Wyoming Christmas Ransom

by Nicole Helm

  “I don’t have a car.” She released his hand reluctantly. “The IV is out. You can open your eyes.”

  He opened his eyes and looked down at where the IV had once been attached to his arm. “Not bad, coroner.”

  She smiled a little at that. “I may be used to working on dead bodies, but I do know something about basic bandaging. My car is at Carson Auto. I can’t get it without Laurel or Cam finding me. It might not even be fixed yet.”

  “We have to try.”

  Gracie glanced at her watch. Surely Cam had found out Jen had given her a ride over to the hospital by now. He’d be mad and he’d be here any second. But Will was right: they had to try.

  Gracie believed in doing things the right way, but she’d been willing to make exceptions for Will. Laurel would never approve of this. She’d want them to sit tight and wait and let the police do their jobs.

  But sometimes the right way didn’t get the truth. Clearly, since Paula’s death had been ruled an accident. Gracie would have to leave Laurel and Cam and their rules behind if she wanted to help Will right now.

  “We won’t go out the front exit.” She frowned at him. “You need a jacket.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “It’s December. You’re injured. You need a jacket.”

  “Where are you going to find me one?”

  That was a good question. There weren’t any places in town that sold winter coats. Fairmont would be the closest place they could go for one. She could go prowling the hospital for unattended coats, but they didn’t have time and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

  Her phone buzzed and she glanced at it, bracing for another text from Will’s number. But this number was worse.

  Cam.

  If you’re not in my truck, which is parked outside the main entrance, in three minutes, you will be sorry.

  She had no doubt. But Cam waiting for her outside did give her an idea.

  “We’re going to have to be sneaky. And I’m going to feel super guilty about it, but it’s the only way.”

  “Fine with me. Just save the guilt for once it’s done.”

  Gracie nodded, but she couldn’t help wincing as she typed up the lie.

  Can you come up to Will’s room instead? With an extra coat if you’ve got one. He lost his in the fire and they’re going to let him out this afternoon.

  Will read over her shoulder with a frown. “He’s not going to help us. I can guarantee you that.”

  “No, but he might bring you a coat. I’m going to meet him in the lobby and ask him for the keys. I’m going to tell him to bring you the coat. While he does that, I’m going to move his truck to the back entrance, and you meet me there as soon as he leaves.”

  “Wow, that is sneaky. I’m impressed.”

  “What can I say? I’m an evil genius. Now it’s your turn. We have to figure out where the heck we’re going to go.”

  Will swore under his breath.

  “Precisely. Get to thinking. I bet you have less than ten minutes all told.” She shoved her phone into her pocket then forced herself to smile at Will. “Let’s just hope this works.”

  He rubbed his good hand over his chin as he studied her, and something about the study was...different. Not his usual baffled what is with you or his calculating attempts to try to get her to do something. This was almost like he wanted to understand some piece of her.

  She was clearly hallucinating.

  “Good luck,” he muttered.

  Gracie nodded and headed for the door. “Back exit. Soon as he leaves. Or we’re toast.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  She didn’t look back. Couldn’t allow herself the precious seconds. She had to be in the lobby before Cam got to Will’s room. She jogged down the hallway, then paused to make herself look calm and ambling before she pushed out the doors into the lobby.

  Cam was already halfway across the room. He looked furious, but he had an old work coat swung over his arm.

  “You’re lucky I’m more pissed at Jen than I am at you.”

  “I only came to the hospital. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “Do you recall someone shooting at you yesterday?”

  “Not at me, per se.”

  His scowl deepened and Gracie hadn’t thought that possible. “How can you be this resolutely obtuse?”

  “Years of practice,” she muttered. “Anyway, why don’t you take the coat up to Will, huh?”

  Cam’s scowl morphed into something softer. “Why can’t you take it up to him?”

  Gracie tried to hide her wide-eyed surprise at his very reasonable question. “I can’t... I can’t...” Cam’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, but Gracie knew at least one of Cam’s weaknesses. Distressed female emotion.

  She sniffled and looked away, working up looking emotional and hurt. If she pretended that she was upset over Will she had no doubt Cam would rush to do what she asked without demanding answers about what was going on. “Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said in a wavering voice.

  Cam grimaced. “Do I need to break his other arm?”

  “No. Just...” She took a deep shaky breath, hoping she wasn’t overselling it. “Give him his coat and let’s go, please. I’d like to wait in your truck, though. They might let him out and I just... I can’t...” She made a little noise, hoping it sounded like a sob.

  “All right.” He handed over the keys, looking supremely uncomfortable. “At least pay attention to your surroundings. Someone could be out there, Gracie. Someone is after you.”

  Gracie nodded, keeping her gaze averted in the hopes he thought she was crying.

  He muttered something but he headed for the hallway to Will’s room. She tried to walk at a normal pace toward the front entrance, but once she got out the doors she broke into a dead run toward Cam’s truck parked in the very front.

  She wasn’t totally foolish. She looked around to make sure no one was following her. But she didn’t think whoever had tried to kill Will knew much about her. Especially if she wasn’t in her shot-out car.

  Adjusting the seat so she could reach the pedals, she started the ignition at the same time. She peeled out of the parking spot and drove as quickly and safely as she could to the back of the hospital.

  For every second that ticked by, she worried about what could happen. Cam could stop Will. A doctor could stop Will. Whoever was after him could intercept him in the hospital and really, truly harm him.

  When the panic breathing came, she started counting through it. She would have made a terrible cop on a stakeout because she was ready to run screaming into the hospital, and when she glanced at the time on her phone she realized she’d been sitting here for no more than two minutes.

  But those minutes crept by until her nerves were strung so tight she was one second away from turning off the truck and marching inside.

  But that was when Will appeared out the back exit. Well, a lump in a coat that looked like the one Cam had been holding stepped out the door, but he walked right to Cam’s truck and opened the passenger-side door.

  He struggled a little bit while getting in, his injuries clearly hampering his mobility. Gracie tried not to let that worry her even more than she was already.

  “So, where are we going?” she asked once he was seated and was struggling to fasten his seat belt.

  “Let’s head toward Fairmont for now,” he said through gritted teeth, clearly in pain. So much so he was pale with it.

  But she couldn’t be distracted by pain or worry. Couldn’t be distracted by the fact Cam would be furious, and might even stop her if she didn’t get out of here now.

  “Hold on to your hat,” she offered before gunning the accelerator.

  * * *

  WILL TRIED TO think through the throbbing pain in every part of his body as Gracie
drove far too fast down the highway to Fairmont. Past the scene of his accident, and then Paula’s. It was strange to watch those places fly by knowing nothing was left of either wreck.

  “Your cousin is going to come looking for his truck.” Will felt the need to point it out.

  “I know.”

  “Laurel probably already has county on our tails.”

  “She’s not on duty until tonight,” Gracie replied in that breezy way she had when she was lying about something.

  “Okay, so say we make it to Fairmont undetected. Then what?” He winced as a bump had him hitting his elbow against the car door and jarring his broken arm.

  “Then we... Well, I don’t know. I got us out of the hospital. You come up with the rest.” She heaved out a breath. “I’m having second thoughts, Will. What are we going to solve by running away?”

  “We’re not running away,” he said firmly. “I mean I am running away from being stuck in that hospital, but we’re not running away from the problem. We need somewhere to hunker down and think and...”

  There were almost no businesses along the highway from Bent to Fairmont. Not even a gas station. But they’d just passed a sign for a motel two miles off the highway.

  “Turn around.”

  “What?” Gracie demanded.

  “Turn around and turn left at that sign.”

  “Why?” But she was slowing down. She reached a center divider and got onto the opposite side of the highway.

  “There’s a motel there. Off the highway. It might buy us some time since Cam and Laurel probably assume we’ve either gone to your place or Fairmont. They won’t guess a motel.” He had to hope.

  “But why a motel?”

  “I want to see if Paula ever stopped here.”

  Gracie was quiet after that, following the signs for the motel. The road toward it was windy and hidden, and there was a good chance no one would find them back here. It would buy them some time.

  “I’m going to park the truck in this back lot just in case,” Gracie said, pulling onto a patch of gravel behind the motel that was probably there for employees.

  It was a squat sprawling building. Ramshackle at best. It may have been white once, but now it was just grayish brown—a mix of peeling paint and snow and mud. A few windows that had apparently been broken had been repaired with duct tape.

  Will couldn’t imagine his put-together late wife ever coming to a place like this. She would have run screaming in the opposite direction before ever parking. At least, that’s what he’d thought, but he’d never imagined her an adulterer. But the mysterious “night” meetings, the coming home smelling like someone else, the giggling text messages she refused to show him.

  He’d let a lot of it continue without confrontation for too long because he hadn’t wanted to believe it. Not just the affair, but that everything he’d thought was true about her was a lie.

  Gracie turned off the ignition and turned to face him. He couldn’t exactly read her thoughts, but clearly she thought he was crazy. What else was new?

  “What are we going to accomplish here?” she asked gently. The kind of gentle he didn’t like from anyone, let alone her.

  “I don’t know who’s after us or why, but I’m sure it has to do with the affair. If we can piece together the affair, then we can piece together what happened that night she died. And there’s no way everything that happened in the past two days doesn’t connect to that.”

  “I don’t think you’re wrong exactly, but... We’re in danger. You especially. The further we dig into this, the more in danger we are.”

  “I know. And I hate that you’re in danger because of me, but we can’t go back now. We’re already here in danger. Now, the only choice we have is to figure it out before they hurt you.”

  “Us. Hurt us.”

  “Look, Gracie...” He didn’t know how to articulate what he wanted to say. “You shouldn’t worry about me. Keeping you safe is our number one priority.”

  “Why would you be less of a priority than me?”

  “We don’t have time to argue,” he muttered, moving to push open the car door.

  “Then don’t argue. Our safety is the number one priority. And for what it’s worth, I can’t find an argument for the theory it connects to the cheating, but I also know it isn’t easy to... Well, you didn’t want to know who the guy was.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Sometimes Will forgot Gracie had been there in those first dark days. So much so he wasn’t even sure of all the things he might have laid at a stranger’s feet when he’d been so blasted off his feet by her unexpected death.

  He’d built himself up to a confrontation. To demand to know why she’d betrayed him. Instead, he’d gotten Gracie on his doorstep informing him Paula was dead.

  He didn’t have time to go back there. He had to move forward. “I didn’t want to know much of anything about what an idiot I was when I was still in the midst of it, but I do want to know who killed her. I want there to be some justice for that. There’s no reason to take these drastic measures against us if someone didn’t kill her.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right, but...” Gracie looked at the building in front of them. “What are we looking for here?”

  “We’ll go in and ask if anyone knew Paula or remembers anything about her.” Something he’d avoided for too long. He’d spent two years poring over records and emails and things. He’d never wanted to deal with people who might question why he needed answers for the death of a woman who’d been cheating on him.

  There was no answer with that question, or, if there was, he didn’t want to find it. He’d never wanted to find it.

  But he couldn’t hide anymore. He couldn’t keep shying away from hard questions people might ask when Gracie’s life was in danger.

  “I’m sorry this is happening to you, Will. It isn’t fair,” she offered, apparently mistaking his hesitation for trepidation over the unfairness of it all. When in fact he was afraid he’d forgotten how to be a person who dealt with other people.

  “Life isn’t fair,” he returned resolutely. Because it was true. Life had never been fair, so whether he knew how to be with people or not anymore, he had to do it. He reached for the door handle, wincing as he remembered that he wasn’t sturdy or healthy. He had a broken arm and a million bruises.

  “Let me open the door for you,” Gracie said, already hopping out of the truck.

  “No. You’re not going to treat me like an invalid, broken arm or not.” He got the door open himself before Gracie could hurry over and do it for him. He got out of the truck, trying to hide the shudder of pain that went through him when his boots landed on gravel.

  He stood there in the parking lot for a second just breathing in the frigid Wyoming air. Everything hurt, body and soul, but he wasn’t dead, even though someone had tried to kill him. And more important, Gracie was here, and he had to do everything in his power to protect her.

  “I could do the asking. I can handle this and you can stay here,” Gracie offered hopefully.

  “You’re the one who told me we were in this together, Gracie. That means no one stays behind. Besides, maybe she never stayed here. It’s not her kind of place, that’s for sure. And if she did, it’ll be good for me to know. It’s been a long time.”

  “Why is it good for you to know how awful she was? She’s dead and it shouldn’t matter. You’re alive and good, and everything she did to you was wrong.”

  “But not wrong enough to die over.”

  “No, I know, but—”

  “Paula might be dead, and drudging up the affair stuff might suck, but as much as I need to find out who killed her, I need to learn from my mistakes. You asked me what I thought would happen after I found out the truth, what would be next, and to be honest I don’t have a clue. But something will have to change.” He strode toward the motel, the
strangest sense of purpose washing over him. Not that obsessive, driving need to find out what was right, as if answers would magically fix the broken things inside him.

  An end. So he could have a new beginning.

  Gracie fell into step next to him. “Her cheating on you wasn’t your fault, so I don’t think you need to learn anything.”

  Will smiled ruefully. “Maybe it wasn’t my fault per se, but I wasn’t a very good husband.”

  “How could anyone be a good husband to someone who could do what she did?”

  Even though Gracie looked fairly young, he didn’t often think of her that way. She had such a confidence and strength about her that often had him thinking she was older than she was. But the truth was that as much death as Gracie had seen in her job, she was still quite a few years younger than him and clearly had lived the kind of life that led you to believe in the goodness of other people.

  All he had in him anymore was distrust. And something like, well, he didn’t like the word fear because it seemed cowardly, but there was a certain amount of discomfort at the thought of letting anyone into his life. Clearly he didn’t have the right instinct when it came to people.

  He looked at the woman pulling the front door open. Maybe Gracie was the one exception to that. He might always be wrong about people, he might be a distant, warped human being these days, but he couldn’t deny Gracie’s goodness. Who could?

  That was not why he was here though. He was here to solve a problem. Keep Gracie safe and figure out who’d killed Paula.

  The order in which he thought of those two things was weird, but he didn’t have time to consider it. He stepped inside. It smelled like cigarette smoke and maybe mildew or mold. Gracie wrinkled her nose and again Will was struck by how wrong this all was.

  Paula was all about upscale and nice things. Any time they’d gone on vacation she’d insisted on the nicest amenities.

  But she’d wanted to live in the run-down town of Bent, even when they’d had opportunity to move elsewhere. She’d always explained that away as wanting home, but maybe that had been an excuse.

  “Maybe I’m going about this all wrong,” Will muttered, staring at the water-stained walls of the motel lobby.