Shotgun Honeymoon

by Terese Ramin

  That waylaid a path unworthy of the dreams he’d slept with, woken with, since meeting his wife as a teen. His timing might have been off, but he’d left Maddie and Jess in safe hands.

  Instead of the looked-for explanation or culpability, he offered Guy nothing but a cold, “My business, I’m back, get over it.”

  To which Guy responded with his usual candor, “Yeah, well, more than your own life’s at stake if you don’t keep your mind in the game, bro.”

  “I’m aware. Trust me.”

  Guy’s mouth quirked without humor. “Maybe not this time. Not all the way. We’ll see how it goes. Meantime, I’ll trust me. Keep an eye on your back.”

  “Always. And yours, too.”

  Guy grinned. “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Hmm.” Russ watched his next-in-line-brother climb into his truck and peel out of the parking lot, headed toward Holbrook and home. Then he returned his attention to Maddie and the waiting officers, who all appeared more than a little uneasy. He considered Maddie briefly, turned over Jonah’s concern that she hadn’t told him everything.

  Felt that flitter of sensation crawl along his nape hairs that told him he’d let her lie to him, experienced the twist in his gut that said fool, and understood that he wouldn’t get an answer from her tonight.

  But their friendship wasn’t based in her verbal truths; he’d always known she lied when she had to. Lied to protect herself, lied to protect someone or something she cared about more than herself. So the fact that she lied to him didn’t bother him.

  Much.

  Unless it endangered her or someone else he held himself responsible for. Or cared about.

  “You sure it was Charlie called?” he asked Maddie, suddenly aware of the obvious question he’d stupidly neglected to ask Guy.

  She nodded, but folded into herself and ducked away from him.

  Russ caught her chin, squared her to face him. “You’re sure. You talked to him yourself? No doubts?”

  She jerked away. “His voice. What I remember of him when I can’t repress it well enough. I heard it on the phone. Yes.”

  He grabbed her arm, swung her back. “Don’t lie to me, Maddie. You want Jess back, I need it all. All, youme?”

  “I hear you,” she said evenly, “And I heard him. You promised me, but weren’t there, so back off, Russ. Now.”

  Good, backbone. A commodity she’d picked up at the trial by the truckload, one she’d needed to get as far as she’d come in the twelve years since, but that Russ hadn’t seen evidence of since she’d arrived back in Winslow. She was still lying about something—probably something within the phone call—but at least she was putting some spine into it.

  The grin he offered her showed a lot of white. “Better,” he said.

  She stared at him a moment, then growled under her breath and flipped a single finger in his direction before stomping off to give the tires of his truck several swift, hard kicks. Then she crossed her arms and eyed him daggers for another fifteen seconds, and finally, when he didn’t give ground, put her nose in the air and turned her back on him to wait.

  Russ’s grin widened. Close, long-term friendships with women could be like that.

  He let his thoughts skate off Maddie with his gaze, shift and intensify with his attention to the patiently waiting cops. “Fill me in on what’s being done to find Jess.”

  Bringing him up to date on the search for Maddie’s life partner didn’t take long. The call had been made from a stolen cell phone. Russ’s caller ID had given them that much. A little footwork had even found them the cell phone itself, disposed of near the train tracks, showing Russ’s number as the last one dialed. There were no fingerprints, and the numbers had probably been punched using the eraser end of a pencil.

  The cell’s owner, a tourist, had discovered the phone missing three days previously when she’d set her carry bag aside while having her picture taken with her family downtown at the Standin’ On The Corner Park. She’d reported it, reluctantly, at her husband’s insistence even though she’d figured the phone had been taken by her seventeen-year-old daughter who was ticked at having been forced to come on the family trip when she’d rather have stayed home near her boyfriend.

  When notified, the woman was both horrified by the truth, but gratified to discover her daughter was not the culprit.

  Other than that, however, the police had had little luck. Searches of the usual places had turned up nothing. Russ suggested they widen the search area to include all abandoned buildings, fallout shelters and storage lockers, especially in or around recreation and camping areas. Charlie Thorn had operated campgrounds at one time and was back-of-his-hand familiar with most of northern and western Arizona despite his years of incarceration. Depending on what his “taken out of play” meant, he’d need somewhere well-ventilated to imprison Jess. Which might mean anything from a car trunk—Russ shuddered at the thought, particularly given the time of year—to an abandoned boxcar to an underground storage tank to a refrigeration unit with holes drilled in it.

  For Jess’s sake, and therefore Maddie’s, he hoped for a nice, airy, well-ventilated abandoned building.

  Given Charlie’s decidedly conscienceless history, he didn’t count on ito the hell had judged the man rehabilitated enough to be released from prison anyway? Some damn psych-evaluation committee he’d been able to fool by taking his medication every day? Judas stinking hell in a handbag.

  Older officer dispatched, Russ turned to the younger one and understood at once where suspicion and thirteen years of withheld gossip would come from: not from the guys who’d watched him come up, but from his underlings, the ones who hadn’t. Because Winslow was small and their lives were in desperate need of drama they could speculate about but didn’t have to live.

  “L.T., was she gay when you were with her or that somethin’ happened later? What’s that like anyway, bein’ with a whore?” It would have been one thing if the young officer was being mean or nasty-spirited, but he wasn’t. He was all of twenty, still pimply-faced-young, curious, didn’t know better and was therefore blunt about what he wanted to know, pure and simple. “I mean I heard she was your girlfriend or somethin’ while she was doin’ your whole high school for cash, plus who all else came along. And now she’s got herself a girlfriend? So…” He scratched his head and worked his mouth around question and problem, trying to figure both politically incorrect things out. “So do you, like, go out with both of ’em at once n—”

  There was a sudden flash of movement and before Russ could intervene, the young patrolman staggered back under a ringing slap. “Don’t you talk to him like that ever,” Maddie snapped. “You say what you want to me, but you leave him and Jess out of it, you flea-brained idiot, or I will—”

  “Maddie,” Russ said forcefully, hauling her back. “I realize this may not help, but Carson’s too stupid to mean anything by what he says.”

  The patrolman in question stared at her wide-eyed and puzzled, rubbing his cheek. Maddie glared at him, glanced furiously at Russ. “Too many people been stupid about this.”

  “Yeah, well, this boy was maybe eight during the trial. He wears this peach fuzz thinking it’s a beard, he’s still cherry and he’s truly innocent, come to that. He doesn’t understand. He wants to figure it out. Goin’ about it the wrong way, but he’s goin’ about it.”

  “Is he.” Not a question. She stepped up toe-to-toe and nose-to-nose with Carson. “That the truth, Carson? You trying to understand what makes different people in the world tick?”

  Carson gulped. His eyes showed a lot of white. “Ah…L.T.?”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to,” Russ advised him. “Especially not when she’s around.”

  The boy tightened his jaw, looked Maddie in the eye and swallowed again. “Okay. Then yes, ma’am. I do wanna know. I never—I ain’t never talked to anybody like you afore. I don’t know how to act. My preacher just says all you folks are bent wrong somehow, but that can
’t be right.” He stopped, worked his way around something baffling—and possibly troubling. “I mean, can it?”

  Something in his face, the question, the tone—some underlying need to know—made Maddie take a step back and look at him hard and thoroughly. What she found made her mouth soften, her stance slacken. glanced at Russ. “You knew. He doesn’t have a clue, but you know.”

  “No.” Russ shook his head. “I suspect. Right now beyond the simple—” he hesitated “—theater of the situation he’s got questions. He needs answers he can’t get from anyone around here.”

  Maddie sucked air between her teeth, shook her head at him. “You knew so you put him on me.”

  “I been gone,” Russ corrected her. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

  Maddie snorted at the ungrammatical double-negative admission. “You abandoned me so this puppy could be obnoxious and work around to his questions if he could find three minutes alone with either Jess or me. You sent him in to distract me from stuff. And I mean all of the stuff including the stuff you don’t want to talk about. Coward.”

  “Wasn’t me,” Russ said, though it was true. Taking her mind off whatever the problem was had always been the best way to handle Maddie. He’d figured distracting her with Carson’s ham-handed quest for identity might also be an excellent way to sidetrack her pursuit of his personal commodities in her baby expedition. “Hadda be somebody else. Kid’s too young and inexperienced for me to stick on Charlie Thorn’s daughter when he’s huntin’ her.” He shrugged. “Well, unless maybe my brothers are around for backup.”

  “Mmm.” Maddie touched her emotion-reddened nose, pointed at him—got it in one. “Yeah, right.” She linked her arm through the now wildly flare-eyed and confused, and perhaps justifiably anxious Carson’s, and started to drag him away. “Come with me, child, and as dazed, scared and befuddled as I am about Jess, I shall attempt the wonders of the universe to convey—”

  “L.T.?” Carson’s voice squeaked.

  Russ swallowed a grin of pure hey, you brought this one on yourself, and cleared his throat. “Mad, cut him loose, you’re riding with me, after I get his report.” He gave it a beat while Carson relaxed in relief and Maddie merely rocked back on her heels, blinked at him and waited. “Then you can have him.”

  Maddie’s teeth showed.

  Carson’s face fell. “Aw, L.T….”

  Russ shook his head, fresh out of sympathy. “Gotta learn, rookie. You’re a peace officer. Don’t go into situations you’re not prepared to extricate yourself from, one way or another. Happens this one’s benign. Another one might not be. Might involve weapons. You provoke it instead of controlling it, what’re you gonna do then?”

  “I—uh…” Carson swallowed, clenched his jaw. “Didn’t think about it that way. It just…it came into my head and I said it. It won’t happen again.”

  “No,” Russ agreed seriously, “It won’t. And to make sure it won’t, all those questions I’ve seen piling up in your head, Maddie’s the person might have some of the answers. So you help each other out, keep her mind off things, guard her good, and you learn something about in the bargain, clear?”

  Carson nodded once, hesitantly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Russ let his mouth twitch upward at one corner. “Now, fill me in.”

  Carson’s report was mostly a rehash of what Jonah had told him about Janina’s ex-husband, with updates on Buddy’s most recent whereabouts and activities, a creditable imitation of the police chief’s manner and language when told Russ was missing and some advice about staying away from the Fat Cat until Tobi Hosey calmed down and stopped being so willing to throw hot coffee in cops’ laps unless somebody did something to get Buddy Carmichael off her and Janina’s doorstep—or she sure as shootin’ would.

  Shootin’ being the operative word.

  Russ cleared his throat and swallowed a grin over the mental picture of the incensed Tobi, then winced when he considered the fact that she was probably not kidding and that she was perfectly capable of following through with her scenario if she felt Janina or herself sufficiently threatened, harassed or downright provoked. Which meant, like it or not, he’d have to talk with her—and soon.

  He rubbed a hand across his eyes, feeling more tired and hassled by the instant. His own fault, no doubt. Facing the consequences of whim. But no matter how much he might regret what Janina might face due to bad timing once people found out he’d married her, he still felt good about that. Good about her. Good about them. Good.

  Damn it. He needed to touch Janina, to assure himself of the good, the right of it. Put his hands on her, experience what she felt to make sure she knew what he thought he knew: good, right, them, together, no going back.

  Damn, who’d told him any of this was a good idea? He had responsibilities to live up to, priorities to stack and shuffle….

  Hell to pay.

  On a silent oath, he tossed Janina’s car keys to Carson. “Get somebody to drive the Chevy wagon over to La Posada, park it out of sight, leave the keys for me at the desk. Have the desk ring me when the officers get there. We’ll safe-house Ms. Thorn there tonight. The officers who bring the car can stay with her till shift change, then I want Bisti and Damiano with her till morning. We’ll coordinate another safe house and a schedule from there.”

  The rookie nodded. “Where’ll you be?”

  Russ snorted. “When I’m done here, there and over there?”

  “Chief’ll ask.”

  Now he remembered what irritated him about nosey underlings, and this one in particular, regardless of whether or not he understood where Carson was coming from. “Chief’s home in bed.”

  “I gotta leave a report.”

  Russ sucked air between his teeth. “Fine. Tell him he’ll find me slouching toward Bethlehem…trying to avert the Apocalypse.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.” Russ shook his head. “Maybe you didn’t study Yeats in high school. Tell him’ll see him in the morning. We can get into it then.”

  And so saying, he headed for his truck, Maddie and the next argument.

  Designed by Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, chief architect and designer for the Fred Harvey Company and one of the female pioneers in architecture, La Posada had the look and feel of a grand hacienda circa 1869, which was exactly the fantasy history Colter had given it. It was large and rambling, as though many sections had been added on as its fantasy family grew and prospered, its roots heavily Spanish and Mexican with large, open, airy rooms, sweeping gardens and a feeling of enormity.

  Opened just after the stock-market crash of 1929, it closed to the public in 1957 and had only opened its doors again as a hotel in 1997, a thing for which Janina was profoundly grateful. She’d always loved the beautiful building and its grounds, its history, its feel. The parts of her heritage that belonged to the hacienda shared a bond with this building and the story Mary Colter had woven around it, designed into it from beam to furniture, dishes to maids’ uniforms. It didn’t matter that they weren’t the same today as they’d been in the thirties, the fact that they’d existed at all, that the stories existed were what mattered to Janina.

  That and the fact that Russ had somehow known to bring her here, of all places, to continue their honeymoon while they figured out a place to begin their practical, real life together. How could he have known how she felt about this place? Did she talk so much to him when she didn’t realize it? Or did he hear more when she didn’t think he was listening than she realized?

  Restless, unable to sleep thinking about him, Janina leaned over the balcony railing and watched the night grow late, the stars—ancient guides for lost travelers—rise clear and bright above the cottonwoods, stark against the summer sky. Perhaps if she could read them, they would tell her what to expect, where to go, how to tiptoe her way up the slender, twisty path she suddenly found herself on. On one side lay steep ravine, on the other a rocky fall toward nothing, at the end of the path, the girlish goal she’d set herself
at sixteen: Russ.

  Now she stood at the balcony watching the shadows, brown eyes charged with green thoughts, knowing he was out there somewhere, taking care of Maddie, the woman he could talk to the way he’d never been able to talk to her. And it upset her. She was too newly married, too newly touched, for it not to.

  Too insecure in absolute trust for it not to.

  Because despite “knowing” each other for the last thirteen years, she and Russ really didn’t know each other at all. Not enough for that kind of trust. The kind where he could spend the sixth night of his marriage out with another woman, and his wife would just say, “Okay, fine, honey, see you whenever, no problem.” No. That kind of trust took time. Took building. Took…

  History.

  A lot of history. And a lot of sleeping together. Perhaps years of it. And waking up together. And breakfasts. And stuff.

  Like dating. And flowers. And maybe chocolates. And other traditional clichés like that.

  Or something.

  She grimaced, turned rebelliously whatever accusation she felt in the breeze that stirred a strand of hair across her cheek. Anyway, a lot more of everything than they’d done.

  Geez—a kick directed at the balcony railing. She didn’t want to be one of those women who was threatened by her man having a female best friend, damn it. For pity’s sake, his youngest brother was one of her best friends, so what would that make her?

  Wise, Tobi’s omnipresent demon cackled gleefully in her ear. When they look like Sharon Stone, it makes you wise.

  “Fiend,” Janina whispered. But Tobi’s anticipated comeback also made her laugh and feel better.

  A sudden commotion in the hallway drew her attention. She cocked her head toward it, recognized Russ’s voice and headed for the door. Jonah, recumbent across the portal, but only half-asleep, grabbed her ankle before she could open it.

  “Stop.”

  “Russ is out there.”

  “And? It’s still me out the door first, got it?”