The Wedding Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  He had no doubt that was what was happening. If the two hired hands figured they’d been overheard—if they had time to notice the microphone—they would shoot.

  And they would barely need to aim. One bullet loose in this narrow space would do damage Wiley didn’t want to think about.

  There was almost no time to counter the threat. As silently as he could, he reached into the pocket of his jeans and extracted the keys to Sam’s truck.

  “Get out of the alley.” He spoke with his lips right against Rae-Anne’s ear. “If anything goes wrong, get the hell out of here. All right?”

  “Wiley…”

  She didn’t make a sound this time. But he could see the alarm in her wide eyes and read his name on her lips.

  He couldn’t help it, any more than he could restrain his instinctive movement of sympathy just a moment ago. He leaned forward and kissed her, hard, briefly, urgently. Then he pushed the truck keys into her palm and gave her a gentle shove toward the rear of the building. His head was swimming with the taste and feel of her, and he reckoned he wasn’t going to have any trouble at all putting on the act he’d decided to stage.

  “Wassa matter?” He slurred his speech deliberately as he started to lurch unsteadily toward the three men at the other end of the alley. “A guy can’t relieve himself in peace in this town?”

  The only thing that kept Rae-Anne going was the knowledge that things would be worse if she went back.

  If Rodney saw her, there was no telling what might happen. It was bad enough that he might recognize Wiley as the man who’d killed the rattlesnake earlier tonight. Her one hope was to defuse this situation somehow before that could happen.

  She edged out of the alley as quickly as she could, wanting to be gone by the time the two men checked to see if Wiley was alone. She felt sure they would check. Her brief encounter with them in the elevator at the hotel had been enough to convince her that these were people who did things thoroughly.

  She could hear Wiley’s voice raised in protest as she hurried through the small parking lot at the rear of the bank building. “I was just takin’ a leak,” he was saying, imitating a drunken drawl to perfection. “What time’s it, anyway?”

  She didn’t stop at the truck. If she was going to hit the road, she wanted Wiley to be with her. And she knew she had to be quick. Wiley might sound genuinely drunk, but if the two men got close to him they would realize that there was no trace of liquor on his breath. And that could mean big trouble.

  So she ran, cutting across a couple of lawns and onto one of the four streets that came together at the town square. She was heading for the bar across the courthouse lawn from the bank, feeling grateful that after her years of bartending in too many little Texas towns just like this one, she automatically noticed the local watering holes in any place she came to.

  Bandera Red’s, the sign outside proclaimed. Rae-Anne stopped in the shadowy doorway, pulling in a deep breath and reminding herself of all the good reasons she shouldn’t just go barging in with a demand for help.

  “I can’t look all flustered,” she said out loud, keeping her voice low. “I don’t want them to pay attention to me. I want them to get curious about Wiley and those two guys.”

  She glanced across the square and saw that Rodney’s pickup truck was driving away. But the two men and Wiley were still standing where she’d left them. Wiley had his hands raised, palms up, as if protesting his innocence. The strangers didn’t seem convinced, and that was enough to get Rae-Anne through the doors of Bandera Red’s in spite of her pounding heart.

  Conversation came to a halt as she walked in. She’d expected that—counted on it, in fact.

  “Well,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and looking at the row of curious faces staring at her from the bar, “this is the last time I take some stranger’s word about what a good time he’s going to show me in his old hometown.”

  “What hometown’s that, honey?” It was the bartender who asked.

  “This one. I met this guy at a party up in Fredericksburg, and he told me he was going to take me out for a drink in the place where he grew up. Said it was the prettiest hill town in Texas.”

  Rae-Anne wasn’t exactly certain where they were, but her experience in the area told her that most hill-country towns considered themselves the prettiest in the region. Several heads nodding at the bar confirmed that she’d said the right thing.

  “And then the minute we got out of his truck, these two guys jumped him.” She put on what she hoped was a convincing pout. “Looked like city types. You know, casual suits and all? Big car with tinted windows. They said something about it had been a quiet night out here in the boonies, and they didn’t like the look of the way my friend was walking, or something dumb like that.”

  “Well, hell.” One of the men at the bar frowned at her. “Where they at now, honey?”

  Rae-Anne nodded toward the door. “Over the other side of the square,” she said.

  “You just left him?”

  She tossed her head. “I came here for a good time, not to watch some old fight,” she said. “If I wanted that, I could have stayed at home.”

  It was working just the way she’d hoped it would. If she’d played damsel in distress, she’d be fending off half a dozen offers of drinks right now, and she didn’t have time for that. But the suggestion that there was a hometown boy in trouble outside—fighting with city types, no less—got several of the men off their bar stools before Rae-Anne had even finished speaking.

  “She’s right,” one of them said from the doorway. “Looks like they’re lighting into him pretty good.”

  Rae-Anne’s heart seemed to come up into her throat, and it was all she could do not to urge the men to get out there and do something before Wiley got hurt.

  Fortunately they didn’t need a lot of urging. A few of them had already spilled out onto the sidewalk, and RaeAnne went with them as unobtrusively as she could. By the time the patrons of the bar were heading in an unsteady clump across the square, she had ducked down the side street again, and was heading fast for the black pickup truck.

  She had to reach for the clutch with the very tip of her sandaled foot, but she managed to get the thing going and drove it around to the front of the bank building without letting it stall. When she got there, she could see that her ruse had been only just in time. There was blood running down Wiley’s face, and dust on his knees and hands, as though he’d been knocked down more than once.

  But the contingent from Bandera Red’s was zeroing in on the two strangers, drawing attention away from Wiley. RaeAnne could hear shouts and challenges, and she gunned the truck engine to reach the spot in time to take advantage of the moment of greatest confusion.

  It worked without a hitch, except that seconds after he’d spotted the truck, Wiley ducked into the shadows of the alley to grab his cassette recorder and the camera he must have let fall before confronting the two men.

  One of the strangers noticed what Wiley was up to, and shouted “Hey!” But he was a moment too late. By then, the men from the bar were all around, and Wiley was heading toward the pickup, hoisting himself into the passenger seat as Rae-Anne flung the door open to meet him.

  “You’re hurt.” She put the truck in gear and urged it away from the scene with a howl of tires.

  “I’m fine.” He wiped at the blood on his face and set the camera and recorder on the seat between them. “That was good going, honey. You’ve got the instincts of a true detective.”

  “I don’t want to be a detective!” She hadn’t realized just how upset and relieved she was until she heard the tears in her voice. “I don’t want anything to do with this stuff, Wiley. I want a place where I can feel at home, and people I can count on. That’s all I’ve ever wanted—and I seem to be getting farther away from it all the time, instead of closer!”

  She nearly lost her grip on the steering wheel as she turned the truck around a corner and had to shift into a lower gear at the s
ame time. She didn’t know whether she was cursing or crying as she fought to keep the vehicle under control, but suddenly it all felt as though too much had happened to keep a lid on any longer.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” She didn’t like the way Wiley was holding himself, and there was nothing in the world she could do to keep her voice steady as she thought about those two brawny strangers hitting him.

  “I told you, I’m fine. This—isn’t the first time this has happened to me.” She wondered if he’d hesitated because he was trying to find a way to avoid saying the obvious thing— that this world of threat and violence and suspicion was the world he lived and worked in every day.

  The thought didn’t do anything to slow the frustration that seemed to have lodged itself permanently in her throat. “I hate this, Wiley,” she said thickly. “I really do.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Maybe he knew there was no good answer, she thought. Wiley had always been perceptive, no matter what his other character flaws might be.

  “Do you want me to drive?” He waited until she’d nearly mismanaged another turn in the oversize vehicle.

  “No. Yes.”

  Suddenly she didn’t know what she wanted. She needed peace, and a place where she could think. “I don’t even know where I’m going,” she finished, as her tears finally threatened to get the better of her. Her vision started to blur, and she wrestled the truck to the side of the road and put it into neutral.

  She wanted to lay her head on the steering wheel and weep until her body was drained of all the tension she’d been carrying around with her for the past days and weeks. It was almost overwhelming, pushing roughly past the selfconfidence she’d always prided herself on.

  This wasn’t the place, she told herself. It was tempting to lean against Wiley’s strong shoulders and let herself fall to pieces in his arms, but that wouldn’t solve anything. Wiley was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  And he wasn’t offering her his shoulder to cry on, anyway. He was holding himself stiffly, looking at her but making no move to come any closer. Probably too sore from the bruising those two thugs had treated him to, she thought. Or maybe he considered this case closed now, and was feeling impatient with Rae-Anne’s emotional reaction to everything that had happened tonight.

  She dragged in a shuddering breath and let go of her death grip on the steering wheel. “Where were you planning to go?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “My office in Austin. I have a darkroom there. I need to make some prints of these pictures and dub a couple of tapes for Jack.”

  “Can I go with you?” Rae-Anne couldn’t imagine where else she might go tonight. It was almost midnight, and there was nowhere in the world she could call home.

  “Sure.”

  Wiley’s voice was level as he got out of the passenger seat and came around to take over the wheel. His brief answer gave her no clue about his state of mind. And that suited Rae-Anne, who’d had about all the mental exercise she could cope with for one evening.

  Chapter 11

  The lights were on in the Cotter Investigations office when they pulled into the parking lot. Wiley would have worried about it, except that the haze of cigarette smoke in the hallway seemed to indicate that Sam—who’d been banned from smoking in the office by a majority vote several weeks ago— was here and working late. His guess was confirmed when he unlocked the office door and saw his brother’s lanky figure seated in front of a computer monitor in the center of the big open-plan room.

  “For Pete’s sake, little brother,” Wiley said, switching on a light. “It’s one o’clock. Go home, would you?”

  Sam yawned and stretched his long arms above his head. “You should talk,” he said. “Evening, Rae-Anne. What are you all doing here at this hour?”

  “Developing pictures.” Wiley stalked toward the back of the office, heading for the darkroom he’d had installed a couple of years earlier.

  “Pay dirt?” Sam inquired, looking over his shoulder at Rae-Anne.

  “I guess you could call it that,” she said.

  She sounded bleak, and Wiley didn’t blame her. The evidence they’d collected tonight was enough to tie Rodney inextricably to the money-laundering ring and to prove that he’d known his first wife’s death was no accident. It was enough to demolish Rae-Anne’s wedding plans for good and ruin her hopes that her baby would have the kind of home and childhood she’d missed so desperately herself.

  “Who the hell turned the air-conditioning off in here?” Wiley knew his irritation was mostly at himself. He’d helped scuttle Rae-Anne’s dreams, and he didn’t have a damn thing to offer her in their place. That was why his voice was so sharp as he called to his brother from the muggy interior of the darkroom.

  “Come on, Wiley. I didn’t figure anybody was going to use the darkroom this time of night.” Sam eased his legs out from under the desk and loped across the office. “Too hot for the developer in there?”

  “Yeah.” Wiley stepped into the big main room again, pushing his hair from his eyes. He was moving cautiously, trying not to show that more blows had managed to land on him than he’d admitted at the town square.

  Sam picked up on it, though. “Been dusting it up, huh?” he remarked. “Who won?”

  Wiley shrugged the question off. “I need to dub a microcassette,” he said, “and develop half a dozen prints. And then I need to get some sleep. You want to get out of my way so I can do that?”

  Sam held out a hand. “Give ‘em to me,” he said. “I’m in the middle of a hell of a long search on the modem. I need an excuse to stand up and stretch once in a while. I’ll throw that in the soup for you and drop it off on my way home.”

  Wiley handed over his camera and cassette recorder without an argument. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Screw it up and you’re a dead man.”

  “You hear that?” Sam appealed to Rae-Anne. “Do a guy a favor and all you get is threats.”

  “Well, there’ve been a lot of threats going around lately.” She sounded tired and bitter, and once again Wiley could understand why.

  He looked at her pale, troubled face and thought about moving closer to her, tucking those escaped auburn strands behind her ears, smoothing her tousled hair and easing some of the weariness in her blue eyes. But her stance—arms crossed, chin kept studiously lifted—was warning him to keep his distance.

  He exchanged a glance with Sam, and saw that his brother had been taking in perhaps more than Wiley wanted him to. “Are you really okay?” Sam’s question hovered halfway between Wiley and Rae-Anne. “What happened tonight?”

  “Rodney Dietrich showed his true colors, that’s all. If you get those pictures and tapes done before morning, we can get them to Jack and wrap this thing up for good. You want to try to grab some sleep before that happens, Rae-Anne?”

  “More than I can tell you.”

  As they went to the parking lot, Wiley knew that for RaeAnne, “wrapping things up” was no simple matter of handing over their evidence to the right people. She was carrying a part of Rodney Dietrich inside her, and there was no way to escape that fact.

  There had to be something he could do to make sure things worked out for her, he thought. Maybe Wiley wasn’t the answer to Rae-Anne’s dreams, but he’d be damned if he’d let her out of his life a second time without doing what he could to take some of the rough edges off the situation she found herself in. With all his expertise, and all his contacts, surely he could come up with something that would help her out.

  If only he wasn’t so damn tired….

  Rae-Anne woke up disoriented, not sure whose bed she was in. The light in the room was dim, and she thought she could hear rain spattering against the windows.

  The windows of her room at Rodney’s ranch house had been sheltered by thick shrubs. And at her apartment—the one she’d given up in anticipation of marrying Rodney—the bedroom windows had been so close to the building next door that rain had never reached them
.

  Then where was she? She blinked and stretched in the comfortable bed. And then she remembered.

  Wiley’s house was in a quiet suburb of Austin, with a small yard in the back that was open to the sky all around. That was why the view out the windows looked so empty.

  “Oh, God.” She kicked off the covers and swung her legs over the side. She dimly recalled Wiley pulling this oversize gray T-shirt out of a drawer somewhere last night and apologizing for the fact that he didn’t have a spare set of sheets to put on the bed.

  The sheets she’d slept between were clean enough, but they carried the subtle and indefinable scent of Wiley’s body, and that was why Rae-Anne wanted to escape them so quickly this morning. In spite of her confusion, in spite of the gray day outside and the sporadic rattle of rain against the windowpanes, she’d wakened feeling good all over, and she knew why that was.

  She’d always wakened that way when she’d slept with Wiley. Apparently even sleeping alone in his bed had the power to make her body hum this way.

  And that was all wrong.

  Things were getting clearer now. She recalled her glimpse of the rest of Wiley’s sparsely furnished home and his offhand comment, as he’d picked up a week’s worth of old newspapers, that he probably spent more time in his car than he did here. And she remembered, only too well, the jaded, mocking tone that both Wiley and Sam had fallen into last night at the Cotter Investigations office.

  The office had been bigger than she’d expected, and somehow more permanent-looking. There had been desks for six or eight people, aside from the glassed-in office that seemed to belong to Wiley.

  And that was where he belonged, she thought, in the world of investigations and intrigue. His small, spartan house, with its empty, half-used atmosphere, was an extra, a place to camp between shifts. His real home was wherever his job took him, and he, like his brothers, was happiest speaking that tough-guy language that turned violence and danger into jokes.