by Jane Graves
John sat back on his heels, breathing hard. “Give me the gun, Renee.”
“No way.” Renee got to her feet, her gaze never leaving his.
“There’s a big price to pay for shooting a cop,” he told her, easing to his feet at the same time.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I just want your car.” Assuming, of course, that she could drive with one hand crossed over the other and bound with surgical tape.
“Give me your keys,” she said.
He paused for a moment, then methodically reached into his pocket and extracted the keys.
“Throw them down and back away.”
He did what she told him to, but even in the near-darkness of the forest, his cold, calculating expression unnerved her. She could almost see his mind working as he formulated a plan to get the upper hand again. He backed away two steps, then three.
“Keep going,” she told him, and waited until he was far enough away that when she dipped the barrel of the gun down to pick up the keys, he wouldn’t be within tackling distance. Once she was satisfied he posed no immediate threat, she knelt carefully and snagged the keys with her left hand.
She started to back through the trees toward the Explorer, the gun still trained on him. But to her dismay, for every step she took backward, he took one step forward.
“No!” she shouted. “Stay there!”
He kept walking, slowly and steadily. “How many crimes do you plan on committing tonight, Renee?”
“Crimes? I haven’t committed—”
He was right. She couldn’t exactly quote the statute, but holding a gun on a cop was most certainly a crime, and an even bigger one, she imagined, when the gun was his. Add that to bail jumping, fire starting, car stealing...Good Lord. How had she gotten herself into this mess when she’d never intended to step on the wrong side of the law again?
“Tell you what,” John said, his voice low and even. “Why don’t we just pretend this never happened? I’ll take you back to Tolosa, and if it turns out you’re innocent of the robbery, I’ll forget about your stealing my car. I’ll forget about your taking my gun. But I gotta tell you—if you shoot me, I’m afraid I’m going to have a pretty hard time forgetting that.”
It was a tempting offer. But no matter how reasonable his suggestion sounded, with all the evidence against her, sooner or later she’d be facing a prison sentence. Just the thought of incarceration made her hands shake as if she had some kind of neurological disorder. She took a deep breath, trying to get a grip. Then tears welled up behind her eyes, and she shook even harder.
No, no, no!
She blinked quickly, but she couldn’t stop the tears. She wiped her face against her shoulder, trying to clear her blurry vision. She couldn’t fall apart now. Not when she was only a few feet away from freedom.
John held up his palm, still inching toward her. “Now, sweetheart, if you’re not careful, you’re going to accidentally pull that trigger, and I think you’re going to be real sorry you shot me. Isn’t that right?”
She was still five yards or so from the car, but all at once she could tell she wasn’t going to make it. John was advancing closer with every step, and the minute she had to turn the gun down and away from him to unlock the car door with her left hand, he’d be on her. She had to stop him.
“Don’t come any closer, John! I mean it!”
He held out his hand. “Give me the gun. Just hand it over, and I’ll forget all about this.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure you will!”
“I give you my word, Renee. I’ll pretend tonight never happened. But I have to take you back to Tolosa. If I told you anything else, you’d know I was lying, right?”
Renee looked at him warily. He’d probably learned all kinds of negotiating skills in cop school, all of which were designed to keep him from getting shot and make sure she ended up in custody. So how was she to know what was the truth and what wasn’t?
“Besides,” he went on, “you say you’re innocent. If that’s true, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Come on, John! With all the evidence against me, they’ll just go through the motions. They’ll toss me in jail and throw away the key!”
“You’ll get a fair trial.”
“Oh, give me a break! Do you really believe that?”
“I’m a cop, Renee. What do you think I believe?”
“You didn’t answer my question!”
John stared at her, his breath fogging the cold night air. “Of course I think you’ll get a fair trial,” he said finally, but his response came a bit too late to be believable. She hated the way he was patronizing her. She hated the fact that he thought she was a criminal. And above all, she hated the fact that he was trying to act as though he had her best interests at heart when all he really wanted to do was see her behind bars.
John held out his hand again. “The gun, Renee.”
“No! I ’m not going to prison for a crime I didn’t commit!” Prison.
All at once she was assaulted by the memory of the “scared straight” program she’d been through as a teenager. The harsh, mocking voices of a dozen female inmates pounded inside her head.
You ’11 love the food here, blondie. Maggots are one of the four major food groups.
Hey, baby, whatcha think of my dress? Pretty snazzy, huh? Get yourself locked up and you can have one just like it.
See this scar? Knife’s a wicked thing. Didn’t even see it comin ’.
Whatsa matter, chickie? Don't cry. You ’11 have plenty of friends in here. We ’11 even introduce you to Big Maude. She just loves pretty little blondes like you.
Renee’s stomach churned. The memory of those terrible hours swirled around in her mind like a scene from a horror movie. She couldn’t do it. If she let John take her back to Tolosa, her life would become a living nightmare.
The gun felt heavy in her hand, straining the muscles of her forearms until she desperately wanted to drop it. But she couldn’t. The weapon she held was the only thing standing between her and incarceration. She took a deep breath and closed her finger around the trigger.
“I can’t let you take me to jail,” she said, her voice shaking so badly she could barely speak. “I-I have to stop you somehow. I have to.”
She raised the barrel of the gun a notch. John’s eyes widened and he held up both palms. “Now, Renee...”
She’d never fired a gun before, so she didn’t know how it was going to feel. It would be loud, and it would probably knock her right off her feet, so she braced herself, preparing for the worst. She couldn’t say John looked panicked, exactly, but there was an unmistakable flash of apprehension in his eyes.
“Take it easy, Renee. Think about what you’re doing.”
No. She’d thought enough. It was time for action.
“I’m sorry, John.”
She took a deep breath, zeroed in on her target, closed her eyes...and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 7
“You shot my car?”
John watched, dumbfounded, as antifreeze-tinged water glugged out of a bullet-sized hole in his radiator.
“You shot my car?”
Renee stared down at the gun in her hand. “Uh...yeah. I guess I did.”
In a fit of angry frustration, John did what he should have done the moment she got her hands on his weapon: he strode over and yanked it right out of her hand.
“What have you got against cars?” he shouted, stuffing the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “You torch one, you shoot another. What’s next? A hangman’s noose? The guillotine?”
Renee took a tentative step forward, peering at the bullet hole. “I got the radiator, right? Can a car run without one of those?”
“Sure it can! As long as you don’t mind overheating the engine and cracking the block!”
“Cracking the block. That’s bad?”
“About two thousand dollars’ worth of bad!”
“So it wouldn’t be a good thing to drive the car wh
en the radiator is, well...shot.”
All at once he understood. So that was why she’d done it. Instead of disabling the cop, she’d disabled his car.
John didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He had five shots left, but it would take only one to solve all his problems. After dumping her body into the lake, he could get a good night’s sleep, wake to a bright, sunshiny morning, call the auto club, get his radiator fixed, then proceed with his life as if he’d never set eyes on Renee Esterhaus. And she’d spend the rest of eternity making Satan sorry he’d ever bargained for her soul.
Okay. So it was just a fantasy. But at least he could do the auto-club part. He took the keys from Renee, then grabbed his cell phone from the car. He flipped it on.
Nothing.
He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then looked back at Renee with an accusing stare.
“Okay, so I made a call.”
“I don’t give a damn about the call! You ran down the battery!”
A look of sudden understanding came over her face, and her gaze turned speculative. “You can charge it again, can’t you? You have your charger, right?”
When he kept on glaring, a subtle yet distinct wave of relief passed over her face that said it all: I shot your car. I took out your communications. We’re not going anywhere, now, are we?
John tossed his phone back into the car and slammed the door, furious with Renee, but even more furious with himself. He was a cop, for God’s sake. He’d arrested some of the vilest, most evil people who’d ever drawn breath, yet he couldn’t manage to outwit a woman half his size who clearly had a screw loose.
“You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” he told her. “Well, you’re not. You’ve only delayed the inevitable. If we can’t drive out of here, we’ll walk. First thing in the morning.” He took a few threatening steps toward her, backing her against his car. “And you’ll behave yourself every step of the way, or I’ll make you wish to God you had.”
His words were intended to instill in her a heaping dose of fear and respect. Instead she gave him a stony stare that would have put Medusa to shame. “Well. We’ll just see about that.”
Her go-to-hell attitude astonished him. She acted as if she were the one being wronged here. As if she didn’t belong behind bars. As if he were the absolute scum of the earth for suggesting she not resist arrest.
He gave her a warning stare. “Don’t mess with me, Renee.”
She stood up straight and pushed herself away from his car, bumping him off balance and forcing him to take a step backward.
“I am not an armed robber. I am not a car thief. And I don’t care what I have to do—I am not going to jail!”
Her gaze bored into him, those blue eyes hot with anger. Strangely enough, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt that familiar little heart skip that had become his body’s way of telling him he’d better watch his back.
That’s crap, he told himself in the next instant, furious that he’d let her rattle him, even for a moment. “Oh, no. You are going to jail, even if I have to use my last breath to drag you there!”
“Then get your last breath ready, buster. You’re going to need it!”
She elbowed past him and started down the path, and John had to fight his gut reaction to reach out and yank her right back around again. What good would it do? Did he really think the bone-rattling shake he wanted to give her would dislodge that smart-ass attitude?
She reached the cabin, fumbled the door open with her bound hands, then went inside and slammed the door behind her. The noise rocketed through the silence of the forest, tripping his anger one more time, and he spewed a string of curse words so virulent the pine trees wilted. What in the hell had he done to deserve all this?
He looked at his wounded radiator. It was going to cost him hundreds of dollars to get it fixed, and it would take him hundreds of years to get reimbursement for the damages. He looked at the dark clouds that obscured the moon and threatened rain, thinking about the miles of dirt road they had to navigate tomorrow on foot. Then he looked back at the cabin. What other tricks did Renee have up her sleeve that would make him wish he’d never been born?
He sighed. Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.
Renee never imagined that merely walking along a calm, wooded road could be such an excruciating experience.
The forest was nice enough. In fact, in the daylight it was downright picturesque. Streaks of bright morning sun shot through the canopy of pine trees, casting cool shadows on the forest floor. Birds were chirping tentatively, as if they weren’t quite sure it was safe to venture out again after last night’s rain. It was a fairy-tale forest. A weekend-in-the-country forest. A forest this quaint and charming should have a yellow-brick road winding through it, with Dorothy and company skipping along, full of optimistic good cheer as they headed for the Emerald City.
Instead, rain had turned the road into a potholed mud bath, Renee wasn’t the least bit optimistic, and she was headed for jail. And Dorothy had a whole lot more congenial company than the man who was slogging through the mud beside her right now. John wore a scowl that had become a permanent part of his face, and he threw off so much negative energy that he practically blew her off the road.
He’d fallen asleep last night before she had, leaving her to shiver in the dark with her bound hands tied to the frame of the sofa bed with a length of twine he’d found in a kitchen cabinet. She’d stared at him in the light of the dying fire, mad as hell at him. At the same time she couldn’t take her eyes off him. For a moment she’d imagined he wasn’t a cop at all, just the very sexy, anonymous man she’d met in that diner.
No. Stop thinking about him as a man. He’s a hard-ass cop holding a great big grudge, who doesn’t care that he might be dragging an innocent woman to jail.
Yeah, he’d looked pretty good lying there in bed last night, only to wake this morning and turn into Nasty Cop all over again. He hadn’t even taken the tape off her wrists to let her go to the bathroom. She’d had to twist herself into a pretzel to accomplish what should have been a relatively simple task, which had forced her to reconsider her natural assumption that all people, even pissed-off cops, were in possession of a heart.
Then he’d gotten all bent out of shape just because she’d used his toothbrush. Please. He could kiss her last night, but she couldn’t use his toothbrush this morning? If she’d known how much her invasion into his personal space irritated him, she’d have swished his manly extra-strength deodorant stick around in the toilet bowl.
As they walked along the muddy road, she turned to him for yet another plea. “John, will you please take this tape off my wrists?”
“I told you three times already to shut up.”
She glared at him. “What’s the matter? Did we get up on the wrong side of the lumpy sofa bed this morning?”
“You’ve already proven you’ll do anything to stay out of jail, so why should I take a chance?”
“Because it would be a nice thing to do, maybe?”
“It’s not my job to be nice.”
“As a taxpaying citizen, I beg to differ.”
“Major advantage of prison life, Renee. You won’t be paying taxes for long.”
She huffed with disgust. “Would it kill you to let me be just a little bit comfortable?”
“The last time you were comfortable, you stole my car.”
“I told you I had every intention of giving it back to you!”
“Did you also have every intention of giving back the money you stole from that convenience store? And pulling the bullet back out of that clerk you shot? Did you have every intention of doing that, too?”
“I didn’t shoot anybody! And I didn’t rob anybody! How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass how many times you tell me. You’re going to jail.”
What had made her think she could talk him into anything? She might not have a prayer of escaping
jail. Not on John’s shift, anyway. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to pour her heart and soul into the fight right up to the moment they tossed her into the cell and clanged the door shut.
“John? How many people do you suppose you’ve taken to jail?”
“I don’t keep track.”
“Just an estimate. A hundred? Two hundred?”
“Probably. And before the day’s out, I’ll be able to add one more to the list.”
She really wanted to bite at that one, but she forced herself to remain calm. “Gee, that’s a lot of guilty people. Or maybe,” she ventured, “some of them were innocent.”
“All of them were innocent.”
“What?”
“Just ask them. They’ll tell you.”
A hundred nasty responses swelled through her mind, but she stopped herself before they came rushing out of her mouth. Cops didn’t like insults. She’d learned that the hard way once during a Black Sabbath concert at Texas Stadium when she was sixteen. Full of her usual nasty belligerence, she’d told a rent-a-cop to get his fat ass out of the way because he was blocking the stage, and she’d ended up with an even worse view—from the parking lot.
She’d almost forgotten about that night, but now the feeling was razor-sharp again, just as she’d felt it back then. Cops are the enemy. Intellectually she knew that wasn’t right. Stay within the law, and you had nothing to fear. That was what she’d told herself all the years since then. You can change. Make a new life for yourself. A life you can be proud of. But that wasn’t right, either, was it? She’d stayed within the boundaries of the law, and look where she’d ended up anyway.
Unfortunately it appeared that John was just like every cop she’d ever encountered. Hard, jaded, don’t-give-a-damn kind of guys. Did jerks get into law enforcement, or did law enforcement turn them into jerks?
“How many times do you think somebody’s looked guilty,” she said, “but they really weren’t?”
“Give it a rest, will you, Renee?”
“But it’s only logical that—”
He came to a quick halt and faced her. “If you don’t shut up—”