by Janzen, Tara
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She shook her head, silently telling him it wasn’t his fault. “I should have known what was going on. I knew things were changing, but I didn’t realize how deep the changes went. The man who hired me four years ago wouldn’t have also hired a man like Johnny Shepherd.” She looked up at Dylan. “He wouldn’t have hired you.”
Dylan shrugged. “Four years ago Austin Bridgeman didn’t need a bodyguard. Some deals went bad. He needed cash, and all of a sudden the rules started changing. I’ve seen a lot of people get in over their heads that way. Most of them don’t come out on top. Austin wanted to make damn sure he did.”
When she didn’t say anything, he leaned down and brushed his mouth over the top of her head in a brief kiss.
“I’m going to go call Charlie. We’ll leave when I get back. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He slipped the handgun into the back of his pants and reached for his coat, but when he turned to leave, her voice stopped him.
“Dylan?”
“Yes?” He looked back over his shoulder at her, continuing to pull his coat on.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
For a moment he was tempted to tell her he loved her, that he’d had no choice but to do everything in his power, and some things that he hadn’t thought himself capable of, to save her life. Not everything had changed, though. He was still taking her to Charlie. He was still going back for Austin. And his chances still didn’t look very good.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and turned toward the door.
* * *
“Charlie. Dylan here.” He stood outside of the lodge, using the pay phone next to the soda-pop machine. He had more privacy there than inside, where late-starting fishermen and a few families were milling around, enjoying the breakfast buffet.
The air was comfortably cool, enough so that his coat wasn’t too out of place, though he would have been less conspicuous in a parka or a down vest.
“Dylan! Good to hear from you, boy! Where the hell you been? I’ve been calling you for three days, must have left half a dozen messages on your machine.”
“I’m on a road trip, heading in your direction.” It was good to hear Charlie’s voice, something familiar. Charlie was older, wiser, and had gotten Dylan out of more scrapes—political and otherwise—than he cared to remember.
“Great! We going fishing, or what?”
“Or what.”
There was a lengthy pause, and Charlie’s voice changed from lighthearted exuberance to almost sad in its seriousness.
“Are you in trouble?”
“I’ve got a woman with me, and she’s got a contract out on her. I need a place to put her for a few days.”
Charlie didn’t answer immediately. Dylan hadn’t expected him to. The older man had a well-earned reputation for looking before he leaped on all occasions and under all circumstances. It’s what had saved Dylan’s life twice.
“Can you bring her here?” Charlie finally asked. “Or do you want to meet somewhere?”
“Meet somewhere. In Seattle,” Dylan said. Charlie lived north of the city, on the sound. If someone had been able to track them, Dylan would rather they stayed on his trail in and out of Seattle, instead of him leading them to Charlie’s.
“Where are you?”
“North of Missoula, Montana. Nine or ten hours from you.”
“You’ll be here early evening. Let’s meet at that bar on First Avenue, the one up from Pike Street. Do you remember the place?” Charlie asked.
“Yes.”
“The one where we ate steamed clams and drank so much beer, they had to carry us out of there.”
“I remember.” Dylan almost smiled. They’d had some wild times together. “We’ll be there. I want this to be quick and clean, Charlie. I’ll send her in, tell her to go into the ladies’ room. I’ll stay in the background, you’ll see me, and when she comes out, she leaves with you.”
Charlie agreed, and Dylan hung up. He felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He had somebody else on his side now, somebody who could take care of her if he went down.
All he had to do was get to Seattle.
Fourteen
“I met Henry at Denver University,” Johanna was saying. “We even roomed together for a while.”
“Roomed together?” Dylan cast her a skeptical look from his side of the car. They had traveled across Idaho, entering the state of Washington on Interstate 90, and were passing through Spokane.
“We shared an apartment,” she explained dryly. “If you ever meet Henry, you’ll know it was a relationship based on finances and friendship, and study habits. I function better in the morning, and Henry can barely face the day before noon. We hardly ever saw each other.”
“But now you’re business partners, Wayland and Lane.” Dylan liked listening to her life story, Henry Wayland and all.
He didn’t like what lay ahead of them. Leaving her was going to be harder than he’d thought. He was tempted to slow down, take another day, steal another night, just to have her by his side a few extra hours.
“Yes,” she said. “Henry didn’t leave Colorado after school. I couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago, but when I decided to make a change, I remembered how much I had liked it there. We haven’t been partners for very long, so we still have some bugs to work out. Like his secretary for one. Mrs. Hunt hates me, and I’m getting tired of it.”
“A little female jealousy?”
She flashed him grin. “A lot of female jealousy. She’s very . . . uh . . . territorial.”
“About Henry?”
“About Henry, and about the filing cabinets, and the law books, and the telephone, and the pencils, and the coffeepot. You name it, she’s made it clear that every item in the office has a long and rich history lovingly detailed by her for Henry. She’s been there for a long time. Sometimes I think that’s why Henry asked me to come on board—to give Mrs. Hunt something to think about besides him so he could have a little breathing space.”
If Henry couldn’t handle his secretary, Dylan concluded he could pretty well write the man off as competition. He smiled.
“Why doesn’t he just get rid of her? Fire her?” he asked. “There’s got to be plenty of good legal secretaries around.”
“Yes, but probably none who would take his laundry home twice a week and iron his shirts.”
Dylan let out a short laugh.
“And bring his lunch every day in little plastic microwavable containers,” she continued, “and peel his oranges without the white part.”
“You’re kidding me,” he said, glancing over at her.
She shook her head. “God’s truth. I swear. She even makes him scones for his morning tea and spreads the jam all the way to the edge on each one. I’ve stood there and watched her do it, like she was painting the Sistine Chapel.”
“Sounds like Henry hired himself a mother instead of a secretary.”
“No. What Henry did was hire his mother to be his secretary.”
“Mrs. Hunt is Henry Wayland’s mother?” He shot her a disbelieving look.
“She’s been married a couple of times since Henry’s father passed away.” She grinned at him again.
Dylan laughed, then looked back at the road and laughed again.
“Henry sounds like a . . .” His voice trailed off, and he gave her a sheepish smile as he tried to come up with a less offensive word than the one he’d almost used. “He sounds like a wimp.”
“Oh, he is,” she agreed wholeheartedly. “Except in the courtroom. It’s the only place he can handle having conflict in his life, and he loves it there.”
“Is he married?”
“Only to his golf clubs. Golf is a religion to Henry.”
“Well, everybody needs something,” Dylan said with a sigh, meaning every word. He pointed up ahead at a fast-food restaurant. “Do you want to stop and get something to eat?”
Johanna took one look and groaned. They’d eaten at the same franchise twice the day before, which was twice more than she wished she had. “No, thank you, nothing for me. But you go ahead—though I don’t see how you can eat that stuff.”
“It’s quick and easy.” He shrugged and put on his blinker to get off the interstate.
“Food isn’t always at its best when it’s quick and easy,” she said.
“Neither is sex,” he murmured half to himself, then slanted her a sly grin. “And between the two, it’s no contest. I would much rather have spent the time we had together today making love instead of eating lunch.”
Johanna couldn’t fault his reasoning. For a moment she thought he was going to say something more, but he didn’t, and she didn’t push. There was nothing they could say to each other. He didn’t want to hear that she wasn’t going with Charlie no matter what Austin had done, and she didn’t want to hear him say no again.
He pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, but instead of heading for the drive-up window as he had for their previous meals, he actually parked.
“I thought if we went inside, you might see something you’d like,” he said. “They have salads. If nothing else, you should get a milkshake. I don’t want you going hungry.”
“A salad sounds good,” she said, though she had her doubts about a fast-food salad. Still, Dylan had enough worries without her adding to them. “May I borrow your comb?”
In answer, he leaned over the seat and searched through the duffel bag until he found what she wanted. He handed her the comb, then stuffed the bag back into its hiding place under the seat.
She took a few quick swipes with the comb as he got out and walked around to her side of the car. Running her fingers through her hair in distraction had become almost a compulsive habit in the last two days. She now understood why he had looked so wild when she’d first seen him in the elevator of her apartment building.
She had just finished restoring some order, if not style, to her hair when he opened her door. She started to get out, but an abrupt shift in his gaze warned her that he’d suddenly changed his mind. He turned to block her way, his hand pushing down on her shoulder, guiding her back into the car.
“Sorry, counselor, but we’re leaving.” His voice was casual, as was his stance, but his eyes told a different story. They met hers with a piercing intensity. “Lean over and open my door, then stay down.”
She did as he asked without question. He closed her door solidly behind her and went around the back of the car. When he got in, he immediately reached for the ignition wires.
“There’s a man inside the restaurant,” he explained. “I don’t like the way he looks.”
She peeked up over the dash. “What do you mean, the way he looks?” The sun was hitting the restaurant windows at such an angle as to make seeing anything inside near impossible. She could make out the silhouette of a man, among others, but she certainly couldn’t see him well enough to make a judgment call on his motives for being in a fast-food restaurant on the west side of Spokane. She didn’t think Dylan could either.
“I can’t explain,” he said, “but in this game, that feeling is adequate grounds for running like hell. There’ll be someplace else to eat down the road a ways.”
“Down the road a ways” proved to be over an hour away, a very long, silent hour in which her attempts at conversation had been dismal failures. She was worried about him. Since they’d left Spokane, he’d gotten steadily edgier. Of course, she’d been known to get a little edgy herself when she missed a meal. She was edgy now. Somehow, though, she got the feeling Dylan’s problems went deeper than hunger.
“There’s another one of your hamburger places up ahead.” She pointed out a sign next to the highway and read the directions aloud with a surprising amount of hope in her voice. “Take the next exit, then in a half mile take a left on Stanton Avenue.”
“I think we’ll pass,” he said.
“I know you’re hungry,” she said, cocking her head in his direction. “So am I, and I really don’t mind eating a hamburger and french fries.”
“We’ll have to stop for gas pretty soon. We’ll get something then.”
She sat back in her seat, sighing heavily as she remembered the pre-made, day-old sandwiches of their first night. She wondered if the next service station/convenience store would have better food or worse.
Worse, no doubt, she thought, her mood deteriorating with the knowledge. She was thinking more of him, however, than of her own abused palate. She hated to see his nutrition levels drop even lower than they already were. He needed decent food, and rest, and medical attention.
She bit back a frustrated oath. She would get nowhere appealing to his sense of personal well-being.
“Dylan.” She spoke his name quietly yet firmly, determined to get his attention and hold it until she’d said her piece and gotten some answers. “When we were talking about Henry earlier, you said everybody needs something. I need to know what you need. I know we’re in danger. I understand the necessity for being careful. But I do not understand why our situation has to preclude taking your basic needs into consideration. We have to stop at a doctor’s office. You have to have antibiotics, and I think you should have medicine to ease the pain. We both need to eat, and better than we’ve been eating. Besides which, quite frankly, I don’t think a possible paranoid delusion is enough reason for the two of us to starve to death on the interstate.”
That was her piece—and she got damn little in return for it.
She took his silence for a mile or more, waiting impatiently for him to say something. She waited, and waited.
“Dylan,” she started again when her patience had grown too thin to bear the weight of his silence.
“This morning,” he interrupted her, his patience also obviously at the end, “you eased my pain. This morning I thought I had you. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, taken aback. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“You’re here now. But where were you this morning when I woke up?”
She couldn’t believe that’s what had been bothering him since Spokane. “I was taking a walk. I told you.”
“Taking a walk?” He sent her a quick glance. “Or calling Henry again?”
She was stunned into silence.
Dylan saw the hurt on her face, but he didn’t take back his accusation. He’d been thinking hard the last hour, and none of his thoughts had been good ones. The man in the fast-food restaurant in Spokane had triggered his warning instincts like a four-alarm fire. He hadn’t told her, but besides looking like somebody who was looking for somebody else, the man had seemed familiar. Not in any way Dylan could put his finger on or identify, but he’d felt a definite sense of familiarity. It was a piece of information he was having a hell of a time computing. Kidnapping was a federal offense, so it was possible he might have met or worked with someone they’d pulled in on Johanna’s case. Or possibly only the man’s cautious, searching demeanor had been familiar. Dylan didn’t know.
He did know Johanna had called Henry twice before, and that she’d had plenty of time to call her partner that morning. He had inadvertently set a pattern of eating in one particular fast-food place. She could have told Henry where they’d eaten the day before and suggested that they would probably eat in the same place again. The Feds could have staked out a few restaurants between Spokane and Seattle. Austin could have gotten the information and staked out a few places of his own.
So he was paranoid. Who had a better right?
“I didn’t make a phone call this morning,” she said, anger simmering just beneath the surface of her words, “but you did.”
He shot her a stony look. No, he thought. He wasn’t that paranoid. Not yet. If Charlie had wanted him dead, he’d had plenty of chances during their five years together.
* * *
The last hours into Seattle were the longest of Johanna’s life. She though
t they would never come to an end, even as she prayed that they would. There was no winning.
Dylan had hurt her in a way only a person she was in love with could hurt her. That was another fact she didn’t want to face, along with him thinking she had finally betrayed him, and her desperately not wanting to leave him.
She had argued with him two or three times, trying to make him see reason. He had been unwilling to join the fray, and she’d been left with nothing but a self-serving defense and her own paranoid delusions. If Dylan had been imagining the danger of the man in the restaurant, that was one thing. But if Charlie had gone bad, then they were walking into a setup they couldn’t hope to escape alive.
“Dylan, you have to listen to me.” She had sunk to pleading again, but this time her pride wasn’t involved. “I’m not going with Charlie no matter what you say, so there is no reason for us to keep going. We can turn around and hide someplace else until we come up with another plan.”
“No, we can’t.” He didn’t sound very damn sure of himself, so she pushed.
“We have to. I’m not giving you a choice. I am not going with Charlie. I have reason to believe he’s the one who leaked information, whether to Austin or the Bureau, I don’t know, but—”
“Austin?” He turned on her. “You think Charlie Holter is working for Austin? Do you know what you’re saying? I’ve trusted Charlie with my life, and he’s never let me down.”
“I’m looking at possibilities, that’s all.” For the first time that day she noticed a sheen of dampness on his forehead. She touched his arm, and even through his shirt she could feel him burning up. “You’re sick.”
She whispered the words in shock. As she looked him over more carefully a wave of guilt washed through her. She’d been so wrapped up in her hurt and anger, she hadn’t noticed his sudden decline. He’d been fine when they’d stopped an hour ago for gas, she was sure of it. But he wasn’t fine now.
The skin beneath his eyes was bluish and smudged looking. A thin line of sweat trickled down his hairline and darkened the already darker hair of his sideburn.