Walking After Midnight

by Karen Robards

“Hands up! Get ’em up!”

  “Throw down your weapons! Right now! Throw ’em on the ground!”

  “FBI!”

  “DEA!”

  “Police!”

  “You’re under arrest!”

  Carmichael and company looked wildly around. Finding themselves surrounded and outgunned by about twenty to one, they slowly, reluctantly, one at a time dropped their guns.

  It was over, just as quick as that. Summer hoped. She still wasn’t positive if their putative rescuers were the good guys or just more of the bad.

  Until she saw that her white-haired ex-father-in-law was one of the half-dozen men supervising proceedings from the deck of the trailered cabin cruiser. She couldn’t account for his presence here—when she’d sneaked the call to him from outside the grocery store she had told him to come to Harmon Brothers funeral home with the rest of the gang—but boy, was she glad to see him.

  “Hi, Sammy,” she called weakly. He grinned and gave her a wave. All around her handcuffs were being snapped on the bad guys’ wrists and they were being led away. Limp with relief, unable to believe the nightmare was really, truly over, she dropped to her knees beside Steve, smiling at Corey, who was crouched on her dad’s other side, her arms wrapped tightly around Steve’s shoulders. The tears hadn’t yet had time to dry on the girl’s cheeks.

  “Plan B?” Summer asked Steve.

  “You might say that,” Steve said. His cheek rested briefly on Corey’s brown hair.

  “You scared me to death.”

  “I scared myself.”

  “Were you really scared, Daddy?” Corey had been listening to this exchange wide-eyed. The three of them made a compact little island in the sea of lawmen bustling all around.

  “Absolutely. Especially when I thought they had you.” Steve smiled at her tenderly.

  “But you saved me.” She hugged him. “I’ve missed you, Daddy. Are you going to go away again?”

  “No.” Steve shook his head. “Not ever again. I promise, Corey.”

  “Then maybe you can talk Mom into letting me start dating. She says I’m too young.”

  “Good God,” Steve said faintly, rolling his eyes toward Summer, who had to repress a grin. Being plunged back into the deep end of fatherhood—to a blossoming teenage daughter yet—was an adventure for which he didn’t seem quite prepared.

  Fortunately for Steve, his daughter chose just then to take a good look at him for the first time. “What happened to your face? Did they—beat you up?”

  “It looks a lot worse than it feels,” he reassured her without really answering. “Corey, this is Summer. Summer saved me.”

  Corey had been casting covert glances at Summer that were both curious and, Summer thought, not entirely favorable. Now she looked at Summer with frank astonishment.

  “You saved my dad? How?”

  Caught by surprise, Summer looked at Steve for inspiration. Steve grinned at her.

  “Her dog peed on the bad guy’s foot at a crucial moment,” he said with a lurking grin.

  “Oh, Daddy!” Corey clearly did not believe that, but before the conversation could proceed any further the three of them were suddenly no longer alone.

  “We found this in the Lincoln. One of the prisoners said it belonged to you.” A heavyset man in a gray business suit held a squirming Muffy out to Steve in a way that told Summer the little dog had done something to make herself less than popular. She had seen that look on men’s faces more times than she could count.

  “Yo, Les,” Steve greeted him. “Good to see you, man.”

  “Good to see you, too. Is this yours?”

  “She’s mine, but I can’t take her,” Summer said. “My hands …” Then inspiration struck. “Corey, would you hold Muffy until they get me out of these cuffs?”

  “Oh, yes!” Corey was clearly rapturous at the idea as she reached out to take Muffy. Holding the little dog carefully, Corey sank cross-legged on the ground with Muffy on her lap.

  “She’s beautiful,” Corey breathed, stroking Muffy’s ears. Muffy licked Corey’s chin. The girl practically melted with bliss right there in front of their eyes.

  “She’s been wanting a dog for years. Her mother doesn’t like them in the house,” Steve said under his breath to Summer.

  “I’d watch that animal if I were you,” the man said to Corey. “She, uh, wet on my shoe.”

  “She really did?” Corey’s eyes lit up with pleasure. “Dad, you weren’t lying? Summer and her dog really did save you?”

  “Yep, they really did.” Steve smiled as he watched his daughter crooning over Muffy. Then he glanced up at the man who still stood over them.

  “Not that I’m not glad as hell to see you, but what are you guys doing here? You were supposed to be waiting for us at a funeral home in Murfreesboro.”

  “Hey, we have our methods.”

  “Before you tell me all about it, you think you could do something about these handcuffs?”

  “Oh, sorry. That’s really what I came in for. We got the key off Clark. Can you believe that asshole? He tried to talk me into letting him go. ’Cause he’s just got two years till retirement and he doesn’t want to lose his pension, he said. I told him, Buddy, where you’re going you won’t have any use for a pension.” He bent to unlock Steve’s handcuffs as he spoke.

  “He and Carmichael killed two cops up on Clingmans Dome. And a reporter. And they also killed the two women you found in her”—here Steve nodded at Summer—“house.”

  “Yeah, I know. We got it all on tape.”

  “On tape?”

  “The reporter—Todd, I think his name was—was calling in the story to his paper when he got shot. His editor heard the whole thing, and promptly called the police. The lucky thing was, Clark and Carmichael took Todd’s cellular phone with them and they never turned it off. It was on the whole time; we just recovered it from their car, and it was still on. There were some officers listening to every word that was said in that car until it got out of range. And Todd’s editor recorded every word. What we’ve got on those two amounts to a confession on tape.”

  With an air of triumph, Les straightened, lifting a jangly pair of handcuffs into the air. Steve, freed at last, brought his arms forward and shook his hands. He wrapped an arm around Corey, who smiled at him with an air of sweet abstraction before turning her attention back to Muffy, who was on her back in the girl’s lap waving her paws in the air and wearing a blissful expression.

  “So that’s how you found us—through that poor man’s telephone,” Summer said in surprise, then glanced at Steve. “I wondered why you told Carmichael and Clark where the van was so easily—and so clearly. Did you know that phone was on?”

  “I hoped.” Steve grinned at her suddenly. “No, I prayed.”

  “Plan B,” Summer said, smiling at him with her heart in her eyes. It was good to know her hero had had some heroics up his sleeve after all.

  “Then there was Plan C, and Plan D … well, I’ll tell you about them later,” Steve concluded as a uniformed police officer came into the warehouse. He made a beeline for Les.

  “What is it, Grogan?” Les greeted him.

  “We just got word that there’s a guy from some security company out front. Our guys won’t let him in the warehouse complex and he says there’s been an unauthorized entry and he needs to check it out.”

  “I guess he’s right. We’re it,” Les said. “Hell, tell him we’re police.”

  “We told him that, and he says that we’re not the unauthorized entry if we used the correct code to get in, which our guys say we did. We got it from the property owners. But apparently there’s some sort of security system in place so that if the wrong code gets punched in at the front gate three times in a row, this security company is alerted. The guy says that happened about twenty minutes ago, and he needs to search the premises. He’s pretty agitated.”

  “Tell him to get un-agitated or we’ll run him in.” Les sounded impatient with the whole
subject. Summer glanced at Steve, eyes widening. That was why he had “forgotten” the code! He’d been deliberately trying to summon the security guard!

  “Plan C?” she asked under her breath.

  He grinned at her. “Hey, I was grabbing at straws. It could have worked. It could have not worked. Just like the phone. I was looking out the window and I saw Clark pick it up—and I didn’t see him turn it off. There was a chance in a million that that phone was still on—but still it was a chance, and any chance is better than none. I remembered the code thing from when I used to come here. It was a chance, too.”

  “I’ll deal with it,” Les said irritably to Grogan, and headed off with Grogan following just as another, younger man in a suit broke away from a huddle of men in suits and walked across to join them.

  “Hey, what about me?” Summer, returned to the present in a hurry, called after Les indignantly. Her arms and shoulders were tingling in jealous response to Steve’s new freedom of movement.

  “Oh, sorry.” Les glanced over his shoulder, looking a bit shamefaced, then retraced his steps, crouching behind her to unlock her handcuffs. “I’m Les Carter, by the way.”

  “He’s the head of the Organized Crime and Intelligence Unit for the Tennessee State Police,” said the newcomer to Summer as he shook hands with Steve, who—though his movements were a trifle wobbly—had by this time managed to get to his feet. “And I’m Larry Kendrick, of the Bureau of Narcotics Clandestine Intelligence Network. DEA,” he translated, seeing Summer’s blank look. “We’ll want to ask you some questions later, Miss McAfee.”

  The handcuffs came off at last, and Les stood up behind Summer. She wiggled her fingers, trying not to wince at the pins and needles that shot up her arms as she moved them slowly forward.

  “We’ll need a statement from you, too, Miss McAfee,” Les said.

  “Hell, it’s Mrs. Rosencrans, she’s my daughter-in-law, and you two bullies are going to leave her alone till the morning, if I have to put her in protective custody. Got it?” Sammy, fat brown cigar sticking out of one side of his mouth, came up and fixed the other two men with a stern look. Summer was so glad to see her portly, white-haired ex-father-in-law that she scrambled to her feet just for him. If Lem had been anything like his father, their marriage would have lasted fifty years.

  “About that security guard …” Grogan said under his breath to Les Carter.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Les said irritably, and, waving a hand at the group, left, with Grogan trailing in his wake.

  “I’m your ex-daughter-in-law, Sammy,” Summer reminded him. “Lem and I have been divorced six years. He’s remarried.”

  “Once family, always family,” Sammy said cheerfully, and shook hands with Steve. “Hello, Calhoun.”

  “Hello, Chief Rosencrans.”

  “You almost got my daughter-in-law killed.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that.”

  “I don’t want it to happen again.”

  “Not if I can help it, sir.”

  “Good. Summer, your mama is at the Holiday Inn in Murfreesboro. You’d better give her a call when you get done here. She is in a right tizzy over you.”

  “She flew in from California?” Summer barely repressed a groan. She loved her mother dearly, but just at the moment she did not feel up to giving her a play-by-play description of everything that had happened. And then there was Steve—Casting her dirty, disreputable beloved a sideways glance, Summer wondered what her mother would make of Steve. In a perfect world, he would have at least had time to get over his black eyes before he met her mother.

  “Both your sisters are here, too.” Sammy sounded as gloomy as Summer felt. Summer could imagine the hell the three McAfee women had put him through in the last few days. “God in heaven, they’re hot about you being put on the wanted list. I told ’em there wasn’t anything I could do about it, but they’ve been all over me like flies on honey.”

  “I gather that’s taken care of?” Steve asked.

  “All cleared up. You don’t have to worry about being arrested.”

  “Sam, can you come over here a minute?” Les Carter called from near the door. With a muttered “excuse me” Sammy was off.

  “Do you know anything about Elaine?” Steve muttered to Larry Kendrick, keeping a wary eye on Corey as he spoke. Corey sat cross-legged near Steve’s feet, playing with Muffy and seeming not to pay a bit of attention to the adult conversations that swirled above her head. But if she was like most children, Summer reflected, she was missing not a word of anything that was said.

  “Nothing yet. We got that guy who was in the hospital with the burned face—Charlie Gladwell—to tell us where they took her. We’ll have her safe before they know any-thing’s gone down, don’t worry.”

  “For Corey’s sake …” Steve cast a glance down at his daughter and looked up at Kendrick again.

  “We’ll get your kid’s mother out of this in one piece,” Larry Kendrick said reassuringly. “I appreciate you calling me in on this, you know. It could be big, very big. By the way, where’s the van?”

  “Where’s the van? You mean none of you guys have it? I thought sure you moved it before we got here.”

  “The van wasn’t here when we got here. Come on, Steve, don’t play games with me. You know where it is.”

  “I don’t. I swear. It was here.” The two exchanged measuring looks. “On Saturday night, or, rather, Sunday morning when we left it, it was here. Ask Summer, if you don’t believe me.”

  Summer nodded agreement.

  “Somebody else must have grabbed it.” Kendrick made an urgent beckoning gesture to one of the other men in suits. He didn’t bother introducing the man who came up but whispered furiously in his ear: The man nodded and walked quickly away.

  “When you called me today and sent me over here to stand guard over this van, you really thought the thing was here?” Kendrick asked Steve. “It wasn’t some sort of trick to get us in place to catch the bad guys and save your ass?”

  “You called him today and told him the van was here?” Summer glanced at Steve, surprised. “When?”

  “At the grocery store, when I was calling everybody else. You went to the ladies’ room, remember? I decided that I better let somebody know where the van was just in case I didn’t make it out alive from our little rendezvous with destiny. I didn’t want to worry you with that possibility, so I waited till you were out of the way to make the call. The whole way up here in the back of that Lincoln, I was hoping Kendrick and his crew might still be hanging around. When I saw the van was missing, I thought they’d taken it and gone.”

  “Plan D?” Summer cocked a fond eyebrow at him. She would have been a little miffed that he hadn’t confided in her if she hadn’t called Sammy and alerted him to the funeral home scheme while Steve was in the rest room. Clearly neither she nor her beloved believed in leaving much to chance.

  Steve grinned. “Yeah.”

  “We didn’t take the van,” Kendrick said grimly. “If you know where it is, now’s the time to tell me, Steve.”

  “Jesus, Larry, do you think I’m playing some kind of game? The van was here. Now I don’t have a clue where it is.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Kendrick held up a calming hand. “It’s important we find it, that’s all.”

  “Daddy, there’s Uncle Mitch,” Corey said suddenly, interrupting.

  Following her gaze, Summer watched as a tall, lean, extraordinarily handsome man walked with slow purpose toward them. When she could tear her eyes away from goggling at his blond, blue-eyed splendor, she glanced at Steve. Steve was suddenly narrow-eyed and grim-jawed as he watched his erstwhile best friend approach. Summer wondered if he expected some kind of verbal or physical assault.

  Knowing what lay between the two men, Summer felt Steve’s tension as if it were her own.

  40

  Mitch walked tip to them and, to Summer’s surprise, held out his hand to Steve. “Glad you made it,” he said quietly
. He nodded at Larry Kendrick. “Hello, Kendrick.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad I did, too,” Steve answered, clasping Mitch’s hand briefly before releasing it. For a moment, Summer wondered if, knowing men, that was all that was going to be said by these two with so much history between them, but then Mitch smiled at Steve. It was a beautiful smile, Summer had to admit. A beautiful smile on the face of a beautiful man.

  “Long time no see, pal.” He glanced down at Corey. “Hi, squirt.”

  “Hi, Uncle Mitch.” Corey smiled up at him, clearly oblivious to the emotional undercurrents swirling among the adults. “I got kidnapped.”

  “So I heard. I was on my way to rescue you, you know.”

  “My dad did that.” Corey glanced down at Muffy, then stood up with coltish grace. She was going to be tall, Summer decided, looking at her, and very pretty one day. “How come you don’t come to see Mom and me much anymore? When Daddy first left, you used to come over all the time. Mom said you guys were dating.”

  The expression on Steve’s face at this revelation was a study in contradictions.

  “Your mom and I were just friends.” Avoiding Steve’s gaze, Mitch reached out to tug at Muffy’s ears. “Since when did you get a dog, squirt?”

  “It’s Summer’s.” Corey nodded at Summer. “You know Mom doesn’t like dogs. She says they make her sneeze, and they have fleas.”

  “Summer, this is Mitch Taylor. Mitch, Summer McAfee,” Steve belatedly made the introductions. Summer shook hands with Mitch. His clasp was warm, firm. Having heard so much about him, Summer had formed her own image of what he should look like, but her mental picture did not do Mitch justice. Though Steve had told her that Mitch was far handsomer than he, Summer had not expected Mitch to be one of the handsomest men she had ever seen. Wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, tanned, perfect features, a blindingly white smile. Tall. Muscular but lean. The guy was good-looking enough to be in the movies.

  No wonder Steve had lost so many girls to him.

  Glancing at the man who still kept firm possession of her heart, Summer surprised a wry look on his face as he watched her eyeing Mitch. She supposed she was looking dazzled. She supposed, too, that Steve had experienced this reaction to Mitch from every woman he had ever introduced his friend to in his life.