The Man from Texas

by Rebecca York

  Hannah was sitting with her arms folded across her chest. “You’re going to be able to find this place again?”

  “There are dead solid landmarks,” he informed her, but didn’t bother to elaborate. One was a sign announcing the speed limit. Twenty yards farther on was a parking lot with picnic tables, and three big rocks between the grassy area and the woods. He pulled into a parking space, opened the back door and took enough cash out of the suitcase to meet their short-term needs. Then he closed the case again and wrapped it in several of the plastic bags.

  “It’s in your best interest to let me know if anyone comes along,” he said.

  She glared at him, but gave a tight nod.

  Picking up the suitcase and the shovel he’d bought, he headed around the rocks and into the woods to a place where a log had fallen across the forest floor.

  The physical labor of digging in the soft dirt helped work off some of his tension. It felt good to scoop up the earth and pile it in a neat mound. He made the hole deeper than he needed for the suitcase.

  A grave, he thought. For the money. And if he got killed, nobody would ever find it.

  Cutting short the morbid thoughts, he set the suitcase inside and re-covered the pit, hiding the evidence of his handiwork by spreading the extra dirt around the area and covering the raw earth with leaves and other debris. After checking the results with a flashlight, he wiped his hands on his jeans and returned to the car.

  AS THEY PULLED AWAY from the parking area, Hannah kept her eyes straight ahead, unwilling to ask Luke exactly where he’d hidden the cash.

  They drove for several miles before she couldn’t stand the uneasy silence any longer. “So now that the money’s taken care of, what next?”

  He sighed. “We’re heading for Pritchard, Texas.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to go there.”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “You were right. It’s the only place I have to start.”

  “Did you come to that conclusion before or after the men outside?”

  “Before.”

  She stole a glance at him, wondering what had happened to change his mind. But if he wasn’t going to volunteer the information, she wasn’t going to pry.

  “So we’re going to the airport?” she asked instead.

  “Yeah. The Philadelphia airport. Where we catch a plane for San Antonio.”

  “That’s two hours from here.”

  “But a lot safer than Baltimore/Washington International, if the cops—or the guys who showed up at the town house—have staked out the local airports.”

  Although his caution was prudent, she was quick to point out a flaw in the plan. “A picture ID is required to get on a plane. So they’ll have Hannah Dawson made when we show up at the ticket counter.”

  He turned to her for a second, then back to the road. “I’ve got a second identity for me and a fake ID for you. In the name of Helen Davis, so it won’t be too hard to remember.”

  Her head whipped toward him. “What? When have you had time for anything like that?”

  “I ordered it before I approached you with the job offer.”

  She took several seconds to digest that startling piece of news. “That could have been a big waste of money.”

  He merged into the traffic on Harford. “I’ve got dinero to burn, remember?”

  She nodded absently, her mind on the implications of his previous statement. He’d ordered the ID before he’d asked her to work for him, which meant he’d been sure of her, and sure of his own decision to hire her. That was no longer true. His faith in her had been eroded, and she found the knowledge had left an aching hole in her chest.

  “If you don’t trust me anymore, why are you taking me with you?” she asked.

  “You know my plans. If you’ve already talked to your friend, you could do it again.”

  “I didn’t! I mean we only talked about the FBI database. And I told Jed that I trusted you when he tried to tell me I was making a mistake by sticking with you. That was all.”

  His shrug had her blood boiling. They rode in strained silence until she heard Luke mutter something she was glad she couldn’t quite catch. Sitting up straighter, she looked from him to the road. “What?”

  “Up there!”

  He pointed toward the road ahead, where she could see several police cars with flashing lights. Ahead of them the line of traffic was slowing down.

  “An accident?” she asked.

  “Or a roadblock.” Luke looked behind him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Figuring out how to turn around.”

  “You can’t. They’ll come after you.”

  Probably he’d known she was right all along. Still, he made a frustrated noise. When the car in back of him honked, he inched forward. At the same time, his hand slid down and came out with the gun he’d tucked under his shirt.

  Her skin turned icy. “Luke, put that away. If they see that, then you will be in trouble.”

  “What am I supposed to do,” he growled, “just let them scoop me up?”

  Always before he’d been calm, in control. But it was obvious that the day’s events had been too much for him.

  She strained her eyes, trying to see what was going on up ahead. But it was too dark to tell. Still, she kept her voice calm and even as she said, “Luke, it could just be an accident and people are slowing down to look. Or maybe they’re spot-checking for drunk drivers.”

  He craned his neck and clenched his teeth when he couldn’t see what was happening. She was in the same position as she sat with her nails digging into the seat cover.

  “What if they’re looking for us, for me?” he demanded.

  “Why would they be looking for us?”

  “This car is stolen, remember.”

  She felt the air freeze in her lungs. Somehow she’d forgotten about that little detail.

  Rising up in her seat, she strained to see what was going on. Then she spotted cars on either side of the road. Cars with crumpled hoods and rear ends. Then an ambulance came into view.

  “It’s an accident,” she breathed. “Just an accident.”

  Moments later, they reached the site and rolled slowly past. Then they were speeding up again, leaving the bottleneck behind them.

  “That took a couple years off my life,” she commented.

  “Yeah. I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

  She agreed as she leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. With an effort, she tried to turn her mind to constructive channels—tried to see the raid on the town house from Luke’s point of view. He didn’t know who he was, he’d picked a detective to help him find his identity, and he’d trusted her enough to talk about his dangerous situation.

  Then at the worst possible time, she’d called him by another man’s name. Next, the house he’d thought was safe had been attacked—after she’d made a phone call he was sure had compromised his security.

  He hadn’t listened when she’d denied working with Jed. But what if she opened up a subject that he knew was painful for her—would that make a difference in his attitude?

  Her mouth turned dry, but she managed to say, “Do you know what it’s like for a detective on the fast track?”

  “No. But I assume you’re about to tell me.”

  She moistened her lips. “It’s exciting at first. Then it’s grueling. It burns you out. I saw hot-shot guys who turned into discipline problems or who got into alcohol or drugs or dug themselves into deep financial problems. I knew I was headed for some kind of crash—until Gary and I…”

  She let the sentence trail off, then started again. “He was my mentor. He helped train me. I told him my problems, went to him for advice, and it was tremendously flattering when he showed a personal interest in me. After a while, I needed the stability he gave me. It was the one constant in my life.”

  “You let him get close to you. And he used the opportunity to get yo
u into his bed. So where is he now? What happened when you really needed him after the shooting?”

  Luke had cut to the bone with the precision of a surgeon. Maybe because she hadn’t talked about this with anyone, she found herself answering the question. “At first he comforted me. Then after a couple of days when I was still too shaky to go to work, he ordered me to snap out of it.” She swallowed, forced herself to tell him the worst part. “He said, ‘Suck it up and get over it, Troop. If you don’t want to shoot bad guys, quit and go to work at Burger King. Then you can have it your way. Until then, stop whining and get your ass back out on the street where it belongs.’”

  Amazed that she’d repeated the words she had never uttered to anyone else, she sat in frozen silence in the moving car.

  His curse made her flinch. “The polecat had the nerve to say that to you?” Detaching his right hand from the wheel, he circled her forearm with his fingers, then worked his way down to the back of her hand.

  She closed her eyes, absorbing the feel of his flesh pressed to hers. The contact didn’t make it any easier to say the next part. “I felt like I’d failed him.”

  Again Luke’s angry rejoinder rang in the confined space. Then more quietly he said, “It wasn’t your fault. He should be horsewhipped for using you. And horsewhipped for leaving you when you needed him most.”

  “I was the one who drew him into the relationship in the first place. Don’t you understand? I liked the prestige of being his girlfriend. Then I needed his strength.”

  “You sound like a rape victim blaming herself for getting attacked.”

  “It’s not the same. He didn’t force me into anything. I flirted with him. I invited him to dinner at my apartment and had a sexy nightgown tucked in the bureau drawer…”

  “And you ended up in the bedroom. That night and a lot of nights after that.”

  She kept her moist palm pressed to her thigh. With brutal honesty she said, “I was doing it again with you. That’s the way I act with men. Needy and seductive. I’m sorry.”

  “How many other men are you talking about?”

  She looked down at her lap.

  “He was the first one, wasn’t he?”

  “How do you know?” she whispered.

  “You’re a lot more innocent than you think. You don’t know how you are with men because you’ve only been with one. The one who seduced you because he liked the sex and he liked having you for a trophy. He liked everybody knowing that he was sleeping with Miss Detective on the Fast Track. I’ll bet he didn’t keep it a secret around the station house, did he?”

  She had never thought about it in those terms. But she didn’t have time to turn it over in her mind, because Luke was speaking again.

  “And then there’s the other guy. The one who can’t remember who he is.”

  Startled, she turned to stare at him, but his rigid profile gave nothing away. Before her brain had time to catch up with her mouth, she said, “So why exactly did you get close to me? Because you want to forget the mess you’re in?”

  “That’s as good a reason as any,” he bit out, and she realized a few seconds too late that the question had been a mistake.

  Beside her, Luke lapsed into silence, and Hannah wished she hadn’t started the conversation in the first place. It certainly hadn’t helped.

  Shifting in her seat, she watched the lights passing and tried to will the tension out of her body. She told herself she’d succeeded—until they pulled into a motel parking lot about twenty minutes from the Philadelphia airport.

  Not wanting to make the decision about sleeping arrangements, she was willing to let Luke go in and register. But he insisted on ushering her into the lobby with him while he got a room on the third floor—with two queen-size beds.

  One room. Where he could keep an eye on her, she thought as she watched him slip the chain into place.

  She was pretty sure she could get away from him if she tried. But that wasn’t what she wanted.

  What did she want? she asked herself as she washed her face and brushed her teeth. For the immediate future, she wanted to stay with him. To prove that he was dead wrong about his new assessment of her.

  And then what?

  That part was complicated. Dangerous. It made her feel as if she was standing at the edge of a crumbling cliff. So she backed up to more solid ground and pretended to herself that she hadn’t come to any decisions.

  But the way he was keeping his distance from her hurt. Even when she washed her hair and asked him to replace the butterfly bandage on her head, his touch was so mechanical that she wondered if she’d only been imagining any sort of intimacy between them.

  “Are you going to handcuff me to the bed?” she asked when she saw him standing hesitantly, looking toward the shower, looking as though he was wondering whether it was safe to close the door.

  “That would be a good idea. But I don’t have any cuffs.” He made a snorting sound. Then slammed the door and took the quickest shower on record.

  She had turned off all but one of the lamps and was lying in one of the beds when he came out wearing only his jeans, his chest bare and hair still glistening with droplets of water.

  His gaze zeroed in on her, pinned her for a brief moment, and she wondered if he really thought she was going to jump ship. Or whether he had simply switched into some sort of protective mode where he wasn’t prepared to rely on anyone but himself.

  She understood that. Understood what he must be feeling. And she longed to convince him that she really was on his side. But she didn’t see any way to accomplish that goal—besides showing him she was prepared to cooperate with any plans he had.

  Unless she judged them outrageous or just plain foolish, she silently added.

  She watched him as he called the airline and booked a flight for the next morning. Then after hanging up, he curtly informed her that they were getting up at 4:00 a.m.

  By the time they boarded a plane for San Antonio at five the next morning, she felt the distance between them looming like a chasm.

  LUKE SAT next to Hannah on the plane, studiously avoiding any physical contact. The closer they got to Texas, the more he was sure he’d made a mistake by letting himself get involved with her in any sort of personal way. For more than one reason. He was dragging along a woman who might rat him out to her friends if she got the chance. He tried to keep that firmly in mind, even while he considered the other half of the equation—himself. His destiny lay somewhere at the end of their flight. He sensed it, and he knew that until he regained the knowledge of his background and the extent of his present problems, he had no business letting his emotions rule his relationship with Hannah or anyone else.

  Unfortunately, the logic of the situation wasn’t enough to turn off his feelings. Despite his doubts about her, he still craved her companionship and her comfort. But he wasn’t going to let her know that. So he exercised an iron control that came from some well of inner strength that he was surprised to find existed within himself.

  Keeping everything on a superficial level with his traveling companion, he followed her out of the plane, then found a rental counter where he could pick up a sport utility vehicle.

  It was when they stepped outside that another kind of emotion seized him. He knew this place—in his blood and bones if not in his head.

  He pulled in a draft of the air, dry and sweet with a familiar tang he couldn’t quite identify. It was still early spring, but the temperature was already edging toward the nineties. And the hot sun beating on his head made him conscious that he needed a hat. So he dragged Hannah back in the building, found a phone booth and copied down some addresses.

  Once they got into their rental, she sat slumped in her seat, quiet and uncommunicative as they headed away from the airport. She straightened and looked at him inquiringly when he stopped at a strip mall.

  “Now what?”

  “I want to get some clothes. For you, too.”

  He didn’t give her time to arg
ue as he climbed out of the car and waited for her to join him on the sidewalk. Inside the store, he stood looking at the racks of clothing, the hats, the boots.

  Boots first. Then a hat and a shirt, he thought, something inside his chest expanding in anticipation. And then a gun. Yes, he’d definitely need one of those to replace the one he’d had to ditch before leaving for the airport in Philadelphia.

  He spent forty-five minutes transforming himself from an easterner to a man at home in Western trappings.

  “You need a hat and boots, too,” he told her. “For the desert.”

  “Why?”

  “There are sixteen varieties of poisonous snakes in Texas. Not to mention fire ants, scorpions and black widow spiders.”

  “Glad to hear it.” She looked at him inquiringly. “The desert, you say. Is that where we’re going?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, not because he knew the exact location but because the concept felt right.

  He figured that if she’d come this far with him, she wasn’t going to hop a plane back to Maryland. So while she was making some selections, he quietly took care of another necessary purchase, then rejoined her in the ladies’ department. It amused him that she deliberately picked hiking boots over Western gear—and a hat that looked more like a souvenir of a Mexican border town rather than anything from the Lone Star State.

  His next stop was a large grocery store where he picked up water, a flashlight and some emergency rations.

  As Hannah looked through the purchases, she slanted him an inquiring look.

  “Are we going camping?”

  “We’re going into territory where you might pass two cars in a hundred miles. It’s best to be prepared.”

  “Prepared for what?”

  “Disaster,” he answered in a flat voice, knowing that he wasn’t being ironic. He was actually expecting a disaster of some kind, although he couldn’t say what.

  They headed out of town, the urban scenery giving way rapidly to open spaces dotted with vegetation he recognized—mesquite, creosote bush, yuccas and century plants.

  Beside him, Hannah was silent as he merged onto Route 90. But he was sure she knew his nerves were humming, the tension increasing the closer he got to Pritchard.