by Paula Graves
“Let me go!” Tara’s voice rose again to a shriek.
“Get her out of here!” Virgil bellowed.
Trask flattened himself against the wall, waving down the hall for Chris Miller to get out of the way.
Chris scurried down the hall and rounded the corner, out of sight. Trask saw him reaching for his phone as he ran. Calling 9-1-1? Trask hoped so.
There was a hard thud against the door, followed by several more thumps.
Then splinters of wood flew from the door beside his head in concert with another blast of gunfire. Trask ducked, his heart galloping in his chest.
* * *
“WHAT THE HELL, VIRGIL! You nearly hit me.” Ty Miller released one of Tara’s arms, giving her the chance to pull away. Her cheek stung where a splinter of wood from the gunshot had sliced through the skin, but she didn’t think she’d been hit anywhere else.
She jerked free of Ty’s grasp and turned to look at Virgil. But he wasn’t standing there holding a gun as she expected. Instead, he was grappling on the floor with Owen, whose eyes were open and locked with Virgil’s. His hand covered Virgil’s on the pistol, and he shouted, “Get out of here, Tara!” without ever looking in her direction.
He was alive. The words sang through her whole body, sending a flood of sheer relief pouring through her like fizzy champagne bubbles. But reality crashed through the brief moment of jubilation. He was still wrapped in a death grip with a man who’d already shot him once. And another man was already moving toward them, ready to help his buddy overpower Owen.
She grabbed the chair that sat near the door and swung it at Ty Miller, catching the big man right in the small of his back. Something made a loud cracking noise, and it wasn’t the solid steel chair she’d somehow managed to wield like a club. Ty howled with pain as he crashed to the floor, writhing in agony.
“Go, Tara! Go!” Owen shouted as he started to lose his grip on Virgil’s arm.
“No!” she cried, picking up the chair again and heading to his rescue.
Ty Miller’s hand clamped around her ankle, stopping her short. Losing her balance, she fell hard to the floor, the impact sending stars sparking through her brain for a moment. She pushed through the disorientation and kicked with her free leg, hitting Ty in the chin. He yelled out a stream of profanities but let go of her leg.
She scrambled up again and grabbed the chair, grunting as the full weight of the steel behemoth made itself known. Earlier, with adrenaline spiking her strength, it had felt almost featherlight, but the adrenaline was starting to drain away.
She gazed desperately at Owen, who had managed to grapple Virgil Trask toward the window.
Suddenly, the door behind her slammed open, and both Virgil and Owen froze to look at the newcomer. Tara turned as well and found herself looking at a dark-haired man holding a big gunmetal-gray pistol. He aimed the pistol’s muzzle across the room at Virgil Trask.
“Put the gun down, Virgil. It’s over.”
Owen let go of Virgil and stumbled back, falling into a chair a few feet away. Tara ran to him, her heart in her throat.
“What are you doin’ here, Archie?” The tone of Virgil’s plaintive query was somewhere between anger and dismay.
“I’m here to put an end to all of this, Virgil. Put down the gun.”
Virgil shook his head. “You don’t know what this is, Archie. I caught your fugitives. He tried to kill me.”
“That’s a lie!” Tara shouted as she paused in the act of trying to find the source of the blood dripping on the floor beneath Owen. “These two men tried to kidnap me the day of my wedding. I think one of them killed my fiancé. They’re after some secret information.”
“I know,” the man in the doorway said. “I’m Archer Trask. I’m the lead investigator on your fiancé’s murder case.”
“Come on, Archie! She’s your top suspect, and I found her. I was going to bring her in.”
“It’s over. Just put down the gun.”
“Archie, it’s me.”
Archer Trask stared at his brother sadly. “I know, Virgil.”
Suddenly, Virgil’s gun hand whipped up a couple of inches, and Tara shouted a warning.
It wasn’t necessary. Gunfire blazed from Archer Trask’s pistol at the same time Virgil pulled the trigger of his own weapon. The bullet Virgil fired went wide, hitting the doorframe behind his brother’s head. His brother’s bullet, however, hit Virgil in the chest.
For a minute, Virgil stared in disbelief at the bloom of red spreading across his shirt. Then he looked back at his brother, the stunned expression frozen on his face as he slid to the floor. His chin fell to his chest, and only the desk beside him and the wall behind him, now streaked with his blood, kept him from falling over.
Archer Trask walked slowly to his brother’s side, gazing down at him with a look of pure grief. He nudged the pistol away from his brother’s slack fingers with his toe, moving it out of reach. Then he crouched in front of Virgil and touched his fingertips to his brother’s throat.
The look of sheer agony on his face told Tara what that trembling touch had revealed.
Archer sat back on his heels, tears leaking from his eyes. “Damn it, Virgil,” he said.
Chapter Seventeen
“Do we have to do this now?” Tara looked at the grim face of Bagley County Sheriff Roy Atkins as he loomed over where she sat in one of the small interrogation rooms at the county hall complex. “I know Deputy Trask must have already told you everything that happened tonight. I just want to make sure Owen is okay.”
“He’s still in surgery.”
Shock hit her like a fist blow. “Surgery? He’s in surgery? Why is he in surgery? He was awake and talking, and the paramedics seemed to think he was okay—”
“He was shot in the side. They want to be sure he didn’t sustain any life-threatening internal injuries, so they need to get the bullet out of him before it causes any worse problems.”
“Surgery?” She pressed her hand to her mouth, terror twisting her insides. She had thought it was over. She just had to get through all the debriefings, convince the authorities that she had been running for her life, and then she and Owen could move forward with the life they should already have been living together.
This couldn’t be happening. Not now.
Owen deserved the forever he wanted so desperately, and somehow she had to find a way to give it to him.
But she couldn’t do it from here, halfway across the county from where he lay on an operating table, fighting for his life.
A brisk duo of knocks on the door drew Sheriff Atkins’s gaze in that direction. His look of mild irritation deepened when Tony Giattina walked confidently through the door and set his gleaming leather briefcase on the table between the sheriff and Tara.
“Don’t say anything else, Tara,” he said, looking at her with far more sympathy in his expression than had been there the last time she saw him. He was dressed in an expensive-looking suit and a crisp linen shirt that would have been more at home at a morning court appearance than a two in the morning visit to the county jail. “Sheriff, are you planning on holding my client overnight?”
For a moment, the sheriff looked as if he wanted to say yes. But finally, he shook his head. “Just don’t leave our jurisdiction this time, Ms. Bentley.”
“She wouldn’t dream of it,” Tony said blithely, offering Tara his hand. She took it and rose, following him out of the interrogation room.
Outside, the corridor was buzzing with more movement than she’d noticed when she was first brought in. A lot had happened, including the death of one of their own deputies. That he’d been the cause of his own death hadn’t really sunk in at this point, and some of the deputies sent furious glares her way as she walked out of the building with her lawyer.
To no one’s surprise, Alexander Quinn was waiting outside the sheriff’s department. He nodded toward Tony before turning his attention to Tara. “Are you all right?”
“I need to see Owen. The sheriff said he’s in surgery.”
“He is. One of my colleagues is there with him, waiting for word. I’m here to take you to the hospital.” He opened the passenger door of a dark blue SUV and helped her inside. As she buckled in, he climbed behind the wheel and reached for his own belt. “On the way, why don’t you tell me everything that happened tonight?”
One way or another, she thought with resignation, she was going to have to undergo an interrogation after all.
* * *
THE LAST PEOPLE Archer Trask had expected to see sitting at the bar of the Sheffield Tavern were Maddox Heller and his pretty wife. He almost turned around and walked out when he saw the expressions of sympathy in their faces, but he braced himself against the unwanted kindness and walked over to where they sat.
The bar was nearly empty at this time of the morning. It would close in another hour, which would at least give him a polite reason to escape, he thought with bleak humor.
“We heard what happened,” Heller said as Trask settled on the bar stool next to him. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Trask said. He waved at the bartender. “Bourbon and branch. Light on the branch.”
“We think we’ve finally figured out what your brother and Ty Miller were involved in,” Heller said. He had a glass of what looked like water with a twist of lime and had drunk a little of it. Even the wife was nursing her glass of white wine, barely taking a sip at all as she looked from her husband’s face to Trask’s.
“I can guess at some of it,” Trask said. “My mother told me Virgil had been spending a lot of time with Ty Miller and some of his friends. I had a chance to talk to Ty’s brother, Chris, for a few minutes before the police and emergency services arrived. He said Ty had gotten involved with some group of preppers.”
“They weren’t just preppers. Preppers mostly just want to be left alone to prepare for whatever might come,” Heller said. “Your brother and his friends were determined to make sure our country cut its ties with the rest of the world. Extreme isolationism, I guess you could call it.”
Trask remembered a few of the more objectionable things he’d heard his brother say over the years. He could definitely see him falling on the side of “kick the foreign bastards out and don’t let them back in.”
“Quinn and his previous security company back in the mountains of Tennessee came across a very similar group of nihilists—the Blue Ridge Infantry. We think one of the men in this group of people had familial ties to some of the former members of the Blue Ridge Infantry.”
“I’ve heard of them. They were in Virginia, too, and there were less organized groups here in Kentucky with sympathetic leanings.”
“I think maybe Ty and your brother were in the process of trying to organize this Kentucky group into something more cohesive. Through Chris, they found out Security Solutions was planning a security event that involves several other countries. I think your brother and Ty must have realized that if they could create a big, deadly disruption of that event, their success would be a spectacular recruiting tool to pull off bigger and more influential attacks against the government they think has betrayed them. But they needed more information about the event to be successful.”
“So they kidnapped Tara Bentley? Why? To get her to tell them what she knew?” Trask asked with a frown. “You think they were going to try to torture it out of her?”
“We thought that might be the case at first,” Heller admitted. “But we couldn’t quite make Robert Mallory’s murder fit our theory.”
The bartender arrived with the bourbon and water. Trask took a sip and grimaced. “Neither could I. It seemed to be completely out of the blue. No motive seemed to fit.”
“They wanted Tara Bentley out of the way, and they wanted the cops looking in a completely different direction,” Heller said. “If they’d killed her, where would your investigation have taken you?”
“To her. Her connections. Her job,” Trask answered. “But instead, it was her fiancé who died. And she was my prime person of interest instead of the victim. I didn’t even look at her work as a possible reason for what happened until recently.”
Heller nodded. “Your brother was a cop. He would have known the direction you’d look in.”
“Leaving him and Ty free to look for the information they would never have gotten from Tara.”
“They planned to stash her somewhere until they got what they wanted from her second-in-command.”
“Ty’s brother, Chris.” Trask took another sip of the bourbon. It burned all the way down, leaving him feeling queasy and unsettled. He pushed the drink away. “They found some files tonight.”
“We heard. Security Solutions has already sent people from their secure documents division to return them to a place of safekeeping.”
“I don’t think Chris was intentionally involved.”
“We don’t think so, either,” Heller agreed. “He was just too careless for the job he was tasked to do.”
Trask stood up, feeling stifled and claustrophobic in this place. He pulled a couple of bills from his wallet and put them on the bar next to his drink. “I gotta get out of here.”
Heller and his wife followed him outside. “Trask,” Heller said, stopping him in his tracks.
He turned to look at them. “I really need to be left alone.”
It was the wife, Iris, who reached out and took his hand. As had happened the last time they met, he felt a strange zip of energy flow through him where her fingers touched his flesh. “I’m so sorry about your brother. If you need anything, you give us a call, okay?”
She flashed him a faint smile, removed her hand and walked away with her husband.
Trask turned to watch her go, rubbing his hand where she’d touched him. Just a moment ago, he’d felt as if he’d never feel normal again. But now...
Now he felt as if there just might be a sliver of hope out there after all.
* * *
“HE’S OUT OF SURGERY. He did just fine.” A tall, beautiful African American woman rose as Quinn and Tara entered the surgical waiting room. “I tried to reach his parents, but I got no answer.”
“I think they’re in Branson, Missouri,” Tara said. “They go there every spring, before the summer tourist rush kicks in.” She rubbed her gritty eyes, surprised to find tears trembling on her eyelashes. “I want to see him.”
“I know. They’ll take him up to his room as soon as he’s out of recovery.” The woman offered Tara a gentle smile. “I’m Rebecca Cameron. I work with Quinn at Campbell Cove Security.”
“Right. Owen’s mentioned you.”
Rebecca put her arm around Tara’s shoulders. “Come on. I’ll take you to his room.”
The empty room looked so sterile. Tara found herself futilely wishing the hospital gift shop downstairs was open so she could at least buy a nice vase of spring flowers to make the place look more homey and welcoming.
As if she had read Tara’s thoughts on her face, Rebecca patted Tara’s back. “I suspect all he really needs right now is you.” With an encouraging smile, Rebecca left her alone in the room.
It seemed to be forever later when a nurse and an attendant wheeled Owen into the hospital room on a gurney. He wasn’t exactly awake, but his eyes were fluttering open and closed and his arms flailed weakly as he tried to help the attendant move him from the gurney to the bed.
The nurse finished settling Owen and put his IV bag on the pole beside him. She turned to smile at Tara. “Are you Tara?”
Tara nodded.
“He asked if you were here when he first started coming out of the anesthesia.”
Tara crossed to Owen’s bedside. His eyes were closed again, but when she took the hand without the IV, he squeezed weakly.
“Tara?” he mumbled.
“Right here, Owen. Where else would I be?”
The nurse smiled at her again. “I’ll be back in a bit to check his vitals. You can stay in here with him if you want. I could get you a reclining chair if you like. To make it more comfortable.”
“That’s fine. Thanks. No hurry. Just when you can get to it.” She waited until the nurse walked out the door, and then she bent closer to Owen. “You gave me a scare, you big, brave idiot. Don’t ever do that again.”
His eyes fluttered halfway open, though his pupils seemed incapable of focusing. “Admit it. You were impressed by my show of manly courage.”
“Terrified is more like it,” she confessed, her heart surging with relief to hear him making jokes. “I didn’t need proof of your strength, you know. I’ve always thought you were the strongest man I know.”
“No matter what my father thought?”
“By now, we both know he’s a fool. So stop trying so hard to prove it, okay?” She touched his cheek. “For the dozen years you scared off my life span, you owe me big, mister.”
His dry lips cracked into a lopsided, painful-looking smile. “Yeah? You got a payment in mind?”
She leaned even closer, lowering her voice to a whisper. “How about you marry me?”
His eyes struggled to focus. “Was that a proposition?”
“It was a proposal.” She picked up the roll of tape the nurse had left on the bedside table after she taped down his IV cannula. Stripping off a piece, she wrapped it around his left ring finger. “See? I got a ring and everything.”
A raspy laugh escaped his throat. He winced, and when he spoke again, his voice was hoarse but full of humor. “Why, Miss Tara, this is so sudden.”
“Say yes, Owen.”
“Yes, Owen.” His eyes fluttered shut.
She drew up the chair beside his bed and sat there with a goofy smile on her face, her fingers twined with his.