The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  Her jaw wavered and her eyes turned shimmery, but she held her tears back.

  “You can stop this,” he implored her, “Whatever it is, I’ll help you. But you’ve got to trust me.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Can’t stop it? Or can’t trust me?” Impatience flared again. He already knew the answer. “Dammit, you know who I am. You know what I am. All I know about you is that you’ve lied to everyone in this town, and yet I still took a bullet to protect you back there. And you don’t trust me?”

  “I—” She stopped before her second word. “You what?”

  Raking a hand—the one he could move without feeling as if someone was taking a razor blade to his back—through his hair, he struggled to his knees. The effort required more concentration than it should have. “Never mind,” he said, hoping his voice was steadier than his hand, “Just—”

  “You’re hurt?” She looked him up and down, her tears suddenly pooled in wells of deep-blue concern. “Where are you hurt?”

  He locked gazes with her as she grabbed the flap of his jacket and peeled it back. Resignedly, he shrugged it off his shoulder and rotated to give her a partial view of his back.

  From the way his shirt was stuck to his skin—not to mention her startled gasp—he guessed there must be a fair amount of blood.

  “Ow, sh-” Shane gasped, sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep. He never finished the expletive. More because he ran out of air than because he was worried about insulting Gigi’s—or whoever-she-was’s—sensibilities.

  She stopped whatever she’d been doing that set his back on fire and stepped around in front of him. A bloody gauze pad still in her hand, she peered at him like a specimen under a microscope, then without a word, cupped her hand around the back of his neck and shoved his head between his knees.

  “Hey!” he called out, “What are you doing?”

  “You’re white as a ghost.”

  “I’m fine.” He sat up, biting back a small moan at the dizziness that assailed him.

  Rolling her eyes, she shoved his head back down. “Of course you are. Now take deep, slow breaths before you pass out.”

  “I’m not going to pass out.” But he wasn’t going to try sitting up again just yet, either.

  Behind him, he heard her tear something. Looking back, he saw her soak a clean gauze pad in something out of a large brown bottle.

  “This is going to sting a little.”

  He groaned again, figuring that if what he’d felt before was any indication, it was going to do more than just sting. “Just get it over with.”

  She steadied his shoulder with her hand. His muscles automatically bunched under her touch, anticipating what was to come.

  “Try to relax. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  He tried, but his nervous system had other ideas. She was still holding that soaked gauze.

  “You know,” she said, “you weren’t such a wimp last time you got shot, and that wound was a lot worse than this.”

  He clamped down on his tongue with his teeth as the gauze pad hit his ravaged back. He knew she was trying to distract him with her teasing. It wasn’t working, but he’d be damned if he’d let her know how much what she was doing hurt.

  She drew the gauze across the furrow a bullet had gouged across the middle of his back—far enough to the side to be well clear of his spine, thank God. His lungs burned with the need to draw a breath. He tried visualizing the skim of her fingertips—without the bloody gauze—across his bare skin, but that only succeeded in making other parts of him burn as well. He needed air; he couldn’t seem to fill his chest. The heat got hotter. A sweat broke out on his forehead.

  Thankfully, the cleaning and prodding ended.

  “You okay?” she asked when the agony stopped.

  “You tell me,” he said, lifting his head cautiously.

  “You’ll live. The wound is fairly deep, but the bullet just grazed you. It may have nicked a rib, but nothing’s broken, and the bleeding is stopped and it’s clean.” She snapped off her latex gloves as he sat up gingerly. “You’re lucky I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re a vet.” He turned around, narrowing his eyes. “You are a vet, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m a vet. What do you think I am, some kind of quack?”

  He frowned as she taped a bandage to his back. She was too good to be a fake. The ranchers around here would have seen through her ruse in a week if she wasn’t the real deal.

  He straightened up, studying the ruined shirt in his hands, then tucked it under the seat and slid his leather jacket on over his bare chest. It was torn too, but at least the dark leather didn’t show the blood as much, and it was too cold to go without. “Tell me about this murder you saw.” Now that the torture was over, the interrogation could continue.

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  He knew differently by the tensing of her shoulders, the way the chords of her neck pulled tight. “Humor me.”

  She shrugged, packing away her supplies. “I saw two men. Then I heard a car, and there were shots. Then it was over.”

  He clenched his fists, knowing there was a lot more to it than that. She had closed her eyes when she stopped talking. Deep lines carved themselves in a frown at the corners of her mouth. It was the same look she’d worn when she’d first told him she’d witnessed a murder. Like she was remembering.

  Which she probably was, he realized. He’d seen enough violence to know the images stayed with you, like bad movies on videotape, playing over and over in your mind.

  “Who was killed?”

  Her eyes opened. “It’s best if you don’t know any more.”

  “Best for who?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  He hopped out of the Jeep and stood next to her as she fidgeted with paraphernalia in her first aid kit. “No, I don’t. You walked away from a murder investigation. Left a killer on the street.”

  She was ignoring him. He grabbed her wrist. “How many more people do you think he’s killed since you let him go?”

  She wheeled angrily. “I did not let him go. I gave up my work and my home—life as I knew it—to do my part for law and order, to be a good citizen. And this is what I get in return. A life on the run.”

  He felt like he’d just been whipsawed. “You were a protected witness?”

  “If you can call what they did protection. I barely survived it.”

  “Someone got to you?”

  She nodded, torture swimming in her expression. “With a little help.”

  “Help from who?” She didn’t answer, but her silence was telling. As telling as her lack of trust in cops. “Someone on the inside. A cop?”

  She shook her head, her lips clamped tight. He didn’t think he’d get any more out of her, but she raised her head, her lips thin and tight. “I wasn’t even in protective custody two days. He got to me that quick.”

  “And you’ve been running ever since.” He loosened his grip on her wrist and ran his hand up her arm in a long stroke. “You can’t let whoever did that get away with it,” he told her.

  “I never saw him.”

  That didn’t sound right. If she hadn’t seen the shooter, why had she been put in protective custody? He would’ve liked to ask, but they were running out of time. If that guy was lucky enough to get his car back on the road in one piece, he could be on them any minute.

  Besides, she looked like she was at the end of her rope. This wasn’t the time for an in-depth interrogation. He needed to get her someplace safe. Someplace she could unwind without worrying about a blue Mercedes. Then he would coax some more answers out of her.

  “Whether you saw him or not doesn’t matter,” he said. “Someone thinks you know something. And he’s willing to kill you and anyone else who gets in his way because of it.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Go back to New York? I might as well paint a big, red target on my back.”

  He paused a moment, tr
ying to decide how best to present his plan. He decided straight out was the only way. “I have a friend in the Justice Department—”

  “No!”

  “This friend is straight as an arrow, you can trust—”

  She jumped up, hands on her hips and defiance swirling like a cloud around her. “No. I’m not putting my life in anyone else’s hands. Not again.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest as if to stop the shaking in her body. She wasn’t going to trust anyone on his say-so; hell, she didn’t even trust him. Someone had really worked a number on her. He planned to find out who, and then work a few numbers of his own on him for putting her through this.

  For now though, he focused on calm. She needed his reassurance, not his rage. “Nothing will go wrong this time. I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Her head snapped up. “I don’t want you involved. You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into.”

  A bemused grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Honey, I’m DEA. I live for trouble.”

  Her lips pressed into a grim line. She never laughed at his jokes.

  “I can take care of myself,” he reassured her.

  She looked a little queasy, as if she didn’t quite believe him. “You’re doing a great job of it so far, getting yourself shot.” She eyed him narrowly. “Again.”

  He feigned a mortal wound to the chest, then smiled. “I do seem to attract bullets, don’t I?”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “No. I don’t think it’s funny at all. But I do think we have to get out of here. So what do you say? If we hit the road now, we can be in Phoenix by dark.”

  She paused, considering. “Do I have a choice?”

  He absorbed the petulant look on her face, the way her toe jabbed at the dirt. If anyone was just stubborn enough to survive this, it was Gigi. “Yeah.” He stood and stepped forward until he was toe to toe with her, chest to chest. “You can go easy, or you can go hard. Which is it going to be?”

  In place of an answer, she huffed and flounced around to the back of the Jeep, then rattled in her pack again. He sure hoped she didn’t have a gun in there. If she did, he figured he was dead meat. He watched her a minute, but she just fussed with bottles and medical supplies.

  He turned away. “You’ve got exactly one minute to come up with your answer,” he called over his shoulder.

  “You allergic to anything, Hightower?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You sure? Penicillin, aspirin, nothing?”

  “I’m sure, why do you as—” He quit the question, the answer in her hand as she walked toward him. “Oh, no. Don’t even think about it.”

  “What’s wrong, Mr. I-live-for-trouble DEA? Afraid of a little needle?”

  “A little needle, no. But that thing…”

  “Sorry. I’m a horse doctor, remember? This is the smallest I have.”

  He scooted backward across the seat as she got closer. “You could knit a sweater with that needle.”

  “Quit whining.”

  “I’m not whining.” He sulked a moment, then shrugged off his jacket not able to stand her mocking stare any longer.

  “Sorry,” she said, glee ringing in her voice. “Penicillin needs to go in deep muscle.” She tapped the syringe and pushed the plunger, squirting a drop of liquid out the end of the needle. Looking down at him, she smiled evilly. “Drop ’em, Hightower.”

  He scooted an inch farther back on the seat. “No way.”

  “You don’t want that wound to get infected while we’re in Phoenix, do you?”

  A mild infection didn’t sound too bad, compared to that needle. How much antibiotic did it take to kill a few little germs, anyway?

  Suddenly he realized what she’d said. She didn’t want him to get an infection, “in Phoenix.” She’d agreed to his plan.

  “Well, what’s it going to be?”

  He eyed the needle again. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Sure.” She tapped air bubbles to the top of the syringe again. The morning sun glistened off her rosy cheeks and mussed hair, giving her a sleepy look. Like he imagined she’d look when he rolled over in bed in the morning after a long night of lovemaking and found her looking at him.

  “You can go easy, or you can go hard,” she said. “Which is it going to be?”

  Fixing his stare on her seductively arched brow and wicked grin, he reached slowly for his belt buckle.

  Oh, he would go hard, all right. All the way to Phoenix, if she kept looking at him like that.

  Gigi woke unpleasantly, her mind full of dark images—two men whispering in a stable late at night, a faceless man in a midnight-blue sedan, and Shane, standing in a doorway, shadows and firelight dancing with the doubt and desire etched across his face.

  Are you afraid of me? The memory of his words taunted her.

  No, she would have told him, if she’d been honest. I’m afraid of me. Afraid she’d fall for those trust-me eyes. Afraid she’d find them looking up at her dull and lifeless one day because of it.

  “Did you have a nice nap?”

  Those words weren’t echoes in her mind; they were real. She opened her eyes, feeling like someone had hung ten-pound weights on her eyelids, and found the very eyes she’d been dreaming about staring at her from the driver’s seat.

  She pulled herself closer to the door, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “How long have I been out?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  She wondered fleetingly what thoughts had held his sleep at bay last night, then when she felt his heavy-lidded gaze linger on her, she decided she didn’t want to know.

  They drove up on an exit. Shane put on his blinker, and let the Jeep coast off the two-lane highway. His hair settled sexily over his eyes as the wind that had been whipping it around his head diminished with their speed. She really wished he’d brush that hair back, before she gave in to the impulse to do it herself.

  “We need gas,” he said. His words cooled the heat of his stare, but did little to slow the clamoring beat of her heart. Lord, what was she thinking? She had to get away from him, before she did something neither one of them might live long enough to regret, like trusting him.

  The convenience store with the pumps out front looked deserted. Shane handed her a twenty-dollar bill and pointed at the See Cashier Before Fueling sign. “You pay, I’ll pump.”

  Gigi took the money, but didn’t move, holding her breath as he swung the door open and climbed out of the Jeep. The keys were in the ignition. This could be her best chance to escape before they got to Phoenix.

  Shane pushed the door and it thunked closed behind him. Her heart lurched when he turned around and smiled at her, then dropped to the floor of her stomach when, never taking his eyes off her, he leaned into the Jeep and slid the keys out of the ignition.

  For a moment she could have sworn he knew what she’d been thinking. A guilty flood of heat bloomed in her cheeks.

  He jammed the keys in his pocket. “Why don’t you get us some drinks while you’re in there?” he said coolly, turning away to lift the handle on the gas pump. “You look a little hot.”

  She made a face at his back.

  Walking out of the store with a brown paper bag of cool drinks and a package of peanut butter cookies, she couldn’t believe her luck. A new-looking sedan pulled right up to the door. The driver, a well-dressed young woman, hopped out and left the engine running when she got out.

  Gigi glanced out at the pumps. She could get away after all. Shane was nowhere in sight.

  A different kind of adrenaline rush kicked her system into high gear. Where could Shane have gone? Had something happened to him while she was in the store? What if all the time she’d been inside plotting her escape, he’d been lying hurt—she wouldn’t let herself think it could be worse than that—out here somewhere
?

  Seconds ticked away. The young woman still hadn’t come out of the store, and there was still no sight of Shane.

  Ugh. She hated herself. Her best chance to leave, and she couldn’t go. She couldn’t take off without knowing Shane was all right.

  Hurriedly she reached into her pocketbook and dug around until she found a makeshift weapon. She considered going for the gun in the Jeep, but she wasn’t Police Woman. She couldn’t see herself running around a gas station brandishing a pistol.

  All she could find was a metal fingernail file, but it had a long thin blade that would certainly hurt if it were jabbed somewhere strategic. With the file clutched in her fist, she crept to the corner of the convenience store and peaked around the corner.

  Nothing.

  She crept around the other side.

  Bingo. Shane was there, but he wasn’t lying hurt. The cold chill of fear she felt turned to a hot blast of anger.

  He was propped against the side of the painted cinder block building next to a phone booth, his long, jeans-clad legs crossed at the ankles, the fingers of one hand crammed into his pocket, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  He glanced over his shoulder, saw her and jutted his chin toward her to acknowledge her presence as he talked. Heat rushed up her neck as she marched to him. What was he doing? They’d called the deputy long ago, from the first gas station they’d come to.

  He covered the receiver with his hand and opened his mouth to say something to her. Before he got a word out, she reached out and jabbed the hook on the phone down.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  “Who were you talking to?” Her throat was so tight she could hardly get the words out. Had he given her away already?

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I told you, no warning anyone that we were coming. I don’t want a reception party waiting for me when I get there.”

  He made a sound of disgust. “You are really paranoid.”

  Her temper rose to a boil. “If I’m paranoid, it’s with good reason. I’ve been driven away from my home, forced to leave my friends and my job, chased, shot at—” The odd look on his face stopped her. “What are you staring at?”