They flattened onto their stomachs as a light swung over them. Someone was shining a flashlight into the rooms and sweeping it around, checking for their bodies.
“We have to go now,” Leo whispered.
Ellen couldn’t have agreed more. She shimmied on her belly to the edge of the building, then pushed back so her legs and hips dangled over the side. As she slid farther to hang off the ledge, her arms burned with the effort of supporting her own body weight twice in one day. She pushed back and dropped. The impact onto the ground was not pleasant, but it could have been much worse. At least they didn’t have to climb down the side of a building again.
Leo dropped beside her, hardly making a sound as he landed. Then he waved her forward. They dove into the tall grass at the back of the motel, crouching to make their way down the side of the building toward the driveway exit that would hopefully put them on the correct road back to town. Or even better, she hoped, they’d see a road sign from the edge of the motel property with the distances marked.
As they reached the edge of the road, she and Leo lay flat against the incline in the ditch, toes tucked to spring forward the instant they decided to move. Ellen risked a look back over her shoulder at the scene they’d left. The far half of the motel was in ruins, and it looked surreal to see a semitruck sitting inside a demolished building.
Where was the owner? She hoped they hadn’t hurt him. If these thieves had been clever enough to figure out where she and Leo were and how to send a truck smashing into their beds, surely they’d have been smart enough to get the owner off-site, even if only for twenty minutes while the situation went down.
“How did they find us?” she whispered.
Leo’s nostrils flared as he swept his gaze back and forth along the empty road. “I have an idea, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The only way—”
One of the men rounded the corner of the motel. As he switched his lit flashlight from one hand to the other, the beam swept across the property. Before Ellen realized what was happening, the light illuminated her leg before continuing its trajectory. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the gasp.
Maybe no one had noticed. Maybe they’d figured her leg for a log, or maybe she was too far away from the men for anyone to even be glancing her direction.
“Don’t move,” Leo said. “My vision at night isn’t great, but I think they’re looking over here. Light draws the eye. As soon as they turn back to the building, we have to move. It’s definitely the same guys—bandannas and ball caps. Why can’t they make this easier for us and not bother with their disguises in the dark?”
But footsteps started to approach. One of the men shouted to the guy with the flashlight. “Why isn’t anyone checking around the perimeter? Weren’t you supposed to be doing that? Go!”
And then the flashlight beam started to rise again, right toward them.
Ellen and Leo locked gazes, silently agreeing that it was indeed time to go. Now.
The beam hit Ellen’s leg again. Simultaneously, they dug their toes into the side of the ditch and sprang over the top, hitting solid earth above.
They started to run, feet pounding the pavement on the dark, empty road.
But so did the thieves, and the thieves were the ones with long-range weapons.
Ellen’s hopes plummeted.
Despite everything they’d survived so far, they weren’t going to make it.
* * *
Leo’s lungs strained as he and Ellen ran down the road in darkness. Seconds after they’d burst out of the ditch like runners at the starting block of a race, shouts and pounding feet had come up behind them—much faster than he could have anticipated. He tried to stay aware of Ellen’s presence next to him, because if either of them stumbled, even a lost second could mean the difference between life and death.
The wet road had dried since the rainstorm earlier in the day, but there was nothing easy about finding the strength to run after everything they’d already been through. Ellen’s breathing had also grown heavy and strained, and the raspy wheeze of trying to catch her breath matched his own.
And then he heard it—the thing that sent the most fear into his heart.
The thieves had started firing at them.
Gunshots brought bullets whizzing through the air. Most seemed to go wide, kicking up dirt or bits of asphalt as the thieves attempted to target the two of them in the dark. He considered telling Ellen to weave, but he almost worried that they’d be doing the thieves a favor.
That was, until a buzzing zip grazed his ear. A centimeter to the right, and he’d have been dead.
Lord, what are we to do?
But before he’d finished his prayer, headlights illuminated the road ahead. Leo cringed at the bright light after so long in darkness, but he immediately pushed Ellen to the road’s shoulder where the light wouldn’t hit them directly—otherwise the headlights would provide the perfect backdrop, giving away their exact position and making them easier targets.
“Keep moving!” He dropped into the ditch and led the way across the ground. “The light will draw their attention away from us being in here, but step carefully.”
The car kept coming, but just when Leo thought the vehicle would speed past them and continue toward the armed thieves, the driver yanked the parking break to spin the car in a perfect semicircle. The passenger-side door flung open, and Leo stumbled to a halt to see Staff Sergeant Clyne inside. Then the red, yellow and blue stripe design on the side of the car came into focus.
“Hurry!” Clyne called. “They’re right behind you!”
Leo scrambled up the bank and helped Ellen inside, but he chose to climb into the back, too, instead of taking the passenger seat up front. He didn’t want to be out of reach in case the danger triggered another PTSD episode.
As soon as they were secure inside the car, Clyne took off down the road. He glanced in his rearview mirror several times, and Leo braced himself for the inevitable pings and thuds of bullets embedding in metal. But none came, so he risked a glance out the back window. He no longer saw men in the road, and it remained empty of vehicles.
“They saw the patrol car and scattered,” Clyne growled. “Just like before. They won’t get far, though. There’s backup on the way.”
“You called it in already?” Leo sat back in his seat as the staff sergeant nodded. “Thanks. You have impeccable timing, you know that?”
The staff sergeant chuckled, though Leo didn’t find it funny. Curious, maybe. And a little disconcerting. “Sorry my intended delivery didn’t reach you. There’s a lot going on back at the station.”
“We had creamer and sugar packets,” Ellen mumbled. “What I don’t understand is how they found us. I don’t get it. Where can we go? Where is left to go?”
Leo took her hand, trying to offer a sense of grounding. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense that they found us when only one other person knew where we were. Unless you mentioned it to someone?” He addressed the staff sergeant. “Or maybe there’s a tracking device on your car.”
In fact, the more he thought about the tracking device theory, the more it made sense. Both Jamie and Clyne had been working on this case since day one. Jamie had been the first to arrive on the scene at the Fosters’, giving his partner or one of the other officers who’d come with him plenty of time and opportunity to add a tracker to his vehicle. And maybe to Leo’s own car, too, since he and Ellen had easily been found at the Parks’ home that first night. Or it could have happened on the second visit to the Fosters’ house, when Jamie was on-site with the forensic crew. The staff sergeant had arrived at the scene shortly after they’d entered the house, leaving both cars exposed once again.
Clyne and Jamie had been champions for getting this case solved and the thieves caught, but even a theory about tracking devices on the cars didn’t explain the one massive detail that did
n’t seem to fit: the community center. He and Ellen had ridden horses out to the community center, not exactly a trackable mode of transport. Though Jamie hadn’t been the only one who knew they’d gone there—the briefing that had shared the info with other officers had happened before he or the staff sergeant expected an internal leak.
All of the pieces were getting harder and harder to link together, to justify how they interconnected with each other. Leo’s RCMP training told him that he was missing something important, that he’d somehow willfully blinded himself to the obvious solution because he was too close to the case. But with adrenaline pumping through his veins and a constant sense of being on the run, he hadn’t had a proper moment to sit down with a clear head and think all of the details through.
“Guess you two didn’t manage to get any sleep, eh?” The staff sergeant watched them through the rearview mirror.
“No.” Ellen sighed. “At this point I’m so beyond tired that I’ve hit that wall where I’m not sure I could actually fall asleep even if I tried.”
“I hear you. Hey, you two mind if I roll down the windows for a bit? The air is still uncomfortably muggy after that rain and the sharp upswing in temperature afterward. Summer is definitely on its way.” He lowered the window without waiting for a response. Leo glanced at Ellen, who shrugged but remained silent. There was puffiness around her eyes that he didn’t recall seeing before, clear evidence of her level of exhaustion—but then again, he hadn’t noticed much else earlier besides the way their lips had fit together so easily for the most perfect, precious kiss. It had been the culmination of something he’d been waiting for since the day he’d realized, at seventeen years old, that what he felt for Ellen was more than friendship.
And then a truck had smashed through the motel and ruined their moment, chasing away their chance to understand what had just happened and what it meant for them and the future—and if it in fact meant anything at all, or if they had both simply been overcome with emotion in the moment.
He feared that possibility almost as much as he’d feared one of the thieves’ bullets finding its mark.
“This might seem like an odd request, too,” the staff sergeant continued, “but do you mind if I have a cigarette? It’s been a long day and I’m feeling a bit overdone.”
“Those things will kill you someday,” Leo said, his standard reply, though he was a touch surprised to hear that the man indulged in that particular vice. Then again, he supposed it shouldn’t come as too great a shock. Smoking was, unfortunately, a common habit among folks in the area. Every summer there were massive campaigns all over the province begging residents and visitors not to fling their spent but still burning cigarette butts into the grass or on the ground. More than one horrific forest fire had been started that way during the increasingly frequent dry seasons, and still the issue persisted.
“I know,” Clyne said, pulling a lighter and a cigarette out of his pocket. He placed the cigarette between his teeth and used his free hand to light it. The stench of carbon and smoke hit the back of Leo’s nostrils and he sneezed several times, his body trying to expel the foreign particles.
Ellen’s hand suddenly clamped down on his forearm. He turned to her, still blinking after the sneezes. “I’m okay,” he said. “I don’t usually have such a sensitivity. Phew.”
But her eyes remained wide and wild. She slid her gaze sideways toward Clyne and back to him, as though attempting to communicate something important.
“Everything all right back there?” Clyne asked, puffing his smoke out the window.
Leo frowned at Ellen. “I think so.” What? he silently asked. She jutted her chin out, pointed to her nose and flicked her gaze sideways again. Leo gaped at her for a moment...until, all of a sudden, his mental fog began to lift.
But before his brain could uncover the whole picture, the staff sergeant yanked on the steering wheel, pulling the car sharply to the right and onto a narrow, darkened road. Or maybe a driveway. Leo couldn’t actually see where they’d ended up, thanks to how tightly hemmed in they were by the forest on either side. Anxiety gnawed at him as he tried once again to find clarity in Ellen’s silent gestures and how they related to everything they’d gone through.
“Good,” said Clyne. He slammed on the brakes to stop the car, punched the gearshift into Park, unbuckled his seat belt and twisted around to face Leo and Ellen. “Then you won’t see this coming, and I can be done with you both and get on with my life.”
That was when Leo noticed the gun pointed directly at Ellen’s heart.
FIFTEEN
“The cigarette, Leo.” Ellen groaned. “He’s smoking one of Hogan’s cigarettes. He’s the person Hogan gave smokes to, and he’s the reason the man isn’t talking. Old Hogan is probably scared out of his mind.”
She watched as Leo’s mouth opened and closed in shock. “I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? You’re an officer of the law. A leader. People look up to you, trust you. Have you been behind the thefts this entire time?”
Clyne’s expression darkened. “You don’t know me. You don’t know my life or my situation, so I suggest you stop talking and accept your fate. You’ll receive an honorable memorial befitting a fallen officer, Thrace. It’s the least I can do, but trust me when I say I never expected any outsiders to get mixed up in this, least of all a fellow officer. You should have kept your nose out of it.”
“And you should have realized that if I wasn’t sitting here, one of your own team members from the Fort St. Jacob detachment very well could be. If you’re truly responsible for all of this, that means you’re also responsible for the homicide of Rod Kroeker. As soon as that happened, you had to have known this was all going to unravel on you.”
Clyne’s hand holding the gun wobbled as the man grew angrier. Ellen hoped Leo had a plan, because she very well couldn’t do anything from where she was seated—and she had a feeling that the more Leo kept the man talking, the more upset he’d get, and upset people tended to lose control of their trigger fingers. She squeezed Leo’s forearm even tighter, hoping he’d get the message again, but his attention was wholly focused on the man with the weapon.
“All I needed to do was remove the eyewitness from the equation, and I could have ensured this entire interruption would blow over. Until you came snooping around.”
“You think your whole town would have let Kroeker’s death go unresolved? You think Jamie Biers would simply let his sister’s traumatic eyewitness experience go? Not to mention, if you killed Ellen here, Biers wouldn’t rest until he’d torn her killer limb from limb, metaphorically speaking. Though I wouldn’t put anything else past him. And if you go through with killing her now, it’ll still be a problem. You’ve lost your chance to take her out quietly.”
Ellen stared at Leo. What was he saying? That the man should have killed her a long time ago? She had no idea where he was going with this—until she saw the uncertainty flash across the staff sergeant’s face.
“I have no choice. This was all a victimless crime until she came along. My men got in, got out and no one got hurt. Those rich, spoiled folks in their ivory towers can afford to replace every single item. They have more money than they know what to do with, anyway. They won’t feel the loss like some of us do when the government gets grabby with our income and refuses to give us what we deserve.”
“But she didn’t come along, Clyne. Your men made a mistake. You chose the wrong target, because she was already there. Your carefully orchestrated operation was doomed the moment you neglected to do due diligence and ensure your men were hitting the right house.” Leo tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “But your men weren’t the only ones there, were they. You were there, too. This was your mistake.”
Even in the darkness, Ellen didn’t miss how the man’s cheeks burned bright red, the creases in his forehead becoming even deeper the longer Leo kept him engaged.
�
��I said, stop talking. I have my reasons. You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“I understand that you’re breaking the law. What I don’t think you understand is how badly this is going to backfire on you once the two of us go missing. Between Ellen and me, we have three brothers and two parents who’ve served in the RCMP. No one is going to take this lightly. There’s no possible way you can sweep our deaths under the rug and manage not to have them point back to you eventually. You even have a visiting forensics examiner in town. Do you honestly think she’s not going to put all the pieces together?”
Clyne raised the barrel of his gun toward the car ceiling as though contemplating Leo’s words. But all too soon, his face grew devoid of expression as he lowered it again—this time at Leo’s forehead. “Trucco is a patsy. I have plans for her, too, if she interferes, and I’ve done my best to keep her off the scent so far...but as of tomorrow morning, she’s on an airplane headed back to Ottawa and out of my hair for good. This is my territory, Thrace. I’ll find a way. Trust me. I have no choice.”
There it was. Ellen heard it in the man’s voice, the depth of his desperation. There was something going on here that he wasn’t telling them about, some critical factor that had driven him to break the law, forfeit his principles, risk his life and take the lives of others.
She spoke as softly and gently as she could, considering the circumstances. “There is always a choice, sir. No matter how bad you think it is. There’s another way.”
Sweat broke out along the man’s forehead, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. The gun trembled in his hand. “There isn’t. That’s been made abundantly clear. I can’t lose... Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Just know, if it makes you feel any better, that someone else’s life will be saved through your sacrifice. Goodbye, Thrace.”
A scream rose in Ellen’s throat as the man’s arm steadied, his finger beginning to squeeze the trigger. At the same instant, Leo dove sideways and kicked upward. His foot connected with the gun as it fired, sending the bullet through the roof. The gun toppled from Clyne’s hand as the man cried out in surprise and pain. Leo rolled up and swung a fist into the staff sergeant’s face.
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