Evan
Evan’s legs gave out from under him and he sat hard on the corner of his desk.
“He’s going to kill her,” he said, feeling all of the air being sucked out of his lungs.
“Not if we can find them first,” Deputy Marshal Fields was saying. “How long would you estimate she’s been gone?”
“I talked to her around eleven-thirty and it took me less than ten minutes to get to her place so that would make it about seven hours,” Evan said grimly, noting the first streaks of dawn appearing in the sky. “He could have her anywhere by now. They could be almost back to Chicago.”
“No I don’t think he’d take her back there. He may be cocky and impulsive but he’s not stupid. He’ll know that by now we are looking for him, and so is his boss. He’ll have taken her somewhere away from people. His face is being plastered all over every form of media there is so he’ll want to lay low,” Shields assured.
Evan pulled out a map of the area, marking off the spots he thought might be a good place to take someone and lay low. He put pins in small towns, noting where there were large ranches and farms with ample hiding spaces. He called in his deputies and assigned each of them an area to check, asked Leanne to get their local Sherriffs on the phone, and called Minnie to have some pastries and coffee brought over. It was going to be a long day and they needed fuel.
“So tell me about Casey Bishop,” Evan asked Fields.
“It’s a pretty simple and, unfortunately, common story actually. She was orphaned at a young age, sent to live with whatever deadbeat family she had and hooked up with the first guy that paid her any attention. Unfortunately for her that guy was Joey Masso. He was dealing by his sixteenth birthday and by twenty-two ran at least a third of the corners in south Chicago.”
“Was Casey involved? I mean, with the drugs,” Evan was almost afraid to ask.
“There was no evidence of that no,” Fields stated. “But she did know where her jewelry came from. The cars, the clothes.”
Evan stared at the floor, trying to reconcile what the Marshal was telling him with the woman he loved. Even in the beginning he had figured she was trying to get away from something but never in a lifetime would he have thought it was this. That she had been involved with someone like Joey Masso. That she would have accepted lavish gifts paid for with the money of criminals and addicts. Christ she’d been in Pawhuska nearly seven months and had yet to buy a car. If she wasn’t with Evan, she walked everywhere. He had a hard time wrapping his mind around it.
“Sherriff,” Fields was saying, “we should probably get on the road.”
“You’re right,” Evan started, “but there’s still one thing that’s stuck in my craw here Marshal.”
“What’s that Sherriff?”
“How the fuck did he know where she was?”
Sally
The tire iron connected with the side of Joeys head with a sickening thud. His eyes never had time to register the recognition of what was about to happen before they rolled back into his head and then crumpled to the ground. Sally wasted no time scrambling out of the trunk. Her eyes blinked painfully at the sudden light after being in the trunk for God knows how long. She stepped over Joey and grabbed for the keys that had dropped from his hand. Dark blood was starting to pool around his head, flowing freely from his left ear and a deep gash just above it. She quickly bent over his body to check his pulse and found none. She’d killed him. She didn’t really give herself time to think about that right now, knowing she needed to get out of here. She had to roll Joey over to check his jacket for a phone and was slightly unnerved at the one fixed eye that stared past her. She found the phone and hurried to the car, climbing in behind the wheel and jamming the key into the ignition. As the engine turned over she turned on the phone. Joey had turned it off so that they couldn’t be tracked. Her high hopes began to fade as she realized there was barely any battery left. She might, if she was lucky, be able to make one quick phone call to Evan.
She punched in his number and her heart leapt when she heard his deep voice come over the line.
“Hello?”
“Evan!” she yelled into the phone.
“Sally,” he answered incredulously. “Where are you? Are you ok? Where’s Joey?”
“I have no idea where I am, I was in the trunk, I couldn’t see anything. Evan the phone is about to die.”
“Sit tight and keep the phone on for as long as you can, I’ll find you,” Evan reassured her.
“Ok. Evan? Joey’s dead. I killed him,” Sally said shakily.
“Don’t worry about that right now, we’ll figure this all out when I get there,” he disconnected in an attempt to preserve as much of her battery as he could. Sally held the phone in her lap and lay her head back against the headrest. She instinctively locked the doors, even though she knew Joey was dead. She could see him if she looked into the side view mirror, laying in a growing pool of blood. She began to shiver uncontrollably, the weight of what she’d done pressing down on her. She knew that it was self-defense; that he was going to kill her, still it seemed surreal. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to control the shaking but it didn’t work. She turned the heat up but it too had no effect.
She looked around at her surroundings for the first time, trying to find some sort of landmark. She was in the parking lot of a long-abandoned gas station with not much but tumbleweeds on either side. In fact, it looked like a ghost town. There were a few other abandoned store fronts and a scattering of small neglected houses. I hope Evan finds me soon, she thought, seriously creeped out by now. She heard a crunch of gravel from behind her and looked up to see a dark car pull up just as the phone in her lap went dead.
Sally put the car in gear, foot ready to jump from brake to gas if needed. The door of the black car opened and a tall Hispanic man stepped out. Sally relaxed as she saw the glint of the Marshal’s shield on his belt and popped the car back into park. She rolled down the window as he approached and offered her a smile.
“Miss Andrews, Deputy US Marshall Cruz Martin. Glad to see that you are alright. We’ve all been worried about you. Why don’t you come with me and we’ll get you out of here,” he said, opening the door and helping her out of the car. He guided her to his vehicle and ushered her into the back seat with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I was delivering case files to the local office when I got the call with your location. I didn’t have time to move them from the passenger seat to the trunk.”
“No need for apologies,” Sally stated, “just glad to be getting out of here.” But she was starting to feel uneasy. Something about this man was familiar to her and she couldn’t place her finger on it but it struck a chord and made her uncomfortable. She tried to shake it, to chalk it up to the trauma of the last several hours but as he looked at her in the rearview mirror her heart skipped a beat. It was his eyes. She knew those eyes but on a different face. Hadn’t he said his same was Cruz Martin? And then it hit her like a ton of bricks. Cruz Martin. Martin Cruz. Teodoro Cruz’s brother.
Evan
Fields was on the phone with her office, giving some techie the number of the phone Sally used to call Evan in an effort to triangulate its location.
“She ok,” Fields asked?
“Yes, thank God, she sounds fine,” Evan answered.
“How did she get away from him?”
“She didn’t have a chance to say,” he said, wanting to see what was up for himself before giving away the info that Sally had killed a man. “Phone was dying and she needed enough juice for us to be able to track her. How are we doing on that by the way?”
Fields checked her phone. “My guys have found a signal and should have something soon. You told her to stay put right?”
Evan nodded. He had pulled over when Sally called, not wanting to keep driving further in the wrong direction, but he was getting antsy just sitting there. He was wound so tight that he jumped when Fields’ phone rang.
“Yeah? You got the loca
tion? Wait, what? You kidding me?” She was hurriedly jotting directions down in her notebook and signaling for Evan to head east. He swung the truck around and headed in the direction she had indicated.
“Where to,” Evan asked as Fields hung up her phone.
“Some place called Blackburn. You heard of it?”
Evan scratched his head. “Yeah, it’s an old ghost town, which would make sense but it’s barely an hour from here. Are they sure? It’s been eight hours now, how would we have missed them this close?”
“Well we weren’t exactly looking at ghost towns. I would’ve thought they’d be somewhere with a little more cover,” Fields stated.
Something wasn’t sitting right with Evan. How was is possible that Sally had been within an hour of him all this time? True, like Fields said, he was thinking Joey would take her somewhere with at least a bit of a population to blend into. But a ghost town did make for good hiding. No one would consider going into those creepy old buildings. He mentally kicked himself for not thinking of it. It didn’t really matter anymore anyway. In less than an hour Sally would be with him again. He floored the truck thinking about the ordeal she’d been through. She must’ve been terrified, locked in the trunk, knowing Joey wanted to kill her. Then having to kill him to get away. He couldn’t imagine how she felt.
His head was spinning with all of the newfound information he had on her as well. Get her back safely first, he’d told himself. Deal with the fallout later. He and Fields made obligatory small talk as they drove to the place the marshal’s service tech guy had told them she’d be. He told himself he should be ecstatic to be on his way to Sally but his gut was telling him something still wasn’t right. He pressed the gas pedal down even further, testing the limits of his engine.
“Whoa there cowboy,” Fields said, one hand on the glovebox and the other on her seatbelt. “Let’s try not to get us killed getting there.”
Evan ignored her and drove on, desperately needing to get to Sally. In just under forty minutes, they entered what was once the small town of Blackburn, Oklahoma. It had been abandoned for some time now, only decrepit old abandoned structures and a crumbling sidewalk remained. Evan drove down the main drag for a few minutes before spotting the old gas station and the car parked in its lot. True to Sally’s confession, Joey was lying in a heap on the ground.
Evan climbed out of his truck and ran to the car while Fields went to Joey’s body. He got to the driver’s side door and looked in but the car was empty. Where was she?
“Girl’s got some balls, I’ll give her that,” Fields was saying behind him. “Just made my job a whole lot easier.”
Something in her voice made Evan’s hackles rise and he turned toward her slowly, his hand on the butt of his gun.
“Uh, uh, uh, Sherriff, hands where I can see them,” Fields said, her own gun pointed straight at Evan’s chest. “Why don’t you toss that over here,” she said motioning to his sidearm. “And I’ll take the one at your ankle too.”
Evan briefly thought about trying to get a shot off but knew if he missed, Sally was as good as dead. If she wasn’t already. He tossed both guns at Fields’ feet and spit in the dirt.
“You were supposed to be the one protecting her,” he growled at her.
“Just doing the job I’m being paid to do Sherriff,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “Let’s get back in the truck, and don’t think about trying anything if you want to make it out of here alive.”
Sally
Sally sat in a dusty old chair in a house that hadn’t had visitors in what looked like decades. Martin Cruz stood by the front room window, occasionally checking the street through a nicotine-stained gauzy curtain. She hoped against hope that Evan had gotten her location before the phone went dead. She knew in all reality that her odds weren’t good but she tried to stay as positive as she could.
“I must thank you for taking care of Joey for us, Miss Andrews,” Cruz said. “Or is it Miss Bishop,” he teased.
“I’m Sally Andrews,” she said, with more defiance than she felt. “I left Casey Bishop behind almost a year ago.”
“It’s a sad thing when someone forgets who they are, don’t you think? When they forget where they come from?”
“Not when that someone is an ignorant kid in a shithole neighborhood. What’s so good about remembering,” she asked.
“Hey now sister, you strolled through that ‘shithole’ neighborhood in some pretty nice shoes if memory serves,” he tsk tskd.
“What do you want from me? Did you send Joey after me,” she asked him.
“Not directly. We made it easier for him to find you and the rest just kind of played itself out. We figured he’d take care of you then we’d take care of him. But I’ll take it any way I can get it,” he said nonchalantly.
“But why come after me? I never said anything about Teddy to the feds. I testified against Joey and only Joey,” she said, hating the desperation in her voice.
“It’s not personal sweetheart,” Cruz said, “Teddy just isn’t a fan of loose ends, which is what you are. How do we know you don’t have some more information for the feds that you’re just saving for a rainy day?”
“I don’t, I swear,” Sally said. “Joey never told me anything except that he answered to Teddy.”
“Well that right there is enough to be a loose end. Teddy likes things neat and clean. Like I said, it’s nothing personal.”
“How did you find me,” Sally wanted to know.
Cruz seemed to ponder something for a moment then shrugged and said, “well I suppose there isn’t any harm in telling you seeing as you’ll be dead soon. Haven’t you ever wondered how Teddy’s stayed under the radar for so long?”
“Actually, yeah now that I think about it,” she responded.
“He makes friends. Mostly in high places. See he met this DEA agent one time who liked to keep some of his busts for himself. Teddy files information like that away for later. Anyway, from time to time, Teddy makes it worth this guy’s while to let us know if something is coming down. The one time we need him most, this guy is nose deep in a coke pile and Teddy now needs to start cleaning up his affairs, you know? But it turns out this DEA guy is married to a Marshal. I mean what are the chances right? So Teddy convinces this guy that it would be in his best interest to see if his wife can be of any use.”
Sally was starting to get the feeling that she knew where this was going.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Teddy’s guy is married to Susan Fields.”
“Bingo!” Cruz yelled, almost gleefully. “I mean come on? How fucking lucky does one guy get right?”
Evan
Evan squared off with Fields, weighing his options though it seemed he didn’t have many. She seemed to read him and clicked the safety off on her gun.
“I’ll drop you right next to this dirtbag if you make one move,” she stated, motioning to Joey’s body.
“What’s your end game here Fields,” Evan asked her. “What happens when I get in that truck? You take me to Sally? Then what?”
“Look my assignment was to take out Casey Bishop, which I had planned to do and then go on my merry way to the bank. Unfortunately for you Sherriff, you happen to be screwing her which makes you a liability now."
“So you’re going to kill me too? How many bodies do you think you can leave behind without getting caught? My whole department saw us leave together, how do you go back to town without me,” Evan asked.
“Who said I was going back? Within a few hours of your demise, I’ll be on a beach sipping Mai Tai’s,” Fields said with a smile.
Evan clenched his fists at his sides, mentally promising himself to wipe that smile off of her face as soon as he had the chance. “So why not just kill me here,” he wondered.
“Call me a romantic, Sherriff, but I thought maybe you’d like to see your girl once more before you go,” she waved her gun at him. “Now let’s get back into the truck.”
Evan got behind the whe
el and started the engine. He waited for Fields to direct him to where she had Sally. He wondered about the cell phone trace and who had been on the other end of that phone call. How much help had she had in this? And why wait so long to act against Sally, why not just take her out on the way here that first day so many months ago?
“I’m assuming the ‘techie’ that gave you Sally’s location is working for you,” he asked.
“That’s a fair assumption, yes. Though I’d say working with me is a better description. Make a left up here,” she motioned.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Evan began, voicing one of his many questions,” if the final play was to kill Sally anyway, why not just do it before you got to town? I mean there are plenty of places between the airport and town you could’ve dumped her. Why let her settle in? Give her hope?”
“Actually this wasn’t the original plan,” Fields told him. She explained how she was originally just supposed to keep tabs on Sally, make sure she forgot all about her life in Chicago. It wasn’t until Joey Masso had given up his boss, Teddy Cruz, that it became necessary for any loose ends to be tied up.
“But I thought you said she testified against Joey, not anyone else,” Evan asked.
“True but Teddy wasn’t willing to take the chance that anyone else might come out against him after Joey did. He’s an extremely cautious man, doesn’t keep many people close to him.”
Evan had a thought. “So if Teddy hired you to take out Sally, how do you know he won’t have you killed when it’s done? I mean, you said he doesn’t like loose ends. What’s more dangerous than a Federal officer who knows where the bodies are buried?” He could see that she hadn’t thought of that possibility and it rattled her.
“Make a right up here,” she said by way of an answer. “Third house on the left.”
Evan pulled the truck to a stop in front of a dilapidated house with a front porch sagging heavily with age and a chipped white picket fence with several boards missing. His heart picked up a beat as he tried to work out a way to get Sally out without getting both of them killed. He was hoping she was still alive.
BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set 1-12 (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy Billionaire Romance) Page 120