The Lawman

by Martha Shields

  She looked up expectantly.

  “Oh, it’s just Wendell Nordan,” Marie said with a glance at the caller ID. “He’s the paper goods rep from Dallas.”

  Marie rang the call back to Tabitha, who took it calmly.

  Jake watched her for a minute. Was she too calm? Yesterday she’d been so nervous she’d jumped every time the phone rang.

  The look that he’d caught on her face that morning popped into his mind, and with it his suspicion that Hines had called.

  Jake stepped into Tabitha’s office, over to her desk.

  She smiled at him as she talked to the salesman, but there was a brittle quality to her smile.

  The call was brief. When Tabitha hung up the phone, her hand shook ever so slightly.

  Jake relaxed. Nerves. Just nerves.

  Tabitha looked up with widened eyes. Another sign of nerves. “What’s wrong?”

  He leaned down and kissed her. “Nothing, kitten. I just need a kiss.”

  She sighed, as if relieved. Her smile was genuine this time. “That feels good.”

  He kissed her again, then left her to her work.

  Marie’s grin was as wide as the Texas sky. “I knew it.”

  He grinned back. “So sue me.”

  He walked back down the hall.

  He was seeing ghosts again. If Hines had called, his men would have picked up the conversation. Even if somehow they hadn’t, Tabitha would have told him. What reason would she have not to?

  Still he couldn’t shake off his doubts. His gut told him something wasn’t right—and his gut was rarely wrong. He just couldn’t figure out exactly what his gut was trying to say.

  Jake had his men order sandwiches for lunch, then took one to Tabitha on the excuse of making her eat. He even managed to work in a little cuddling. Though he didn’t take it as far as the night before, Tabitha was as responsive.

  Although… Was there just a hint of desperation to her caresses?

  He couldn’t tell, couldn’t put his finger on anything specific to explain his uneasiness.

  Then, just as Jake was leaving to check on his men, Tabitha’s phone rang. Marie had gone out to lunch, so Tabitha had to answer it herself.

  Jake stopped at the door and looked back at her.

  She picked it up without hesitation. “Tabitha Monroe. Can I help you? … Oh, yes, Mrs. Wainwright. Thanks for calling me back. Crystal’s out of town, so I’m making calls to reschedule the fund-raising meeting.”

  Jake froze. She had no reaction at all to the phone ringing. Yesterday she’d nearly jumped out of her chair.

  Still, it wasn’t conclusive evidence. So what would be?

  Maybe if he checked her caller ID.

  After getting Tabitha’s house key from Dan Hammel, who’d used it when he installed surveillance equipment there that morning, it took Jake twenty minutes to ascertain that Hines hadn’t called her home phone. The one call coming there had been from the hospital.

  It took a little longer to get to her cell phone, since it was buried in her purse which was buried in her desk.

  They were leaving her office for the afternoon press conference when Jake stopped just as they stepped on the elevator. “Damn. I forgot my notes on the search areas. You go on down. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She nodded distractedly. “All right.”

  When the elevator slid closed, he spun around and headed straight for her office.

  “Forget something?” Marie asked as he walked through.

  “Yeah. I’ll just be a minute.”

  He didn’t close the door behind him. Walking behind Tabitha’s desk, he pulled open the right bottom drawer and grabbed her purse. Fishing out both cell phones, he checked the one he’d given her, the one his men could record. No calls.

  He quickly found the incoming call history on her private cell phone. The last call was at eight-eleven that morning. It was from a “local call,” but didn’t list the number.

  Jake’s hand gripped the phone so hard his knuckled turned white, as white as little Miss Feng Shui had been that morning.

  She’d lied. Hines had called her.

  He stared at the phone in disbelief. Why wouldn’t she tell him? Did she think she could handle a violent criminal like Branson Hines? He had an arrest record as long as Jake’s arm. The man was crazy.

  Jake tossed both cell phones back in Tabitha’s purse, then threw it in the drawer.

  And she’d told him he had a Superman complex. Hines had no doubt told her he’d kill the hostages if the police were involved, and she obviously didn’t trust cops to get her employees back alive.

  Which really meant she didn’t trust him.

  Jake dropped into Tabitha’s chair, feeling as if his heart dropped even further, into some dark corner of his soul where he’d never find it again.

  After last night he’d thought that maybe she’d begun to care for him, that she’d begun to trust him. That maybe she’d realized he was a man even though he wore a badge. A man who wanted her, needed her.

  For the first time in his life he didn’t feel a pressing need to be on the job all the time. He didn’t feel as if he would be missing something if he wasn’t there. Last night he’d been content to lie in Tabitha’s arms all night. With any other woman, he would have been up ten times, checking on the situation, on his men.

  He closed his eyes and banged his head back against the chair.

  This morning he hadn’t even kept an ear out for the phone while he showered. He’d sung, for God’s sake.

  She’d done that for him. She’d made him relax, made him see that there was more to life than dragging criminals off the street, made him forget all about crime for a little while. She’d made him trust her, made him want to be with her twenty-four/seven.

  But he obviously hadn’t touched her in any way. She still saw him as one of the cops she hated. She didn’t see Jake the man.

  He wanted to call her on it, wanted to see her reaction to him figuring out that she’d talked to Hines. But he couldn’t say anything.

  No doubt Hines told her to meet him alone. Jake didn’t know why she thought she could pull this off by herself, didn’t know why she would even want to, but he had to let her think she was doing it.

  In one of his first kidnapping situations, years ago, he let the father take the money in. Because the man knew dozens of police officers were hidden, watching him, he kept looking around for them, clueing the kidnapper in to their presence. Eight people were killed that day, including four officers.

  Jake had never forgotten that lesson.

  “You okay?”

  Jake looked up to see Marie in the doorway. He shook off his dejection. He had to seem normal. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

  She nodded as if she only half believed him. “Good things, I hope.”

  Jake didn’t release the bitter laugh that bubbled to the surface. “Yeah, well, guess I need to get down to the press conference. Thanks for waking me up.”

  “What time are we going home?” Tabitha asked.

  Jake studied her carefully averted face. She’d been quiet since the press conference. In fact, this was the first thing she’d said since then that wasn’t answering a question of his. “I don’t know. Why? You tired?”

  She shrugged, but the movement was jerky. “Billy’s probably getting hungry. He needs to be fed.”

  Jake had been wondering how she planned to separate herself from him. She needed to be alone so she could slip away and meet Hines.

  Throughout the day Jake had been quietly arranging for backup. Since he didn’t know the location, the force he was assembling had to be on standby, had to wait on his signal to move in when he knew where they were going.

  The only thing Jake had been able to do to prepare Tabitha was to show her some self-defense moves on the pretext of being restless and wanting to kill time. At the same time he’d given her a can of pepper spray just in case something happened when he wasn’t around.

  Jake glance
d at the window behind Tabitha. About an hour until dark. That must be the time Hines had told her to meet him.

  Didn’t kidnappers have any imagination? Hines was going strictly by the book. Dark or dusk was a favorite time of kidnappers for meetings because the light was so uncertain. Shadows distorted things, or made them disappear altogether.

  He would have laughed at Hines being such a cliché, but he wasn’t in the mood. “I still have a couple of things I need to take care of around here. Probably another hour or so. You want to go on home and feed him?”

  “By myself?”

  Jake probably wouldn’t have heard the hopefulness in her voice if he hadn’t been looking for it. “Now, kitten, would I do that to you? No, not by yourself. I’ll have a squad car take you home.”

  The officers he’d already chosen had orders to let her slip away “unnoticed.” Jake would be parked down her street in one of the department’s unmarked vehicles, waiting to follow her.

  “I don’t want to leave my car here overnight,” she said.

  “Of course not. They’ll follow you home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be sure to let them search your house before you go in.”

  She nodded. “I’m getting used to it.”

  He watched her gather her things. This might be the last time he saw her alive. He wanted to shake her, demand to know why she was being so irrational as to meet Hines on her own, urge her to be careful.

  Most of all, however, he wanted to know why she couldn’t love him.

  But he couldn’t make her love him. Letting on that he knew would only distract her when she needed all her concentration to come out of this unharmed.

  As she rounded the desk, he took her in his arms and kissed her hard. She returned his kiss fervently, wrapping her arms around him as if she never wanted to let go, which made it even harder to let her go.

  Finally he pulled back and gently forced her to look at him. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  She dropped her gaze. “I’m only going home.”

  He drew his thumb across her cheek. “I know.” He dropped another kiss on her lips. “I’ll miss you.”

  She stepped away from his arms. “You’ll see me in just a little while, Jake.”

  God willing.

  He walked her to the elevator and hit the down button. “There’s a couple of squad cars patrolling the hospital perimeter. I’ll radio one of them to follow you home.”

  “All right.” As the elevator dinged, she searched his eyes.

  “Something wrong?” he asked, giving her one last chance to tell him.

  She stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him, then trailed a hand down his face. “I’ll see you.”

  Unable to let her go, Jake hugged her tight. “Why don’t you just wait for me? I won’t be that long.”

  She returned the hug, then drew away. “Billy needs to be fed.”

  “Yeah.” He tried to smile but didn’t think he was all that successful.

  The elevator began to close, and he reached out to hold it for her.

  She stepped in, then turned to face him. “See you later.”

  “Yeah.”

  As it closed, he thought he heard the words “I love you.” He quickly punched the down button to make it open again, but it didn’t.

  She was gone.

  Sixteen

  Branson Hines was right. The dirt road he’d described wasn’t easy to find. Extreme South Texas consisted of dirt and scrub, so distinguishing a road from the rest of the dirt in fading light took all of Tabitha’s limited concentration.

  Finally spotting some ruts disappearing between two hills, she turned west just as the sun blinked its last. Utterly flat coastal plains stretched east from Mission Creek to the Gulf, but rolling hills undulated westward all the way into Laredo. Highway 16 seemed to be the dividing line.

  Since she didn’t know how dark Branson Hines wanted it to be when she arrived, Tabitha stopped her car just out of sight of the highway.

  She glanced down at Billy, who stared at her from his crouched position in the passenger seat. He’d crawled out from under the seat just a few minutes ago. “I’m sorry, Billy boy, but you had to come. I need you.”

  She slowly reached to pet him. He blinked as she stroked his head, making her sigh with relief. “Good, you’re not too freaked. You’ve got an important part to play in this fiasco, so you need to be calm.”

  Tabitha rolled her eyes. “A heck of a lot calmer than I am at the moment. You need to be my sweet baby. Can you do that, Billy? Your mom’s life depends on it. No pressure or anything.”

  She laughed nervously at her weak joke, mostly to keep from screaming. “I wish Jake were here. Jeez. What am I doing? Why didn’t I tell him? Why didn’t I let him help me? Am I nuts? I don’t know what I’m doing. I could ruin everything.”

  The cat started purring just as Tabitha noticed it was full dark. “Yeah, well, at least you’re calm. That’s something. It’s too late to turn back now. It’s all up to us.”

  Taking a deep breath, she shifted her car into Drive. To keep Billy as calm as possible, she kept a hand on him, petting him, as they slowly bumped along the rough road.

  She guided them over and around hills of varying size, wondering how far she had to go, how far she’d gone. “What if I missed them? What if we’re too—”

  Headlights flashed from a relatively flat field as she rounded a bend.

  Tabitha stepped on the brake reflexively, her heart pounding against her ears. “Oh, Billy, what are we doing?”

  She swallowed her fear. She’d made the decision to do this hours ago. It was too late to turn back now.

  As she guided her car toward the shadows, her lights bounced off three people—two men and a woman.

  “At least Cait and Dr. Walters are alive.”

  Jake picked up his cell phone as he drove, on purpose, past the dirt road that Tabitha had turned down.

  “She just turned onto a dirt road heading west,” he said into his phone. He’d kept an open line on his cell phone since leaving Mission Creek. Since Hines could be monitoring police bands, he didn’t want to chance a two-way.

  Burl Terry was on the other end of the line, leading the rescue force following Jake.

  “That’s the drive to the old Miller ranch,” Burl said. “It was abandoned thirty-odd years ago.”

  “Is there a ranch house?” Jake asked. “Or a barn or some type of shelter?”

  “Nothing at all,” the chief answered. “Brush fire got every stick of wood standing for about a five-mile stretch. No one knows exactly when.”

  Jake continued down Highway 16 for another hundred yards. Then checking the empty road in both directions, he turned off his headlights and drove back. “Any idea where Hines’ll be waiting for her?”

  “Not a damn one,” Burl said.

  “How far back does the road go?”

  “Six or seven miles.”

  “Great. The hills are a blessing and a curse. If I go on foot, it could take an hour to reach them. If I drive, I could be on top of them before I know it.”

  “If I were a betting man—”

  “Which you are.” Jake turned off the highway onto the dirt road. Dusk was rapidly turning into night, though it hadn’t quite made it there yet.

  Burl ignored him. “I’d lay odds that Hines’ll pick an open area, where he can see what’s coming at him for a ways. There’s a couple of flat stretches along the road. One about two miles in, the other about five.”

  “All right. I’ll let you—” He hit the brakes. “Damn.”

  “What is it?”

  “She stopped about a quarter mile in. Must be waiting for full dark. Hope my brake lights didn’t reflect off any of these hills.”

  “Nah. Texas dirt is so dull it soaks up every ray of light that hits it.”

  Jake sat still for a long moment, watching the shadowy car ahead. All he could see was the back end. The taillights were glowing but not bright. She h
ad it in Park.

  “I guess I’m clear. I’ll give you the heads-up when she starts moving.”

  The short drive across the rough field seemed to take an hour to Tabitha.

  On the other hand, when Hines waved his gun, motioning her to stop, it was far too soon. Guiding her car perpendicular to Hines’s truck so she could have it between herself and him when she got out with the cat, Tabitha shifted her car into Park, then switched off the engine.

  “Turn off your headlights,” Hines screamed in the now-familiar nasal voice. She’d been hearing it in her head all day.

  She twisted the stick on the left side of the steering wheel, and the field went dark. That was both good and bad. Branson Hines’s view of the “baby” would be that much more limited. But then, her view of him would be, too.

  “Get out real slow-like, and hold up the baby so’s I can see him. It is a him, ain’t it? You wouldn’t try to palm no girl off on me, now would ya?”

  “It’s a boy,” Tabitha called back as she wrapped Billy in the baby blanket she’d managed to sneak out of the maternity ward. At least she didn’t have to lie about that. Not that it would bother her. Hines had done much worse. And she was about to.

  Holding Billy in the crook of her left arm, she mentally ran over her plan one last time. She made sure the top on the baby powder was barely on, then she arranged the blanket so the can of pepper spray Jake had given her that afternoon couldn’t be seen in her left hand.

  “What’s taking you so long?”

  “Babies need a lot of stuff. Plus I’m trying not to get him upset. You don’t want a screaming baby on your hands, do you?”

  “I reckon not. But get on outta there.”

  “All right. I’m coming.” She opened the car door, grateful that she had remembered to set the inside light to not come on.

  It wasn’t easy getting out of the car while scratching a cat’s tummy at the same time—with the same hand holding a bottle of baby powder with the top barely on. But somehow Tabitha managed not to upset Billy by dousing him with powder.

  “C’mon, lady. We ain’t got all night.”

  Tabitha hesitated on the pretext of adjusting the blanket, glaring across the hood of her car at the weasely little shadow there. She wanted to point out to Branson Hines that a man who had tortured an entire town for days could wait for a few minutes. But she didn’t dare.