Chapter Seven
“Hurry.” Troy Morehead grabbed her before she would have gone to the ground.
The man in front of him—a kid really—moved forward and jerked open the side door of the supply truck. Darnell Hampton was a seventeen-year-old dropout with fists the size of hammers and lots of greed. Troy had been using him for information…and other things…for going on three years now.
“This is stupid, man,” Darnell said, bending to grab the woman’s feet. His face was twisted in a scowl, the scar that ran from his temple to the corner of mouth paler against his dark skin.
“Be quiet and move. You ride in the back. If she causes any trouble, cut her open.”
Darnell swore. “Anybody can walk—”
The click behind Morehead had them both freezing.
“You want to put her down now?”
Morehead stared at Darnell. Darnell’s eyes flitted to the gun and he licked his lips.
As the muzzle of a gun pushed hard against the bone just behind Morehead’s ear, Officer Bennett Deverall asked again, “You want to put her down? It’s going to get really messy if I put a bullet in you.”
“Come on now, Dev,” Morehead said, his mind racing furiously.
“You heard me.”
Morehead gave a short nod. He needed his hands to act. “Drop her,” he said.
And he did just that, right before he spun. Darnell took off running.
A fist caught Morehead in the gut with all the strength of a sledgehammer. Air blasted out of him and he didn’t even have a chance to suck in more oxygen to replace it before he was thrown up against the truck, a heavy forearm at his throat.
“Hey there, Dev,” he managed to squeeze out.
Dev leaned in, the gun still in his hand. He jammed it into Morehead’s side. “Now…just what were you going to do with her?”
“Ah. You know. Dates are hard to find these days.” He had to get to his—
A scream split the air.
Dev shoved back just as a woman, face pale and eyes wide, ran away from where she’d glimpsed them between the truck and the van.
Morehead went for his weapon.
“Do it and you die now,” Dev said, backing up out of reach. He had his Glock trained on Morehead in an easy, two-handed grip and his gaze was unwavering.
“You don’t want to kill a cop, man.”
“Yeah? I don’t want to be killed, either. Funny how none of you seem to give a shit about that.” Dev’s lips twitched. “Back away…now.”
Slowly, he did, casting the girl one last look.
His mind whirled.
He had to fix this.
He already knew people were gunning for him because of the fuck-up with Russell. Had to fix it.
As Dev went to one knee, he let his hand hang looser.
“Don’t,” Dev said, his voice gentle. “I’ll put a dozen holes in you before you hit the ground. You won’t even know you’re dead. Now. You just keep right on moving. Back up, back up…”
Dev had no idea where the man came from.
One minute he’d been preparing himself to kill a fellow cop, or at least wound him, and the next, Morehead was jerked off his feet, disappearing between the van and the truck.
A man, easily as big as Dev, appeared in the next moment, holding Morehead off his feet while the cop struggled against the choke hold.
“Go,” the man said. “Now.”
“What…”
“Don’t make me say it again.” His gaze flicked to the woman and something that looked like regret appeared.
“I’m not leaving her,” Dev warned.
“Did I ask you to? Now move.”
He didn’t wait another second. Hefting her in his arms, he picked up the keys and the bag she’d dropped and unlocked her car, dumping her into the back. Her purse fell onto the floor as he slammed the door shut.
He was in the front and whipping out of the space a few seconds later.
By the time the first cops arrived on scene through the main entrance, he was calmly driving out the other, ball cap turned backward, sunglasses on.
And an unconscious woman in the back of the car.
This hadn’t gone as planned.
He flicked a glance in the rearview mirror at the sound of the low moan.
“You waking up back there?” he asked as another cop car blasted by him.
“Unghh…”
The muffled grunt had him grimacing. That kid who’d hit her—he’d been a giant, easily three or four inches taller than Dev, and Dev stood six four.
“Come on, Nyrene,” he said, keeping his voice level as he pulled into a parking garage a few blocks from the hospital. Had to get out of this car. Now.
He yanked open the back door just as she was sitting up.
She caught sight of him and jerked back, all but cringing against the door on the far side.
“Get out of the car,” he said.
“No.” It came out as a tight whisper.
Fuck. He bent down, one hand braced on the hood, the other on the door. “In about five minutes, this whole block is going to be shut down, if not sooner. You just had a cop try to kill you. I’m the only reason you’re not dead right now.” Okay, that might be exaggeration, but he as pretty sure Morehead hadn’t been about to throw her into that moving truck just because he wanted to discuss her choice in uniform wear.
Her dazed eyes cleared as she blinked. “The… I saw the detective,” she whispered.
“Yeah. You did. Congratulations, you’re now on his shitlist, too. Now…think again before you tell me no.”
He wasn’t proud of himself when she climbed out.
He’d scared her into it.
“Wait,” she whispered, the words choked.
“No time.”
She jerked back and stretched out her hand, grabbing the heavy red bag he’d dumped into the car with her.
Swearing, he slammed the door shut and they moved down the aisle.
“Don’t speak,” he warned as they came to a stop beside a beige sedan. Boring as hell. Perfect. He had the door open in seconds and unlocked her door. “Get in.”
“You… This isn’t your car.”
“No.”
She said nothing else for the next twenty minutes.
They stopped at a shopping mall just off the interstate and he left the sedan there, watching the crowds moving in and out of the mall.
“I can’t believe you want to see that movie again,” an indulgent voice said.
He tuned in on it and watched as a couple moved away from a black Ford Escape. It was an older model, clean. No dents or anything that made it stand out.
And…
“Look at it this way,” the guy said, tugging the girl up against him. “It doesn’t start for another forty-five minutes. You got all that time in the bookstore.”
Perfect.
He waited until they were through the main entrance and then he got to work.
“You’re stealing another car,” she said, her voice faint.
“Yes.”
“You’re a cop.”
Grimly, he said, “Trust me, I know.”
They got on the road again and didn’t stop for two hours. The lights of New Orleans gleamed in the night as he backed into a parking space on a crowded level of the garage.
“Another car?” she asked.
“No. We’re keeping this one for a while. I just need to do one quick thing.”
It wouldn’t be long before the SUV was reported stolen. Swapping out the plates wouldn’t buy them a lot of time, but it would give him a little longer to think.
Once he slid back into the vehicle, he looked over at Nyrene. The left side of her face was a vicious, ugly, mottled black and blue. He should have gotten her some ice—something.
“How’s your head?”
She huddled deeper into the seat, staring out the window.
“Nyrene?”
“What’s going on?” she asked softly.
“As soon as you start telling me the truth, we can start to figure that out.” He shrugged and put the Escape into drive.
“I did.”
He opened his mouth to say something—anything—and decided not to. Not then.
They needed to get some food, and while he was reasonably certain the scruffy clothes, his haggard face and the light growth of beard he’d developed over the past two days would alter his appearance some, it wasn’t enough and there were too many cops here, too many cameras.
The bigger city was ideal for what he needed—Clary wasn’t a small town, but it wasn’t big, either. Swapping out plates back there wouldn’t do him much good when cops started eyeballing every vehicle, looking for him.
By now, they had a BOLO out for him but he was hoping the anonymity of the city would work on his side for a short while. As he pulled out onto the street, he said softly, “Here’s the deal, Nyrene. I pissed off the wrong people in Clary. I’ve known it for a while and I was ready to deal with what happened. Bad cops—”
“Bad cops?” She stiffened.
“That wasn’t the tooth fairy you ran in to at your work,” he said, his voice grim.
She sucked in a breath.
“Corruption,” she whispered. Then she swore. “I am an idiot.”
“Naive, at the very least,” he agreed. “Getting involved with men like Morehead, what did you think would happen?”
“Morehead?”
He glanced over at her just as she straightened and leveled a glare at him. “I got involved with you, you jackass. All of this started when I tried to warn you not to go into that garage!”
“About that.” He nodded, grimacing at the slow-moving traffic all around. Absently, he hit the locks on the doors and the safety that kept her from unlocking her door. “How did you know about Meredith?”
She didn’t respond.
The light turned red and he slowed to a stop, turning his gaze on her once more. “She was just doing her job. She hadn’t hurt anybody. She didn’t deserve to die like that.” He paused, saw the tears forming in her eyes and pushed. “She was engaged to a nice guy. They would have been married in another four months.”
She sucked in a breath.
Bastard.
“Who told you about her? How did you get involved in this?”
Nyrene felt the threads of her temper snap. Her head was hurting—no. Not her head, her face. She’d caught a glimpse of her reflection and she looked like she’d gone one-on-one with a pro boxer…and she’d lost.
She’d left her car in a parking garage.
She had nothing more than her purse, the cash and laptop inside it, and that was about it.
Bennett sighed, the sound almost bored, as if he could keep this up all night. “I already told you, I can’t start to help you until you tell me what’s going on.”
“You want to know?” she asked, the words escaping her in a rush. She twisted around to glare at him.
He had a faint smile on his face. He checked the mirror and then hit the entrance ramp to the freeway, merging into traffic. She couldn’t decide what she hated more, the faint smirk he wore now or the scary son of a bitch she’d faced last night.
“I hit my head.” She said it slowly. “In the wreck, I hit my head. The headache got worse and worse. I kept hearing voices…”
She paused and reached up, hitting her temple with the heel of her hand. It sent a sickening wave of pain through her, but she ignored it. “I’d hear whispers and mutters and yells and screams and I couldn’t shut them up. The next day, I was watching the news and I saw you. You were dead. The headline? Local officer, celebrated war hero Bennett Deverall was gunned down.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “That’s their plan?”
“You stupid son of a bitch!” she shouted. “I don’t know who they are. I saw this!”
She grabbed her hair and tugged, ignoring the pain it sent splintering through her. Her face pounded from where she’d been hit, but she was almost inured to the agony now. “I saw it in my head. You dense idiot! I saw it…” Her voice broke and she looked away. Cold now, the fury suddenly gone, she drew up her knees. “Just like I saw them kill her. It was in my head…just in my head.”
“Agent Crawford, you want to tell me again just why you assaulted one of my officers?”
Joss kept his smile in place and stared at the cop in front of him. Damn, but it was a mess here.
The captain, who’d settled down in front of him, had a hard expression to her face. She was probably a few years older than she seemed. He imagined she’d have to be. She barely appeared old enough to be in her twenties, but in order for her to be a captain, she’d have to be double that.
Good bone structure, he decided.
The grim look in her eyes made up for the somewhat youthful appearance though. She had a cop’s gaze on her and he’d bet his right nut she was a good cop.
Captain Clair Amana didn’t look like the kind of woman who’d take a lot of shit, but unfortunately, she was running a department full of it and it didn’t sit well on her.
Joss had figured all of that out within a few seconds of shaking the hand of one Clair Amana, thanks to a little hook-up with Taige Morgan. His abilities might be a freak show among freak shows, but the chameleon act, the gift that let him pick up any other psychics, made this a lot easier to figure out.
If he was going to wade into a nest of snakes, he wanted to know how big the nest was.
The cop he’d grabbed in the parking lot was as dirty as they came.
The cop who’d shown up on the scene ten minutes later, also dirty.
There was a uniform who’d escorted him into the captain’s office and yeah, he was dirty, but he was also scared. Joss had caught images of a woman’s face in his mind—a woman, with a gun pressed to her head.
He didn’t have time to think through all the shit he was picking up, and he wasn’t used to working it like Taige was. It would take him a while.
But it was good to be in a room with a cop who wasn’t dirty.
“I already explained this,” Joss said with a sigh. “I saw him going for his weapon.”
“He has a different story.”
Scraping his nails down his chin, Joss shrugged. “Well, I can’t help that. I saw a man going for a gun. I had about two seconds to assess the situation and all I could see was the woman on the ground and a man kneeling in front of her. He looked like he was trying to help.”
“Detective Morehead tells me Officer Deverall had a gun on her.”
Liar. “No.” Joss shook his head. “That’s not what it looked like. He was the one on his knees trying to help. Honestly, I was surprised as hell when your man told me he was a cop. He hadn’t declared himself, issued any sort of warning…”
He wasn’t surprised to see the flash in the back of Captain Amana’s gaze. You know something’s going on, don’t you?
Joss thought about trying to touch her again, see if he could pick up something, but his job wasn’t this town, or their problems. His job could be halfway to Toronto by now and he was on his ass, making nice with the locals.
“Just what brings you to Clary, Agent Crawford?”
“Visiting.” Without a blink, he lied and said, “My wife and I are looking to relocate out of DC. I might have the chance to move to the Nashville office but I wanted to get the lay of the land.”
“Nashville, huh?” Amana cocked her head. A wisp of blonde hair escaped from her ponytail, falling down to frame her face. “That would be a commute from here to Clary. Something of a step down, I’d think, too, going from the capitol to Tennessee.”
“My wife hates big cities.” He shrugged and said it easily, although Dru would rather eat raw chicken before moving to a small town—I feel claustrophobic, she’d told him when they’d gone back home to visit his folks.
Instead of answering, Amana picked up the card Joss had given her.
“Okay.” She tapped the edge of it on her desk and then nodded toward the door. “I’ll have a talk with my detective, Agent.”
Joss didn’t wait another second before he hauled ass out of there.
It rubbed him raw, though, walking out of what felt like a nest of vipers.
Because he took his pleasures where he could, he gave Detective Morehead a mock salute on his way out the door. “I’ll be seeing you around, Detective.”
If he didn’t know better, he would have almost believed her.
Almost.
Dev fought to keep his expression relaxed, even his hands loose and easy on the steering wheel as he navigated the light traffic on the interstate. It was late, and getting later, but it would be another hour before they made it to where he wanted to go.
He had that one hour to figure out just what in the hell he was going to do with a woman who was at the same time, beautiful, frustrating…and either the best damn liar he’d ever met or completely and utterly crazy.
He couldn’t let her go back to Clary.
That much was certain. No matter how she’d gotten involved in this, he couldn’t believe the scared, quiet woman at his side had gotten involved with the scum of the earth because she wanted to.
Her breathing was getting slower, steadier and after a few more minutes, he chanced a look over. The dim light coming from the dashboard was barely enough for him to make out her face, but her lashes were low over her eyes.
If she wasn’t asleep, then she was pretty close to it.
No. She wasn’t involved in this because she wanted to be—that took a certain sort of mindset, a certain type of person. If she was that kind of person, then she’d know better than to fall asleep in the cab of the truck with him.
His phone started to vibrate and he tugged it from his pocket, gave it a quick look.
Amana’s number came up and he had to resist the urge to hurl the phone out the window. He needed to get rid of it, should have done it already.
“Ummm…”
A soft, throaty sigh came from across the bench seat and he bit back a groan as his blood heated in response. He could imagine her making that sigh as he spread her out beneath him…
Not happening.
Spying an exit up ahead, he hit his blinker. He needed coffee and a couple of minutes away, out of the SUV. The whole damn vehicle smelled like her now and it wasn’t helping him think anymore.
“What…”
He set his jaw, prepared for the questions, the accusations, the pleas.
She just cleared her throat. “What are we doing?”
“I need coffee and the tank’s running low.”
Slowly, she straightened up in the seat, wincing as she stretched. The action pushed her breasts against the thin cotton of her scrubs top—it was a pale pink that warmed against the gold of her skin. Not that he could see it now, but he’d seen her too well earlier. Seen her enough to imprint the look of her forever on his brain, and his libido kept taunting him with images of how it would be to peel those utilitarian scrubs from her body, how soft her skin would be, how full and heavy her breasts would feel in his hands.
Her breath hitched in her throat and he glanced at her from the corner of his eye, wondering if she’d caught the same heavy tension in the air—
But she was pale.
Her gaze locked, almost blindly, on the oasis of light up ahead. “Don’t,” she whispered.
“What?”
She shook her head and sank deeper, lower into the seat. “Don’t stop there.”
The odd note in her voice—the same one he’d heard when she’d lain on the floor in the ER, the same one he’d heard when she’d told him not to go home—was back and he wanted to slam his fist into the steering wheel.
“Nyrene,” he said, keeping his voice flat. “I’ve had enough of the bullshit. I don’t know what you think is going on in your head, but whatever it is, get over it. We’re stopping.”
“There’s somebody there.” She spun her head around, her eyes huge in her face. “You can’t stop. Not here.”
“There’s nobody there!” he snapped, wrenching on the steering wheel with more force than he needed. They took the sharp exit too fast and he sucked in a breath as she was shoved back up against the door. Damn it. He had to get his head together. Why was she getting to him like this?
He clenched his jaw. “I’m sorry…” Blowing out a breath, he said, “Nobody has been following us, nobody knows what we’re driving and there’s no way anybody could be here—”
She made a lunge for the steering wheel and jerked it. He swore.
And then he swore again as he grabbed her and shoved her head down—the glass had exploded as the bullet went through the windshield, catching it right at the edge. Glass rained down all over them.
“Son of a bitch!” Instinct kicked in even as some part of his mind wanted to draw back. How…what…that…
He was babbling inside his own mind.
There was another voice up there chatting, too. One that stood back and calmly analyzed what had just happened. It had taken into account the direction of the vehicle, where the bullet had slammed into the windshield—
If she hadn’t grabbed the wheel, you’d be without most of your head right now, son.
Dev ignored both voices as he whipped the truck into reverse and spun around, tearing out of the parking lot so fast the tires squealed.
Had to move. Get back on the expressway, although, damn it, how far would he get with the windshield busted like this?
“Don’t…”
She sucked in a breath. “Don’t take the expressway.”
“No choice,” he said grimly. “We’re sitting ducks on a road this quiet.”
“No…don’t…take the expressway.”
Instinct warred with reason, and at the very last moment, he whipped the steering wheel around and punched it, taking them flying off into the night, away from the truck stop. The illusion of solitude was shattered moments later when two, then three, sets of headlights came boiling out of the parking lot and headed toward them.
“Left.”
“Do you know where the fuck we are?” he snarled. “There’s no road!”
“Go…left.” She slumped deeper in the seat, her hands fisted in her hair.
He crested the slight swell. His brain processed the four-way stop. He didn’t slow down, just turned left and once more hit the gas. “I hope you know these roads, Nyrene.”
It twisted and snaked around and the cars behind them were closing in. Dev could drive with the best of them, but the SUV wasn’t built for this kind of driving.
“Train.”
He barely heard her, too busy trying to figure out what to do, how to do it, when—
“Train!” she shouted.
The tracks…
He saw the RR crossing coming up out of the darkness. There’s not going to be a train…
But there was, speeding down on them. He shoved the gas pedal to the floor. They busted through the heavy, striped arm that had just lowered and cleared the tracks.
He chanced a look off into the darkness and saw the long, unending line of the train stretching off into the north. “How the hell did you…?”
He clamped his mouth shut over the rest of the question and focused on one thing. Driving.
That train wouldn’t last forever.
They needed a new vehicle and they needed to get out of the open.
Just beyond the train speeding by, he could see the cars that had come to a halt.
Son of a bitch. He reached down and picked up the phone, taking a second to study the screen. Amana hadn’t called again, but she’d sent two texts.
You need to get in touch with me. Now.
The second one had a grimmer tone.
Damn it, Deverall, where the fuck are you?
Without letting himself think about it, he threw the phone out the window.
He still hadn’t gotten his damn coffee.