“Then what? Don’t you think you owe me some explanation for all this? For what’s going on?”
“I owe you protection. You and Josh.”
“And I’m just supposed to accept that you’re the good guys and they’re the bad? Because you say so. And then at the same time you tell me you killed your wife. What kind of sense does this make to you?”
“None of it has made any sense to me from the beginning,” he said. “None of it’s ever made sense.”
“Look,” Becki said, still trying for calmness, but knowing she was losing the battle. This was too important—her need to know what was going on so she could decide how best to protect Josh. “You can be cryptic as all get out some other time. When this is over, when I’ve found Josh, and when we’re safely back home. But right now, you’ve put me and my six-year-old son in the middle of…God, I don’t even know what,” she said, despairing. “Men with guns. Being chased down the interstate. Being dragged through the woods in my nightgown. I think you owe me some explanation besides somebody’s trying to put a bullet in your head. I’m beginning to believe you’re playing me for the world’s biggest sucker. Conspirators connected by the Internet? I think Hollywood did that. Only I didn’t buy the premise then, and I don’t buy it now. Not without some proof. Some explanation.”
Despite her rising voice, Deke hadn’t turned back to face her. He was still leaning against the wall beside the window, one hand lifting the shade, and for some reason his lack of reaction made her angrier.
“I think that’s all a bunch of crap, Mr. Summers,” she finished, slowly and distinctly.
He turned toward her at that, assessing, the blue eyes calmly examining her face.
“You tell me the truth or I’m gone,” she threatened.
“Gone where?” he asked, and his gaze shifted back to the scene outside.
“First, to the office to call the local sheriff.”
The silence lasted a long time, while she wondered what she would do if he refused to answer her—if he called her bluff. Would she really make that call? Despite her angry ultimatum, she was surprised when Deke Summers began to talk, his voice very soft, his eyes still directed outside the window.
“I was working undercover. Inside one of the patriot groups. We’d been told they were stockpiling arms and explosives. Getting ready for Armageddon.” She watched as the corner of his mouth flicked upward and then returned to its original tight line, not really amused by their fears. “There were several families living together in this compound they’d built. It was up in the Smokies, the country around it really beautiful. Spectacular.”
His voice stopped, and she waited a long time for him to go on.
“And?” she prodded finally.
“And something went wrong. I’d found out what I’d been sent there to find out. I reported the information and then…” Again he hesitated, and this time she waited through the pause. “There was a raid by the authorities. It was supposed to be a simple operation to recover the weapons, the explosives. Something happened.”
“What happened?” she asked when his voice faded.
“Somebody screwed up. For some reason…they rushed the place, shooting. The people inside returned the fire and…all hell broke loose.” Again the thread of the narrative was broken, the quiet voice silent for a long time.
She waited, thinking about everything she knew, trying to put it together.
“Some of those people were killed? Some of the people in the compound?” she asked.
There was no answer from the man by the window.
“And some of them were children,” she finished. It wasn’t a question. It was obvious from what she’d been told by the man in the shadows that night. “And they blamed you?” she asked.
He said nothing, his eyes still focused outside.
“Why was your wife there?”
“My wife was five hundred miles away.”
“Then…”
Suddenly, she knew she was going to have a hard time formulating that question. This was all too hard. What she was doing. She forced herself to remember that this man had endangered her child. And she had to know why. She had to understand if she was going to be able to trust him to take care of Josh.
“I wasn’t going to work undercover again. We’d agreed. But I had to do that one because I was…perfect. I could get in. I’d grown up with people like that. Everyone knew I had to do that one, but we’d agreed it was the last time. Lila wanted a baby, and she thought what I was doing was too dangerous.”
Becki waited because she didn’t know what else to ask, what question would restart the halting flow of information.
“I knew those kids. I’d lived with them. I thought it was important, before we started a family, to get to know something about kids, to…” Again his voice faded and she saw him take a breath. “I’d never been around children before. And those were just…normal kids. Kids like Josh. I liked them. Liked being with them…a lot. And then they were dead.”
She wanted to cry. Or maybe she wanted him to cry. Given the depth of pain in that carefully controlled voice, she honestly didn’t know if she could listen to the rest.
“I’ve tried to tell myself that I’d given the authorities all the information they’d needed. They came too early. The kids were supposed to be away, already at school. They didn’t have to start firing. Some idiot issued a shoot-to-kill. It wasn’t necessary. Those people wouldn’t have resisted. None of it should have happened.”
He breathed again, his jawline rigid, the muscle pulsing once, its small movement exposed by the light from the window.
“I was the one they blamed. I was the one whose picture was put out on the bulletin boards. I was the traitor, the one who had been inside, supplying the information that led to the raid. Everybody said it would blow over. That they’d forget. Just give it time. So Lila and I went into protection. Different state. Different names. She still wanted a baby. She said we had lots of time on our hands, lots of time to concentrate on making a baby.”
Again there was a prolonged silence before he made the confession he hadn’t made before, when it might have made a difference. “When we cut out the lights, all I could see were those kids. But I never told her that.”
She looked down into the container of coffee he’d brought her, no longer steaming, growing cool as he told her what she had said she had to know. Despite the need, she wished she hadn’t asked. These were secrets no one should know. She knew, too, that the worst was yet to come. Whatever it was, the ending of his story would be no better than what had gone before.
“We had a fight. She accused me of not really wanting a baby. And then of…not wanting her any more.”
Something had happened to his voice. She looked up in time to watch his eyes close. There was a small negative movement of his head, light shimmering through the platinum. “She went storming out, because I didn’t know how to explain it all to her. I couldn’t tell her I was afraid. That life is so damn fragile. I understood that for the first time, but I thought if I told her that…Somehow, I thought…”
Again she waited, just wanting it over. Whatever had happened, just over.
“They’d put a bomb in the car. My car. When she turned the key in the ignition, it blew up.”
She closed her eyes against the force of the soft words, beating against her view of the world. Her reality.
“Then she was dead, just like the kids. Then they all were dead.”
“None of it was your fault,” she whispered finally, knowing that she had to say something.
“And if I had left it alone? Left them alone? They weren’t doing anything to anybody.”
“But they would have. That’s why you were sent there. Because they would have. Eventually. People who stockpile explosives use them. To blow up buildings where innocent people are killed. To derail trains. Those incidents are in the news every day. How could you know they’d never have used them?”
He didn’t
look at her.
“How can I ever know they would?” he said.
It was so quiet in the room that she became aware again of the hum of the air-conditioning. The traffic on the road. Somewhere outside a car door slammed. The sounds too ordinary against what had gone before. Against the calmness of his deep voice.
“No,” he said. She thought he must be talking to her, but when she glanced up, his attention was focused on the narrow crack his fingers were creating by holding the shade away from the window. “Damn it, I knew…” Deke was no longer leaning against the wall, and the tension in his body was not that which had been there before. Something had happened. Was happening.
“Get into the bathroom,” he ordered.
“What?”
“Bathroom. Open the window. Don’t do anything else until I tell you.”
“What’s going—”
“Now, dammit. Now.”
He let go of the shade and stepped away from the window. He ran his hand under the pillow on the side of the bed he’d slept on last night, pulling out the heavy handgun. When he turned around and found her still standing where she had been before, paralyzed by the unexpectedness of the threat, he pushed her toward the other room.
He didn’t even wait to see if she kept moving. He picked up the chair, one-handed, and fitted it carefully under the knob and then he retrieved the extra clips from the canvas bag and slipped them into the front pocket of his jeans. He backed across the room to the bathroom, where she stood trembling, the window opened as he’d directed. He eased the door closed behind him.
“It’s okay. We’ve got time. They’ve gone inside.”
“Time for what?” she asked, licking lips that were suddenly too stiff to form words.
He didn’t answer, but he slid the small window up a little more and then carefully stuck his head out and took a quick look. He stepped up on the toilet and bending, inserted the top half of his body through the frame. His legs followed, the movement a controlled somersault, absolutely noiseless except for the soft impact of his back hitting the ground.
She heard his voice from outside.
“Come on,” he whispered.
Knees shaking, she climbed on the rim of the seat and stuck her head out. He was standing just below, braced to take her weight. Somehow she couldn’t convince her body to move. She was terrified of whoever was out front that had necessitated this escape, but she was also, ridiculously, afraid to dive down into his arms.
“I’ll catch you,” he whispered, and the slow one-sided smile touched his mouth. “I promise I’m not going to let you fall. Trust me, Bec.”
Whether it was the familiar diminutive or her common sense coming to the rescue, she didn’t know, but suddenly she put her knee up on the top of the toilet and launched her body downward, diving awkwardly into his arms. He caught her without any visible effort.
“Good girl,” he said, as he literally turned her body upright.
She took a deep breath, moved by the compliment, by the fact that he had taken time to verify her small courage.
“Get in the truck,” he said, turning to open the driver’s door for her. She climbed into the cab and slid over the coolness of the vinyl seat to the passenger’s side. He stepped up, leaving the door standing open, and laid the heavy gun across his lap. He did whatever he had done before to the wiring under the dash and the engine caught—too loud in the morning quiet.
Suddenly here were sounds from the front of the motel. Voices. Someone shouting.
Deke’s face reflected nothing of the fear that moved sick-eningly in her empty stomach. He appeared perfectly calm as he pulled the door closed and then wheeled the truck backward in a semicircle, stopping when the rear bumper touched one of the trees.
“Get ready,” he ordered, and remembering the terror of the interstate, she somehow found the two ends of her lap belt. Hands shaking, she forced one into the other as Deke accelerated past the small cabin where they’d spent the night.
As he rounded the front of that building she could see that the open yard, which had been deserted in the faint light of dawn as she’d made her phone call, seemed full of men, not in uniform, no blackface. Their gear was no different than a hundred hunting parties she’d seen set out through the years, except the guns this time were beginning to lower, the dark muzzles pointing toward the beat-up old truck that was rushing through their midst, scattering people right and left as Deke pushed it for all it was worth.
Tires squealing, dirt spraying behind in a wide arc, he angled to the right across the open space, trying to reach the road. So tantalizingly close, and yet, under the aim of the lowering guns, so dangerously distant.
She heard the first shots as they bumped up on the edge of the blacktop. The rear end skewed, tires leaving smoking streaks as Deke pushed the accelerator to the floor. Something had rushed by through the open windows, brushing against her hair like a night beetle. Somewhere in her mind she knew—but couldn’t conceive of it—that what had touched her was a bullet.
Deke’s hand was on the top of her head, pushing her down. Panicked, she fought a moment against the strength of it, against his control, and then she realized what she was doing. She threw herself flat onto the seat, her face resting against his denim-covered thigh, her entire body shaking.
The glass from the small back window suddenly blew inward, into the truck, showering them both, stinging her back and shoulders. She felt the truck swerve and then right itself.
“Son of a bitch,” she heard the man beside her hiss softly, and she tried to struggle upright.
“Be still,” he ordered, his hand again spread out over her head, holding her down against his body. “We’re okay. Just need a cutoff. A road. Just…” His voice faded and behind them the fusillade diminished, the noise decreasing gradually with the distance he was putting between them and the guns.
She finally remembered to take a breath, and she eased her hand up to touch his. It was still resting protectively over her hair, which was littered with broken glass, still holding her face against the hard, secure warmth of his thigh. It took her a moment to realize why the back of his hand was sticky. Wet and hot. At about the same time she realized what that meant, the truck swerved again to the right, and she felt the wheels leave the smoothness of the asphalt.
Chapter Seven
Becki pushed upward against the pressure of his palm, and he released her. Just as she sat up, the truck straightened. Apparently, despite the fact that he’d been hit, Deke had not lost control. They were now flying down a paved side road, a turnoff from the main highway that ran in front of the motel. She glanced through the shattered rear window and was relieved that there was no one there, none of the men who had been swarming over the motel grounds.
“Any sign of them?” Deke asked.
She turned back, and her stomach lurched. A gash ran across his neck, blood streaming. She had nothing to press against the wound, nothing to stop the bleeding. Too much blood, it seemed, for the thin cut.
“Deke,” she said, and because she had to do something, she put her fingers against the solid warmth of his neck, now streaked with crimson.
Despite the speed he was maintaining, he glanced at her face. After a quick look at the road ahead, his eyes moved back to hers, and he smiled.
“It’s okay,” he said, returning his attention to the narrow, twisting ribbon he was following. “Somebody had a shotgun. A lot of sound and fury. I caught a few pellets that came through the back. Not straight on.”
A few? More than the shallow furrow on his neck? They would be in his shoulder and back, she realized, but it was hard to tell because of the concealing darkness of the black knit shirt he was wearing.
“It’s okay,” he said again, concerned about her. Her eyes were glazed, almost shell-shocked by the sudden unexpected violence. Unprepared.
“Have we lost them?” she asked. She couldn’t believe, given the number of men milling in the yard, that they’d gotten away.
/> “I don’t know, but we don’t have a chance of outrunning them. All we can do is try to hide.”
“That’s why we turned off?”
He didn’t answer, allowing the truck to lose speed as he noticed that the woods to their right had begun to thin, probably as a result of a wildfire. The undergrowth had flourished, the saplings and brush shooting up rapidly since the removal of the taller trees that normally deprived them of light and moisture.
Deke continued to slow the truck, and Becki glanced behind them, apprehensive about their pursuers. She just wanted him to drive on, to put miles between them and those men with guns they didn’t mind firing, even though they had to have seen Deke Summers wasn’t alone. She had nothing to do with whatever they thought Deke had done, but a shotgun blast was pretty undiscriminating. She could just as easily have been the one who’d been hit.
Suddenly Deke turned the wheel, directing the pickup off the edge of the narrow road and out into the dense undergrowth. Becki was forced to put her hands against the dashboard as they bounced over bushes and rocks. Despite that precaution, her head bumped once, hard, against the top of the truck, and she was aware of the small grunt of pain, quickly stifled, from the man beside her. He was driving through the nearly impossible terrain one-handed, his injured right arm held protectively against his body, trying to direct the plunging truck between stumps and around obstacles that appeared too rapidly in their path.
He continued into the heart of the emerging growth, its density becoming greater with each foot they traveled. Suddenly the truck didn’t clear, and with the resulting scraping jolt and loss of momentum, it was obvious it was going no farther. The engine died, and they sat in the stalled vehicle while the world surrounding them, which had been visible only in glimpses caught out of the bouncing windshield, settled into silence.
Becki took a breath and turned to look again out the back window—what used to be the window. She was surprised to find that the damage their passage had done to the flora was hardly visible. The small trees and undergrowth stretched behind them, appearing undisturbed except for those they’d struck, which were moving slightly, and even as she watched, that movement stilled.
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