by Madi Le
"Good enough for me," Misty said.
"I'm glad you're so accommodating."
"It's one of my better qualities," Misty agreed. "That, and my looks."
Grant scowled at the comment. He didn't like the amount of forwardness he was getting. It wasn't proper. Then again, if he was allowed to mention it then there was no reason that he wasn't going to. Society assumed that you weren't a stripper, and that you weren't going to forget a man who you'd planned an entire life with. If society's assumptions were out the window then you might as well take advantage of it.
"They haven't faded a bit," he said. "Might as well have been two days since I last saw you."
"How long was it?"
He looked at her for a moment. Then he answered her. "Nine years," he said. "And seven months."
"That long?"
"That long," he agreed. "And now I find out, it still stings."
"I'm sorry. Must've been hard."
"Harder than anything else I've had to deal with," he said. "But I got over it."
"I'm glad to hear that, at least."
They stepped inside. It was easier to treat her like someone else entirely. That was the way that she acted. She was someone else with the same face. The same voice. The same breasts, which was almost surprising given her admitted profession. An entirely different approach to conversations with men, and with strangers was one of the few things that proved her not to be the exact same person.
"You really liked me, huh?"
"Sweetheart," Grant said, pulling the door to the diner open, "I never even knew you. But the person you were? Yeah, you could say that."
She kept her head down. Something in his voice must have betrayed the feelings that he had been trying to keep guarded. He wasn't interested in feeling vulnerable in front of a woman like that.
"You could tell me what's really going on," Grant offered. They sat down opposite one another. It felt like his life had just picked back up after everything happened, like they'd taken a little break. A little ten-year-long break. Now they were going to talk about their future again, and it was going to be the exact same. But it wasn't.
"I would if I could," she said. "I'm serious when I say that. Okay? So stop asking."
"I don't have much else to talk about."
"You have some kind of computer problem," she said. "I heard one of your deputies talking about it."
"Loose lipped…" he tried to keep the growl under his breath, but there was no doubt that she heard it. He closed his eyes. "Yeah, we've got some issues with some dumb-ass kids getting involved in local politics a little too fervently."
"You want me to take a look at it? I can make myself useful. At least then you can justify keeping me locked up."
"I can't," he said. "No matter how useful you are."
"Then you don't have to keep me locked up. You can just take me back to your place. I can sleep on the couch."
"I don't think that would be good either."
"Or I can sleep, you know… someplace else."
The images came to his mind entirely unbidden, and he pushed them away just as quickly. He hated it, but at the same time he loved it. He wanted to be done with this conversation as soon as possible.
"No," he said, with a little more force.
The waitress came up. She pretended to be embarrassed to be interrupting, but Grant knew Carrie-Anne and knew that she was a gossip all the way down to her rotten core, and she wanted to be in the middle of it if at all possible. She'd picked the ideal time to walk up and get details.
Grant ordered. Misty ordered, too. He noted that she didn't look at the menu, but her order–two eggs, over-hard, rye toast, bacon not too crispy–was simple enough that any diner in the world would be able to make it happen without batting an eye. It made her look like a regular without actually proving a thing. She'd always been a pancakes girl, before. He didn't remark on it.
"So what's the plan?"
"The plan is, I'm going to drop you off someplace. If you want to know, the freight is coming by around 3, eastbound. About 5, westbound. It's not a perfect schedule. But they've got a refueling yard here, and better than even odds that they'll stop. You hop on, and I happen to know the engineer doesn't bother to check for strays."
"You're sure? Not even for old-times' sake?"
"That's precisely why I'm not interested," he said. He left it up to her to figure out what he meant by it.
She shrugged. Their food came, and they ate without much more conversation, climbed into his police cruiser, and took off. He checked both ways, and pulled out into the road. Traffic was thin, around midnight, in a town with fewer than nine thousand residents.
Which made it all the more surprising when a dark blue sedan shifted lanes at the last minute and slammed into the side of his nose hard enough to turn the cruiser almost a full rotation.
It took an instant for Grant to catch his bearings. He was unharmed. He'd almost go as far as to say that they had intentionally left him unhurt. Only another foot towards the trunk and he'd have been clipped by the corner of their car. But he hadn't.
It took another instant, almost a third of a second, to recognize that there was another vehicle pulled up beside them. A large, unmarked van. It looked black in the dim, but it might have been red, or blue.
There were men peeling out of it in a hurry. He didn't take long to recognize that they were armed, and he didn't take more than another third of a second to realize that he needed to be armed, too, and in a hurry. He pulled the pistol from his holster and pointed it out the window. He pulled the trigger.
One of the guys jerked in pain. There were two others, though, and they made their way around the side of the car. One grabbed at the passenger side door. The other stepped out in front and pointed his gun at Grant. Grant moved and fired as the barrel came level. He knew vaguely that the gun in the other man's hand was intended more as a threat than as a killing weapon.
The bullet cut a hole through the windshield and caught the guy high in the middle of his chest. The passenger side door opened and Grant forced his door open. The hinges were more than a little bit crumpled, and he had to put some force into it.
The sedan pulled away in a hurry. He caught the license plate as it went. 1F 7851L. He took a mental note of it, turned, and aimed his weapon at the third man.
"Let her go," Grant growled. "I'm not going to ask twice."
The guy had a ski mask on, in spite of the warmth. It covered most of his head, but he should have cut his hair shorter. He showed a lock of dark hair that was matted down over his brows.
The guy seemed to think about that for a moment, looked at his useless comrades, and decided to take the better part of valor. He dropped his military-looking hardware to his side, let Misty go. Grant supposed that the guy was worried that he might get shot. It was the Sheriff's experience that people worry that you might treat them the way they would treat someone else.
But Grant wasn't interested in killings. He was interested in self-defense and in protecting people in his charge. It was just an issue that he happened to be protecting a woman who he told, directly and assuredly, that he wasn't going to protect. Well, if he needed proof that there was something to protect her from, Grant thought, he supposed that he had the proof now.
"Get in the car," he said. Misty did. Grant brought back to his mind the number of the plate on the vehicle that peeled off in the dark. 1F 7851L. He heard the passenger side door close. Saw the man pull his friends into the van's side door. There was a fourth guy behind the wheel. As soon as all three slid into the car they pulled away after the other. Grant looked for a license plate. There wasn't one.
He waited until the van disappeared around the corner. Then he let out the breath he'd been holding and slid back into the car. It took his full weight but he managed to get the door to pull back into a vaguely closed-looking position. Carrie-Anne was standing outside the diner openly gaping. It was lucky that she hadn't gotten caught in the crossfire.
"Want to tell me who they were?"
"I did tell you."
"Want to tell me who they really were? That was military hardware."
"I told you. Chief Petty-Officer Joseph Greene. He resides in Lexington, Virginia, when he's not out to sea."
"I guess he's not out to sea," Grant said. "But you're going to have to do better than that. Even SEALs don't carry that kind of stuff around their civvie lives."
"He's very committed," Misty said, with a tone in her voice like she was hopeful that he would believe it even though she guessed he wouldn't. She guessed right, he wasn't going to buy that. He'd been in the Army himself, for six of the past ten years. The Sheriff duty had come quickly, along with the wife, and now it felt like that was what his life was. At least, it had felt that way for a while. Now the only thing that was left was the job.
"So you're going to stick with that story? Even though it's a load of baloney?"
"Why don't you just say what you mean?'
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You think it's bullshit."
"Sure."
"So say that."
"Why?" Grant limped the car along the road. If he had been patrolling and seen someone's vehicle looking like this, there was better than even odds that he'd have pulled the guy over. But he was driving an official vehicle, and nobody was going to stop him. There was nobody on patrol to do so, anyways.
Misty frowned in the passenger seat and didn't say anything. There was nothing that really needed saying, at that point. Grant knew it, and Misty knew it. So they drove in silence.
"I don't like this," he said. "You're hiding something."
"I'm going to keep hiding it."
"You want my guess?"
"I'm not going to stop you," Misty told him. "You really ought to find some place to disappear to, though. Or at least back to the station."
"I'm working on it," he said. But it was twenty minutes back to the station at the best of times. At twenty miles an hour, he guessed it was at least double that.
He took a breath. His first full breath since the whole thing had gone down that didn't feel like he was gulping air.
"I think you've got some kind of government types after you."
"That's quite a theory. What's a girl like me got to do to get 'some government types' after her, anyways?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," he said. "Maybe you're a fugitive. But then again, that would turn up first thing if I searched it. So you'd never go to a Sheriff. So I reckon that it's something they're doing on the down-low."
"How do you figure?"
Sheriff Holloway looked over at her as the car limped along. He made a left turn, the opposite way of the van and the sedan that had hit him. It didn't stop him looking into the rear-view, almost afraid that he was going to see them coming down on him like a cannonball.
"I don't know all the details."
"Maybe it's some kind of gang thing?'
"The wild, nation-wide gangs of Lexington, Virginia, huh?"
"What's the problem?"
"The city's not exactly known for it's mafia problem. And besides that, it's not the sixties. There really isn't a mafia problem. There's local outfits, and there aren't any around here."
"There's local outfits everywhere," Misty said.
Grant didn't push it.
Four ♥
*
Misty's body hurt. She'd been in bad situations before. From what she was able to piece together, she'd been in much worse, and come out of it nominally alive. But she thought she had more time. Fleeing to a po-dunk little nowhere place had been intended to throw her pursuers off the trail. Now it seemed as if it had no effect at all.
"I need to get out of here," she said, almost unaware of what she was saying.
"We need to get you someplace where you can be protected," the Sheriff answered. "Even if we have to go real slow about it."
The words were a joke, but he didn't do much to make it sound like one. Misty soured and looked out the window, watching the houses pass them by on the side of the road. The speed felt like she could have made a leisurely walk to keep up.
Vaguely, she knew that wasn't the case, but there had to be a better way to do this, hadn't there?
"Don't you guys have a towing company around here, or something?"
"Flu," he said. "Sick with the flu."
"You're joking. In this weather?"
"I don't know, and I'm not the guy's doctor. But we've got exactly one, and he's out of commission right now. Unless you were thinking we should wait there while a tow comes from the next town over? It's only fifteen minutes, if they hurry. But you know, they might worry about breaking the speed limit and they might get hungry on the way over, so who knows how long it actually ends up being."
Misty went quiet and pressed her lips together. She had to figure out some kind of plan. They were sitting ducks here. It took them almost ten minutes to a mile.
"I'm…" she let out a long breath. "I'm scared, Sheriff."
"I can understand that," Grant said. "But there's nothing much I can do until I get to the station, alright?"
"Yeah," she said. "I know. But I'm not happy about it."
"Look, I don't know what you have coming down on your head here, but here's what I can try to do." He took his eyes off the road. At this speed, he had what seemed like forever to react to changing conditions; she guessed he could have taken a nap. "You need someplace to stay, right? And I need another ride. So let me make a call, and maybe I have someplace a little closer by."
"You sure?"
"No," Grant answered. "Which is why I'm calling."
He pulled a phone from his pants and fumbled with it one-handed. She eyed the phone suspiciously. It had been a weeks since Misty carried one. If there was anything that she missed, it was having something that was constantly linked to the web. Something that let her occupy herself when there was nothing else to do, on long bus rides and hikes.
If there was anything that she didn't miss, it was having a way that the men after her could track her, no matter how hard she tried to keep them away. This was just another way of tracking her.
She tried to remind herself that it didn't matter if she was being tracked, because there way no way that they couldn't find her in this wreck. It didn't do much to break the association, though. She let out a breath and watched the houses pass slowly.
Most of them had windows that were completely dim. One or two had the blinds closed, but light seeped in around the edges enough to let her know that there were people inside. The only ones of interest were the ones where the television showed through.
The programs were the same here as they were anywhere. It seemed a little strange to her to be passing by houses in the night, in a little town where nobody went and apparently folks didn't bother to leave, either, and to see them watching shows about high-powered city executives, or glitzy fashion programs.
Then again, maybe it was something to do with wanting what you can't have. She'd been here once. What had made her leave? Was that what it was with her? She wanted to get out because she wanted to live the glamorous city lifestyle?
Well, D.C. was a terrible life. It wasn't glamorous at all. She'd spent time, as far back as she could remember, flying back and forth to Paris, London, L.A., Shanghai, Tokyo, and one time she'd gone to Dresden.
A quote bubbled to the forefront of her mind, though she couldn't say who originally said it, that every city looks the same from the inside of a hotel room. Well, that was equally true when you were let out for a music concert, as it did when you were let out to do any other job. Even murder pretty much doesn't change anything about the city. It changes the nature of the job, though, that much she had to admit.
She looked over at the Sheriff. What if he knew that she was a killer? Would he still think that she looked like the girl he claimed that she used to be? Would he still look at her like he missed her? Or would he turn her right in?
He was a Sheriff. The answer ought to have been obvious. She wondered anyways. It was easier to wonder than to know that he'd condemn her in a second. She hadn't chosen that life. As soon as the opportunity arose, she'd gotten out. Some other woman had chosen her entire life, and she'd chosen wrong.
Maybe if Misty knew that woman's whole story, she could have gotten into the same places, no problem. She could have been comfortable with the work that she'd been doing because she knew that it was the right thing to do, or that the world had wronged her and it didn't matter what was right and what was wrong. Like some kind of TV movie villain.
But she didn't have any of that. She just had a skillset that she couldn't explain, and a handful of memories that she'd rather not have had. And, as a result of those two things, she had a bunch of armed men coming after her.
Now she had one other thing, something that she hadn't had for the weeks that she'd been on the run. Maybe it would make all the difference, or maybe there was nothing that would. She had someone who was willing to help her. As long as she managed to keep her secret, he wouldn't abandon her. She just had to hope that would be enough.
"Yes, sir," Grant said. "I understand, sir."
He put the phone down.
"Who was that?"
"The guy I said I had to call."
"And who's that?"
"The mayor," he said. "If you must know."
"Oh. So what's the news?"
"Well, there's good news, and there's bad news. Which would you rather hear first?"
"The bad news," Misty said. "If I had to pick."
"The bad news is, we're taking the long way home, just like before. So I suppose there's not much change there."
"The good news?"
"The good news is that you're famous," Grant said. There it was again, a joke that didn't touch his tone even for an instant. "Apparently, you showing up in town was like kicking a hornet's nest, and now there's all kinds of heat coming down. So I'm in deep shit if I stick my neck out for you."
Misty knew exactly what she was hearing, because it was what she'd been afraid she would hear first thing. They didn't know everything; that wouldn't have been productive. No, she was a domestic terrorist. Or she was a murder suspect. Or maybe they pegged her for the things that she was actually responsible for, but they pretended that there was no rhyme or reason to it beyond her love of mayhem and death.
