In Laymon's Terms

Without Danni, Keyes wouldn’t have survived. She always knew what to do. Trouble came and she kicked into gear. She didn’t waste time thinking, the way Keyes did. He drove her crazy that way. That’s why Danni was the one driving after things went bad, and Keyes was the one bleeding.

Keyes knew that.

Same way he knew that he loved Danni like he’d never love anyone else.

It was the same for her.

Keyes was sure that it was.

Keyes worried as he hobbled through the woods. He hadn’t wanted to come to Murdock’s cabin. He’d wanted to lay low a little bit longer and he’d given Danni a mouthful of reasons explaining why that was a good idea, but she wouldn’t buy any of them.

No. Talking didn’t work with Danni. It might have worked on her sister Elise, but Elise was a new-age mystic who loved jabbering on about chakras and spirit guides and shit that even Ripley wouldn’t believe, and Danni read The Wall Street Journal. The way she saw it, waiting four months to split up the swag from the armored car job was way too long. Danni insisted on arranging a meet with Murdock and Morales before the calendar flipped another page. And she also insisted that she and Keyes arrive at said meet separately, so they wouldn’t end up like the two birds who’d gotten into trouble with that one proverbial stone.

Keyes had gone along with the plan, even though he was only running at half speed. He knew that he wouldn’t be ready if trouble came, and come it had. Trouble had lashed Murdock to a chair with fishhooks and line, and trouble had drawn a gun and opened fire on Keyes. Yeah. Trouble had hit him right between the eyes...figuratively, if not literally. And he wasn’t ready for it. Not at all.

That was the damned shame of the thing, and it was more than enough to put Keyes’ insecurities on the boil. A few months ago he’d hesitated for just a second, and some cop had pulled a trigger a couple of times, and he’d ended up in a feverish limbo for four months. During that time he’d suffered through Danni’s long silences as the moon hung heavy in the night sky, and he’d listened to her sister rattle on about a whole bunch of mystical shit that never existed beneath the bright sun that he lived under. And now someone else had taken a couple of shots at him, and the whole cycle seemed to be starting up again.

Here he was, scared, limping through the woods like a wounded rabbit. That wasn’t the smart way to do things. Keyes knew it. He wasn’t thinking straight, like he used to. That was something he had to start doing again, and right now.

Keyes pulled up short and crouched in a tangle of ferns at the edge of the path. That low growl—that middle-of-nowhere silence—closed around him like the dark redwood forest. The only other sound was the long cool whisper of deeply drawn breaths that passed over his dry lips. He concentrated on that sound as he watched the path.

Even, steady breaths. That long cool whisper. Concentrating. Thinking things through...

It didn’t look like anyone was following him. And that was too bad. Crouching in the ferns, Keyes had good cover. If the guy who’d tried to drill him at the cabin came along, it would be easy to surprise him from behind, easier still to draw his knife across the bastard’s throat—

But the bastard in question obviously wasn’t that stupid, and the knowledge twisted in Keyes’ scarred guts like an angry snake. He knew that he couldn’t be stupid, either. He had to get a handle on the situation...and quick.

Okay. Someone had tried to kill him at the cabin. That someone had also done a job on Murdock. Whoever it was wasn’t fucking around, not even a little bit. Keyes had seen that pretty clearly in Murdock’s eyes.

Keyes considered the possibility that he was the cause of Murdock’s fear. After all, he had pulled a knife as he entered the cabin, but only because he wanted to cut Murdock loose. He’d as much as said so to Murdock. So it had to be the sound of those footsteps outside that had set the old man off. That was why Murdock was afraid. He’d realized that his pal Mr. Fishhooks was coming back, probably to do something worse—something that would make Murdock reveal the location of the hidden cash from the armored car holdup.

In the meantime, Mr. Fishhooks was using Murdock for bait. It wasn’t a bad plan, really—lure Murdock’s partners in crime into a trap one by one and slap the lid on them. It had nearly worked. A couple more inches to the left, and the gunman’s bullets would have drilled Keyes’ forehead, not a stuttering door.

So who was Mr. Fishhooks? It wasn’t much of a question, really, because there were only four members of Murdock’s gang, and Keyes could easily account for three of them—Murdock was bound to a chair, and Danni wasn’t even due at the cabin for another couple hours, and Keyes...well, Keyes knew the exact location of his own ass—right there with the banana slugs, crouching in a stand of ferns in the middle of a cold, wet redwood forest.

That left Morales.