“How did you know?” the sheriff asked.
“Ruby wrote about him.” She touched the name, and Sam leaned close, his focus on the note scribbled at the bottom of the journal entry. Different color of ink. Different style of writing.
“Are you sure she wrote this?” he asked, slipping the notebook from her hands and reading the words aloud. “Because it doesn’t look like the rest of her writing.”
“She wrote in calligraphy when she was journaling. That—” she touched the page “—is her normal handwriting.”
“You’re certain?”
“As certain as I can be without hiring a handwriting expert.”
“We’ll copy this and send it to an expert I know at the Houston field office. Do you have other samples of her writing?”
“I do at my place. She loved snail mail and sent me handwritten letters every couple of weeks. They’re in a box in my closet.”
“With your permission, we can send someone into your home to find them.”
“Will I get the samples back?”
“Yes,” he said, closing the notebook and handing it back to her. “That’s an interesting note she left.”
“I was going to say the same thing,” the sheriff agreed. “Why would he leave his bank account information with Ruby?”
“Because he didn’t have a home?” Ella speculated, dropping the journal into her bag. “If he’d gotten a job and received his first paycheck, he’d have had to deposit it in a bank, right? Maybe he opened an account and didn’t want to carry the information around with him.”
“He’d only need a bank account if he planned to stick around town for a while,” the sheriff said. “Otherwise, he could have walked into the Walmart and used their check-cashing service.”
“Maybe he did plan to stay in town,” Ella said, her mind on the seventeen-year-old. He’d been a kid, really. A child who’d had nowhere to go. No home to return to. Nothing but what he could carry. Maybe he’d wanted to put down roots and stay a while. A job would have been the first step in that direction. A bank account would have been the second.
“That still doesn’t explain why he gave bank information to your cousin,” the sheriff insisted, turning off the main road that ran through town and onto a side street.
She’d driven it several times, and she knew it wound through a community and then onto a country road that ran parallel to the river.
“Maybe he trusted her,” Sam said. “She was his drug-addiction counselor, right?”
“Yes. She mentioned in another entry that he was part of her Tuesday night group last year, but was concerned when he stopped showing up to the meeting.”
“It still might be a stretch to think he trusted her enough to hand over his bank account information.” The sheriff reached a four-way stop and turned, the river gleaming below. A grassy knoll separated asphalt from tall river grass.
“He was seventeen,” Ella reminded him. “He was alone in the world. Maybe he just wanted someone to believe in.”
“If so, your cousin was a good person to choose. I don’t know if I mentioned this to you when you came to the office, but she and I attended the same church.”
“No. You didn’t.” And if he had, it wouldn’t have made any difference to Ella. Her goal was to prove that Ruby hadn’t been a drug addict, that her death hadn’t been accidental. Nothing anyone said about her cousin, no story anyone told, could have swayed her from that.
“We didn’t know each other well, but I never heard a bad word said about her. The kids in her Sunday school class loved her. The ladies in her Bible study group felt the same. As far as I could determine, there’s been no gossip about a drug problem or addiction. I talked to a few of Ruby’s friends after you came to the office. They were all shocked by her cause of death.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“You knew your cousin. She was merely an acquaintance of mine. When her body was discovered, the situation looked cut-and-dried. Drug paraphernalia. Tourniquet. Needle mark. Unfortunately, my office has processed scenes like that dozens of times. Opioids have been an increasingly virulent problem in the area. In the last few years, the number of drug overdoses has tripled. The number of deaths from drug overdoses has nearly doubled.”
“That’s a big spike,” Sam commented, tapping his fingers impatiently against his thigh.
She almost covered his hand to stop the restless movement, but she couldn’t stop remembering how it had felt to throw caution to the wind, to wrap her arms around his waist, let her head rest against his chest, hear the steady pulse of his heart.
She also couldn’t stop thinking that she’d be making a big mistake if she fell for Sam.
Big. Huge. Colossal.
Inevitable.
That’s what Ruby would have said.
She’d believed in love at first sight, happily-ever-afters, soul mates.
Ella believed in keeping her heart, and her body, intact.
“Like I said, lots of things have changed since Medical Properties Incorporated arrived in town. Not all for the worse. We have a quicker emergency response time for non-critical patients. Better treatment options for low-income citizens. Good doctors and nurses that the community has come to rely on,” the sheriff responded, glancing in his rearview mirror and scowling. “You’d think people wouldn’t drive a hundred miles an hour on a country road when the sheriff is in front of them.”
Sam shifted in his seat and looked out the back window.
Ella did the same.
She could see a car racing toward them. Distant, but closing the gap rapidly. “Wow. He’s flying.”
“Yeah, and he’s going to get a ticket for it if he doesn’t slow down,” the sheriff muttered.
“Is there a place to turn off around here?” Sam broke in.
“Not really. There are a couple of old dirt roads that lead to hunting cabins, but they narrow quickly and are only accessible by foot or ATV.”
“Are they for public use?” Sam asked.
“It’s all county land and has been for seventy years.”
“So your speeder could be a hunter or camper? Someone who plans to spend some time out in the wilderness.”
“Not if he’s from around here. There’s better hunting farther from town. All the locals know it.”
“How far is your office?” Sam was still watching out the back window.
“Four miles.” The sheriff accelerated. “Not far.”
“It’ll be far if the guy behind us has a gun.”
“You’re armed,” the sheriff said.
Sam nodded. “Yes.”
“I’m armed. We should be ok—” A car jumped out in front of them, exploding from a hidden road a hundred yards ahead and heading toward them at breakneck speed.
A game of chicken that Ella didn’t want to play.
The sheriff swerved, the SUV bouncing off the road and down the knoll. They were heading straight for the water, and Ella didn’t think there was anything he could do about it. They were moving too fast, the brakes locking as he slammed on them.
Sam’s hand was on the back of her head, pushing it down between her knees.
He was saying something, but all she could hear was the squeal of brakes and the splash of water as they hit the river.
* * *
Momentum carried them out past feathery river grass and gray-green boulders, the SUV finally coming to a stop a dozen yards from shore. Nose down, rear up, cold water already seeping into the front and lapping up against the windows there.
Sam didn’t waste time.
He unclipped his seat belt and did the same for Ella, then grabbed the door handle and opened it. The river pulsed just below the doorsill, water splashing up and onto the floorboards.
“You two okay?” Sheriff Johnson asked, releasing his seat belt
and opening the glass panel that separated the front of the squad car from the back.
“We’ll be better once we’re out of here,” Sam said, eyeing the water, the shore and the two vehicles idling on the road.
“Agreed. The front end of the SUV is going down fast, and the river is deep enough here to completely submerge it.” He tried his radio, shook his head. “Already dead.”
“Maybe we should call for help after we get out of here?” Ella suggested, her voice shaking.
“It’s going to be okay,” Sam assured her, wanting to pull her out quickly, help her to shore and get her to safety. But safety didn’t exist on shore. Not with the occupants of the cars waiting for them to emerge. They’d set up a nearly perfect ambush, and they were waiting to make certain they took out their targets. With the right person behind the barrel, a high-powered rifle could easily make a shot at this range. Sam knew that. Just like he knew that staying out of the line of fire would be a death sentence. The SUV would sink. With or without them in it.
“What do you think?” Sheriff Johnson asked. “Do we risk it?”
“We don’t have much of a choice.”
“We could wait for total submersion, and then exit underwater. That will make their target practice more difficult.”
“Good plan unless our timing is off. Then one or more of us could drown.” The truth was, if Ella weren’t with him, Sam would have taken the risk. He was a strong swimmer, and he wasn’t prone to panic. But she was with him, and she looked terrified, eyes wide in her soot-streaked face.
“First fire and now water. If we’d had them both at the same time, the apartment building would still be standing,” she murmured, her eyes focused on the cars that were still waiting. “They don’t seem very eager to leave, but I sure am.”
She pulled her purse strap over her head and scrambled for the door, the large bag slapping against her chest as she lunged in its direction.
Sam grabbed her by the waist, tugging her back.
“Wait until we have a plan,” he growled, holding her still when she tried to escape his grip.
“If you want me to wait, you’d better come up with one fast, because my plan is not to drown in a police car in a river that has a name I can barely spell!”
“You’re panicking,” he said calmly. “And that’s not going to help.”
“No. I’m taking action, because every minute we sit in this vehicle increases our chances of not getting out of it. The water is freezing, Sheriff Johnson is chest deep in it and we all know muscles cease functioning when the body gets too cold. Blood is pumped out of the extremities and into the major organs, but eventually even that isn’t enough. The—”
“You sound like you’ve been watching a lot of documentaries,” the sheriff commented, pulling his keys from the ignition and using a small tool dangling from the chain to break the front passenger window.
“I wrote an article on the long-term effects of hypothermia a couple of years back. Since this might be my last opportunity to spout useless trivia, I decided I’d better take it.”
Sam laughed.
He couldn’t help himself.
Even terrified, she had a sense of humor and a wry way of viewing the world that made him smile.
“Not so useless,” the sheriff said. “Because you’re right. Sitting in cold water isn’t going to do anything but weaken us. I’ll go out the passenger side of the vehicle and see if I can distract them. You two wait a few seconds and exit through the open door.” He slipped through the broken window, splashing loudly as he swam away from the SUV.
The occupants of the cars didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Not surprising.
Sam and Ella were their targets.
The front end of the vehicle dropped lower, water pouring in through the window and splashing over the seat. It lapped over the doorjamb and swished around Sam’s feet.
“I really think we need to go,” Ella said uneasily.
“Are you a strong swimmer?”
“Strong enough to get myself to shore,” she assured him, already slipping into the water.
He followed, the river icy and sharp, the fall air warm in comparison. On the side of the road, he could see the cars’ doors still closed, sunlight glinting on the windows. He couldn’t see the occupants, but he assumed there was more than one in each vehicle.
Ella was treading water. White skin. Purple lips. Gasping breaths.
“Which way?” she asked.
The far bank was at least a quarter mile away. On a warm summer day that would be an easy swim, but today it could kill them.
“Straight into the shore. Aim for that area.” He gestured toward a small peninsula of land, lush with river grass thick and tall enough to provide cover.
She nodded, her chin dipping beneath the water as she started paddling, the sound of screaming sirens suddenly filling the air.
TEN
The peninsula wasn’t that far, and Ella should have been able to make it there easily. As a kid, she’d spent hours swimming in the pond behind her grandmother’s house. As a high school student, she’d spent most of her summers working as a lifeguard at a local pool.
She’d always been an excellent swimmer.
Until now.
She kicked frantically, trying to gain some momentum, but her movements were sluggish and uncoordinated, her muscles too cold to react properly. This was what she’d been babbling about in the sinking SUV—the insidiousness of the cold, the way it seeped into the body and shut it down.
She’d been babbling about it, but she hadn’t realized she was about to experience it. She slipped under, water rushing into her nose and mouth, her purse strap wrapped around her neck and nearly choking her, but she tried her best to hold it above the water.
Sam dragged her out of the water, one arm wrapped around her waist, fingers digging into her abdomen. Water dripped into her eyes and off her chin, her hair pasted to her cheeks and neck.
He set her down, her feet sinking into mud, long grass brushing her shins. She was out of the water, on her feet, staring at Sam’s soaked black T-shirt, and she wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there.
“Okay?” he asked, brushing hair from her cheeks, tilting her chin so he could look in her eyes. She was staring into his face, and she couldn’t make herself look away, couldn’t make herself move away.
“Yes. Thanks.” Her throat still burned from the fire, her voice was hoarse and she was shivering, but all she could think about, all she could focus on, was him.
That couldn’t be good.
It wasn’t good.
She didn’t want to open her heart again.
She didn’t want to be hurt again.
She didn’t want to believe in all the old dreams again or let herself imagine how wonderful it would be to love someone who loved her back. Not faked or pretended or feigned it.
She made herself step away, forced her gaze from Sam to the road. The cars were gone, replaced by a police cruiser. Lights flashing, doors open. Several people were running across the grassy knoll, sprinting down the hill and straight toward them. She recognized Wren and Radley. A third man was with them—tall and lean, his dark suit and white dress shirt incongruent against the backdrop of river grass and water. She guessed him to be another agent, his movements just as fluid and controlled as his coworkers’. A uniformed officer ran behind him, black boots spraying water and mud, face shadowed by a uniform hat.
“Where’s Sheriff Johnson?” he called, and Ella realized what she hadn’t before. She and Sam were alone on the peninsula, the river empty, the SUV already sucked beneath is surface.
She scanned the shore and then the lake again, but she saw no sign of the sheriff.
“He’s out,” Sam responded.
He didn’t sound concerned, but Ella was.
The
moment she’d dropped into the water, she’d known she was in trouble, the quick sharp sting of cold stealing her breath and her thoughts. She’d barely been able to swim.
She hadn’t been able to swim.
If Sam hadn’t dragged her to shore, she’d probably be lying on the sediment-covered bottom of the river. Since the sheriff had exited the vehicle first, he should have exited the water first. If he hadn’t, something was wrong.
Had he succumbed to the cold?
Drowned, when his neurons short-fired and his muscles refused to cooperate?
Cold wind rippled across the glassy surface of the water, and she held her breath, praying that the sheriff would appear, somewhere close to land.
Even better, on land.
Dripping wet, but safe.
That he’d usher them all to his office and ask questions about the fire, Ruby, The Organization.
“Out of the SUV? Or out of the river?” the officer demanded.
“Both. He exited the water over there.” Sam pointed toward two pine trees that jutted out over the river, their needles carpeting the ground. “I saw him running toward the road and then lost sight of him. Based on where he was heading, I’d say he was trying to get a better look at the cars that ambushed us.”
“Ambushed?” Wren had reached them, her face still streaked with soot, her expression grim.
“Yeah.” Sam explained quickly, the quiet cadence of his voice drifting over Ella.
She was tired.
Bone-deep exhausted.
And she wanted to go home to the predicable world of research, deadlines and edits.
“How are you holding up?” Radley asked, appearing at her side with a blanket in one hand and a cell phone in the other.
“Fine,” she lied, and he nodded.
“So not good?” He dropped the blanket around her shoulders and glanced at his phone. “Our ride will be here in three minutes. We’ll get you somewhere safe so you can warm up.”
“What ride?”
“Honor,” Wren answered. “She and Radley are going to escort you to a safe house where you’ll remain until the threat against you is neutralized.”
Gone Page 13