by Alice Sharpe
He groaned.
With one hand she groped around in the back until she found a pillow and handed it to him. “Hold it over that wound, keep applying pressure.”
“We need to get you back to Black Boulder.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Your bus leaves in a little over an hour. No one saw your face. We’ll stop at the edge of town, put you in a cab to the bus station and you can get out of this mess.”
“Adam—”
“I mean it.” He struggled for a few moments to get his wallet out of his pocket and opened it with one hand. “Take your ticket and this cash—”
“Put that away,” she said, not looking at him.
“You were right, Chelsea, I was wrong. This isn’t your battle. If those two had known who you were or what we were driving, they would have snatched you to get to me. Now they know about the Jeep. I can’t put you in danger like this. I’ve been selfish, just so blasted glad to have you back—”
“Have me back?”
“Being on the run gets...lonesome,” he said quickly. “Everybody needs a friendly face.”
Her gaze flicked to him, then back to the road. They drove in silence for several miles, seemingly at a standoff that she finally broke with a protracted sigh. “See, the thing is, I’ve changed my mind about leaving. It’s a woman’s prerogative, you know. Now, where exactly is this friend you mentioned? In Spur, right? And he’s a doctor? How fortuitous is that?”
“I’m not sure Doc Fisher is even in Spur anymore. I haven’t communicated with him in well over a year.”
“Listen to me,” she said in her take-command voice. “We’re getting close to Spur. Get on that phone and find out if your friend is still here. We need to ditch the Jeep. Call him—”
“Not until you’re safe.”
She suppressed a sigh when she saw the blood staining the pillow he gripped tightly to his side. “Any minute now a very angry man driving a van or a car full of deputies who don’t appreciate wild west tactics in their town are going to roar up our tailpipe. If your goal is to keep me out of jail and the bad guys from killing us, at least find out if your friend is in town. Now.”
He put away the wallet and took out a phone. As he called Information, she looked around for a side road they could use to get off the main highway. When she found one, she took it and parked behind a boarded-up building that, according to a bleached-out sign, had once been Teddy’s Tavern.
“Please, connect me,” Adam said into the phone. His end of the ensuing conversation was terse and short.
“We caught a break,” he told her as he clicked off the call. “When I told Doc we were lurking behind this old tavern, he said we’re pretty close by. He’s coming here to pick us up.”
“What about the police?”
“They’re the least of our problems,” Adam said between shallow breaths. “Holton’s men won’t file any complaints. By the time the cops arrive on scene those guys will be long gone. Deputies won’t find anything, not even a blood splatter. But this Jeep is too noticeable. Doc is driving out here to take us back to his place. He’ll get the Jeep at a later date unless someone steals it in the meantime.” He paused a second. “I really wish we hadn’t gone back to Black Boulder,” he said as he slumped.
She smoothed his sweaty forehead. “You did what seemed right. What did you tell your friend about—” she paused to gesture at their vehicle, their wounds, their predicament “—all this?”
“I just told him we’d fired shots and I’d been knifed. Doc will be here soon. Chelsea, do you want to call your parents? Your whole family must be grief-stricken. It’ll take days or even weeks for Forensics to discover your DNA isn’t in the chopper.”
She shook her head. She’d been thinking about what he said earlier. “After what happened in the alley...well, now I can see the scope of what you’ve been talking about. My parents will be safer if I don’t tell them. It feels wrong, but if someone is watching them...”
“I agree,” he said.
“I’ll make it up to them later when I can actually recognize them.”
“Your memory will come back,” he said.
At that moment they heard an engine. Chelsea grabbed the gun from where Adam had stashed it under the seat and tensed herself for action. Instead of the dreaded dark van, a bright and shiny red SUV rolled around the building and came to a stop. She put the gun down and stepped out of the Jeep as a man in his seventies with a white walrus mustache got out of the SUV.
“Morning,” he said, all but tipping a nonexistent hat to Chelsea. “Doc Fisher at your service.” Santa Claus-blue eyes twinkled as he addressed her.
“Good morning,” she said.
He looked past her, zeroing in on Adam’s battered face and then his bloody shirt. “Adam, good Lord, boy, look at you!” He reached inside his vehicle, snagged a black doctor’s bag and trotted around to Adam’s side of the Jeep. “Looks like you’ve still got a talent for charming the hooligans of the world. Just like your dad, huh, boy?”
“Uncomfortably like him,” Adam said through clenched teeth.
The doctor looked up from Adam’s wound and met Chelsea’s gaze. “Why don’t you get a head start moving the stuff in the Jeep into the back of my car? We don’t want to stick around here any longer than we have to.”
“Not the heavy things,” Adam said.
Chelsea cast Adam an exacerbated look. “Good grief,” she muttered.
The doctor’s mustache twitched as he smiled, but his expression changed when he stripped off Adam’s shirt and examined his torso. After a few seconds of closer inspection, he seemed to relax. “You say this is a knife wound?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re lucky. It’s not as deep as I feared and it’s relatively clean. I’ll stitch it up back at the house.”
As he applied a temporary bandage, Chelsea moved the Jeep’s cargo. Once in a while she caught sight of the shirtless Adam and had to force herself to look away. She recalled the strength of his powerful arms when he’d lifted her down from the chopper and the way he’d stood as close as a...as a lover.
Why was it so easy for her to imagine him holding her against his bare chest, owning her with his kisses, his hands...
“Need some help?” Doc said.
She tore her mind away from fantasy and shook her head.
“I’ll get the chainsaw and the tools,” he insisted. “You help the boy into the car, get him lying down in the back. How about you? Are you hurt, too?”
“No,” she said.
“Don’t forget about your head and possible other injuries,” Adam said.
“How can I?” she asked as she approached him. “You always seem to remind me.”
* * *
DOC FISHER CLEARED off the desk in his office then helped Adam perch on top of it. “There are clean towels in the hall closet,” he told Chelsea. She left the room as Doc rustled around in a wall cabinet filled with medical supplies, then spent a few minutes cleaning off the abrasions on Adam’s forehead, nose and cheek.
Chelsea returned with a stack of snow-white towels. “Do you need help?” she asked.
“No, I’ve done this a hundred times. My wife, Val, is off playing keno but she’ll be back in an hour or so. She’ll call the pizza place and we can eat lunch.”
“Oh, let me fix lunch,” Chelsea pleaded. “Adam says I can cook. Let’s see if he’s right. Anything in your kitchen you don’t want me to use?”
“Knock yourself out. I’ll need a half hour or so to put Adam back together.” He ushered her to the door and closed it softly behind her. “Are you going to tell me why she’s not sure she can cook?” he asked as he turned back to face Adam.
“Long story.” When Doc offered a couple of codeine tablets and some water Adam held up a hand. “I can’t take those. Someone just tried to kill us. I h
ave to stay sharp.”
Doc shook his head. “I’m going to stitch that wound of yours. That’s going to hurt a bit.”
“Just give me a local,” Adam insisted.
“Whatever you say,” Doc said as he helped Adam lie down. “What’s with this scar on your shoulder?”
“Old gunshot wound.”
“Not that old,” Doc commented as he positioned clean towels before purging the new wound with a solution.
“Doc, let me ask you a question,” Adam said as he did his best to ignore the searing pain.
“Hmm—”
“You don’t seem too surprised to see me.”
“Well, I’m kind of embarrassed to tell you this. See, I knew you were in the witness protection program because I hounded Whip after you disappeared. He finally admitted you were but he wouldn’t tell me where you’d been sent.”
“He didn’t know until after I left. The man I helped put away swore revenge—that’s why I was allowed into the program. A few weeks ago one of his thugs found me. I ended up killing the guy and then I staged my disappearance and death. After that I called Whip.”
“I didn’t know any of that.”
“I ‘died’ under another name,” Adam said. “No one from the old days knew.”
“I take it you knew Chelsea by then. How did she take your ‘death,’ or did she know the truth?”
“I thought it would be safer if she didn’t know. It was hard on her.”
“But now you’re back together. Did you find her or did she find you?”
“It’s kind of a toss-up who found who,” Adam said, wincing as the first stitch pierced his skin. The local hadn’t helped a lot.
“We’ve got a few minutes,” Doc said. “Tell me how you reconnected.”
Between gritted teeth, Adam explained about the cabin and about Chelsea coming to say goodbye and the subsequent helicopter crash. “I’m not entirely sure how one of Holton’s men wound up on her chopper, but he did.”
“Doesn’t she know how it happened?”
“Doc, she doesn’t even know who she is. She survived the crash, but she suffered a concussion of some kind. She can’t remember anything.”
“Including you?”
“Including everything. Including the fact she’s pregnant.”
Doc never missed a beat but a soft whistle escaped his lips. “Almost done here. So, that’s why you didn’t want her lifting heavy things?”
“I’ve been worried sick she would miscarry because of the crash.”
“How far along is she?”
“Not more than four months,” Adam said as the feeling of the surgical thread pulling through his skin sent shivers down his spine. “Yikes, that hurts.”
“Tried to warn you. Well, if she’d suffered a miscarriage she would have told you. You haven’t seen any blood?”
“We haven’t even had a chance to change clothes. I’m beginning to bug her with all my questions. I was so worried she might have some kind of hemorrhage, either with the baby or in her brain or something.”
“That would have surfaced by now. It’s been about twenty-four hours, right? No, she looks a hell of a lot better off than you do. I’ll give her an examination before you leave, ask a few discreet questions.”
“I thought it might be better to tell her about the baby when I got her to a safe place,” Adam said.
“She can stay here,” Doc said.
“Thanks, Doc, but I need to take her somewhere she’ll be protected if armed men show up. That’s not here with you and your wife. But I think I have an idea. She has a brother about eight hours from here. I’ve been thinking about him since she shot that guy in the alley.”
“She shot the gun? I thought you did.”
“Nope, she saved my skin, not the other way around.”
“You really care about her, don’t you?”
Adam nodded. “We’re engaged, but of course she doesn’t know that, either. I haven’t been sure what to tell her about herself so I haven’t said a lot. I was afraid if I told her every detail she’d hate me for faking my death and leaving her and she’d be horrified she was carrying my baby. I had to get her to trust me so I could protect her. I’ve tried not to lie...it’s just such a mess and we’ve been so busy running.”
The doctor set aside his equipment and helped Adam into a sitting position. As he wrapped a bandage around Adam’s rib cage, he sighed. “I remember young love,” he said as he taped it. “It’s like riding a roller coaster without a seat belt.” He looked thoughtful for a second, then added, “’Course, some people keep that level of intensity their whole lives—like your parents, for instance.”
“I lived in the same house,” Adam said. “I had a first-row seat to their ‘intensity’ and to Dad’s temper.”
“He wouldn’t have hurt her for the world,” Doc said, his voice very steady.
“I hope not,” Adam said.
Doc opened his mouth but closed it without speaking, then finally shook his head. “Awful business, your mother’s murder. I saw her just the week before—as tied up in knots as she was with that runaway student of hers, she still had time to drop by and say hello. Wonderful woman.”
“I know.”
Doc grabbed a prescription pad. “Thanks to the volunteer work I do, I can write prescriptions in Nevada. Get this filled. It’s for antibiotics. Take every single pill.”
Adam tucked the prescription into his wallet, glad to move the conversation on. “What about Chelsea’s memory? Will it come back soon?”
“I have no idea. But lacking a serious injury, I do have to wonder if she’s blocking something painful.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I just wonder if deep down, she isn’t ready to remember her life, that maybe there’s too much pain to face.”
“Pain I caused,” Adam said.
“Maybe.”
“No, Doc, if she’s running from something, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s me.”
“Listen,” Doc said. “Get her to her brother’s house. If he can give her some peace and quiet, she might start to relax. At the very least, she shouldn’t be running. If a problem does pop up, she needs to be able to get to a doctor without being shot at.”
“It would be better for our baby,” Adam said quietly.
“And better for you, too,” Doc added.
“Sure,” Adam said. But he knew the truth. Leaving Chelsea at her brother’s house would be better off for everybody but him.
* * *
ADAM ADJUSTED HIS body to fit into Doc’s well-worn desk chair. Doc had left when he heard Val come home and Adam used the time alone to access Chelsea’s brother’s phone number out of the short, coded list he kept in his wallet. He punched it into his prepaid phone.
“Who is this?” Bill said by way of greeting.
Adam explained who he was, which took a second because like everyone else—except Whip and a handful of others, including Holton and his gang—Bill had thought Adam was dead.
“Escaping the Feds,” he finally said when Adam finished. “Dude, that’s righteous. Wait, is that the truth about what happened to Chelsea, too?”
Ignoring the misconception Bill had formed on who was chasing him, Adam went on to break the news that Chelsea wasn’t as dead as reports had stated. In fact, she was in Nevada and needed refuge.
“That’s a relief,” Bill said. “Sure, bring Sis down here. Jan and I will take excellent care of her. I bet Mom and Dad are over-the-moon happy she’s okay.”
“Chelsea hasn’t told them. Let’s just say we’ve been on the run. I’ll explain it all when I see you, but right now, she’s in danger and I just want to get her somewhere safe. And you should know there’s a couple of other issues—she’s got amnesia and she’s about four months pregnant.”
>
“Whoa, that’s a lot to take in,” Bill said.
“She’ll be safe with you as long as no one knows she’s there and that includes the rest of your family for now,” Adam stressed. “And because of the amnesia, we’re not telling her yet about the baby. Hopefully her memory will return before that becomes an issue.”
“We know how to keep a secret,” Bill said, his voice serious. “We won’t say a word about the baby and trust me, we won’t let the Feds near her.”
“Er, well, we’ll talk about what’s really going on when we get there, okay? Your father told me you live about fifty miles outside Las Vegas, is that right?”
“More or less,” Bill said.
Adam gave him the vague directions Chelsea’s parents had mentioned at a family gathering when they talked about Bill and his eccentric lifestyle.
Bill chuckled. “That’s the way the old man insists on coming. You can shave off forty-five minutes of road time if you turn off the main highway when you reach a wide spot in the road named Dry Gulch. Better grab a pen and paper.”
Adam did as told and jotted down half a page of colorful directions. A few minutes later, they disconnected.
His next call was to Whip and the old guy answered with a sigh of relief. “I got worried when we got disconnected last time,” he admitted. “Where are you?”
“With Doc,” Adam said.
“In Nevada, then. Do you have a plan?”
“Chelsea Pierce and I—”
“Chelsea Pierce—wait a second, her name was in the news. They said she’d died in a chopper crash somewhere in the mountains. Was that the same crash you mentioned?”
“Yes. I managed to get her out of there.”
“Is she one of Holton’s people?”
“No. She’s a friend of mine. Holton’s people must have used her to find me. I don’t know why they didn’t buy into the report that I died in the lake. Anyway, I’m going to take her to her brother’s place in Nevada, where she’ll be safe, and then I’ve got to get out of the country until things die down.”
“As long as you’re not coming back to Arizona,” Whip said.