Welcome to Last Chance

by Hope Ramsay

  She couldn’t blame anyone else for all the bad things that had happened to her in the past. She wasn’t a victim of bad luck or mean people. She was a victim of her own mistakes. It would be terrific if Clay could understand that, but he couldn’t. Not with his mother lying in some hospital with a gunshot wound that was, at least in part, her fault.

  Jane would learn from this experience. She would pick herself up and move on. It was what she did best.

  The FBI agent spoke again. “We need to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of the Cambodian Camel.”

  Clay pulled his Windstar up to the curb, opened the door, and stepped out into a suddenly warm and humid day. A glorious autumn sun beamed down on him, making his wet clothes cling, but failing to warm him.

  He kept thinking about the look on Jane’s face as the FBI hauled her away. His heart kept telling him that he needed to quit worrying about what was true or untrue about Jane and just go after her. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d failed her in some awful way.

  On the other hand, Momma was shot and possibly dying in a hospital up in Orangeburg. Haley was traumatized and talking about angels. Clay didn’t think he could forgive her for either of those things. He didn’t need to be running after the woman who was responsible for what had happened.

  Right now, he needed to focus on getting some dry clothes and getting himself up to the hospital.

  He stepped into his living room, and the sight of Tricia’s suitcase and purse lined up like they were ready to go reminded him of every other heartache he’d ever suffered. And to make it worse, Chad Ames, a-hole of the century, had decided to pay a social call.

  “Man, what the hell happened to you?” Chad asked as Clay entered his home. The lead singer for Tumbleweed sat on the sofa in the living room looking handsome. With his spiky bleached hair and soul patch, Chad was the hottest heartthrob in country music. And as usual, he was operating as if the world revolved around him.

  He sat with one leg cocked up over the other, his arm around Tricia with her head resting on his shoulder. A pile of Kleenex littered the coffee table, and by the look of things, there had been a major scene played out between Chad and Tricia that had, at least for the moment, ended amicably.

  Tricia was asleep.

  Well, that was a good thing. That loose end was tied up nice and neat and tidy. Clay didn’t have to worry about having to settle for something comfortable instead of passionate. He could settle for nothing at all.

  That thought hit him like a punch to the gut.

  Clay wondered where Ricki might be. Maybe the woman had taken the hint and hightailed it back to Los Angeles. That was a good thing, too. He didn’t want Ricki, either.

  You want Jane, his heart said. You can’t have Jane, his head rejoined; she’s a criminal. Every time that thought crossed his mind, his chest constricted and his gut burned.

  “Great timing as usual,” Clay said in a barely civil voice, then turned his back on Chad and Tricia as he headed toward the bathroom at the back of the house.

  “Hey, man, wait up.”

  Clay stopped midway down the hall, ready to punch Chad if the guy pushed him too hard. Right now, he didn’t even care about messing up his hands. He just wanted to hit something, hard, and Chad looked like a good target.

  Clay turned and watched Chad disengage himself from Tricia and lay the sleeping woman out on the couch. The singer sauntered down the hall. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

  “Thanks? For what? Letting you steal my woman and my band and—” Clay stopped in midstream. This was an old hurt. He was almost over it. He had other, much bigger hurts right now.

  “Hey, look,” Chad said. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  Clay let go of a cynical laugh. “Oh, yes, it does. But for the record, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Really? So you’re ready to reconsider and come back? We could sure use—”

  “Are you insane? I meant that I’m glad you came to get Tricia. I’m glad on her account.”

  “Oh, that.” Chad shrugged like that didn’t matter much. “Look, the thing is, everyone in Tumbleweed feels bad about what happened. Fact is, we wouldn’t be where we are today without your songs. It—”

  “You mean you wouldn’t be where you are without ‘I Gotta Know.’ ” If he could bottle up this hurt and turn it into lyrics, he might end up as a success at something. Isn’t that what Jane had told him on Saturday night? Country music was made for sad love songs, and he had plumbed the depths of human heartache.

  “The songs are good, Clay, that’s what I mean. But more than that, there’s no reason you had to walk out. Everyone wants you back. Our new fiddler hasn’t worked out, and there’s a place for you in the band, man.”

  Something deadly coursed through Clay. Chad Ames was a hanger-on. And so were Tricia and Ricki. They came into his life when they needed him and left when the need disappeared. Tumbleweed had been Clay’s band. He’d been the one to hire Chad as a lead singer. Boy, the guy had cojones.

  “Is that what this is all about? Is that why you came back here? Are you more interested in getting me to write a few more songs than you are in Tricia?”

  “Look, Clay, this is a good deal for both of us. It’s not like you haven’t made some money on the songs Tumbleweed recorded. And, hey, it would make Tricia happy, you know. She says you’re still her friend. And I figure with the baby and all, it would be better if you were around.”

  Clay lost it then. He let all the emotions that had been building up through the morning explode. “You are a supreme asshole,” he bellowed. “You take a look at that woman over there. She’s carrying your baby. She loves you for some reason I cannot fathom, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t love her back. What she feels for you is whole and pure, and she’s going to give you a miracle. And instead of taking Tricia off to a preacher and marrying her and making sure she feels like the center of your universe, you let her come to me? And now you’re saying you’re ready to share her with me just to get a few hit songs. Oh, my God, that is just wrong.”

  Clay turned his back on Chad and stalked down to the bathroom at the end of the hall and slammed the door. He stood there shaking for a solid minute.

  Why the hell couldn’t he have a love like that? Why did he have to fall for all these screwed-up people? Why did he have to be in love with someone who was a criminal?

  Aw, crap.

  Clay sat himself down on the lid of the commode and hung his head in his hands and waged a ten-minute battle with his emotions. When he’d managed to regain control of himself, he took a quick shower and placed a call to the hospital that netted him no information about his mother’s condition. A half hour later, after cursing Chad Ames out a second time, he was back in his Windstar, dry-eyed and heading north toward Orangeburg with a hole in his chest where his heart used to be.

  CHAPTER 21

  Jane sat on the hard chair under the bright fluorescent light. She wore a Day-Glo jail jumpsuit that was several sizes too large. Someone had given her a cup of coffee and a blanket. She was still cold, even though she was no longer wet.

  She had made a full confession to FBI Agents Hannigan and Wilkes during the car ride from Golfing for God to the Allenberg County jail. She made a clean breast of everything. Not just the location of the Cambodian Camel, but a blow-by-blow description of her life for the last seven years.

  They had recovered the necklace from Haley before the EMTs left for the hospital, and they had listened with avid interest about Joey Hamil and Woody West and the stupid things Jane had done in her life.

  Then they had brought her here and left her alone so she could ponder the Universe and her place in it. During this time, Jane concluded that she sucked at manifesting change in her life. She decided that when they got around to booking her, she would destroy Dr. Goodbody’s tapes. They were not particularly useful.

  While she was waiting, she also did a lot of thinking about Clay. She decided th
at she would always hold the memory of the last twenty-four hours close. She would let herself remember that for one instant, she had been on the point of having a remarkable man tell her he loved her.

  She sniffled and shivered as a single tear left her right eye and trickled down her cheek. She was too depressed to wipe it away.

  Her morose thoughts were interrupted by Agent Hannigan, who entered the room carrying a bundle that looked a whole lot like the soggy clothes she had given up for this ugly, oversized jumpsuit with the words Allenberg County stenciled on the back.

  He sat down across from her. “Turns out you were right about the necklace you gave to Haley Rhodes.”

  “Huh?”

  He shrugged and gave her a warm smile that had his Irish eyes sparkling. “Turns out the necklace is, in fact, an item that you can find at any Value Mart. It’s not even gold.”

  She blinked at him for a few moments as her brain processed this. “Are you telling me Woody the weasel went on a crime spree over a discount-store necklace?”

  He nodded, and a little blush crawled up his face. “I’m afraid so.”

  “And just exactly how did he get the idea that this necklace was valuable?” She was warming up a little bit. A dose of healthy anger percolated down in her belly. Ruby Rhodes got shot over a piece-of-crap necklace? It was too awful to even consider.

  Hannigan cleared his throat. “Well, ma’am, I’m afraid the FBI gave him that idea. We had gotten a tip from a reliable source.”

  “I see.”

  “Turns out our Miami Office has recovered the real Cambodian Camel.”

  “Do tell. And where did they find it?”

  “In a vault deep beneath Oliver Cromwell Jones’s compound in Palm Springs. Seems the old goat was a little strapped for cash and stole it himself.”

  “Say that again?”

  “For the insurance, you know. Apparently, Jones faked the robbery and then passed a forgery to Freddie the Fence, who runs one of the largest high-end stolen property rings in the country. Freddie was probably in on the scam, and being a wily kind of guy, he arranged to have Jones’s fake transported to a buyer in Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles? So what does that have to do with Woody and the necklace he gave me? We were going to Nashville.”

  “Well, see, Freddie was fed up with Woody. Near as we can figure, Woody’s gambling had become a huge liability for Freddie, so he set Woody up. Gave him a fake Cambodian Camel, told him to give it you, and then we think he was the one who provided the anonymous tip that my partner and I followed.”

  The anger was really making her hot now. She shrugged off the blanket. “You mean Woody only asked me along because this Freddie guy wanted me to wear the necklace?”

  “It looks like that’s what happened. At least that’s what Woody says. Woody was a decoy, designed to keep us off the scent. And by having us pick up Woody, Freddie also allowed the Colombian’s goons to take care of Freddie’s little problem.”

  “Woody works for Freddie the Fence?”

  “’Fraid so. There is no honor among thieves, Jane. That’s for sure.”

  “I see.” But she didn’t see at all.

  “If you want my advice, you’d do a whole lot better if you avoided jerks like Woodrow Arnold West and Joseph Andrew Hamil in the future.”

  “So you checked out the whole Lexington thing, huh? Are you going to arrest me for Jane Coblentz’s murder?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not. Jane Coblentz isn’t dead.”

  Jane blinked a few times. “You believe me?”

  He nodded. “Seems the Last Chance chief of police has a DNA report that proves you are Jane Coblentz. And your story about the miscarriage squares with what Hamil told authorities years ago.”

  “And no one believed him back then?”

  “No one had reason to believe him. You gave the impression of being a pretty responsible girl until you ran away.”

  “So what happens now?” she asked.

  “You’re free to go, although I’m pretty sure the state of South Carolina and the federal government are both going to want you as a witness at Woody’s trials.”

  She nodded. “I’d like nothing better than to put that peckerwood away.”

  “Well, I’m sure that will happen. But look on the bright side: Maybe you’ll luck out, and the state will negotiate a plea bargain, and we can put this sorry and embarrassing situation behind us.”

  Sorry and embarrassing? Is that what he thought? Woody had shot Ruby right there in the parking lot of the Cut ’n Curl. That was not sorry or embarrassing. That was a disaster. It was something she would regret for the rest of her life.

  And a piece of cheap jewelry from Value Mart was the reason Ruby might be dead.

  Hannigan cleared his throat. “Look, it’s going to be all right, Jane. The worst is over, and we appreciate the way you cooperated with us. Sheriff Bennett says you can keep the jumpsuit since your clothes are soaked. But I wanted to make sure you didn’t lose this.”

  He put a copper penny down on the Formica tabletop and pushed it across the surface with his index finger.

  Jane stared down at the 1943 wheat penny, as her anger transformed itself into a grief so deep she could hardly breathe.

  She should have told Clay and Stone that there were bad guys on her tail. She should never have taken a job babysitting Stone’s kids. That was just dumb, and neither of those men would ever forgive her for it.

  She stared down at that penny through a smear of tears. She would keep it with her for the rest of her life as a reminder. What had Clay said when he found it? Oh, yeah, that it was something special hiding out in plain sight. That its worth was not measured by its value.

  She reached for it, and took it into her palm, and squeezed it. When he’d said those words, he’d been halfway talking about her.

  “So where’d you find it?” Hannigan asked.

  She looked up at him. His tone had been more than casual. “Why?” She sniffled back her tears.

  “Because if it’s real, it’s worth a great deal of money.”

  “If it’s real?”

  He grinned. “You have no idea, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  Hannigan folded his arms and leaned on the table. “I do a lot of stolen property work, and we come across cases all the time involving rare and valuable coins. I’m not much of an expert, but if that’s an authentic 1943 copper penny, it’s very rare and valuable. The U.S. wasn’t supposed to make any copper pennies in 1943 because copper was needed for the war effort during World War II. All of the pennies struck in that year were supposed to be made of steel. Only a mistake was made, and an unknown, but small, number of copper pennies were made. If it’s real, that penny is worth thousands of dollars.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not kidding. But here’s the catch. People fake 1943 pennies all the time. The usual methods are to put a copper coating on a 1943 steel penny or to alter the eight in a 1948 copper penny. I used a refrigerator magnet to see if your penny was steel. It’s not. So it’s not copper-plated. It appears to be real copper. You should have someone appraise it.”

  “A refrigerator magnet?”

  “Yeah. A magnet can pick up a steel penny, but it won’t pick up a copper penny.”

  She opened her palm and looked down at the penny and almost laughed. It might be a rare and precious object, or it might be a bad penny. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a bad penny. It was the penny Clay had found in the bottom of her purse last Thursday morning. It was her good luck charm.

  That made it priceless. Worth more than the value of the thing itself. Like a MasterCard commercial.

  “Thanks,” Jane said in a shaky voice.

  “There’s just one more thing,” the agent said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that shirt.”

  “Huh?”

  Hannigan nodded toward Sharon Rhodes’s pi
nk T-shirt that lay in a soggy pile on the table. “I guess it’s your lucky shirt, huh?”

  She didn’t really know what he meant by that, so she unwadded the T-shirt until she could read what was written on its back. Two angels, standing with wings outstretched, framed a verse from Psalm 91:

  No evil shall befall you,

  Nor shall any plague come near to your dwelling,

  For He shall give His angels charge over you,

  To keep you in all your ways.

  Her vision blurred with tears. What was the Universe trying to tell her? What was Hannigan trying to tell her?

  “Look, Jane, don’t beat yourself up over Woody,” Hannigan said. “The fact is, you saved that little girl’s life today… you were her guardian angel in a really tight spot. That’s probably why she’s coping with the trauma the way she is.”

  Jane blinked away the tears. “Uh, Agent Hannigan, do you know how Ruby Rhodes is doing?”

  He shrugged. “She’s in the hospital up in Orangeburg with a head injury. I don’t know the details, but the county is watching it closely. That woman dies and Woody’s up for murder, instead of just assault and kidnapping.”

  “Oh, God, I need to go there.”

  “If you want, I can give you a lift.”

  She closed her eyes as the monumental truth settled into her head. She didn’t have anywhere else she wanted to go. And Miriam Randall had been so right. Jane needed to ask for more.

  “I really need a lift up there,” she said in a tiny voice.

  She had to apologize to Stone and Clay and the rest of the Rhodes family. For once, she had to face the mistakes she had made.

  Then she had to fight for what she wanted. That was the point. Running away had never solved anything in her life. She had saved Haley. And she had tried to warn Ruby. She wasn’t a bad person, even though bad things had happened.

  She was worthy of Clay’s love. She needed to make that statement right out loud—like the biggest affirmation of all. She needed to rescue herself.