On a ledge above them, Alaskan climber and helicopter pilot Andee MacLeod worked to warm the two other spelunkers. She’d layered the boy in every blanket and extra stitch of clothing she could find. Right now, she huddled in a sleeping bag and wrapped the girl in a 98.6-degree clench.
“Help me move him, Micah.” Sarah grabbed the Sked litter, an inflatable cot designed for cave rescue. It wrapped around a patient’s body, providing a smooth sled to maneuver through the cave’s labyrinth. She’d already snapped on a C-collar, checked for a head injury, and strapped him onto a waist board.
They slid Brian onto the Sked. Sarah inflated and secured the litter while Micah affixed the Gibbs ascenders to the rope.
“I’ll climb to the top, then haul him up while you follow and steady him,” Micah said.
As Micah climbed, he grieved the loss these kids would have at enjoying the subterranean world. He’d wager his next meal that they would never set foot in a cave again. They’d miss out on so many treasures—calcite straws dangling like teardrops from the ceiling; stalactites, drips of rock frozen in time; snow-white, selenite crystals blooming like ferns; egg-sized cave pearls; and pools of clear water that reflected like mirrors. All because their camp counselor—now warm and safe in the company of Micah’s search and rescue (SAR) compatriots—decided to lead with his sense of adventure instead of his common sense.
A memory scurried across Micah’s mind—nearly translucent so as to deny its presence but real enough to make him flinch. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” John Montgomery had said as his curiosity led them into a deserted Kentucky coal mine. Adventure, right. In the end, adventure had been John’s demise.
Adventure and his unlucky Penny. Micah didn’t know what was worse—that he’d introduced his best friend to the woman who took his life, or that he, Jim Micah, had loved her first. If love was blind, he’d also been knocked deaf, dumb, and brainless the day Lacey Galloway literally fell from the bleachers into his outstretched arms. Her chagrined smile snared him, and right then a bittersweet love/hate affair birthed. One that had yet to die.
How quickly his “Penny” invaded his head—her lips against his, light, laughing, tasting of cherry punch; her copper hair, as unruly as her spirit, twining between his fingers. He’d spent too many lonely nights wondering if their children would have had her infectious smile or been cursed with his impatience and bullheadedness.
Micah swallowed a choke hold of grief. A smart man would expunge her the second she started tunneling through the soft tissue of his emotions. Thankfully, his brain wasn’t nearly as fickle as his heart.
He’d been praying for righteous justice for seven years, and if it was up to him, he’d figure out a way to send Lacey Galloway to the slammer for life and the hereafter if he got her in his sights again. That was a promise.
Micah reached the ledge, checked on Andee and the two kids fighting sleep, and rigged the Sked’s ascent. Brian cried the fifteen feet to the top, too exhausted to feign courage. His screams echoed against the rutted limestone.
The crawl out of the Pit took eight hours, twice the time it had taken to locate the cavers. Micah dragged the Sked through Amoeba Alley and hauled it over Pouter’s Lip; then he and Sarah ferried it through Popcorn Cavern, dodging stalagmites and calcite formations on the wall that resembled the late-night movie snack. Micah kept Brian awake, telling him unclassified stories of adventure overseas, originated from his years of clandestine missions as a Green Beret. Missions that just might be old history if he didn’t figure out a way to get himself reinstated to the active duty list.
Please, God, one more miracle? According to his latest blood work, his cancer had vanished. He hoped God was paying attention. Time to go back to work. Even with Senator Ramey plugging for him, Micah knew he’d need God’s intervention if he hoped to join his Special Forces team anytime soon. He’d spent serious time on his knees over the past year, hoping that God had bigger plans for him than just a swift discharge and a floundering plunge into the private sector.
Thankfully, his medical-leave status gave him the opportunity to hang out with the few outdoor athletes he’d befriended over the years—Conner, Sarah, Andee, and occasionally Dannette, Andee’s former roommate. They’d met more than a few weekends over the past year and volunteered their skills to the local SAR teams on opportune occasions. He’d discovered that the hope of finding lost souls ignited his adrenaline in a way that his years as a warrior never had.
Micah chose not to dwell on that realization. Explorations into his feelings usually ended up breaching old wounds and laying bare his mistakes. There was a reason he was called Iceman, and right now he needed all the ice he could get to keep memories from burning a hole in his heart.
So he stuck to the Gulf War stories, especially when Brian asked, “What war?”
Micah groaned when the kid couldn’t name the presidents before Reagan. Glancing at Sarah, he gave her a look that asked, “What do they teach kids these days in school?”
She shrugged, and the fact that she could smile through the grime streaking her face made him realize how lucky they all were to be laughing at Brian’s bewilderment. Behind them, Andee was tethered to the two youngsters. She kept them going with horrendous renditions of “Fried Ham,” a camp song without end. Micah finally bartered a year’s worth of ice cream for silence.
They reached the twilight zone, the near exit to the cave where lichen and moss grew, hinting at life and sunlight. The hint of real air fumigated the smell of subterranean mud and dirt. Micah made out spotlights, heard the crackle of radios, and braced himself. Media. He lumped them with the liars and connivers, with people like Lacey. And he hated them most when they exploited kids.
He stopped, turned, and smiled at Brian. “You okay, kid?”
When Brian nodded, relief poured through Micah. For the first time in twelve hours he felt the coil of dread around his chest begin to loosen. Fighting the burn of emotion, he breathed deeply, composed himself, and stepped out into the circus.
Mission completed without casualty. This time.
Chapter 2
SHEER PANIC SHOT Lacey to the surface of consciousness. Light assaulted, so bright her eyes teared. The repugnant odor of antiseptic swilled her brain. She gulped a cleansing breath, then groaned, feeling as if she inhaled through a web of nettles. “Where …?”
Reaching to rub her eyes, a stinging and pull in her hand made her wince. She blinked away the prick of tears and stared in horror at an IV taped to her skin. A hospital?
Twilight poured into the room, mottling the dark confusion that permeated her mind. Lacey felt stiff on her left side. She realized with another chest-ripping gasp that her arm had been plastered to her chest in an immovable sling. She wiggled her fingers and, with a rush of relief, felt pain slice up her arm and into her neck. At least she was still intact. The silence was fractured only by the hiss of an oxygen machine as she scrounged through memory, unconsciousness to—
Ishmael Shavik.
Explosions.
Falling!
A train crash?
Her chest thickened, breaths forced. Emily!
Lacey forced herself to move, searching for the nurse’s call button. She held the box to her plastered chest and squeezed her thumb into it. Obviously she’d pushed a little hard because the nurse barreled in, wearing a definite non—Florence Nightingale expression, and ripped it from Lacey’s embrace.
“Where’s my daughter?” Lacey’s voice rattled through her parched throat. “Emily Montgomery.”
The nurse, obviously dog tired judging from her fuzzy halo of brown hair and her forehead etched into a frown, sighed and reached for Lacey’s chart in a file holder above the bed. She flipped through it. “Nope. Nothing here about a daughter.” Her Southern smugness, rife with nasal twang, razed Lacey’s barely knitted calm.
“Yes, okay. No, I think she was traveling as … uh—” Lacey fingered the air, grabbing for mental purchase—“Janie Simmons. Yes.”
/> The nurse had rough hands, and when she pushed Lacey back into the folds of the bed, she didn’t spare her the full brunt. Lacey had sudden images of Stephen King’s psychotic Nurse Wilkes. “Sorry. Your chart lists you as traveling single.”
“No!” Lacey grabbed the nurse’s wrist in a death grip. “I have a daughter. Six years old, blonde hair. She’s wearing a sweater and her jammies.” Thoughts of Emily—crying, alone, bewildered, or worse, trapped in the smoking remains of the Amtrak car—pinched Lacey’s voice to a squeak. “Is there someone in charge of the crash I can talk to?”
Nurse I-Am-Misery Wilkes yanked her wrist from Lacey’s grasp, glared at her, and stalked out.
Lacey dropped onto her pillow, feeling like she’d been dragged a thousand miles through the Texas landscape. Of course, the hospital—or Amtrak for that matter—wouldn’t have Emily listed as her daughter or even her traveling companion. She’d purchased her ticket under an assumed name for safety purposes—so people like Ishmael Shavik couldn’t …
Lacey grabbed the nurse’s call button again.
This time Nurse Wilkes spared her no mercy. “You’re already in enough trouble.” She kicked the call box on the floor, where Lacey would have to dive over the side of the bed to snare it.
Lacey ignored her. “Do you have a patient here, a Middle Eastern man? His real name is Ishmael Shavik, but he could be traveling under an alias. He’s tall, thin, dark hair—”
“Thank you for calling us, Maggie.” The baritone accompanied a tall man, grim and stoic in a navy suit, with a crew cut, and the face and girth of a prizefighter.
Lacey swallowed her words as Maggie Wilkes smiled, not sweetly, and abandoned her into the hands of …?
“Agent Michael Brower. FBI.” He flipped out his credentials as if she could actually read them from six feet away. He closed the door behind Maggie. “And you’re Lacey Montgomery.”
Her heart stopped. Actually lurched in her chest and froze, midflight in her throat. She didn’t nod, didn’t blink.
“You’re under arrest.”
With an agonizing jerk, her pulse restarted and took off like a shot. “What?”
“For the murder of NSA Agent Brad Mitchell.” His dark eyes betrayed no tease, but rather painful shards of malice.
“Murder?”
“Murder.”
Lacey reached for the bed rail, ignoring the pull in her hand. “I didn’t kill anyone.” Well, at least not directly. She flinched, hoping he thought it was from the pain of her injury—which, at this point, she still wasn’t sure what that was.
“Your prints were all over the knife that neatly dissected his aorta.”
My prints? “I don’t even know a Brad Mitchell.” She stared hard at him. “And I certainly didn’t kill him. How could I when I was unconscious?”
Fury gathered on the man’s clean-shaven, squared-off face. He had a nose that looked like it had met up with a few uncooperative suspects. “Tell it to your attorney.”
Lacey took a deep breath. “Who is Brad Mitchell?” she asked, forcing her voice to be calm and scrolling through her list of contacts, afraid that she’d inadvertently added another enemy. But certainly she would remember killing a man. She hadn’t been able to dodge the memory of nearly killing a man, regardless of her attempts.
“Your NSA bodyguard,” Brower answered. He looked disgusted, arranging his chiseled features in a glare. “Tall man, built like a linebacker, brown hair?”
She let his sarcasm bounce off her, closed her eyes, and tried to pluck the description out of her memory. It came to her in a painful flash. The burly ice-cream buyer from the train. “He was my bodyguard?” A chill started at her toes and ended in her hands gripped on the bed. “Murdered?”
“Do you want me to spell it out?”
Fighting the mental image of springing from the bed and knocking the snide smile from his face, she glared back and said clearly, just in case he didn’t get it, “I. Didn’t. Murder. Him.”
Agent Brower smirked and picked up her chart. “We’re going to let you sit here for another twenty-four hours. Let that dislocation heal. But now that you’re awake …” He slipped the chart back into the file holder and stepped toward her. She could have sworn the man actually enjoyed pulling out a pair of handcuffs and locking her good hand, IV and all, to the bed rail.
She stared at the handcuff. The cold radiated up her arm as he Mirandized her, finishing with, “Do you want to make a telephone call?”
“Telephone call?” she echoed like a sick parrot. She shook her head. Who could she call? Never in her life had her she felt so bitterly alone, even when she lay in a grungy warehouse in Almaty, Kazakhstan. And even then she’d known that Micah would find her.
But any hope she had of her hometown hero locating her today while she died of desperation in a Missouri hospital had vanished years ago when she started collecting aliases like shoes.
Traitorous tears bit her eyes. “Listen, I really don’t care what you accuse me of. But I have a daughter. Six years old. I was traveling with her. Can you please, please find her?”
The agent drove despair into her heart with a single look and left the room.
Lacey trembled from head to toe, twisting the metal against her wrist, wondering how she’d managed to be accused of murder—again.
Who would have thought that the girl voted “most likely never to leave Ashleyville” in high school would find herself, twenty years later, running from an international thug, living under an array of assumed identities, and shackled to a hospital bed? Then again, if Micah had chosen her, perhaps she would have never left.
“Hey, Lucky Penny.” The memory of Micah’s voice swept over her as if he’d yelled across the hospital room, reviving the smells of decaying autumn leaves, the taste of youth, the ebullient sensation of hope. She bit her tongue, fighting the image of Jim Micah waving his helmet as he ran across the football field in his modern-day warrior regalia. He’d looked every inch the ruddy senior, with a spackling of five-o’clock shadow along his chin, and wide, wide-receiver hands that could grip a pigskin or catch a girl falling at his feet. Built like a powerhouse, Micah plowed through opponents like matchsticks and took her heart away with his rapscallion grin.
“A bunch of us are going out after the game—hangin’ at Shakey’s Pizza. Come along?” So it hadn’t been an invitation to the homecoming dance. She hadn’t dared hope that Jim Micah might actually see her as more than a tagalong, someone who had nearly dug a hole of humiliation in the dirt at his feet. But since that moment when she’d fallen at his feet—a split second of sheer embarrassment, followed by unutterable joy at his impressive game-winning thirty-yard catch—he’d called her his “lucky penny.” And, well, it fertilized all the dangerous daydreams she’d entertained about the six-foot-two senior.
Daydreams that turned into full-fledged regrets now as Lacey glanced at the handcuff tethering her to her dark future. She wished she could wipe away the tears that blinded her. No, Jim Micah hadn’t loved her. Despite her attempts to get his attention. Attempts that had not only failed miserably but caused him to despise her.
She balled her fist in the shackles, despair rising to choke her. “Oh, God, what now? Please … help.” The tinny words escaped her lips before she could bite them back. She had no right to approach God after her years on the lam. But lately, foxhole prayers had bubbled from some well of desperation in her soul. She let the prayer rise and hover near the ceiling, even lifted her head as if hoping He might swoop down and snatch it up.
Nothing. She’d run so far from God the doors to heaven had been permanently locked. “Okay, fine. I’ll save her on my own,” she mumbled.
Night blanketed the windows and she stared at her own miserable reflection. Matted, tangled copper red hair, puffy eyes, gaunt face. Unable to face the hollow, despairing woman in the window, she turned away and craned her body over the side of the bed, enduring a wash of sheer torture to haul up the nurse’s call box with her slung a
rm. She somehow finagled the television power button at the top and prayed for news about the train crash. Maybe a reporter would tell her Emily was safe and looking for her mother in a local hospital. Then at least Lacey wouldn’t need a sedative to sleep tonight.
She flicked through the channels. Reality shows, sitcoms. Her heart sank. But—oh, thank you!—they had CNN. She read the headlines ticking across the bottom. Something about the Middle East and the latest verbal boxing. A pretty brunette with caramel-colored skin mouthed news. Where was the volume? Lacey fiddled with the buttons and managed to add sound …
“—just emerged from a cave ominously called the Pit, where a group of local cavers rescued campers Jenny Davis, Brian Cummings, and Levi Schumann. The three had disappeared early yesterday morning when they hiked off with a counselor from Camp Break Point.” The picture panned to a handful of grimy rescuers climbing out of a slit in the earth’s crust. A slight drizzle blanketed the crew, adding to their grim, muddy appearance.
Lacey pumped up the volume.
“SAR-trained spelunkers exploring in the area volunteered to hike into the cave early this morning after receiving the missing person bulletin.” The on-scene reporter, a skinny woman with stringy brown hair, barely hiding a scowl, poked her microphone at the bunch. “Can you tell us how you found them, sir?”
Lacey sat stone still, watching one of the rescuers turn. Face nearly blackened with dirt as if he’d spent a year buried to his neck, the man gave the camera a death look.
She knew that look. Her breath caught and saliva pooled in her mouth. Yes, it had to be him. Lacey recognized the scar on his chin, showing as white as a laser against his filthy beard, and she’d never—not in a thousand lifetimes—forget those gray green eyes, the color of stones glistening in a flowing creek. Her eyes watered as Jim Micah, in all his dirty, rumpled, man-sized glory, growled, “Yeah. The counselor was pretty disoriented when he finally made it out for help. I’d have to say that God was the one who found them. We just kept searching ’til He showed us where they were.”
Flee the Night Page 2
