The well-built car made her feel safer until she contemplated that the next attack might not come from a hit-and-run driver. In spite of Josh’s earlier assurances she was safe inside the plant, her imagination galloped on fast-forward. Maybe a sniper, hidden on the roof of a building at the entrance to the industrial park, would take his best shot. Or perhaps they’d run her off the road and attempt to inject her with some lethal dose. Or maybe Lashner’s men had already planted a bomb in her car.
Dear God, I wish I hadn’t thought of that.
Reining in her fears, she rammed the key into the ignition with an unsteady hand and turned. When the quiet purr of the engine confirmed she hadn’t been blown to bits, she backed out of the parking space and circled to the main entrance. The guard must have recognized her car, because he opened the steel gates at her approach.
She drove between them and picked up speed, eying the security guard in her rearview mirror as a reluctant sailor views the vanishing land.
“I’m through the gates and headed toward the highway,” she said aloud, and wished her communication with Josh was two-way. She could have used some encouragement as she traveled the dark, lifeless streets of the industrial park.
Another check in the rearview mirror revealed a movement on the road. A vehicle without headlights had pulled in behind her. It couldn’t have been Josh. His proximity would have alerted Lashner’s men.
“Watson to Sherlock,” she said with infinitely more calm than she felt, “the game is afoot. I’m being followed.”
Another glance disclosed the dark silhouette of a second vehicle, too close to the first to be Josh. “Now my shadow has company.”
When she reached the highway, a cluster of emergency vehicles blocked the road just south of the intersection. Their flashing lights strobed on two cars on the shoulder, hoods crumpled and windshields smashed from a head-on collision. Paramedics were lifting a man on a stretcher into an ambulance, and a policeman draped a sheet over a body beside the wrecked cars.
Her sympathy went out to the victims, and at the same time, she murmured a prayer of thanks that the road north of the intersection wasn’t blocked. If she was forced to halt or choose a route unknown to Josh, she would have no defense against Lashner’s men.
Josh had rented adjoining rooms in a motel ten miles up the unpopulated highway from the plant. If she reached the motel without interception, she would take one room, while Josh and Jim Dexter would wait in the other for Lashner’s thugs to make their move. All she had to do now was concentrate on reaching the motel.
The trailing cars, headlights now blazing, turned onto the highway behind her, accelerated and closed the distance between them. Apparently, her pursuers were too impatient to wait until she reached her destination.
Morgan pressed the gas and checked the mirror to assure herself Josh and Dexter were following. The sight of the long, empty highway behind Lashner’s vehicles made her stomach plunge like an elevator with a broken cable.
“I’m on the main highway with two cars in hot pursuit,” she said. “Where are you?”
Speeding along the desolate road, she cast frantic glances in her mirror, hoping for Josh’s appearance behind the convoy that chased her.
What was keeping him? Outside the limited range of the wire, he couldn’t hear if she called for help.
And where was Jim Dexter?
A horrifying speculation burst into her consciousness. What if Josh’s trap had been set, not for Robert Lashner, but for her? Was treachery the secret she had glimpsed so often in Josh’s eyes?
She forced the idea away as quickly as it came. Josh was Ben’s friend and ally. Even if the investigator cared nothing for her, he wouldn’t betray Ben.
Are you sure?
Panic was making her crazy. She had to focus on the instructions Josh had given her. For all she knew, he and Dexter could be rocketing behind her pursuers with their lights off.
Yeah, right.
She closed her mind to doubts. She needed Josh if she expected to survive.
“Josh.” She called his name like a prayer.
She approached a curve, and the car behind her pulled alongside and nudged into her Lexus, forcing her right wheels onto the uneven shoulder.
Maintaining her speed and fighting the wheel for control, she risked a quick look at her assailant, but tinted windows in the late-model black van obscured both its driver and any passengers.
In a spurt of speed, the black van pulled ahead and the car behind her, a dark sedan, took the van’s place alongside her. With their engines screaming in her ears, the two vehicles hemmed her in, closing off all escape.
Praying for Josh’s arrival, she checked the rearview mirror.
Only darkness.
Ahead, the van slowed abruptly. At the same time, the sedan on her left cut its wheels, forcing her completely off the road. When she slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the van, her car slid to a stop in a shallow drainage ditch.
The van halted in front of her, and the sedan formed a wedge between her and the road. In desperation, she threw the Lexus into reverse and gunned it, but the tires spun without traction in the deep muck of the ditch.
The driver of the sedan leaped out and sprinted toward her. Camouflage fatigues and a dark ski mask concealed everything but his ominous size. He rapped against her window with the barrel of a handgun the size of a small cannon.
“Get out, now,” he yelled, “or I’ll kill you where you sit.”
WHEN BRENDA JERNIGAN told Morgan of Lashner’s confiscation of Frank’s mysterious file, Josh cursed and struck the dashboard with his fist. Having guessed right that Lashner got to Frank’s papers ahead of Morgan gave him no satisfaction.
If she had found evidence to put Lashner behind bars, Josh would have gladly aborted their dangerous plan. He had no choice now but to carry out the scheme.
Quashing the desire to chuck everything and carry Morgan off to safety, he monitored her departure as she spoke first from the lobby, then outside the plant gates. Her humorous chatter and the bravado in her voice when she announced she was being tailed made him grin.
She was one spunky lady.
He started the Chevy, and his grin faded when the car choked and died. He turned the key again.
The engine revved, sputtered and quit.
With uneasy patience, Josh gripped the steering wheel. In contrast to the Chevy’s dilapidated exterior, beneath its hood lay a powerful and finely tuned machine. His overzealous pressure on the gas must have flooded the engine. Every cell of his being screamed for haste as he endured the requisite delay before starting the car again.
He calmed himself with the reminder that Jim Dexter waited where the industrial park road entered the highway. As soon as Morgan’s Lexus appeared, Dexter would fall in behind at a discreet distance.
“I’m on the main highway—” Morgan’s escalating pitch implied panic “—with two cars in hot pursuit. Where are you?”
Restarting the car too hastily would only flood the engine again. He gritted his teeth and scrutinized the luminescent dial of his watch while the second hand crept forward with painful slowness.
“Josh?” Morgan’s static-filled plea was almost indiscernible. She was leaving transmitting range.
When the hand of his watch had advanced to the allotted time, he twisted the ignition key and the powerful engine roared to life. He floored the gas, and the Chevy shot from its hiding place near the plant in a flurry of dust and the stench of burning rubber.
When Josh reached the highway, the first thing he saw was Jim Dexter’s Bronco with its smashed front end and a sunburst of broken glass where Jim’s head had hit the windshield. Someone had run off the road, straight into Jim’s parked car.
His first inclination was to go to his friend’s aid, but Jim, if still alive, was being cared for by paramedics and policemen.
Morgan was alone.
Except for Lashner’s goons, hot on her trail.
He ramm
ed the gas as he turned north. The heavy car careened on its left wheels, threatened briefly to overturn and righted again. He accelerated, and the escalating whine of the engine tortured his ears. Ahead, as far as he could see, the highway lay dark and empty.
“Say something, Morgan.” he begged between clenched teeth. “Let me know you’re all right.”
The receiver remained silent.
Chapter Eight
A double dose of gudt gnawed at Josh as he barreled down the highway. Jim Dexter was headed to the hospital—or worse—because Josh had hired him. The man had survived twenty-five years of active duty with the police department unscathed, only to be struck down by a careering car.
And if Josh didn’t catch up with Morgan…
He damned himself with every curse he knew, then invented a few new ones. What a rock-headed idiot he’d been, risking Morgan. By now, with her backup missing, she would be terrified. If Lashner’s men harmed her, he would never forgive himself.
He grimaced, struck by the painful irony that Ben would never forgive him, either.
Suddenly, above the massive engine’s whine, static crackled from the receiver.
“Kill you…” the garbled transmission announced. Almost unintelligible, the harsh and menacing voice was male.
Lashner’s thugs had Morgan.
Anguish skewered him with numbing despair. If he didn’t reach her in time…
He refused to think the unthinkable. She couldn’t be far away. On the open road, the transmitter range extended only a mile. Two at the most.
Her proximity reignited his flickering hope, and he increased his speed. The car surged forward and flew down the dark road. Pushing the Chevy to its limits, Josh skidded around a curve. In the distance, an emergency flare gleamed, and its sputtering flame cast an eerie red glow over tall pines beside the road.
Josh slowed as he approached, drew his gun from its holster and pulled the Chevy onto the shoulder.
Ahead, Morgan’s Lexus rested in a ditch, the tires mired in mud, the driver’s door ajar. Across the highway, two semitrucks were parked in tandem, half on, half off the asphalt, their presence marked with a warning flare.
Josh parked behind the Lexus, and the lead truck pulled away with a blast of its air horn. A second trucker remained in front of his rig and waved at the departing driver.
Josh holstered his gun, jumped from the car and rushed to Morgan’s vehicle.
Empty.
A framed picture of Frank and his daughter stared at him accusingly from the passenger seat.
“Did you see the woman who was driving this Lexus?” he yelled to the trucker.
The driver, his lanky frame backlit by the headlights of his rig, jogged across the road. “Nope. Two other cars were here when me and my buddy drove up. We thought there’d been an accident and we stopped to help.”
“An accident?”
“Yeah—” the trucker removed his cap and scratched his head “—’cause of the car in the ditch. Some feller was helping another big guy into a black van. Then the van and a blue Buick took off, headed north like bats outta hell. My buddy and me figured we’d stumbled onto some kinda drug deal and were lucky not to be shot.”
“Was there a woman inside either vehicle?”
“Couldn’t tell. Tinted windows.” The trucker tugged his cap back on, started back to his truck, then turned. “You want me to call the highway patrol?”
With Morgan’s life at stake, Josh needed all the help he could get. “Give them the description and direction of the cars and tell them you think a woman’s been kidnapped.”
The man ran back to his cab, started the motor and reached for his cell phone. “Handy things, these gadgets,” he yelled across the road. “I just punch star-FHP to contact the Smokey Bears.”
He pressed the keypad with a bony finger, lifted the phone to his ear and one-handedly maneuvered his ng onto the pavement and down the road.
Josh raced back to his car. He would drive north, and if he didn’t overtake the vehicles the trucker had described, he’d go straight to Lashner.
If anyone had harmed Morgan, he’d kill Lashner with his bare hands.
Time was short, because Lashner’s men wouldn’t dare hold her long. The sooner they disposed of her and fled, the safer they would be.
He refused to believe he had already lost her, all she had been to him, all she would ever be.
When he reached the Chevy, a voice reverberated from the receiver.
“Josh? Where are you?”
Morgan!
He jerked open the door and slid behind the wheel. “Just feed me clues, and I’ll find you,” he begged, knowing she couldn’t hear him.
“Josh—” her voice rang so loud and clear, she couldn’t be far away “—if you find my car, don’t leave. I’m nearby.”
He bolted out of the car and yelled her name, begging her to speak again.
When the receiver remained silent, he returned to the Chevy and increased the receiver’s volume, snatched a flashlight from the glove compartment and stumbled back to the Lexus.
“Morgan, can you hear me?” he shouted
Only the wind soughing through the pine boughs, the screech of cicadas and the distant call of a chuckwill’s-widow answered.
Playing the flashlight’s beam over the ground, he searched the matted grass. The weeds, flattened by tires, displayed no hint of her footprints. Recalling how Morgan’s slight weight had left no imprints in the wet beach sand, he held little hope of detecting her tracks, until he shone the light across the drainage ditch.
On the far side of the gully, a trail of black mud, stamped with the treads of small sneakers, disappeared into the words. Josh leaped the ditch and pursued the dwindling traces of muck across the pine needles carpeting the ground.
Every few yards, he called to her.
No answer.
He plowed deeper into the thick underbrush of the woods, until the vestiges of mud vanished completely. Fearing Lashner’s men might return before he found her, Josh screamed her name into the stillness.
“Here—” the faint answer finally came “—over here.”
Bulldozing his way through dense undergrowth that slowed his progress, he traveled in the direction of her voice. “Where are you?”
“Under a big oak—” her voice sounded stronger, closer “—in a field at the edge of the woods.”
“I don’t see a field,” he called. “Run toward my voice.”
Silence filled the forest.
“Morgan?”
“I can’t” came her reply, weaker this time.
A legion of possibilities sprang into his mind. One of Lashner’s men was with her, using her for bait. Or maybe she’d been shot before she escaped and was too injured to move. He pressed forward, oblivious to the branches thrashing his face as he ran.
Breaking into a clearing, he paused and turned off the flashlight. A broad moonlit meadow stretched ahead, empty except for a massive oak about a hundred feet away. The shadows of its spreading branches and heavy strands of Spanish moss hid whoever waited beneath.
An accessible target in the open field, he retreated into the pines. “Morgan, are you there?”
“I’ve twisted my ankle.” Embarrassment rang in her voice.
Asking if she was alone was pointless. If Lasher’s men were holding her, she wouldn’t be allowed an honest reply. He tucked the flashlight into his belt, drew his gun and burst into the open, darting a zigzag course toward the tree. If a gunman awaited, Josh refused to provide him an easy shot.
In seconds, he covered the distance between the pines and the oak, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spied Morgan propped against the oak’s thick trunk. He circled the tree, making certain she was alone, then scooped her into his arms.
“We have to get out of here fast,” he said, “before they return.”
Her arms clasped his neck, and her head nestled in the hollow of his throat. “I thought you had deserted me.”
>
The disappointment in her voice increased his staggering load of guilt. “No time for talk now. I’ll need all my breath to get us both back to the car.”
With Morgan clutched against his heart, he loped back across the field toward the trees.
“How will we find our way back?” she asked.
“Pull the flashlight out of my belt and aim it ahead of us.”
Morgan did as he asked, and for several minutes he searched up and down the treeline. When he spotted several broken branches, he lunged into the brush. Following the signs of his earlier passage, he labored back the way he’d come.
The heat of her body scorched his chest, blending with the ache of his old chest wound, but he welcomed the ferocious pain. The agony overrode the raging desire that had gripped him when he beheld Morgan in the moonlight, her eyes wide with fear, her smooth cheeks wet with tears, the subtle scent of jasmine swirling in the night air.
He had wanted to claim her then and there beneath the oak, to love her to exhaustion to drive away the horror of the interminable minutes-when he feared she was dead.
He had almost lost her once tonight. He wouldn’t allow his seething hunger to jeopardize her again. Focusing on his pain, he forced one foot ahead of the other and struggled to breathe. If they could reach the car before the assassins returned, they’d be safe.
The whine of a speeding truck signaled the approaching highway, and Josh hovered at the edge of the woods until certain no one lurked near the cars.
Satisfied the coast was clear, he rallied the remnants of his strength, leaped the ditch and carried Morgan to the Chevy. He slid her onto the front seat.
“What about the Lexus?” she asked.
He sprinted to her vehicle. Pain expanded in his chest, slowing his movements and weighting his legs, as if he were slogging through mud. With labored breath, he retrieved the ignition keys and the framed photograph from the front seat and locked the car.
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