He stepped inside the open barn door and she heard him flip the light switch. Nothing happened.
While the sun was making its way up over the horizon, it was still too dark to see inside the barn without the light.
The horse to her right seemed restless, pacing from one end of the stall to the other. Pete. “What is it, big boy?”
He came to the opening and stuck his head through. She rubbed his nose and he seemed to calm. Then he stamped his foot and threw his head up and down. Was his foot bothering him? She checked the abscess a few times since Zeb had diagnosed it and been treating it, but mostly she’d entrusted the horse’s care to him while she’d been doing her own recovering. But maybe she should take a look?
A shuffle just ahead near the feed room caught her attention. Trent heard it, too, and he stepped forward, then cried out and went to his knees.
“Trent!”
Becca tried to see through the shifting shadows but couldn’t figure out what had happened. And then her rifle was ripped from her fingers and a hard forearm pressed against her throat. “You should mind your own business.”
Becca struggled against the man’s hold. Trent rose to his feet, swaying and lifting his weapon. “Let her go.”
Her captor raised his right arm and fired his weapon at Trent. Trent went down. Becca screamed.
“Police! Freeze!”
Becca’s knees nearly buckled at Nathan’s shout. Her attacker swung her around to face Nathan, his gun now aimed on Nathan.
Her heart pounded while her head spun and her gaze bounced between the two. The masked face and the one who’d once again come to her rescue.
“Drop it!” Nathan ordered as he ducked around the door for cover.
“I don’t think so, cowboy. You drop yours or I shoot both of you.”
“I’m a cop and I’ve got backup coming. Right now, no one’s seen your face, so either drop the weapon or start running. Either way, the clock is ticking.”
The weapon pressed harder against her temple, and Becca winced as pain shot through her head. She didn’t bother to fight him. He was strong and had the upper hand. She would have to wait him out and then outsmart him. While praying he didn’t shoot her or anyone else.
Please God, let Trent be okay.
She caught Nathan’s eye. Sirens sounded in the distance. Her captor swore and shoved her to the ground. He spun and started for the back door. Nathan raced past her. “Check Trent!”
Becca dropped to the ground next to the unconscious deputy and pressed her fingers to his pulse. It beat steady and hard beneath her fingers. As the sun rose, so did the visibility in the barn. With shaking hands, Becca checked for wounds. He’d taken a bullet in the shoulder. She raced for the first aid kit she kept in her office and grabbed it from the shelf. Hurrying back to Trent’s side, she snagged the scissors from the kit and cut away his shirt. Quickly, she grabbed disinfectant, bandages and tape then turned him on his side. “In and out,” she whispered. But he was bleeding—a lot.
She worked almost without thinking, her movements efficient and steady while she sent up prayers for Nathan’s safety. She could hear something going on outside the barn, but couldn’t leave Trent just yet without worrying he’d bleed to death if she didn’t care for his wound.
Trent groaned. “Wha—”
“Shh,” she said. “Stay still.”
“Somebody stabbed me with a hot poker. Man, that hurts.” He groaned.
“I have to stop the bleeding, Trent.”
“And my head. What happened?”
“This is going to sting.” She disinfected the wound and Trent cried out. Then passed out again. In record time, she finished dressing both sides, front and back, and figured that would keep him for now. She heard a cry from behind the barn and fear for Nathan clawed at her.
The goose egg on the side of Trent’s head needed an ice pack, but that would have to wait. All in all, she figured with time, he’d heal up as good as new.
With thanksgiving, she left him and bolted toward the back where Nathan and her attacker had disappeared.
She found them scuffling in the dirt just beyond the barn. And then Nathan managed to flip the guy onto his back and land a bone-crunching punch to the man’s face.
He went still.
Nathan rolled off of him, caught his breath, then flipped the man back over to his stomach. “You got any zip ties?”
“In the barn.”
“Can you get me one?”
Becca raced to grab one from the office just as the cruisers pulled into the yard. She waved them in her direction then ran back to Nathan, worried the prisoner would wake up and start fighting again.
Once Nathan had the man’s hands bound, he rolled him to his back and pulled his mask off.
Becca gasped. “That’s Larry Bowen.”
ELEVEN
While Lance and Clay took care of the prisoner, Nathan worked his sore jaw and decided it wasn’t broken. Bowen had gotten in a good punch before Nathan had managed to take him down. But in the end, Nathan’s training and expertise had come through for him, and they now had their suspect in custody with an angry-looking deputy standing guard. Lance looked ready to land a few punches on the prisoner’s battered face.
An ambulance had already come and gone with Trent who had awakened again, confused and complaining of a killer headache and a shoulder that was on fire. He didn’t remember Becca bandaging him up. The paramedic had looked at them and said, “He’ll be all right. We’ll get him to the hospital and taken care of.”
Nathan nodded.
Clay helped the shooter into the back of the cruiser while Nathan and Becca watched nearby.
Lance shut the door and shook his head. “Think your troubles are over now?”
“I sure hope so,” Becca said. “But I’m still bothered by the fact that he’s being so quiet. Why won’t he talk?”
“He’s mad he got caught.”
Nathan narrowed his eyes and shot a glance at Clay’s squad car. “I don’t know. Most people who don’t talk are scared to. He’s mad, but he’s scared, too. He was pretty desperate to get away.”
“You think someone’s not going to be happy he got caught,” Clay said.
“Exactly.” Nathan crossed his arms. “Thought you were going home to sleep,” Nathan said.
“I guess I’ll do that next month. I stopped at the office when I left here and was just getting ready to head home when your call for backup came in.” Clay looked at Becca. “So that’s Larry Bowen.”
“Yes.” She clasped her arms across her stomach. “He’s the piece I’ve been trying to remember. As soon as I saw his face, it came back to me. Christine was right. He stopped by the day of the accident and we talked for a few minutes. He wanted some information for his daughter who was interested in taking lessons. I gave him one of my flyers and he left. Or I thought he did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had forgotten my phone. I came back to get it and found him talking on it.”
Clay and Nathan exchanged a glance with raised brows. Clay opened the door and looked at the prisoner in the back seat. “What were you doing on her phone?”
The man glared then turned his gaze to the opposite window, jaw clamped tight.
Clay shook his head. “Right.” He shut the door and locked him inside. “Guess he’s not going to talk without some coercion.”
“What did you do when you found him on your phone?” Nathan asked her.
“He had his back to me and I asked him what he was doing. He turned around fast and knocked a bunch of papers off the desk. He started scrambling to pick them up and I told him to stop. Some of those were tax documents that I didn’t exactly want him seeing. Not that I have anything to hide,” she said with a shrug, “but i
t wasn’t his business—and he was making a bigger mess trying to help. He knocked over the can of pens and then tripped over a chair. I realize now he probably did that to cover up whatever he was doing, but at the time, I just wanted him out.”
Clay nodded. “What happened after that?”
“He finally settled himself in the chair and said he’d left his phone in his car and didn’t think I’d mind if he used mine. It was definitely kind of weird, but he was so nice about it and apologized so profusely that I didn’t think anything else about it—or even remember the incident.” She looked at the man in the back of the cruiser. “Until now.”
“And then you had your accident.”
“Yes. About an hour later. It took me a while to get the papers and everything cleaned up and back in order. I was Christine’s only lesson that day, so she was fine with waiting on me. We finally got out to the pasture and well...you know the rest. Pete went crazy.”
“You think that’s a coincidence?”
She frowned. “But he wouldn’t have had time to do anything to Pete. He was already saddled and waiting on me. Christine arrived and I watched Larry leave again.”
Clay nodded. “It’s a good thing Christine arrived when she did. Bowen might have come back and planned to get rid of you at that point.”
Becca blanched. “So what stopped him the first time?”
Clay shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he was just checking the place out to see who was around and if he would be able to do it without getting caught.”
She shivered and wrapped her arms around her middle.
Nathan slid an arm across her shoulders and brought her against his side.
“All right,” Clay said. “I’ll get this guy to lockup, then I’ll check the time of that call against the one the dead guy, Donny Torres, received from Becca’s phone. If it lines up then we might have something.”
“But you said someone called that number several times,” Becca said. “I only saw Mr. Bowen—or whoever he is—that once. He wouldn’t have had access to my phone the other times.”
“What if he’s not working alone?” Nathan said.
“I was thinking that, too.” Clay scrubbed a hand down his face. “I’m going to take this guy in and make sure he’s nice and comfortable in his cell, then we’ll do a little more digging into who he is and who he hangs out with.”
“I want to be there when they question him,” she said.
Clay shook his head. “You don’t need to be there. You’ve already ID’d him as someone who’d trespassed before. We’ve got a name to go with him. Even if it’s an alias, it’s a start. We’ll print him and see what turns up.”
Clay climbed into the cruiser and rolled the window down. “And then I’m going to sleep for a couple of hours. Try to stay out of trouble until I can do that, okay?”
Becca rolled her eyes and Nathan crossed his arms with a scowl. “We’ll do our best.”
Clay waved a hand. “I’m kidding. Sort of.”
He drove away with Larry Bowen staring out the window, the look in his eyes chilling, promising retribution. Lance followed close behind.
Nathan ran a hand through his hair.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m thinking our plan worked, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Because he was working with someone?”
“Yes.”
Becca turned to walk back into the house. A sharp crack ripped through the air and she spun, only to slam into Nathan. He clamped his arms around her, keeping his body between her and the direction that he thought the bullet had come from. “Run to the house!”
“Clay!”
“Go, Becca!”
She stopped protesting and they raced to the house together with Nathan covering her back.
Jack raced next to him to catch up with them just as Nathan threw open the door and shoved her inside. “Stay here and call for help!”
“Nathan, no—” She broke off when he turned on his heel and raced back to Clay, his prisoner and the cruiser. Lance was already on the scene, pulling Clay out of the car.
From the way the man was moving, Nathan didn’t think he was hurt. Lance kept his back to Clay, who slid Larry Bowen from the vehicle and laid him on the ground.
Nathan dropped to his knees beside Bowen and looked at Clay. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “But he’s not.”
“No.” Nathan pressed his fingers against the man’s neck, but the bullet had done its damage to Bowen’s face. “He’s dead. Probably didn’t know what hit him.”
“Great,” Clay said. “Just great. I wanted him alive.”
“And someone figured he was better off dead.”
Clay’s eyes met Nathan’s. “Yeah. The same someone who thinks Becca should be, too.”
* * *
Two hours later, Becca opened the refrigerator while Nathan took a seat at the kitchen table. “Want some tea?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t believe this.” Shaking, she pulled the pitcher out and poured two glasses, the liquid sloshing over the sides.
Nathan rose, took the pitcher from her and set it on the counter. He gripped her upper arms in a gentle clasp. “You’re going to be okay, Becca.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know you are. I’m scared for you.”
She pulled away from him and handed him one of the glasses. At the table, she sat in the nearest chair while he sank back into the one opposite. “You didn’t have your vest on,” he said.
She rubbed her eyes. “I know. I saw Lady Lou get out of the barn and ran out of the house without thinking about it. Not that it mattered. The gun was aimed at my head, not my torso.”
“True.”
“That was scary.”
“Terrifying.”
She sighed. “You know, I don’t want to believe it, but I keep coming back to my father as the one behind all of this.”
“You really think he’d try to kill you?”
Tears formed and she blinked them away. “No. Of course not.” She fell silent then sighed. “Then again...”
“Yeah?”
Her gaze met his. “I really don’t know if he would go to such lengths to get me to quit this ranch or not. How sad is that? What kind of awful daughter am I to actually consider that my father would do something like this? To think that he would hire people like the man who was arrested today. How can I entertain such thoughts about my own father?”
“I think we need to take a trip to Nashville to see him.”
She bit her lip. “Can we do that and be safe? Someone’s already tried to run me over the side of the mountain. I’d be afraid they’d try again.”
“I know. We’ll have to work out the security details, but I think you need to talk to your parents face-to-face.”
She shuddered and he scooted his chair closer to wrap an arm around her shoulders. She buried her face in his chest, and he simply held her for the next few minutes.
The knock on the door startled them both. Jack barked and got to his feet. Nathan jumped up and placed a hand on his weapon.
Becca stood, too. “I don’t think the person trying to kill me is going to knock.
“Probably not, but we’re not taking any chances.” Nathan glanced through the screen. “It’s your neighbor.”
Becca stepped up behind him. “Jean, hi, come on in.”
Jean walked into the house and Becca motioned for her to have a seat at the table. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Water?”
“No, no. I’m fine, thanks.” She slipped into the chair on the end. “I just came over to ask you a favor.”
“You should have called.”
The woman shook her head. “
Well, if you say yes, and I’m pretty sure you will, I’ll need my truck.”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Could I borrow a barrel of feed from you? I have some on order, but they haven’t been delivered yet. I could run into town and get some, but I don’t want to be gone too long from Hank. He’s not feeling well and I hate to leave him.”
Becca jumped up. “Absolutely. I have two barrels in the barn you can take tonight.”
“Oh thank you, dear girl. I was hoping you’d have some to share.”
Nathan was already pulling on his gloves. “I can put them in your truck.” He looked at Becca. “You want me to use the two barrels at the back?”
She nodded.
“All right. You two ladies stay put. I’ll be back.”
He left and Jean leaned forward. “I’ve been so wrapped up in what’s going on over at my ranch that I haven’t checked in on you like I should have. How are you holding up?”
“I’m holding—and healing. It’s taking time, of course, and I’m not the most patient person around, but I’m getting there.” Should she mention the incident with Larry Bowen or not? “Thank you very much for your help with the lessons. I hate that we took you away from Hank. I didn’t realize that he was sick.”
“It’s just a nasty cold, but I’m watching him close to make sure it doesn’t develop into pneumonia like it did a couple of years ago.”
The woman was in her late sixties, petite and energetic. Becca had immediately liked her engaging personality and infectious laughter. “I hear you’re still having trouble over here.”
Becca drew in a breath and nodded as she let it out slowly. “I am.”
“Sorry about that. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No. But you might want to steer clear of my place until the trouble is over. I’m not very healthy to be around.”
Jean waved a hand. “I’m not too worried.”
She didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. Most likely she wouldn’t need to. She’d get her feed and head back to her ranch to take care of her animals and her husband and that would be that.
The door opened and Nathan stepped back inside. “Got you all loaded up. You’re good to go.”
Christmas Ranch Rescue Page 12