by Jodie Bailey
Sam didn’t dare engage yet. While no one was close to the pair, there were too many students milling in the parking lot and pulling out of the main entrance. They were all in striking distance if the situation disintegrated into a shootout.
Sam was out of options. “I could use some help here.”
“Backup is still several minutes out. Can you stall them?”
“I can try.” He’d love to call in the police or give the order to clear the parking lot, but without knowing who the man was or what his plans for Amy were, any broad moves were risky. Whatever Sam did would have to be subtle and calculated.
The man who was holding Amy captive was tall, broad and blond. He was bigger than Sam, though likely not as well trained. He opened the front door of his car and jerked Amy closer.
The front seat. Okay, good. He was likely alone if he was willing to put her in the front seat where she could grab the wheel and wreck the car.
Slipping his pistol onto his lap and holding it at the ready, Sam rolled his window down and pulled to a stop behind the gray car before Amy climbed into the vehicle.
Her eyes widened when she saw Sam. She opened her mouth, then flicked her gaze to the man behind her and closed it again.
Good. If she blew his cover, they’d all be dead.
The stranger slid his hand from her wrist to her back and tried to shove her into the car as he cut his eyes at Sam. “I think you need to keep moving, buddy.” His voice was low and heavy with a midwestern drawl. He wasn’t holding a weapon, but the way his shirt hung at his side said he had one close to the ready.
Good news? It would take him longer to draw than it would take Sam. Bad news? Amy stood between them—a human shield.
There was an easy fix for that dilemma. He caught Amy’s eye, then deliberately looked at the car door, which stood open in front of her. Come on, Amy. Hear what I’m saying to you. “I just need directions, man. No worries. You know where the student center is? I’ve got a meeting with my—”
“I don’t know anything.” He nudged Amy until she climbed into the car, then he shut the door behind her.
Perfect. Now if backup would get here so they could flank this guy and end this thing without anyone firing a weapon. “I could use a hand here. If you could point me in the right direction, you’d be doing me a solid.”
Casting aside all pretense of civility, the man glanced at Amy and strode toward Sam’s car, anger flushing his cheeks and narrowing his eyes. “I told you to move. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll find your gas pedal and use it now.”
Before Sam could respond, a black sedan slipped around his car and into the space next to the one where Amy sat, a hostage to her captor. Another sedan slid behind Sam and into the spot on the other side.
Sam almost sagged in relief. Deputy Marshal Vince Wainwright slipped out of his car, drawing the man’s attention as another deputy Sam didn’t recognize stepped up from the other side.
Amy’s attacker reached for the pistol at his side, but Sam lifted his own weapon and aimed it at center mass. “United States Deputy Marshals. And I wouldn’t even think about touching that gun if I were standing in your shoes.”
The man’s head whipped toward Sam and he hesitated, then flicked his gaze back and forth between the three US marshals who had hemmed him in. In an instant, his posture melted from defiant anger to sullen resignation.
Sam’s stomach unclenched, but he kept his expression hard. “You’re done. Lace your fingers behind your head.”
The man obeyed, and the deputy Sam didn’t know took him into custody.
Sam eased out of his car and turned to Wainwright. “Deputy Edgecombe’s car is right in front of you. I have a bad feeling about what you’re going to find.” Sam would have checked himself, but Amy was his responsibility.
Deputy Wainwright nodded grimly and disappeared around the SUV as the other deputy hauled their suspect off.
Sam headed straight for Amy. As soon as he pulled the door open, she dropped her head to the back of the seat. “You got him?”
“We did.” He had to get her out of here quickly, before any more of Grant Meyer’s goons showed up, but she was pale and shaking. She likely needed a minute to gather herself before he tried to move her. It was probable her legs wouldn’t hold her until she’d caught her breath. Sam knelt beside her, slightly below her eye level. He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Take a minute. Get your bearings, and then we need to move you.”
“This isn’t over, is it?”
“No.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
Movement at the front of the car caught Sam’s attention. Wainwright, his phone already pulled to his ear, caught Sam’s eye, his face tight. He shook his head.
No words needed to be spoken. Edgecombe was gone.
Shoving his emotions to the side, Sam turned his attention to Amy, who was still watching him. “There’s a vest in the front seat of my car. When you get in, I want you to put it on.” His own was hot under his shirt, but in a retrieval like this, he wasn’t taking any chances.
“Deputy Maldonado?” Her face paled, almost as though she’d heard what the two deputies hadn’t spoken. “How bad is it?”
He wanted to answer her. He really did. But the truth was worse than anything she could imagine. If he’d arrived forty-two seconds later, Amy’s blood would have been on his hands.
TWO
The deputy standing at the front of the car disconnected his call and shoved his phone into a holster on his belt. He seemed to listen to something in his earpiece, then walked over to stand on the other side of the car, watching the entrance to the parking lot.
Amy didn’t have to ask about Deputy Marshal Edgecombe’s condition. The silent conversation between the two men confirmed her suspicions.
Shutting her eyes against the pressure of tears, Amy did her best to swallow the pain in her throat. Deputy Elijah Edgecombe had been her main point of contact since she’d been relocated to Georgia over three years ago. He’d been the one to deliver news, both good and bad, to answer her questions, to check on her in those dark moments when she was certain she’d never be safe again. He was a good man, although she had no idea what his life outside of their occasional interactions looked like. It was certain someone out there would grieve the loss of a son or a husband or a brother.
If only her phone hadn’t been on vibrate. If only she’d answered the first—
“Amy.” Deputy Maldonado’s hand on her shoulder tightened. “You’re okay. We’re going to get you out of here.”
The other marshal spoke. “Two local detectives are pulling in to secure the scene. Deputy Kline is on his way with a team. Two local officers will escort our suspect out. I’m to follow you. We have to get moving though, before we draw a crowd.”
Amy opened her eyes, the full implications of his words bringing the truth back like a slap to her face. Her identity had been compromised. She turned to Deputy Maldonado, who pulled his hand from her shoulder and stood. “I can’t go home, can I?”
He glanced at the other deputy, then back to Amy before holding out his hand to her. His brown eyes were sad, either because of Deputy Edgecombe or because of her situation. “I’m sorry.”
The adrenaline that had been keeping Amy upright ebbed and left her entire body aching. Coupled with the weight of what was about to happen, she wasn’t sure she could move. She lifted her hand and placed it in Deputy Maldonado’s. He helped her out of the car, his support the only thing keeping her on her feet. When the other deputy handed him a bulletproof vest, she let Deputy Maldonado help her into it, the entire scene playing out from a distance.
She grabbed her bag. The other deputy rounded the car and held his hand out over the top of the door. “I’m going to need your bag along with your cell phone.”
Amy opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Sh
e’d done this before and had awakened too many times to count in a cold sweat from nightmares that this moment had come again.
Well, this was no bad dream. This was her reality...again. Surrender everything she owned, leave her entire life behind, become someone completely different.
Silently, she passed the bag to the deputy, then drew her cell phone from her pocket and handed it over as well. All she had left of Amy Naylor—and of the real Amy Brady—were the wedding ring she wore around her neck and the antique watch on her wrist. The ring was the only thing she had left of her deceased husband and the watch was the only memento of the friendship that had landed her in this mess in the first place. If her other watch hadn’t died two days ago and she hadn’t replaced it with this one, she’d have likely been forced to leave it behind.
Amy let Deputy Maldonado lead her to his car. He opened the door and ushered her in, shutting it behind her before he turned to have a quick conversation with the other deputy, the one who was holding what was left of her life in his hands.
With a cold fury, she despised the nameless deputy and she didn’t even know him. He represented the horror she was facing. He’d taken the last of her identity away from her. Everything she was, everything that identified her hung casually from his fingertips in her gray messenger bag. The favorite pen she wished would never run dry. The keychain from a hiking trip along the southernmost part of the Appalachian Trail. Her phone with pictures of her few Georgia friends.
Her friends, who would never know what had happened to her. Her students, who would only know that Ms. Naylor never showed up for class. The entire life she’d built here was firmly erased by the taking of her messenger bag.
The bag with a photo slipped inside a torn lining, the photo she wasn’t supposed to have in the first place.
“Wait!”
Deputy Maldonado had pulled the door open but stopped before he slid in. “What?”
Amy reached across the seat and grabbed his hand, gripping tight, desperate for him to understand that she needed this one forbidden thing or she might lose her real self forever. “In the top pocket of my backpack, the lining is cut. There’s a picture...”
His expression tightened, the no already forming on his lips. She shouldn’t have mementos like that, pieces of her old life that someone could find and use against her. But she couldn’t let this one go. It was all she had left. “Please.”
He eyed her for a long moment before he shoved away from the car and walked over to the other deputy. There was a brief conversation before Sam dug through the messenger bag then returned, passing the picture to her as he shut the door and started the car. “I can’t promise they’ll let you keep it.”
“Thank you for trying.” She stared down at the photo in her hand. Two women and one man, smiling and happy, in better days when they didn’t know that the next two years would rip them entirely apart.
Deputy Maldonado shifted the car into gear and rolled out. He cast a lingering glance in the rearview, likely at the car that held Deputy Edgecombe’s remains.
Amy wasn’t the only one who was losing today. With a crushing weight in her chest, the grief returned. Deputy Edgecombe’s family was about to get a devastating visit. A team of men had lost a colleague. There was a difference in losing a temporary life and losing a permanent one. “I’m sorry.”
Deputy Maldonado’s eyes shifted to her and he eased out of the parking lot. “For what?”
“About Edgecombe. He was a good man.”
“The best.” He massaged the steering wheel for a moment, then tipped his chin toward the photo in her hand. “What’s so important about that photo that you’re willing to risk your neck to keep it?”
Amy turned her eyes to the picture and scanned the faces forever frozen in time. “I can look in the mirror any day and see my twin sister’s face looking back at me, but this is the only actual picture I have of her. And it’s the only one I have left of my husband and me together.”
His head jerked back. “There’s no mention of a husband in your file.”
“Then you haven’t seen my whole file. We were married six years ago, shortly before he deployed to Afghanistan.” Amy stared into Noah’s laughing hazel eyes. Their entire relationship had been the very definition of a whirlwind. They’d met in January, married in April and he deployed in July. On the first chilly autumn day in September, an army chaplain flanked by two other soldiers knocked on her door. From the first time they laid eyes on each other until the day he died, less than ten months had passed. “He was killed in a firefight in the Arghandab Valley.”
“I know the place well.”
Amy started to ask how, but experience with the buttoned-down deputy marshal told her he’d only change the subject without answering. While she’d seen him and spoken to him many times, little had changed between them in the months since she’d first met him. Back then, he’d ridden the edge of frustration and anger for the two days it had taken for him and his team to be certain she hadn’t compromised her new identity. Deputy Edgecombe had been the one to fill her in on exactly what it was Deputy Maldonado and his people did. An elite recovery team within WITSEC, they were sent after missing or endangered high-value targets in the most desperate situations. She’d gone missing on her own the first time, prompting the deployment of his team. She’d deserved his irritation and annoyance then. This time... She gasped, guilt burning in her stomach. “Deputy, is all of this happening because of me? Because you had to hunt me down the last time?”
“Call me Sam. We’re about to spend a lot of time together, and it will make things easier.” Before she could ask what he meant, Sam shook his head. “None of this is your fault. Despite how foolish your actions were a few months ago, no one tracked you then. To be honest, we’re not certain what’s happening now or how you were found. Our cyber expert was trolling the dark web and found a hit out on you placed only a few hours ago.”
“A hit?” It wasn’t possible. This was the stuff of action movies and TV shows. How had she landed here? Three years ago, she’d been a normal person working for a living after the loss of her husband, whose insurance money had gone to his mother. She’d wrapped up her degree in sports medicine and was interviewing for full-time jobs in her field. While working on her college job as a personal trainer and part-time receptionist at a day spa, she’d discovered an ugly truth straight out of her worst nightmares.
Her boss, Grant Meyer, had been using New Horizons Day Spa’s multiple locations in Texas to traffic human beings. Worse, his partner was a man she’d trusted enough to introduce to her twin sister. Logan Cutter had manipulated Eve until she’d pulled away from everyone in her life, including Amy. When Amy had notified the authorities about the evidence she’d found at the day spa, she never dreamed her life would end up jumping the tracks so completely. She’d been forced to leave everything behind and to become an entirely new person. Certainly, she’d never imagined she’d be the target of real-life hit men, something she’d foolishly thought only happened in the movies.
“Why now?” It had been more than three years since she’d stepped into her life as Amy Naylor. Three years in which, while she never stopped looking over her shoulder, she’d at least grown slightly more comfortable in her skin teaching underclassmen biology at the community college. It was the closest she could come to using her real degree without giving away who she used to be.
“The prosecution is close to securing a trial date. It’s possible Grant Meyer was able to make contact with the outside and have you targeted. It seems unlikely, since his organization fell apart after he was jailed and agents rounded up most of his men. Still, if he has any sort of reach, he’ll use it to get to you. You’re the biggest thing the prosecution has against him. Even though he knows the evidence you turned over is enough to take him down without you ever taking the stand, revenge would be a pretty sweet dish to him. Our big concern is how he
was able to tell others where to look for you. And why he’d put out a blanket call for a hit on the dark web where authorities could be tipped off, instead of having someone he trusted come after you. At this moment, none of it makes sense.”
The more he talked, the more Amy tensed. Nothing he said made this better. Everything was only getting worse and the crushing weight of it threatened to suffocate her.
Sam glanced in her direction and seemed to notice his words were having the opposite effect of his intentions. “Amy, you’re safe with me. I promise. That’s why they sent me and why they put my team on the job. No one is going to hurt you as long as you’re doing as we—” He tipped his head away from her, to the left where his earpiece was. The lines around his mouth and above his eyes drew tighter and he gripped the steering wheel with both hands, gaze roaming from mirror to mirror.
Amy pressed deeper into the seat, panic threatening to overwhelm her. Whatever he was hearing, nothing good was going to come of it.
* * *
Sam eyed the rearview and immediately spotted the vehicle that had sparked Wainwright’s concern. The gray full-size pickup had slipped in behind them shortly after Sam merged onto the highway headed toward Atlanta and his team’s base of operations three hours and some change to the northwest. The truck hadn’t raised too much concern as it had stayed a few cars back and seemed to be running with the ever-increasing Friday afternoon traffic. He kept his voice low, knowing he couldn’t avoid Amy hearing him but hoping against hope she wouldn’t understand. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” Wainwright’s voice was serious and certain.
Moments like this reinforced the reason Sam liked to travel in pairs and to have someone watching his back during witness transport. There was a reason he liked to have the younger deputy back him up on days like this. Wainwright was competent and quick, with a gift for seeing what Sam couldn’t because his focus had to be out the front windshield. “When you hit the highway, the pickup crossed two lanes of traffic and cut me off to stay with you. I don’t think he realizes I’m back here, so we have the advantage on him there, but he’s definitely latched on to you.”