by Jodie Bailey
Sam locked his back teeth and scanned the road signs ahead, looking for an exit that wouldn’t leave him stranded in the middle of nowhere. They were rapidly heading out of town and would soon be in a broad stretch of pecan groves and onion fields, leaving few places to pull off and hide. “Run the plates and get back to me. I’m going to pull off at the next exit. Sign says there’s a shopping mall there. I can make a broad circle in the lot and see if he sticks with me. If he does, there’s a better chance of losing him on a side street than there is on the highway.”
Beside him, Amy stiffened. Sam wished there was a way to have this conversation out of her earshot, a way to keep her ignorant to the danger, but until someone invented silent speech, that was impossible.
His earpiece hummed as Wainwright spoke. “He’ll figure you out the minute you leave the highway. It might make him desperate.”
“I know.” It was a chance Sam had to take. The guy might spook and back off if he thought he’d been tagged, but it might also make him desperate enough to risk an impulsive move. “Back off enough to keep him from being suspicious of you but stay close enough to keep an eye on him.”
“Got it.”
Sam checked his mirrors to make sure he was clear, then slipped from the left lane without signaling, abruptly crossing the right lane and taking the exit at the last second.
The truck followed.
“Someone’s behind us, aren’t they?” Amy had one hand on the grab handle above her head and the other holding tight to the seat beside her. She was even more ashen than she had been before. If Sam weren’t already familiar with Amy and her hard-set determination, he’d think she was about to pass out on him. It was a good thing he’d run up against her stubbornness before. She wasn’t one to knuckle under easily.
But she was also prone to panic attacks, and Sam couldn’t risk one now. From personal experience, he knew they could bring everything to a full stop.
He could skirt the truth to protect her, but in the months he’d known Amy, he’d learned she wasn’t one who would believe an easy story. Edgecombe had always spoken plainly to her when she demanded the truth, and Sam would do no differently. When he’d caught up to her in Virginia the first time he met her, she’d smoked him out immediately and demanded he give her the whole truth about her situation. He had. With both barrels. At the time, she’d deserved to hear how foolish she’d been to run off alone.
This time, the fault was not her own so she deserved none of his righteous anger.
But she still deserved the truth.
“It looks like we’ve picked up a tail, but Wainwright is behind him and our new friend doesn’t seem to know it. We’re fine. We’ll either slip him or we’ll call in local law enforcement to keep him busy and shake him off our scent. We’re fine.” Boy, that had better project more calm than he felt. Adrenaline zipped through his veins. The truth was, the situation could get a lot more complicated. With civilians around and with the driver of the truck being a complete unknown, there were a whole lot of what-ifs that could come to fruition in the next few minutes. More of those scenarios worked against them than for them.
Wainwright’s voice buzzed in his ear. “Just got word on the license plate and you really aren’t going to like it.”
The man had a flare for the dramatic that could make him a little slow with information sometimes, but Sam took the good with the bad. “Probably not.”
“Truck is registered to a student at the community college. He was carjacked about the same time we pulled out of the parking lot and called it in. Guy hit him from behind, so he doesn’t have a description, but local LEOs are still talking to him. Kid’s fine but upset about his truck.”
So their original kidnapper had an accomplice. This operation was more coordinated than he’d suspected. Sam balled his fist and hit the side of the steering wheel.
Amy jumped but remained silent.
He’d have to be careful not to scare her any more than she probably already was, which meant he’d have to be careful what he said to Wainwright. Sam waited as cars turned left on the green light into the large shopping center parking lot. “We showed up at the right time to the college.”
“Looks like. When we descended en masse, he probably made the wise choice to keep himself hidden. Hayes is having our suspect from the college moved into interrogation now, trying to figure out who the partner is.”
In the rearview, the pickup followed Sam into the parking lot, while Wainwright got caught several cars behind him as the light cycled. Sam cruised up the broad center aisle with the pickup still two cars back. At a fork in the drive, Sam hooked a left away from the main lot into a deserted auxiliary lot closer to the road.
The pickup continued straight toward the mall.
Interesting. Far from bringing relief, the truck driver’s odd decision to break away amped Sam’s adrenaline. Their new friend knew something Sam and Wainwright didn’t. “He went his own way.”
“You’re thinking he’s either confident he won’t lose you and he’s trying to throw you off, or he’s got an accomplice who’s finally caught up and who’s got eyes on you so he’s free to move on.”
Sam slowed and eyed the cars on the other side of the parking lot. None seemed familiar. He took a second to glance at Amy, who was watching out the front window, her gaze fixed on nothing. She’d detached from the situation and seemed to be watching from a distance.
It might be for the best. According to her file and Edgecombe’s intel, she’d started having panic attacks when WITSEC faked her death in El Paso. It had been a concern the last time he’d had to pick her up. An attack at the wrong time could compromise everything. He knew all too well the coping mechanism she was using right now. Detach. Watch the world as though the whole thing was a movie. Don’t let emotions creep into the show.
Amy was doing all of that and more. Sam started to ask if she was okay, then thought better of it. The last thing he needed her to do was analyze her feelings before he could get her to a safe place to feel them.
“I’m in.” Wainwright’s voice cut through his thoughts. “I’m going to come around behind you and see if you’ve picked up a second tail, although there’s no one around you right now.”
“Keep an eye out for the first guy.” Sam didn’t like this. He swung back around toward the shopping mall’s entrance. If Wainwright didn’t pick up anything else, he was getting back on the highway double time and getting Amy as far from here as possible. Maybe, just maybe, their tail had figured out he was being followed and had abandoned pursuit.
At the end of an aisle close to the road, traffic was nonexistent and no cars obstructed his view. Sam stopped to check every direction and slipped through the cross aisle. Still no sign of the truck and no indication there was another car tailing him. “I’m heading back for the main road.”
“I’m going to drop in behind you and follow you out, but I’ve got a red coupe three aisles over from me trying to mix into the crowded part of the lot. He’s paralleling your moves.”
So there was another one and he was smart. He’d stayed close to the building where the parking lot was crowded, blending in with the rest of the cars. He glanced at the rearview and watched Wainwright’s car turn onto the row behind him and stop at the same intersection he’d just crossed. “Keep an eye on him. See if he follows.”
“Got it. No sign of the truck. I’m going to—” The screech of tires came from Sam’s earpiece and from across the parking lot at the same time. Metal crunched with a sickening finality.
Sam hit the brakes and turned to look over his shoulder as Amy screamed.
The pickup had appeared out of nowhere and broadsided Wainwright’s car, pushing him at full speed across the narrow intersection and into a light pole. The passenger side was smashed against the truck and the driver’s door curved around the pole.
“Wainwright!” Sam ye
lled for his partner.
Only silence answered.
Sam gunned the engine and spun the car to face the carnage as people raced toward the accident scene. Inside the pickup, the driver was slumped over the steering wheel. The airbag clearly hadn’t deployed.
His earpiece came to life. “I’m okay.” Wainwright was breathless but alive. “Get Amy out.”
Sam scanned the lot, searching for the red car. To his left, a blur of motion caught the low-hanging sun as the car hung a J-turn and aimed at them, roaring across the empty parking spaces, gaining speed and power.
This was a coordinated attack, and Sam was on his own.
THREE
Amy’s shoulder cracked against the window as Sam executed another sharp turn and floored the gas pedal, leaving her stomach somewhere behind them on the asphalt.
“Hold on.” Sam’s hands were tight on the wheel, his focus on what lay ahead of them. He was intense yet he radiated no stress, only a fierce sense of capability that left Amy with the overarching belief that she was safe. She was safe even inside of a car going way too fast for the empty section of parking lot they were currently speeding through.
There was a brief exchange between him and someone she couldn’t hear in his earpiece, but his words didn’t make sense to her until he said, “We’re going to make a lot of turns without warning.”
Amy pressed her back into the seat even farther than she had before. Her fingers ached around the grab handle above the door, but she didn’t let go. “Is Wainwright okay?”
“He’s okay. Fortunately for him, side airbags are a thing.”
Relief was temporary, flung aside as Sam threw the car into another turn away from the more crowded section of the parking lot.
She should have been panicking right now. Her brain should have already given way to adrenaline and fear, throwing her into a state of sheer terror. It had happened under less harrowing circumstances. An overcrowded store during the holiday season. A sharp sound during a movie. Simply waking up too suddenly in the middle of the night. Panic attacks had become a semi-regular occurrence since she’d fled her real life.
Flying across the parking lot as though they’d been fired out of a missile launcher, the only thing she felt was detachment, as though her body was buckled into the front seat but her mind was somewhere slightly to the left. She was two steps behind what was happening.
She braced herself against the dash with her free hand as Sam navigated the turn out of the shopping center and shot up the road toward the highway entrance. Numb detachment was another thing she was used to, a side effect of the anxiety that had hounded her since the night she realized WITSEC had killed the old Amy Brady and given rise to Amy Naylor. Since the moment she’d realized the person she’d been from birth was dead.
In essence, although she still lived and breathed, she’d died that day. No more job. No more friends. No more sports medicine degree. WITSEC had rewritten and recreated her degree. They had fabricated her past work experience to fit this new person, a community college professor teaching biology, which she had studied a bit while taking sports medicine. She couldn’t even use her experience as a personal trainer, the job that had kept her afloat during college, without risking her own life. Everything she’d worked for and fought for was gone.
Worst of all, there was no hope of ever reconciling with her twin sister. Like the rest of the world, Eve had been told that Amy Brady was dead.
Well, she would have been told if the Marshals Service had been able to find her. Eve had disappeared shortly before Amy discovered the truth about Grant Meyer and began compiling evidence against him. For all Amy knew, Meyer’s coconspirator—who was also Eve’s boyfriend—had murdered her...or worse.
Amy jerked her mind into the present, to Sam taking the highway exit and threading through cars like a madman. If she continued down this road of thought, she’d jerk herself out of the numbness and lose control. There was no time for Sam to stop and coax her through an attack now. He needed both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
She stared at her feet braced against the floor mat and prayed her stomach would stay inside her body. Thankfully, she’d never been prone to motion sickness, but a hundred miles an hour on an interstate, weaving between cars, might change everything. “The police won’t like this.”
Sam’s chuckle was low and humorless as he navigated around a slow-moving truck. “My team leader is in touch with them. They’ll give us space, but the guy behind us is about to have his hands full.”
As if on cue, sirens squealed in the distance, seeming to come from all directions at once. Two police cars zoomed past on the other side of the highway. Amy dipped her head to peek at the side mirror. Two more, lights flashing and sirens blaring, were running up fast on the red car from the parking lot. While Sam and Amy blew past the next off-ramp, the car trailing them cut onto the exit and sped off the interstate, the police close behind.
Sam lifted his foot from the accelerator and exhaled loudly as the car leveled out to a more normal highway speed. His relief was the first sign he’d been holding any tension, a slight crack in his cool armor. He dropped one hand from the steering wheel to his thigh, flexing his fingers as though they were tight.
They probably were, given the grip he’d had on the wheel while he was evading their pursuer. His shoulders, his neck... Everything was probably balled into knots. If Amy had been in his shoes, there’d be a tension headache pounding through her skull.
It was a whole lot easier to think about his physical state than it was to think about all that had happened and all that was about to happen. Denial was her friend, and it would be until she had a moment alone to fall apart. “Thank you.”
“Just doing my job.” He winked at her, a rare flash of his personality beyond his role as a deputy marshal. There was a flash of a smile, then he tilted his head slightly as though his earpiece was talking to him again.
The glimpse of the real person who lived inside of him zinged along her spine. Amy looked away. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t noticed him the first time she’d seen him, the epitome of tall, dark and gorgeous. Every time he’d visited alongside Deputy Edgecombe, Sam had dogged her thoughts for days after.
She’d ignored the attraction. Her minor in psychology had taught her to recognize that her childhood could create a fascination with honorable men and heroes who galloped in on white horses to rescue fair maidens.
The men in her young life had been transient, coming and going at her mother’s princess-fantasy whims. Her mother had been addicted to the rush of new love. The minute her high was gone, she moved on to someone else.
Only one man had stayed longer than a month. Only one man had ever come close to being a father figure, and he’d vanished when his connections to organized crime threatened Amy and her sister.
She clenched her teeth. Amy had promised herself she’d never be like her mother, drifting into the princess fantasy of needing a man to rescue her or to complete her.
As it turned out, she was almost as bad as her mother. She’d jumped into marriage with Noah when she was nineteen because he’d not only loved her but had promised the security her life lacked. They were both young, lost and looking for someone to come home to. Sure, she’d loved him, but maturity made her wonder what would have happened with their marriage had he come home alive. They’d still been in the getting-to-know-each-other phase when she’d married him. Like her mother, she’d fallen into the rush of first love.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If she remarried, it would be to someone she’d known for longer than a month.
With a glance at Sam, she created another resolve. If she ever remarried, it would be to a man who didn’t make her feel special simply because he’d rescued her from the gnashing teeth of a human-trafficking dragon.
“You doing okay over there?” Sam’s voice cut through
the memories and dragged Amy into the reality she’d been trying with partial success to avoid.
“I’m fine.” A dull ache in her knees and fingers reminded her she was still braced for impact. Painfully, she unwrapped her fingers from the handle above the door and shifted her legs from side to side to relax her knees. “Where are we headed?”
Sam drummed his thigh and the steering wheel with his thumbs. “We’re going to my team’s headquarters in Atlanta. It’s secure. You’ll be safe. While we’re there, you’ll be briefed on everything that’s happened and someone will go over your options with you. In a few hours, you’ll know more than I do.”
That probably wasn’t true, but she’d act as though she believed him. “Last time, when the marshals faked my car accident, I was in a safe house in Ohio for a few days.” It had been horrible. The place had been a nondescript cookie-cutter rental home in the middle of a small residential neighborhood. “I was stuck in a back bedroom with the blinds closed for days. All I had was a TV and some books one of the deputies picked up at a grocery store.” Used to regular physical activity both in her personal life and on her job, she’d craved a run or a good set of weights. The tension had overwhelmed her and, without release, the panic attacks had come on stronger each day. That first run she’d taken after her relocation had been both terrifying and liberating.
Sam cast her a sympathetic smile. “I’m afraid this won’t be much better. It might even be a little bit worse because you won’t be in a house, at least not at first. I suppose when we turn you over to a relocation team, you’ll be in a safe house again for a short time, but for a day or so you’ll be stuck with us in an industrial office building.” He grimaced as though he were silently apologizing. “We do have a couple of rooms with some temporary sleeping quarters. Cots actually.”