Stranger in Cold Creek

by Paula Graves

  “Why don’t we go inside, warm up until they get here?” he asked to distract himself from a rush of heat rising from deep in his belly. He gave a backward nod of his head, coaxing her toward the fireplace.

  She gave him a reluctant look but didn’t resist. It wasn’t long before she was settling on the sofa and leaning toward the heat.

  “How long have you been a deputy?” he asked, taking a seat beside her.

  Her forehead crinkled at the question. “Almost ten years. I joined right out of college.”

  “Where did you go to college?”

  Her slate-colored eyes narrowed slightly. “Texas Tech. You?”

  “That information didn’t come up in your background search?”

  Her gaze narrowed. “I got a call about a missing person’s case, so I didn’t get to finish stripping your background bare.”

  The tart tone of her reply made him smile. “My bachelor’s degree was from Wake Forest. My master’s was from the University of Alabama.”

  “And now you’re a carpenter?”

  “After all that time and money, I realized I really hated accounting.”

  “Unfortunate.” Her lips curved at the corners but didn’t quite manage a smile. “Did you feel pressure to go into the family business anyway?”

  Her tone suggested she understood that sort of pressure. “Your dad wanted you to go into the nuts-and-bolts biz?”

  “I’m it for his branch of the family tree. No other kids, no living siblings. He’s not that far from retiring, and I know he’d love it if I quit the sheriff’s department and joined him in the sale of hardware.” She laid her head against the back of the sofa, closing her eyes as she relaxed into the comfortable cushions. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m so grateful for the life my dad’s business gave me growing up. But I love being a cop.”

  “Even in a little place like Cold Creek?”

  “Especially in a little place like Cold Creek.” Her smile was genuine. “These are my people. I grew up with most of them. They’re here in Cold Creek not because there’s nowhere else they could go, but because there’s nowhere else in this big, wide world they want to be. This place is in their blood, like it’s in mine.” She slanted a quick, sheepish look at him. “That was a little hokey, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” he disagreed, meaning it. He had left his Tennessee roots behind a long time ago, but the pull of the mountains had never gone away. He’d felt it, a tug in the soul, during the months he’d recently spent in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Virginia.

  He wondered if he could feel the same sort of tug from another place, especially one as flat and desolate as this part of Texas seemed to be.

  Then he wondered why he was even thinking about spending more time in Texas than it took to get himself back into fighting shape, in case law enforcement couldn’t round up all the stragglers left in the moribund Blue Ridge Infantry.

  The sound of a car motor approaching on the highway dragged his attention away from that worrisome thought. He rose quickly and edged to the window to take a quick peek through the curtains.

  A Barstow County Sheriff’s Department cruiser had pulled up outside, parking next to Miranda’s truck. “It’s your colleague,” he murmured as a tall young man stepped out of the cruiser and made his way through the crusty snow to the porch. He was the deputy who’d accompanied the sheriff earlier that day. What was his name?

  Miranda followed him to the door as he opened it to the deputy’s knock. “Robertson,” she said briskly, joining him on the front porch rather than letting him in. She filled him in on what John had told her about the intruder. “He was wearing boot covers, so we don’t have any tracks around the wreck, but Mr. Blake believes he drove away from behind that small stand of shrubs down the highway.” She waved in the direction John had indicated. “He doesn’t think any other vehicles have come through since then, thanks to the snow, so I thought we could get tire impressions, at least, to compare to the vehicle that took potshots at me earlier today.”

  Robertson took in everything she told him quietly, jotting notes. Then he looked up at Miranda, his blue eyes gentle with concern. “I thought the sheriff told you to get some rest.”

  John didn’t miss the look of not-so-professional interest in the deputy’s expression, but if Miranda was aware that the deputy had a bit of a crush on her, she didn’t show it as she shrugged and said, “I was on the phone with Mr. Blake when he saw the intruder. I was at my dad’s place, so I was several minutes closer than a cruiser could be.”

  Robertson flicked his gaze up to meet John’s eyes. “I see.”

  “Well?” Miranda asked. “Did you bring the casting material?”

  “It’s out in the cruiser.”

  Miranda went inside to grab her jacket, zipped it up and started out the door after Robertson.

  John caught up with her on the porch. “Do you think this is a good idea? It’s freezing out here, and you took an awfully hard knock to the head earlier today. I’m pretty sure the EMTs told you to take it easy.”

  “I feel fine,” she insisted, starting down the steps. But she swayed as she reached the bottom, and John hurried to give her a bracing hand before she ended up facedown in the snow.

  “Yeah, I can see how fine you are,” he murmured, tightening his grip around her arm to keep her from following Robertson. “Robertson strikes me as a capable guy.”

  “He doesn’t know where to look for the tire prints.”

  “Neither do you, really. Come on.” He tugged her arm, gently leading her back up the stairs to the house. He stopped before they entered. “Deputy Robertson?”

  The deputy turned to look at him. “Yes?”

  “Hold up. I’ll go with you to show you where I saw the car. Let me get Deputy Duncan settled.” He nudged Miranda into the house.

  “You’re making me look like a slacker in front of my fellow deputy,” she grumbled, but she didn’t fight him as he led her back to the fire and urged her to sit. “Do you know how hard it can be for a female cop to be taken seriously?”

  “I do,” he assured her. “But working when you’ve been told you have a concussion and need to rest doesn’t exactly shower you with glory. It just makes you look overeager.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve been waiting to hit me with that all night, haven’t you?”

  He smiled. “No, but you know I’m right. What would you be thinking right now if the shoe was on the other foot, and it was Robertson out there staggering and reeling against doctor’s orders, trying to prove he’s a hotshot investigator?”

  “I’d think he was an idiot,” she conceded gruffly.

  “I’ll be right back.” John laid his hand on her shoulder for a brief moment, his thumb brushing over her clavicle. The skin there was unexpectedly silky and delicate, an intriguing contrast to her tough, no-nonsense exterior.

  He forced himself to turn and head out into the cold again, where he found Robertson waiting for him impatiently. He waved John to the passenger side and slid his own lanky body behind the steering wheel.

  Robertson cranked up the heat to high as he pulled out on the highway. “Stop me short of where you saw the vehicle enter the highway,” the deputy said. “Don’t want to mess up the tracks.”

  John told him to stop about twenty yards from the stand of shrubs that had hidden the intruder’s vehicle. “It should be about thirty yards up the road. I think he must’ve parked his vehicle behind those shrubs because they’d block my view of the car from the house.”

  Robertson parked on the shoulder and pulled a flashlight from the cruiser’s glove compartment. “Stay behind me,” he told John.

  John could have given the young deputy a few lessons on evidence retrieval, but he wasn’t a cop and this wasn’t his town. Plus, nobody liked a know-it-all.

 
The tire treads in the snow weren’t hard to spot, and to John’s surprise, they were nearly pristine. Apparently no other vehicles had passed on this side of the highway since the intruder drove away.

  Robertson handed John the flashlight. “Can you hold this on the tracks while I get the casting material?”

  John directed the beam toward the tire impressions, bending for a closer look. The treads had a pretty distinctive pattern. If the tire impressions the deputies had made earlier in the day were clear at all, they should be able to tell whether or not their intruder tonight was driving the same car.

  Robertson stopped beside John. “Those are the same treads.”

  John looked up. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m the one who took the impressions this afternoon after the tow truck hauled the cruiser away. These look like fairly new tires. Firestones, I think. The lab in Lubbock will tell us for sure.”

  “So I may have seen the man who shot at us this afternoon.”

  “Looks like.”

  “And we have no idea who he is or where he’s gone.”

  “That’s right.”

  John looked down the highway behind him, barely able to see his house, sitting small and isolated nearly a mile down the road.

  And he’d left Miranda in there, alone and vulnerable, with a target on her back.

  Chapter Five

  She should be the one out there with Robertson. She was a deputy, damn it. A good one. And John Blake was a civilian.

  Everybody was treating her as if she was made of glass, something delicate that needed to be wrapped in cotton batting and hidden away for her own protection.

  She pushed to her feet, ignoring the aches and twinges in her muscles and bones, and crossed to the side window that looked out across the snowy plain between the house and the stand of shrubs where John had seen the mystery vehicle enter the highway.

  The lights of Robertson’s cruiser gleamed in the darkness down the road, and she could make out their silhouettes in the beams of the cruiser’s headlights.

  Tamping down frustration, she moved her gaze to the taped-off crime scene, wondering what the intruder had been looking for. The cruiser was already at the lab in Lubbock by now, set for examination. An attempted murder of a Texas lawman would put the case high on the list of priorities, she knew. At the very least, ballistics should give them some idea of what kind of weapon the assailant had used.

  She couldn’t remember how many shots had been fired. Two had hit the cruiser for sure. And there’d been at least one other shot, hadn’t there?

  Could the intruder have been looking for a bullet that hadn’t hit the cruiser? But why? It’s not like they could keep the lab guys from finding the two slugs embedded in the cruiser.

  She rubbed her aching head, wincing as her fingers brushed against the bandage covering the gash in her head. Nothing was making any sense. She wasn’t likely to be on anyone’s hit list. Most of the cases she investigated were minor-league domestic disturbances, drunk-and-disorderly calls and property theft, usually of animals or farming tools.

  Could it have been mistaken identity?

  But how could someone make a mistake about a well-marked Barstow County Sheriff’s Department cruiser?

  The cold night air seeped through the seams of the window, making her shiver and intensifying the ache in her battered body. She headed back to the warmth of the crackling fireplace but made herself stay on her feet. Sitting and wallowing in weariness and aching misery was not something she was going to allow herself to do.

  She was young and strong. And, she reminded herself, she was all by herself in the house of a mysterious, intriguing stranger who’d just wandered into her town.

  What were the odds, really, that she’d end up rolling her cruiser off the road just yards away from John Blake’s house on the very day she ran into him at her father’s hardware store?

  Was it possible that her accident, and the subsequent assault on the two of them, was actually more about John than it was about her?

  All very good questions, she had to admit. And she might never have a better chance to take a look around John Blake’s residence than right now.

  The living room sprawled across the full width of the house, but there was little in it that gave her any clue about its occupant. No artwork on the walls, no personal photos on the mantel or the side tables. The lamps were simple and inexpensive, the kind she could find in any discount department store. The furniture was equally free of personality.

  Average, she thought, squelching a smile. Like the man.

  Except she was beginning to understand that John Blake was about as far from average as a man could get.

  The bathroom revealed a few details. He liked his toothbrushes medium and his razors single bladed. He used soap, not bath gel. His medicine cabinet was stocked with both acetaminophen and ibuprofen, along with a prescription for a stronger painkiller from a pharmacy in Abingdon, Virginia. The prescription had been filled a month ago, but based on the pill count on the bottle, he hadn’t taken any since the prescription had been filled.

  He’d told her he’d spent some time in the hospital recently. He’d said it wasn’t an accident.

  Then what?

  As she was heading from the bathroom toward the bedroom, she heard the rattle of keys in the door and detoured quickly toward the living room, making it to the fireplace before the door opened and John walked inside.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked, trying not to sound out of breath, even though her pulse was pounding like a drum in her ears.

  “Robertson is taking impressions of the tire treads.” John locked the door behind him and crossed to where she stood. “You look flushed. Feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him, swallowing her guilt. She was a cop, and John Blake was a stranger in town who had been conveniently nearby when someone tried to kill her. He wasn’t at the top of her suspect list, since he’d been in the line of fire himself, but she’d be stupid not to at least take a look around and make sure he wasn’t hiding some deep, dark secret.

  Wouldn’t she?

  “Did Robertson say anything about the tire prints?” she asked as he dropped onto the sofa and stretched his hands toward the fire.

  “Can’t be sure until the lab takes a look, but Robertson thinks the tires are the same as the car we saw parked out front earlier today.”

  “But was that the car that took shots at us?”

  “I think it almost had to be. Don’t you?”

  She frowned at the fire, wishing she could remember more about the events that had sent her and the cruiser careening off the highway. “The doctor at the clinic in town said I might never remember exactly what happened today.”

  “Or, in a day or two, you might remember everything.” John put his hand on hers, his touch gentle. Undemanding.

  But a ripple of animal awareness darted through her from the place his hand touched hers.

  She didn’t know whether she was relieved or disappointed when he drew his hand away and turned back to the fire. The fact that she didn’t know made what she was about to say that much more difficult to utter.

  “I think I should stay here tonight.”

  John’s head snapped toward hers, a quizzical expression in his dark eyes. “I really don’t know how to respond to that.”

  “I’m not supposed to sleep much tonight anyway,” she said with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Because of the concussion. So I thought I could stay up, keep watch on the crime scene until morning.”

  “Or you could get someone from the station who hasn’t been in a rollover car crash to stand watch outside,” he suggested. “You should be resting, not playing cop.”

  “First off, I don’t play cop. I am a cop.”

 
“You know what I meant.”

  “Second, maybe things are different where you come from, but here in Cold Creek, we don’t have many officers to spare. I’m here. I’m awake and I’m way too wired to go to sleep tonight. I can pull up a chair to that window, bundle up and keep an eye out for anybody else who might wander into the crime scene. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  He gave a soft huff of laughter. “Believe me, Deputy, I’ll know you’re here.”

  She shot him a challenging look. “Is there some other reason you don’t want me here? Do you have something to hide?”

  “If I did, it’s within my constitutional rights to do so, Deputy.” He spoke with a firmness that tweaked her curiosity.

  So he did have something to hide.

  But what?

  “Stay,” he said after a long pause. “If that’s what you want to do. I’ll stay up with you. Keep you company.”

  “That’s not necessary—”

  “That’s my condition for your staying in my house overnight,” he said firmly. “Take it or leave it.”

  She looked at him through narrowed eyes, debating her options. He was right—if he had secrets, keeping them was his right unless she could prove they broke any laws within her jurisdiction. And if she wanted to stay at his house, she would simply have to abide by his rules.

  No matter how much inconvenience—or temptation—they might pose.

  * * *

  THERE WERE THREE WOUNDS, he saw as he assessed the damage quickly from his hiding place behind a rocky outcropping near the top of the ridge. Dallas Cole and Nicki Jamison had gotten away, along with the woman and the boy they’d rescued from the cabin, but the woman’s husband and his henchmen were out here in the woods somewhere, looking for him.

  It was dark, so there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to follow the track of blood he’d left as he ran, but if the good guys didn’t show up before morning, John was going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble.