The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “Works for me. All we have to do is get through this morning—”

  Dani shook her head, looked down at her clasped hands, then at Kelly. “I’ve made alternate arrangements for tonight. Don’t—” Dani cut off Kelly’s protest. “You know as well as I do, that I need to keep moving. It’s too dangerous to you, your mother-in-law, her staff. Even the Dobermans.”

  Kelly stared at her, her signature pout slightly marred by resignation. “Don’t tell me you’re really gonna meet with your lovelorn ex-spy?”

  “All right, I won’t.” At the look on Kelly’s face, Dani added, “It’s not like I have that many options and we’re meeting at the mall. If I don’t like the look of him, I walk away, still anonymous and think of something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know!” She jumped up and paced away. “Something.”

  Reflected in the window, Dani saw Kelly stand up, pull on her jeans, and then stamp into her shoes. Her arms crossed, she stared at Dani’s back for so long she hunched her shoulders.

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Look, Dan, I’m all for making the alpha guy suffer torments. I love putting them through it in my books. But this ain’t fiction, girl. This is real life. Your life. Your death. Put the spook on hold and call the Fed.”

  Dani could see the telephone without turning her head. All she had to do was put out her hand, dial some numbers, and they would all come running. They would lift the burden of living or dying off her shoulders. Let her lapse back into a semi-terrified limbo, going where she was told, saying what she was told—

  “They can’t all be dirty. If you can trust some cyberspace spook you’ve never met, you can trust the Feds for a mere twenty-four hours, can’t you?”

  “It’s not me they want, Kelly. They want Dark Lord. He thinks I’ll draw him to me and they can catch him.”

  “Sounds like a better proposition than facing him alone again. If he’s not dead, he will come. And you’re using up your luck.” Kelly stalked over and pulled her around. “How you gonna get into that courthouse without their help? If Richard really does have mob connections, they’ll have the place covered so tight an ant won’t be able to get by them. You gotta know when to fold ’em.” She gave a crooked grin. “Kenny Rogers said so. Hey, a guy that cute can’t be wrong. Unless…”

  At the change in her tone, Dani looked at her sharply. “Unless what?”

  There was only concern in her face. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about all this? Unless you don’t want to get into that courtroom? Unless you don’t want to face Richard? Is that it? When it comes right down to it, that you can’t do it to him and Liz? Or their kids?”

  Dani shook her head once sharply, then hesitated. Was Kelly right? Was she choking at the gate? She couldn’t, wouldn’t forget the horror of seeing Richard kill. She couldn’t forget the other memories either. He was the brother she never had long before Dani married his brother and he married her other best friend, Liz. He was the one who had come to tell her that Meggie had died. The one who held her while she cried out her first shock and grief. Stood by her, with Liz on the other side, at the cemetery when Steven wouldn’t even look at her. Protected her from Steven’s drunken grief. Helped her navigate her messy divorce. Rejoiced with her when her first book sold. When Liz had her cancer scare, Dani was the one he had called to share his worry. She’d waited with him, then rejoiced with them both when the tests came back negative.

  And the kids? She couldn’t think about the kids without flinching. She was their godmother.

  Why would she want to do this? She was losing as much, or more than Richard in the deal.

  Dani wrapped her arms around her middle, cradling the hurt that was as fresh as the day she had watched him pull the trigger and shatter her illusions. “Did you hear what they’re saying? That I’m accusing him of murder to get back at Steven for killing our baby.”

  “I heard. He’s too stupid to live, you know that.” Her touch was light at first, as if she was afraid Dani didn’t want it. Dani covered the hand on her shoulder and Kelly slid her arm around Dani’s shoulder in a warming hug. “It sucks big time dead toads, girl. But he did this to himself. He did this, not you.”

  It was the right thing, she knew it. Why did it feel so wrong. “So why do I feel guilty?”

  “It’s a woman’s lot in life, according to Erma Bombeck, a lovely gift that just keeps on giving, like the Energizer Bunny. Only way to beat it, is to plow through it. Put his butt in jail and get on with your life.”

  Kelly was right. Dani knew she was right. He had started it by killing. She couldn’t let him walk away. Not because he had tried to kill her. For Peg and Cloris and all the others who had died.

  Dani looked at Kelly, gave her a smile that tried to brave, but was shaky at the edges. “I’m going to be there tomorrow. I’m going to testify if I have to do it postmortem.”

  Kelly hugged her again. “Good. I was starting to worry.”

  Dani arched her brows. “You? Worry?”

  “It was getting hip deep in maudlin in here. You know how I hate that.”

  “Yeah.” Dani gave her a gentle shove. “You’d better get going. Don’t want to keep your jerk waiting.”

  Kelly turned to leave, then stopped and looked back, her face a mix of relief and worry that was strangely reminiscent of the look on Meat’s face when they’d parted company.

  “What now?”

  “That was it, right? Just the guilt thing about Richard?”

  Dani stiffened. “What else would it be?”

  Kelly looked uneasy. “It’s just that, well, when Meggie…at first, I was worried you wouldn’t make it, then you did okay, but—”

  “But what?” Dani asked, going tense.

  “Now I’m not sure you did get over it,” Kelly admitted.

  “I didn’t get over it. No one does, no matter what they say. I learned to live with it. It was that or—” Don’t even go down that road, she cautioned herself. “What does it have to do with Richard?”

  Kelly looked like she wished she hadn’t started this. She shifted uneasily on her heels and rubbed her upper arms convulsively. “Well, you can’t blame me for wondering.”

  “Wondering what? Come on, spill it, Kel. You’ve never spared me your keen insight before.”

  The words came out sharper than Dani intended and erased the hesitation from Kelly’s face. She slung her purse over her shoulder and looked squarely at Dani.

  “Well, I did wonder if you wanted this Dark Lord guy to do it. You’re not the type to do yourself, but if someone did it for you, no guilt, right?”

  It would have been kinder, Dani decided, if she had just pulled her beating heart out of her chest and stomped on it. Much less painful. It hurt to breathe, hurt more to ask, “You think I have some kind of death wish?”

  Kelly looked away then. “Think about it, Dani. Your angst-ridden heroes practically writhe with life and death themes in your books, even the funny ones.”

  “Which they resolve by choosing life,” Dani pointed out with a hint of desperation. “Always life.”

  “Yeah.” Kelly opened the door, looked back. “But those are books. This is real. This is about what you choose.”

  Instinctively Dani shook her head. “I’ve never even thought about—”

  She stopped. It was a lie. Of course she had thought about dying. No one could lose a child without wondering if they could live in a world their baby wasn’t in anymore. Once, a couple of months after the accident, she had cut herself shaving in the shower. It hadn’t hurt. She’d stood for a long time with water pounding into her back watching the blood run down her leg.

  “I don’t know, okay?” Dani glared at her because she had to be angry. Anger was easy. It didn’t involve thinking or deciding. It just was.

  “It’s not okay! Figure out what you want before someone comes after you again, Dani. I’d hate for Richard to lose the battle and win the war.” She left
then, closing the door with a pointed care that was more dramatic than slamming it would have been.

  “If a world full of people couldn’t agree on when life begins or ends,” she said, “how am I supposed to figure it out?” She sighed. Maybe she should ask Niles.

  * * * *

  Instead of heading straight into the office, Matt took a detour into Commerce City to meet Riggs. Their interest had become focused on the suburb of mostly blue collar families, triggered by the telephone call that had immediately preceded Dani’s call to her agent from the pay phone in the convenience store Monday evening. Though the name listed with the phone number, one Joshua Heywood, didn’t match any of Dani’s known contacts, Matt’s gut told him it was worth checking out—since their other leads were going nowhere fast.

  On the drive over, he had a conference call by cell phone with his team. It strengthened his conviction that Heywood could be important. Alice, acting on a hunch that Boomer’s magic program couldn’t have found all of Dani’s cyberspace identities had done some cross-checking of the online information they’d collected on her, then cross-referenced it with her real time life and identified several more online handles that could be Dani’s. One in particular was an actress known as Delphi. Alice made a convincing enough case for Matt to direct Sebastian to monitor her email traffic. Before the call ended he hit pay dirt. Just prior to Dani’s online meet with Matt, Delphi had emailed some joker called Spook. The message was innocuous enough, a reminder that they had talked about meeting at “their” place if she ever got to Denver. She was here, did he still want to meet? The signature was followed by a quote that had probably been tampered with, since it was followed by an emoticon grin.

  “There is only one passion, the passion for chocolate.”

  Dani’s posts certainly reflected a passion for chocolate, but so did a lot of the other romance writers’ musings. More important in his view was that this Spook was near the top of the list of people Dani chatted with regularly and extensively. CIA agents were called spooks and Dani had mentioned an ex-CIA agent making a pass at her in her posts on a romance writers bulletin board a few months ago.

  This bit of information was strangely annoying. Because, he told himself, it was crazy for her to be approaching some weirdo ex-spy for help. Of course, his annoyance was on a purely professional level, with maybe some professional jealousy mixed in. How could she choose the CIA over the Marshals Service?

  The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when Sebastian linked this Spook to Joshua Heywood and the address they were approaching just as he and Riggs turned onto the street from opposite directions. Matt pulled into the curb several houses down. Riggs parked across the street. Still talking by telephone, Riggs asked, “So do we set up surveillance or talk to the guy and hope he throws in with us?”

  Matt frowned. What was the best approach? If the guy really was ex-CIA and infatuated with Dani, would he be likely to help them? Spooks were unstable, ex-spook’s notoriously so. A misstep now could put them back in the dark double quick. He tried to relax, to mine his instinct, but his gut was giving off mixed signals with his pride complicating the mix.

  “I’d like to get a read on him before making that call,” Matt admitted, annoyed with himself for being indecisive. “Can you get me something from his records, Sebastian? I’ll settle for an unpaid parking ticket.”

  “You don’t think an ex-spook will smell a rat,” Riggs said, dryly, “when a couple of US Marshals wake him up at seven a.m. to ask him about a parking ticket?”

  “I don’t care what he thinks,” Matt snapped, “as long as he doesn’t make the connection with—”

  Matt stopped when a car cruising slowly down the street turned into Heywood’s driveway. Two men got out and started up the walk.

  “Now where have I seen you two?” Matt muttered as they reached the door. One examined the street with an alertly casual air. The other bent to unlock the door. Or to pick the lock, Matt thought with a frown. They looked suspiciously like mob muscle. He looked across at Riggs. “Isn’t that Bates’ favorite muscle? The Trip boys?”

  “What they doing here?” Riggs asked, pulling his gun out from under his coat and checking the clip.

  There was only one reason Matt could produce. Dani was already here. “Send backup,” he snapped into the telephone. Without waiting for confirmation, he tossed it onto the seat. Moving in sync with Riggs, he slid out of his car and started up the street, keeping low, moving fast.

  A quick look told him they were still trying to work the lock. Matt signaled for Riggs to start working his way around to the back. He nodded, dropped to the street, and crawled under a parked car—

  The lock gave, followed quickly by an explosion that unleashed a ball of fire. It engulfed the Trips, then roared across the car Riggs was under and headed toward Matt.

  THIRTEEN

  Smoke still drifted in fragments of white against the deep blue of the morning sky when the bomb squad’s investigative team moved into the wreckage. It was both easier and harder to navigate than the safe house had been. This one lacked the unstable overhead beams, since the roof had been completely destroyed in the explosion, but there were more pieces of wreckage to sift through this time, with hidden hot pockets that threatened to flare anew when uncovered.

  The Trip boys, Bad and Bum, had been blown from the doorstep across the street, making a messy landing on the hood of one car and the roof of another car. Screens now shielded curious onlookers from their remains.

  Not too surprisingly, their initial inspection failed to turn up any fatalities beyond Bates’ two boys. The door had to have been booby-trapped. The question was, why? Who was this guy that Dani may have turned to for help?

  An hour after the blast, Matt still didn’t have an answer, though the ringing in his ears was beginning to subside. He’d been lucky. He was still breathing. The car he had been behind had afforded him a measure of protection from the blast, if not the flying glass and debris. The EMT finished the stitching and patching of the wide variety of lacerations and contusions on his exposed skin, luckily, all of them superficial, then stepped back to survey his handiwork.

  Matt didn’t ask how he looked. If it was close to how he felt, it was better not to know. He tossed aside the cold pack and fingered the lump caused by a flying door knob. It felt smaller. The headache it had spawned felt worse, though he had a feeling he felt better than Riggs.

  He had been closer to the source of the explosion than Matt. He might have a concussion, possibly internal injuries, according to the EMTs, who advised transport to the hospital for further examination.

  Matt hated to lose Riggs to the injury list, just when the operation was accelerating so lethally. Riggs protested he was fine. Matt wanted to believe him, but it was hard when his eyes kept crossing. He gestured for them to take him away, then turned to Henry and Alice, who’d arrived on the scene shortly after the house blew.

  “Anything?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Right.” He had had time to think while he was being fixed up. His bell had been thoroughly rung, but he could still add two plus two and get a solid four. “We gotta move fast. Give me the short version of what you’ve got while we’re in transit.”

  Alice and Henry exchanged puzzled looks, then Alice asked, “In transit?”

  “Someone needs to tell Bates his boys are toast. Want it to be me.” He pulled out his car keys, his car had been luckier than all of them, with only minor dents and a layer of soot. He tossed Henry the keys. “You drive. I’m not seeing that good yet.”

  This time their exchange of looks was distinctly uneasy. Matt ignored them and slid in the back seat, grimacing as his butt protested both movement and contact with the seat. Getting knocked on his butt was no longer an abstract expression. He had been offered painkiller, but refused it. He couldn’t afford to fog his thinking with the situation jumping to critical mass. He could admit to himself that he hurt, that he was seriously shook up,
this one had been a little too close for comfort, but he couldn’t let it stop him.

  “Let’s start with Dani,” Matt directed. “What’s her status?”

  “I looked over your chat this morning and had a bit of luck,” Alice said, resting her elbow on the seat between them. “I had my radio on this morning when I was driving in. Romance author Kelly Kerwin was being interviewed. She’s in town for a writers conference this weekend. All the guy interviewing her wanted to talk about was the sex.”

  “Go talk sex with a jerk,” Matt said softly. “I’ll be…I never thought of that.”

  “No reason you should.” Alice grinned. “I called the agent. She almost shuddered when she heard Dani had hooked up with Kerwin. Their chemistry, when combined, is a bit incendiary, her words toned down a bit. She suggested we check packaged cookie dough sales and canvas strip joints. Kerwin is writing a book about a male stripper and has been doing a lot of research.”

  “And did we do that while I was getting blown on my butt?” Matt asked dryly.

  “We did the strip joints.” Alice’s smile was deficient in demure. “Tuesday night. Buns’n Roses. The clincher? Kerwin was signing books that day at the mall where Dani bought the red dress. I checked the hotel she’s registered at and there’s no sign of either of them. Room wasn’t slept in last night.”

  “They have to be somewhere. Let’s add Kerwin’s known associates to our list. They may be bunking with someone Kerwin knows, but Dani doesn’t.” When he wondered, as an idle aside, had he started calling her the personal “Dani” instead of “Gwynne?”

  “Already working on it,” Alice said. “But based on her latest email traffic, she’s getting ready to move again.”

  “Which brings us to Heywood.” Matt frowned. He was having trouble focusing. Every turn they took hurt just enough to be distracting. “I can understand Bates sending his hit squad in if he thought Dani was there. She probably wasn’t. So where does the bomb come in? You don’t send a hit squad into a location you’ve already booby-trapped.”