Danger on the Ranch

by Dana Mentink

  “They never made it in. On my way out back right now.”

  The trickle of fear in his belly morphed into a raging torrent. “I’m there in two.” He pocketed the phone and flat-out ran, darting past pedestrians and leaping over a small dog tethered to an older man’s wrist.

  Why hadn’t they gone into the restaurant? He had no time to puzzle it out. His boots pounded down the alley, and he almost plowed into Bette as she ran the opposite direction.

  “Where’s Jane?” he demanded.

  She didn’t answer. He gripped her shoulders and bent to look her square in the face. It was as if he peered into a long and lonely tunnel. “Where, Bette?”

  Bette pointed to the rear lot. “Go inside the restaurant,” he told her. “Stay until I come for you.”

  He clattered on, skidding on a spot slick with oil until he plunged out into the rear lot.

  His phone buzzed with a text. I’m at your three o’clock.

  He jerked a look to his right and saw Liam sneaking behind a parked car. He would check row by row starting from his end. Mitch began to do the same from the opposite side. Pulse raging, gun drawn, he scooted from fender to fender, both fearing and praying that he would find Jane. But what if it was already too late?

  “God, You save her,” he muttered savagely. “She trusts You. Make it right.” It wasn’t so much a prayer as a demand, tossed like a rock with more anger than he’d ever felt in his life. Another row, and there was no Jane, no Wade. Finally Liam scurried to him, bent low, both hands on his gun.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Desperate, Mitch jumped in the bed of the nearest truck. From his vantage point he caught a glimpse, the tiniest flash of a fender vanishing around the corner of the building.

  “East,” he thundered.

  “My truck’s here,” Liam said. They ran to his vehicle. Liam peeled out of the lot heading east, but he was forced to wait for a family crossing the road.

  When it was clear, he guided the truck to the first intersection.

  “Which way?” he said.

  Mitch scanned desperately. Left would take them to a winding road that ran along the coast and met up with the highway after it crossed the mountain. To the right was a sleepy small-town street dotted with houses, a shopping area and the Roughwater Lodge.

  Which way? Isolation, the lonely beach, dozens of places to pull off behind rocks, deserted spots where Wade would not be interrupted. Bile rose in his throat. But what if he was wrong? Perhaps Wade anticipated that Mitch would follow, figured his brother would come to that very conclusion.

  But Driftwood was a small town and people noticed strangers, especially now when word of Wade’s actions had started to spread, thanks in part to Barber’s presence.

  Which way? Left or right? If he made the wrong choice, Jane would die—he felt the truth of that in his bones. Maybe Bette, too. She’d looked so lost in her college shirt and jeans with the hole in the knee.

  Liam idled at the light, shoulders tense, head cocked so he would not miss Mitch’s decision. Mitch flashed on the faces at the trial, not the photos of the women Wade had murdered, but the real, live mothers, sisters, aunts, left behind to grieve. Their anguished expressions in the courtroom said it all. Why had their women had to die, just because they trusted the wrong man?

  And what if Jane dies because she put her trust in that man’s brother?

  The seconds ticked away like sand trickling through his clenched fingers. Three things, he reminded himself. Wade needed three things—money, communication and a place to stay. He’d found those things somewhere nearby. He might take Jane there, to wherever he was holing up, and wait for dark to get away.

  Left or right?

  “Left,” Mitch said.

  The light turned green, and Liam hit the gas.

  “God, You save her,” he whispered again, only this time he added, “Please.”

  * * *

  Jane’s head spun as she stared at Wade from the passenger seat.

  “Let me go,” she tried to say, but her throat was dry as sand, her body dazed.

  He drove along a twisting road, edged with precarious black cliffs that plunged down to the ocean. Then he wrenched the car off the road and they bumped and skidded for what seemed like hours, though it was probably not even fifteen minutes, taking a path that grew more sandy and wild the farther they went. She put her hand on the door handle, ready to jump out.

  “Don’t even try it,” he said. He’d slowed the car, edged down a faint trail that looked as though it led directly to the ocean. She realized with sickening certainty that he knew where he was going, that he’d been planning her abduction. At least Bette had gotten away. Jane tried to hang on to the fact that she had not failed Bette a second time. Wade spoke, making her jump.

  “Oh, Jane, how could you do it?” He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “How could you stab a knife in my heart after everything I did for you?”

  His face had gone stark with anger, his cheeks two dusky spots. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go, Wade. You said you loved me.”

  He hit the brakes then, so suddenly that her head snapped forward and the rear of the truck shimmied. She tried to wrench open the door handle, but her fingers refused to cooperate.

  He opened the door and hauled her out. She stumbled and fell to her knees. They were alone, concealed by a cage of rocks, the ocean thundering on the other side of the barrier. The grit abraded her knees through the fabric of her jeans. Far away a gull shrieked. No one would see them this far off the road. The isolation slammed her like a fist.

  Wade wrapped his arms tight to his body as if trying to contain some strong emotion. “I thought you came to Driftwood because you knew I’d be here, that we could be together after I killed Mitch. I was so certain. You are weak, Jane, but I didn’t think you were a traitor.”

  Jane stared up at him, the sun dazzling her eyes where it shone over the top of the rocks. Bette would get help, she told herself. She’d find Mitch or Liam and tell them what had happened. But had she seen which direction Wade had taken her?

  “Wade...”

  “Quiet,” he snarled. “I can’t understand how I could be so wrong. Blinded by my love of you, it must be.”

  You’ve never loved anyone but yourself, she thought. She forced her lungs to keep working. “Wade, tell me what’s upset you.”

  He did not appear to hear. “I was wrong, I realize now. You came to Mitch because you wanted me put away again. I could forgive you cooperating with the cops because you are a coward at heart, they threatened and bullied you, no doubt, Mitch was always a brute, but he’s stupid, of course, taking you to town, thinking that a public setting would scare me off.”

  She tried to keep him talking, to buy time. “Tell me what you’re so mad about.”

  His eyes brimmed with hatred, lips quivering with rage. “But what you’ve done, Jane, Jane...” His hands balled into fists. “I can’t forgive you.”

  “For what?” she begged. “For meeting with Bette?”

  He blinked, surprised, and she realized he wasn’t thinking about Bette Whipple. He crouched so his face was level with hers, his expression stark and mad. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a photo and shoved it inches from her nose.

  Her heart turned to glass and shattered into millions of tiny pieces that cut deep. She began to cry.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Blood pounded in Mitch’s temples as Liam rocketed the truck along the road.

  “Too far,” he said.

  Liam hadn’t heard him. Mitch clapped him on the shoulder. “Too far. We should have seen him by now.”

  Liam jerked the truck into a U-turn and drove the opposite direction, slower, Mitch scanning the sandy shoulder of the road, Liam’s eyes narrowed on the road ahead.

  “There,” Mitch shouted.<
br />
  Liam braked, and they leaped out. It wasn’t much to see, just a faint track in the sand where a vehicle had left the road.

  He looked at Liam. “Get help. Call Foley.”

  “Not leaving you.”

  “Wade’s not worth risking your life for.”

  “You are.”

  Mitch felt a hitch in his chest. Though his biological family was wrecked beyond repairing, he’d been given a family more precious than gold that no circumstances could tear apart. He didn’t deserve it, couldn’t earn it, never even asked for it, but he’d been given it. A blessing, Aunt Ginny would say, and at long last he knew she was right.

  He answered Liam with a curt nod. Without any further conversation, they both charged down toward the jumbled rocks. Mitch’s panic revved into high gear.

  Hang on, Jane. Just hang on.

  There was a little boy with clear blue eyes waiting back home for her, a child who needed his courageous, faithful mother to walk through this life with him. Jane believed that God would give her a future with her boy, and he wanted with everything in him at that moment to believe the same thing. Wade had destroyed her past but not her future, not if Mitch had breath in his body.

  He pushed faster. A sound came from twenty feet away. He signaled to Liam, who nodded and crept around a pile of rocks while Mitch did the same. Mitch pulled his gun. Before he’d made it ten paces, he heard a shout and a gunshot. Energy swamped his body, and he sprinted forward. A second shot mingled with the roar of an engine as a compact car hurtled forward from behind a granite pile, Wade at the wheel. Another car skidded to a stop. Foley jumped out and took a futile shot at Wade’s retreating car.

  Liam burst from his hiding place, looked at Mitch and then shot a disgusted look at Foley. “I’ll go back to the truck, see if I can make out where he’s headed.”

  Foley holstered his weapon. “He heard you coming. You messed up my bust.”

  Mitch did not trust himself to answer. Instead he scanned the ground, looking for any sign of Jane. She was the only thing that mattered now. Had she been hit? Was she still in Wade’s car? Was there even the slightest chance that she’d gotten free? Fear choked off his breathing. Or had Wade killed her and left her for dead in some sandy shallow?

  He scanned closer, trying to pick out a clue. Lurching forward, he’d made it two steps when Jane stepped out from between two rocks. His joy turned to terror.

  She was scratched and hunched over, her face a white blur in the mottled sunlight, but the look on her face stopped his breathing. She did not appear to notice Foley was there at all. Mitch ran to her, gripping her forearms as she collapsed onto her knees. In her hand she squeezed a crumpled paper so tightly her fingernails dug half-moons into her palm. He saw no signs that she’d been shot, no blood-soaked patches on her clothing.

  “Jane,” he said, “what did he do to you?”

  “Calling for an ambulance,” Foley said, speaking into his radio.

  “Jane,” he continued, stroking her face, chafing her arms, heedless of what Foley might think, desperate to comfort her. She seemed to be unable even to support herself on her knees, so he picked her up.

  “Here,” Foley called. “Put her in my car.”

  He followed Foley to his squad car and put her in the back seat. He accepted a blanket from Foley and crouched next to her, stroking her hand, trying to think of the soothing sounds he’d heard her use when Ben had fallen and scraped his knee.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe now,” he murmured. “The ambulance is on its way.”

  She did not cry, but just rocked back and forth. His desperation mounted.

  “If you had—” Foley started.

  His blood went hot. “If this is an ‘I told you so’ right now, Foley, we’re gonna have a real serious issue.” The dangerous tone must have been persuasive. Foley paused a beat.

  “We’ve been tracking all the contacts, letters written to Wade during his prison time. Plenty of hate mail but one consistent writer. Postmarked from a town called Stottsville. We think it might be the ex-girlfriend. We’re tracking her last known whereabouts.”

  “Think she might be funding him?”

  “Makes sense.”

  He wouldn’t admit that he’d been up late each night calling, poking around on Liam’s computer, trying every trick he’d ever learned in his days as a marshal to sniff out any source of support Wade might be calling upon. Instead he kept his gaze on Jane, stroking her hands and murmuring.

  “How’d you know where Wade was today?” Mitch said over his shoulder.

  Foley snorted. “You have to know we have eyes on you, right?”

  He did. It was exactly what he would have done in Foley’s place.

  “So you spotted Bette Whipple?”

  “Yeah, and that was all kinds of crazy for her to come to Driftwood.”

  “She’s scared. Wade has that effect on people. Can you help her?”

  “If we can find her. Maybe she will have the good sense to listen to us.”

  He was about to fire off an angry retort when Jane sucked in a shuddering breath and blinked.

  “I have to get back. I have to...” Her breathing grew so rapid he was afraid she might hyperventilate.

  “The ambulance is almost here...”

  “No,” she squeezed out. “I have to get back, right now.” She was struggling to get out of the car, to push past him as if she would run down the road in the direction of town. He grabbed her arm to stop her. She twirled around so quickly she almost fell.

  “Jane,” he said. “You need to stay here, to get checked out by the medics.”

  She thrust the piece of paper at him. It was a photo, balled and creased, of Ben, walking between Jane and Mitch, his little legs almost lost in the tall green grass of Roughwater Ranch. “Wade gave it to me,” she whispered. “He knows.”

  Mitch’s vision narrowed for a moment, his fear and anger coalescing into one dark spot. From far away he heard Foley say, “So it’s true, then. She does have a son—Wade’s son.”

  “No,” Jane snapped in a voice hard as diamond. “Ben is my son, and Wade’s not going to get him, ever.”

  Mitch put a hand on her back, the other gripping his phone. He sent a frantic text to the ranch. “We’ll go right now.”

  “I’ll dispatch Patron, too,” Foley said.

  He did not add what Mitch knew he was thinking. And we’ll take both of you into custody like we should have in the first place. Something ticked under Mitch’s consciousness, a piece he could not see the edges of as he supported Jane back to the truck. There was no time to do anything but drive as fast as he could back to Roughwater Ranch.

  * * *

  Jane knew she would have been dead if Wade hadn’t been interrupted. She could not summon up the emotional energy to care. All that mattered was getting to her son.

  The phone rang, and Mitch banged the speaker button.

  “Ben’s fine,” Uncle Gus said. “We’re locked in. Danny Patron is patrolling the property. Tell Jane her boy is safe.”

  She almost started sobbing at the last word. He’s okay. She repeated it over and over in her mind.

  Mitch drove to the edge of reckless, but not quite over. “Breathe,” he told her. “Breathe slow.”

  The words did not penetrate deep down. Wade’s face blotted all other thoughts away.

  But what you’ve done, Jane... I can’t forgive you.

  She was out of the truck before it had fully stopped.

  “Jane,” he shouted, but she paid no mind, running to the front door, which was flung open by Aunt Ginny.

  “It’s okay,” she called. “Ben’s fine.”

  Jane ran past her, flew through the foyer and into the living room, where Ben sat on his splayed knees, playing with the train Mitch had given him. Her cry startled him and sent Catty C
at running under the nearest chair.

  “Mommy?” he said as if he didn’t recognize her.

  She gathered him up and held him, smelled him, touched him, prayed to God with thanks he was safe, until he squirmed and she loosened her grip. “Ben Bear,” she said.

  He scooted away. “Mommy, owie?” He put up a tiny finger near her face but did not touch her. She could not answer for the tears clogging her throat.

  Mitch knelt gently on one knee. “Yes,” he said to Ben. “Mommy got an owie, but we’ll fix it up, okay?” He took her hand and started to lead her away, but she resisted.

  “I’m staying with Ben,” she said.

  He bent low and murmured in her ear. “Honey, Ben is okay. Liam’s here, and Danny. We need to take care of you now, just for a minute. Ben’s...not used to seeing you hurt.”

  She realized what Mitch was trying to say, that she’d scared her son, her fear overflowing and turning her into someone he did not recognize. It sent a knife blade right through her. “I’ll be right back, Ben,” she choked out. Blinking back tears, she followed Mitch into the guest room and sank down onto the bed, struggling to keep the sobs in check.

  He closed the door and went to the bathroom, returning with a first-aid kit. Squirting some disinfectant onto a cotton ball, he gently dabbed at her cuts. It stung, but nothing close to the agony she felt inside.

  “He’s going to come,” she said. “He’s going to come for his son.”

  Mitch finished tending to her cuts and sat on a chair. “Yes,” he said.

  “What should I do?”

  He looked at his knees, got up and paced back and forth. “I think it’s time to do as Foley says.”

  She felt like she’d been struck. “Do you trust him?”

  “Not completely, but he’s following the same leads I would have. I would let some former colleagues know the situation, just to be sure there are more ears involved. The marshals can move you from here, settle you somewhere until...”

  “Until when? Until they capture Wade? If they ever do?” She shook her head. “You and I both know Wade will never give up.”