Blind Run by Patricia Lewin

memory and vowed he and Callie wouldn’t end up like that. “They have to find us first, and I’m not going to let that happen.”
    He wasn’t sure how he would keep his promise, but he had to try. This was all his fault. He’d convinced Callie to run away and to trust Anna.
    He searched the sky for the hawk and saw it gliding overhead. Then, flapping its wings in slow easy motions, it let out a screech, caught an updraft, and flew out of sight. Danny envied the big bird and its freedom. He wished he and Callie could just fly away as well.
    “Danny.” The fear in Callie’s voice brought him back to earth. She’d deserted the chair and moved to the edge of the awning. “Someone’s coming.”
    Danny looked toward the road, where a cloud of dust rose in the distance. Quickly, he moved to Callie’s side, fear tightening his stomach.
    “Can you make out what kind of car it is?” His sister’s eyesight was better than his. “Is it Anna or Decker?”
    Callie squinted, shading her eyes with her hand. “I can’t tell, it’s too far away. But I didn’t expect them back this quick.”
    “Me, neither.”
    “Could it be the Keepers?”
    Without answering, Danny turned from the trailer to scan the surrounding desert. He couldn’t let them take him and Callie back. They needed to hide. Think, he ordered himself, desperate now, but he saw nothing but miles and miles of sand.
    Callie slipped her hand into his, and she may as well have wrapped her small fingers around his heart. “I’m scared.”
    Danny sucked in a breath. “Me, too.”
    ETHAN WAS TOO LATE.
    He stared at the empty chair beneath the awning where he’d left the girl and her brother. Next to it, on a plastic table covered with dust, sat an empty glass and the clear plastic wrapper from the crackers. As earlier, when he’d found Anna’s car, everything seemed entirely too quiet.
    Without warning, another child’s face leapt before his memory’s eye, a laughing, blue-eyed boy. Ethan had been too late then as well. And too slow.
    Though he fought it, the sudden upsurge of memories tore at him, making him look again at his failure. Nicky was what he saw, lying peacefully beneath a tree as if taking a nap. A little boy enjoying a hot summer day, while his father . . .
    No.
    Ethan shut down his thoughts, refusing to head down that road. It wouldn’t do them any good. Not him, not Nicky, and certainly not those two kids Anna had left behind.
    Gripping her .38, he climbed out of his truck. The empty gun was useless, except as a bluff, but it was all he had. He made a quick visual sweep of the trailer and surrounding desert. Then he scanned the boulders and crumbled-down cliff face a couple of hundred yards behind the trailer, watching for the glint of sunlight on steel that would mark him as a target.
    Nothing.
    Except the silent, hulking trailer and endless sand, dotted with its sparse desert vegetation.
    He checked the ground. No extra tire tracks. No signs of a struggle. Plus his instincts told him Ramirez hadn’t been here, and fourteen years of military and Agency work had taught him to trust those instincts.
    Even if Ethan assumed the dark import on the highway belonged to Ramirez, he doubted whether the assassin would have had time to get to the trailer and back. It was at least a twenty-minute drive to the highway, forty minutes round-trip, not counting the time it would take to grab the kids and run. And Ethan was willing to bet the boy wouldn’t have gone easily. So maybe it would have taken fifty minutes.
    Had Ethan been on the highway chasing Anna that long?
    He didn’t think so. It definitely hadn’t been that long since he’d passed the other car. Besides, if Marco Ramirez had come for those kids, they wouldn’t be gone, they’d be lying facedown in the sand.
    Like Anna.
    Pushing the truck door closed behind him, Ethan moved to the trailer’s open window and put his back against the metal frame.
    “Danny?” he called over his