Time Bomb_On The Run Romance

by Madi Le

  "And then?"

  "Then we cross that bridge when we come to it."

  She went quiet. Her weight shifted to press the shirt harder into her hip. And whatever she had on her mind, she kept it to herself.

  What Grant didn't tell her was that he wasn't sure where he was going to land at the end of this. He didn't know what he was up against, didn't really know their resources, and didn't know how to fight them even if he could guess. That made it hard to plan. When he had slept, maybe that would make a difference. Right now, all that mattered was finding a place to stay for a few short hours.

  "You really didn't have to save me," Misty said. "I'd have been alright on my own."

  "You looked like you were out on your feet," Grant said. "Lay your head back and try to rest. I know it's not comfortable."

  "It's fine." Misty laid her head back, kept her weight hard on her hip. His shirt was looking more and more red, the more time went by.

  They drove on in silence for another five minutes. He turned off the road, his eyes scanning the horizon. Looking for cars. At first he thought that she'd been wrong, that he was free and clear for all intents and purposes. Grant had no need to hide where he lived, but he was a fairly private person. That was what happened, when you had a wife who didn't want to be involved in your work.

  Then, when you had a wife who you were having a rough patch with, the privacy only increased. When you started initiating divorce proceedings, and then an annulment… well, he hadn't been the most social person in the county, suffice it to say. And that had translated to not bringing anyone around. So there was always a chance that nobody really knew precisely where he lived.

  The first strange car, he almost wrote off. There was nobody inside, the engine was off. He checked both things. There wasn't even a pair of teenagers necking in the back. The second car put him on edge. By the time he saw the third, and then the fourth, he was already turning around in the lot. The men inside the cars might have noticed him coming, but they hadn't put two and two together about who he was, even with the large six-pointed star on the side of the car.

  He put the pedal down and kept on moving. He'd hoped to be able to lay his head down. But at this point, the number of options were dwindling, and he was going to have to figure something out soon. Because whoever was after Misty, they had his number now, and he was going to have to accept one of two impossible positions: give up the girl, or go on the run.

  Neither was appetizing. He didn't spend any time at all thinking about which he would choose, though. The engine roared and the mile markers whipped by, and in spite of himself, he did something Sheriffs are not supposed to do as a rule: he went on the run.

  Grant's eyes drifted off the road. He watched a mile marker coming up slowly; as they passed it whipped by. He jerked the wheel, and the car righted itself into the middle of the lane. He should be off the road. But he couldn't. At least, not yet. There was no good place to stop.

  Being accused of trying to kill some random civilian was one thing. He could prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was innocent of that. But he had a feeling about Misty. He told himself that the feeling had nothing to do with their past together. Maybe he believed it, somewhere deep in his heart.

  She was asleep, finally. It was almost pleasant. He chanced another glance over at her, telling himself that he wasn't going to drift again. He had learned his lesson about being careless. She was as beautiful as he remembered.

  She was stronger than she had been, though. Harder on the outside. She needed some of that toughness; always had. He'd been there to protect her before. Not when she left. She didn't want him to follow, and he couldn't force himself to leave. Once he'd managed to get his head on even a little straight, she was gone for good. So he joined the Army.

  Grant thought he'd learned his lesson about carelessness, but looking away from the road was careless. He saw headlights coming toward them when he looked back to the road. He almost swerved on reflex before he looked at the lines on the road. He hadn't drifted. Neither had the oncoming car. He forced his hands to steady and kept driving. The oncoming car passed harmlessly by him.

  He needed to sleep. He was starting to see things. Starting to imagine things. There was danger all around him, he knew that. It was hard to avoid admitting it, at least to himself. But that didn't mean that he needed to be irresponsible. He pinched his lips together and looked hard at the horizon.

  "God damn it," he said, only to himself. The sound of his voice startled him. It was too loud. He glanced, only for an instant, over to Misty. She didn't move an inch. Her color was alright, he told himself. He almost believed it.

  He needed someplace to go. Some place where he could try to sleep. Only one immediately came to mind. He dismissed it out of hand. He was willing to let her into his life a little bit, but there were limits to that. Limits for anyone.

  So he started going down the list. He was too tired for inspired thinking. The only thing was to try to be systematic. If he could wrangle his brain into a structure, then the fact that it moved slowly wasn't going to make much in the way of difference… right?

  Could he go home? No. Did he own property, other than his home? Yes. Could he go there? He could. Would he? He would not. He let out a breath. That was easy. Next step.

  Was there someone he could call on, who could be trusted not to go to the police? There was not. His parents were long gone, and Heather… well, it had been a fairly amicable split. But he wasn't going to ask her to get involved in this situation. He couldn't, it wouldn't be fair. The list of other people in his life was short, and few of them were better than acquaintances.

  Then what about public places? Sleeping on the street wasn't an option. He needed to be able to perform some first aid. That would be impossible with the two of them sitting on park benches. And it would be impossible to stop someone from finding them while they slept. He let out a breath.

  Which left private establishments. Paid. He thought about the offer to stop at a motel. It seemed like a lifetime ago. The offer didn't stand, as far as he knew. Few things did, when you were bleeding like a stuck pig.

  He hadn't stayed in a motel for years. Not since he'd gotten out of the Army, and then only a couple of days while he made his way back to Idaho.

  Grant caught his thoughts slipping, following tangents. He was too tired for this. He needed to sleep. He just had to get them someplace with a warm bed. Two warm beds, preferably. Cold beds were acceptable, as long as they were beds and they were inside, and nobody was going to immediately call the cops.

  So that left motels and hotels. Were they an option?

  He took a long moment before deciding that no, they weren't. He needed to be incognito. They were going to want him to pay with plastic. Plastic that would immediately set off the search for him, right to his location. It wasn't like he had a set of fake credit cards lying around, after all. He let out a breath and closed his eyes.

  There were some places where they might take cash. Not the kinds of places that he wanted to go, but as they say, any old port in a storm.

  The trouble was that he didn't have the cash on hand. If he stopped someplace to get cash, then he had the same problem as before, once removed: he'd ping an alert that would bring the entire Federal government down on his head. The fact that he could drive away wasn't going to make all that much difference.

  Grant grit his teeth. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, and he knew it. He hated it. He looked over at Misty. Her face twisted in pain, but she still didn't stir from her sleep. There were few people who he would have done it for, but he needed to keep her safe. There was only one way to do that, and as much as he hated it, he wasn't going to risk her safety just so that he could protect his privacy a little bit.

  He let a breath out his nose and started plotting a course. It was almost forty miles, but the good news was that he hadn't been going the wrong way. If he'd been going south all this time, it could have been a hundred by now.<
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  He took the straight shot up, took the exit. He was exhausted, but the routine was almost normal at that point. He'd done it a handful of times, but it was always in emergencies like this. So the act of going there almost made it easier to keep himself awake.

  The house wasn't his. At least, according to the paperwork, it wasn't. It belonged to a man named Anthony Harper. Anthony Harper looked and sounded quite a bit like Sheriff Holloway. If you put them into the same room together, which no one ever had–at least, not knowingly–they would have been indistinguishable.

  But they had different addresses, and they both paid their bills–Anthony was quite a bit more reliable, but his bills were almost nothing each month–and they both had different social security numbers.

  Which was enough to disappear on, if you were careful. And Grant had always been careful. He pulled into the driveway. The clock read 2:05. He turned off the engine, and the dashboard clock stopped saying anything. He eased out of the driver's seat, walked around to the passenger side, and helped Misty out. She'd woken, apparently, when they stopped. She only mostly needed help. Her leg almost took her weight, even.

  Grant Holloway, for all legal purposes, stopped existing. Anthony Harper reached into his pocket, grabbed Sheriff Holloway's keys, and fanned them out. Grabbed one from the middle and slipped it into his lock. Opened the door. Stepped inside.

  The room was dusty. He needed to use air fresheners next time, or it was always going to smell like an underused closet. He helped Misty inside. Four steps past the foyer, he stopped cold. The computer was on. It wasn't supposed to be; it was an expense he didn't like paying, when he was off being someone else, in some other place.

  The screen was his own desktop, except for one thing. A Word document, taking up most of the screen, in the approximate middle, with large text spread across it. Even from across the room, he had no trouble reading it.

  "Welcome home, Sheriff Holloway."

  Eight ♥

  *

  Misty's eyes locked on the computer. The pain in her hip had renewed itself, after sitting stiffly for more than an hour, and it set off alarm bells in her head. But more than that, she was looking at the computer.

  "You didn't leave that for yourself, did you?"

  Grant looked down at her as if he'd forgotten that she was there, though Misty knew that she was leaning on him heavily enough that he must have known.

  "What? No."

  He moved her automatically towards the computer chair; she followed, unsure how steady she was able to be on her own. He sat her down in the chair. As she sat down and eased back, she saw him reaching for his gun. She watched, more nervous than she felt comfortable being, but less nervous than she thought she ought to be.

  He put a finger to his lips. She watched him turn, and then turned herself towards the computer.

  Her lips pinched together. There were only three possibilities, as far as she saw it. First, a prank. The only person who could have been pulling it was Grant. Maybe he had someone else in his life who would pull it, but the look on his face wasn't the sort of expression that she expected from someone who suspected a prank.

  Second, someone in the house. Granted, it was impossible to know from a glance how long the computer had been showing the screen. She could look to see if it had an auto-sleep. She turned around and did so. The monitor had the feature, but it was disabled. The computer's had been disabled, as well.

  Which meant that if someone had accessed the computer locally, it could have been weeks ago. Months. She didn't know how often the place was checked, but from the smell she guessed it was somewhere between 'never' and 'once on a month of blue moons.'

  She pursed her lips. Which left option 3. Remote access. It was hard to be sure. So she turned, pressed a few keys on the keyboard. The movements were so automatic that she wasn't sure what keys she pressed; if she had wanted to know, she could have slowed down and looked after she pressed them, but she couldn't begin to put words to it.

  She scrolled through the list of active processes. She knew it wasn't any kind of guarantee that she would find anything. She didn't even know what she was looking to find. Her eyes drifted over something that set off alarm bells. She looked back. She couldn't say why, but there was something wrong with the name of the process.

  She pulled open a browser window and searched. She had been right to be suspicious. So Misty cleaned up. She let out a breath. She didn't notice Grant come back in, holstering his pistol, until he set a hand on her shoulder.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Looking at your problem."

  "Okay, what's that?"

  "You had a virus."

  "Virus?"

  "Yeah," she said. "It was spoofing your–" she stopped. The words were coming out as automatically as her fingers had done their own work. Whatever had given her this expertise, it was from before the first thing she could remember. A part of her old life. The one that she had left behind. The life, however, hadn't left her behind.

  So, she thought, letting out a breath and letting herself decompress, there were upsides to whatever it was that she'd gotten herself into.

  Misty looked at the Sheriff's face. He looked at her like someone who thought that they were quite a capable swimmer going up against the Olympic team. He blinked. "And you think they have access to my computer?"

  "Not any more," she said. Misty tapped a few more keys. She went by her gut, because her brain didn't know any more about what she was doing than Grant's. What she did know was that she could lean hard on herself, and it was working out better than she had expected. Now she just had to get herself out of a thousand other messes. Now that she'd gotten herself into a new one.

  "Should I be worried?"

  "Yeah," Misty said. "Probably."

  "Okay?"

  "Someone got in, somehow. You've got a weak link in your system, and that's a concern."

  Grant looked at her with a cocked eyebrow. "And is there anything else I should do right now, to make sure that I don't get screwed up again?"

  "Who comes into this place?"

  "You're the third person on the list, behind me and the realtor."

  "Short list of weak links, then."

  "Yeah," Grant said. His eyes flicked to the corner, like he was thinking about something. Then he shook his head and shrugged. "So what do I do about this virus?"

  "Do about–nothing. I dealt with the issue."

  "And should I be concerned about anything else?"

  She turned back to the computer, started an install. It went on in the background while she talked. "Yeah, sure. If there's one, there's usually more than one. But then again, this was a targeted attack, so someone must have known what they were trying to do. My guess? Probably an email, or something like that."

  Grant let out a breath and settled onto the couch.

  "How's your hip?"

  "Hurts," Misty said. "But I think I'm going to live."

  She clicked through a menu. It was mindless work, usually; the state that her hip was in made the whole thing agonizing. She watched the screen in a daze, wanting nothing more than the pain to go away.

  Then something surprising happened. Her hand was pressed, for the moment, into her hip. But the mouse, with nothing touching it, no tremor, no wind, nothing to create a disturbance, moved. All on its own. The hunk of plastic on the table stayed put, but the cursor moved. Half an inch.

  Misty let out a breath. Her heart thumped hard. Someone was there. Was accessing the computer at that exact moment. She thought she'd plugged the leaks. The fact that she had suspected there might be more didn't mean that she was prepared to find that she'd missed something so big.

  She pushed the chair back, thoughts of her hip forgotten until she started to put her weight down on her feet. She fell to the floor, reached down and grabbed the ethernet cable coming out of the back of the tower, and she yanked it.

  The pain exploding in her mind didn't dull as she eased herself back into what s
he thought would be a more comfortable position, holding a bright yellow cable. She hadn't been thinking; without depressing the clip that was supposed to keep it in, she might have broken the ethernet port right out of the board.

  Instead, like it usually did, the plastic clip had snapped right off. It was probably lying somewhere in a corner where nobody was going to find it. But now she could work in peace, at least. She grabbed the arms of the office chair and started to lift herself up. When she felt a pair of powerful arms wrapping around her waist and heaving her up, it took her a moment to realize what was happening. When she did, though, she didn't want him to put her back down.

  Misty's eyes drifted shut. There was a moment of blissful relaxation. Then the pain in her hip exploded. Misty let out an involuntary scream and tried to writhe on the couch that she was laying out on. Her hip didn't move under Grant's weight.

  "I know it hurts," he said, through gritted teeth. The pain lessened from screaming agony to a dull, pervasive agony. "There. I've got it."

  The feeling of her leg being sewn up was almost nothing at all, by comparison. When it finally closed up he wiped a cooling salve on it, and then tied a tight bandage around her leg. Misty let out a breath. The pain faded. But she was as awake as she'd ever been, now.

  "Do you have anything to drink," she asked weakly.

  "Nothing good," he said.

  "Then give me something bad."

  He let his weight up off her thigh. Misty struggled to sit up. Her body didn't really want to do it, but she quietly reminded herself that she hadn't asked her body's opinion on the matter.

  "Don't get up," he told her.

  "I didn't really ask you," she said. She forced her legs to take the weight. The pain wasn't as bad as it had been, but she'd been on her back for the better part of twenty minutes now, and the return of the pain, however lessened, was a surprise.

  "You should stay off that leg."

  "I've had worse," she said. There weren't many things that she could absolutely say about her life up to this point; whatever had made her forget, it had taken most of her history with it. The injuries, though, she had a good memory of, because there were plenty since the last she could remember. It had been a long year.