by Liz Johnson
“How much longer?”
“It’s going to be a little while. I was just coming to let you know. Your line was a little loose, and I want to make sure it’s secure. Would you like me to light your pilot while I’m here?” Myles silently shot a prayer toward the ceiling that Kenzie had ducked out of view and was invisible to Edna’s prying eyes.
“Make it fast!” she snapped, turning on her heel.
Myles turned back to Kenzie as she slipped from around the concrete corner of the wall. He put his finger to his lips and listened to Edna’s footsteps moving toward the far corner of the house.
Finally he whispered, “Stay behind me until we hit the landing. Then get into Larry’s room as fast as you can. Dig around in there until I come get you. If you hear Edna, hide.”
Kenzie looked doubtful, but finally nodded her acquiescence, her eyes huge in the dim light. He felt only a twinge of guilt over sending her into the untidy room, but he doubted that anyone would be able to find anything in the pig sty. Plus, she could be as careless as she liked, and no one would ever be able to tell anyone had been snooping in that room. He needed to look carefully at the rest of the house, unhindered by a walking shadow.
He turned and hurried toward the kitchen landing, his eyes peering into every corner, trying to get the lay of the land. Immediately pushing Kenzie into the pig sty, he hurried silently around the kitchen.
He turned to look for the trash can, tripping over a four-legged fur ball. His heart jumped to his throat in surprise. “Great, I’m scared of fluffy white cats,” he grumbled silently as he pushed the cat away with his leg and moved to the trash can. Empty, the bag just replaced. No scraps of paper or notepads lying around. Everything in its proper place. The kitchen would be little help. Keeping an ear open, he crept down the short hallway toward the front door. He passed another hallway, leading toward two more doors, one closed, the other ajar. He figured that was Edna’s bedroom, and probably where she was at that moment.
In the foyer he spotted what he’d been looking for. Just where he had seen them the day before sat the three stacks of newspapers. They tugged at his imagination, conjuring images of all kinds of crazy reasons for a woman to keep such a collection of newspapers. He doubted they had anything to do with Kenzie’s kidnapping—there were too many to have accumulated in the few short days since his prison escape—but maybe they could clue him into something about the missing prison guard.
He knelt on the floor next to the largest stack and quickly scanned the first page. A headline about halfway down the page announced that the governor’s race was closer than anyone expected. Another article condemned the gubernatorial candidates, including Judge Claudia Suarez for running accusatory and unfounded advertising campaigns.
Rifling through the stacks, he found only newspapers from Mondays, and they went back more than a year.
What could possibly be so special about Mondays? Will she take tomorrow’s paper and add it to her stacks? He mentally talked himself through the piles of papers.
Deep in thought, he almost missed the tiny creak of the floorboards.
Movement down the hallway!
Oh-crud-oh-crud-oh-crud-oh-crud! Shoving the stacks of papers back into formation and racing down the hallway, he slid past Edna as she backed out of her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Thank You, God, for that little favor.
Keeping his footfalls silent, he raced into the bedroom where Kenzie hid. Just as he slid past the door and closed it most of the way, his mountain lion wound screamed in pain. Looking down, he noticed the metal bed frame that had connected with his injury. He chomped on his lower lip to keep from hollering with the agony.
His eyes sought out Kenzie’s across the room. She poked her questioning eyes above the unmade bed. He just shook his head and again pressed his forefinger to his lips. Kenzie nodded as Edna puttered into the kitchen.
Footsteps approached the door, and a hand clamped onto his forearm. Myles looked into Kenzie’s anxious gray eyes. Her clean, fresh scent surrounded him. Kenzie’s little hand let go, then immediately reconnected with his forearm as she clung to him. Silence hung in the air, but she spoke through little squeezes of her fingers. As slow footsteps moved closer to the cracked door, she squeezed tighter. If he could see her knuckles, he was sure that they would be white. A shadow blocked the light coming from the kitchen, and he was certain they were doomed. But her grip relaxed as the footfalls moved farther into the kitchen.
And then the worst possible thing happened. Ms. Edna picked up the telephone. One beep, as she punched in the first number. Two. Three. Four, five, and six. Please, just one more. Beeps seven and eight. Nine and ten. A long distance call.
Myles groaned inwardly and clutched the knee of his suddenly shaking leg with the hand that wasn’t occupied as Kenzie’s squeeze toy. He clamped his hand over his thigh and felt the sticky ooze through his pant leg. Suddenly his head began spinning, and he had to lean his chin on his chest and close his eyes.
He could hear Edna talking on the phone, but could make out nothing she said over the rushing in his ears. Her footsteps worked their way from one wall to another in the kitchen, and in his mind’s eye he could see her pacing to the end of the curly phone cord and then stretching it in the other direction. With her right on the other side of the door, they were trapped.
And who knew for how long?
After several minutes of silence, Kenzie leaned in until her lips brushed his ear. “Are you okay?” He nodded in response but could not summon the strength to speak at the moment. Clammy with sweat, he leaned into her shoulder. Then her arm slipped around his shoulder, and she rested one cool hand on his forehead.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” her voice almost inaudible but strong.
“Yes.”
“You’re weak. What’s wrong?”
How on earth could she know that something was wrong? There was no way she could see his leg in the darkness, though the reopened wound on his right leg howled in pain at just the thought of it. “I’m bleeding again.”
TEN
Kenzie’s hand brushed the sticky mess on Myles’s thigh and she instinctively pulled back, biting her tongue to keep from crying out at the amount of blood she felt there. No wonder he was leaning so heavily against her shoulder. She had to stop the blood before he left a mess for Edna Whitestall to find later. More importantly, she had to stop the blood before Myles was too far gone to be any help.
And she needed help right now.
Reaching around her on the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, she hunted for something to tie around the leg to stop the blood flow. Nothing. She could tear her shirt sleeves, but that would cause too much noise. Even now Edna marched just on the other side of the door, making a ruckus in the kitchen.
Her hand landed on her waist, and therein lay the help she needed. Unbuckling her belt as fast as she could with one hand, she pulled it free from the belt loops and nudged Myles awake.
“I need you to help me.”
He grunted softly. “What?”
“Help me tie this around your leg so you don’t lose any more blood.”
With fumbling fingers he held on to one end of the belt as Kenzie tugged the other end under his leg and wrapped it around. They managed to get it tight enough that he grunted again, this time in pain.
Myles’s breathing eased slightly, and she took several moments to rescan the room. Immediately, her eyes landed on the prison guard uniform crumpled almost underneath the bed, that she’d missed during her first look around the room. Clearly, it had been waiting to be laundered for quite some time. Could it contain some bit of information that she had not found in the rest of the room? Obviously unsavory things were happening at the prison, if that’s where Larry had conscripted Myles. Maybe the others behind this plot were at the prison, as well.
Leaning Myles against the wall behind them, she peeked out the door and slipped across the floor to rifle through the pile of clothes. Tucking her fingers
into every pocket, she found thirty-four cents, a paper clip, some lint and a little sticky note. Squinting at the block print on the paper, she made out the words, “Call when the job is done,” followed by a phone number, and signed “Joe.”
Suddenly Myles groaned, and she looked up just in time to see his eyes droop closed again. Hopping back to his side, she said, “Wake up, Myles. Talk to me.”
“About what?” he whispered.
She wasn’t sure. How much noise could they make? Edna was just on the other side of the door, and if they weren’t careful they’d give themselves away. And then—as if in response to Kenzie’s unprayed prayer—Edna’s words clearly rang through the door.
“My hearing aid is bothering me again. I’m going to take it out, so you just speak up really clear now…What? Speak up!”
Kenzie smiled and silently thanked God for knowing exactly what they needed. Then she whispered to Myles, “Anything. Tell me where you went to school.”
“School? I went to Kofa High. I played on the football team. We weren’t great, but we won city my senior year.”
The smile in his soft voice filled the small room. “Go on. What about college?” Silence reigned for several moments until she thought he hadn’t heard her. “College?” she prompted.
“I…I wanted to be a navy SEAL. Always. I just wanted to be part of that elite team, to belong to something bigger than myself. I spent my entire time in high school just preparing to join the navy. I never worried about college. I was going to be a SEAL.
“And then, during the city championship game my senior year, I got tackled, and my ACL was shredded. A couple of surgeries and I was supposed to be good as new, so they let me join the navy. I made it through boot camp and then registered for SEAL training as soon as I could. I was in the best shape of my life and passed all of the exams with flying colors, but then I had a physical just before BUDs—”
“Buds? What’s that?”
Myles rubbed his left knee absently in a gentle rotating motion. “Basic Underwater Demolition—the training program for SEALs. Its core is an eight-week intensive conditioning program that culminates in the worst week on the planet. Sleep-deprived, hungry, every muscle aching, pushing yourself past every limit you thought you had. Man, it would have been great!”
“Sounds like a blast.”
“Yeah, well, it’s all I ever wanted. But the doctor didn’t pass me. He wouldn’t let me even attempt BUDs. Said it would be too hard on my knee. Said I’d never walk again if I reinjured it, and there was a strong likelihood of that during training.
“So I finished out my four-year enlistment. Sadly, I was less than a model seaman.” She willed him to open up more, to share the details. She wanted to see his heart, to know what his life before this moment was really like.
“I barely managed to keep my name off a list of men court martialed for conduct unbecoming a member of the U.S. Navy. I was angry and still just looking to belong to something bigger than myself. I needed a new goal, a new purpose, and until I found it, I was only about having a good time.
“My uncle used to be in the secret service, so I thought about that, but it didn’t seem a good fit for me. I wanted more than just standing on the sidelines of history.”
While he swallowed, Kenzie heard Edna talking loudly, still in the kitchen. Her words jumbled together, but there was a definite cadence to the way Edna spoke. A chair scraped along the linoleum and a loud sigh echoed into the adjoining room.
“It was my mom who suggested the FBI. She said she’d been praying for me and that she was sure I was supposed to be a special agent. I laughed at her at first. I really hadn’t had anything to do with God since I was forced to go to youth group in high school. But that seed was planted, and when I started college at the University of Arizona, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, I was already seriously thinking about law enforcement. Three of the five courses I took my first semester were political science and criminal justice classes. After that, I was hooked.
“It took me three years to get my bachelor’s, working straight through, another two years for law school at Arizona State, and by then I was sure that the FBI was the right place for me. I’d cleaned up my act and stayed on the right side of the law, and I thought that joining the bureau would give me the sense of belonging that I’d always wanted.”
“And it didn’t?”
Sighing even more heavily into Kenzie’s shoulder, he shook his head. She felt the brush of his soft hair against her cheek. “No. It didn’t. I loved the bureau right away, but I was still lost. I didn’t fit in. I was missing something. I knew it, and I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t going to find it in the SEALs or the bureau or school or anywhere else.
“When I was stationed in the Portland field office, I met this woman, Heather. She invited me to her church. I must have turned her down at least a dozen times. But she had this beautiful blond hair, and I had this idea that if I just went to church with her, maybe she’d go on a date with me.”
Kenzie saw green for a moment, instantly despising Heather and her gorgeous hair. Her shoulders twitched and her hands fisted into Myles’s shirt. He winced, and she realized she had grabbed more than just his shirt. Trying to tamp down her wayward emotions, she focused on Myles’s whispers.
“Anyway, things with Heather never went anywhere—”
Kenzie let out the breath she didn’t even realize she had been holding in.
“—but I got hooked on the church. The people there just seemed to really care about me and each other. This older couple, the Stirlings, invited me to their house for lunch after church on my second Sunday there. They became like another set of grandparents to me, and Roger helped me through the death of my grandparents—my mom’s parents—a couple years ago. I wanted to be just like him.
“Don’t get me wrong, my parents are great, and my grandparents were wonderful. But there was something so incredibly contagious about Roger. It was the way he greeted everyone like he’d known them for a lifetime. The way he listened when I talked, even about the most mundane things. The way he still held his wife’s hand after forty-five years of marriage. I wanted what he had.”
Even the forty-five years of marriage? A scene of Myles’s eighty-year-old hand covered in age spots and little tufts of white hair, holding her equally wrinkled hand, flashed before her eyes.
“I guess I’d always known that I couldn’t—wouldn’t—have any of that unless I really decided what I was going to do with God. So, when my grandparents passed away so close together, I took it as a reminder that none of us are guaranteed one more day on this earth. I found that God had been waiting for me, so close, right there all the time, waiting for me to turn to Him.”
Kenzie blinked at the wetness in her eyes, fighting the urge to wipe them. She cleared her throat as softly as she could, not sure what to say.
And suddenly she didn’t have to respond to what Myles had said.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
He nodded. A door had definitely opened. Edna must have left the kitchen while Kenzie was consumed with Myles’s story.
“I’m going to go check it out.” She leaned him back against the cool wall, then hopped up and hurried to the crack in the door. Silence. She held her breath, waiting for something, anything. She reached behind her and pulled Myles to his feet, letting him rest on her shoulders.
Then a toilet flushed.
Doing her best impression of Myles, she cleared her throat and said, “All set, ma’am. No leaks. You should be good to go for the winter. Have a good day.”
Ignoring the heaviness of the dead weight around her shoulders, Kenzie raced for the nearest exit, the back door. Hobbling around the side of the house, they burst into the open side yard.
At the curb she looked left. Clear. Looked right.
Police car.
A white car with red and blue lights pulled to a stop in front of them!
Myles took a twisted step from the soft, lush
grass to the firm cement of the sidewalk. His leg howled, and black spots obstructed his vision. Blinking rapidly, he clung to the slim shoulders under his left arm.
When his vision finally cleared, he began to sigh—but stopped in an almost hiccup.
The police car rolled toward them, silent but deadly. If they were captured, he could do nothing to protect Kenzie, to save her from whoever had risked everything to take her out of the picture. And he’d fail his assignment, too, which of course was the real issue. Right?
Kenzie’s right arm squeezed at his middle, and he chanced a look down at his left leg. A dark red stain marred his new jeans, and he realized that he would have to do some fancy talking to get them out of this.
Claiming an attack of some sort would only spur the police officer to greater interest. An emergency too severe would mean too many questions. He had to offer just the right excuse for why two men—after all, this officer should see Kenzie as a man—ran from a backyard, one with blood coming from his leg and the other holding his friend up.
A chance glance at the soft facial lines and smooth jaw of the woman next to him and he knew the jig was up. No way would any man with a pulse mistake Kenzie for anything other than what she truly was.
The police car pulled up to the curb directly in front of them, and the passenger-side window rolled down with a slight hissing noise.
“Afternoon, gentlemen.” The police officer was young, with classic but forgettable features, his hair slicked back with more oil than his sedan probably used in a month.
Myles opened his mouth, but was immediately cut short.
“Afternoon, officer.” The voice that came from Kenzie’s lips was rough and slightly hoarse, and Myles almost didn’t recognize who had interrupted him.
The officer rested on his steering wheel with one arm and leaned so far toward them that his face nearly eclipsed the passenger door. “What seems to be the trouble here?”
“Oh, my stupid cousin stabbed himself in the leg with Aunt Edna’s gardening shears.” She nudged Myles in the rib. “We was working on cleaning out her garage. Ever since Larry took off, she hasn’t had much help around the house.”
