The problem with a shoot-out was that it would end with either him or someone else taking another bullet. And if he killed that someone else, he’d be a cop killer for real this time.
That left hiding. But where?
Right here.
A voice in his head? Great. Not only had he lost his food, now he was losing his mind.
He nudged an old-fashioned throw rug back from the floor. Underneath was a trapdoor and he was willing to bet that it led to the root cellar. He pulled on the metal ring and lifted, shining his flashlight into the cold, damp space beneath the floor. There was a rickety ladder leading down and a musty smell rising up.
He dropped his snowshoes into the hole and his backpack after them. Then with the flashlight held between his teeth, he descended, making sure that the rug was in place to cover the trapdoor again after it shut. Once down in the cellar, he swept the beam of the flashlight in front of him. Cobwebs hung from wooden rafters and along the dirt walls were ramshackle shelves with a few old milky jars and ancient tin cans.
It’s the perfect place to hide a body.
Jolie’s voice was a ghost in his ear, making the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, Jolie,” he whispered to the silence. “Because I didn’t do it and I’m tired of running.”
* * *
JOLIE NOTICED THE missing lock right away. There was a second—a millisecond maybe—when she considered not mentioning it. But Edwards had been shadowing her the entire time and he must have noticed the missing padlock, since every other door of the old ghost town had one.
“Over here,” Edwards called.
How different this was from her last visit, when she’d been dying to peek inside the old buildings and walk around. Now, as she walked across the lobby and through the dining hall of the old hotel, it was like the ghosts were everywhere, flitting between the shadows, making strange sounds from the walls and beneath the floorboards.
“Back here,” Ross—who’d gone on ahead—called.
Edwards’s flashlight led the way and all four of them congregated in the kitchen storeroom. “He’s been here, all right. Look at this.”
The shelves had been pilfered, quickly. Cans knocked over, bags ripped open.
“Do you think he’s still here?” Edwards asked Ross.
“If he is, he’s a fool.”
“It was probably a couple days ago,” Dillon said.
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, he left on the night of the twenty-eighth or morning of the twenty-ninth. We checked the kitchen and nothing was missing from the house. He doesn’t keep much at his place so this is probably the first place he came before heading out into Beaverhead County to avoid people.”
“Listen to this guy,” Edwards drawled. “Thinking like a real lawman.”
Jo glanced at Dillon to see how he responded to the condescending tone of the agent.
Ross ignored his partner. “How far would he have gotten in two days?”
“On snowshoes? He might be twenty, thirty miles away by now. But which direction? Who knows. There’s the pass, there’s the southern route, northern route...”
Ross tugged on Edwards’s sleeve and pulled him in the other direction so they could speak together without Jolie or Dillon hearing. However, their discussion soon turned into an argument, which meant it was loud and clear.
“We go after him now. There’s no turning back.”
“Are you crazy? With these two? No food, no shelter, no equipment? It’s suicide.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Why don’t you call in some helicopters?” Dillon offered. “There’s a lot of back country to cover by snowmobile and pretty hard to track in darkness.”
Ross scowled in Dillon’s direction, holding up his hand to silence him before lowering his voice so that Jo was unable to hear the rest of the discussion.
“Those guys are not what I expected,” Dillon said quietly.
“You mean you didn’t expect incompetent assholes,” she whispered.
Dillon snickered and then covered it up with a cough as flashlights turned in their direction.
“Okay,” Ross said as he rejoined them. “We’ll head back to the ranch and start again at first light. He’s got to have left some tracks we just have to pray for no snow.”
Thank God. Jolie was desperate to get back so that these men could do their job and leave her out of it. Maybe this was her big story but...the truth was, she didn’t want it and she didn’t want to help these arrogant jerks.
She wanted... Thad.
He lied to you. He used you. He’s a killer.
Even now, even after all she’d learned about him and all he’d put her through, she still wanted him. What did that make her? A lunatic? A hopeless romantic? An accomplice to a killer?
Her limbs were numb as she climbed aboard the snowmobile behind Dillon. She shivered for the duration of the ride home as she hugged Dillon’s back, and the ride seemed to take three times as long as the way out there. So similar to last time she’d ridden the dogsled back to the ranch, yet so different.
When they finally parked the machines near the shed behind the barn, Edwards took her elbow and escorted her to the lodge, in through the foyer, right to the door of her room.
“What are you doing?” she asked, trying to pull away.
He dragged a chair from her room out into the hall and said, “I’m going to be right here, all night. We’ll be leaving at first light, so be ready because you’re coming with us.”
That didn’t make sense. She would just slow them down. Why on earth would FBI agents want her to join them?
Because they don’t trust you.
Jo had never been in a situation like this before, where people questioned her integrity. “Fine. I’ll be ready.” She shut the bedroom door and locked it. Edwards might think he was keeping her in, but she was just as intent on keeping him out. The first thing she did was go into the bathroom and turn on the faucet for a bath, nice and hot. She dumped some of her new bubble bath under the running water, the lavender scent seeming incongruent to her state of mind. But she needed to do something to warm up, to relax, and then she’d try to figure out what to do.
While the tub filled, she went to retrieve her pajamas and saw her cell phone sitting on the desk where she’d left it earlier—before being so rudely interrupted by the Feds. A little meditation music while she soaked the chill out of her bones was just what she needed. However, the second she entered her passcode, she was greeted with over seventeen notifications of messages and three missed calls. She touched the message app.
All were from her brother. All with the same message: call me.
With a glance at the closed door to the hall, Jo went into the bathroom, then shut and locked the door behind her. She hit the redial button and waited. Jacob answered on the first ring.
“Oh, thank God,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Tell me the truth. Are you lying to me about Lukas Hunter?”
“No. I swear.”
She heard him exhale heavily. “Shit, Jo, I wish you were.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Are you sitting down?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are the FBI?”
“One’s parked outside my door as we speak. Why?”
“I want you to listen to me very
carefully. Those are not FBI agents.”
18
Being brave is not doing something worthwhile in the absence of fear but rather doing something worthwhile despite fear.
Jo Duval
JO SAT STARING straight ahead, the phone hanging from her fingertips, the water in the tub coming much too close to the rim. She reached over and turned off the faucet, pushing her sleeve back in order to fish around in the deep tub to pull the plug. What the hell was she supposed to do? Her brother had told her to sit tight and play dumb until the real authorities arrived. But when would that be? In an hour? Tomorrow? Thad might not have that long. Who knew what Ross and Edwards had planned.
Except their names weren’t really Ross and Edwards. They were members of the Salvatori family—a branch of the family that owned casinos in Atlantic City. It was so much to take in that for ten minutes, Jo sat there, immobilized. But her stillness did not mean her brain had shut off. On the contrary. While Jo sat on the toilet seat, her brain had been working hard, coming up with a plan.
And what she came up with was crazy, partly because Ms. Internal Editor had fainted from shock and disapproval, but even the creative side of her brain knew the plan was ludicrous. It didn’t matter. She was going to go through with it because she had to, for her sake, for everyone at the ranch and most of all, for Thad.
The first thing she did, once she’d convinced herself to move, was open up her computer and send a message to Gloria and Dillon via their website. They needed to know who these men were and what they intended. She just prayed they’d get the information before it was too late.
Next, she dressed in warm clothes, stuffing as many extra things into her carry-on bag as possible, including the emergency kit she’d picked up at the general store in Half Moon Creek before Christmas. Thank God Edwards hadn’t even given her time to take off her boots when he escorted her inside; having no boots would have foiled her plan completely.
Jo turned off her lights and tiptoed to the sliding doors, ever so quietly opening them to slip outside. But no matter how quiet she tried to be, the crunch of the snow beneath her feet sounded extraloud as she made her way across the deck and down the steps. Hiding in the shadows by the side of the house, Jo concentrated on breathing long and deep to calm her racing heart.
It wasn’t just sneaking out that had her jittery; it was what she was about to do.
“You can do this, Jo. You can,” she muttered beneath her breath, her nerves in desperate need of bolstering.
Making her way across the yard to the barn seemed to take forever, and Jo had to lean against the wall as if she’d run a marathon. She pushed herself away from the wall and jogged around the barn to Thad’s bunkhouse. The door was still unlocked and she went in, using the flashlight on her phone to light her way, not willing to take the risk of turning on a light that might be seen from the house.
She found some nonperishables in the cupboards: crackers, jerky, instant soup and candy—black licorice, a whole tinful. That’s why he always tasted like licorice. She stuffed the goods in her bag before tiptoeing to Thad’s room. This was the critical part. She opened his closet and pulled a shirt out of his laundry basket. Perfect.
Outside, she glanced one way, then the other, watching. Listening. The snowmobiles were still sitting out by the shed, and Jo checked to see if the keys were there. They weren’t. That was fine; she didn’t plan on taking the machines anyway. They were too loud and she didn’t know how to operate one. What she needed was in the shed. After unlatching the lock, she swung the door wide, cringing when the hinges squealed. Thank God—there it was.
Dragging the sled out of the shed wasn’t the quietest endeavor either and after shutting the door, she paused to listen.
Only the wind.
Now came the hard part. Jo couldn’t do this alone; she needed help. Opening the door to the barn, she whistled softly. “Hey, Sue? You in here?”
All three dogs came scampering up, heads hanging—as if they knew they’d been punished for something—and hind ends wagging, as if in hopes of being forgiven for whatever bad thing they’d done.
Her initial response was to back away, but Jo forced herself to stand still as the dogs milled around her legs. She made herself bend over and scratch each one of them behind the ears and somehow managed to control the urge to turn tail and run. She thought she’d have trouble coercing them to be hitched up to the sled, but she was wrong. The idea of pulling the sled, probably after being cooped up in the barn all day, made the animals ecstatic, and the fact that even Humper sat still as she figured out the harness and tether was a testament to Thad’s training of the animals.
Jo clutched her stomach at the thought of him.
“Okay, Jo,” she whispered to herself. “No time for histrionics. You’ve got a job to do.”
Now all she had to do was figure out how to drive this thing.
* * *
DOGS MIGHT BE TERRIFYING—though these ones weren’t as bad as most—but they are smart. She’d give them that. After she let the animals sniff Thad’s shirt, it was like Sue knew exactly what Jo wanted her to do. Out in the lead position, Sue simply followed the snowmobile tracks all the way to Silverton and Jo really didn’t have to do a thing to steer. Only one problem. When they got to the main street of the old ghost town, the dog kept right on going, barely slowing down to sniff.
Glancing nervously around at the shadows of the abandoned buildings, which seemed larger in the faint moonlight, Jo called, “Hey. You sure you’re going the right way?”
It was like the dog understood, turning her head to look at Jo with an exasperated expression before focusing on the task at hand again. Finding her master.
“Okay,” Jo said, more to herself than to Sue. “If you say so.”
She adjusted her stance on the runners, standing up on the back of the sled the way Thad had done. Standing helped to keep warm, but her legs were starting to stiffen up.
Even though they’d been running for over an hour, Jolie swore the animals picked up the pace. And the reality of what Jo was doing set in. Here she was, Jolie Duval from Chicago—it was the middle of the night, in the middle of winter and she was driving a dogsled.
Mush, mush!
If someone would have told her this a year ago—no, a month ago—she’d have laughed and called them crazy.
Life was weird.
Suddenly the dogs slowed. Sue sniffed one way, and then another, nose to the ground, whining.
“What is it?” Jo stepped stiffly off the runners to approach the dog. The ground beneath her feet was packed down, trampled in fact. Lots of people had come this way at some point.
“Hmm. This doesn’t seem right,” Jo said. “Where are we?” She got out her phone and turned on the flashlight to sweep the area.
Then she saw the stick, poking up out of the middle of a pile of snow. She knew exactly where she was.
“Oh, Sue. You brought us back to the quinzee.” She knelt beside the dog. “Thad’s not here. He wouldn’t—”
The dog jumped up, yipping once before making happy whining noises, her back end going crazy.
Jo stood and turned slowly.
Thad was there, tall as a mountain. A rifle in his hands, aimed at her head.
* * *
“WHAT THE HELL are you doing here, Jolie?” Thad demanded, flicking his gaze to the dark trees behind her
“Put the gun down, Lukas.”
With the
gun still propped against his shoulder, he took a step closer and said, “I don’t think so.”
“We need to talk.”
“Where is everyone else?” he growled.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb. The choppers, the dogs, the Feds?”
“I’m alone.”
Convinced she was lying and that agents were using her while hiding somewhere nearby—with sniper rifles ready to do business if he made one wrong move—Thad shook his head.
“What are you going to do, Thad? Shoot me?”
Blowing air through clenched teeth, Thad cautiously lowered the gun. Hell, he wanted to believe she was alone, but he didn’t. The problem was, pointing a gun at Jolie was just plain wrong, and he did not want to put her in danger.
Once the gun was down, she came toward him, ripped off her mitten and slapped him soundly across the cheek.
“Ouch,” he said out of surprise, not pain. He grabbed her hand before she could hit him again. “I didn’t do it, Jolie. I swear to you, whatever those men told you? It’s a lie—”
She shut him up by throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. “I know,” she eventually whispered against his mouth. “I know you didn’t kill those men.”
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
She shuddered in the circle of his arms, her lips cold against his cheek. She was freezing again. Whatever had possessed this woman to travel by dogsled in the middle of the night he’d find out in a minute, but first he had to get her out of the cold.
“Come on.” He took her hand and pulled her toward the snow cave. Switching on the flashlight, he showed her the opening, gave the light to her so she could crawl in first and then crawled in after her. There was enough room inside for two people. Three people would have been a squeeze. Two people and three dogs was a very tight squeeze.
A Christmas Seduction Page 18