Bench Trial in the Backwoods

by Maggie Wells

  The statement earned her another chorus of awws and more than a few disgruntled mutters about men in general. Pleased, she decided she could pull off magnanimous as well as Marlee Masters could.

  “To be fair, we had barely started seeing each other,” she said in a rush, hoping they would appreciate how quickly she rose to defend poor Harry’s honor. “We both did the whole no harm, no foul, let’s keep in touch, play-it-casual thing,” she said, offering a self-deprecating smile.

  “And how long did you last?” Lori prodded.

  Alicia ducked her head again. When she peeked at Susie Troutman from under her eyelashes, she saw she had the woman eating out of her palm. “Three days,” she replied quietly. “He lasted three days.”

  All the women in the room sighed with pleasure, and voila! The egg was cracked.

  Alicia spent the next hour and a half sitting on the love seat, soaking up every tidbit of information she could like a sponge.

  By the time Harry appeared in the doorway holding her coat, her head was spinning and her bladder near to bursting. Anxious to talk over her newly gleaned information with Harry, she wriggled her way off the love seat, making all the right noises about how she hated to leave her new friends, but she couldn’t keep her man waiting.

  When she reached him, she took her coat from his arm and leaned in close. “I need the powder room before we try to walk home from here.”

  He nodded to a door at the end of the hallway. “There’s one there, but if it’s occupied, I’m sure Simon wouldn’t mind you heading down to the bedroom to use the master.”

  Alicia chuckled at his use of the term. “Hang tight. I’ll be right back.”

  Before she could step away, he plucked her coat out of her hand once more. “I’ll be right here.”

  Five minutes later, they’d said their goodbyes and thanked Lori and Simon for a nice evening. Alicia found herself laughing as they made their way down the shallow porch steps. “That was interesting.”

  He smiled down at her. “Good interesting?”

  “Mostly, I’d say,” she assured him.

  Their breaths floated away in clouds of vapor. Alicia tucked her hands into her jacket pockets and scanned the street as they turned onto the sidewalk. Most every house boasted some kind of Christmas decor, some more understated than others. “People around here seriously start Christmas the minute Thanksgiving is over, don’t they?”

  Harry paused to take in the scene as if noticing for the first time. “What? Oh, well, it’s no different from anywhere else. Retail-driven holiday spirit. Seems like we skip right over Thanksgiving anymore.”

  “True.” She walked beside him, noticing how nicely the length of their strides matched. “I heard a couple of interesting things tonight.”

  He slid her a sidelong glance. “Oh?”

  She nodded. “Do you know someone named Rinker?”

  Harry made a sound of assent. “Yeah. Chet Rinker owns the pharmacy. Why?”

  “Hmm.” She filed the information away to be examined more closely later. “I guess he’s developed an interest in motorcycles. Been running with a bunch of hoodlums, according to Susie Troutman.” He stopped dead in his tracks. When she turned back, she found him scowling fiercely. “What?”

  “Chet Rinker?” he demanded.

  She let one shoulder rise and fall. “She called him That Rinker boy.”

  Some of the confusion clouding his face cleared. “She must have meant Matt Rinker, Chet’s son.”

  “Okay.”

  Alicia raised an eyebrow. She couldn’t care less whether the person in question was father or son. She was focused solely on the notion of someone local keeping company with people the townsfolk obviously disapproved of. Add in the pharmacy angle, the rise of oxy addicts and heroin usage in the area, and suddenly her curiosity was more than piqued.

  Harry started walking again, and she had to jog two steps to catch up when he passed her, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the end of the block.

  “Do you know him?” she asked, falling back into step beside him.

  “He was younger than me in school, so not well.”

  Alicia didn’t need to prod more to know whether they were good friends or not; Harry was affronted by the idea of this Matt Rinker coming after him. More so than he had been about the Smithson guy who had been in the same year.

  Fascinated by what appeared to be another wrinkle in the small-town dynamic, she pushed. “But you’re upset it might be him.”

  “Well, of course I am,” he retorted. He slowed when they approached the corner.

  “Why? You said you didn’t know him well,” she prodded. “Why is it worse for this guy to be in on it than the Smithson guy?”

  “Because it is,” Harry said, his tone brusque.

  They stepped off the curb and were about three strides across the street when the squeal of tires alerted them to the approach of a vehicle. Alicia’s head swiveled in time to see a dark sedan with no headlights bearing down on them, the acrid scent of burnt rubber blooming in the crisp night air.

  “Harry!” she barked, catching his arm and propelling him forward.

  They were aligned with the center of the hood, and Alicia knew they stood a better chance with momentum on their side. He twisted his arm around until it encircled her waist and all but shoved her up onto the opposite curb. Together, they dived into a neatly trimmed hedge strung with white Christmas lights.

  Chapter Twelve

  Harry turned his head in time to see the car run up on the curb they’d hopped a split second ago, but before he could right himself enough to get a good look at the vehicle, the driver had hooked a sharp left onto the next street and floored it.

  “Sedan, older model, no plates,’’ Alicia panted. She wriggled out of Harry’s tight hold and rolled off his chest. Grasping a handful of shrubbery, she leveraged herself out of the hedge, then turned to offer him a hand.

  “How’d you get all that?” Harry gained his feet, then bent forward, bracing his hands on wobbly knees.

  “I saw there was no front tag when it was coming at us. Caught sight of the back before he turned.”

  “I can’t believe you had the presence of mind to do either,” he grumbled. “All I could think about was getting out of the way.”

  She slid down to sit cross-legged on the grass. The corner of her mouth was twisted into a frustrated smirk. “Now, if I’d have been able to catch a tag and memorize it, that would’ve been impressive.”

  “Oh, well, yeah. You’re right. Way to put forth mediocre effort, Agent Simmons,” he said, dropping into a sitting position next to her.

  “I’ll try to do better next time.” With a groan, Alicia rolled onto her hip and rummaged in her pocket.

  “Are you okay?” he demanded, panic rising inside him. Of course she wasn’t okay. She was pregnant and they were diving into bushes to keep from being run over by cars. “Are you hurt?”

  She extracted her cell phone from her jacket pocket. “Oh, thank God I didn’t break another one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She held her phone up and waved it at him. “I didn’t break the screen. I’m not exactly easy on phones. I didn’t want to have to replace another screen.”

  He stared at her openmouthed, trying to reconcile his concern for her well-being and the health of their unborn child with her relief at finding her mobile phone intact. “You’re worried about your phone?”

  Her head popped up. He hadn’t been able to check the disapproval in his tone, and Alicia found she had to tamp down her impatience his judgement stirred. “I find cellular devices handy when one has narrowly avoided being mowed down. I need to call Ben and report this.”

  Harry didn’t think; he simply reacted. Reaching out, he grasped her wrist and kept her from completing the call. “Don’t.”

  She gap
ed at him, surprised. “Don’t? This needs to go on the record.”

  He reached over and gently removed her phone from her hand and placed it on her leg. He sandwiched her cool fingers between his hands and expelled a long plume of breath. “It doesn’t need to be called in right now. We have no make or model, no license plate. I’m not even sure what color it was.” He shrugged and chafed her hand to warm it. “Ben’s at the party. He’s out with his girlfriend having a nice Saturday night. This can keep until tomorrow.”

  Alicia held his gaze for a beat before nodding. When he didn’t let go of her, she dropped her eyes to their joined hands.

  “People were asking how we, uh, got together...” She trailed off. “I had to tell them some story about how we got together in exchange for them telling me their stories.”

  He gave her a half-hearted smile. “The currency of small towns.”

  She met his eyes again. “The funny thing was, other than Marlee and Lori insinuating I came here with an eye toward stealing their men, I didn’t have much to say. It was...there wasn’t anybody here who interests me as much as you do,” she said with a small lift of her shoulders.

  “I’m going to take your interest as a compliment,” he warned.

  “It was meant as one.” Alicia offered him a tremulous smile. “I thought you were interesting, but now I find you downright fascinating.”

  He let go of her hand. “Fascinating? Hardly.”

  “But you are. You’ve got this kind of center of calm and cool I don’t often see in people who aren’t cops.”

  He ducked his head, pleased and embarrassed. Anxious to escape her scrutiny, Harry planted a hand on the cool damp grass and pressed up. Once he’d regained his feet, he offered her both of his hands and she placed her fingers in his. “I’m adding cool to the pile of compliments.”

  She shot up and bumped right into his chest. Again. Harry felt a sizzle of excitement. And familiarity. A flashback to the night they’d spent together. He tamped it down. His life was complicated enough right now, and things between him and Alicia were only going to get more complicated as her pregnancy advanced.

  “Harry,” she prompted, drawing his attention up from where their bodies pressed together to where her eyes bored into his.

  He had a flashback to the night they’d been together. The joy and uninhibited pleasure they’d taken in one another. Now they were running on adrenaline and fear, and Harry decided if he were to kiss this woman again, he didn’t want it to be because they survived some ordeal together. He wanted to revel in genuine jubilation with her again. He lifted his hands to hers, wrapped them firmly around her fingers and gave them a gentle squeeze before removing them from his chest.

  “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  HOME. HE’D SAID the word so casually. Thoughtlessly, probably, but Alicia couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thinking about him. Or about the people who were trying to make him feel uncomfortable in the town he considered his home. Alicia stared up at the ceiling long into the night. Harry’s guest room was comfortable, though the decor was somewhat on the masculine, minimalist side, but lived-in. Truth be told, she liked it this way. Her own condo in Atlanta was more like a room at one of those extended-stay hotels. Probably one of the reasons why she didn’t consider it home.

  Home.

  She tossed and turned, trying to parse out why it sounded so right when Harry said Let’s go home. Given her background, she didn’t need an advanced degree to make sense of it. He was home. Pine Bluff was his home; this house was his home. One of the women at the party had told her it had once been his parents’ house, so it may even have been the home he grew up in.

  Alicia tried to imagine living in any of the myriad houses her parents had either purchased or rented depending on how long her father’s post was expected to last. She wondered if it was weird for him, living as an adult in the house where he’d been a boy. Had this been his room at one time? She’d seen another bedroom converted into a home office. Had it been strange for him to move into the larger master bedroom at the end of the hall? Maybe not. The redhead who told her the house once belonged to his parents also said Harry had put a lot of work into making the place his own.

  Why hadn’t she thought about inspecting his place in the hours he was gone? Why had she stuck so close to the public rooms of the house and not poked her nose in at least a couple of his drawers? Frankly, it was unlike her. She was a cop. Sure, they put the title Special Agent in front of her name, but when it came down to it, she was no different from any other member of the law enforcement community. Her lack of curiosity in this case would have been considered appalling by some of her colleagues.

  But she didn’t want to cross any lines with Harry.

  He was obviously a man who liked structure and boundaries. She was a guest in his home and had no desire to pry into the private life of her host. Okay, she had the desire, but she had more willpower. She knew enough about him as it was. Probably more than he’d want her to know if she hadn’t borne witness to the attacks on him.

  Restless, she flung back the covers, swung her legs from the bed and padded to the dresser where she’d left her laptop. She might not be willing to go through his bathroom cabinet, but she wasn’t at all above poking in some dark corners to determine exactly how real these threats were. Up until this point, the bumbling attempts to intimidate him could be considered scare tactics, some more extreme than others, but tonight...

  Tonight, someone meant to cause them bodily harm.

  Some ancient maternal instinct had her covering her still-flat abdomen with her hand. As if she could somehow reassure herself the child she was carrying was nevertheless safe and secure.

  Ridiculous, she thought, snatching the laptop from the dresser and hurrying back to the warmth of her bed. With the duvet pulled up over her bare legs, she flipped open the top and booted the computer.

  It opened to her email application automatically, but Alicia shut it down after ingesting the gist of Bronson’s email. He’d put his order in writing. An email from his agency address made his order more official than the text massage. He expected to see her Monday morning, or else.

  The ultimatum meant she had less than twenty-four hours to make a decision that would likely affect the rest of her career.

  Instead, with a few quick keystrokes, she logged in to a message board. It appeared to be a chat room like any other, but this was a site most people would never stumble across on their own. One of the tech guys at work clued her in to it when she asked about how to search out hate groups. She only had to try two different variations of search terms before she found some hits. The name Samuel Coulter spawned more than one thread. Only two had regular interchanges, so she zeroed in on them.

  Drawing a deep breath, she clicked on the one titled “Samuel Coulter was framed” and scrolled back through the messages until she found the post at the head of the thread. Her stomach churned while she absorbed conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. Her gorge rose when she read each justification for Coulter’s acquittal.

  Most of these posters had absolutely no idea who or what they were dealing with. They simply thought a man who dealt in exotic snakes had been framed by the federal government as a drug trafficker to stop them from pursuing their hobby.

  They were wrong.

  The evidence she’d uncovered before coming to Pine Bluff showed Coulter had a long history of involvement with some of South Florida’s most infamous traffickers. He had ongoing connections with various gangs in both the Miami and Jacksonville areas. It had been absolutely no surprise to her to discover he was connected with the product moving through Atlanta. Some of the convoluted ideas people posted were plain creepy.

  Gnawing her bottom lip, she reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. As Simon Wingate pointed out, she wasn’t a woman who scared easily, but she was also human. If she
was going to trawl through the dregs of internet society, she could do so with the light on.

  She was a half hour in before she found her first direct hit. The person who posted actually typed the name Ivan Jones.

  A chill ran down her spine when she scanned the subthreads connected to the entry. She was so absorbed in her research, she barely registered the soft knock on her door. Lowering the top of her laptop, she stared at the door in confusion before whispering a tentative “Come in?” She didn’t want to speak too loudly in case she’d only imagined the knock.

  The door opened and Harry poked his head in. “Can’t sleep?”

  Alicia closed the lid on the laptop, not wanting him to know exactly what she was piecing together until it was fully formed in her head. “Restless night.”

  He opened the door farther, propped his forearm on the jamb and ran his other hand through his already rumpled hair. Alicia took in the view. She was only human, after all. He wore a washed-thin T-shirt and flannel pajama pants. The angle of the arm braced against the door only highlighted the contour of his biceps. The last time she’d seen his hair in such disarray, it had been her fingers doing the mussing.

  “Do you think you can eat something?” he asked.

  Startled by the offer of food rather than warm milk, cocoa or whatever else people thought they should drink in the middle of the night, she let out a laugh.

  It took only a second for the thought to find a foothold, and her stomach growled its affirmative response. “Actually, I think I can.”

  “Come to the kitchen. I’ll make us some oatmeal.”

  He was gone before she could question his choice of late-night snack. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and yanked on the yoga pants she’d discarded before climbing between the sheets. She stuffed her bare toes into a pair of fluffy slippers she’d bought on a whim the previous winter. When she scuffed into the kitchen, Harry’s gaze trailed to her feet and his eyebrows jumped.

  “Never pegged you for the leopard-print type,” he commented. “Those are totally something my sister would pick out.”