Trapped by a Dangerous Man

by Cleo Peitsche

  “Find a way,” Corbin growled. “There’s a snowstorm. What better cover do you want? Remember that it’s your boyfriend on the line, and I’m not running a charity. If you want to keep him out of jail, you’ll make the trade. If you want to stay in my good graces—and believe me, Nellie, you do—then you’ll uphold your end of the deal.”

  Nellie’s quiet sobs came in clearly through the amplifier, and I wanted to walk over and punch Corbin in the face. Not that I felt she needed someone to come to her rescue, or that she deserved it, but this guy was such a dick. That’s what most people didn’t understand about my job. I did it because yeah, I needed the crappy little paychecks, but I also got a bit of satisfaction from a job well done. Tracking down people who broke the law made me feel good. In my not-so-limited experience with minor criminals, they were assholes. Every so often there was a decent sob story that made me feel like a piece of human scum, but generally? They were the scum, and not even human.

  “Should I make a phone call?” he snarled. “Or have you decided to follow through?”

  “Yes, Corbin,” the woman stuttered. She was now crying loudly enough that the noise carried across the store, and the mummified woman came from behind the register to investigate.

  Right. I needed to react as well, or it’d be weird. I looked up, and my gaze connected with Corbin’s emotionless eyes. Even in the shadow of his cowboy hat, I saw that his irises were a vivid shade of blue-green, the likes of which I’d never seen. The rest of his face was equally arresting. He looked away as the shopkeeper approached, but for a long moment, I stared at him, unable to breathe. He was gorgeous. Not just attractive, or sexy, but gorgeous. Square chin. Strong nose. A generous mouth that was lightly turning up in a forced smile, revealing straight teeth. And those eyes fringed by black lashes… oof.

  Blushing, I tore my gaze away and pretended to be really interested in the “Menopause is a party” display in front of me. But the call to look at him again was too strong, probably made stronger by the realization that the man was certainly dangerous. I hurried out of the store, my head down.

  Once outside, though, a plan started to form. This Corbin had been a little wet but not soaked when he walked in. That meant he had likely parked close to the door. I edged into the shadows afforded by a large pillar and waited.

  Not a minute later, he came out. He didn’t look around him, just walked straight to a black SUV parked not far from where I hid. One glance at the license plate and I’d memorized it—a skill our father had drilled into us by the time we were eight, which was about when he’d started teaching us how to handle a knife and gun. It was a bit excessive, but I couldn’t completely fault Dad; he lived in a world where everyone was always trying to get away with something, and he wanted us aware of our surroundings, equipped to handle emergencies.

  The second I had the license plate, I turned away. Looking longer wasn’t going to give me any extra information, and I didn’t want to be caught staring.

  It was 7:00. Time for me to get to the diner and sit alone while my brother took his sweet time getting there. Or I could stop by the sheriff’s office, schmooze my way to a computer, run the license plate through the database and see what came up.

  There were so many places where the story could have turned out differently, but it felt like every choice was predetermined.

  ~~~

  And now I was driving out to the middle of nowhere, alone, to catch the biggest bounty of my life.

  I fiddled with my car’s broken radio, jumping from station to station, trying to pick out the threads of voices through the permanent static. Everyone was talking about the weather, that it would be a blizzard for the history books. The worst of it would hit early the next morning. At least that’s what I thought they said. Happy weekend to me. It was already dark out, but if it hadn’t been, I had a feeling the sky would have been black anyway. The last two winters had been brutal, and it looked like Mother Nature planned a hat-trick.

  The traffic stayed at a steady 30 mph. Too slow. Occasionally someone in an elephant-size SUV passed, but I, like the majority of vehicles on the road, couldn’t go any faster without risking a spin out. Besides, we were lined up neatly behind a snow plow and salt truck.

  After almost ninety minutes, I reached my exit. Within half a mile, I was on unplowed roads.

  That was ok. The conditions had deteriorated, but I didn’t need to go much farther, distance wise. The address attached to Lagos’s vehicle, which was registered to a John Browning, was only another half hour away. Longer in the snow. The directions hadn’t been difficult to memorize, and I’d had plenty of time to mentally rehearse while I waited in the diner.

  The car slid through a snow drift, and I didn’t have a chance to panic before it came under my control again. I slowed even more and flipped on my turn signal despite the lack of other motorists.

  If the road I was on was in bad shape, the one I needed to turn onto could have been an open field. I wiped at the inside of my windshield and peered out, the rhythmic thumping of my wipers strangely reassuring. Actually, maybe I was looking at an open field. Impossible to tell with certainty where the road ended. One more unlucky maneuver and I’d be tangled in an electric fence, scaring the hell out of the local bovines.

  The smart thing to do was turn back. Or get a hotel in the area for the night. Except Corbin wouldn’t be there in the morning. He drove a mean truck, the kind that could shoulder through a blizzard. When it was time for him to leave, he’d go. And I’d have nothing but a pathetic story about how I almost caught Corbin Lagos. Which would be worth next to nothing since no one knew who he was, and every one of my dad’s bounty hunter friends had a string of “almost” to put even the most delusional fisherman to shame.

  I glanced at my phone and discovered it was a little after 10:00, and my signal was weak. Not good. On the other hand, I wasn’t too far from my destination, and maybe my crappy phone would come through. So many unknowns, and as they piled up, I became less certain that I wasn’t making an enormous mistake.

  How did that saying go? No matter how far down the wrong path you’ve gone, turn back.

  Except turning back could be as dangerous as continuing. This storm felt like it had more than fourteen inches worth of snow in it. If that was the case, the highways would get shut down. Might already be shutting down.

  I told myself I was being paranoid. I reminded myself that I couldn’t be too far from a hotel. And I thought of the look on my dad’s face when he learned that the daughter he refused to take seriously had reeled in two million dollars.

  And it wouldn’t be going through the company, either. It would be mine, fair and square. It was after work hours and I wasn’t on an assignment. What I did in my own time was up to me. After all, if I failed, I wasn’t going to be reimbursed for gas money. Or the hotel.

  Better not fail, then.

  “What’re you waiting for?” I slowly stepped on the gas and turned the wheel, trying to feel the road underneath my tires. It felt like driving on a cloud.

  But my loyal car straightened perfectly. The road was drivable. All I needed to do was get to the house and apprehend Lagos. At that point I could borrow his vehicle for a few hours, come back and pick up my car later. Or we could hole up in a hotel until the storm passed… I snickered.

  Despite the gravity of my predicament, I found myself having a vividly lewd thought about Lagos in bed. A dangerous man worth millions of dollars. Ah, but it didn’t matter how hot he was. Assholes weren’t my thing.

  I assumed he was an asshole—he had to be. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to investigate him at the station. Nancy handed me a copy of the Most Wanted list as soon as I walked in. Requesting the list was something I’d started back when my father first allowed me and Rob to work for him part time, in high school. Though to the old ladies in the sheriff’s office, I was probably still a zit-faced sixteen-year-old with bony legs and no friends. Maybe I’d been out of high school for six years, but
the past spring one of them asked if I was graduating soon, and would I go to college?

  And it was habit that made me glance at the list. After a few very confused moments, I realized that I was staring at a grainy, black-and-white photo of Corbin Lagos, public enemy #1.

  Actually, he probably wasn’t any great danger to the average person; it didn’t work that way. Hell, if a man had a dozen kids and went long enough without paying his child support, he could get pretty high on the list, which said a lot about our little neck of the woods. Lagos had surely done something very, very naughty. I didn’t need to know what “various crimes” meant. Sure, it would have been better to know how dangerous he might be, but I could safely assume that he wasn’t wanted so the FBI could ask him a few gentle questions and send him home with a complimentary T-shirt and coffee mug.

  Fact was, I didn’t really care. All that mattered was the money and the prestige I’d get for delivering such a large bounty all on my own.

  The road suddenly felt different under the car, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another vehicle in some twenty minutes. With light from the moon muted by thickly falling snow, nothing but my headlights lit my way. The road was now either pristine or all previous tracks had been completely covered. Not good.

  I slowed even more. Despite the cold, I was sweating, and fear twisted my stomach into a knot. The car felt funny, like I was driving in a dream and we were about to lift into the dark, snowy sky.

  The skid started slowly, and so gently. I turned into it, remembering road safety education class in school, and was able to straighten, then came to a stop. After taking a moment to regroup, I gently pushed on the accelerator.

  The wheels spun loudly, but the car moved back like a giant, invisible hand was pushing on it. Puzzled, I checked that I hadn’t popped into reverse, then tried again.

  For a moment, I rocked forward. “Come on, damn you!” I floored the accelerator, desperate.

  What goes forward, apparently, must go back. Except I kept going back, sliding, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to stop it except brace myself for the impact, which was mercifully soft.

  The car shuddered and the engine shut off. Everything was frighteningly quiet.

  “You know what? You can stay off,” I muttered, trying to ignore the dread settling around me in the silence. Judging from the angle of my car, my back end was in deep snow, the exhaust pipe blocked. My cell phone showed the time was 10:35. And I had no signal.

  I turned off the headlights to spare the battery and tried to convince myself that someone would soon pass by.

  ~~~

  It took a whole fifteen seconds for the cold to creep in. I’d thought I was cold before, but I had no idea. Even the crappy heating in my car was better than nothing. Soon my hands and feet were blocks of ice.

  The snow had piled up on the windows and windshield, and it was dark. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was in an enclosed space… that it was my car didn’t change the fact that I was inside, and I couldn’t see anything. Like in a coffin.

  A nervous, panicked fluttering kicked up in my stomach, and I ripped off my seatbelt and shoved it away when it didn’t retract automatically. After every snowstorm, there was an obligatory news story about someone who’d been caught unawares. Someone stupid enough to venture into Nature’s wrath without chains on the tires, without telling someone where she was going, without a decent cell phone. And without an emergency kit in the trunk—a week earlier I’d taken it out to make space in anticipation of a big-box store shopping trip.

  It had been years since I’d had a claustrophobia-induced panic attack, but the tightening in my chest was exactly how I remembered it, except worse. I’d learned a technique to cope with this, and Mrs. Rico’s kind face appeared. Breathe low in your stomach. Tell the panic who’s boss. Despite how it feels, you are safe.

  The hyperventilation slowed to an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fast breathing, and I nodded. “Exactly like that, Audrey,” I said, channeling Mrs. Rico.

  My hand stilled on the door handle. It was surely warmer in the car than outside, and at least I was dry…

  But it might be twelve hours before someone got around to plowing this road. Or it could be a week, and they’d find me, suffocated—

  “I am bigger than my fear,” I chanted. I wrung my white-knuckled hands around the cold steering wheel, forcing myself to take deep, even breaths. Making a decision to get out of the car because I was scared was about the dumbest thing I could do, but I couldn’t simultaneously weigh my options while keeping the dread at bay.

  I’d driven about thirty-five minutes off the freeway. Of course, I didn’t know when I’d lost phone reception, but maybe I could walk within range of a tower. I didn’t want to be one of those people who died twenty feet from salvation.

  “The road is right there,” I told myself, but all the while, the car continued to squeeze in, the darkness creeping closer.

  “Action, Audrey,” Mrs. Rico had said. “Go about your life and the panic might realize it’s unwanted.”

  Ok. And my action was going to be to get out of the car, but not in a screaming, frightened mess. I was going to do it like a survivor.

  After wrapping my feet in some sales circulars that were piled up on the back seat, I tied my boots tighter, pulled down my hat, which I knew was woefully thin, zipped up my coat the last millimeter, checked that the phone was in my coat pocket, and tried to open the door. It didn’t budge.

  I flipped the lock down, then up again. The door refused to yield.

  Mrs. Rico’s voice disappeared. I needed to get the hell out—

  Suddenly I couldn’t get enough air. I slammed my shoulder into the door, but my fingers slid off the handle at the last second. I tried again, my entire body shaking, cold sweat drenching me from head to newspaper-covered toe.

  The door gave. Just a few inches, but enough for fresh air to rush in. I gulped it, barely waiting to exhale before sucking back another lungful. I knew I was going to hyperventilate and faint if I didn’t slow down; already my fingertips and lips were getting numb from the lack of oxygen, and pinpricks of imaginary light dotted my field of vision.

  Through a haze, I realized that the overhead light had come on, that snow was piled up high outside the door. I pushed harder, knowing all that snow must be heavy. My rocking made the car slide back more, but miracle of miracles, I was able to shove the door open and stumble into the open, fresh world.

  The car rested in a shallow culvert ditch. I had slid off of a short bridge that seemed designed to freeze over and send an innocent motorist to her embarrassingly pathetic death.

  I struggled up the few feet to the road, or what I assumed was the road. The snow was so heavy that if there was a house nearby, it was invisible. I bent over, my arms stiff and propped on my thighs while I tried to slow my breathing. Once the little spots of light disappeared, I straightened and marched back the way I’d come, my hand over my mouth to stop the cruel wind from suffocating me, following the skinny tracks left by my car.

  Tracks which were, to my dismay, quickly disappearing.

  ~~~

  My father always complained that I was too stubborn. When he was pleased with me, it was my greatest quality, and he spoke of it like other parents might boast about their precocious violin prodigies. “My Audrey stayed up all night in front of the fireplace, waiting for Santa to come so that she could lecture him about giving her a pink bike when she wanted a black one.” When he was angry with me, which was fairly often, he would say that my stubbornness was going to lead to my downfall.

  He and my mother never agreed on much, which was probably why they divorced when Rob and I were young, but on the subject of my blind, thoughtless stubbornness, they were 100% in accord.

  At the moment, I was inclined to admit they were right.

  My aching toes, dragged through the snow, were uncomfortable even before I started walking, so I couldn’t pinpoint when I lost all feeling. One moment
I was stepping through blocks of burning ice, and a few seconds later it felt like my lower legs ended in stumps.

  Loss of feeling in extremities… not good. I told myself I would just sit down a moment, pull my knees into my chest and get my blood flowing again. Maybe rub my feet until the feeling returned. Then I would get up and find a way out of this mess.

  Deep down, I knew that wasn’t likely to happen, that not stopping was the better option.

  But I was starting to panic again; the air around me, the snow weighing on my limbs, was not much better than the vise of the car’s interior. It was like the darkness took on weight, pushing on my coat and wet jeans, forcing me down, and only when I went still did it relent.

  I tried to scrunch and flex my toes and was rewarded with a bit of stifled movement. The boots were… no, not coffins.

  “Get a grip,” I yelled, the heavy snowflakes muffling the sound. For once, the hysteria obeyed.

  But not the fear. I couldn’t banish the knowledge that I would die there. Icy tears slid down my cheeks, mingled with the mucous running down my nose, and froze on my lips and chin. I’d never been the type to feel sorry for myself, but damn… what a crappy way to die.

  Except I was feeling, strangely, a little better. Not warm, but warmed… cozy despite the cold, which took a back seat to the strange euphoria that was creeping along my chilled flesh. It was so quiet and peaceful there, but I knew I needed to stay awake. So I thought of all the cows, cozy and quiet in their barns, and I wanted nothing more than to be with them, appreciating the puffs of their steamy breath in the air. I could spend the rest of my life with them, would happily dedicate myself to shoveling cow dung if some fairy godmother should flit in and offer me the choice… I would have agreed to anything… there was no existence too degrading. “Shovel cow dung. Shovel cow dung,” I chanted, the cold making my jaw vibrate, shaking the words as they stuttered between my ice cube lips.

  Tears had frozen my eyelashes together, and I was no longer sure if I was upright or lying down, though I supposed I was on my back, yet I didn’t remember falling over.