The Perfect Outsider

by Loreth Anne White

  “Good boy—take it easy,” she said a little shakily. “I’m right behind you, buddy.”

  It was dark at the base of the bramble-choked gulley as June pushed branches aside and saw what Eager had found.

  A man lay on his side. Big. Maybe six foot two. His face was hidden from view and his dark hair glistened with rain. His denim jacket and jeans were soaked through. June noted he wore serious hiking boots, and the bottom of his left pant leg was soaked in what looked like blood.

  “Good boy, Eager,” she whispered, tossing his toy to the side for him to play with as she crouched down beside the man.

  June carefully rolled him over. His head flopped back, exposing a mean gash across his temple. She felt his carotid. He was alive, but unconscious, his skin cold.

  Her peripheral thought was that he was devastatingly good-looking, in a rough, tanned, mountain-man kind of way, and maybe in his early thirties. She hadn’t seen him around Cold Plains before—a guy like this would be hard to miss.

  Then she caught sight of the leather holster at his hip—empty. And for a nanosecond June froze. It must have been his Beretta she’d found.

  Had he fired at Lacy and her children?

  Sweat broke out over her body and her paramedic training warred with a need for safety. Because if this man was carrying, he could very likely be one of Samuel’s henchmen.

  Samuel eschewed weapons in the hands of his Devotees, but his personal murderous militia were the exception.

  Bitterness filled her mouth as she reached quickly for his leather belt, first removing a GPS handheld device so she could undo his buckle, which was engraved with the name Jesse. It sounded like a brand of Western wear. June quickly undid the buckle and the zipper of his jeans. She edged his pants down over his hip. And there it was—a small D tattoo—the branding mark Samuel Grayson personally gave each one of his true Devotees. And if this Devotee was carrying—he was most certainly a henchman.

  Bastard.

  But before she could think through her next move, the man’s eyes flared open and he grabbed her wrists. A hatchet of panic struck into her heart. She tried to jerk free, but his grip was like iron.

  He blinked into the glow of her headlamp, and June saw his eyes were a deep and unusual shade of indigo-blue. In them she could read confusion.

  “What are doing with my pants?” His voice came out hoarse, rough. Eager growled, hackles rising.

  “Quiet, Eager,” June whispered, fighting to tamp down the fear swelling inside her. “I’m here to help you,” she said as calmly as she could. “I…needed to see if you had the Devotee tattoo on your hip—to see if you were a local, one of us, from Cold Plains.”

  Confusion filtered deeper into his eyes. “Devotee?” he said.

  “You have a D tattooed on your hip, the one Samuel Grayson personally gives his true followers,” she said.

  He stared at her, features blank. Then he tried to move his head, wincing as he did. The movement caused fresh blood to flow from the gash down the side of his face. His jaw was dark with stubble. She wondered how long he’d been lying here.

  “Where am I?”

  “Looks like you took a tumble into the ravine,” she said. “You’ve got a pretty nasty cut on your head and your leg is bleeding. Let me go so I can look at it.”

  He stared at her, refusing to relinquish his viselike grip on her wrists. His hands were big, calloused. He was impossibly strong, even in his injured state.

  June’s mouth went dry. She could easily disappear down here with her dog, and no one would find her until it was too late.

  “I haven’t seen you around Cold Plains,” she said as calmly as she could. “My name is June Farrow. I’m a part-time paramedic with the Cold Plains Urgent Care Center, and a SAR volunteer. This is Eager, my K9. He’s pretty friendly, but if he thinks you’re going to hurt me, he’ll attack. I’d hate for that to happen, so why don’t you let go of me and maybe I can help you?”

  His gaze shifted to her dog. Slowly he let go of her hands.

  June lurched up to her feet, jumped back and pulled out her gun. She aimed it at his head.

  Careful, don’t blow your cover, June.

  To the best of her knowledge, no one in town knew she worked against Samuel. Like most of the two thousand residents of Cold Plains, June attended his motivational seminars on Being the Best You. She pretended to hang on to his every word, painting herself as a potential Devotee on the cusp of conversion. Samuel had even suggested she come to one of his private counseling sessions, which were where he did most of his mind control. He was a master at preying on any insecurity, exposing a person’s deepest fears and then promising to make them feel safe. His message was that as long as you were a Devotee, you were safe—in turn he wanted obedience, time and money. But if you tried to escape, as Lacy just had, he wanted you dead.

  “What’s your name?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here in the woods?”

  His hand went to the holster at his hip.

  “I have your weapon. It’s missing rounds. Did you shoot at them?”

  He frowned.

  “Shoot at who?”

  “There’s a young mother and her two children lost in these woods. I’m looking for them. Are you chasing them? Did you hurt them?”

  He tried to sit up, groaning in pain. And as he moved June caught sight of something lying in the soil behind his shoulder—a little, sparkly red shoe.

  Rage arrowed through her body, obliterating any trace of fear.

  “Don’t move! Or I will shoot you dead. Where did you find that shoe?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about… I can’t seem to remember…anything.” His voice faded and he touched the wound on his brow, his fingertips coming away bloody. He stared at the blood, a look of disorientation on his rugged features.

  “What’s your name?” she repeated.

  His gaze lifted slowly and met hers, and in his eyes June saw the beginnings of fear. “I… Jesus—I don’t know my name,” he whispered.

  June swallowed.

  Was he playing her?

  What was she going to do with him now? Leave him out here to die—which he might if he was disoriented and lost more blood. And if hypothermia kicked in, he was finished.

  June glanced at his GPS device lying near her feet.

  “Where were you going when you fell down here?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “Which way is Cold Plains?” she said.

  “Cold Plains?”

  “You’ve never heard of Cold Plains?”

  “I…” He cursed softly.

  June swore to herself. She was not capable of leaving him to die out here. She was programmed to rescue, had been ever since she was a kid. June was the child who saved bugs from puddles. It was why she became a paramedic. It was why she worked for SAR—she was wired to help those in despair.

  But she had not been able to help her husband. The sudden memory stab, the sharp reminder of her inadequacies, hurt.

  Holding her gun on him with one hand, she reached down and picked up his GPS with the other. She pressed the menu button, saw that he’d been saving his route—and he appeared to have hiked in not from Cold Plains, but from over the mountains.

  “You’ve come a long way,” she said. “You’ve saved a route into these mountains from forty miles north—where were you before that?”

  He groaned, lay back. “I wish I knew.”

  He needed help—he was still losing blood. He might have been lying here for hours. She had no idea how bad his leg wound was. And daylight was beginning to filter down into the ravine. She had maybe an hour to hike all the way down into Cold Plains and to head around to the search base camp on the other side of the mountain, and she’d still found no sign of Lacy and the twins.

  Her only solution—if one could even call it that—was to take this stranger back to the safe house and hold him there until she could fetch FBI Agent Hawk Bledsoe. It was risky, b
ut she didn’t have time to think further.

  “I’m going to help you, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m putting this gun away.” Please don’t let this be a mistake… “And if you hurt me, you’re going to die out here, alone, understand?”

  His eyes remained locked onto hers. “I don’t hurt people.”

  She holstered her Glock. “How would you know?” She shrugged out of her backpack as she spoke. “You don’t even know your name.”

  Crouching down next to him, she opened her pack and removed her first-aid kit. His pulse was within range, and he was breathing okay—she’d seen that much.

  “Can you move your limbs? Any numbness in your extremities?”

  He grunted. “No. Just…weak.”

  Blood loss was her priority now.

  “I’m going to cut open the bottom of your jeans. I want to take a look at that injury on your leg,” she said as she reached for her scissors and began splitting open the base of his pants. The gash on his head was bad, but the one on his leg could be worse—she needed to see what she was dealing with.

  He groaned in pain as she peeled the bloodied and rain-soaked denim off a deep gash on his calf.

  He was going to need sutures.

  She worked quickly to clean and dry the wound as best she could, shielding him from the rain with her body. There was no arterial damage or obvious fracture—just a big surface gash probably caused by sharp rock during his fall.

  Pulling the edges of the cut together, she applied butterfly sutures from her kit. Then she wound a bandage tightly around his calf, urgency powering her movements.

  “This should work as a temporary stopgap,” she said as she began to clean the cut on his temple.

  His gaze caught hers and she stilled for a second—the intensity in his eyes was disturbing. He smelled faintly of wood smoke.

  “You been camping?” she said.

  He inhaled sharply as disinfectant touched his cut. “I—I really don’t know.” Then, as he thought deeper: “Do I have a backpack with me?”

  “I can’t see one.”

  He closed his eyes, clearly straining to remember. Then he swore softly again. “I feel as if I might have had a pack or something. That I was going somewhere…important.”

  The cut on his head, if ugly, was also superficial. However, given his apparent memory loss, he could be suffering from some sort of intracranial hemorrhaging due to blunt-force trauma, which could become dangerous.

  “I’m going to give you three words,” she said. “Radio, belt, Jesse. Can you memorize them for me? I’m going to ask you to repeat them to me in a little while, okay?”

  “Radio, belt, Jesse,” he repeated. “Got it.”

  His voice was beautiful, she thought, deep and husky like Matt’s used to be. Matt had been fair, but similar in stature to this man—an ace helicopter pilot she’d met on one of her very first recue missions. She’d loved going camping with Matt—loved the way fire smoke lingered in his checked lumberjack shirt, how the stubble on his cheeks grew rough in the wilderness. Emotion pricked into her eyes. June pushed it away, startled at the freshness of it all. It had been five years. She’d dealt with it.

  “You sure you don’t recall firing your weapon?” she said, trying another angle as she taped more butterfly sutures to the cut on his temple. Eager was watching obediently from the side, waiting for new directions.

  “No.”

  “But you knew you had a gun—you went for it at your hip.”

  “I…guess.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t see a young mother and her children in the woods?”

  “No!” Frustration bit into his tone “I’m not the hell sure of anything.”

  He was scared of what was happening to him, thought June.

  “Why do you have that little red shoe?”

  He was quiet a moment, then his eyes flickered as if a memory suddenly crossed before them. “I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  June wondered if he was lying.

  “That shoe—” she jerked her chin to where it lay “—belongs to a three-year-old twin. She and her sister call them their Dorothy shoes. They like to take them everywhere so they can put them on and click their heels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and be home safe whenever they need to be. Their names are Rebecca and Abigail. Their mother is Lacy Matthews. Lacy runs the coffee shop in town. They’ve been missing in these woods for two nights, and I’m thinking the girls will be wanting their magic shoes to take them home about now.”

  His gaze went to the shoe and he stared at it as if he’d never seen it before in his life.

  “There, that should tide you over,” she said as she applied a bandage over the sutures.

  He pulled up his jeans zipper, buckled his belt and immediately tried to get to his feet, but he swayed and slumped heavily back to the ground.

  “Easy, big guy,” she said, helping him back up by the arm. “You lost a fair bit of blood. Move too fast and you’re going down like a rock.”

  “I need to go—” He started to stumble through the brush, then swayed and leaned heavily on her. “I’ve got to get to…” His voice faded, and his features twisted in frustration.

  “Get to where?” she said.

  “I… Jesus, I don’t know. I was going somewhere. Urgent—had to do something…important, for someone. Something…dangerous.”

  A chill trickled down her spine.

  “Do something for whom? Samuel Grayson?”

  “I… The name feels familiar.”

  “Yeah,” she said bitterly. “He’d be the one who tattooed your hip. Can you walk, if you lean on me like this?” She hooked his big arm around her neck, taking the brunt of his weight across her shoulders.

  June began to help him up the bank. He was solid muscle and their progress was slow. When the bank got too steep, she let him climb in front of her while she supported him from behind. She also wanted to be in a position where she could draw her gun again if she had to.

  June’s immediate goal was to get this injured stranger into the safe house, further assess his condition and administer whatever additional medical aid she could. Then she was going to press him hard on the whereabouts of Lacy and the twins—he was her only clue right now.

  She’d also ask the others in the house if they’d seen him around Cold Plains. If they did recognize the stranger as one of Samuel’s cult enforcers, she’d keep him under lock and key, fetch Hawk Bledsoe and hand him over to the FBI.

  Hawk was one of the few people June could totally trust in this surreal, picture-perfect and sick little town. Four months ago Hawk’s sister-in-law, Mia, had been brought to an EXIT psychologist for “deprogramming,” which is how EXIT had got wind of the cult in Cold Plains.

  Mia had told EXIT there were other members who wanted to get out, but they had no resources and were afraid for their lives if they spoke out against Samuel. Mia had passed on the name of Hannah Mendes, a widow in her seventies with a ranch on the outskirts of Cold Plains. Hannah had been trying to set up a safe halfway house with the aid of her sister-in-law from Little Gulch over in the next valley. EXIT had contacted June and asked if she’d run the house and help Hannah with an evacuation program. They presently had five people in the safe house waiting to move into an EXIT program, and June had done the early stages of counseling with them. Lacy and her twins would have brought the number of occupants to eight.

  As they edged up over the ravine lip, rain was coming down hard again and the wind soughed, swirling mist like wraiths through the trees. Dawn had done little to dissipate the gloomy eeriness of the forest. June paused and gave the stranger some water. His face had a pallor that worried her, and he was weakening.

  “Where are we going?” he said, handing her water bottle back to her.

  “Shelter. A safe place.” Hooking his arm over her neck again, supporting his weight with her shoulders, June led him through the trees toward a hidden crevas
se that would lead into caves and a tunnel to Hidden Valley on the other side of the mountain. That’s where the safe house was.

  As he began to lean more heavily on her, June prayed she wasn’t taking a cult enforcer, her worst kind of enemy, into the very heart of their safe house.

  Chapter 2

  As they neared the opening of the crevasse that led to the cave tunnel, the pager on June’s hip sounded. Tension whipped through her. She leaned her shoulder against the rock face, the stranger heavy against her body as she checked the page.

  Chief Fargo.

  Her pulse quickened. The police chief was probably wondering why she and Eager hadn’t shown up with the rest of the SAR team at first light this morning. June would never make it down there in time now, not if she had to take this injured man back to the safe house first. Sweat prickled over her lip.

  With the FBI’s noose tightening around Samuel, and with more and more of his Devotees disappearing into some rumored safe house, the entire town was on edge, looking for the traitor among them. The last thing June needed was to give Fargo, Samuel or anyone else in Cold Plains cause to suspect her.

  As part of her of her cover, June rented an outbuilding on Hannah Mendes’s ranch as her “official” residence in Cold Plains while she worked two days a week as a paramedic for the urgent-care ambulance service.

  Hannah covered for June on all the other nights and days she spent working at the cave house in the mountains. The ranch was likely the first place Fargo might go looking for June when she didn’t show up for the search party or answer this page. Fargo might see June’s truck still in the driveway, start asking questions. Hannah could come under scrutiny, as well.

  June cursed to herself—she was going to need a damn fine explanation to satisfy Fargo.

  This community with its seemingly picture-perfect facade was like a ticking time bomb. June just wished the FBI would hurry up and get something they could actually use to take Samuel down and prosecute him before the whole place blew sky-high, Waco-style.