Montana Refuge

by Alice Sharpe

  “That means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” she asked, and for the first time in a couple of days remembered the bomb John Smyth was getting ready to launch at Tyler.

  “Sure. But not just to carry on the name. My own father died when I was a teenager. I missed a lot of good years with him, years I’d like to share with my own kids. How about you, Julie?”

  “I want children, too,” she said, surprised at the ease with which the words slipped out. But she’d thought her life was over, she’d seen no possibility of a future and now that there was one, she felt changed, different, as though there were avenues she wanted to explore, parts of herself that she’d been afraid to know.

  He seemed equally surprised. “Really?” There was no ignoring the excited tone of his voice.

  “Really.” She needed to explain herself. “I tried to stop thinking about it when I left here,” she added. “I wanted to immerse myself in the present. I’d tried so hard to fit into your life, Tyler, to want what you wanted, and it made me feel like the ultimate failure when I couldn’t.”

  “There goes the little bubble I created in my head,” he said, his lowered voice hard to hear over the sound of the horses’ hooves.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told myself to be cautious with you but of course, I didn’t really listen.”

  “Oh, Tyler.”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said, holding up a hand. “You never promised me anything. The important thing is the danger is almost over for you. You’ll have to stand up to Trill, but you won’t have to do it alone. We can drive into the sheriff’s office and find out what to do next. I guess we both need to learn to take life one day at a time.”

  One day at a time. What an easy concept and what a difficult path to follow...

  She looked up at the century house as they drew parallel to it, her gaze zeroing in on the second-floor window of the room they’d shared up until a year ago. At first she thought it was the nature of their conversation that drew her attention in that direction and then she realized something was wrong.

  For one thing, the curtains were fluttering in the wind which meant the window was open. Tyler never left the house open for days at a time when he wasn’t on the ranch, not with strangers coming and going all the time. Then she realized there was something shiny behind the curtains....

  “Tyler,” she said quickly, “dig in your heels and ride like hell!”

  Before either one of them could make this happen a shot fired out, then another and another. Julie felt a burning sensation in her arm and jumped from the horse. She was riding Tex, the roan, and the poor guy took off in a cloud of dust.

  Tyler was soon at her side. He shooed the other two horses away, maybe using them as a diversion. He half carried her to the shelter of the fence where Julie knew they’d be invisible from the upstairs window. A hail of bullets danced around them.

  “You’ve been hit,” he said when they’d reached their destination.

  “So have you,” she said, touching his left forearm.

  “It’s just a scratch.” He pulled his bandanna from around his neck and pressed it against her wound. “Did you see someone?”

  “Just the glint of something metallic.”

  He took out his gun.

  “Go get ’em,” she said, taking the bandanna and applying her own pressure. “I’ll be fine. That has to be Trill in there and I don’t want him to get away.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “Hurry, Tyler, before he leaves. But be careful, he’s a cop.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a cowboy,” he said. Then he was gone.

  * * *

  HE FIGURED HE HAD to have the advantage; after all, he had known this house his entire life and lived in it the past seven years. He found the back door open and hoped it meant the intruder had been careless getting into the house and not that he’d already left.

  He knew where to stand in the foyer so that he could hear the creaking of the old floorboards if anyone upstairs moved. All but holding his breath, he stood there now, gun at the ready. After several tense seconds, he heard the squeak he’d been waiting for.

  “Gotcha!” he whispered.

  He started up the stairs avoiding the noisy third step and the last one, then crept along the hallway.

  The gun went off again and he flattened himself against the wall, expecting a bullet in the head any second until he realized the fire had been directed outside, not inside. Julie! She must be doing something to attract the shooter’s attention. He took the last few steps quickly, not worrying about noise as the gunman was still shooting up a storm.

  The gunfire stopped as Tyler reached the bedroom door. He could see a shape behind the curtain and from the furtive movement and sounds, guessed the gunman was reloading. Charging across the room, he threw himself at the shape and tackled it to the floor. The curtains came crashing down with them. A gun went off but the bullet flew by Tyler’s head. Tyler grabbed the weapon and clicked on the safety, then stuffed it in his waistband. He got to his feet, pointing his own gun down at the gunman and took a deep breath.

  “Get up,” he said.

  Julie came crashing into the room behind him. “Are you okay?”

  “Stay back,” he warned her. Who knew if the assailant carried another weapon? Right now, that person seemed to be having a lot of trouble fighting his way out of the folds of fabric. Tyler leaned down and grabbed an arm and pulled the gunman to his feet.

  Tyler’s mouth dropped open as the curtains slid away, revealing the cold gray eyes of the woman he knew as Meg Peterson. The kindly Midwestern glow was gone, replaced by a hard, menacing glare directed behind Tyler toward the door.

  “You!” Julie said incredulously.

  Meg laughed without mirth. “Who else, you fools?”

  * * *

  “OKAY, YES, ALL RIGHT, I made Snowflake go over the edge,” Meg said. “I was the official diversion although I didn’t plan on the stupid horse falling. Ted was positive he could handle the old man and the girl. Where is he?”

  She was sitting on their bed. Tyler had called the sheriff’s department who had promised to dispatch someone right away. He’d tied her up, hands behind her back. There was no sign of the supposed broken wrist. For good measure, he held a gun on her. She might look all-American wholesome, but that was about as real as the accent which had faded clean away.

  “He’s dead,” Tyler said.

  “You killed him?”

  “Nope, snakes got him. Appropriate, isn’t it? A snake in the grass getting bitten by a snake? A pit viper for a pit viper?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Who was he? And who are you?”

  “Ted is the only name I know for him, and Meg will do for me.”

  “Who hired you two?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you,” she said.

  “Did you have a contact on this ranch?”

  “No, I don’t think so—”

  “He knew to target Robert Marquis. How?”

  “I don’t know,” she insisted, “and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “As far as I know, you haven’t actually killed anyone yet. The fake doctor killed the real doctor and kidnapped—”

  “Don’t try that,” she said with a look of disdain on her face. “I’m an accessory to everything and you probably know it. Okay, I’ll tell you. What’s the difference to me? The answer is, I don’t know. I just know it’s a man and he’s traveling very soon to somewhere, and before you ask, no, I’m not privy to where. He’s going to assassinate a political figure, and no, I don’t know who that is either. Now, aren’t you glad we had this little conversation?”

  Julie came into the room. “I can’t reach the professor,” she said. Tyler knew she’d been downstairs using the phone to make a slew of calls, including one to Professor Killigrew to warn him about Trill.

  “I called the ranch and explained the shots and the horses that showed up a little while ago. I told eve
ryone to stay there and not to be surprised if they heard sirens.”

  “And did you tell them about her?” Tyler asked, nodding toward Meg.

  “I just said she was with us. They hadn’t missed her yet. Everyone thought she was in her room sleeping. Turns out her wrist is sprained, not broken.”

  “And what about Andy?” Tyler added, almost hating to hear the answer.

  “He’s still alive. They airlifted him to an urgent care facility. Mele went with him.”

  “Good. And Trill? Were you able to make sure he’s still in Portland?”

  “No. I called the station and asked to be put through to him although my plan was to hang up before he picked up his phone, but I was told he was unavailable for the next week and I should try his cell phone. What about her?” Julie added, looking hard at Meg. “Did she mention Trill’s name?”

  “How about it?” Tyler asked Meg. “Do you know a cop by the name of Roger Trill?”

  “I make it a policy not to make friends with cops. I’ve never heard of Roger Trill.”

  “We think he’s who hired you.”

  “Because I doubt I’m going to get paid for a job I didn’t complete, it doesn’t really matter to me.”

  “You might be able to save a man’s life if you would just cooperate,” Julie coaxed.

  Meg shrugged. “All I know is the man who hired me is a terrorist, an assassin with connections. Ted met him last year at some convention or something.”

  Julie and Tyler exchanged a look, then moved back toward the wall. Keeping the gun pointed at Meg, they exchanged a hurried, whispered conversation. “The convention part fits with Trill,” Julie said.

  “And with your old boss. Wait, why couldn’t you get a hold of Killigrew? Doesn’t he carry a phone with him?”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t always answer it, especially when he doesn’t recognize the caller and he would have no way of associating me with this number. For that matter, if he did, that might be enough to keep him from answering it.”

  “How about his office? Can someone there get in touch with him?”

  “Not if he hasn’t replaced me yet. I know he’s gone because I got the usual message he hooks up when he leaves. He’s a private man, Tyler. He takes off on these trips to broaden his horizons, as he calls it. He stays in a room by himself when he isn’t networking.”

  “I wonder if the reason he reacted so strongly to your snooping is because Trill is blackmailing him. Maybe he thought you were in on it.”

  She nodded. “That makes sense.”

  Julie moved closer to Meg. “Do you know why someone wants to kill me?”

  Again Meg shrugged. “What’s it to me?”

  They both looked up when they heard a siren approaching. “I’ll go let the sheriff in,” Julie said, and left the room.

  Tyler stared at Meg who met his look with a defiant one of her own.

  “You and Ted were partners?”

  “Not really. We’d worked together before. He called me and told me to get out here a day before him and pose as something harmless. I was his backup plan if he wasn’t successful making Julie’s death appear an accident.”

  “Why was it so important it appear an accident?” he asked.

  “Because that’s what the client asked for. You know how it goes. You get a contract and you try to fulfill the terms, but the bottom line was actually really simple. Kill Julie. One way or another.”

  “And you failed,” Tyler said.

  She stared at him. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said with a bitter smile.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Let me get this straight,” the officer said. His eyes were all but spinning as he held out his pointer finger, counting things down. “There’s a doctor’s body stuffed in the trunk of a car in the long-term parking lot in Chicago?”

  When Julie nodded and opened her mouth to speak, he held up a pudgy hand. Deputy Harris was a nice man, but Julie got the feeling his office wasn’t used to handling anything like what they were getting now. “Please, ma’am,” he said, “don’t talk, let me finish.” He added his middle finger. “There’s another dead guy named Ted something up on Willard land who died by stepping in a nest of rattlesnakes. In June, no less.”

  Julie nodded again.

  His ring finger joined the other two. “Then there’s a dead woman in Portland, a victim of a robbery, only you say she was really killed by a police detective working undercover who was also blackmailing your old boss?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  He shook his head and popped out his little finger. “Plus the woman we just took into custody and the dead guy with the snakes are killers hired by this same detective to kill you because you figured out he was really a cop and not a federal agent of some kind and now your old boss is in danger because the detective is on vacation, so I should call Seattle and have this Killigrew man alerted?”

  “And arrest Trill. I’m sure he’s there, too.”

  The deputy stared at her hard, opened his whole hand and shook it. “Ma’am, I have heard me some stories, I surely have, but this one beats ’em all. Tell you what. You and the other folks who were on that cattle drive stay right here on this ranch. We’ll go recover the snake-bite victim and come back here tomorrow and go over this all again.”

  “But, Deputy, there isn’t time—”

  “We’ll do this my way. Now, I’ll make some calls. Just hold tight until tomorrow.”

  Without waiting for a response, he pulled on his hat and addressed the others. “Stay put for a couple more days, folks, then I’m sure you can go home.”

  “Most of us have travel plans for the weekend,” John Smyth said amid a chorus of assents.

  “That works out fine, then.” The deputy nodded at Julie and Tyler and walked out of the room. Julie stared at his back, but she didn’t say anything. She thought Tyler might, but he seemed anxious to leave and hustled out of the room.

  Rose took over. “We have additional guests here, so it’ll be a full house tonight, just like the old days. Surf and turf for dinner, folks, in one hour. Now, where’d Heidi get off to?”

  “She wanted to talk to Tyler about something,” Mele said.

  Julie could tell John was about to come speak to her and she didn’t want to encourage that, so she left quietly, following Rose as though planning to help. She hated keeping secrets from Tyler and the knowledge of what John planned on dropping on Tyler weighed heavily on her heart. For that reason she grabbed a snack and skipped out the kitchen door, making it back to cabin eight where she planned on taking a rejuvenating hot shower before she did something she knew would hurt Tyler to the quick.

  She had to leave. Tonight. Soon. She could not sit here in Montana while Professor Killigrew walked into a trap in Seattle. The deputy would not act until it was too late. She’d made Killigrew’s original arrangements, she knew where the professor was staying and that he would meet with a committee tomorrow night at the hotel. She also knew leaving like this would infuriate and hurt Tyler and hoped he understood that at least this time she wasn’t running away from trouble, but straight into it.

  When she turned off the water after brushing her teeth, she heard the faint sound of a familiar tune and exited the bathroom to find Tyler sitting on the bed with his boots off.

  He stopped humming. “I’ve always loved the way you look wrapped up in a towel,” he said. He’d obviously bathed, too, and had changed into casual clothes. He looked familiar and sexy and wonderful.

  “You didn’t stay for your dinner?” she asked.

  “Not hungry—well, not for food,” he said, making the most of the double entendre by pitching his voice just so and lavishing her with his gaze. “Anyway, Mom is as tense as a calf at branding time. John Smyth is acting funny and everyone wants to hear about the snakes over and over again. I swear, you’d think they’re all disappointed they missed the last part of the ‘adventure.’”

  She smiled and sat down next to him.

 
; “I talked to Heidi,” he said suddenly, leaning forward, his attention apparently galvanized on her shoulders. She felt a hot, piercing stab of desire.

  “What about?” she asked, her voice raspy, her skin electrified.

  “When she heard about the real Dr. Marquis being murdered, she asked me if we could speak. She remembered a call from a couple of days before the trip. That would have made it right around the time everything happened to you in Portland. Someone convinced her to give him the names of the people coming to the ranch. He claimed he was writing a story and the ranch would get lots of free publicity and he wanted contacts. She blithely asked if the guest list for the cattle drive in two days would be good and he said that would be fine. So, she gave it to him and forgot all about it.”

  As he’d been talking, he’d been studying her. With his last words, he leaned forward a little bit more, lifted her hair away from her shoulders and kissed her neck, effectively melting her internal organs.

  “Then there was no one here in league with those two murderers,” she mumbled.

  “Just a kid who didn’t think,” he said as his fingers skimmed across her shoulders, up her throat, then down under the towel which fell away from her body. She closed her eyes as he found a dozen ways to touch her that glued her to the bed.

  Soon they were under the cool sheets making their own heat. Julie knew this was just going to make everything even more difficult, but she honestly didn’t care. She needed him and he needed her and tomorrow she’d never see him again.

  Afterward, she realized she had to find a way to get him out of her cabin because she had to leave. She’d swiped the truck keys from the century house, but how to get out of this room....

  Turning in his arms, she looked up at his face and found him staring at her as his hand caressed her arm.

  “When were you going to tell me?” he asked.

  She studied his eyes and didn’t speak. Was he talking about the adoption thing?

  “Were you just going to sneak away?” he added.

  She pulled back a little when she realized this had nothing to do with John Smyth. He obviously guessed her plans. “Yes. How did you know?” she asked.