Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4)

by Rosalind James

  “Honey,” he’d said, “if it wasn’t in the will . . .”

  “No. It isn’t fair.” Faye had looked at Hallie and said, “Henry loved those guns. He called them family heirlooms. Of course, they were just hunting guns, not really anything special except to somebody who’d love them like he did, maybe just because they were so precious to him. Please don’t tell me they’re all gone, too. That would be a shame, and it would go straight against your father’s wishes. You weren’t here so you wouldn’t know, but I’m sure he meant all of them to be passed along to somebody who would’ve used them.”

  “They’re not gone,” Hallie had said. “But they will be.” She’d been willing to give a gun to Cole, and maybe she’d even have offered one to her uncle, but something in her was balking now. Maybe it was the sharpness in Faye’s eyes. “If you’d really like them,” she’d told her uncle, carefully not looking at Faye, “I can get a quote, then sell them to you instead at the wholesale price. Or any of them that you’d particularly want. But actually, they are valuable. I’m surprised you didn’t realize that, since you hunted with him. I’ve been told I could get forty thousand at least for the collection, even at wholesale.”

  Faye had drawn in a sharp breath. “I can’t believe you’d do such a thing. You’d give away your father’s things to strangers, but begrudge your uncle his prize possessions, things you don’t want that were supposed to come to him anyway? Family’s family.”

  It hadn’t been guilt, then, but anger that had made Hallie’s stomach clench. Really? she’d thought. Then where were you after my mom left? Why did I feel so much more welcome at Anthea’s house than I did at yours growing up? Even after what my father did to her mother? She’d found herself saying, “I guess if they were supposed to come to him, that would have been in the will. What I’ve given away so far is some furniture and a few bolo ties, though, not tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of guns. But you’re right about family. You probably tried to talk him out of disowning me, when he had that plan. I wish I’d known. It would’ve been nice not to feel so cut off from everybody.”

  She hadn’t missed the sharp glance Faye had shot Dale before Dale had shaken his head and said, “That was a terrible thing. Like Faye says—family’s family, but you know what a hard head Henry had. Anyway, you’re back now, and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you. If you don’t see it about the guns—well, I guess you have the right.”

  Faye’s mouth had tightened, and Hallie could almost hear the words that had wanted to come out of her aunt’s mouth. Like hell she does.

  Hallie had called Bob Jenkins the next day just to make sure. She’d had a sickening moment where she’d wondered if she’d violated the terms of the will already by selling off her father’s things, then had reminded herself that her feelings about her inheritance had been mixed from the start. She was afraid it was what Jim had said—now that she knew the money was hers, or was going to be hers, it felt like hers, and losing it would be a blow.

  “Is there any reason I can’t sell or give away everything in the house, if I want to?” she’d asked Bob. “I have to tell you, Goodwill will have taken away a bunch of the contents by now.”

  “No reason,” he’d said. “It reads, ‘for her use absolutely.’ The only stipulation is that you have to live in it for six months, so you wouldn’t want to sell the house itself during that time. It didn’t say anything about keeping the contents, though.”

  “I’m surprised it’s only six months,” she’d said. “I’d have expected him to go for, oh, a year at least.”

  “He wanted to do that. I don’t think there’s any problem with me telling you so. He thought, though, that it might push you too far. He wanted to hold you here, to get you back in his house, so he made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

  Which had, of course, made her want to refuse it more than ever. What was she doing, dancing to her father’s tune again? “Did you know about any promise to my uncle that he’d get my father’s guns?” she’d asked, abandoning the other question for now. “Was it in any former will or anything?”

  Bob had hesitated, then said, “His former will would be privileged information, so I can’t tell you either way. You have a copy of the will that was in place when he died, and that’s all that matters.”

  Not exactly an answer. “Well, I’m selling the guns,” she’d said. “Or rather, Jim Lawson is picking them up tomorrow night and taking them to Spokane on Saturday to sell them. So if there’s anything I should know, tell me now, because they’re on their way out the door.”

  “What you choose to do from any family obligation is one thing,” he’d said, offering up another nice little stab of guilt, “but you have no legal obligation.”

  Well, it was done. She’d given them to Jim, and she was here. Right or wrong, she’d made her decision.

  She’d driven from Seattle on Tuesday afternoon, her car stuffed full of clothes and personal items after the world’s hastiest packing job, worn out from supervising the movers who’d taken the rest of her things out of her apartment and into a storage unit. Her heart had plunged at the cost of last-minute packing and hauling services, before she’d reminded herself that she’d be living rent free for the next year.

  Not to mention the 10K a month. Yeah. Not to mention that.

  If she stayed.

  It was already late September, though. All she had to do was make it one more week, and she’d have that first check. She’d take it one step at a time. She could change her mind at any point.

  Except, of course, that she no longer had a job. Or tenure. Or an apartment.

  Move on. She stood in her new room, pulled out her phone, and dialed a number Jim had showed her in a coffee shop a week—or a lifetime—ago.

  “Hi,” she said. “Is this Eileen Hendricks? This is Hallie Cavanaugh.”

  A few sentences later, she’d set it up. She had a cleaner who’d start next Thursday. She’d never had a cleaner. Even if she could’ve afforded one, which she couldn’t. She’d never wanted one anyway, not since those teenage years when she’d felt all the awkwardness of having her best friend’s mom cleaning her toilet.

  That was why she’d called Eileen, though. Because she hadn’t wanted to, and because it was the least she could do.

  She hung up and thought, I’m in the house. Everything I hated is gone. I’m on my way. Now all I need is a job.

  VISITORS

  Jim never slept all that soundly. Ten years of bedding down with one ear open, because it made it more likely you’d live to wake up, could do that to you. Not to mention the months of lying here beside Maya, waking when she did, doing his meager best to make her more comfortable, watching helplessly as that got harder and harder to do. And then the months and years of lying here without her.

  So it wasn’t too surprising that the faint rattle woke him. He came awake fast and fully, like always, and lay still for a moment, listening hard.

  There it was again. Something metallic. Coming from the driveway, or someplace close to it.

  Shit.

  He was up, not bothering with shoes or shirt but going right for his service weapon. He pulled the Glock down from the top shelf of the closet, reached into the drawer where he kept his ammo, and shoved a magazine home, then racked the slide. Locked and loaded, in as much time as it would have taken another guy to decide to do it.

  He padded quickly down the hallway and into the dark living room, edged a curtain aside, and looked out.

  Two dark figures stood in his truck bed, with another rig pulled up close, tail to tail. The men were trying to shove something heavy across to the other truck. Something a whole lot like a gun safe.

  Jim was running now. Not out the front door. To the back one. Flipping the outdoor floods on, lighting up the driveway like Christmas, then opening the door and standing in the shelter of the back porch, out of sight, while he shouted, “Police officer! Freeze!”

  He heard a scramble and risked a quick look
around the corner. The two guys were out of his rig and hauling ass into the passenger side of theirs. The driver gunned the engine, and the truck pulled away. Its tires spun for a long moment, the truck’s forward momentum halted by the gun safe that was half in, half out of its bed, and then the horsepower kicked in, and the truck tugged itself free. The night was split by the sound of four hundred pounds of gun safe hitting the concrete driveway, and then the heavy vehicle was turning into the street with a mighty fishtail that had Jim, who’d run into the driveway now, holding his breath for fear that they’d go through somebody’s living-room wall. They took off down the road at close to fifty, and Jim lowered his weapon.

  No chance of stopping them. He wasn’t firing hollow-point rounds in an inhabited area to catch a burglar.

  He turned to go back into the house and saw Mac at the front door. The open front door.

  “Daddy?” she asked. “What happened?”

  A window opened on the neighbor’s house to the left, and Mrs. Sanchez called out, “Jim? Everything OK over there?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  George Carstairs, his other next-door neighbor, was on his porch with the light switched on, making Jim painfully aware that he was standing in his driveway in nothing but his briefs, with his weapon in his hand.

  “What’s going on?” George asked.

  “Attempted burglary,” Jim said. “Lock your doors, both of you. Just in case.”

  George was looking at the metal box on the driveway. “That’s a gun safe,” he said, displaying a blinding grasp of the obvious. “Want me to call the cops?”

  “I am the cops,” Jim said, ignoring the leftover adrenaline racketing around his body with no place to go. “Consider me called.”

  “You take care,” Mrs. Sanchez said.

  “Always.” Then Jim did go into the house, closed and locked the front door, and told Mac, “Go back to bed, partner.”

  “I want to know what’s going on,” she said.

  “And I’ll come tell you. When you’re in bed. One minute.”

  He locked the back door while he called in an attempted burglary to the Paradise PD, then grabbed a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and pulled them on, unloaded his weapon but left it and the ammo on the bedside table where he could get to them fast, then went into Mac’s room. He needed to see to that safe, but this came first.

  She was sitting up in bed with the light on and her arms folded across her chest.

  Oh, boy.

  “Hey,” he said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “Everything’s OK.”

  She studied him through narrowed brown eyes, her nearly black hair mussed in its braid. “That was reckless,” she told him. “You’ve always said that a burglary isn’t worth dying over, or killing over.”

  “And did I die? Or kill anybody?”

  “You were in the driveway,” she informed him. “With no body armor on.”

  “Yep. And I wasn’t there until I knew they were leaving, and that they weren’t shooting. I was trying to get a plate.”

  “Did you?”

  “Nope. Tailgate was down.”

  “Oh. Too bad.”

  “Yep.” He looked at her and got serious, because the moment when he’d seen her standing there hadn’t been a good one. “Listen good, now,” he told her. “If you ever look out the window again to see me with my weapon drawn? Or anybody else with a weapon drawn? You do not open the door. You lock all the doors first, call 911 second, and third, you lie down on the floor and wait to hear me or another officer call out to you before you unlock them again. One, two, three. Lock, call, fall. Got it?”

  “If I lock the doors,” she said, “you can’t dive back in for cover.”

  “I’ll take my chances. This isn’t an argument, Mackenzie. This is a rule. Lock, call, fall. And the answer is, ‘Yes, sir.’”

  “You never make me say that anymore.”

  “I’m making you say it now.”

  She heaved a martyred sigh. “Yes, sir. Lock, call, fall. Happy?”

  He smiled at last and bent to kiss her forehead and smooth the hair back from her face. “Nope. But I’m happier. Go back to sleep.”

  He turned out her light and closed her door, then called Luke.

  “Jim. What?” Luke’s voice answered after a single ring.

  Jim explained in a few sentences, and Luke said, “Well, shit,” and Jim said, “Yeah. That’s what I said,” and heard a soft female voice on the other end, urgent with alarm.

  “Hang on,” Luke said, and Jim heard him reassuring Kayla. “Right,” he said. “I’m back. What can I do?”

  “Need you to come help me put the safe back in my rig, if you don’t mind,” Jim said. “I’ll call Cal, too, but it’ll take him a while to get in from the farm, so figure in half an hour. And I know it’s three in the morning,” he added, “but this feels damn hinky.”

  “We don’t need Cal,” Luke said. “I’ll get Travis. We’ll be there in ten.”

  Jim hung up and put on his boots, then strapped his shoulder holster on, reloaded his weapon, and shoved it in there. He shrugged into a jacket, checked Mac’s room and saw her asleep again, locked the front door behind him, and headed out to survey the damage and wait for the guys to show.

  When they came, it wasn’t just Luke and Travis Cochran, the not-local boy who’d married Rochelle Marks. It was Rochelle, too. The three of them walked up the driveway, and Jim told Rochelle, “No.” He looked at Travis and said, “Absolutely not. She’s not helping.”

  Rochelle said, “Geez. Way to talk to my husband over my head. Maybe I came over to do womanly things, you know? Like brew coffee for the menfolk after they get done with the heavy lifting.”

  “Or maybe you were just curious,” Travis said in his usual slow, amused drawl. “And don’t worry,” he told Jim. “She’s not lifting a damn thing.”

  Rochelle sighed. “Overprotective much? I’m pregnant, guys. Not incapacitated.”

  The wedding had been in June, and Rochelle had already been a couple months gone. She must be a good five months along now, though she was tall and full-figured enough not to show it the way a more petite woman would. Like Maya had. She put her hands on her hips and said, “So, hmm. Luke says you guys loaded this thing up tonight, you put it under a blanket, and, what, nine hours later you’ve got people in your front yard trying to steal it?” She looked around at the rolls of carpeting and the blanket that still littered the driveway. “Under all that. Somebody sure had some inside knowledge. Henry Cavanaugh’s guns, though—it’s not a secret that they’re worth a mint. Best gun collection in town.”

  She reached a hand out for the bolt cutters in the bed of the truck along with the severed chain, and Jim said sharply, “No. Fingerprints,” while registering that Rochelle knew about Henry Cavanaugh’s guns. But then, Rochelle knew most things, and most people.

  “Oh,” she said, drawing her hand back. “Wouldn’t they have worn gloves, especially if they knew they were robbing a cop? Who robs a cop?”

  “They did wear gloves,” Jim said. He’d seen them during that brief flash of light when they’d climbed into their rig. Or rather, he hadn’t seen the gleam of pale skin. “But we might find fingerprints from the last time somebody used those cutters. They wouldn’t have expected to leave them behind. You going for a new career in law enforcement? You could sure enough do it.”

  “By which you mean,” she said, “nosy and without the good sense to run away.” She gestured at the safe. “I guess you guys had better load it up, though.”

  “You think?” Travis asked, exchanging a grin with Jim. “I guess we’d better, then. Except that Jim may have something he’s waiting for. You know, being a trained officer of the law and all.”

  At that timely moment, a cruiser pulled up to the driveway and Jesse Hartung got out, hitching up his gun belt. “Jim,” he said. “You called in?”

  “Hey,” Jim said. “Yeah. I’ll give you the story and some bolt cutters, to
o.” He told it fast, such as it was. “Older model Dodge Ram. Say ’05, ’06. Dark blue or black. Not a rig I knew, off the bat. Didn’t recognize the guys, either, but it was dark. Call them five ten and one sixty—skinny guy—and six one and two twenty—big guy. Wearing feed caps, so no hair color. I’m guessing late twenties to mid-thirties, from how they moved.”

  “Recognize them again?”

  “No,” Jim said with regret. “Mainly saw their backs, running away. Didn’t get the driver at all.”

  “Got an idea who did it?” Jesse asked.

  “Depends,” Jim said. “On who knew this was here. I’ll ask around.”

  Jesse nodded and stuck his notepad back into his pocket. “Do that. That’s an odd thing.”

  “Yep,” Jim said. “It is an odd thing.” He shoved a boot against the safe. “And this is a heavy thing. Want to give us a hand?”

  Once Jesse had tagged and bagged the bolt cutters, he did. It was a job, with the safe flat on the ground and no hand truck to help them out, but they got it done in the end. They were all breathing harder by the time Jim was fastening the shortened chain over the safe again as best he could and snapping the lock back in place.

  Jesse said, “I’ll take off, then.”

  “Let me know if you get anything off the cutters,” Jim said.

  “You bet,” Jesse said. “You take care. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Jim said, “I never do anything stupid.”

  Jesse said, “Yeah, right. They come around again, with your little girl in the house? I wouldn’t take a bet on that. If they do show, give us a call first. Before you do anything stupid. You call in an in-progress, and I’ll be here in five. Quiet night so far, and the drunks are all in bed by now.” He nodded to the others, took the bolt cutters, climbed back into the cruiser, and rolled away.

  “Right,” Jim said after Luke and Travis had tossed the rolls of carpeting up into the truck again. “Thanks. Sorry to get you all out of bed.”