“For your sake, I hope you’re not lying about this prisoner,” he said. “Because if you helped him escape, you’re in danger—not just from him but from Warden James, too. No one crosses that man and lives.”
Oh, God, Jed…
“You know the warden’s a killer but you haven’t done anything about it?” she asked, as horrified and disappointed in him as he seemed to be in her.
His face flushed, mottled with either embarrassment or anger. “You’re a naive girl, Macy. You have no idea what the real world is like.”
She chuckled bitterly. “I know exactly what the real world is like.” Regrettably. “And I don’t like it. I don’t like it that people stand by and do nothing—”
“And some people get involved when they shouldn’t,” he interrupted. “And they get hurt. Or worse.”
“You’re scared of the warden?” She almost hoped that was the only reason he hadn’t gotten involved. Fear was better than complicity.
“You should be scared of Warden James, too,” the coroner warned her. “If he finds out that you helped this inmate escape…” He shuddered, as if he was imagining all the horrible things that he would discover had been done to her when he examined her dead body in his morgue.
“There’s nothing for him to find out,” she said, refusing to drop her bluff even though those knots of fear tightened in her stomach.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “And neither did Warden James.”
No. She doubted that he had, too. But he had no proof that she was lying until he found Rowe. He couldn’t find Rowe. Hopefully the man, whatever he really was, was long gone.
“The warden is paranoid,” she said. “That corpse didn’t walk out of here.”
The older man nodded in agreement. “No. He had help getting out of here. He had you.”
She couldn’t keep lying to a man she had once respected, so she just shook her head.
“Like you, this prisoner can’t be trusted either,” Dr. Bernard said. “Whatever he told you to enlist your aid could be just as many lies as you’ve told me.”
“Dr. Bernard—”
“Just clear out all of your things and leave,” her boss said, covering his eyes as if unable to look at her anymore. “I don’t want to see you again.”
Tears—real tears—stung her eyes, and she blinked them back. “I’m sorry…”
“I don’t want to see you in my morgue either,” he added. “I don’t want to unzip a body bag and find you inside it, Macy.”
“You won’t—”
“I will. It’s inevitable,” he said with a fatalistic sigh, “because you have put your trust in the wrong people. You’re a smart girl, Macy. Start using your head before you wind up losing your life.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe she shouldn’t have trusted Rowe Cusack; that might not even be his real name. She had only his word for who he really was. She had only his word that he wasn’t the dangerous, murderous convict the warden claimed he was.
And if the warden was right, there was a very good chance that Macy would wind up back in the morgue—in that body bag, just as Dr. Bernard feared.
Chapter Six
Rowe had been right to trust her to handle the meeting on her own. Not that he would have been able to accompany her, since his presence would have only put her in more danger. And he didn’t know of anyone he could have trusted to go along with her to the meeting either. But he had also doubted that her boss would have let the warden hurt her. As it had played out, though, Dr. Bernard had been the one who’d hurt her.
“The coroner fired you?” he asked, as she settled her box of belongings onto the passenger’s seat beside her. Once again, he was crouched down in the back of the van.
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but pain darkened her brown eyes to nearly black when she glanced back at him. “I expected consequences for what I did last night. I knew I would get in trouble for helping you.”
“But you still helped me.” He didn’t know anyone else who would have.
“I only helped you for Jed,” she clarified, as if she was worried that he would misconstrue her involvement with him. After the kiss, he didn’t blame her for worrying. That kiss worried him, too. “I have to protect Jed and get you to help him. Can you even help him, though?”
“I won’t know for sure until I get a chance to go over all of the evidence the prosecutor had against him,” he admitted. And he suspected it must have been substantial for a jury to have convicted him.
She gave an eager nod. “We can get the files from his lawyer.”
“Not yet,” Rowe reminded her. “I can’t do anything as a dead man, or as an escaped convict. First, I have to find out who blew my cover to the warden.”
She reached into the box in the passenger’s seat, pulled out a cell phone and handed it back to him. “So find out.”
“I can’t use your phone,” he protested, keeping his hand at his side. “The call can be traced back to you.”
“This call will be traced back to Mr. Mortimer. I took the cell from his personal effects.” She thrust the phone at him until he finally closed his fingers around it.
He had no idea who to call. No idea who to trust.
She must have sensed his hesitation because she said, “There must be someone who can help you.”
“You’ve worked so hard to prove me dead,” he pointed out. “With one call, I can undo all your work once someone hears and recognizes my voice.”
“True.” She took the phone back. “So I’ll make the call. What’s the number?”
His head pounded with frustration for his inability to do anything for himself right now without risking her life and his. “What number?”
“For the DEA,” she replied matter-of-factly.
Dr. Bernard hadn’t just hurt her. He and the warden had unnerved her. Whatever they’d said to her had brought back all her doubts about him. Gone was the woman who had teased and kissed him just hours ago.
So he gave her the direct number to his office and watched her face as she listened to his message. “That extension is no longer working,” she informed him.
“That’s my direct line.” And the call should have gone to his voice mail. Even though he spent most of his time in the field, he still had an office in the Drug Enforcement Administration building in Detroit.
Maybe word had gotten back to the administration about his “death.” He grabbed the phone from her and punched in another number for the department secretary. He handed the phone back to her while it rang.
“Hello,” she said. “I’d like to speak to someone about Agent Rowe Cusack.” She listened for a moment then clicked off the cell.
“Nobody would talk to you about me,” he surmised.
“No.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Because nobody knows who you are.”
“I’m deep undercover,” he reminded her. “It’s protocol not to risk it.”
“Your cover’s been blown,” she said. “As far as they know, you’re dead. Why deny you exist?”
Why? He damn well wondered himself. “You could be anyone calling. A reporter. My killer.”
“Who are you?” she asked, her dark eyes narrowed with suspicion as she stared back at him. “Really. Who are you?”
“I told you.”
“And I was a fool to believe your story just because you know about some old scar on my head.”
He suspected that she had more scars than the one on her head. She had some on her heart, too. He wasn’t the only one who had been betrayed and now struggled to trust anyone.
“What happened in there?” he asked, the concern that had tortured him during her meeting rushed back over him, quickening his pulse. He reached between the seats and tried to grasp her hand.
But she shrank away from him, as if afraid or repulsed.
She hadn’t acted repulsed just a short time ago when he’d covered her body with his and kissed her lips. In fact she had seemed to want more. More
of a kiss. More than a kiss…
He had wanted more, too. That brief taste of her sweet lips had made him hungry for her. He’d wanted to take her mouth and then her sweet body. But he had already used her enough.
“Are you all right?” he asked, worried that the warden had hurt or had threatened her.
She shook her head again. But her face was deathly pale, as if she’d suddenly gotten sick. “No. I think I made a terrible mistake.”
“I haven’t lied to you, Macy.” But he suspected she was lying, at least by omission. Something else had happened besides her being fired.
“You won’t be able to help Jed,” she said with a weary sigh of resignation, as if she’d already accepted that he wasn’t going to keep his promise. “You don’t even know how to help yourself.”
“I know how,” he insisted, pride smarting. “I have a plan.”
He had to go to Detroit, to the office, and confront all of his possible betrayers. Only a few people knew the details of his undercover assignment. “But I’m worried about you.”
His promise to Jed, to keep her safe, had become the most important of all the promises he had ever made. Not that he’d made many; he knew better than to make promises he might not be able to keep given the danger of his profession.
“Haven’t I proved that I can take care of myself?” she asked. “I don’t need you. And you don’t need me. You have your plan.”
“What do you have?” he wondered. “You just lost your job.” And maybe her brother. Since the warden was convinced that Rowe wasn’t dead, he must know that Jed had disobeyed his order to kill. The egomaniacal control freak would not tolerate disobedience.
She shrugged again, as if it didn’t matter to her that she had nothing anymore. But he knew better. “Right now, I just want some space,” she insisted. “Some time to think.”
“You want me gone.” He didn’t blame her. Since turning up in the morgue in that body bag, he had turned her life upside down.
She didn’t deny that she wanted him to go away. “You can go to the sheriff,” she suggested. “The warden doesn’t own him. Yet.”
“How do you know that?”
She lifted her arms, extending her wrists beyond the sleeves of her jacket. “He hasn’t slapped the cuffs on me yet.”
“The warden wanted you arrested?”
“The warden wants you,” she said. “And he’ll use whatever and whoever he needs to in order to get you.”
“So Doc must have given up that I’m not dead.” He couldn’t blame him either. The old man had taken a beating. He probably would have given up his own mother to stop the pain.
Damn it. Then Macy Kleyn’s brother was probably already dead.
She sighed. “I don’t know. Warden James suspects you’re alive, but he doesn’t know for sure, especially since your body’s gone missing.”
He chuckled in remembrance of exactly how his body went missing. “You bought me some time with your ruse at the crematorium.”
She nodded. “So stop wasting that time.”
She reached into the box and lifted out a ring of keys. “Take this and get the hell out of Blackwoods County.”
He studied the keys; one was clearly for an ignition. “There was a car in someone’s personal effects, too?”
“It’s mine.”
“But you have this van….” And he doubted she made enough even at both of her jobs to afford payments, license and insurance on two vehicles.
“This van is Elliot’s,” she explained. “He bought it and put it in my name, so that his dad wouldn’t know he uses it for gigs. We switch, and I drive the hearse to the crematorium on the nights his band plays.”
She and this Elliot were close. She had friends in Blackwoods, people she could trust. He didn’t have to worry about her. He took the car keys from her hand but closed his fingers around hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If there had been any other way, I wouldn’t have gotten your brother and you involved in this.”
“I just wish I knew, without a doubt, what this was,” she said wistfully, and then she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, though. Goodbye.”
He wanted to kiss her. But he just squeezed her fingers once before releasing her. Then he opened the sliding side door and slipped out of the van. And out of her life. Despite his promise to her brother, it was the right thing to do. She would be safer without him in it.
HE THOUGHT HER BROTHER was dead; she had seen the regret in his blue eyes when he’d squeezed her hand. Rowe believed it was too late for Jed.
Macy couldn’t believe it until she saw for herself that her brother was really gone. So the minute the door slid closed behind the man whose body bag she’d unzipped less than twenty-four hours ago, she started the van and headed toward the prison on the heavily wooded outskirts of Blackwoods County.
Even during the day the winding roads were treacherous, but in her emotional state with her heart pumping slowly and heavily with dread and with tears of grief filling her eyes, Macy struggled to keep the van in her lane.
If she crossed the solid yellow lines, she could be struck by another vehicle coming fast around a sharp curve. Or if she went off the shoulder, she could roll the van into one of the deep ditches. Usually those ditches were filled with water that had drowned more than one hapless driver in the three years she had been working at Blackwoods County morgue.
Despite her emotional state, she wasn’t hapless. But the driver behind her was. Just like the night before, the vehicle came up fast and struck her rear bumper. But the impact was harder, so hard that the van spun out. Macy gripped the wheel hard, fighting to keep it from the ditch. And the only way to do that was to go across that yellow line.
With a sharp curve ahead she couldn’t see what was coming up. Logging trucks frequented these northern Michigan roads. And with the weight of their loads, they were unable to stop quickly. She stomped on the brakes, her tires squealing.
She had avoided the ditch on her right, but a horn blew as the van careened around the corner, straight into the path of an oncoming car. The sedan’s tires squealed as it swerved around her.
But Macy couldn’t breathe yet or let go of the wheel, because now the van slid toward the ditch on the left. But the gravel shoulder widened for a scenic turnout overlooking a steep ravine. She managed to steer the van for that wider stretch of gravel and stop at the pylons that separated the shoulder from the tree-filled ravine below.
Finally she released the cry of terror she had been holding inside. But her relief was short-lived. The van creaked as someone yanked open her driver’s door. She caught only a glimpse of a tall, dark shadow as strong hands grabbed at her shoulder, pulling her from the van.
She kicked out and clawed with her hands, fighting for her life. But her attacker was undeterred, his foot only slipping a bit on the gravel as he wrapped his arms around her from behind.
She reached back into the van, managing to grab the strap of her purse and drag it with her as he lifted her off her feet. She tried to twist around, trying to see his face, trying to fight.
But he was too strong, his arms wound too tightly around her for her to wriggle free. He carried her toward the black SUV he had left running behind the van, blocking the road. When he let go of her with one arm to open the back door, Macy wrenched loose from his grasp.
She ran, and as she ran, she reached inside her purse for the weapon she’d stashed inside, the one that had already wounded one man. But before her fingers could close around the scalpel, a hand grasped her hair, jerking her ponytail with such force that tears trickled from the corners of her eyes.
Another strong hand, on her arm, swung her around. But before she could focus on the face of her attacker, a fist came toward her, catching her off guard.
She couldn’t duck. She could do nothing to avoid the blow. Pain exploded in her face, staggering her so that her legs gave way, folding beneath her.
And as she fell to the ground, her vision b
lurred, blackness overwhelming her as she lost consciousness and the fight for her life.
INSTINCTS—THE SAME ONES that had warned him that his cover had been blown—had compelled Rowe to follow Macy instead of the signs that would have led him out of Blackwoods County. When he’d noticed the black SUV also following her, Rowe had known he was right to trust the instincts that had clenched his stomach muscles into tight knots of dread.
But he didn’t know the back roads as well as Macy and her stalker, so he couldn’t drive as fast and he lost sight of them around the hairpin turns. While he couldn’t anticipate the sharp curves, he recognized the road as the one that would lead him straight back to hell.
Blackwoods Penitentiary.
He should have known she was going to check on her brother. If the warden had discovered her relationship to Blackwoods’ notorious inmate, he would have exploited it for her cooperation. James had probably threatened Jed’s life.
But instead of giving up Rowe to save her brother, Macy had given up herself if she was going to Blackwoods. Just because she was visiting didn’t mean she couldn’t be held at the prison until she told the warden what he wanted to know. Since the heartless bastard had had no problem beating an old man to death, he would have no problem torturing Macy into telling him everything. Except that Macy was stubborn and loyal and smart. She would die before she gave up any information that would put her brother in danger.
The next curve brought Rowe around to her van, where it was parked precariously on the shoulder of the wrong side of the road. The rear bumper wasn’t just dented now but smashed up into the back quarter panels.
With his heart hammering, he pulled up behind the van and vaulted out of the car Macy had loaned him. Had she been driving that instead, whatever vehicle had struck her would have pushed her right over the edge into the ravine. As he rushed around to the driver’s side of her borrowed van, he nearly slipped in the loose gravel and fell off the road into the ravine below. Hell, she’d nearly gone over in the van.
Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs Page 7