straightened up and could see the bushes thrashing to his left where Dex had plunged into the woods. So much for his helping Cobbs. Ricci whipped off after him, both hands around the shotgun he’d torn from Cobbs’s grasp.
Dex’s lead was slight and his panic flung him blindly through the low branches and undergrowth. He stumbled over roots, crashed against bushes and tree limbs.
Despite the relative bulkiness of his dry suit, Ricci closed the distance between them in less than a minute.
“Hold it, Dex! Not another step!” he called out, and pumped a fresh cartridge into the chamber of the Remington. “I mean it.”
Dex halted under an arcade of pine branches. He was panting from fear and exertion.
“Turn around,” Ricci said. “Slow.”
Dex did as he’d been told.
Ricci moved forward, the gun barrel out in front of him, his finger on the trigger.
Dex stood there in a sort of half slump, still panting, his long hair wet from sweat and pasted to his cheeks and neck. He glanced at Ricci a moment, and then cast his eyes down at some indeterminate patch of ground between them.