River Road

by JoAnn Ross

  "You're pretty gorgeous yourself," she murmured as she sank lower into the water. Into seduction.

  "How can you tell? Your eyes are closed."

  "Believe me, I've memorized, every glorious inch." No wonder Warren had been concerned about self-combustion. If she wasn't a levelheaded woman, she might worry about it herself.

  "Open your eyes."

  It took an effort, but she managed to do as he asked.

  "Look at this." Her breasts were draped in iridescent lather, but he'd left her ruby-hard nipples bare. The sight of his wide, dark hand against those snowy bubbles, against her fair skin, was the most erotic thing she'd ever seen. "Did I ever tell you that I was a soda jerk for a while?"

  "I don't believe it came up," she said raggedly, as those fingers inside her began seductively moving in and out.

  "Breaux's Drugstore had a fountain. Before I was old enough to get my driver's license, I used to build hot fudge sundaes for pretty girls." He skimmed a thumb over first one taut peak, then the other. "That's what you remind me of, two scoops of French vanilla with whipped cream and red cherries topping them off. Sweet and indulgent and very, very tasty."

  His lips closed over her nipple, battering her senses with the tug of his mouth, which connected directly to the dark sensation between her legs. Not wanting to come alone, needing to share everything, she rolled over on top of him, taking him deep inside her, embracing him as they both slid under the water.

  * * *

  They were on their way to Beau Soleil for the final day's shoot when Finn's cell phone rang. He flipped it open and tensed when he saw the caller had blocked his identity. "Callahan."

  "Finn?"

  "Jim? What's up?" Figuring Jansen had been busy trying to get rid of him while he'd been away, Finn braced himself for the worst.

  "I've got some good news and some bad news," his superior told him.

  "Give me the good news first."

  "Jansen's gone."

  "What do you mean, gone? Wait a minute, let me guess. Someone threw water on her and she melted?"

  "She's been transferred. Well, more like demoted to desk duty out in the hinterlands. So far out, I figure it'll take her about fifty years to crawl her way back up to Boise."

  She'd come from Idaho on her rocket ride up the Bureau's ranks. It appeared her rocket had crashed and burned.

  "Why? What did she do?"

  "It was more a case of what she didn't do. She didn't pay enough attention when Lawson fired his counsel and hired himself a female lawyer."

  "He's entitled." Finn had thought it had been a stupid move when he'd heard about it the other night on the news, but if dumping the dream team weakened Lawson's defense enough to ensure his conviction, he was all for it.

  "Sure, but then she stalled when brass told her to move the guy out of the hospital to a more secure facility."

  "Because she wanted to keep him in her jurisdiction." And garner all the press that would entail, Finn supposed.

  "It'd be my guess she didn't want to lose the headlines," Jim Burke said. One of the reasons they'd always worked so well together was that they often thought alike. "But she miscalculated badly."

  Finn felt everything in him still. "You're not telling me he tried to escape again?"

  "No." The drawn breath was easily heard across the miles. "I'm telling you he did escape."

  "Fuck," Finn ground out, causing Julia, who'd been studying her script, to look over at him. "Anyone know where he's gone?"

  "He seems to have gone to ground. Remember that house he had in North Carolina?"

  "In the mountains around where he grew up." They'd found his fourth victim in the well in the back yard.

  "We tracked him to a truck stop at the North Carolina-Virginia border. We're guessing he's headed home."

  "Hell, the ground there is riddled with limestone caves." If Lawson stayed put, it could take years to find him.

  "We've got agents headed there now. And the state cops have brought out dog teams. I'm trying to get your suspension overturned so you can get in on the hunt, but you know the red tape involved. Jansen built up a pretty strong political base, which seems to be lobbying to shift the blame to the guys who were assigned to guard Lawson, so it may take a day or so."

  "They might have screwed up, letting him get away. But it was her command." Which meant the SAC should have been prepared to accept responsibility.

  "Standing by her men wasn't in her playbook," Burke said, telling Finn nothing he hadn't thought for himself innumerable times. "Since you know Lawson best, the director's bound to want you on the case."

  "Yeah. I want me on the case, too." After his supervisor promised to keep him up to date, Finn flipped the phone closed again.

  "Was that about Lawson?" Julia asked.

  "Yeah. He escaped."

  "So I gathered. And you're going after him."

  "Yeah. After you're safe on the plane for Kathmandu."

  He could sense she was prepared to argue, and appreciated when she didn't challenge his choices.

  "You'll get him," she said calmly.

  "Yeah." Finn couldn't allow himself to consider the alternative. He worried momentarily that Lawson might actually come after him, then decided that he wouldn't go to the trouble of escaping only to risk showing up here in the media spotlight.

  Hell. The guy was turning out to be just like the killer in all those Halloween movies: just when you thought for sure he was a goner, he'd leap up, knife in hand, for another sequel.

  He'd find him, Finn vowed. And this time, if he was lucky, Lawson would give him the excuse to end things once and for all.

  * * *

  "All right, everyone," Randy said as everyone gathered to shoot the kidnapping scene. "Since time is money, and I know everyone's eager to take off on holiday, we're going to attempt the impossible and pull this off in one take. Julia, you'll be in the cemetery, digging up the silver you'd hidden there at the beginning of the war.

  "The Yankees are holding your stepfather prisoner. You plan to buy his freedom with some of the sterling, then use the rest to finance a new start in Texas, where you've heard people don't ask questions regarding others' backgrounds.

  "With the cannons booming, you don't hear the men creeping up behind you in the fog. When you do become aware of them, it's too late. You're captured by a group of rebel deserters who've concocted a plan to kidnap you and finance their own trip west by selling you to a brothel in New Orleans."

  "A brothel?"

  "A brothel," he agreed. "Worn out by the trials and tribulations you've undergone, on the brink of starvation because the Yankees have burned your fields and taken all your livestock for their army, you can't bear the idea of further degradation. So instead of fighting for your freedom, you pull the derringer from your garter and shoot yourself through the heart,"

  "I don't believe that."

  The director shot Julia a frustrated look. "You don't believe what?"

  "That Fancy wouldn't fight. This is a woman who's done whatever it took for survival. She's within days—perhaps even hours—of this nightmare being over. And now she's giving up?"

  "You've never heard of metaphors?" Charles challenged in that bull-like way Julia hated. "She's been defeated. Like the South. She's a woman in ruins. Like Belle Terre. Fancy symbolizes the excesses of the antebellum era finally brought to its knees."

  "I agree with Julia," Warren spoke up, as he had been doing more and more. Julia wondered if he was merely starting to understand his power, or if perhaps his relationship with Lorelei Fairchild had boosted his self-confidence. "Which is why I wrote Fancy fighting like a wildcat."

  "That's the way I see it," Randy seconded. "Not only do we get another Fancy fight scene, which audiences will love, but since we need to get the story line back to modern times, it'll be more dramatic if the renegade soldiers take her hostage. Then, when she escapes, she can make that leap back to the twenty-first century."

  "I don't like it." Ke
ndall folded his arms in a show of the Golden Rule: he who owns the gold, rules. "Since Julia insists on leaving River Road , there's no point in having her return. We'll still get back to the twenty-first century by killing her off in the Belle Terre cemetery, which will result in her dying while lingering in that coma."

  It was the first time the producer had actually acknowledged she was leaving the show. Julia was relieved he'd finally seen the light. But Amanda had been good for her and she intended to remain true to character, flawed though it might be, until the end.

  Warren insisted, "Neither Fancy nor Amanda would kill themselves. They're survivors. Fancy has survived a war; certainly she isn't going to view being kidnapped by a bunch of thugs as the end of the world. Particularly since she has a way of getting men to do what she wants. She'd probably seduce each and every one of them, or at least promise them sex, then hold them at gunpoint with their own weapons and escape."

  "Viewers want retribution," Kendall said stubbornly. "Fancy has betrayed everyone in her life. She deserves comeuppance."

  "Why don't we try it this way first, mates?" Randy suggested. "Then if it doesn't work, suicide's still on the table. The extra riders we've pulled in for the kidnapping are already here, so we might as well shoot the scene for insurance. Because if it turns out you're wrong, Kendall, and the suicide scene doesn't work, it'd cost us a bloody fortune on wasted days while we rounded everyone up again."

  "All right." Charles was obviously less than pleased with this suggestion. Julia suspected the only reason he was willing to concede to even try the scene her way was that time was money and they were wasting too much of it standing around here arguing. "When you put it that way, it seems only cost effective to give it a try."

  Not even attempting to conceal his satisfaction with having won that argument, Randy turned toward Julia. "All right, love, here's the setup. You're in the cemetery, placing flowers on the grave of your sister's fiance, having realized too late that it's him, not your stepfather, you love. Will ever love. You throw yourself on his grave—"

  "Isn't that a bit overly dramatic?"

  "You're bleeping right it is. Which is why it works. So, because you're weeping, you don't hear the thunder of the horses' hooves at first. When you do, you look up—wiping your tears from your face— expecting it to be those hated Yankees soldiers returning to Belle Terre after the battle.

  "Instead, you're thrilled to see the group of men in tattered gray uniforms who you believe have broken through the battle lines. The cannon fire is growing closer; you realize that the war is finally coming to an end and you're looking forward to a new start.

  "But that's not to be. They've already planned to kidnap you. Both sides think you've been spying on the other, but these are blokes without principles or scruples, so they're just going to hold you hostage until the war ends, then hand you over to the victors. For a price, of course."

  "Of course," Julia murmured.

  Randy and Warren then began arguing that it might be a good idea to have Fancy seduce her captors. Fortunately, they finally opted for the cliff-hanger ending of just having her kidnapped. As patient as Finn had been, Julia knew he would have been less than thrilled watching the seduction scenario played out.

  Chapter 26

  Watching Julia being kidnapped by Confederate thugs might not be as bad as watching the rape scene on Beau Soleil's stairs, and definitely not as heart wrenching as when the horse and carriage had been tearing toward the water, but Finn sure couldn't call it entertainment.

  "All this is starting to make whatever she's going to go through on that Bond movie look like kiddie's play," Nate observed as one of the rebels dressed in tattered and bloodied gray yanked her off the mound of dirt that had been brought in to look like a freshly covered grave, and pulled her astride his horse.

  "We've always ended each episode with a bit of a cliff-hanger," Warren, who was standing nearby, said. "And a big one at the end of the season. Viewers have come to expect it."

  "Well, they're definitely not going to be disappointed with this one then," Nate said.

  Finn didn't say anything. His eyes remained riveted on the riders and horses as they raced away into the fog, which was even thicker than usual this morning. He could barely see his hand in front of his face. That hadn't deterred Hogan, who'd declared it only heightened the suspense and besides, if it did prove a problem, computers could rake care of it in editing.

  "Cut," Hogan called out.

  "Cut," the assistant director echoed.

  "And that's finally a wrap," the director said, making Finn all too aware of the fact that Julia would be leaving tomorrow.

  In the beginning, he'd been looking forward to that day. When things had been different. When he hadn't known how much more satisfying his days were when he began them with her smile, how much more pleasurable his nights were when he spent them making love to her. And how much enjoyment she brought to all those hours in between.

  She did more than just rile up his glands; she filled his senses, balanced him in a way he hadn't felt in a very long time. Since a young woman had been found murdered in San Diego's Griffith. Park and had set off the thirty-month nearly round-the-clock chase for Lawson that had consumed not just his every waking hour and most of those he should have been sleeping, but his mind. She'd been right about them becoming linked in some eerie way. Somehow Lawson's thoughts had become his, writhing in his brain and before his mind's eye like poisonous snakes.

  Finn had dreamed of the women, all young and pretty and filled with life when the killer had picked them up at the local watering spots around the universities, and taken them to whatever home he'd been living in at the time. Julia had once accused him of only viewing the world in black and white. What he hadn't told her, hadn't told anyone, was that whenever he'd look down at one of Lawson's victim's bodies, discarded like old rags onto a trash heap, he'd pictured her last days of life in vivid, blinding Technicolor, down to the last horrendous detail.

  He'd forced himself to watch every minute of their autopsies, acknowledging that they were more than mere files that were piling higher and higher on his metal desk. Although it was by far the most difficult thing he'd ever done, and hoped it was the most painful thing he'd ever have to do, he'd attended their funerals and assured their weeping mothers and shell-shocked fathers, whose suffering made his own inconsequential by comparison, that the monster who'd brought so much misery to so many, would be brought to justice.

  "Justice," he scoffed now. The only real justice would be to put Lawson in a cage with all those grieving parents and sisters and brothers, and walk away.

  Nate glanced over at him. "Did you say something?"

  "No," Finn responded brusquely, as he always did when this subject came up. But somehow, when he hadn't been paying close attention, his internal walls had begun to crumble. "I was just wondering at what point vengeance becomes justice. And vice versa."

  "I suppose it depends on your point of view."

  "Yeah. I suppose so."

  "You got him once," Nate said. Finn had told him, and only him, about Burke's call. "You'll get him again."

  "I fully intend to." The riders had returned. At least four of them had. But hadn't there originally been six? "How long has she been gone ?"

  Nate blinked at the sudden shift in topic, then followed Finn's gaze to the wrangler, who was unsaddling the horses. "I don't know. Five minutes, maybe. Six?"

  The short hairs at the back of Finn's neck prickled. Never a good sign. "However long it's been," he said, "it's been too damn long."

  * * *

  Julia blinked her eyes, attempting to focus through the shadows. She had no idea where she was or any memory of how she'd gotten here. The last thing she remembered, she'd been flung over the back of a horse that was thundering through fog as thick as a gray velvet theater curtain.

  "It's about time you woke up," an unfamiliar voice said. "I was getting afraid you'd overdosed."

  Was she awa
ke? Or dreaming? Had she fallen off the horse? That might explain the maniac who was pounding away with a sledgehammer inside her head.

  He mentioned an overdose. Which was impossible, since she'd never done drugs. But maybe she'd been given drugs? Was she in a hospital? She tried to focus through the dark shadows, but everything was blurry, as if viewed through dirty glass.

  It didn't feel like a hospital. Or smell, sound, or look like one. There were no bright lights, no busy activity out in the hallway, no disembodied voices paging doctors over the intercom, no low, steady beeping of monitors or distant sound of televisions from adjoining rooms.

  There was no rattle of metal trays outside her door, which made her realize she was hungry. And instead of the smell of antiseptic, the air, drenched with moisture, was thick with the rank odor of mildew.

  Her arms and shoulders felt as if they'd been yanked out of their sockets. Had she fallen off the horse during that kidnap scene? She tried to ease the ache, only to discover that she couldn't move. Someone had tied her wrists to the rusted iron headboard of a narrow bed, in much the same way Amanda had been tied to the bedposts in that scene they'd shot before leaving Los Angeles.

  Julia struggled to steady her breath. Tried to concentrate. She seemed to be in a cabin that was nothing like Finn's cozy camp. The mold and musty smell suggested it had been deserted for a very long time. If there were windows, they must have been painted black, because the only light coming into the room was a stuttering thin sliver that managed to shine through a gap in the rotting boards.

  How long ago had she been unconscious? Minutes? Hours? Days?

  "I know this is a cliche. But where am I?" Her throat was sore and raspy. "And who are you?"

  "You don't need to know either of those things," said a gruffer male voice coming from the shadows. "You just need to know that if you follow the program and don't try anything funny, everything will be okay."

  Julia found nothing funny about her situation.

  "Are you my stalker?"