by Mallory Kane
“I’ll be a little late for the board meeting,” she said when her secretary answered. “Order in some pastries to go with the coffee and make my apologies.”
She flipped off the phone.
“Now, Katie, I want you to answer some questions for me.”
“I want to talk to my mom. Every time you come here, I get to talk to her.”
Leonard stepped toward Katie. “Look here, kid. You talk to your mama after you answer questions. Get it?”
Katie shrank away from him.
“Leonard, you’re frightening her,” Serena said. “Now, Katie. Didn’t I get you a night-light?”
“Mr. Martin did.”
“Well, yes, but Mr. Martin works for me. And didn’t he bring you pizza?”
“It was cold.”
Leonard snorted.
Serena sighed impatiently. “I did all that for you. Now I want you to talk to me.”
Serena inserted a cigarette into her holder and lit it, waving the smoke away.
“I don’t want to. I want my mom.”
Leonard stood over the little girl. “If you don’t talk, you’ll never see Mama again.”
Katie blinked at him, and a fat tear rolled down her cheek. She looked at the cell phone Serena had laid on a nearby crate, then back at Serena.
“My m-mommy will call the police and they’ll find you and put you in jail.”
Serena checked her watch again. “Katie, I’m late for an appointment. I don’t have time to play games.” She took a puff off her cigarette and nodded at Leonard.
“Your mama ain’t gonna go to the police, because if she does, she knows we’ll kill you. You understand what that means?” He grinned.
Katie’s eyes grew wide and another tear slipped from her eye. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, Katie,” Serena said, smiling at her. “I’m going to ask you some questions and you are going to give me some answers. If I like the answers, I’ll let you talk to your mother for a minute. Agreed?”
“Okay,” Katie said in a tiny voice.
JAY STOOD SHIRTLESS ON the stoop of his safe house and listened to water drip from the trees. The rain had only lasted a couple of hours. Thank goodness it hadn’t disturbed Paige.
She’d needed to sleep. And he’d needed to think.
His fingers and scalp still tingled from the shock that had ripped through his body when she’d told him that her daughter was his.
His daughter.
It was what he’d expected her to say, but suspecting it was true and hearing her confirm it were two very different things.
He had a child. He had no memory of his own childhood, no memory of his parents, no experience or knowledge to give meaning to those four words.
He had a child.
Still, just saying them to himself filled a bit of the emptiness that ate at his insides.
What did his daughter look like? Was she blonde, like Paige? Did she have his odd dark-blue eyes? He tried to picture her, but all he could see was Paige.
Did Katie know he was her father?
And the biggest question, the one that would make all the difference was had he known Paige was pregnant when he’d left her?
Jay held out his hands to collect the runoff from the roof in his cupped palms, then splashed his face and pushed damp fingers through his hair. His skin tightened as cool droplets showered his shoulders and chest.
He wanted to know all that and more, wanted to make Paige tell him everything. But it was as if admitting to him that he was Katie’s father had sapped the last of her energy. She’d slumped, exhausted, her body gone boneless.
So Jay had tucked an old blanket around her, and sat and watched as she slept restlessly, mumbling and whimpering. He was sure she was dreaming about Katie.
He hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d been hyperalert, and the headache that had threatened all evening had pounded in his head.
It still did. He collected a bit more water and splashed his eyes, wishing the coolness would relieve the searing pain.
He’d give Paige a little while longer, but then they needed to get going. He was so anxious to find answers that he could chew nails.
He wanted to examine Paige’s apartment in case she’d missed a note or a clue. He wanted to talk to every person in the area who might have seen anyone with a little girl, and he wanted to search out information about the Yarbroughs.
The Yarbroughs. The people who were supposed to be his family. Yesterday morning he’d known nothing about his past. Now…his mind played back everything that had happened since he’d opened the door and seen her standing there.
He had so few memories he could call his own. Since he’d woken up with no memory of his previous life, he’d existed in a state of constant awareness, knowing that he was a wanted man. The bullet wound proved that.
Whether he was wanted by the police, or by an individual didn’t matter. The threat was still there. What did matter to him was making sense out of the jumble of mixed-up memories inside his head.
Most of what was in his head from before was fractured and distorted, like trying to see something behind him through a broken mirror. The only images that had survived intact were her face and the suffocating darkness.
The best and the worst, he thought wryly.
He gathered another handful of water and splashed his face again, his palms scraping against a day’s worth of stubble.
It frightened him how much he already depended on her, how much he’d already risked on the chance that she might be able to give him back his memories. He’d always known his day of reckoning would come. But his wildest fantasies hadn’t come close to the reality.
Now watery daylight was peeking through the moss-draped cypress trees and the swamp was waking up. Herons and egrets flapped their wings and began their day’s work of finding food.
Here and there a splash or a rasping sound indicated that snakes and alligators and other swamp life were stirring.
Jay assessed the road. They couldn’t delay any longer. It was going to be rough going because of last night’s rain. The damn road carried a patina of mud even in dry weather. And that gumbo mud stuck to everything. Even the tires would get so coated and heavy the car could hardly move.
He grimaced as a breeze scattered raindrops from the overhanging limbs. If it started raining again, they’d be stuck. And he knew, as soon as Paige woke up she’d be the one chewing nails.
He turned to go inside to rouse her, but an odd noise stopped him.
He froze, listening. He didn’t think it was a natural swamp sound. Could it be thunder? An alligator’s roar?
He waited. There it was again. It was more of a buzz, far away but getting louder.
Car engine!
By the time the thought had fully formed, he was through the door. He grabbed Paige’s jacket.
“Paige. Wake up.”
She jumped. “Katie?”
He thrust her jacket at her. “Get up. Can you walk? We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What time is it?”
“Get up!”
Paige pushed the blanket away and sat up, her eyes wide. She grabbed her jacket and put it on, moaning as she moved her left arm. “What’s going on?”
Jay didn’t answer her. He was busy arguing with himself about the advisability of what he was thinking. Unsure of his decision, he opened a tall kitchen cabinet and reached up into the back of the top shelf.
His fingers closed around cold metal as he pulled down the little Davis .380 he’d bought off a guy from the oil rigs. He felt around until he found the two extra magazines and stuck them in the pocket of his windbreaker. He slid the gun into the waistband of his jeans.
“Is that a gun? What are you doing?”
“Protecting us, I hope,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Outside, he opened the passenger door for her. “Get in.”
He eased her door shut and stood, listening. The car engine sound was getting louder every second. The
y had no time left.
He took one quick look at the shack, hoping they hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he went around the car and got in. “You have the phone?”
She nodded.
“Okay.” He cranked the car, wincing at the roar of the engine, which he was sure echoed just as loudly through the swamp as the one coming toward them, and rolled the window down.
Paige started to say something, but he held up his hand. He couldn’t hear the other engine any longer. Assessing the condition of the road, he eased forward, concentrating on keeping the car out of the deepest ruts. If he slipped up they would end up stuck in gumbo mud.
The thought of abandoning the car and facing their pursuers or heading out across the swamp on foot was not a pleasant one.
Paige rubbed her eyes and flexed her stiff, sore shoulder gingerly.
“What time is it? Did the cell phone ring?” she asked, digging the phone out of her pocket to look at its face. She breathed a sigh of relief. No missed calls. The digital clock read seven-thirty.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” She had wasted precious hours sleeping, hours they could have been looking for Katie.
“You weren’t going to do Katie or us any good in the condition you were in with that shoulder. You were on the verge of passing out, anyhow,” Johnny said. “Now be quiet so I can hear the other car.”
“Other car? What other car?” she asked, tensing, thinking about how urgently he’d woken her and gotten them into the car.
His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. His jaw flexed under a day’s growth of stubble and his brow was wrinkled in concentration.
He held up a hand as he listened. “The car that’s coming our way.”
“Out here?” Paige looked around. “We’re in the middle of a swamp. I thought you said nobody knew about this place.”
“Nobody does, which means there’s probably only one reason another car would be out here.” Johnny’s eyes flicked downward to the odometer, then back up at the road.
“They’ve found us.”
He nodded, sending her a quick glance. “Yeah.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to pray they don’t know these roads. Now hold on.”
He yanked the steering wheel without slowing down, and the back wheels slid in the mud as he struggled to keep control of the car.
They weren’t going fast, but it was obvious how hard Johnny had to work to hold the car in the road and fight the sticky mud that sucked at the tires and plastered itself to the sides and bottom of the car.
Then she saw something through the mist. A dark shape. The other car. It was headed straight for them.
“Johnny, they’re coming right at us!”
“No kidding.” He cursed, using words and phrases Paige had never heard before. She tensed and braced herself as the black car came closer and closer.
“Hold tight.”
“What are you—”
He leaned forward, his teeth clenched in concentration, working the clutch and the gears to keep traction in the mud.
The other car was big and low to the ground. It was caked with mud, and as it came closer, Paige could hear its engine laboring.
It fishtailed once, but its driver compensated and kept coming.
Paige couldn’t breathe. She watched in frozen fascination. They were going to crash!
Johnny suddenly went into action, shoving the gearshift into First and yanking the steering wheel to the right. The back wheels spun again, and Paige clung to the armrest as the momentum slung her sideways.
She heard the other engine roar as its driver tried to follow. Then a dull, wet thump echoed through the swamp. Twisting around as much as her sore shoulder would allow, she saw that the other car had missed the road and slammed into a tree. There was no sign of life from inside the vehicle.
“Oh my God, they tried to run us off the road. Do you think they’re hurt?”
Johnny took a deep breath and slowed to a stop on a small rise that seemed a bit less muddy. He let the car idle as he flexed his fingers and arched his neck.
“Do you think they’re the kidnappers?”
He frowned at her. “I can’t figure out who else they’d be. Like I told you before, nobody knows this place.”
He pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans. “I’ll go check on them. Maybe get some answers.”
“Johnny?”
He stopped with the car door half open.
“Be careful.”
Just as he stepped out, a shot rang out and shattered the glass in the driver’s side door. He ducked, slipping in the mud.
“Johnny!”
“Get down!” he shouted as a second shot hit metal.
Paige saw him crouching against the car frame, one hand bracing himself, the other holding the gun.
“Get in!” she cried. “Are you hurt?”
“I said get down.”
Paige slumped down in the passenger seat just as a bullet hit the rear window.
Johnny climbed back into the car, throwing the mud-spattered gun into her lap, and gunned the engine. For a heart-stopping moment it felt like the car was going to spin down into the mud and leave them trapped.
Finally the back wheels caught and the vehicle lunged forward.
More shots rang out, shrieking as they grazed metal. A couple of them hit the rear window again. Each one stopped Paige’s heart for an instant as she waited to see if its impact hit her or Johnny.
But somehow, although bullets continued to ricochet off metal, none hit them as Johnny maneuvered the swamp road with what seemed to Paige like incredible expertise. His entire right side was coated with mud where he’d dropped to the ground when the first shot rang out.
Behind them, a dark figure aimed a gun over the top of the black car as its engine roared helplessly and mud sprayed from under its back wheels.
“Are you all right?” Paige cried.
He nodded as he fought with the car. His broad shoulders bunched with tension and drying mud flecked off his bicep and wrist.
After a few seconds his struggle seemed to ease. The road was changing. It rose a little higher above the surrounding swamp and the surface began to turn to gravel instead of mud.
He relaxed minutely.
Paige couldn’t take her eyes off him. He was so focused, so determined, so strong. After that first shocking meeting at the door of his apartment, she hadn’t had much of a chance to study the differences in him. She’d been too worried and frightened.
Then the stunning news that Johnny didn’t remember her or his life before he was kidnapped had further confused her already muddled brain. She reached out and wiped mud off his cheek. He stiffened, then glanced at her sidelong, his lashes shadowing his eyes.
“We’re almost back to the main road,” he said curtly. “We’ve got to decide what to do.”
Paige looked in the side mirror. “Do you think they got out of the mud? Do you think they’re following us?”
“I think it’s real strange that they managed to get as close to us as they did.” His voice held an unmistakable note of suspicion.
“What are you saying? You think I somehow led them to us? You think I’d do that?”
He pushed mud-encrusted hair off his forehead with an impatient gesture that sent flecks of dried mud flying everywhere.
“Look, Paige. I don’t doubt that I knew you in the past. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so…in my head.” He rubbed his left temple and a grimace of pain crossed his face. “But how do I know what’s going on here? How do I know there’s a child at all?”
Paige felt the impact of each word as if it were a separate punishing blow. Fury rose inside her like a flame fed by oxygen. He didn’t believe her?
Then she thought about what it must have been like for him to hear the things she’d told him. He’d protected her. He’d gotten her safely away from the men who’d attacked them, he’d tenderly cared for her hurt shoulder and he’d
watched over her while she slept.
And he’d done it all without knowing anything about who she was.
He only knew one thing for sure, and that was that he’d seen her before. He had no reason to believe what she said, not after she’d brought those men right to his door. How could she convince him she was sincere?
She took in his haggard face, his white-knuckled hands, the bunched tension of his shoulders and gave him the only answer that she thought he could relate to.
“How do I know you really have amnesia?”
His brows shot up and he sent her a look of surprise laced with venom. He started to say something, then clamped his jaw shut.
She pressed her lips together and waited. The next few seconds might decide both their fates.
He looked back at the road then at her again and his mouth turned up just slightly.
“Touché,” he muttered.
She relaxed. Their uneasy alliance was still intact. They drove in silence for a while, listening to the car’s engine labor under the extra weight of the mud sticking to it. There were loud thumps and metallic clangs as clumps of mud loosened and fell.
Slowly, the landscape began to change, to look more urban. Johnny flexed his hand, cracking dried mud.
“So, Paige. What next? I can’t go anywhere looking like this.”
She looked behind her and saw the round cracks where bullets had hit the rear window. “I guess we got away from them?”
“For the moment.” Johnny frowned. “But how did they find us?”
“Does anybody else know about your cabin? Tante Yvette? The old man on the steps?”
“The old man—you mean Old Mose?” Johnny shook his head. “Old Mose would never…” He stopped and his face reflected a sick horror.
“Johnny?”
“It’s Mose’s house…his family’s house. But he wouldn’t—”
Paige closed her eyes. “Maybe he had no choice.”
Johnny cursed. “I’ve got to go to the hotel. I’ve got to check on him.”
“We can’t. That’s the one place they’d be sure to find us. Please, Johnny. We don’t have much time.” She touched his muddy arm. “They only gave me until the cell phone battery runs out.”