Friendly Fire

by Lorhainne Eckhart

  “He says he’s fine. Tom’s with him. They’re sending everyone else back, but they’re going to keep looking for her. We lost cell service when Logan’s phone cut out.” She sighed on the other end, and a sense of powerlessness was all Julia could feel.

  “Rose, what am I supposed to do? I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I need to go out there and find my daughter. Logan told me—no, he promised he wouldn’t come back until he found Trinity, but how can he, if he’s hurt?”

  Maybe Rose sensed Julia’s restlessness. She was past thinking clearly and just needed to do something. “You listen to me, Julia,” the older woman said. “Logan Wilde may be new around here, and I may not know everything about him, but I know enough and have seen enough to know—that man would kill himself to bring your daughter back. If it was me out there in Trinity’s place…well, I’d feel some comfort knowing the sheriff was looking for me. He’s not a man to give up, and he knows what he’s doing. You need to hold on to that.”

  There was a knock at her front door, and Julia watched as Ruth answered it. She was speaking with someone and looked to Julia. Her expression seemed awkward.

  “Rose, I’ve got to go,” Julia said. “Please call me if you hear anything from Logan.”

  She set the phone down and started toward the door when a familiar, tall, light-haired man walked into her house, his expression guarded. His redheaded wife was with him.

  “Julia,” Kevin Cooper said, “where’s my daughter?”

  Chapter 22

  “Daddy!” Dawn raced past her and launched herself into Kevin’s arms. He lifted her with ease, kissing and hugging her.

  “There’s my girl!” he said. “I missed you.” He kissed her cheek and just held her tight, and his gaze locked on Julia. He had light blue eyes and styled hair, and he was so tall…but as she watched him holding Dawn, she found herself comparing him to Logan—and she found Kevin falling short in so many ways. She wondered what had changed for her; that his charm and striking good looks now seemed shallow and meaningless. The anger he was exuding had her crossing her arms over her stomach.

  Angie, his new wife, looked at him and set her hand on his arm; maybe letting Julia know who he belonged to, which was ridiculous, considering he was a two-timing, deceitful coward. She wondered if Angie realized that a man who strayed once would do it again.

  “How could you let this happen?” Kevin snapped.

  Julia had known this was coming. Blaming others was just what he did. She had just never realized the mean streak Kevin Cooper could have—but then, she had fought tooth and nail to ensure he didn’t get more access to the girls than he already did. She wanted to lash out, but she took a moment to let his words sink in, and she realized that maybe he was right. She glanced away, swallowing the lump in her throat and squinting to fight the tears that sprang to her eyes. Damn, she wasn’t about to cry in front of him. She was stronger than that.

  “Now, just a minute,” Ruth interjected. “I don’t know who you are, coming in here and blaming Julia. This was not her fault, and if you had any of the facts, you’d realize what a pea-brained idiot you’re being.”

  Everyone stared at Ruth, who had planted herself in front of Kevin, standing up for Julia like an angry mama bear. Julia had never seen Ruth like that. She knew many of the women in town made fun of her for her tight clothes, bleached blond hair, C-cup breasts, and makeup—of which she wore enough to resemble a two-dollar hooker.

  “I’m Trinity and Dawn’s father—” Kevin started, but Ruth pointed a long, red fingernail at him.

  “I’m not an idiot! I know what this is. This is about your guilt. Julia, here, does a fine job with these two girls; and she raises them alone. You show up here, trying to throw your weight around…well, I won’t stand for it. Blaming Julia for Trinity disappearing from school in a small town that should be safe—it’s just not right!”

  For the first time Julia could remember, Kevin appeared sheepish. Maybe she should have had Ruth around when Kevin had been cheating on her. She had a feeling Ruth would have been the type of friend to pull her aside and knock some sense into her; taking a few shots at Kevin, too.

  He nodded in the sarcastic way he had when he was getting ready to come back with something really cutting. He patted Dawn’s back, and maybe she sensed the change in him, as she was holding herself away and looking from Kevin to Julia.

  “Dawn?” Julia held out her arms, and Kevin let his daughter down. She went right to her mother, setting her arms around her waist and holding on. “Why don’t you go with Ruth and get your pajamas on?” Julia rubbed her back and then looked imploringly up at Ruth, a woman she had never really given the time of day. The one person who had stepped up to help Julia in a way she’d never expected.

  “Come on, honey,” Ruth said, holding her hand out. Dawn followed her, glancing back once at her mother.

  Julia crossed her arms again and peered up at Kevin. She could feel his bimbo wife watching her, too. She felt scrutinized, uncomfortable, and sick with worry.

  “I got a call from the sheriff, who said my daughter is missing,” Kevin said. “I would have expected that call to come from you, Julia. How do you think I felt, hearing from a stranger that my daughter’s vanished?”

  “Logan isn’t a stranger. He’s a…friend.” She hesitated. She couldn’t lie to herself about Logan anymore. He was her friend, nothing but a friend, albeit a friend she had to force herself to stay away from. “He’s looking for Trinity now, and he’s going to find her.”

  “Well, you better be right,” Kevin started, and Julia immediately felt herself going on the defensive.

  “Okay, I think we need to calm down, here, everybody,” Angie said, setting her hand on Kevin’s arm. Julia couldn’t help but be offended by the callousness of the remark. Angie was on Kevin’s side, so it wasn’t right to insert herself into the conversation as some sort of peacekeeper.

  “What do you want, Kevin?” Julia asked. “If you just showed up here to hurt me, then I’d rather you leave.”

  “My daughter is missing. I’m not leaving!” he shouted, and his wife cleared her throat and rubbed her hand up his arm.

  “Kevin, of course you need to be here,” she said. “Trinity is your daughter, and the two of you need to stop poking each other’s eyes out.”

  Julia wanted to shout that she wasn’t the one doing the poking, but then, just being in the same room as Kevin set her teeth on edge. She didn’t hate people, but she couldn’t deny she despised the very ground Kevin walked on.

  “Trinity disappeared from school between math and music class,” Julia began. “No one made the connection. Her running shoe was just found on a trail, and they think a deputy was responsible for taking her.” At the expression on Kevin’s face, she stopped herself from saying any more.

  He firmed his lips and nodded as if getting ready to say something Julia wasn’t going to like. “Well, what do you expect from some backwoods small town? In the city, they don’t hire just anyone to be a cop. Trinity would be safe, protected, with a mother at home to look after her.”

  Julia felt the floor give out beneath her feet. She took in Angie’s pink cheeks, realizing this discussion was nothing new between them. To Julia, it had come out of left field, sucker punching her when she was already vulnerable. She worked her jaw. She needed to say something, anything, but she couldn’t find the words. Right now, protecting her daughters had become her first priority.

  “Get out,” she snapped. “Now.”

  Chapter 23

  “Mom, where are we going?” Dawn asked, scared, from the backseat of their compact car.

  Julia pulled up in front of the busy sheriff’s station, and Rose waved as if she’d been waiting for her. She stopped in the middle of the dark road, her car still running, as there were no vacant spots. “Dawn, we’re going to stay at the sheriff’s station,” she explained. “That way, we’ll know when Trinity is found.”

  The fact of the matter was, that
she was scared shitless of what Kevin would do. Would he make a move to take Dawn? She couldn’t think clearly, but she’d seen the look in his eyes, a look that only added to her stress. With Logan not there but out searching for Trinity…well, she felt all her backup was gone. Being here at the station, which was humming with activity, she also knew she would be able to receive firsthand information about Trinity.

  Her door opened, and Clinton poked his head in. “Hi, Julia,” he said. “Ruth called to tell us you were on your way. I’ll park your car around back. You two can go on in with Rose.”

  Julia was relieved. Having Ruth back her up, forcing Kevin and Angie out the door and asking them not to come back—made her feel humbled to have such a friend. Ruth had stayed at the house, understanding Julia’s need to take her daughter somewhere safe after Kevin’s unsubtle threat. What better place than the sheriff’s office?

  When Julia walked into the station, though, she stumbled as she spotted Kevin and Angie with two of the volunteers across the room.

  “Don’t pay no mind to them,” Rose said, setting her hand on Julia’s back. “You go right into the office. They showed up here right after Ruth called.”

  Julia clutched Dawn’s hand, maybe squeezing a little too tightly. She felt panicked, cornered from all directions.

  “Don’t worry about nothing, now,” Rose continued. “Ruth told us what happened, and he’s not going anywhere with Dawn. He’d have an entire town stopping him.”

  If there was one thing Julia knew about Rose, it was that she said nothing without every intention of following through. Julia spotted the old sheriff as he strode her way. He seemed portly now, wearing a plaid shirt and a ball cap.

  “Julia, don’t you worry none,” he told her. “We’re going to find your girl. There’re good people out looking for her.” He patted her shoulder and winked at her as if that would make everything all right. She had always liked him, but there was something that seemed too practiced and too perfect about his reply now. He and Logan were so different, she realized: Logan was a doer, an unassuming deep thinker, a man who’d get the job done. Sheriff Wilcox had always been about the politics. She remembered that now.

  A loud whirring echoed around them, and Julia realized it was a helicopter. She wondered what was happening now.

  Rose looked up, frowned, and said, “Is that a helicopter?”

  “Sounds like it,” the old sheriff replied.

  There was a commotion out front, and one of the men shouted, “A helicopter just landed in the middle of the road!”

  Julia followed Rose out the front door, and she glimpsed a person she thought was Logan. She blinked, realizing her mistake in her fogged, overtired mind. The man she stared at was the same height and build as Logan, so he stood out from everyone around him. He was drop-dead gorgeous, with dark hair, clean cut and polished. He looked as if he had stepped off the cover of GQ Magazine, right down to the rich leather of his coat. There were three other men with him, all tall, wearing dark coats and blue jeans—not from around here. He glanced around shrewdly as if taking in the room and everyone in it. When his gaze landed on Julia and then her daughter, pinned to her side, his expression softened.

  “I’m looking for Rose,” the man called out in a deep, confident voice.

  “You found her,” Rose replied, starting toward the man. “You must be Ben, Logan’s brother.”

  “I am.”

  Clinton strode in from the back. “Rose, there’s a chopper in the middle of Main Street!”

  She just waved her hand his way as if she knew all about it.

  Sheriff Wilcox lifted his ball cap and scratched his head, chiming in. “Are you joining the search?”

  “No,” Ben replied. “I’m taking it over.”

  Chapter 24

  Logan could hear dogs in the background as he moved through the brush, his flashlight illuminating odd tracks. He had to back up, running his flashlight along the ground, taking a second to try to reorient himself. He was rusty, and he wanted to kick his own ass for not picking this up sooner. He’d been following Trinity’s tracks, which had suddenly ended, and he now caught the impression of someone being dragged. He shone his flashlight around the area and noticed a bent branch. The trail looked as if something had come through this way—then the same footprints, the deep grooves, the diagonal traction. Logan cursed under his breath. The tracks deepened, as if the person was now carrying some weight…much more than the weight of a little girl who weighed next to nothing.

  “Tom, I’ve got an awful feeling, here. Tell me, are there any cabins nearby?”

  Tom rustled the brush and was at his side, shining his light at the path, which had suddenly changed direction, winding up a sharp incline. “There’s a cabin up that way: small, rustic, with an open meadow in front. There were always supplies of some kind there, too. It’s just up on the ridge. You can’t see it from here until you hit that break of trees at the top.” Tom glanced behind him. “Sounds like the dogs are coming, too. They’ll have picked up the girl’s scent.”

  Logan didn’t say anything. He was thinking, doing his best to shut out the pounding in his head. He touched the back of his head again, feeling dried blood. It hurt like hell. “Stay behind me—” he started to say when he heard a chopper in the distance. The spotlight was dragging toward them. “Give me your phone,” he demanded, holding out his hand. He dialed Ben’s number.

  “Yeah?” Ben shouted over the line.

  Logan could hear the chopper in the background. “Ben, I can hear you coming and can see your lights. You’re almost on top of us.”

  The noise level ramped up, the cut of the chopper blades stirring up wind and setting the trees rocking around them.

  “Just ahead of us, up that incline, there should be a cabin,” Logan shouted, his finger stuck in his other ear. He waited as the chopper moved ahead a bit. The light swirled across the area around them and up higher, then seemed to hover in place.

  “Yeah, I see it. Tucked away against the side of the mountain, has a nice lookout spot. Whoa, wait! Someone’s up there,” Ben said.

  Logan held the phone and started up the hill, fighting the ache in his leg, which was starting to slow him down. He was fine on the straightaway, but climbing nearly finished him off.

  “I can see someone running!” Ben was shouting. “Set it down,” he said to someone in the background, and Logan could hear the chopper descending.

  Logan somehow found it in himself to hurry up that hill. He tossed the phone to Tom and pushed through the bush up the incline, but he couldn’t hear anything with the chopper blades whirring in the background. He sensed the man bursting through the brush before he saw him, and Logan threw himself forward, locking his arms around the man’s chest. They went down, rolling over rocks and debris and stopping when they hit a tree.

  Logan sucked in a breath. The other man was moving to his feet already, and Logan reached for his leg and took him down again, but the man was strong and kicked him in his bad leg, as if he knew exactly where to hit him. Logan groaned and was stopped by the excruciating pain. He reached for his gun, pulled back the hammer, and fired.

  He heard a scream, and the man went down. Logan hobbled to his feet as Tom set his hand under his arm to help him up.

  “Logan!” Ben shouted from somewhere in the trees. Logan could hear feet pounding over the ground and the whir of chopper blades slowing.

  “Over here!” he shouted. Beside him, Tom shone his flashlight on a redheaded man on the ground, blood seeping from his leg. Logan would never forget that face; Brent Maloney. He knew something had never added up about the man, and here he was, writhing on the ground, wearing the heavy-treaded boots that had left the tracks.

  “Where is Trinity?” Logan demanded, staggering toward Brent, whose face held the dark expression of a man who’d stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

  “You bastard! You shot me without any warning,” he yelled.

  “Consider this the warning sh
ot! You’re damn lucky I didn’t decide to kill you,” Logan said, watching as the man grasped at his leg.

  “Logan!” Ben pushed through the brush, slipping down the incline to where Logan had fallen. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, still aiming his gun at Brent. “I asked you where the girl is!”

  Tom’s flashlight still shone in Brent’s eyes, and he held up his hand to block the brightness. He actually smiled when he replied, “She would have been mine, you know.”

  Logan knew exactly who he was talking about, but he wondered if anyone else did. “Why Trinity? Why take a little girl if you were intent on having Julia?”

  “She was losing interest. I had to do something that would let me be there for her,” he said.

  “And Trinity, what were you going to do with her?”

  Brent just stared back at him with an expression he had seen often in combat. It was a dead look, as if life was meaningless, as if killing people meant just another day at the office. There was no feeling left, no remorse and no guilt.

  He took a step toward Brent and winced, yanking the cuffs from his belt, keeping his gun trained, hoping Brent would make a move so he could be forced to put another bullet in him. Logan started to bend down to cuff him, his leg hurting as if the fires of hell were shooting through it, but he used the pain to grab Brent by the shirtfront and press the barrel of the gun between his eyes. “Give me a reason,” he snarled.

  Brent didn’t move. “Do it,” he goaded. A sick smile touched the edge of his lips. “Amazing, Sheriff. You lose it in Julia’s cafe, damn near killing her like the reckless bastard you are, yet you don’t have the balls to pull the trigger now.”

  The man was provoking Logan. He knew this deep down, but Brent somehow pressed every one of his triggers like no one had before. Logan just stared down at the worthless scum, and a hand touched his shoulder.

  “Logan, don’t,” Ben said, stepping up beside him. “Give me the gun, and put those handcuffs on him.”