“You think the coroner called the warden about the missing phone?” He had obviously already concluded that her former boss had betrayed her.
“Dr. Bernard had to have called someone about it,” she said. “He reported it either to the warden. Or to the sheriff.” Maybe he hadn’t been paid off. Maybe he’d thought he was doing the right thing by reporting a theft to the sheriff, and the sheriff had given her up to the warden.
He cursed. “You’re right. He could have called the sheriff. We can’t trust anyone.”
“Elliot’s my friend,” she said. “I can trust him.” He was probably the only one in Blackwoods that she could trust—besides Rowe.
“He may not be there,” Rowe warned her as he followed her directions to the narrow two-track that led to the back entrance of the crematorium. “Do you have the keys yet?”
She patted her purse in confirmation. “I’ll be all right.”
She doubted he would be the same, given that he was going back to the place where he had nearly been killed. Where he would have been killed if not for Jed helping instead of hurting him. What if Jed wasn’t there to protect him again?
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” she said, “but I know that you have to do this.” Just as Jed wanted whoever had framed him to pay for his crimes, Rowe wanted whoever had blown his cover and tried to kill him to be brought to justice.
“It’s my job,” he said, as if it was not personal at all. Maybe to him, given the icy way he was acting now, it wasn’t.
He pulled the truck up to the back of the steel and post building but didn’t cut the motor or even put the vehicle in Park.
“It’s more than that,” she insisted. “It’s personal.” And she wasn’t talking about whoever had betrayed him but about the two of them.
He nodded. “My job is personal to me. I told you that my parents were drug addicts. That’s why this job means so much to me.”
“What about me?” she asked, wondering what she meant to him. Just a promise he’d kept to her brother? He was so much more to her than the man who kept saving her life. He was the man who’d given her a reason for living again. For loving…
“Macy…”
And she had her answer. He had consigned her to just part of his job, a promise he’d made to a man who’d helped him out.
While she wouldn’t burden him with the words, she couldn’t hold back the expression of her feelings for him. She leaned across the console again and wrapped both arms around his neck. And she pressed her mouth to his.
His lips stilled and his breath held, as if he tried to resist her. But then he groaned. His mouth opened, his tongue sliding across her lips, as he clutched a hand in her hair, holding her head close. He kissed her hungrily, with all the passion she remembered from the night before.
And when finally he pulled back, panting for breath as harshly as she did, his eyes weren’t icy anymore. They gleamed with desire.
“Promise you’ll come back for me,” she asked, knowing that he was a man who took his promises seriously.
But instead, he asked one of her. “Promise me you’ll stay out of the way?”
She opened the passenger door and stepped out into the empty lot. “It doesn’t get any more out of the way than this.”
He barely waited until she closed the door before he backed out, putting that distance between them again. This time physically as well as emotionally.
She should have told him her feelings. He deserved to know she loved him; maybe then he would have been as careful with his own safety as he’d been with hers. Her hands trembling, she barely managed to unlock the door. The wind had chilled as night began to fall, numbing her fingers so that she fumbled with the keys. Once she finally managed to unlock and open the door, she found that it wasn’t much warmer inside the steel building than it was outside.
She considered starting a fire. But she didn’t need the smoking stack to draw any attention to her whereabouts. So instead she searched the small office for more clothes. Elliot usually kept a coat tossed over the back of his chair. As she lifted her friend’s old parka, she noticed the picture on his desk. It was his band. She leaned over the chair to study the faces in the photo.
And now she realized why the man who had run her off the road and attacked her had looked vaguely familiar. She had seen him in this photo and probably playing guitar in Elliot’s band when she’d gone to a couple of their gigs. But the dive bars were always so dark that she could barely recognize the guys she did know. And this photo was so small that she had to lean closer to make certain that she wasn’t wrong.
The man had been Elliot’s bandmate and friend.
The door rattled behind her, and this time she knew it wasn’t Rowe. He wouldn’t have had the key that slid in and unlocked the door. A gasp of surprise slipped through the man’s lips as he noticed her standing inside the small office. He slammed the outside door shut and locked it behind himself.
She swallowed hard, choking on her nerves and fear. “H-hello….”
“Where is he?” Elliot asked, sparing her no greeting as he stalked toward her.
“The DEA agent?” She shrank back from the man she had been foolish enough to consider a friend. “He’s on his way to the prison.”
“Him and everyone else,” Elliot remarked. “I’m talking about my friend.” He gestured toward the picture on his desk that she’d been studying. “Where is he?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Teddy.” He pointed toward the bruise on her jaw. “I think he did that to you, probably when he ran you off the road yesterday. That was the last time I heard from him, when he called to tell me that he’d grabbed you.”
“You told him to do that?”
Elliot shrugged, mocking her gesture of futile denial. Then he admitted, “The warden told me to do it. But I had already tried running you off the road once, the night before, when you left here with that damn drug agent in the back of the van.”
“You saw him?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t what I saw. It was what I didn’t see.”
She furrowed her brow in confusion…until he pointed toward the ovens in the back room.
“No ashes, Mace,” he said, then snapped his tongue against his teeth in a tsking noise. “You had taken the picture and started the fire. But you forgot the damn ashes.”
How could she have been so stupid? So careless? “You called the warden.”
“He’d already brought Dr. Bernard back to the morgue and found that the prisoner’s body was missing,” he explained. “Warden James and Dr. Bernard figured out it had come here.”
“Why would you help the warden?” she asked. Her head pounded with confusion.
“Because I work for him,” he replied matter-of-factly, as if she were an idiot for not knowing.
Maybe she was an idiot, because she still didn’t understand. “You work here, for your dad.”
He glanced around the small room, his eyes hard with hatred. It was evident that he dreaded this place nearly as much as Rowe did. “I have another side job besides the band, Macy.”
She remembered his offering once to get her something to help her relax. She hadn’t thought anything of it then, even as she’d refused him. “You’re a drug dealer?”
“My dad pays me crap. Gigs don’t pay much more than free drinks around here,” he shared. “I need money—real money—to launch the band.”
“You’re talented,” she praised him. And she wasn’t lying. His band was good.
“Talent means nothing in the music business,” he said with a snort of disgust over her ignorance and naïveté. “I need money.”
Now she was lying when she said, “I can get you money, Elliot. I’ll help you with your band.” She’d thought she was helping him while she covered for him during his gigs. Maybe if she had done more, he wouldn’t have become so desperate that he’d gone to work for the devil.
“I need my guitar playe
r, too,” Elliot said. “Where is he, Mace?” He stepped closer, and she noticed that same look in his dilated eyes. That same murderous intent that had been in his friend’s gaze.
“Why would you turn on me?” she asked, her voice cracking with fear and emotion. “I thought we were friends.”
“I wanted to be more than friends,” he reminded her of his earlier advances. “But you thought you were too good for me. Like you’re so high-class when you got a brother rotting in prison for murder.”
She flinched. Her pride wasn’t stinging, though, but her heart was, over the image of Jed rotting anywhere. And Rowe joining him…
“Tell me what happened to Teddy,” Elliot demanded, stepping closer to her. “Where is he?”
Because she wanted to hurt him, too, and because she needed to distract him, she replied, “Sitting in his SUV at the bottom of the ravine he nearly ran me into.”
He staggered back a foot, shocked by her admission. “But how— He ran you off the road?”
She fumbled inside the purse clutched at her side, nicking her finger at the blade protruding from her wallet. “And I returned the favor.”
“Is he dead?” he asked, his bloodshot eyes widening with horror.
She had always thought her young friend looked so rough because of the late hours he kept. Now she realized he wasn’t just a dealer but a user, too.
“Is he dead?” he repeated his question, his voice rising to a shout of anger.
Fear gripped her at how out of control he was already becoming, but she nodded in reply to his question even though she risked more of his wrath. She couldn’t let her fear paralyze her, or she would wind up as dead as Elliot’s friend. Teddy.
“He’s dead,” she said.
Despite the cold in the unheated building, sweat beaded on the young man’s face, trailing from his brow and dripping from his lip. “What—what the hell happened?” he stammered.
“I killed him,” she replied matter-of-factly as she pulled the scalpel from her purse. “Just like I’m going to kill you.”
But before she could brandish the weapon, he caught her wrist in a painfully tight grasp. “You’re the one who’s going to die today, Macy.”
He was too strong, like his drugged-up friend, inhumanly strong. She couldn’t pull free of him. She couldn’t tug loose. She couldn’t even drop the scalpel as his grip covered her fingers, pressing them into the sharp metal.
A cry of pain slipped through her lips. Elliot laughed, as if spurred on by her display of weakness. They had never truly been friends.
Like so many other people, he had always had his own agenda. He had been using her to cover for him with his dad.
“Elliot!” she screamed, hoping to get through to whatever decency the drugs hadn’t stolen from him.
But he only laughed again, as if amused by her desperation and fear.
So then she kicked out, her foot connecting with his shins. The blow jammed her toes inside her shoe but didn’t faze him at all.
He grunted and cussed, but he didn’t loosen his grip. Instead he twisted her wrist, turning the blade toward her. Then he lifted her hand, despite her struggle, and directed it toward her neck. One nick of the scalpel into her carotid artery, and she would bleed out before Rowe could come back for her.
If he could come back for her…
He figured he had set a trap for the bad guys, but she suspected that he would be the one who got caught in that trap.
And Macy had figured Elliot was a friend, and she would be safe with him. Instead she had stepped into a trap of her own naïveté. She and Rowe might both die for their mistakes.
Chapter Thirteen
His instincts warned Rowe that something bad was about to happen. The muscles in his stomach were tightening. But with the trap he had set, it was inevitable that something bad was going to happen.
Or had already happened to Jed.
But Jed wasn’t the Kleyn he was worried about. He kept glancing into his rearview mirror. The stack from the oven rose above the tin roof of the crematorium and even above some of the trees that surrounded the building. The lot wasn’t empty now. The hearse had pulled in moments after Rowe had pulled out of the two-track onto the street.
The skinny guy inside hadn’t even glanced at the truck. From the dent in his front bumper though, he didn’t seem to be that careful a driver.
Rowe slammed on the brakes. The hearse was black, like the paint on the rear bumper of Macy’s van. He’d thought that the SUV that had run Macy off the road had been the one that had tried the night before. But there had been no old dents on it before they’d sent it crashing down into the ravine.
“Son of a bitch…”
She thought the man was her friend. She would never see it coming when he hurt her. Despite her resourcefulness and quick wits, she wouldn’t be able to protect herself.
He jerked the wheel, spiraling the truck around in a tight U-turn. The front tire nearly dropped off the road into one of the deep ditches, but it caught the shoulder, spewing gravel behind it. Rubber squealed against asphalt as he hit the accelerator and turned off the street to speed down the narrow two-track lane that led to the back entrance of the crematorium.
He parked behind the hearse, trapping it between his truck and the building. As he threw open his door, he reached for the gun he had taken off the last guy who’d tried to hurt Macy. And he hoped this kid wasn’t armed, too.
With his free hand he grabbed the handle of the back door of the creepy metal building, but the knob wouldn’t turn. The kid had locked it behind himself, locking Macy inside with him and help outside, so that she had no one to turn to—just as she had had nobody since her brother’s incarceration.
Macy had learned to rely on and protect herself. But she didn’t have to do that anymore. She had Rowe, even though he’d been too much of a pigheaded fool to make sure she knew how he felt about her.
The reinforced steel door wasn’t keeping Rowe out. He shoved his shoulder against it and hammered his foot against it. But when he couldn’t budge it with his shoulder or his foot, he jumped back into the truck. He rammed it into Reverse and then into Drive. Stomping on the accelerator, he steered directly into the door.
He switched his foot to the brake, stopping short of plowing right through the building, so that he wouldn’t drive over Macy. He jumped out of the truck and scrambled around it to the door. But his bumper had only torn the wooden jamb loose. He still couldn’t get through the door until he kicked it open far enough to squeeze inside. He did so with caution, keeping his head low in case someone fired at him.
They would have definitely heard him coming and had time to arm themselves.
But the room with the oven was empty. Of living people and dead bodies.
“Macy!” he shouted over the noise of the truck’s idling engine. “Macy!”
Was he already too late? He passed through the oven room into a short hall.
Then he heard her cry. Soft sobs drifted through an open office door. His heart clutched with the fear and pain in her voice.
He rushed through the doorway into a scene of destruction. A desk and chair had toppled over, pictures and papers strewn across the room. He nearly missed Macy. The man was on top of her, his body covering hers as he trapped her to the ground.
What had the son of a bitch done to her? Had badly had he hurt her?
Rowe lifted his gun, training his barrel on the kid’s back. But he couldn’t shoot. As tightly as they were locked together, the bullet could pass through the man and right into Macy.
“Get off her!” he ordered, his shout echoing inside the metal building and hanging in the cold air like a puff of smoke. “Let her go!”
“Rowe!” she cried. And she shoved at the man until he rolled off her.
Blood smeared her face and saturated her shirt. Panic and fear stole Rowe’s breath. He dropped to his knees beside her. “Where are you hurt?”
She shook her head.
He glanc
ed at the man, to make sure he wasn’t a threat any longer. The kid stared back at Rowe through eyes wide with shock and glazed with death. Blood covered him too, from the open wound in his chest.
The blood-covered scalpel clattered against the cement floor as it dropped from Macy’s trembling hand. When was he going to accept that this woman could take care of herself? She didn’t need him.
But then she threw her arms around his neck and clung to him, sobs racking her bruised and bloodied body. She had killed her attacker, but she hadn’t come through their fight unscathed. Either physically or emotionally.
MACY HAD WANTED TO BE A DOCTOR to save people and yet she had just taken a life. That was a certain violation of the oath to do no harm. But she had never taken that oath.
“I—I killed him,” she said.
“You had to,” Rowe assured, one hand cupping the back of her head while his other one ran over her body as if he checked her for injuries. “You had no choice.”
Elliot had landed a few blows. Enough to steal Macy’s breath but not her strength. She hadn’t lost her grip on the scalpel. But he’d lost his grip on her when she’d kicked him a lot higher than his shins.
He’d fallen back and doubled over in pain. But before she could get away, he’d recovered and come at her again. And when he’d charged her…
She had done what she’d had to in order to survive. “I—I thought he was my friend.”
“I know…”
Of course he would understand her pain; he had been betrayed, too. She had given up med school and had moved to support Jed. But until now, she had never really understood how he’d felt. Someone had framed him; someone he’d known and trusted had betrayed him. Like Elliot had betrayed her…
“It was him that first night,” she said. “He tried to run us off the road.”
“I know,” Rowe replied, his hands trembling slightly as they ran over her back, clutching her tightly against him. “I saw the hearse. It had a dent on the front bumper. It’s why I came back.”
“You’re back,” she said, pushing against his chest. Her shock easing, she was able to focus again. He was real; she hadn’t conjured him up out of fear or because of some kind of psychotic break over being forced to kill to protect herself. “You shouldn’t be back here. You should be at the prison.”
Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs Page 14