He also believed Gunner’s version of events. The bad guy had done something boneheaded to break his own neck before Gunner could let go of him. Gunner had never been able to lie to him, and he hadn’t been lying last night.
Chas might not like the fact that a man had died, but it was a far sight better than Poppy dying—or Gunner, or himself.
They were driving along a two-lane westbound road. Rolling farmland and forest surrounded them. Gunner looked beat. “Where are we?” Chas mumbled.
“Central Missouri.”
“Can I take a turn at the wheel?” Chas offered.
“Nah.”
“C’mon. Let me help. You don’t have to be a superhero all the time. You haven’t been getting nearly enough sleep the past several days.”
“Well now, whose fault would that be?”
Chas grinned. “My point exactly. It’s only right that I drive a bit while you catch a nap.”
Gunner relented and pulled over for them to swap seats.
And so it went through the day, with them taking turns driving while the other napped.
At least a dozen times, Chas started to bring up the subject of Gunner calling a halt to the violence of his life, but every time, he chickened out. Gunner seemed to have fully hit his stride after last night and was in full-on badass mode. Now was probably not the moment to ask him to walk away from the job and never look back.
But soon. Soon he would have to tell Gunner that he couldn’t live with knowing his lover was a professional killer.
They made good time and drove through the day and late into the night before Gunner finally called a stop. Chas’s whole body felt beat-up from sitting in a moving vehicle for so long, sleeping in cramped positions, and from the forced inactivity. He hated to think how Gunner’s back felt.
But they’d put nearly a thousand miles between themselves and that nightmare in Kentucky. The Rocky Mountains rose in front of them, hulking black shadows against the night sky, more an absence of stars in the dark than physical shapes.
Gunner murmured, “Let’s wait until daylight to take on driving through the Rockies. Particularly since we won’t be taking main roads.”
Given that the idea of driving off a cliff scared the hell out of him, Chas agreed quickly. They were somewhere between Colorado Springs and Denver, just entering the Front Range, when Gunner pulled into a state park and followed the signs to a camping area. It was deserted at this time of year, and the ranger at the front gate told them to take whatever camping space they wanted.
“Camping?” Chas exclaimed. “What happened to hotels with running water and, oh, flush toilets?”
“We’re roughing it tonight. Staying off the grid.”
“You may like ‘roughing it,’ mister, but I am a huge fan of my creature comforts, thank you very much,” Chas declared.
“We’ll have all the comforts of home,” Gunner argued. “Roughing it is when you’re getting snowed on without any cover, sleeping directly on frozen ground, have to pee into a bottle, and don’t take a shower for a month.”
Chas stared at him in open horror. “No amount of money on earth could entice me to do something like that.”
“How about a choice between life and death?” Gunner responded practically.
“Well, if I was going to die, I might do all that. But—” He broke off. “Are we in life-or-death danger?”
Gunner shrugged as he pulled out a flimsy-looking gray-green tent and started putting it up.
“Don’t you shrug at me, Gunner Vance. I want to know. Exactly how much danger are we in?”
“I’ll let you know when I talk with Spencer and Drago and find out what the guy I captured had to say.”
“And when is that going to happen?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s talked by now. Obviously Spencer and Drago are still tracking down information or they would’ve already called us.”
“How can you be so patient about all this stuff? Don’t you want to know who’s got it in for Poppy and why?”
Gunner pounded in the last stake with a rock and looked up grimly. “Yeah. I do,” he answered flatly. “Grab that pole and lift it when I tell you to.”
In a few seconds, the tent went from being a bunch of nylon on the ground to a fully erected shelter. It barely came up to Chas’s waist, though. Appalled, he watched Gunner crawl in.
“Pass me the sleeping bags, will you?” Gunner called from inside. “They’re the black cylinders about the length of my forearm.”
“You mean these hard pillow things?”
“That’s them.”
Chas passed in the sleeping bags, which appeared to explode from their storage bags.
From inside the tent, Gunner said, “If you’re nice to me, I’ll tell you what all the noises you hear tonight are. Otherwise you get to spend the night wondering.”
“What noises?”
“You’ll see,” Gunner answered cryptically.
They ate sandwiches they’d bought during a fuel stop a few hours back, and Gunner tossed Chas an apple that he commenced munching. With intense distaste, Chas relieved himself against a tree as if he was eight years old again, and then crawled into the tent—on his hands and knees, for crying out loud.
“I feel like a freaking dog.”
“You’d make a cute puppy.”
“There is no part of this that I like,” he declared.
Gunner grinned as he unzipped his combat boots and set them just inside the flap. “Aww, c’mon. It’s not that bad.”
“I can see my breath,” Chas complained. “And the ground is hard. I’m gonna have bruises in the morning just from sleeping.”
“I put foam pads under the sleeping bags.”
Chas lay down experimentally. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Oh, you’d know the difference. You’d have pebbles and sticks digging into your back if I hadn’t.”
“This is barbaric.”
“It’s nicer than the way mankind lived for millions of years.”
“I, sir, am not a caveman,” Chas announced indignantly.
Gunner’s chuckle floated out of the darkness. “I put a bottle of water by the top of your sleeping bag for you. It’s deceptively dry in this part of the country. Easy to get dehydrated, especially when it gets cold.”
“Speaking of which, I’m shivering.”
“You have to mummy up your sleeping bag.”
“What the heck does that mean?” Chas demanded.
“At the top of your sleeping bag’s zipper, there’s a drawstring. Pull it until the top of the bag forms a hood around your head. If it gets really cold tonight, you can tighten it down until there’s only a tiny hole left to get fresh air through.”
“You do realize I’m claustrophobic,” Chas grumbled.
“Think of it as sleeping in a coat.”
Chas thrashed around, hating the confinement of the sleeping bag and unable to get comfortable on the hard alleged pad. He wasn’t at all convinced there actually was a pad beneath him. He could totally see Gunner not giving him one as a joke. He opened his mouth to accuse Gunner of that very thing when a haunting noise, almost like a ghost moaning, made him freeze.