Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

  He sighed. “I got a text from Wendell Friday night, that Desmond was out of prison. Some sort of work-release program he’d walked away from. He shouldn’t have been allowed outside at all, not with the way he’s been cyber-stalking Tanya, but she didn’t want to cause a fuss and make him even more angry, so she never reported it.”

  “That doesn’t sound smart.”

  “No kidding,” Rafe said. “She’s barely twenty one and takes her clothes off for a living. Ain’t nothing smart about that girl.”

  I tried my best not to smile a bit happily at the description, but I don’t think I managed completely. “So...?”

  “Wendell stayed with her overnight to make sure nothing happened, and I went to her place on Saturday to help move her out and into the apartment she’s in now.”

  Moving a witness. In the very basic sense of the word: actually moving her from one residence to another. Along with her assorted belongings.

  “Wendell and I have been trading off watching her for the past couple days. Getting her to work and home. Picking up the kid. Just until we... until they track down Desmond.”

  “That’s all?”

  He nodded.

  “You could have told me.”

  He glanced at me. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  How could he imagine I wouldn’t?

  I had my mouth open to ask when he turned to look at me again, and the expression on his face took my breath away. “I don’t know about this, Savannah.”

  This? As in, him and me?

  “Rafe...”

  He shook his head, hands flexing on the steering wheel as we flew down the interstate. “I know I promised you I was done. But I ain’t cut out to paint walls and finish floors for the rest of my life. I’m sorry, darlin’. I know you worry when I’m out there, but I’m dying doing nothing.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. “What do you want to do?”

  He glanced at me, so maybe it showed in my voice. “It won’t be undercover work. I wouldn’t do that to you. I won’t be gone for weeks or months at a time. But it prob’ly won’t be nine to five, either.”

  I nodded.

  “And I can’t see myself taking that desk job they offered. Maybe I can do training, or be a handler. Ten years of undercover work oughta be good for something.”

  “I’m sure they can learn a lot from you,” I managed.

  He peered at me. “Are you crying?”

  “No,” I said, dashing tears from my eyes.

  “Darlin’...”

  “I’m happy. I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving me. That I wasn’t interesting enough.”

  “Darlin’...” But he ended up just shaking his head.

  “You can do anything you want. Just as long as you come back to me at the end of the day.” And if I worried about him while it was going on, well... that was par for the course, when you fell in love with someone whose idea of being alive was carrying a gun and chasing down bad guys.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rafe slowed down when we turned onto the street where the duplex was.

  Everything looked quiet. There were lights on in some of the houses we passed, and the blue flicker of televisions behind drawn curtains. Someone was playing music—Spanish mariachi—and somewhere, not too close, a dog barked.

  The duplex also looked quiet. One side was completely dark, while the other had a flickering blue light in what I assumed was the living room. That must be where Lantana—Tanya—lived.

  “Who lives on the other side?” I asked Rafe, my voice low.

  He glanced at me. “Nobody.”

  “How come?”

  “I moved in with you.”

  Oh.

  I didn’t say anything, and he added, “We didn’t wanna risk somebody moving in next to me. So I rented both sides.”

  Good thinking. Not that I would have expected any less. “It’s empty, then.”

  He nodded. “Should be.”

  “Is there furniture?” Like maybe a bed? Or at least a sofa?

  His teeth flashed white in the darkness, as if he knew what I was thinking. “It don’t do no good to be on the other side of the wall from someone you’re trying to protect, darlin’. But hold that thought for later.”

  “How long do you think this will take?”

  He shrugged and pulled the car into the driveway. “No way to know. Get ready to take the wheel.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting out,” Rafe said. “I need you to drive away.”

  What? “Why?”

  He glanced at me. “He’s been tailing us from East Nashville. But he ain’t gonna make a move unless he thinks we’ve checked that everything’s OK and left again. So one of us’ll have to drive away. And it can’t be me.”

  Obviously not. “He’s been following us?”

  “Black Buick,” Rafe said, “five or six years old.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “You’re not used to looking for a tail.”

  “I spotted him last time!”

  “It’s easier to stay back on the interstate. Harder on the smaller roads.” He opened his door and the overhead light turned on.

  “If you knew he was there, why did you bring him here? Why didn’t we just go back home?”

  “Cause this way I have a chance to catch him,” Rafe said and swung his legs out. I watched as he stood up and then bent. “C’mon. Scoot over.”

  I scooted. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Gimme my gun. Thanks.” He stuffed it into the back of his pants. “Wait for me to get inside and give you the all clear. And then you leave. Drive far enough that he thinks you’re gone and wait for me to call you.”

  “Don’t you want me to take Lan... Tanya and her baby out of here?”

  “Do I look stupid to you?” Rafe demanded. “If you’ve got’em in the car, he’ll stop you. I ain’t risking your life like that.”

  “They could hide in the back. And won’t he notice that you’re not with me?”

  “Not if you drive fast.” He shut my door and took a step back. I rolled the window down, of course. “Go,” he told me. “Get the hell outta here. Wait for me to call you.”

  I hesitated, of course. I didn’t want to leave him here to face Desmond-AKA-Othello on his own. Not that I imagined I’d be able to do anything helpful, but I just didn’t want to leave.

  He must have known it, because he took a step forward and dropped a quick, hard kiss on my lips. “Don’t make me worry about you too, Savannah. Let me do my job.”

  Of course. “Just be careful.”

  “Always.” He winked and headed for the door. Tanya opened up, in sweats and a T-shirt, looking both ways before stepping back to let him in. He slipped across the threshold, gun in hand, while down on the road, the sleek shadow of a car rolled by, slowly.

  The door closed, and I put the car in reverse. If that was Desmond going by, I might be able to get onto the road and turned in the other direction while he was down at the end of the street, and where he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was alone in the car.

  I rolled down the hill toward the road and took a left. Behind me, I could see the dark shape of the sedan coming back up the road, lights off.

  I stepped on the gas and took off up the street.

  Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me to question Rafe’s plan. It made sense. Driving away would make it seem like we’d checked to make sure everything was all right, and now we were going back home.

  You can imagine my surprise when the sedan followed me instead of going up to the house.

  My first reaction was disbelief. Then worry, when I realized that just because Rafe said Desmond wouldn’t bother stopping me when I didn’t have Tanya and Justin in the car, didn’t mean anything. He had no idea whether I did or not. He wouldn’t know until he stopped me.

  The fear didn’t really kick in until he put on a burst of speed, two blocks away from the house, and hit t
he back of my car with the front of his.

  It doesn’t look like much in the movies. In reality, it knocked me forward against the seatbelt, which made my foot slam down automatically on the brake, which threw my head back again against the seat—hello, whiplash—at least until he hit the back of the Volvo one more time, since I’d now come to a complete stop and he didn’t have a choice...

  I bounced forward again, squealing across the blacktop, and ended up with the nose of the car against a telephone pole. There were only two saving graces: one, that I was driving a Volvo, the safest car on the road, and two, that I’d been standing still when he hit me. The impact wasn’t enough to do much damage at all. Both headlights kept shining into the night, one on each side of the pole, and the engine even kept grinding until I shook off the shock and confusion and turned it off.

  That took a few moments, and by the time I got the door open, Desmond had exited his own car and was stalking toward me, gun in hand.

  He reached in for me.

  I batted his hand away. “Knock it off. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Where’s Tanya?”

  “I told you,” I said, “I don’t know Tanya. See for yourself. There’s no one else here.”

  There wasn’t, and he could see it clearly with the door open, since the interior light was on, illuminating the clearly empty car.

  It had worked once, but I guess it was too much to expect it to work again. He wrapped a ham-sized hand around my upper arm and yanked.

  “Ow!” I protested, but I popped out of the car like a cork out of a bottle. “What are you doing?”

  “I want Tanya.”

  Yes, I’d caught that. “I’m not Tanya. I don’t know her.”

  “You gonna get her.” He pulled me, stumbling, over to his own car, idling by the side of the road. The driver’s side door was open, and— “In.” He gave me a push, and I scrambled into the sedan ahead of him.

  We talked a lot about safety during real estate training. A lot of realtors are women, and a lot of us move around on our own, without the benefit of male protection. Among other things, I’ve been told that getting into a car with an abductor is the worst thing you can do for your own safety. Letting him take you out of your familiar territory and into his, is practically tantamount to signing your death warrant. It sounds good on paper. But when you’re in the middle of the situation, and it’s a decision between getting into the car or getting shot... well, let’s just say that the choice becomes a little more complicated than that.

  I thought about fighting. I did. Turning around and kicking at him. Or trying to open the door on the other side of the car and getting out that way, while he was getting in.

  But in the end, it came down to not wanting to risk him using the gun on me. He didn’t really want me, he wanted Tanya. If I didn’t do anything to upset him, maybe I’d survive.

  So I did as he said, and crawled across the gear shift into the passenger seat. He got in next to me and we were off, back in the direction we’d come, before I’d even managed to straighten up.

  It was a weird sensation, sitting there next to a man with a gun in his hand. A man with a gun who wasn’t Rafe, I mean. Desmond didn’t talk to me. Didn’t seem to notice I was there, to be honest. I knew he had to know I was in the car—he had put me there, after all—but it was like I didn’t quite exist.

  Like I wasn’t really human, just a means to an end.

  It was a pretty uncomfortable feeling, to be honest.

  I was fairly certain I knew what he planned to do. It came as no surprise at all when we pulled up outside the duplex and he pointed the gun at me. “Stay.”

  I stayed. Until he walked around the car and opened my door. This time the command was, “Get out.”

  I got out, on legs that were shaky. He yanked me around and held me in front of him like a shield, with the muzzle of the gun cold against my temple, and raised his voice. “Tanya!”

  Shades of Marlon Brando...

  The bellow was loud enough that for a moment, I found myself worrying about my eardrum. Loud enough that surely one of the neighbors would hear him. Maybe they’d call the police.

  And then I remembered that the TBI was already here. And besides, a busted eardrum was really the least of my concerns. A bullet through the brain would do a lot more damage.

  “Tanya!”

  There was the sound of a baby crying from inside the house. Justin must have woken up from the ruckus. And there was a sense of movement behind one of the darkened windows. I could almost feel the force of Rafe’s chagrin at the miscalculation we’d both made, and I was certain he was cursing me.

  “What d’you want?” a male voice came from the house.

  It startled me for a second, before I realized what was going on. Desmond’s grip tightened on my arm, as if he suspected me of trying to get away. “I want Tanya!”

  “You can’t have her.”

  “I wanna talk to her!”

  There was no answer from inside. I could imagine the conversation. Or rather, I could imagine Tanya refusing and the arguments as to why she should allow it. Including the one that came next.

  “I’ll kill her if I don’t get to talk to Tanya!”

  It must have been compelling—it certainly had an effect on me—because a moment later, Tanya’s voice floated out of the house. “Don’t hurt her, Des.”

  Desmond stiffened. “Hello, bitch.”

  There wasn’t much anyone could say to that, and Tanya didn’t try.

  “You can’t talk to her like that,” I managed. “Not if you want her to talk to you.”

  Desmond growled, and the pistol dug into my temple. “Shut up.” He raised his voice. “Get out here!”

  It wasn’t Tanya who answered. “Can’t let her do that, Desmond. You’ll have to talk to her through the door.”

  “Fuck that!” Desmond said, and yanked me up straight. I squeaked. “You can have this one if I get Tanya. If not, I’ll kill her.”

  The voice was still even, though I could hear the tightness in it. “You’ll go back to prison for the rest of your life if you do.”

  “I ain’t going back at all!” Desmond hollered, so spittle flew out of his mouth and hit my shoulder and hair. “You have five seconds to send Tanya out before I put a bullet through her brain!”

  As he began to count, time stretched to infinity and my mind blanked.

  I’d been here once before, although it hadn’t been my life on the line then. Back in Rafe’s childhood home, a trailer in the Bog in Sweetwater, Jorge Pena had given Elspeth Caulfield five seconds to get out of his way and leave a clear shot so he could kill Rafe.

  “Four.”

  Elspeth had refused, and he’d ended up shooting her instead. Rafe had killed him, with a gun I hadn’t even realized he’d had, and somehow Jorge had managed to clip Rafe in the shoulder too, before going down. I knew from personal experience, gleaned since, that getting shot in the shoulder hurts like hell, but isn’t fatal. However, when I stepped out of the closet where he’d hid me, the room had looked like a mini-massacre had taken place.

  “Three.”

  In just a few seconds, it could be me on the ground, with my brains spattered across the blacktop. And unlike Elspeth, I didn’t have a weapon I could use. She’d had a gun. She could have shot Jorge any time between five and one. Under those circumstances, I think I would have. It wasn’t as if there’d been any doubt he’d been serious. But now there was nothing I could do. Desmond had made me leave my purse in the Volvo, so I didn’t even have my handy little lipstick cylinders from Sally’s store to help me.

  “Two.”

  There was a sound from the house. Voices. Arguing. And what might have been a scuffle over the door. Either Tanya was trying to get outside, or resisting being shoved.

  Desmond hesitated. But when nothing happened, he said, “One.”

  Everything happened at once.

  “Wait!” sounded from the house. The door opened. I took adv
antage of Desmond’s momentary distraction to grind my heel, hard, into his foot, and at that exact moment, there was a sound from behind us. I didn’t even have time to turn my head before something heavy hit Desmond from behind and knocked him forward, and me along with him.

  He let go of both his grip on the gun and on me. I fell to my knees and scrambled out of the way on all fours, as quickly as I could and barely even noticing the cold blacktop against my knees and palms.

  Safely out of the way, I turned around.

  Rafe was busy trying to subdue Desmond and put a pair of handcuffs on him. It took effort, because Desmond was big—heavier than Rafe—and had nothing to lose. He obviously didn’t want to go back to prison, and who could blame him? So he bucked and cursed and did everything he could to toss Rafe off.

  Rafe, meanwhile, did his best to keep a knee planted in the middle of Desmond’s back while he struggled to get the cuffs on, and muttering a litany of threats and curses of his own. “A little help?” he asked breathlessly after a particularly vicious move on Desmond’s part threatened to dislodge him completely.

  He wasn’t asking me. Wendell was on his way out of the house and toward him even as he spoke. Beyond Wendell, I could see Tanya in the now lighted window, holding Justin and cooing to him. The little boy was dressed in footed pajamas with dinosaurs, and he had his head on his mother’s shoulder and his thumb in his mouth. His head was full of tight, dark brown curls.

  I turned back to Rafe, who with Wendell’s help managed to get the cuffs fastened around Desmond’s beefy wrists. Between the two of them, they hauled the big man up. “I’ll get him in the car,” Wendell grunted.

  Rafe nodded and turned to me.

  For a second neither of us said anything. I was glad to be alive, and that he was alive, not that I’d really expected him to be otherwise. He was probably happy that I’d come through mostly unscathed, too. My hands and knees smarted a little from contact with the blacktop, and my nerves were shot, but other than that I was fine. I managed a tentative smile, and saw some of the tension ease.

  He came toward me, slowly. I don’t know why, but it was almost as if he was reluctant, or fearful of his reception. For a second I worried that he didn’t want to embrace me in front of Tanya, but then I pushed it aside as silly. When I reached out, he pulled me into his arms, carefully. I could feel his breath against my hair, and hear his heart beating double-time, but he didn’t speak. Just held me.