by Jane Graves
She leaped into the Explorer, knocking her shoes into the passenger seat, thanking her lucky stars that she’d had the foresight to hang on to the car keys. She clicked the door locks, then started the engine. She glanced back to see that John had evidently paid attention in cop school, because he’d leaped on top of Leandro, his knee between his shoulders and his hand clamped around the back of his neck, shoving his already mangled nose even deeper into the dirt. Leandro squirmed beneath him like a squashed bug. It was a beautiful sight, and under normal circumstances she’d have paid dearly to have a ringside seat. Unfortunately, she had more pressing things to attend to, like getting the hell out of there.
She backed the car around in a semicircle, ignoring her conscience, which was screaming at the top of its imaginary lungs. It was reminding her that the only reason John had come to her rescue was because he undoubtedly believed Leandro was her abusive boyfriend. He was trying to protect her, and she was thanking him by stealing his car.
No. Not stealing. Borrowing.
She hit the accelerator and sped down the dark, forest-lined road, intending to put as many miles between her and that cabin as she possibly could. Sooner or later the insane bounty hunter and the enraged cop would stop beating each other senseless and compare notes, and the minute they did, they’d stop going after each other and start coming after her.
Even though John had managed to maneuver himself into a superior position, he wasn’t at all sure he had King Kong under control. The guy was rumbling beneath him like a volcano ready to blow.
“Let me up, you bastard!”
John felt a little dizzy from the blow the guy had given him to his face, but finally he managed to catch a good, solid breath and inched his knee farther up the guy’s back.
“Police officer!” he shouted. “And you’re staying down!”
The guy went still beneath him. “A cop? You’re a cop?”
John felt a flush of satisfaction. A certain abusive boyfriend hadn’t counted on the law showing up, now, had he?
“You’re a cop, and you let her get away?”
John froze. Let her get away?
“I’m a bounty hunter, you idiot! She’s worth a bundle, and you went and screwed it up!”
The guy’s words were a little muffled, since he was still eating dirt, but John could have sworn he said he was a bounty hunter. If he was telling the truth, that meant...Oh, God.
“Alice is a bail jumper?”
“Alice, my ass. Her name is Renee Esterhaus. She’s wanted for armed robbery. And I’d be taking her back to Tolosa right now if you hadn’t decided to play Lone Ranger!”
Armed robbery? That pretty little blonde with those big blue eyes? John was paralyzed with disbelief. He’d seen a lot of non sequiturs as a cop, but that topped them all. “No way.”
“She got caught with the loot and the weapon, and the convenience-store clerk—who, by the way, she shot and wounded—nailed her in a lineup.”
“She shot somebody?”
“Flesh wound. But she didn’t think twice about pulling the trigger.”
John rose just enough to yank the guy’s wallet out of his hip pocket. He flipped it open. Max Leandro. Bail Enforcement Officer.
“There,” Leandro said. “Satisfied? Now, will you get the fuck off me?”
John got up. Leandro scrambled to his feet, his hand hovering over his bleeding nose. He yanked his wallet out of John’s hand and shoved it back into his hip pocket.
“Nice piece of police work, ace. While you were busy beating the hell out of me, she took off with your car.”
John whipped his head around. His car was nowhere in sight. He stared down the road, unable to believe what had just happened. He’d gone after Leandro, thinking he was her boyfriend, trying to protect her, for God’s sake, and while he was busy playing dueling credentials with a two-bit bounty hunter, Alice—Renee —had made off with his car.
His shock gave way to anger, which rapidly transformed into a burning desire to get his hands on the woman who hadn’t uttered a truthful word since the moment she walked into that diner. The woman who’d robbed a convenience store, shot a clerk, skipped bail, then baited a cop and a thousand pound gorilla into beating each other senseless.
And made the cop look like a fool.
“Stay here.” John shot into the cabin and grabbed his weapon and his wallet. He ran back to Leandro. “Give me your keys.”
“My keys? I’m not giving you—”
“I’m going after my car. Where are your keys?”
“No way. If you take her in, I lose the bounty.”
“You can have her. As long as I get my car back.”
Leandro just glared at him.
“Give me your keys! Now!”
Leandro reluctantly slapped the keys into John’s hand, and John raced toward the car with Leandro hurrying along behind him. As John slid into the driver’s seat, a sharp, acrid smell hit his nose. He spun around and glanced into the backseat. It looked like the inside of a garbage incinerator. “Holy shit.”
“She’s a lunatic.” Leandro slammed the passenger door, then hunched down in the seat, grabbing a wad of napkins from the floorboard and pressing it to his bleeding nose. “A fucking lunatic.”
All at once it dawned on John what must have happened. “She torched your car?”
“Shut up,” Leandro muttered. “Just shut up.”
Then John realized this was the smoking vehicle he’d seen pulling into Harley’s place. So that was how Renee had gotten away from Leandro. Good God—was there anything she wouldn’t do?
John started the car, stomped the accelerator, and headed down the dirt road, the headlights slashing through the night. He went as fast as he dared on the winding road, wheeling the car left and right through the dense forest, searching the road ahead for the red glare of taillights. She couldn’t have gotten more than a three-minute head start, but he saw nothing but blackness ahead.
“Shit,” Leandro said. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know. We should have caught up to her by now.”
“Step on it, will you?”
“You want me to wrap this heap around a tree?”
“I want you to get my bail jumper!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!”
Leandro made a scoffing noise, then swapped one blood drenched napkin for another. “So tell me,” he said, a mocking tone creeping into his voice. “She obviously didn’t let on who she really was, so what did she do to get you to take her away from that diner? Make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?” When John didn’t respond, Leandro’s face twisted into a speculative sneer. “The old in-and-out, I bet. Was that it?”
John fumed silently, feeling every bit as gullible as Leandro was making him out to be. She wouldn’t be the first woman who’d offered him her body to stay out of jail. But it was the first time he’d taken the bait.
“Not that I can blame you for taking her up on it,” Leandro went on. “I mean, that’s one hot little body she’s got, right?” He seemed to ponder that for a moment. “You know, I don’t get chicks jumping bail very often. I bet most of them would do just about anything to keep from going to jail.”
John imagined the revolting acts a guy like Leandro might expect in return for such a favor, and his hands tightened against the steering wheel.
“Come to think of it, she’s just the kind of woman I’d like to get my hands on. Blond hair, blue eyes, nice little ass...and how about those lips?” Leandro gave a low whistle. “I knew a girl once who had lips like that. I swear, she could suck the cap right off a beer bottle. By the time she got through with you, you felt like you’d been hit by a Mack truck. Yeah, it might be worth giving up the money just to see those pretty little lips of hers wrapped around my—”
John slammed on the brakes. Leandro lurched forward, almost going through the windshield and doing his nose in once and for all. When the car ground to a halt, the equal and opposite reaction sent him whiplashi
ng back against the headrest. In the next instant, John took a fistful of his grimy shirt and yanked him halfway over the console. The very thought of Leandro getting within leering distance of Renee made his blood boil.
“If you so much as lay a hand on her, I swear to God I’ll arrest you for rape. You got that?”
Leandro’s face eased into a cocky smile. “Yeah, Officer. I’ve got it. It’s okay for cops to do the nasty with pretty little fugitives, but bounty hunters gotta be hands-off. Is that right?”
“I didn’t know she was a fugitive. And I didn’t do anything with her! And you’re not going to, either!”
Leandro rolled his eyes with disgust. “Shit! Can’t a guy think out loud? Do you really think I’d trade that kind of money to get laid only once?”'
John pushed Leandro away with disgust, only it wasn’t just Leandro he was disgusted with. What was the matter with him? Why in the world did he give a damn about Renee Esterhaus? She wasn’t a victim, and it was about time he got that through his head, no matter how sweet and innocent she looked. She was an armed robber who hadn’t thought twice about putting a bullet in a store clerk. And she was a car thief. A criminal, plain and simple. If she hadn’t been robbing convenience stores, she wouldn’t be on the run, and Leandro wouldn’t be fantasizing about grabbing a little recreation on the side. It was her own fault she was in this mess, and it was time she paid the consequences.
John stomped the accelerator again, and a few minutes later they emerged from the dense woods, reaching the two-lane highway a mile or two down the road from Harley’s place. The road was deserted, with no sign of Renee. And John had no idea which way she might have gone.
They were at a dead end. If he kept searching, he could flounder around the countryside going one direction while she’d taken off the other way. He would have much preferred to find her himself so he could take his car back rather than going through all the administrative crap of reporting and reclaiming a stolen vehicle, but it didn’t look as if that was going to happen.
“Damn,” John muttered. “She could be anywhere by now. Do you have any idea where she was heading when you grabbed her?”
“New Orleans.”
“Then she’s probably heading there now. I’m going to call the local cops, then the highway patrol. With a description of my car, they’ll pick her up.”
“Oh, that’s a great plan, ace. You get your car back, but I lose the bounty because the cops grabbed her instead of me.”
“Those are the breaks, buddy.”
“This is your fault. We’d already have her in custody if you hadn’t jacked around getting out of the woods.”
“I was doing fifty on a gravel road!”
“Well, she must have been doing sixty, because I don’t see her anywhere. How about you, ace? Do you see her anywhere?” Leandro snorted. “Guess you didn’t bother to show up that day at the academy when they covered vehicular pursuit.”
A hundred nasty retorts flooded John’s mind, and he bit his tongue to keep from lashing out. Why waste time bickering with this guy, when Renee was his real target? Hell, it was probably a good thing he hadn’t caught up to her. If he’d gotten exiled to the backwoods of Texas for punching out a paper-towel dispenser, he could only imagine what Daniels would do to him if he went for the throat of a certain conniving little fugitive.
Leandro looked down at the blood-soaked napkins he held, and when the blood kept coming, he flipped on the dome light and pulled down the mirror on the sun visor. A look of horror spread over his rearranged face, and he let out an agonized groan.
“You son of a bitch! You broke my nose!”
John really didn’t see the big deal. What was a crooked nose when it had to live on a face like that? “It’ll heal.”
“Heal? How? Half my face is on the other half of my face!”
John had no patience with Leandro’s whining. Not when he could feel his own face swelling to massive proportions.
“I’m gonna press charges,” Leandro went on. “Police brutality. When a jury sees how you’ve disfigured me, you’ll be history!”
John had news for Leandro. Mother Nature had beaten him to the disfiguring thing.
“There’s a hospital in Winslow,” Leandro said. “Take me there.”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“I’ll see a doctor; you call the cops.”
John drew a long breath and let it out slowly, wondering how in the hell this had happened. Somehow, in the span of only a few hours, he’d gone from the promise of having hot sex with a beautiful woman to trading insults with the ugliest man on earth. With a sigh of disgusted resignation, he put the car in gear, turned onto the two-lane highway, and headed west toward Winslow.
Renee brought John’s Explorer to a halt in a McDonald’s parking lot at the comer of Fourth and Taylor in Winslow, her heart still beating like crazy. All the way out of that forest, she’d expected to see headlights in her rearview mirror, but since she hadn’t, she could only assume that John and Leandro had no idea which way she’d gone.
The car idled softly. She took a deep, cleansing breath, extricated her clenched hands from the steering wheel, and dropped them to her lap. She pushed the jazz tape back into the tape player, trying to calm herself further so she could think. It looked as if she’d bought herself a little time, but now what? Okay. Priority number one was to ditch John’s car, because if he couldn’t find her, she was sure his next step would be to call the local cops and report his car stolen. But she had to have some kind of plan before she could give up this car, somewhere to go or some other means of transportation to put as many miles between herself and this town as she could.
What she wanted to do was go back to that motel Leandro had grabbed her from, get her belongings, then wait there until tomorrow morning so she could get her car. But if Leandro figured out she’d headed back there, she’d be a sitting duck again.
Maybe she should go to the bus station. The money she’d taken from John would probably buy her a ticket to New Orleans. She had no means to disguise herself, though, and John would probably check with the bus station. He could have the highway patrol grab her before the bus hit the Louisiana border.
She decided the worst thing she could do was get on the freeway and head for New Orleans. She’d be way too easy to spot. She squeezed her eyes closed, fighting tears. How in the world had she gotten herself into this mess? She was tired and hungry and scared to death, and she just couldn’t think.
Then the aroma of burgers and fries wafted through the car.
Food.
Her mouth instantly watered, and it didn’t take long for the food-deprived part of her brain to convince the self-preservation part that she should do the rest of her thinking in the drive-through line. She put the car in gear and came up behind a red minivan crammed to capacity with a group of teenagers.
After a moment the line advanced, and the minivan moved to the speaker to place an order. Renee inched the Explorer forward and waited. Two other cars pulled into the line behind her.
Her gaze settled on John’s phone. She thought of her friend Paula, who was probably the only person on the planet who actually believed she was innocent, and all at once she felt so alone she wanted to cry.
On impulse, she picked up the phone and dialed Paula’s number. It rang once, twice. When the line finally clicked and she heard her friend’s voice, Renee closed her eyes with relief.
“Paula. It’s me.”
Paula gasped. “Renee! My God! Where are you? Still at that motel? Is your car fixed?”
“No. The most awful thing happened. A bounty hunter tried to bring me back to Tolosa. A big, ugly monster—”
Paula gasped. “He found you?”
Renee froze. “Huh?”
“A big bald guy, tattoos, looks like a pro wrestler?”
“Yeah...?”
“He was here. He came to my apartment looking for you.”
“How did he know to talk to you?”
<
br /> “I don’t know. I think he came poking around our apartment building. Somebody must have told him we were friends.”
“And you told him I was at that motel?”
“No! Of course not! I have no idea how he found you!”
“Did you tell anyone where I was?”
Paula paused. “Well, only Tom—”
“Tom? You told Tom?”
“He didn’t tell the guy where you were! I swear! He’d never do anything to hurt you!”
Renee wanted to scream. Ever since Paula had first laid eyes on Tom, she’d been blinded by his blond, surfer-boy good looks and failed to notice that he went through women like most men went through a six-pack. She had also failed to notice that he hadn’t bothered to repay the two thousand dollars she’d loaned him when he’d been out of a job last summer.
In contrast to Tom, Paula was cute but ordinary-looking, with dark hair, a pixie face, and about fifteen extra pounds she couldn’t seem to get rid of, one of those girls who people always said had a nice personality because physically she was a little lacking. She really did have a nice personality, though, and about a thousand other fabulous qualities, and any decent guy would be lucky to have her. But she didn’t believe that about herself and always got stuck with guys who were losers. Tom just happened to be a very good-looking loser, and a very smooth liar. And sooner or later he was going to break her heart.
“Tom likes you,” Paula went on. “He doesn’t understand why you don’t like him. I don’t understand why you don’t like him.”
“Because he cheats on you, Paula! Get a clue, will you?”
“Tom says that has to be some kind of misunderstanding, that maybe you were mistaken—”
