by Liz Johnson
A brown paper grocery bag sat on the table next to her, and she smiled brightly. “I picked us up something to eat. I’m starving!” She immediately began unloading things from the bag and chattering away. “We don’t have a refrigerator or microwave, so I tried to come up with some things that don’t need to be cooled or heated. And I know you need to eat to get your strength back.”
She held up a bag of baby carrots and he scowled. Here she was being Sweet Kenzie, and he was in the mood to verbally spar with Spicy Kenzie.
She continued ignoring him, unloading bread, peanut butter, jelly, a bag of apples and something that looked like a short, brown can of soda. In the dim light and at this distance, he was sure he was mistaken, but he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at.
“I even remembered to get utensils and plates!” She held up her purchases as trophies, dancing them back and forth in front of her.
“Great,” he mumbled.
Kenzie cocked her head to one side and looked right into his face. “What’s wrong?” Simple and sweet. To-the-point Kenzie.
Myles glowered and tried again to bring back Spicy. “I just thought you might like to know that I’ve been pacing in my mind for the last half an hour, going crazy with worry. I told you to be back before dark.”
“Just in your mind? What, I don’t rate actually walking?”
“Well, that hurts too much.”
She threw her head back and laughed as she slipped onto the edge of the bed next to him and put her hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry I’m late. There was a police officer at the grocery store.”
His hand reached up and locked around her wrist. His other hand cupped her neck and he pulled her to his chest, holding her close, making sure she was really there. He needed to confirm that she wasn’t an illusion.
Obligingly, she tucked her head under his chin and just rested against him. His heart returned to its normal pace. Had it been racing? He hadn’t even noticed. But now, with her in his arms, holding her close, Myles realized just how scared he had been. He ran his hand over her back one more time, just for good measure, then gripped her by her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look into her face.
“Did he see you? The cop?”
“No.” She smiled. “I wasn’t bothering anyone, and I kept to myself. He was too busy chatting with the pretty clerk to notice me.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.” Heaving a deep breath, he continued. “But from here on out, we don’t go anywhere without the other. Agreed?”
She nodded and quickly moved back to prepare her feast. In no time at all, she whipped together two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and handed him a plate holding them both.
“Both for me?” he quirked an eyebrow.
“You’re a growing boy and all. We’ve got to keep you well fed.”
He chuckled, then bowed his head to say a quick prayer. Suddenly Kenzie’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
“Will you pray for me, too?” she asked.
He looked up at her expectant face and nodded. “God, thanks for keeping us safe. Thanks for this food. Please be with us as we try to figure out this whole situation. In Your name, amen.”
Shortly, Kenzie joined him again, sitting at the end of the bed, legs crossed, a plate with her own sandwich in front of her. She tossed him a red apple and began munching on her own.
The first sandwich was gone in three bites, and Myles licked his fingers, mumbling his appreciation. “Grape jelly. My favorite.”
“Mine, too,” Kenzie chuckled.
He stared at her for several long moments and finally said, “Thank you.”
“For what?” she asked around a bite of sticky peanut butter.
“For risking everything just to feed us. For making me take you along.” He realized for maybe the first time that he really meant it. He was so thankful not to be doing this alone. Somehow, having Kenzie along for the ride made the whole situation bearable.
“Anytime!” she chirped. She crammed the rest of her sandwich into her mouth and chewed loudly. “Nana would be so ashamed of me if she could see me now. What happened to my good table manners?”
Myles laughed. “No table. No manners required.”
They finished eating their dinner in silence, filling up on baby carrots and washing it all down with murky water from the tap.
As she picked up Myles’s plate and swept a few crumbs from the bedspread onto the plate, Kenzie said, “Well, are we going to call Joe?” Her eyes glanced to the old-fashioned phone on the bedside table.
“We can’t call Joe from here.” He was just as curious as Kenzie about the name and phone number on the slip of paper that she had found in Whitestall’s guard uniform. But they had to be smart about it.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “We have no idea what we’re calling into. What if they are tracking the call? What if they are only expecting a call at a certain time and we blow it? What if they have the U.S. Marshals monitoring it? Too many what-ifs. We need a safe place to come back to, and right now that’s the Jewel Motel. We can’t put that in jeopardy yet. It’s getting late and I’m beat. We’ll call from a pay phone tomorrow.”
Kenzie shrugged. “If you think that’s best.”
“I do.”
She tossed him the item from the table that, in the dim light and from a distance, looked like a short can of soda. It landed softly into his outstretched hands. An ace bandage. She chucked a small white plastic container at him. He flipped it over and saw the large red cross on the front.
“I picked up another pair of pants for you, and we don’t need those covered in blood, too. Fix yourself up.”
“Oh.” Not his wittiest retort, but the girl had a good point.
“Now, get some sleep. I’ll be in the car if you need me.”
“No, let me,” he argued.
She only shook her head and slipped out the door. “It’s my turn. You need the rest and the bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
TWELVE
Myles’s fingers drummed ceaselessly on the black steering wheel of his grandma’s old sedan. His injured leg bounced in rhythm to the tapping of his hands, and his head jerked every four beats to the tempo within.
The car radio was turned off, and the only other sound in the vehicle was Kenzie’s deep breaths. They sat in the car outside of an almost deserted gas station. The gas pump attendant milled around the pumps, filling up windshield washing fluids and rinsing the ground with a garden hose. But the only other car, a red, classic Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, parked in front of the small station house, was also the transportation for the man standing at the crumbling pay phone booth at the corner of the building.
The man in khaki pants and a black, short-sleeve shirt stood with his back to them, head ducked down. He just needed a baseball cap to look more conspicuously like he was hiding from something or someone.
Kenzie must have been thinking the same thing as she pulled the hat off her own head, letting her red hair fall around her shoulders. The sunglasses remained perched on her nose as she shook her hair out one more time.
“When this is all said and done, you should wear your hair down more.” Myles almost clamped his hands over his mouth. How could he say something like that?
Kenzie glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and a tiny smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “Why?”
“It…just…well—” When had he become such an ineloquent clod? He cleared his throat and tried again. “It’s very fetching when it’s down.”
“Fetching, huh? And are you saying that you’ll be around to appreciate its fetchingness—you know—when all is said and done?”
He’d backed himself into this corner. But if the punch in his gut told him anything, it was that he sure wanted to be around to appreciate it. He imagined having free rein to run his fingers through all of that fiery silk. To have her rely on him and expect him to protect her when this was all over. He wanted to be there for her, forever.
>
He choked aloud on his own silent thoughts. What was it about Kenzie Thorn that made his mind wander down these dangerous paths? And this thought track was definitely unsafe. No good ever came of wishing about what-ifs. And until this assignment was complete, everything about a future with Kenzie was a what-if.
He needed a new topic to think about. Now.
Trying to sidestep the conversation he had started by picking on the guy on the phone, he said, “He looks like he can afford a cell phone. Wonder why he’s not using it.”
Kenzie shot Myles a smirk, but let him off the hook and followed the new line in the conversation. “Probably for the same reason we wouldn’t use a cell phone if we had one.”
“Ah, he’s on the lam, too, you think? Could be.”
She pushed his shoulder and laughed. “He doesn’t want to be tracked.”
“So he’s hiding out from the little missus?”
“No! I’ll bet he’s ordering a really nice gift for her and doesn’t want her to find out.”
“Or he’s bribing a city councilman for better parking on his street,” Myles mused.
“More likely, he’s trying to reach his daughter who isn’t talking to him and won’t pick up if she sees it’s him on the caller ID.”
“Or…maybe he’s checking in with the parole officer his wife doesn’t know he has.”
“Don’t be deranged. He’s obviously calling the police about the suspicious white sedan parked in front of a service station and not filling up with gas. Being a good citizen and all.”
Myles chuckled. “Oh, of course, turning in the two felon-looking guys in the front seat of said sedan is only the proper and citizenly thing to—”
Whack! Whack! Whack!
Myles’s head banged against the car’s ceiling, sending sunbursts in front of his eyes. He hacked and coughed for several seconds, trying to remove his tongue from his throat. Fingernails from the passenger in the seat next to him dug unrelentingly into his right forearm.
When his eyes finally stopped watering enough for him to see who had pounded on his window, he made out a gray uniform from ankles to chin. And a name sewn above the wearer’s heart: Jimmy.
Myles rolled his window down about four inches and looked hard into the face of the boy who had been hosing down the gas pumps just two minutes before.
“Do you need a fill-up, mister? I’m about to go on break, so if you need gas, I’ll fill it up now or you’ll have to wait twenty minutes.”
Myles gave him a scowl. “We’re fine,” he said, putting his hand over his heart, thankful that it was returning to its normal speed. He rolled the window back up and looked at Kenzie. Lips pulled tightly and eyes crinkled at the corner, she looked ready to explode. Snorting once, then again, she swallowed deeply and sighed.
“I thought we were toast, but the look of sheer panic on your face would have kept me laughing all the way back to Mac and Nana’s.”
“Well, I appreciate your concern,” he deadpanned, “but I would be going back to the big house for quite a while. No cause for mirth there.”
“No, I suppose not.” She sighed again, closed her eyes and laid her hand on his arm.
“But of course, we have to live in a state where a man can’t pump his own gas,” he growled. “If it weren’t for that crazy kid, my heart rate would be normal instead of through the top of my head.”
“Oh, you poor thing. You know, we could always go to another pay phone.”
“No, this one is perfect.” And it was. Pay phones were hard to come by these days. With every kid and his little brother getting a cell phone on a family plan, pay phones had gone the way of the dodo. To find a phone seventeen blocks from the Jewel Motel was nothing short of ideal. Five blocks west. Six north. Six more west. Not too close—no less than two other motels on the route between the two locations. Not too far—a walkable distance if necessary.
Ideal.
After all, once they placed a call from this location, they would either be tracked or—Myles hoped—ignored. Either way, this phone would not give away their location.
Just then Mr. Bribing-his-daughter-for-a-special-gift-for-his-wife walked away from the phone. He hopped into his little coupe and zipped out of the parking lot.
“Well, kid, this is it.” Myles produced the scrap of yellow paper from his pocket and held it with his fingertips. “If a cop shows up, don’t worry about me—just get out of here. Okay?”
Kenzie nodded and he turned to get out of the car. Suddenly she grabbed his arm. “Get a newspaper while you’re out there. Please.” It was his turn to nod, then he hopped out of the car and stalked toward the deserted pay phone.
God, please let there be something to help us at the other end of this phone number. He plunked a dime and quarter from his pocket and listened to them roll down the slot, clinking as they hit the bottom. He punched in the ten digits onto the sticky number pad and waited as the phone on the other end rang twice.
His stomach bunched in knots, his hands clammy, Myles took a deep breath. No amount of training prepared anyone for an unknown phone call that could either make or break a case.
The phone on the other end stopped ringing; someone took a deep breath and in a gravelly voice said, “Larry? Where have you been? No one’s seen hide nor hair of you in days!”
Myles grunted, not sure how to answer.
“Joe” grumbled something unsavory, but continued on. “It doesn’t matter. It’s probably better anyway! So get on with it. Have you heard from the inmate? Well? Is she dead?”
Kenzie sat in the passenger seat of her car as she watched Myles step up to the phone booth next to the front entrance of the small building. He picked up the phone, dialed the number and then ruffled his hair impatiently. Sunlight glinted off the metal partitions jutting out from the wall. A gust of wind kicked a white plastic bag along the ground and then spun it around several times. The theme from the old television show Gunsmoke whistled through her head, as Kenzie imagined the bag to be tumbleweed.
She supposed that her situation could be considered something like an old Western. There was definitely a bad guy, and certainly Myles could be construed as a modern-day cowboy in his jeans and cotton T-shirt, his rakish brown hair blowing gently in the breeze. Likely at least several of the players in this Western owned cowboy hats—and in small-town Oregon, they probably owned horses, too.
A grin quirked the corner of her mouth as she let her mind wander to a place where she and Myles rode horses through open pastures, galloping away from the men in black hats who chased them. Suddenly one of the men in black pulled a gun and fired it at them.
Crack!
Even though it was imagined, the sound of the gunfire shook Kenzie from her trance. It also opened up a whole new realm of possibilities in the real world. She could not be sure why it had never occurred to her until now, but the men chasing her and Myles were armed, were dangerous—likely wouldn’t hesitate before shooting Myles.
A knot settled in the bottom of Kenzie’s stomach, and she pondered it for several seconds. Although she expected it to be a nervous response to the feeling of being watched—likely by the men in black hats—a quick glance around the parking lot told her they were more or less alone. The fill-up kid slouched along the side of the building, chugging back what appeared to be an energy drink. No other cars had pulled into the station while she daydreamed.
But the knot remained. Was it just fear for Myles? She sorted through her thoughts as methodically as possible, hunting for the root of the tension. Myles stood with his back to her, his shoulders wide, stable. Feet planted shoulder-width apart looked as though an earthquake would not move them. His hand combed through this hair, and he swung the offending strands from his forehead with a quick toss of his head, completely nonchalant and on the phone with their one chance at cracking open this entire nightmare.
No, she wasn’t afraid for Myles. He could take care of himself. Kenzie grudgingly admitted to herself that she had been lettin
g him take care of her for the last—Well, for as long as they’d been on the run. Even if she took care of his injuries, she thrived on his stability. Nothing rattled him, and she clung to that core of power that he radiated.
Myles could take care of the both of them.
So why was her stomach tied so tight?
When the knot first arrived, she had been thinking of riding horses, and Myles and the bad guys chasing them and…
The bad guys chasing them?
Kenzie let her head fall into her hands. Head pounding, she fought to isolate the gut feeling that said something was wrong.
And then it was there, so glaring, so obvious. Why hadn’t she thought about this before?
Where were the men that Mac had surely hired to track her down? Why weren’t there roadblocks and police searches going on all over? There were no wanted posters plastered in store windows. No notices tacked to phone poles promising money for her safe return. There had been only that one newspaper article offering a reward.
She and Myles had tried to be careful—always paying with the cash from the cabin, not visiting major chain stores or gas stations that would have video cameras—but certainly they were having better-than-average luck.
Brows furrowed, she glanced up just in time to see a blue-and-red reflection glinting off the metal partition next to Myles’s shoulder. He obviously saw the same thing, because he spun on the spot and made a frantic swiping motion with his left arm and slammed the phone down at the same time.
From this distance, she could almost read his lips yelling, “It’s a cop!”
Kenzie hurdled the dividing console and fell into the driver’s seat, cranking the engine to life without a second thought. Jamming the gear shift into Reverse, she plowed through the gas station parking lot. Two plastic trash cans filled with windshield cleaner sailed through the air, and a gray cement barrier jumped out of nowhere. Her front bumper left a six-inch white kiss on it as she hurtled onto the almost-deserted street.
