Smoky Ridge Curse

by Paula Graves

  “I’m not putting your neck on the line for me.” He shook his head. “I won’t ask you to do this, Hammond. It scares me sick to think about it.”

  “I know it does.” She reached out and touched his arm, her fingers strong and warm. “But I’m already neck deep in this mess. Cortland went after my brother. He’ll be after me as well, even if I do nothing.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Really?” Her dark eyes gleamed with skepticism. “Look at the lengths this guy has gone to already. We’re in the way of whatever he has planned. All of us. There’s no way in hell I can stay on the sidelines.”

  She was right. He knew it. He just didn’t want to believe there wasn’t a way to keep her safe.

  She squeezed his arm, then let go. “We need to know what he’s up to, not just to stop him from coming after us, but to stop him from doing whatever he has planned.”

  His skin still tingled where she’d touched him. “Any ideas how we go about that?”

  “A few,” she admitted. Then she flashed him a sassy grin so familiar it made his breath catch. “But first, Special Agent Brand, you need to feed me. Because I’m starving.”

  * * *

  “WHY DID HE pick Oak Ridge National Laboratory, I wonder?” Delilah asked an hour later over burgers and sodas they’d bought at a fast-food place in Mount Airy. They’d pulled the Camaro into a slot in a strip-mall parking lot while they ate.

  “It would certainly raise a lot of warning flags for the feds,” Brand pointed out, stretching his legs gingerly. The Camaro wasn’t built for men his size, Delilah thought with sympathy. “They take nuclear security pretty damned seriously, for obvious reasons.”

  “Which makes it an odd choice for a federal agent gone rogue, doesn’t it?” she asked. “You of all people would know how hard it would be to accomplish what you’re accused of plotting.”

  “True. And the Surry and North Anna plants in Virginia are closer to my home base.”

  “So maybe there’s a reason why Cortland chose Oak Ridge.”

  Brand slanted a look at her. “You mean he has plans for the place himself?”

  “He’s hanging out with militias and anarchists, either of which group might want to create the kind of havoc an attack on a nuclear laboratory could produce.”

  “But what’s in it for Cortland? I don’t get the idea that this guy’s a true believer, even if he’s got his minions convinced otherwise. There has to be a profit angle in it for him to go to these lengths.”

  “Okay, so who profits from an attack on Oak Ridge?”

  “Well, any time something happens at a nuclear plant, the whole industry comes under scrutiny.”

  “So if the nuclear industry comes under scrutiny, the winners in that scenario are other energy producers, right?”

  “Right. Coal, hydroelectric, oil, natural gas.”

  “Does Cortland have any energy holdings?”

  Brand shook his head. “No. He has land connected to his lumberyard, and probably some logging interests, but no energy holdings that I know of.”

  “Maybe they’re under another name,” Delilah suggested, stifling a yawn. “Before we leave Mount Airy, maybe I should go to the local library and do a little research.”

  “I have a better idea,” Brand said.

  She looked up to find his gaze directed toward the large navy-and-white Walmart sign glowing in the deepening twilight. “Yeah?”

  “Why borrow a computer for an hour or two when you can own one?”

  “You have that kind of cash to toss around?”

  “We can get a tablet for under five hundred.”

  “We can eat about fifty times for that kind of money.”

  He grinned. “I forgot what a thrifty little thing you always were.”

  “Seriously, we can borrow the library computer for free, probably. I’ll just have to show my ID to get a guest pass or something.”

  “And every time you flash your ID, it’s one more chance for Cortland to track you down.” Brand dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a fat money clip. “Meanwhile, take this with you into the store, buy a tablet with cash, and nobody’s going to ask to see your ID at all.” He peeled off five hundred-dollar bills and handed them to her. “Go ahead. I’ll wait here for you.”

  She looked at the money clip, wondering just how many more hundreds he had folded up in it.

  “I saw this mess coming for a while,” he said quietly, drawing her gaze up to meet his. His blue eyes were hard with regrets. “I wasn’t sure how it would shake out, but I figured I’d best prepare for the worst.”

  “I’m sorry all of this happened to you. I know how much you prided yourself in the job.” The memory of just how seriously he took his job, and the price he was willing to pay to keep it, still had the power to make her heart ache.

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this mess.” There wasn’t a hint of doubt in his voice.

  Delilah stifled a smile. His confidence had always been his most alluring asset as far as she was concerned. She’d sensed immediately that he was a man who appreciated confidence in the people he worked with, so she’d tamped down her fears and thrown a whole boatload of confidence right back in his face when she’d walked into his office and informed him that she planned to be the next member of his domestic-terrorism task force.

  She wondered if he’d had any idea just how hard her knees had been shaking that day.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She reached over and plucked the dark blue baseball cap from his head. “Mind if I borrow this?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, pulling the cap over her head and tucking her hair up under the band. She tugged the bill low over her face, zipped her hoodie up to her neck and hurried across the parking lot to the front of the discount department store.

  “Too bad you couldn’t wait a couple of weeks,” the cashier at the front commented as she scanned the tablet computer Delilah had selected. “Black Friday, we’re probably going to drop this price by twenty-five percent.”

  “It’s for a birthday,” Delilah lied. “Can’t wait until Thanksgiving.” She’d also picked up some clothes for herself and a small duffel bag in which to stash them, since the tablet didn’t take up the whole five hundred dollars and she’d been wearing the same clothes for entirely too long. She handed over the cash, noting the woman’s slightly arched eyebrows as she spotted the hundred-dollar bills.

  She took them without comment, however, and handed Delilah the change and a receipt. “Have a nice night.”

  “You, too,” Delilah returned politely, already halfway to the exit.

  The parking lot was nearly full, and there were enough shoppers milling about to give Delilah a prickly sensation at the back of her neck. But a casual look around the parking lot assured her nobody was paying much attention to her at all.

  Back at the Camaro, she stopped one more time outside the driver’s door and scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of place. After a few seconds, she decided she was being paranoid and opened the car door.

  She pulled the boxed tablet from her shopping bag and handed it to Brand as she slid behind the wheel. “I bought some clothes, too. Hope that’s okay.”

  He slanted a look at her and grinned. “That’s fine. You were starting to get a little ripe.”

  She made a face at him. “Now what?”

  “Now we find us a free Wi-Fi hotspot and get this baby up and running.”

  * * *

  “ANOTHER NIGHT, ANOTHER cheap motel.” Freshly showered and dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt she’d bought at Walmart, Delilah flopped on the only bed in the room, a queen-size job that had seen better days, but none of them recently. The motel was a boxy, halfhearted attempt at traveler lodging called Sleep
and Save Inn, located a few miles west of Galax, Virginia. Its primary assets were a sleepy-looking desk clerk who didn’t look twice at Brand’s fake ID and, as advertised in neon letters on the motel marquee, free Wi-Fi available to lodgers.

  Brand locked the door behind them and engaged the safety latch before he settled in one of the uncomfortable tub chairs by the window table. “Sorry there wasn’t a room with two beds available. But I couldn’t pass up free Wi-Fi. As long as we use other people’s IP addresses, we’ll be damned hard to track through the internet.”

  “Maybe we could table that until morning,” she suggested, attempting to hold back an enormous yawn. “If we’re heading to Travisville tomorrow, we should probably be well rested and alert.”

  “Good idea.” He smiled as she stifled another yawn. “It’s late, and I’m bushed. Why don’t we catch a little shut-eye and start fresh in the morning?”

  “Okay.” She swung her feet off the bed and started to get up.

  “Where are you going?” Brand asked.

  She looked back at him. “I’ll take the chair. You’re too big to sleep in a chair all night.”

  “We can share the bed, Hammond. We did last night.”

  She couldn’t stop one eyebrow from lifting. “Dressed for the arctic and sharing a room with my brother and his girlfriend.”

  “It’s not like you’re in a little lace nightie tonight,” he pointed out pragmatically, waving his hand at her clothing.

  “I like to think my feminine allure doesn’t depend on lingerie.”

  “It doesn’t,” he replied with a wicked grin. “But I think we’re both a little too tired to give in to temptation.” He patted the bed, and after a brief pause, she sat down beside him.

  He looked down at his attire. “I can live with the jeans, but do I have your permission to lose the sweater?”

  “Give it to me. I’m cold.”

  He shrugged off his sweater, revealing a T-shirt beneath. Delilah wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed. He handed her his discarded sweater and she slipped it over her head, trying not to breathe in his scent too obviously, even though the familiar smell of him threatened to overwhelm her.

  God, she’d missed him. Missed the sight of him, the smell of him, the sound of his voice and the timbre of his laugh. She’d thought—she’d hoped—that eight years away from him would have been enough to exorcise the memories, but they seemed to be imprinted on her at the cellular level, impossible to shake.

  She wished they weren’t bone tired and in the middle of a dangerous mess, that they didn’t have a painful history or bleak hopes for any sort of future. She wished she could forget about yesterday and tomorrow and think only about tonight, about the feel of his body over her, under her, inside her.

  But she couldn’t forget, nor did he seem inclined to do so. And the last thing she needed was another shattering memory of Adam Brand indelibly etched on her soul.

  He lay back on the pillows and shut off the bedside lamp, plunging the motel room into dark. After a few seconds, Delilah’s eyes adjusted to the low light enough to see the faint yellow glow of the sodium-vapor parking-lot lamps seeping through the heavily lined curtains of the room.

  The night was a heavy kind of quiet, broken only by the sporadic traffic sounds coming from the highway nearby, the hum of electricity running through the walls and the staccato duet of their own breathing.

  Unable to stand the silence any longer, she asked, “Do you ever see any of the old gang?”

  “No,” he answered. “I was the last one of the old crew left. Most of the others moved on to lead their own teams.”

  She might have done so as well, she thought, had she stuck around.

  “How much do you know about the things I asked your brother to do for me?” he asked a few tense moments later.

  “Not much. He keeps a lot to himself.”

  “I pushed him, maybe farther than I should have.” Brand sounded regretful. “But I wanted him to see that he had it in him to be a hero.”

  Delilah smiled at the darkness. “A hero, huh? Don’t you know that’s a quaint, antiquated notion in this cynical world?”

  “This cynical world has its share of heroes. But it could use more. I could tell Seth wanted to make up for his mistakes. And he was your brother, so I knew he had it in his genes to be one of the good guys.”

  “You never knew our father.” She’d kept most of her past where it belonged—miles and years behind her. She and Brand had been close in a lot of ways, but there were parts of her experiences she’d never shared with him, just as she knew there were parts of his past that he’d kept from her, too.

  Brand was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “I know a lot more about him than I ever told you.”

  She couldn’t say she was surprised. As her supervisor, he’d have made it his business to know everything in her employment file, including the details of her background check. “Then you know he hit my mama, all the time. And she took it without sayin’ much, because if he was hittin’ her, he wasn’t hittin’ us.” She grimaced as she heard her accent broaden, as if even thinking about her past transported her back to the days when she was little Dee Hammond from Smoky Ridge, whose daddy was a drug dealer and whose mama was a drunk. “She drank to dull the pain and kill the fear. Then, after he died, she drank to drown the guilt.”

  “Guilt? For what happened to your father?”

  “For what happened to Seth.”

  “Seth was burned in the explosion and fire?”

  “Mom had passed out drunk in the back bedroom, and somehow the explosion didn’t tear that room apart like the rest of the house. Seth went back in there to get her. They both got out, but Seth had some painful burns on his back and chest. He probably still has the scars.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At school. I stayed late every chance I got, because it was so much better than being at home.”

  Brand didn’t say anything else for a long time. Delilah was relieved, frankly. She never felt any sort of catharsis from talking about her past, only a bitter film of regret that she’d ever lived it.

  The silence extended so long she had started to doze off. When Brand spoke, it jarred her awake.

  “I told you I was married before.”

  “Yes,” she said, stifling a yawn.

  “To another agent.”

  “Right.” The FBI, unlike a lot of law-enforcement agencies, didn’t have any rules about agents dating and marrying, beyond the obvious strictures against superiors having sexual relationships with agents under their supervision. Brand and his first wife, Joanna Lake, had been at the same level on the bureau totem pole, from what she’d learned through the FBI grapevine. They’d wed quickly and divorced quickly, the marriage not lasting a full year.

  “Joanna seemed absolutely perfect for me. She was attractive, smart, funny, and being a fellow agent, she understood the pressures of the job. We had fun together. We were strongly attracted to each other. It seemed the perfect relationship for a couple of FBI agents still young enough and starry-eyed enough to believe in forever.”

  She asked the question she’d never asked before. “So what happened?”

  She heard his intake of breath, as if preparing to answer. But before he could say a word, another sound pierced the quiet of the motel room.

  A rattle of metal on metal.

  Delilah whipped her head to the left, her gaze settling on the faint glow outside the lined window curtains. A shadow darkened one patch of the light, swaying slightly.

  Someone was trying to open the motel-room door.

  Chapter Nine

  Brand grabbed the Ruger, still in its holster, from the bedside table, while Delilah went for her own weapon on the table near the window.

  “B
e careful!” he whispered as she moved toward the door and took a quick look through the peephole.

  After a few seconds, she whispered, “I think it’s a drunk. Probably has the wrong room.” Raising her voice, she asked, “Who’s there?”

  The rattling of the doorknob ceased and a slurred male voice responded, muffled by the door. “Who are you?”

  “I asked first,” Delilah called.

  There was a brief pause, then the slurred voice asked, “Is this room two sixteen?”

  “No, it’s one sixteen.”

  There was a babble of curses on the other side of the door. “Sorry! So sorry!” The shadow moved away from the door, weaving its way past the window.

  Delilah slumped against the door, breathing hard. “This fugitive thing is for the birds.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We can’t stay here any longer.” She pushed away from the door and started picking up their things.

  Brand set the Ruger back on the bedside table. “It was just a drunk—”

  “What if it wasn’t? Or even if it was, what if the next rattle on the door comes with a few bullet holes? You know how this works, Brand. Fugitives who stay free the longest are the ones who keep moving.”

  “We’ll go in the morning.” He caught her by the wrist as she came around the bed in search of something.

  She went still, looking down at his hand. When she looked back at him, her eyes glittered in the low light. “How did they do this to you? Why did the FBI buy the allegations against you? You’re a veteran FBI agent with a jacket full of commendations—”

  “The shake-up in the administration after the president’s chief of staff was implicated in a murder conspiracy was like an earthquake in the capital. We all felt the aftershocks.” He thought about letting go of her wrist, but she didn’t show any signs of wanting to get away. So he held on. “Even a whiff of potential corruption is taken very seriously these days. No exceptions.”

  “But how hard could it be for the FBI to ascertain that those emails were faked?”

  “Very hard, if it’s done well.” He edged over and let go of her hand, patting the bed beside him.