Second Chance Cowboy

by B. J Daniels

  The garage door opened again. Two seconds later, a pregnant Meredith Foster drove out in her silver SUV.

  Arlene swore. “That’s the same color and type of vehicle that I saw driving by my house. We’re going to follow her, aren’t we?”

  Hank started the van, but before he could shift into gear, another car came out of the darkness of a side street.

  He let out a curse as John Foster’s black sports car began to tail his wife’s SUV.

  “The son of a bitch is going to blow the whole thing,” Hank said as he shifted into gear and joined the parade, staying back a good distance.

  They hadn’t gone far when he said, “I knew it. She spotted her husband following her. Didn’t the dumb SOB realize she would be looking for a tail?”

  “Obviously not,” Arlene said. “If we’re right, he must not know anything.”

  “But he suspects something if he’s tailing her.”

  Meredith turned into a convenience store. Her husband parked on the street. Hank drove past to circle a block and come back to park far enough away they could watch but not be noticed.

  Meredith came out of the convenience store with an ice cream cone and got into her car.

  “She doesn’t act like she sees him,” Arlene said. “Maybe—”

  “No, she saw him,” Hank said. Meredith turned back the way she’d come. “She’s going home. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”

  HANK HAD WANTED to drop Arlene off at a motel, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I’m staying with you.”

  “It’s not going to be that comfortable in the van all night.” He didn’t expect Meredith to leave the house again tonight. But he couldn’t take the chance she’d leave when her husband, home from wherever he’d gone dressed up like that, was sound asleep.

  Hank had known this would put pressure on Meredith. That is, if she had Charlotte. They couldn’t be sure of that, and it scared him that while they were killing time in this van Charlotte could be having her baby while being held prisoner by someone else. Someone they couldn’t even imagine.

  On the way back to the Foster house he’d stopped at a pizza joint, filled up two thermoses with black coffee and bought three large pizzas, loaded.

  “Dinner, midnight snack and breakfast,” he’d said at Arlene’s raised eyebrow.

  Every few hours he moved the van. Residents in fancy neighborhoods tended to notice a van parked too long in one spot. Even a utility van. They ate, drank coffee and talked. The van was set up with a monitor, the surveillance camera mounted on the top so they could watch the house from the back and not be seen.

  A little after midnight he got a call. He’d set his home phone to forward any calls he got—just in case he heard more on the case.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was a call from Cameron.

  “She’s flown.”

  “What?” he demanded, sitting straight up.

  “How the hell—”

  “Probably the same way she fooled you,” Cameron snapped. “I wanted you to know. Just in case.”

  “Just in case she shows up here?” he demanded.

  “Sorry.”

  Hank swore as he snapped the phone shut. His suspicious mind couldn’t help but consider that Rena had been allowed to escape—after she’d been told he was the one who’d identified her from some photographs. They wanted her to come for him. Maybe they hoped he and Rena would kill each other and clean up the mess that way.

  Who the hell knew what they wanted? Or if his suspicions weren’t just paranoia. It came with the territory.

  “What is it?” Arlene asked.

  He looked over at her. “It’s my old life, the one I tried to protect you from.” No chance of that now. He was too deep in Arlene’s life to back out now, and she his.

  He pulled her to him. Curled up together in front of the monitor, a curtain drawn behind the seats, he told her about Rena. Arlene had to know exactly what the stakes were.

  “So what I’m saying is that it could dangerous,” he finished. Rena hadn’t been the kind of woman who would use someone else to get to him. But then, Rena had gone to the other side, hadn’t she?

  In the glow of the monitor he saw the look on Arlene’s face when he described Rena. “I want you to know what she looks like in case you ever see her, so you can give her a wide berth—and me, as well, should she turn up.”

  “She sounds like she is a beautiful young woman.”

  He laughed at that. “In her case, beauty is definitely only skin deep.”

  Then he told her about himself. He was sick of secrets and he didn’t want any between them. But also he wanted her to know who he’d been, what he’d been, because he knew they couldn’t escape their pasts. He wanted her to know him. Know him in a way Bitsy never had.

  “You killed people.” Arlene said it so simply, without judgment, without reproach, when he’d finished.

  “For my country,” he said, his tone laced with sarcasm.

  “It haunts you.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She snuggled against him, her head on his chest. “You and I have that in common, don’t we? We both wish we could rewrite the past.”

  He stroked a hand down her slim back. “I guess we’re just going to have to make the best of every minute. Have you ever made love in the back of a van?”

  She shook her head as his hand slid inside her shirt to cup her breast.

  “Then you definitely haven’t lived.”

  Just before daylight, Arlene dozed.

  It wasn’t until a little after seven in the morning that the garage door on the Foster house finally purred open once more.

  Chapter Ten

  Violet Evans had done everything they had asked. She’d being working at one of the nurses’ stations as required by the doctors, hating every minute of the horrible graveyard schedule they’d given her and the mind-numbing monotony of the work.

  Every day it was harder to pretend to be one of the sane ones. It had been easier to pretend to be crazy. How crazy was that?

  She had too much time to think about her life. To remember things she’d forgotten, things that began to haunt her. She’d been a disappointment to her mother, but sometimes when she thought about it, she didn’t hear her mother’s voice—which surprised her.

  It was her grandmother she heard belittling her. You’ll never get that girl married off, Arlene. You’d better teach her to cook. It’s the only hope she has of ever getting a man.

  Her grandmother’s irritating voice seemed to follow her through her daily duties. At night, Violet would take one of the pills the doctor had prescribed for her after she’d complained of headaches, and that quieted her grandmother for a while.

  But lately the voice had been getting more insistent. Violet had been forced to steal extra pills just so she could get some peace.

  That girl is a malingerer, Arlene. You going to let her get away with that?

  “Shut up!” Violet screamed.

  “Violet?”

  She looked up and realized she was still at the nurses’ station, and now the nursing supervisor was watching her closely, looking worried.

  “Sorry,” she said meekly. “I was talking to myself. It’s a song that I got in my head this morning and can’t get out,” she added, smiling sheepishly. “It’s driving me crazy.” She realized what she’d said. “You know what I mean.”

  The nurse nodded, but Violet knew the woman would be keeping a closer eye on her. That’s all they did around here—watch you. It was as if they expected abnormal behavior, waited for it. Who wouldn’t go crazy here?

  And she still didn’t have a release date. She felt as if it had all been a trick, as though they were pushing her to the edge, seeing if she would break so they could keep her here.

  The irony was that she’d put herself in here. She’d used her intelligence to fool the law and the doctors into believing she’d had a breakdown. It had kept her out of prison. She’d pretended to be crazy. An
d now she was pretending to be sane. No wonder she felt…confused.

  That girl is crazy, Arlene. Certifiable. Remember that wagon with the dead cats?

  Violet shook her head frantically. I didn’t do anything to the cats. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Noooooooo. She looked up, hoping she’d only thought the word—not spoken again.

  “I think you’ve worked enough for one day,” the nurse said.

  “No, I’m fine. I need to finish filing these.” Violet stared down at the papers in her hand. Is that what she’d been doing? Filing? She couldn’t remember.

  The nurse gently took the papers from her. “You’re overwrought. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

  Violet nodded and stepped out from the behind the desk. She stopped in the middle of the hall, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where her room was. Stress. It short-fused her brain. That and all the drugs they’d given her.

  Well, at least now we know what happened to those cats that kept disappearing, don’t we?

  “Violet?” the nurse asked behind her. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Tired,” she said, realizing that she’d put her hands over her ears to shut out the sound of her grandmother’s voice. How crazy was that, since her grandmother was dead? “I didn’t realize I was so tired.”

  She heard a bell ding behind her and an instant later a young orderly was at her elbow.

  “Show Violet to her room,” said the nurse.

  “Make sure she takes her medication.”

  Violet felt a hand on her elbow and then she was moving down the hall in a direction she would have sworn she’d never been before.

  Do you need any more proof that something is wrong with that girl, Arlene? A wagon full of dead cats. It’s enough to scare the wits out of you. You can’t let this get out. Imagine what people would say about this family if they knew. And we all know who they’d blame, don’t we, Arlene?

  “I didn’t do anything to the cats,” Violet whimpered as the orderly led her down the hall.

  “I found them like that. I thought I could…” But she couldn’t remember what she’d planned to do with them.

  As she crawled up onto her bed into a fetal position, she saw herself at her bedroom window watching her mother in the yard below with an eerie kind of fascination. Her mother had been crying. Violet could tell by the way Arlene’s body seemed to jerk with sobs. She’d never seen her mother cry before, especially like that.

  It had been strange watching her usually stoic mother digging a hole and dropping the dead cats into it, her body convulsing with sobs, face stained with tears, her strangled words barely audible through the open window, “Violet, oh, my baby girl, what have you done?”

  ARLENE WOKE TO daylight and Hank still watching the monitor. The street was quiet, as was the Foster house, but the sun was up. She could feel the glow of it coming through the curtains and wondered, as she did every morning, where Charlotte was and if she was all right.

  A part of her still believed that Charlotte had taken off with some man. Just as Hank had told Meredith, the girl lied so much that it was hard to believe she hadn’t told yet another man that he was the father of her baby—and probably had, if the mood struck her.

  “Good morning,” Hank said more cheerfully than she would have had she stayed up all night.

  “Good morning.” She sat up, knowing he’d seen the worry on her face and was doing his best to relieve her mind. She thought of his confession last night and knew how hard that had been for him. As hard as her telling him about her children and the terrible job she felt she’d done with them.

  “Cold pizza,” he offered.

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  He reached out and stroked her cheek. “You look beautiful in the morning.”

  “I can well imagine,” she said with a laugh.

  Suddenly his gaze darted to the monitor, and she instantly sobered as she watched the garage door yawn open.

  “Let’s get dressed,” he said as John Foster drove out in his black sports car and the garage door slid shut.

  “What about Meredith?” she asked as she quickly shed what little clothing she was wearing to put on the utility workman uniform, complete with cap.

  “If we have to, we’ll trick her out of the house, but I’m willing to bet she doesn’t spend a lot of time cleaning the place,” Hank said.

  “Even pregnant, I’d bet she has a very active social life. Also, if she has Charlotte, then she will know she’s being watched. After last night, she knows that even her husband is watching her, so she’ll stick rigidly to her normal schedule.”

  JOHN FOSTER FOUGHT panic as he drove to work. Those FBI agents, even working in an unofficial capacity, asking questions about the girl, had him more than rattled. Add to that the strange way Meredith had been acting. He’d tried to write it off as her just being pregnant, hormones, as she’d said.

  But he was worried. If Meredith had known about the girl, what would she have done?

  He felt sick and scared, and it was all he could do not to get on the interstate and make a run for it.

  We couldn’t be happier, could we, John? Meredith’s voice echoed in his head from the night she’d announced she was pregnant.

  He couldn’t leave his child. Wasn’t that exactly the reason Meredith had gotten pregnant?

  She’d never wanted children. She’d made that perfectly clear. At one point she’d even demanded he have a vasectomy. It was one of the few times he’d stood his ground. Had he known then that he would try to leave her one day? That he might want a chance for happiness with another woman?

  He and Meredith hadn’t been intimate for months after that. Hell, they hardly were now. He was surprised she’d managed to get pregnant.

  Except she’d been more loving after he’d returned from Whitehorse, he thought now. Oh, God, had she known even then?

  If not, she’d suspected. He’d been such a fool. Her getting pregnant, and the girl, Charlotte Evans, getting pregnant with his child, as well. He wasn’t stupid enough to think it was a coincidence, not knowing Meredith the way he did. She knew about Charlotte. And now she had him trapped.

  Not that he hadn’t felt trapped all his life. His family and Meredith’s had been friends from before the time the two were born. Just a year apart, the families had always joked that John and Meredith would marry.

  Unfortunately his father and Meredith’s were also in business together, and it became quite clear to John that he was expected to marry Meredith. He’d made the mistake of dating her a few times to appease his parents. Meredith had given herself to him and he’d taken her up on it. Hell, sex was sex. But then two months later she’d called him to tell him she was pregnant.

  John had felt he had no choice, had never had a choice, not about going to work for his father or about marrying Meredith. It wasn’t until after the huge, expensive wedding when they were on their way to St. Thomas for their honeymoon, that Meredith told him she’d lost the baby.

  He’d suspected she’d never been pregnant. He had tried to make the best of it. Meredith had made it clear early on that they were married for life. John knew what he would lose if he left Meredith: his job, his family, everything he’d worked for. He’d be lucky to get out with his life.

  After ten years of marriage, he’d gotten to the point that he couldn’t take it anymore. Willing to give up everything to be free, he’d asked Meredith for a divorce. He’d left the house not caring what happened.

  He’d gotten into his car and headed north, not having any idea where he would go or what he would do. The freedom was intoxicating. He found himself in the small western town of Whitehorse, Montana. He’d rented a motel room and gone out to dinner. A young blond woman had waited on him. She didn’t even look of legal age.

  John had gone back a second time. He felt sorry for the girl. She’d dropped some dishes. He’d given her a large tip. She’d been grateful and had asked him to wait for her, since she
was getting off for the night, something about needing a ride home.

  That was the last thing he remembered except for nightmarish bits of memory until he woke up in a strange motel room with the reek of the young blonde’s perfume all over him and the girl in bed beside him.

  He’d never been unfaithful to Meredith. That morning with the girl in his bed, he could just see the headlines when he was arrested for sleeping with an underage girl. He’d hightailed it out of Whitehorse, running back to Meredith. A mistake, of course, in hindsight.

  He’d never dreamed he might have gotten the girl pregnant. Or that Meredith would find out and trick him into getting her pregnant, as well.

  And now the girl was missing and the FBI was involved. They knew what he’d done, believed him to be the father of the baby, probably thought he’d done something with the girl.

  John Foster couldn’t imagine things getting any worse.

  Unless, of course, Meredith had done something to that poor pregnant girl.

  HANK WATCHED THE monitor and waited. He’d been a little jumpy ever since he’d heard that Rena was on the loose again, but he’d tried to hide it from Arlene.

  What had worried him as he’d stayed awake last night on the surveillance was why hadn’t Rena settled the old score with him?

  It had been almost a year. How many kills had she done in that amount of time? Or was the one in Prague the first? Where had she been all this time?

  In a hospital recuperating? Strange how that thought pricked him to his soul. Doing away with enemies of the state was one thing. Wounding one of them was another.

  What a screwed-up job he’d had. No wonder Bitsy hadn’t been able to take it. He’d never told her exactly what he did. Had she suspected? All Bitsy had known was that he’d worked with a female operative for a while. Until Rena had defected to the other side. Until she’d become enemy number one.

  “Are you all right?” Arlene asked.

  He glanced over at her and nodded. It hadn’t just been Rena who’d kept him up last night. He was worried about Arlene because he feared that they might already be too late to save Charlotte and the baby.