Smoky Ridge Curse

by Paula Graves

  Tear-gas canister, Brand thought, desperately trying to come up with a way to help her without getting into an unwinnable gunfight with the two goons guarding the shack. The thought of Delilah forced to deal with tear gas inside that shed made his blood boil, but he had to keep his head. She’d survive a tear-gas attack. It would hurt like hell for a while, but she’d survive. If he ran down there, guns blazing, she’d be a sitting duck.

  The two men in the masks went into the shed a few minutes later and emerged, finally, carrying a large wooden box about the size of a coffin.

  Brand had no doubt Delilah was inside the box, and the GPS tracker proved him right a few minutes later, as he followed its frequent updates of her position on his burner phone.

  The men had loaded the box into a white panel truck with no logos or other markings on its sides. They had a decent head start, since Brand had to trek through the woods to get back to Liz’s truck. He’d made decent time on the highway, using the GPS tracker’s coordinates to guide him toward the panel truck’s destination.

  The tracker finally stopped moving. Had they stopped somewhere for good? Even though the roads in this part of the county were notorious speed traps, he gunned the truck’s engine, risking the attention of police. Hell, it would probably be better in the long run if he picked up a few blue lights for the ride. He had a feeling he could use all the backup he could muster.

  He never should have agreed to let her meet Cortland alone. He’d clearly been expecting her.

  But how? Had someone spotted her in Blakeville and reported back to Cortland? Maybe that dark-haired man in the John Deere cap who’d been scoping out her Camaro at the bank parking lot?

  The next update from the tracker showed she was still in the same place. They’d definitely reached the end of the line.

  But where was that? The GPS map showed she was located on Bachelor Road, a two-lane that wound through woods and past the occasional storage warehouse or two on the edge of Travisville. Maybe Cortland owned land in the area. A warehouse?

  He ended up passing the place before he spotted the panel truck parked around the side of a nondescript, one-story cinder-block building in the middle of nowhere. There were no signs on the building, nothing that might signify it was in use. But the panel truck sat there, the back doors open. Brand watched in the rearview mirror as two men emerged from the building, locked the door behind them and crouched beside the building.

  A sharp curve in the road forced Brand to pay attention to his driving, and by the time he checked the rearview mirror again, the building was no longer in sight.

  * * *

  THEY’D STOPPED SOMEWHERE, and her captors had taken the box from the truck and deposited it in a very quiet place. She heard the sound of footsteps moving away from her at a rapid pace, dying away to nothing after a door creaked and clicked closed.

  She waited a moment, listening for more sound. She heard nothing in particular, but the prickle of hair on the back of her neck told her that, wherever they’d deposited her and her makeshift cage, she wasn’t alone.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice still raspy.

  There was no answer.

  Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe she was all alone here after all. She turned her attention away from what might lie outside the box and tried to focus on how to escape the inside of the box.

  But even with slivers of light seeping into the box through the seams, she could barely see. The plastic sheeting had stopped a lot of the tear gas, but she hadn’t emerged unscathed. Tears still streamed from her eyes and mucus trickled from her nose and down her throat, forcing her to cough and sneeze and generally make a sorry mess of her clothes.

  But she knew her body’s reaction to the pepper gas was also its best means of getting rid of the offending chemicals, so she didn’t worry too much about what she’d look like when she finally found a way out of the box.

  She gave up trying to see and focused on feeling her way around the confines of the box, looking for a weak board or a loose nail. But a rattle right outside the box froze her in place.

  She followed the sound. It was coming from the right corner of the box directly behind her.

  She turned her head to face the noise, squinting with pain when the box opened suddenly, letting bright daylight pour into her formerly dark prison.

  A dark, man-shaped silhouette blocked part of the light, and for a moment, her heart beat a little faster with the certainty that Brand had ignored her warning and come after her.

  But as her streaming eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw that the man standing in front of her was shorter and more slightly built than Brand. His face bore the first telltale lines of impending middle age, putting him somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties. His hair was sandy and a little on the wavy side, falling almost to his shoulders in a blunt, shapeless cut. His eyes were clear green and watchful as he stepped back from the box and waited.

  She blinked back the tears filling her eyes and tried to focus on his face. There was something familiar about him. It took a second to place him, but when she did, she felt a ripple of relief.

  “Cav.”

  Nolan Cavanaugh’s mouth curved slightly. “Who?” But the look in his eyes didn’t match his words. She saw a warning there. “Never mind. You just do what I tell you and everything will be okay.”

  He must think the place was bugged. Hell, he was probably right. And if he was undercover, she didn’t want to be the one to expose him to Wayne Cortland. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Sit there at the table. I have some questions to ask you.”

  She walked over to the table and chairs he indicated. Other than the box, they were the only things in the room, save for a few heavy-looking pieces of equipment that lined the walls on almost every side. She looked at the equipment, frowning. What a strange way to set up a warehouse.

  She sat in one of the two chairs. Cavanaugh took the other, looking meaningfully at her until she focused on him again. “Mr. Cortland would like to know why you contacted him.”

  “I wanted to make a deal.” All her internal alarms were clanging like crazy. If Cortland had cared what she wanted, why hadn’t he simply met with her? Why gas her and spirit her away from the lumber mill?

  Something about the layout of this warehouse bothered her. What was the point of lining the walls with heavy equipment?

  “What’s in those boxes?” she asked Cavanaugh, nodding toward the rows of machines, where cardboard boxes covered nearly every available surface.

  “I’m here to ask questions, not answer them,” Cavanaugh said patiently, though she saw his gaze shift around the room as if he hadn’t thought to check his surroundings before now.

  Something was wrong here. Very wrong. She looked Cavanaugh over quickly, forced to make a decision. He was either on her side or on Cortland’s. Which was it?

  He wasn’t armed. And even if he was on Cortland’s payroll for real, he had to be low on the totem pole. So why would they have sent him to interrogate her?

  “Why you?” she asked.

  His green eyes met hers, and he saw what she was asking. “A test of loyalty, I suppose.” His tone was flat, but his eyes were sending out messages about his true intent.

  He was on her side.

  She got up out of the chair, confident he wouldn’t do anything to stop her. “This setup is all wrong.”

  “Please come back and sit down,” he said, resignation in his voice.

  She crossed to the nearest door and tried it. Locked, from the outside.

  She moved from the door to the nearest machine, a table saw. She rested her hand on it for support to reach for the cardboard box that lay near the saw, but the whole machine moved, drawing her gaze to the floor. Caster wheels had been attached to the legs of the table. To all of the pieces of machinery, she
saw with a quick scan of the room.

  The klaxons in her head growing more urgent, she opened the top of the cardboard box and looked inside. The box was half-filled with nails, screws and other small metal objects. A quick look in the next three boxes revealed the same thing.

  Shrapnel, she thought, her heart in her throat.

  “Delilah, come sit down and let’s get on with this,” Cavanaugh called, sounding frustrated.

  She hurried across the room to the only other door she saw. It was locked as well, but she heard movement outside. The unmistakable sound of tape being pulled from a spool. There was a soft thud that rattled the door and a couple of patting noises against the wood.

  Delilah backed away from the door, her heart in her throat. “It’s a bomb.”

  Cavanaugh rose from his chair, knocking it backward. “A bomb?”

  She turned to look at him. “All the machinery is set on casters—any movement will send them flying with nothing to slow them down. The boxes are full of nails, screws and other shrapnel. And I just heard what I’m pretty sure was someone attaching a block of C-4 or some other explosive to the door. They’re rigging this place to blow, and they’ve made damned sure that anyone inside will be flayed or crushed or both.”

  Cavanaugh’s eyes widened with fear. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken this damned job.”

  “Who put you onto it?” She moved close to him, keeping her voice low, in case his fears about the place being bugged were right.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he whispered back.

  “Okay. Who told you to come here to interrogate me? Was it Cortland himself?”

  “No. It was another guy. He never gave his name.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Dark hair, clean-cut, blue eyes.”

  “Tall? Short? Thin?”

  “My height. A little burly.”

  Cavanaugh’s description sent a little shiver up her spine. “How old?”

  Cavanaugh’s gaze had begun to wander around the room, wide with growing terror. “How long before they blow this place?”

  “I don’t know. How old was the man who sent you here?”

  “I don’t know—late fifties? Maybe early sixties.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Well, that answered at least one question that had been nagging her since she came back to Bitterwood to follow up on Sutton Calhoun’s investigation into the Bitterwood murders. She’d believed all along that whoever had been behind the murders had an ally in the local police force.

  Now she knew who the ally was. “We have to get out of here.”

  “They’ll kill us if we try.”

  “They’re going to kill us anyway,” she growled, her gaze wandering across the small building. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, even if she could use the machines to rig some sort of shelter. She discarded that idea quickly—depending on the kind of explosive, crouching behind a heavy piece of equipment with big, sharp blades was a damned good way to sign your own death warrant.

  They needed to get out of the warehouse. Now.

  Her gaze snagged on the only bit of decoration in the small building—a dun-colored area rug that sat by itself in the middle of the floor. Why was there a rug in a warehouse?

  Working a desperate hunch, Delilah ran to the rug and gave it a sharp pull. It slid aside, revealing a square of concrete that looked different from the rest of the floor.

  “Cav, come help me with this.” There was no handle, but a small depression in one side of the block created a fingerhold. She tugged at it, straining against the heavy slab of concrete.

  “Wait!” Cavanaugh ran across the room and grabbed something off one of the machines. It was a metal rod, she saw as he slipped one end under the narrow opening she’d managed to create. The rod levered the slab up enough for them to push it out of the way, revealing a metal ladder extending down into a dark basement.

  “After you,” Delilah said, nodding toward the opening.

  Cavanaugh didn’t need to be coaxed. He scrambled down ahead of her, leaving her to follow. She landed next to Cavanaugh in the small square of light pouring through the trapdoor from the warehouse above.

  Delilah patted the pocket of her jeans and found, to her surprise, that she still had her keys. She pulled out the keychain and tried the penlight. It cast a thin beam across their new surroundings, revealing a long, narrow basement. The walls and floor were hard-packed dirt, held in place by wooden beams. Not as sturdy a structure as she’d hoped, she thought with sinking heart.

  “This place can’t survive a blast.” Cavanaugh grimaced.

  “No, it can’t.” She tried to keep her wits, but it was hard concentrating on their surroundings when she had a ticking clock in her head. How long before the whole place blew to kingdom come? Minutes? Seconds?

  The cellar was dank and musty but gave no real sense of disuse. She spotted a few cobwebs in the corners, but the dirt floor was clear of clutter, and the penlight showed fresh footprints in the dirt floor near the back of the small room where there was a dark recess, as if an alcove had been dug into the wall.

  She crossed to the alcove and directed the beam of her penlight into the darkness. The beam bounced off a flat metal surface.

  “That’s a door,” Cavanaugh said.

  It was, indeed, a door. A steel-reinforced door similar to the one she’d had on the rental house she’d lived in back in Maybridge, Alabama. She’d added the steel door on Jesse’s suggestion, since some of the jobs Cooper Security worked invited retaliation from people who’d find a normal wooden door no obstacle.

  There was no dead bolt on the door, just a knob lock. On this side there wasn’t even a keyhole, only a thin-edged button that turned easily at Delilah’s touch. She turned the knob and pushed the steel door outward.

  Beyond the door was only darkness.

  She flashed her penlight across the opening. The beam bounced off the walls of a narrow tunnel. The floor was hard-packed dirt, but as far as the flashlight beam would go, she saw only concrete walls.

  “What the hell is this?” Cavanaugh asked, gazing into the tunnel with narrowed eyes.

  Delilah took a step into the tunnel. “Hopefully, a way out.”

  * * *

  THE ROAD WOUND on for a mile, it seemed, before Brand could find a place to turn around. He had even tried a U-turn a couple of times, but oncoming traffic had thwarted him each time, forcing him to continue forward until he could find a better place.

  By the dashboard clock, almost five minutes had passed since he’d driven by the warehouse. Five excruciating minutes filled with an endless stream of nightmare images. Brand had been in the FBI for more than twenty years. In that time, he’d seen a wide range of the evils men did to each other, the lengths to which the truly depraved could go.

  And still, he had to take care on this second approach, with the clock ticking time away, because he couldn’t be sure just how many people were guarding the storage building in the middle of nowhere.

  But when the cinder-block building came back into view, there was no one around, and the panel truck was gone.

  He pulled off the road and parked in an empty gravel lot about thirty yards from the building. He grabbed his binoculars from the seat beside him and lifted them to his eyes for a better look.

  At first, the building seemed ordinary. An older building, grimy on the outside and probably equally dirty on the inside. There were only a few windows in the place, set high on the walls, and they were too thick with dust to see inside.

  He could make out the shape of a door near the end of the building on the side he faced. As he directed the binoculars toward that door, a thin wire caught his attention. It seemed to be strung up all the way around the building, held in place at intervals by strips of duct tape the same pale color as
the concrete cinder blocks of the building. Every four or five feet, a square block of what looked like putty had been pressed against the building.

  Brand’s heart skipped a couple of beats as he realized what he was seeing.

  C-4 plastic explosive.

  Detonators stuck out from the explosive, rigged to the wire, which was probably attached to a timer somewhere on the building’s exterior.

  He was out of the car before he could stop and think, driven only by a primal urge to get inside that building and get Delilah out before it blew. He had no doubt she was still inside. Why bring her out here and then rig the building if the intention wasn’t to blow her up inside?

  A passing pickup truck honked as he darted out in front of it, but he didn’t care, picking up speed as he reached the other side of the road. From there, he was faced with an almost ninety-degree incline about six feet up to the flattened clearing where the cinder-block building stood.

  He reached for a handhold in the dry grass of the slope, grimacing against the answering pain in his injured side. His hand slipped and he stumbled into the hillside, hitting awkwardly on his shoulder. A burst of pain from the point of impact was swallowed immediately by a bone-jarring boom. His ears began to ring as the sky opened above him, raining down debris on top of where he crouched.

  He pressed himself flat, covering his head to protect himself from the onslaught, his brain swirling with a toxic cocktail of fear and denial. That couldn’t have been the building exploding. It wasn’t possible. He could still reach the building before time ran out.

  That was how it had to be. Anything else was unthinkable.

  On the road behind him, vehicles hit the brakes with a squeal. The shower of debris had stopped enough for Brand to spare a glance at the road. Chunks of cinder blocks and twisted pieces of metal littered the blacktop, making it next to impossible for traffic to pass. Cars and trucks had begun to pile up on either side of the debris field, and some of the drivers had gotten out of their vehicles to stare.

  Dread squeezing his chest like a vise, Brand backed away from the incline so he could see what lay beyond the rise. It took a long, surreal moment to process what he saw.