Manhunt in the Wild West

by Jessica Andersen

  He’d tried to talk himself out of the plan a few times over the course of the day. Okay, more like once every ten minutes or so, which was about how often he’d thought about her.

  He’d thought of how it had felt to kiss her the night before, and he’d thought of doing it again, of working his way down her body, tasting every inch of creamy skin. Of losing himself inside her.

  He’d thought of her as he’d helped Lee and Muhammad set up the small cabin they were using, located high on a ridge that overlooked Bear Claw Canyon and led up to the mountain used by the city’s main ski resort. They’d outfitted the cottage with the supplies he’d stolen, along with boxes of other essentials that’d appeared out of nowhere, reconfirming that al-Jihad’s reach remained long, his subjects loyal.

  And he’d thought of her as he’d looked in the terrorist leader’s eyes and seen the cold sanity there, the murderous rage, the desire to kill the whole country, and the American way of life.

  This was far too dangerous a situation for Chelsea. It was too much to ask of anyone, never mind someone like her. She was sweetness and innocence, America and apple pie. She was all the things people like al-Jihad wanted to wipe from the face of the earth.

  It wasn’t right. Unfortunately, he still hadn’t been able to reach Jane—the lines of communication had gone dead, and the very nature of his cover meant that he didn’t have access to the information he’d once had at his fingertips. He was going to have to do things the old-fashioned way, through hands-on investigation.

  Even worse, based on a few things Muhammad had let slip, he suspected that they didn’t have much time left. Whatever al-Jihad was planning, it was going to happen Sunday morning, which was less than seventy-two hours away.

  If Fax thought there was a chance that turning himself in and leading the authorities to the escapees’ hideout would prevent an attack, he would’ve done just that. But logic and experience said that the plan was already in place, and the underlings had their orders. Even if al-Jihad and the others were back in custody, the attack would be carried out on schedule.

  Fax needed to know who else was involved. He needed to take them down all at once. That was the only way he was going to save lives. And for that, he needed more information on Rickey Charles. Which meant he needed Chelsea.

  When they reached the dark bulk of the car, he used the keyless remote to pop the locks and got her door open for her.

  He caught the flash of surprise in her eyes. “Thanks.”

  “My mother taught me well.”

  Once he was in the driver’s seat and they were headed down the road into town, she said, “Does she know…you know. What you’re doing?”

  “She knows I’m in jail for murder,” he said shortly, wishing he’d never mentioned her. This wasn’t the time or place for getting-to-know-you chitchat.

  The slip was just another sign of how Chelsea’s involvement was messing him up, blurring the line between the man he’d been and the one he had to be now.

  He glanced over and caught her looking at his profile.

  When their eyes met, she looked away. “In other words, you don’t want to talk about your family.”

  “What’s the point?” When that came out sounding far harsher than he’d intended, he muttered a curse, took a breath, and forced himself to back it down a notch. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk. It’s just I don’t want—” He broke off, not sure anymore what he did and didn’t want. “Damn it.”

  “I’m the one who should be sorry.” She looked away, so her voice was slightly muffled when she said, “This isn’t a date. There’s no reason for us to get to know each other better. I’m just…” She shrugged. “I was just trying to make it seem a little more normal, I guess. Which is silly, really, because this is anything but normal.”

  “You can say that again,” he said, and let the conversation lag as he sent the car through the twisty streets of Bear Claw, headed back to the loading dock where they’d met.

  Strange thing was, part of him wanted to do the small-talk thing, wanted to get to know her better. The urge was separate from the attraction, too, like he was looking to take a piece of her sweetness for himself by pretending he was the sort of man she’d be with if she’d had a choice in the matter.

  Because really, he was under no illusions on that front. Once upon a time he’d been the sort of guy nice girls went for, but those days were long gone.

  “We’re here,” he said as he pulled up to the back dock of the ME’s office, then winced and said, “Sorry. You knew that.”

  She looked over at him. Her chocolate-brown eyes were very serious, but her full lips twitched at the corners, turning up in a half smile that held more resignation than humor. “Let’s agree to stop apologizing, okay? This is weird for both of us.”

  He nodded. “Thank you. For doing this, I mean. And I promise I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”

  “I know.” She stared at the doors leading to the morgue, and he could tell she was thinking about what’d happened there two days earlier, about her friend who’d been killed. About what might’ve happened to her, what would’ve happened if she hadn’t lucked into the middle of an undercover op.

  “You want to bail out on this?” he asked.

  “Of course I do.” But she popped open the door and unhooked her seat belt. “I’d be stupid if I didn’t. But you need help.”

  She got out of the car before he could follow his impulse to call her back, to call it off and come up with another plan.

  Only there was no other plan. And they had less than three days to root out al-Jihad’s conspirators and prevent what he feared would be a major terror attack.

  CHELSEA HAD WORKED odd hours in the morgue before, during crisis situations and high-priority cases, when the cops needed answers pronto. She’d stayed late a night or two doing paperwork as well. But she’d never come back in after hours and been the only one there.

  Even the cleaning crews were gone for the night—which, of course, was why they’d waited until so late to come. But the silence was creepy, the dim lights even worse.

  For the first time, her job seemed less about compassion and more about corpses. Her imagination started playing tricks on her, showing flickers of motion at the edges of her peripheral vision, and sending the sly scrape of a footstep to her ears, just below the threshold of hearing.

  Then a hand grabbed on to her arm, and she jumped a mile, giving a little squeak of fear.

  “Shh,” Fax ordered. “It’s me.” He shook her arm. “Hold it together, okay?”

  She concentrated on the feel of his touch, the strength of his fingers, firm yet gentle on her flesh, and warm even through her shirt and light jacket. Using those sensations to steady herself, to anchor herself, she nodded. “I’m okay. What do you want to see first?”

  “Did Rickey Charles have a computer station of his own? An office, or a cube or something?”

  “This way.” She led him down a short corridor, gesturing to doors as they passed. “This is Sara’s office. Mine.” She stopped outside the next door down. “Rickey’s.”

  Fax paused. “Have the crime scene techs been here already?”

  She frowned. “You know, I’m not sure. Sara said something about them being delayed.”

  “Big surprise,” he muttered. “Al-Jihad has friends everywhere, it seems.” He glanced at her. “You got any nonpowdered latex gloves?”

  “Of course.” She went and grabbed a handful from the morgue, feeling strange and ill at ease in her own space.

  Fax was waiting for her in the hallway when she returned. She practically shoved the gloves at him. “Here. Let’s hurry.”

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at her, and his icy reserve softened just the barest hint around the edges. “I know we said no more apologies, but I really am sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “Didn’t stop you from doing it, though, did it?” She pushed at his shoulder, aiming him at the door. “Just do whateve
r you need to do.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  And he was quick, she realized over the next forty minutes as she watched him go through Rickey’s work life inside and out, and then turn his attention to Sara and Jerry. He even went through the desk of their forty-something clerical assistant, Della Jones. She was a divorced mother of two who sometimes dated their thirty-something meat wagon driver, Bradley.

  She was definitely not a terrorist.

  Then again, what do I know about terrorists? Chelsea thought as she hovered over Fax’s shoulder, her stomach in knots, half afraid he wouldn’t find anything, half afraid that he would.

  When he bypassed her office and headed for the morgue itself, she said, “You don’t want to toss my office?”

  He stopped and turned, his strong body silhouetted in the dim emergency lights that were the only thing illuminating the hallways so late at night. “Why?” His voice seemed almost disembodied. “Should I be worried about you?”

  “You seem to be worried about everybody else.” Her voice was sharper than she’d intended, the irritation closer to the surface than she’d realized. “I told you Jerry was harmless. And Sara’s my friend. She wouldn’t ever in a million years do something like this. Never mind Della, who wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

  He approached her, his footsteps nearly silent on the marble tiles lining the hallway. Stopping very near her, he leaned down and whispered, “It’s my job to be worried about everyone and everything. If I stop worrying, then I stop breathing.”

  For a second his lips hovered above hers and she thought he was going to kiss her. She felt the zip of heat in a time and place it shouldn’t have existed.

  Then he moved away, turned on his heel, and headed for the autopsy theater. “Show me the computers in here, and how to hack in. I need to see the guards’ autopsies.”

  “You were there when they died. What will the autopsies tell you that you don’t already know?” Her voice was starting to crack around the edges from the strain of the past few days. She was getting ragged, beginning to think she’d made a mistake.

  He was investigating her coworkers, her friends. And she was helping him.

  He might be looking for a traitor, but she already was one.

  “Chelsea.” He was near her again without her having been aware that he’d moved. He touched a finger beneath her chin and used it to tip her face up to his, not for a kiss, but so that she was looking into his eyes when he said, “This is necessary. I swear it.”

  The thing was, she believed him. Was that her instincts talking or something else?

  She stepped away and nodded. “Come on. I’ll get you into the files.”

  Five minutes later, he made a low sound of satisfaction. “Gotcha.”

  “What?” She crowded behind him, and leaned over his shoulder. “What do you see?”

  “Here.” He pointed to a line of autopsy notes. “This isn’t right. I know for a fact that this guy had a bullet in him, yet the autopsy only mentions the broken neck.” He glanced at her, his face too close to hers, his eyes going a little sad for her. “The autopsy was rigged. You know what that means, right?”

  “That we’re not your problem,” she said.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me?”

  She gestured around the morgue. “The state made us ship out the autopsies. They said we were too close to the case, that we had to pass the bodies up the chain.”

  He went very still. “Who did the autopsies?”

  “The FBI.”

  “Hell.”

  “Which means—” She broke off, realizing exactly what it meant, and echoed his, “Hell.”

  “Okay, we’re done here,” he said suddenly, powering down the machine. “Let’s go.”

  She didn’t even bother to ask about the rush, just followed him numbly out to the car. It wasn’t until they were back on the road headed to her place that he finally said, “What’s wrong?”

  All of it, she wanted to say. It’s all wrong.

  “The autopsy was overseen by a friend of mine,” she said softly, thinking of Cassie’s husband, Seth. “Someone I trust.”

  “Trusted, you mean. Past tense.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. None of this makes any sense.” She glanced over at Fax. “I was going to ask you—beg you, really—to turn yourself in to him. I thought we could trust him, that he’d be a good guy to have on our side.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think.”

  He reached across the distance separating them, and closed his fingers over hers. “Welcome to my world. Do yourself a favor and get out as soon as you can.”

  “Just tell me when and where, and I’ll take a flying leap off this bus,” she said, and almost meant it. But she’d seen too much death and comforted too many grieving families to walk away now, when she might be able to do something to prevent a terrorist attack and the deaths it would bring.

  She sighed, realizing that her conscience could apparently override her inner wimp and almost wishing it couldn’t. “What next?” she asked.

  He looked at her for a moment, his eyes intent, and something moved in their depths, making her wonder what he saw when he looked at her. A nice girl? A small life? Or something more?

  But he said only, “Let’s get you home before we push our luck too far.”

  He walked her through the woods to her back door, proving once again that her police protection was more for show than anything else.

  Once she had the kitchen door open, she paused. “Do you want to come in?”

  It was a foolish offer, a sign of just how confused she was inside, how much she’d blurred the lines between date and danger, adventure and stupidity. Fiction and reality.

  He shook his head, his eyes holding hers. “I shouldn’t.”

  Not I can’t, but I shouldn’t.

  “You’re probably right,” she agreed, but she didn’t move out of the doorway.

  He stepped up onto the landing. With her standing a tread higher on the threshold, the move put them eye-to-eye.

  Electricity buzzed in the air. Chemistry. Maybe it was a pointless, futureless, mad attraction, but in that moment the logic didn’t seem to matter.

  Only the heat mattered.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he said, but didn’t.

  “I know,” she said, and even though it made absolutely no sense, what she really meant was, Come inside.

  He leaned in and touched his lips to hers, a fleeting touch, there and gone so quickly that she might’ve imagined it, except there was no imagining the arcing shock of sensation, and the ripe, full flavor of him.

  She moved to deepen the kiss.

  He stepped away, shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Backing away from her, he turned and crossed her backyard, then slipped into the forest. And was gone.

  AS HE RETRIEVED his vehicle and set off for the deep-woods hideout where al-Jihad and the others were hiding, Fax tried to tell himself that it’d been the right choice to reveal himself to Chelsea and recruit her help. She was a necessary asset at a time when he was cut off from his normal channels.

  Despite that logic and the fact that he’d done everything he could think of to ensure her safety within the dangerous circumstances surrounding her, he couldn’t outrun the growing certainty that he was playing it wrong, taking advantage of someone who deserved better, who shouldn’t be part of his world.

  Then again, that was part of the horror of terrorism: it brought evil into everyday life.

  Unfortunately, that sometimes meant that the good guys had to bring the war into the picket-fenced backyards of America and apple pie. Fax understood the need. He’d dealt with the emotions—what few he had left—long ago, consoling himself with the knowledge that for every innocent life lost during one of his ops, several hundred other people would live on oblivious, never knowing how close they’d come to death.

  Usually he neither liked nor disliked the necessi
ty; he simply accepted it. Now, though, he was caught up in it, worried about it, thinking more about the danger to Chelsea than the menace of al-Jihad and the terrorist leader’s plan, which he could sense taking shape around him but couldn’t define.

  He knew he had three days—make that two and a half now, he thought, glancing at the in-dash display, which showed that it was well past 2:00 a.m. But although he knew approximately when, he had no idea of where or how, no idea what sort of attack was being planned. Without those details, the time line was next to useless.

  Complicating things even further was Jane’s continued silence. He felt a pang of grief for the woman who’d given him purpose—and absolution—after Abby’s death.

  He knew Jane wouldn’t thank him for the grief, though, so he focused on what she would’ve considered far more important—the information disruption caused by her disappearance and how to circumvent that limitation.

  Stop stalling and come up with a plan, Fairfax, she would’ve said.

  With her out of the loop, he didn’t have the luxury of knowing a response could be up and running with the snap of a finger. Worse, he strongly suspected she’d been betrayed from within the core of the few people she trusted. She was too smart to be taken out by anything short of betrayal.

  If al-Jihad’s compatriots were strong enough to do that, Fax knew they were easily strong enough to make him quietly disappear if he showed up on their radar screens. Especially given that they had someone inside the FBI, as evidenced by the fudged autopsy records. All of which meant he couldn’t risk contacting anyone in the federal food chain, for fear of revealing himself to one of the conspirators.

  “In other words, I’m on my own,” he said as he bounced his way up the narrow lane to where they’d been hiding the cars, and from there hiking up to the cabin. “As usual.”

  Only it wasn’t business as usual, not really, because he had Chelsea on his conscience and in his head.

  “You’d better focus,” he warned himself as he climbed out of the car and popped the trunk to retrieve the bulging knapsack that had ostensibly been his reason for the midnight errand.