Jack pulled the front door shut behind him and positioned himself on the steps facing the house. His toes were perched on the edge of the concrete steps as he lowered himself to stretch out his calf muscles. He felt the calves of his legs slowly burn as the muscles lengthened like rubber bands.
“So you decided to show up,” Jack said to Patty’s reflection in the window as she walked up the front walk behind him.
“I didn’t think you’d be up this early. Seems like you’ve had some late nights lately with this investigation.” Patty stopped on the sidewalk and bent over into her own stretch, knees locked, her forehead pressed against them as she grabbed her ankles.
“Show off,” Jack said.
“Yoga, you should try it.” Patty put her hands out in front of her on the sidewalk and posed in an inverted vee.
Jack took the opportunity to check out Patty’s back, butt, and legs. Her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. The white top showed off her brown skin and the muscles of her back, shoulders, and arms. Her legs were well proportioned from her taut hamstrings down to her defined calves.
Then he bent over to reach towards his toes, his fingers reaching his shins. “Whatever. You ready to run? I usually go down by the river, through the trees. Kind of gets you out of the city.”
Patty rolled her head from her left shoulder, to her chest, and to her right shoulder. Then she windmilled her arms in large circles. “Lead the way, Miller.”
By the time Jack reached West River Road, the sweat started to trickle from the pores of his head and his chest. Patty ran to his side or slightly behind him. “How’s this pace?”
“Six miles?” Patty asked. “This will work.”
Jack looked over at Patty. She was running easily alongside him, breathing without a struggle. “Am I the only one that sweats?”
“I don’t sweat, I glisten.”
“Well, you’re not glistening yet.”
Patty laughed.
The birds were flitting about singing their morning songs as the sky to the east warmed to an orange glow. Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand and jogged automatically onto a path that led down into the woods, deeper into the Mississippi River gorge. A sign at the head of the path said “Winchell Trail.”
“This way,” Jack said and motioned down the hill through the trees.
Jack had explored the trail with his son, Willy, before. Its history was that it was an old Indian trail used to move up and down the bank of the river. Willy imagined the past as he walked down the trail with his dad and they found routes down to the river. The well-worn path through the brush and trees at spots had been paved or had chain link fences erected to keep people from falling down the steep slope.
The path offered some relief from the heat with the cooler night air trapped among the trees, but there was no breeze to evaporate the sweat from Jack’s skin and help to cool him. As he worked his way along the trail, he looked about twenty feet ahead for rocks, roots, and holes to avoid. He hadn’t sprained an ankle yet on a morning run on this trail and he wasn’t going to start today.
Jack also found that if he focused on the trail and where to step, that kept part of his brain busy and the other part of his brain found something else to keep it occupied, usually his cases from work. Patty hadn’t told him yet what she wanted to share with him and he was trying to decide if he should wait or push for the info.
“You were right, Miller.”
Jack yelled back over his shoulder. “What’s that?”
“This path down here is great!”
“Don’t tell anybody. I don’t want to share it.”
Chapter 34
The sun was coming up, but the Mississippi River Gorge was still in shadows. The rays of color from the rising sun just touched the tops of the oaks and elms lining the top of the gorge on either side of the river. The river’s surface was ninety feet below the tops of the trees, carrying water from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Governor was sweating as he worked his way down through the trees from the street to the riverbank below. He was in a hurry to be set for when Jack ran by. Vadim’s surveillance said Agent Miller ran most mornings, leaving his house at five thirty. Vadim’s cohorts had also scouted out this spot for the Governor to shoot from.
He wrapped the rifle in a jumble of fishing rods he carried in one hand, a plastic pail filled with ammunition and his camouflaged gillie suit in the other. At the edge of the river, he checked the time. Jack should be running across the river from him in about five minutes.
The Governor stood in the sand along the riverbank and dumped the contents of the pail by a tree. He put the plastic pail upside down on the shore for a stool, and propped up a fishing pole next to it with the line in the water.
A large log was half-buried in the sand. Weeds and brush grew up around it. He pulled the gillie suit over his shoulders and lay behind the log. He was almost completely out of sight. He looked up and down the opposite bank of the river. Seeing nobody, he looked to the south, up at the Ford Parkway Bridge, the only place somebody may be able to see him as he was exposed from above.
Under the netting, leaning on the log, he felt secure, hidden. He wiggled and shifted to move the sand until it conformed to his body. The rifle barrel rested on a branch from the fallen tree. He held the stock against his shoulder and moved his eye to the scope. The trees across the river were suddenly in focus. The Governor looked through the scope and scanned slowly up and down the river to make sure he could move the rifle freely. He also assessed the path through the trees to identify the best spot to execute his plan. He didn’t want his prey to have a place to hide. He wanted him in the open, trapped. The Governor looked up and down the opposite bank, took a deep breath and exhaled to relax. Any minute.
The cracked blacktop path curved up the slope and merged with the bike path before turning back down into the woods farther ahead. Jack slowed and Patty caught up with him.
“Here’s your chance, Patty. We’ve gone a mile. You can turn around here or it’s another mile before we come out of the woods again up by the Ford Parkway Bridge.”
“Let’s keep going.”
“You going to tell me what info you found out?”
“Later.” Patty ran out ahead of Jack. “Follow me.”
Jack followed Patty into the woods. She was running faster than he had up to this point and he was breathing heavier than he had before. “So what was it… you found out?”
“Shut up, Miller, or I’ll run faster so you can’t talk at all.”
Jack stayed quiet and ran on the path behind Patty. Running with somebody else wasn’t so bad, if it was a beautiful woman and she was running in front of you. He tried to guess what she might have found out, running different scenarios through his head. Back down the slope in the trees, it was quiet again; the only sound was their feet pounding along the path. Jack felt himself pushing to keep up, running at a faster pace than normal.
“How can somebody as short as you run so fast?”
“I don’t have as much gravity pulling on me. Just move the legs fast, Miller.”
The walking path ran along the river about halfway up the slope between the river and the road above. A dirt path veered down the slope to the river.
“Follow the path down the hill,” Jack panted. “We’ll get down closer to the river.”
Patty slowed and worked her way down the steep dirt path to a path that ran along the Mississippi River. They ran in the same direction as the river flowed.
“This is great being this close to the river. I feel it’s pulling us along with it.”
“Down here can be a different world,” Jack said, having a chance to catch his breath as they slowed, coming down the slope. “I’ve seen deer, fox, and a coyote.”
Patty kept running ahead, her feet crunching across the dead leaves on the dirt path. “I haven’t seen the Ford Parkway Bridge from down here before,” she yelled back over her shoulder.