by Diane Castle
“No, that was an accident,” I said, “and it wasn’t Cameron’s fault. I’m sorry if it put you in any hot water.”
Nash jumped in again. “Chloe, we need to talk. Outside. Now.”
I continued to ignore him. Heh. This silent treatment thing was totally working for me. We’d just see how much he liked it.
Lewis swallowed. “No hot water,” he said hurriedly. “Did anyone see you come here?”
“No,” I said. “It’s so early. Nobody was out.”
Lewis nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Why don’t I go upstairs and get the tapes for you so you can get out of here before anyone notices. I’ll just be right back.”
Lewis disappeared up an ornate staircase.
“Are you out of your mind?” Nash whispered. “Have you got any idea how much information you just gave away?”
I debated about whether or not to answer him. In the end, I decided that right now, defending myself was more important than continuing to play some childish game. “You have to give information to get it,” I whispered back. “And besides that, he’s got the tapes. It all worked out. We got what we wanted.”
At that moment, a little red laser dot appeared right in the middle of Nash’s forehead.
I groaned.
“What?” Nash asked. “Have I got something on my face?”
Without moving my head, I shifted my eyes towards the staircase. Nash followed suit.
“Chloe Taylor,” Nash said. “You talk way too much. From now on, I’ll do all the talking.”
“Well, wouldn’t that be a refreshing change,” I said.
“Stand up slowly,” Lewis said from the staircase.
We complied. “Slowly take out your weapons and put them on the ground in front of you.”
“We’re unarmed,” Nash said.
“Give me a break,” Lewis said. “This is Texas. Guns out, or I shoot first and ask questions later.”
Nash slowly pulled his gun out of his jacket and put it on the carpet in front of him.
“Chloe, you’re next,” Lewis said. “Move slowly, or I shoot your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, inching my right arm around to the small of my back. I pulled out my gun and put it on the ground in front of me, then returned to the standard hands-up, don’t shoot position.
“Kick the guns behind you.”
We did.
“Now Chloe,” Lewis said. “I want you to take the detective’s handcuffs and cuff him to the stair railing over here. Then I want you to take his second set and handcuff yourself also.”
I sighed. “He doesn’t have any handcuffs,” I said.
The laser dot moved an inch to the left of Nash’s face, and Lewis fired.
“Do it!” he said. “Or you’re both dead!”
“No handcuffs, I swear!” I said, eyes shut. “We kind of left them on Dorian Saks last night. He’s stuck at Schaeffer’s house right now.”
Lewis fired his gun again. This time, Nash flinched.
“What have you got to gain by shooting us?” Nash said. “Thanks to Chloe and her big mouth here, it should be pretty obvious by now that we’ve got nothing on you or your company. You shoot us, then you have to deal with two bodies, a lot of blood, stains on the carpet. Your wife’ll be mad, and the police will be tromping all through your house, and it’ll just be a big hassle. Plus, what if they try you for murder? You let us go now, and you don’t have to worry about any of that.”
“I can’t take that risk,” Lewis said. “If Schaeffer had a mole, and the mole finds you, things could get ugly.”
“That’s a big if,” I said. “We have no idea who the mole might be, if he even really exists at all. All we have is Schaeffer’s word on that.”
“You could be lying.”
“Of course we’re not lying,” Nash said. “If we had any idea who the mole actually was, we certainly wouldn’t be here. You know we thought you were the mole. Look, it ought to be pretty obvious to you by now that we are no threat.”
Lewis didn’t look so sure. Holding his gun steady in one hand, he pulled an iPhone out of the pocket of his robe and speed dialed someone. The call connected.
“Hey, I know it’s early,” he said into the phone, “but you’ll never guess who turned up on my doorstep this morning.” A pause. “Chloe Taylor and Cop Nash. Yeah, they think I’m some kind of company mole and that I have some tapes that Schaeffer was going to use as evidence against us. Large scale press release. They’re working with Gilbert.”
Another pause. “I know,” he said. “It’s Gilbert that’s the most dangerous.” Another pause. “Okay, when I find him, I’ll let you know.”
Lewis hung up.
I grasped at straws. “They don’t trust you, you know,” I said. “Cameron intercepted an email from Fitz that questioned your loyalty.”
“Chloe,” Nash said. “Shut up.”
“That is why I am going to make you take me to Cameron Gilbert so I can get rid of him.”
“We’re not taking you to Gilbert,” Nash said.
“You are,” Lewis said, and just like that, he shot Nash in the foot.
Nash crumpled to the ground.
“Stop! Stop!” I fell to the ground beside Nash, pulling off his shoe and trying to staunch the flow of blood.
Crap! This was all my fault! I was tired. Despite the few hours of sleep I’d had last night, I felt like I hadn’t slept in days. I just hadn’t been thinking straight. I thought I had seen an end in sight and rushed in way too fast. I should have been more careful.
It looked like Lewis had hit the very end of Nash’s big toe—a flesh wound. That was better than if he’d shattered some bones, but even under the circumstances, I knew Nash had to be in tremendous pain.
“Help him up,” Lewis said. “Get him to the car, or his kneecap is next. After that, it’s your foot. Then your knee. And so on.”
Nash was apparently unwilling to risk any more gunshots. “Car,” he said, throwing his arm around my shoulder. “Now.”
“But Nash—“
“Trust me,” he said.
Well, that was a tall order coming from someone who clearly had trust issues that he was taking out on little ol’ me. But what choice did I have? I grabbed his arm and helped him up.
Together, we did a kind of three-legged limp towards the front door and out to the car. Lewis grabbed a roll of gardening twine from the front porch, and once we were at the car, he ordered me to tie Nash’s hands behind his back. I did so, trying to keep the knots loose.
Lewis checked the knots and tightened them up, all the while keeping his gun’s laser sight trained on me.
Once he was satisfied with the knots, he waved the gun towards the driver’s seat. “Drive,” he told me.
I got behind the wheel, and Lewis got in the seat behind me, holding the gun to my head.
“Where do I go?” I whispered to Nash.
“I can hear you, you know,” Lewis said.
“Take him to Cameron,” Nash said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes, really,” Nash said.
Lewis pressed the gun into my head even harder.
I turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear, heading towards town, not towards Gracie’s root cellar. Surely Nash didn’t really mean take him to Cameron. I wondered how long I could keep up the deception before Lewis got suspicious. Did he have a whole lot of experience with this whole hostage driving thing? Surely not, I hoped.
I had only gone a couple of miles when I noticed that someone was following us. It was a black car with heavily tinted windows. Impossible to see who was inside.
“Where are we going?” Lewis demanded.
“To Cameron,” I said. “Like you want.”
“Where is that?”
I had a feeling there was going to be one heck of a gun bruise on my scalp if I lived to tell about it.
“Ease off the barrel, will you? You’re giving me a headache. “
>
Lewis eased off the pressure, but only a little. “Tell me where we’re going, or Nash gets it in the knee. Right here in the car.”
I swallowed hard. “My office,” I said. “Cameron’s holed up in my office. We’re almost there.”
I had no idea what we were going to do when we got to my office, but I just didn’t feel right about actually taking Lewis to the root cellar. I couldn’t give Cameron up that easily. Plus, there were also Miles and Lucy to think about.
I checked the rearview mirror uneasily. The dark car was still following us. Lewis seemed to be oblivious.
“If you’re lying to me,” Lewis said, “you’ll regret it.”
“Not as much as you’re about to regret waking up this morning,” Nash said. He spun around in his seat and shot Lewis in the forehead.
I screamed and let go of the wheel, gripping my chest to make sure my heart hadn’t popped right out. “Again? Again with the bullets in the head? Really?”
Nash reached out and steadied the wheel.
“I saw you leave your gun on Lewis’s floor,” I said.
“What, you think I only carry one gun? Good thing Lewis is obviously not a professional crook. A violent one, anyway,” Nash amended. “He didn’t even check for the knife in my back pocket, or my backup firearm.”
“A knife, too?”
“How do you think I got my hands free? Nicked my finger though. Darn hard to maneuver a switchblade when you can’t see what you’re doing.”
I shook my head. “Good Lord. You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“You didn’t really expect me to telegraph what I was about to do, did you?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“You guess not?
“That’s what I said.”
Nash sighed.
“And now there’s another body on our hands,” I said. “These things are kind of starting to pile up.” I was really going to have to start winning some cases so I could afford a therapist.
“Better them than you and me,” Nash said.
He did have a fair point. Since the black car was still trailing along behind us, I thought it might be a good idea to bring it up.
“Somebody’s following us,” I said.
“I know. Keep driving.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere but back to Gracie’s.”
I drove downtown and past my office. Then I took a right turn and drove several blocks towards the court house. I swung around and drove past Caliente, the grocery store, and then back by the office again. The black car stayed on my tail. The car was definitely following us. This was too circuitous a route to be a coincidence.
I wished Kettle had some dark alleyways full of garbage cans and punks—the kind you can pull into during a high speed chase, swerve back and forth a couple times, and lose the tail. But Kettle was open and spacious and made for easy driving. I decided I needed to get out of town and into the countryside.
I hung a left at my office and took Opossum Road to the outskirts of town.
The black car stayed right behind me, following noiselessly along like an eerie shadow.
Nash flipped open the passenger’s side vanity mirror and adjusted it so he could keep a close eye on the car.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I think I wish I were driving,” Nash said. “You drive like a girl.”
I glanced sharply over at him, trying to figure out whether he’d said that with a hint of a grin, or if he was just being a jerk. I thought I maybe detected a hint of a grin, but I put the pedal to the metal anyway.
“I’ll show you who drives like a girl,” I said.
My back tires spun on the pavement, and to the serenade of screeching rubber, we were off.
A matching tire screech sounded behind me, and the black car stayed hot on our heels.
I fishtailed right onto Farm Road 1538, kicking up a cloud of dust behind me.
The black car followed suit, swerving right and then left, but still managing to keep up.
Nash flipped on the radio and turned it way up loud.
“What are you doing?” The noise of electric guitars and a heavy rhythm threatened to drown out my voice.
“Car chase music!” Nash yelled.
“Are you serious?”
“A little extra motivation!”
“I don’t need extra motivation! Running for my life with a dead guy in the back seat is motivation enough!”
“Then what are you still doing out on the open road? You have to get off these long stretches, or we’ll never lose this guy!”
I veered left onto a smaller two-lane road that led deeper into farmland area. At a hundred-and-ten miles an hour, I felt a little out of control of the car. If my tail was bothered by the speed, it didn’t show. The car kept on keeping up.
“Fence post!” Nash hollered, pointing at a thick metal pipe lying across the road.
I couldn’t swerve fast enough to miss it. It popped up under my car and hit the innards with a sickening thud, and then flew out behind me.
I watched my rearview mirror anxiously, hoping it would fly up and catch the pursuer in the windshield. It smacked into his grill and spun sideways, back to the side of the road.
I’d been watching the rear view mirror so anxiously I had forgotten to look where I was going.
“Cow!” Nash pointed at it, jabbing his finger toward it repeatedly. “Cow!”
I swung right off the road and narrowly avoided a deadly collision. I managed to steer through a hole in the fence into some open pasture. The car bumped and bounced across the dried up grass, kicking up a cloud of dust behind us. This definitely didn’t feel better than the open road.
I checked the rear view mirror again.
The black car veered left around the cow and missed it on the other side. Then it hurtled through the hole in the fence right after us. Not good.
“You look forward, I’ll look backward!” Nash yelled.
I raced farther into the pasture, keeping an eye out for more holes in the fence, looking for a way to get out. The field was huge, but surrounded by barbed wire. I was penned in.
The car bumped along the uneven ground as we sped along, half airborne. Lewis’s body bounced around on the seat behind us like a lottery ball in the picker machine.
A herd of cattle loomed ahead of me. I honked my horn and they fanned out, creating a big wall of cow—the very opposite of what I had hoped would happen. I had hoped they would all run away and clear a space for me. I braced myself for impact.
Nash reached over and yanked the steering wheel right. We went into a spin.
“What are you doing? Let me drive, already!”
“I would, if you weren’t trying to kill us! A cow through the windshield is not a good idea.”
I fought frantically to get control of the spinning car. After two full turns, I straightened it out and swerved right.
The black car hit the brakes and made a cleaner turn. It edged in to try to cut us off.
I spun the wheel again and changed directions. The new route took me right into the wall of a barn.
Wooden siding crashed around us, and I narrowly missed a bale of hay.
A shovel handle speared my windshield and planted itself an inch to the right of my face in the padded headrest.
I shut my eyes tight as we went through the other side of the barn.
“Open your eyes!” Nash said.
I did, and discovered that we’d acquired a new hood ornament. A severed pair of longhorns, which had most likely been used as a barn door ornament, stuck upside down, horns first, into my hood.
The black car kept pace.
I squinted past the longhorns on my hood, scanning for a hole in the fence, and found one.
I floored it and headed straight towards the hole.
“You’re going too fast!” Nash hollered over a thrumming electric guitar baseline. “You’re going to miss the road!”
Too late, I hit
the brakes. I sailed through the hole in the fence, across the road, and into a stretch of barbed wire.
We both ducked as the wire dislodged the longhorns and slingshotted them into the windshield. Miraculously, they glanced off the shovel tip before bouncing into the windshield and cracking the glass even more.
I felt like I was driving blind. “I can’t see!”
Nash reached over and grabbed the handle of the shovel, giving it a good yank. Once again, I shut my eyes—this time, against the waterfall of glass coming down on me.
I heard Nash bash out the rest of the windshield and toss the shovel behind us. It landed with a thump.
Since the rearview mirror was now gone, I twisted my head around for a look at what was going on behind me. The black car swerved around the shovel and kept pace.
“I told you, you look forward, I’ll look back!” Nash said.
Returning my attention to the pasture, I spotted a cattle crossing, which provided a break in the barbed wire fence, and sped towards it. “Can’t you shoot this guy or something?”
“I only have five bullets,” Nash said, “and it’s a handgun!”
“So?”
“So, accuracy is already low at this range, and you’re bouncing the car so much I’d never hit him!”
“Let me get back on the pavement!”
I slowed up a bit as I reached the cattle crossing and fishtailed back onto actual pavement. It was a one-lane road with no paint and no curbs. The edges of the pavement just crumbled out into the dirt. Obviously not a public street.
Nash twisted in his seat and pointed the gun backwards. He shot once.
Our back window shattered, but he didn’t appear to have hit the black car.
The black car slowed pace a little and hung farther back.
“Hit his tires!” I said.
“What do you think I’m aiming for? Slow down a little! He’s falling back.”
I slowed, but the black car did too, keeping pace, but also keeping its distance.
The Texas countryside was nothing but wide open spaces, which meant this guy could hang a half a mile back and still be able to see us. I didn’t see how we were going to be able to lose him under the circumstances.
“We’ve got to get him closer or I won’t hit him!” Nash said. “Speed up some, and when I say ‘go,’ slam on the brakes. Got it?”