STEAMPUNK ROMANCE: An Innovative Clockwork Steampunk World Adventure: The Complete Collection Boxed Set (Mystery Suspense Romance Short Stories)

by Haven, Rose

  When Joey had found out that Casey was cooperating with the feds, he’d been stunned at first and then furious. He never thought she’d had it in her. Never thought she’d be that bold. When she’d taken the stand against him, the bitch had never even looked at him. Not once. She almost single-handedly put him in prison for twenty-five years, and she’d never so much glanced in his direction.

  Those first few nights in prison were rough. He wasn’t scared, he knew he’d have protection on the inside. But at night when he lay awake staring at the ceiling, the hatred built and bubbled in his gut until he could almost taste it. How dare she do this to him? He immediately began to make plans to get at her however he could. Quickly though, Joey found out that the protection he’d thought he would have was not as great as he was lead to believe. He realized his bosses saw him as more of a liability now and made moves to have him eliminated. His plans for Casey had to be placed on the back burner as he spent most waking moments trying to avoid a crudely made knife in his back. He’d pick fights in the cafeteria or openly defy guards’ orders to get himself sent to the hole. Joey quickly began to realize that his only real way out was to offer something none of the rest of them could. Teodoro Cruz. His boss.

  He didn’t look at it like he was doing Teddy the same way Casey had done him. This was life and death. Casey was only in danger of losing her Gucci sandals and Prada purses if he’d been arrested or sent away. He also wasn’t a scared little punk who would change his name and go into hiding. No. He would choose parole, go back home, live on those same streets and prove that he wasn’t to be fucked with. But he couldn’t let go of the hatred that had consumed his waking hours those first few days. He would have no peace until Casey was dead.

  Sally

  Sally didn’t know how long she’d slept bound in the trunk of the car. When she woke, the vehicle was stopped. She immediately again began working on the bindings on her hands. Her right arm was beginning to go numb from how she was laying on it and she had to adjust her body in the tight space. She was cold and hungry and scared. She was almost as scared of what Joey was going to do to her as she was of what Evan would think of her when he found out who she really was.

  She’d spent these last months trying to reinvent herself. It had been easy with Evan. He made her feel strong and safe; things she’d never felt before. She’d truly started to believe that she could take care of herself. She’d started to believe that she wasn’t helpless and dependent on anyone to give her what she needed to survive. For the first time since she was seventeen, Sally was making her own money, paying her own bills, buying her own clothes. So they weren’t top notch department store brands, she didn’t care. She felt more alive, more free, and more beautiful than ever before. All because of Evan.

  How would he look at her when he learned the truth? That she was really this helpless wallflower that lived off of ill-gained money. Money earned through addiction, violence, and death. She had always known it wasn’t right. That kids were getting hooked on the drugs Joey sold. That they were ruining their futures and dying in the streets. But she looked past it. She felt that she was finally getting the attention that she never had as a child. All the birthdays that had gone by without presents; the Christmases where nothing but disappointment piled up under the tree. When her aunt even remembered to get a tree. Though now she realized that none of the material things had made her truly happy, she had clung to and thrived on them as long as she possibly could.

  She had been forced to admit to herself that her cooperation with the feds had had little to do with the legal and moral ramifications of the life she was living, but was more about the fear of going to prison herself because of it. She had been so disappointed in herself. How would Evan react? He was a good man. An honest man. A cop. How could he ever look at her the same? Sally began to cry. It was funny, she thought to herself, she’d truly begun to see herself as Sally. Everything in her life here in Pawhuska was so far removed from who she’d been in Chicago. She was so very different now.

  She was not that scared, insecure girl who clung to all the bad decisions she made along the way. She was someone with a future now. She cried for Sally. She cried for Casey. For Evan. Evan. No, she told herself, no she would not give up, she would fight her way back to him and try to make things right, to explain that she wasn’t who she used to be. That she was a better person, that he made her a better person.

  She blinked the tears from her eyes and began again to work at the bindings on her wrists. This time she felt one of them loosen. A few more twists of the wrist and she had one hand free. She worked quickly now to free her other hand and then to work on the bindings at her feet. When she was free she stretched as much as her confines would allow and shook the feeling back into her hands. Her confidence bolstered and she began to feel around in the dark for something in the trunk to use as a weapon when Joey came for her. Her fingers curled around a cold metal object; tire iron. She was trying to move herself into a more advantageous position to strike out when she felt the car rise up as Joey got out. She slowed her breathing, concentrating on the footsteps she heard coming toward the back of the car. Sally gripped the tire iron and waited. The trunk popped open, Joey’s face appeared above hers and she swung with all her might.

  Evan

  Evan’s legs gave out from under him and he sat hard on the corner of his desk.

  “He’s going to kill her,” he said, feeling all of the air being sucked out of his lungs.

  “Not if we can find them first,” Deputy Marshal Fields was saying. “How long would you estimate she’s been gone?”

  “I talked to her around eleven-thirty and it took me less than ten minutes to get to her place so that would make it about seven hours,” Evan said grimly, noting the first streaks of dawn appearing in the sky. “He could have her anywhere by now. They could be almost back to Chicago.”

  “No I don’t think he’d take her back there. He may be cocky and impulsive but he’s not stupid. He’ll know that by now we are looking for him, and so is his boss. He’ll have taken her somewhere away from people. His face is being plastered all over every form of media there is so he’ll want to lay low,” Shields assured.

  Evan pulled out a map of the area, marking off the spots he thought might be a good place to take someone and lay low. He put pins in small towns, noting where there were large ranches and farms with ample hiding spaces. He called in his deputies and assigned each of them an area to check, asked Leanne to get their local Sherriffs on the phone, and called Minnie to have some pastries and coffee brought over. It was going to be a long day and they needed fuel.

  “So tell me about Casey Bishop,” Evan asked Fields.

  “It’s a pretty simple and, unfortunately, common story actually. She was orphaned at a young age, sent to live with whatever deadbeat family she had and hooked up with the first guy that paid her any attention. Unfortunately for her that guy was Joey Masso. He was dealing by his sixteenth birthday and by twenty-two ran at least a third of the corners in south Chicago.”

  “Was Casey involved? I mean, with the drugs,” Evan was almost afraid to ask.

  “There was no evidence of that no,” Fields stated. “But she did know where her jewelry came from. The cars, the clothes.”

  Evan stared at the floor, trying to reconcile what the Marshal was telling him with the woman he loved. Even in the beginning he had figured she was trying to get away from something but never in a lifetime would he have thought it was this. That she had been involved with someone like Joey Masso. That she would have accepted lavish gifts paid for with the money of criminals and addicts. Christ she’d been in Pawhuska nearly seven months and had yet to buy a car. If she wasn’t with Evan, she walked everywhere. He had a hard time wrapping his mind around it.

  “Sherriff,” Fields was saying, “we should probably get on the road.”

  “You’re right,” Evan started, “but there’s still one thing that’s stuck in my craw here Marshal.”
/>   “What’s that Sherriff?”

  “How the fuck did he know where she was?”

  Sally

  The tire iron connected with the side of Joeys head with a sickening thud. His eyes never had time to register the recognition of what was about to happen before they rolled back into his head and then crumpled to the ground. Sally wasted no time scrambling out of the trunk. Her eyes blinked painfully at the sudden light after being in the trunk for God knows how long. She stepped over Joey and grabbed for the keys that had dropped from his hand. Dark blood was starting to pool around his head, flowing freely from his left ear and a deep gash just above it. She quickly bent over his body to check his pulse and found none. She’d killed him. She didn’t really give herself time to think about that right now, knowing she needed to get out of here. She had to roll Joey over to check his jacket for a phone and was slightly unnerved at the one fixed eye that stared past her. She found the phone and hurried to the car, climbing in behind the wheel and jamming the key into the ignition. As the engine turned over she turned on the phone. Joey had turned it off so that they couldn’t be tracked. Her high hopes began to fade as she realized there was barely any battery left. She might, if she was lucky, be able to make one quick phone call to Evan.

  She punched in his number and her heart leapt when she heard his deep voice come over the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Evan!” she yelled into the phone.

  “Sally,” he answered incredulously. “Where are you? Are you ok? Where’s Joey?”

  “I have no idea where I am, I was in the trunk, I couldn’t see anything. Evan the phone is about to die.”

  “Sit tight and keep the phone on for as long as you can, I’ll find you,” Evan reassured her.

  “Ok. Evan? Joey’s dead. I killed him,” Sally said shakily.

  “Don’t worry about that right now, we’ll figure this all out when I get there,” he disconnected in an attempt to preserve as much of her battery as he could. Sally held the phone in her lap and lay her head back against the headrest. She instinctively locked the doors, even though she knew Joey was dead. She could see him if she looked into the side view mirror, laying in a growing pool of blood. She began to shiver uncontrollably, the weight of what she’d done pressing down on her. She knew that it was self-defense; that he was going to kill her, still it seemed surreal. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to control the shaking but it didn’t work. She turned the heat up but it too had no effect.

  She looked around at her surroundings for the first time, trying to find some sort of landmark. She was in the parking lot of a long-abandoned gas station with not much but tumbleweeds on either side. In fact, it looked like a ghost town. There were a few other abandoned store fronts and a scattering of small neglected houses. I hope Evan finds me soon, she thought, seriously creeped out by now. She heard a crunch of gravel from behind her and looked up to see a dark car pull up just as the phone in her lap went dead.

  Sally put the car in gear, foot ready to jump from brake to gas if needed. The door of the black car opened and a tall Hispanic man stepped out. Sally relaxed as she saw the glint of the Marshal’s shield on his belt and popped the car back into park. She rolled down the window as he approached and offered her a smile.

  “Miss Andrews, Deputy US Marshall Cruz Martin. Glad to see that you are alright. We’ve all been worried about you. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll get you out of here,” he said, opening the door and helping her out of the car. He guided her to his vehicle and ushered her into the back seat with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I was delivering case files to the local office when I got the call with your location. I didn’t have time to move them from the passenger seat to the trunk.”

  “No need for apologies,” Sally stated, “just glad to be getting out of here.” But she was starting to feel uneasy. Something about this man was familiar to her and she couldn’t place her finger on it but it struck a chord and made her uncomfortable. She tried to shake it, to chalk it up to the trauma of the last several hours but as he looked at her in the rearview mirror her heart skipped a beat. It was his eyes. She knew those eyes but on a different face. Hadn’t he said his same was Cruz Martin? And then it hit her like a ton of bricks. Cruz Martin. Martin Cruz. Teodoro Cruz’s brother.

  Evan

  Fields was on the phone with her office, giving some techie the number of the phone Sally used to call Evan in an effort to triangulate its location.

  “She ok,” Fields asked?

  “Yes, thank God, she sounds fine,” Evan answered.

  “How did she get away from him?”

  “She didn’t have a chance to say,” he said, wanting to see what was up for himself before giving away the info that Sally had killed a man. “Phone was dying and she needed enough juice for us to be able to track her. How are we doing on that by the way?”

  Fields checked her phone. “My guys have found a signal and should have something soon. You told her to stay put right?”

  Evan nodded. He had pulled over when Sally called, not wanting to keep driving further in the wrong direction, but he was getting antsy just sitting there. He was wound so tight that he jumped when Fields’ phone rang.

  “Yeah? You got the location? Wait, what? You kidding me?” She was hurriedly jotting directions down in her notebook and signaling for Evan to head east. He swung the truck around and headed in the direction she had indicated.

  “Where to,” Evan asked as Fields hung up her phone.

  “Some place called Blackburn. You heard of it?”

  Evan scratched his head. “Yeah, it’s an old ghost town, which would make sense but it’s barely an hour from here. Are they sure? It’s been eight hours now, how would we have missed them this close?”

  “Well we weren’t exactly looking at ghost towns. I would’ve thought they’d be somewhere with a little more cover,” Fields stated.

  Something wasn’t sitting right with Evan. How was is possible that Sally had been within an hour of him all this time? True, like Fields said, he was thinking Joey would take her somewhere with at least a bit of a population to blend into. But a ghost town did make for good hiding. No one would consider going into those creepy old buildings. He mentally kicked himself for not thinking of it. It didn’t really matter anymore anyway. In less than an hour Sally would be with him again. He floored the truck thinking about the ordeal she’d been through. She must’ve been terrified, locked in the trunk, knowing Joey wanted to kill her. Then having to kill him to get away. He couldn’t imagine how she felt.

  His head was spinning with all of the newfound information he had on her as well. Get her back safely first, he’d told himself. Deal with the fallout later. He and Fields made obligatory small talk as they drove to the place the marshal’s service tech guy had told them she’d be. He told himself he should be ecstatic to be on his way to Sally but his gut was telling him something still wasn’t right. He pressed the gas pedal down even further, testing the limits of his engine.

  “Whoa there cowboy,” Fields said, one hand on the glovebox and the other on her seatbelt. “Let’s try not to get us killed getting there.”

  Evan ignored her and drove on, desperately needing to get to Sally. In just under forty minutes, they entered what was once the small town of Blackburn, Oklahoma. It had been abandoned for some time now, only decrepit old abandoned structures and a crumbling sidewalk remained. Evan drove down the main drag for a few minutes before spotting the old gas station and the car parked in its lot. True to Sally’s confession, Joey was lying in a heap on the ground.

  Evan climbed out of his truck and ran to the car while Fields went to Joey’s body. He got to the driver’s side door and looked in but the car was empty. Where was she?

  “Girl’s got some balls, I’ll give her that,” Fields was saying behind him. “Just made my job a whole lot easier.”

  Something in her voice made Evan’s hackles rise and he turned toward her slowly, his han
d on the butt of his gun.

  “Uh, uh, uh, Sherriff, hands where I can see them,” Fields said, her own gun pointed straight at Evan’s chest. “Why don’t you toss that over here,” she said motioning to his sidearm. “And I’ll take the one at your ankle too.”

  Evan briefly thought about trying to get a shot off but knew if he missed, Sally was as good as dead. If she wasn’t already. He tossed both guns at Fields’ feet and spit in the dirt.

  “You were supposed to be the one protecting her,” he growled at her.

  “Just doing the job I’m being paid to do Sherriff,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “Let’s get back in the truck, and don’t think about trying anything if you want to make it out of here alive.”

  Sally

  Sally sat in a dusty old chair in a house that hadn’t had visitors in what looked like decades. Martin Cruz stood by the front room window, occasionally checking the street through a nicotine-stained gauzy curtain. She hoped against hope that Evan had gotten her location before the phone went dead. She knew in all reality that her odds weren’t good but she tried to stay as positive as she could.

  “I must thank you for taking care of Joey for us, Miss Andrews,” Cruz said. “Or is it Miss Bishop,” he teased.

  “I’m Sally Andrews,” she said, with more defiance than she felt. “I left Casey Bishop behind almost a year ago.”

  “It’s a sad thing when someone forgets who they are, don’t you think? When they forget where they come from?”

  “Not when that someone is an ignorant kid in a shithole neighborhood. What’s so good about remembering,” she asked.

  “Hey now sister, you strolled through that ‘shithole’ neighborhood in some pretty nice shoes if memory serves,” he tsk tskd.