Five Seconds

Skinner’s mind worked furiously during the five-second flight from the construction site to the bomb-making laboratory that his mysterious sponsors had prepared for him.

Slung over her right shoulder like a sack of cornmeal, his chest and stomach resting on her back, Skinner clamped his arms around Trish’s trim waist, while the girl held his upper legs with her small forearm. The lights of the doomed town whipped by, a thousand feet below.

Another man might have screamed or prayed or both, but Skinner was oblivious to both the indignity and the precariousness of his perch as his mind raced. Almost from the moment she appeared in his cell at Grasslands, the bizarre Russian super cowgirl, as he thought of her, had changed his life.