Passion to Protect

by Colleen Thompson

  “Hell, no, it isn’t about my wife’s stupid donuts. But she wouldn’t quit squawking, so I checked things out and found a busted window latch in the back. So I checked, and a pistol’s missing from my gun case.”

  That was when it hit Harry, like a hard pop to the sternum. This was definitely no laughing matter. Because the Carpenters lived out on Black Oak Road, all too close to the Masons.

  Heart pounding, he murmured a promise that he would send a man out ASAP and quickly hung up, thirty-eight years of law enforcement instincts screaming that the theft was no coincidence. McCleary was alive and had come back with a vengeance, either out of desperation to find his missing money or to finally finish what he’d started when he’d first tried to kill Liane.

  * * *

  Jake was just pulling his phone from his pocket when it started ringing and Liane’s name popped up on the screen.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, ignoring Misty’s attempt to push her head beneath his free hand. “I saw you drive off. What the hell—where are you going?”

  “He was my father. I can’t do this.” Her words clinked together, like ice cubes against glass. “And I don’t want you in there, digging through my house.”

  The phone beeped to signal that he had another call. Ignoring it, he stepped outside, the blood rushing in his ears and the big dog right beside him. “Come back, Liane, please. You’re upset. Let’s talk this through, and then if you still don’t want to—”

  “It’s not that—it’s Cody. The school nurse called to say he’s sick. I have to go and get him. I have to go right now.”

  “Come on back and let me take you. You shouldn’t be driving when you’re upset.”

  “No!” she said, far too sharply.

  “Liane, think of your kids. If you’re in a wreck, who will they have to—”

  “You,” she said emphatically. “They’ll have you, Jake. That’s what I want. Remember.”

  A white-hot current of alarm burned through him. “What are you saying, Liane?”

  With a beep in his ear, the call disconnected. Ignoring the ringing of the landline inside, he tried frantically to call her back. When his calls kept rolling to her voice mail, he reached for his keys and raced for his pickup. His heart was hammering a warning that if he didn’t get to her quickly, he would regret it forever.

  “Out of the truck, Misty,” he shouted when the dog jumped into the pickup bed, her tail wagging with excitement. As she reluctantly obeyed, the phone in his hand started ringing. “Liane,” he said, slipping behind the wheel. “Thank God. What’s—”

  “Jake—it’s Harry here.” The sheriff shouted to make himself heard over a siren’s wail. “I’ve been trying to reach you to let you know—”

  “I have to catch Liane.” The pickup’s engine roared to life. “She just took off in her Jeep. Then she called and told me—”

  “You don’t understand. It’s—”

  Jake talked over him. “No, you don’t understand. Something’s wrong. I have to catch her before she—”

  “Shut up and listen to me, Whittaker!” Harry boomed. “It’s McCleary. I think he’s alive and on his way there.”

  “McCleary?” Panic speared him. Could Liane’s ex have grabbed her? “I thought he was long gone. Or dead.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I’m on my way out to the ranch now. We’ve had a report of a break-in next door, and Bob Carpenter says he has a gun missing. School’s been contacted to keep the children inside and in sight, and not to release them until a deputy gets there, but I couldn’t get hold of Liane.”

  “He has her. That has to be it.” Nothing else accounted for her abrupt change in behavior. His blood running cold, Jake threw the truck back into Park and bailed out. He was going to need a weapon of his own. “She said she was going to the school to pick up Cody. That might’ve been a lie, but either way I’m going after them before they get too far.”

  “You stay put,” Harry ordered. “I’m en route, and I’ve got deputies dispatched, too.”

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll let him hurt her,” Jake swore.

  “You’re in way over your head on this, Jake. You’ll get her killed. Maybe yourself, too.”

  “If I don’t move right now, she’s as good as dead already.” His life would be over, too, if he couldn’t save her.

  “You have to let me do this. This is my responsibility, all of it.”

  Before Jake could ask what he meant, Harry added, “I’m only ten, maybe fifteen, minutes out at most. It’s possible that I can intercept them. If not, I’ll pick you up and we can go from there.”

  “That’s ten or fifteen minutes for Mac to take her God knows where.” Jake couldn’t stand to think about what he would do to Liane then or how terrified she must be. How could he have taken his eyes off her even for a moment?

  “I’m—I’m ordering—” Gasping for breath, the sheriff struggled to get the words out. “Ordering—you—Jake. Stay—”

  A pained grunt was followed by a thump as if he’d dropped the phone.

  “What’s wrong, Harry? Harry?” Jake shouted, but no matter how he strained his ears, he heard only the keening of the siren. Not this. Not now, he thought, recalling how exhausted the man had looked of late, how worn by the burden of his best friend’s murder.

  “Pull over!” he yelled. “Pull off the road now, Harry. I’m calling 9-1-1.” When there was no response, he added, “Can you hear me?”

  As the siren continued to wail, Jake thought he made out another low moan. A moment later there was a banging sound and the line went dead. Had Harry fumbled the phone and disconnected—or crashed into the trees that lined the lightly traveled road?

  Though finding Liane was his priority, Jake called 9-1-1 and reported what he’d heard, along with his best estimate of the sheriff’s location. By the time he was finished making certain the dispatcher understood Liane’s situation, too, he’d collected the borrowed handgun from the cabin and was speeding down Black Oak Road in the direction she had turned.

  As he drove he lowered the windows, thinking he might hear something his eyes missed, and racked his brain trying to imagine where McCleary might have taken her. Did he really mean to snatch the children, as Liane’s call had suggested? Thankful that Harry had moved quickly to see to their safety, Jake considered the possibility that McCleary believed Liane knew the location of the money. Or maybe it had never been about the money. Maybe she’d been right to think it was the desire for vengeance that drove him.

  Jake tasted bile at the thought that McCleary might simply shoot her and dump the body somewhere, just as he had left Deke. Even more nightmarish was the possibility that he would take her someplace where he could pay her back for her imagined sins with hours of brutal torture, while Jake searched frantically, as helpless to save her as he’d been to rescue his men.

  He slowed as he approached a crossroads, looking for any clue that a vehicle might have recently turned off, heading either toward the river or the Smuggler’s Gulch Trailhead. Spotting no traffic or even a hint of telltale dust above the smaller dirt roads, he made the difficult decision to remain on Black Oak, heading toward town—and the school.

  Spotting a blue-gray blur in his rearview mirror, he saw that Misty must have jumped back into the pickup bed when he’d gone inside to grab the gun. Nothing he could do about that now. He just kept driving, panic clawing its way along his backbone. What if he’d been wrong to go straight? What if Mac had forced Liane to pull off into one of the narrow driveways leading toward someone’s vacation cabin or a hidden hiking trail? And there were other turn-offs ahead, other choices that could as easily prove wrong.

  Images of Liane suffering at that bastard’s hands hammering at his temples, Jake pictured himself blowing McCleary’s brains out or, better yet, pounding his face to pulp. But as v
iolent as his rage was, he quickly realized that right now, raw emotion was the enemy. He had to push aside his feelings and think clearly or he really would lose her forever....

  And two beautiful kids would lose the only parent they knew, just as he’d lost his own mother so many years before.

  Liane’s voice whispered in his memory, saying that the kids would have him. That’s what I want. Remember.

  “They’ll have both of us,” he promised, voice breaking. “Because I swear I’m going to bring you home alive.”

  * * *

  “Are you deliberately trying to piss me off?” Mac accused Liane. “I heard what you said, telling him my kids—my son—will have him? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she said as she continued driving, hating herself for backsliding into the same useless excuses she had once used to placate him. She’d faced down a forest fire, killed a desperate ex-con before he could kill her, but in the face of Mac’s threats she was as helpless as she’d been the night he’d left her to die.

  “Don’t lie to me. You were thinking,” he said. “Thinking of one more way to screw me over. Now give me that damned phone so I can call him back.”

  “What? You’re going to—”

  “Now that we’ve put a little distance between him and us, it’s time to give him a chance to buy your freedom. So do you trust your lover, Liane? Do you trust that two-bit wrangler with your life?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said with a grunt of disgust. “I want the money your father stole from me, every last dime of it. And your cowboy’s going to bring it to me—if he ever wants to see you again.”

  “And then you’ll let us go?”

  Rather than answering, he asked, “What do you think, Liane? Will he bring the money, or will he sell you out?”

  “He’ll come,” she said hollowly, realizing that her attempt to warn him with her phone call had been doomed from the start. Even after she had made the choice to leave him, to marry another man and bear his children, Jake had never given up on her. And now, regardless of the cost, he would keep fighting long after she surrendered. Because that’s what real love does.

  The thought of his strength, his selflessness and his passion to protect drove the weakness from her body. If Jake saw something in her worth risking—even sacrificing—his own life for, how could she sit there like a trembling, passive victim and let him walk straight into a situation that would surely get him killed?

  “There’s no need to involve him,” she said. “We don’t need him to get the money.”

  “Don’t lie to me to try to save him.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I heard you. The money’s in your father’s study.”

  “That was Jake’s theory,” she argued. “But I’m telling you, he’s wrong.”

  “Make a right here,” he ordered, pointing toward a rutted gravel track so overgrown that she had already zipped past before she spotted it.

  Cursing her, Mac ordered, “Turn around right now, or I swear, this will go far worse than you ever imagined.”

  Realizing that nothing she could say was going to make him listen, she sucked in a deep breath and mashed down the accelerator, her pulse jumping along with the accelerator needle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roared.

  “You think I’m going to let you lure Jake to some dark, deserted spot and kill us both the moment he shows up?” she asked, her voice shaking with the effort of defying her worst nightmare. “You want to shoot me? Fine. Do it now and let’s end this together—if you’re willing to leave our kids without either of their parents.”

  If he pulled the trigger, at least her death would count for something. Jake and her children would be safe from Mac’s insanity.

  In an instant he grabbed her hair and brutally yanked her skull back against the headrest. Screaming at the sudden pain, she reflexively jerked the wheel and stamped on the brakes.

  Tires squealing, they shot across the line into the other lane. At the same moment an oncoming RV emerged from around the upcoming bend. As Mac let go of her, a horn blared—far too close—and she saw the driver and his passenger’s rounded mouths and terrified eyes.

  Instinct kicked in—she couldn’t cost an innocent couple their lives—and before she realized she was even steering clear, the brown-and-white RV was sliding past them. In her rearview she saw it straighten and disappear farther down the road.

  Heart jackhammering against her rib cage, she was shaking so hard, she had no choice except to pull onto the shoulder.

  The moment she came to a stop, Mac screamed at her, “You crazy bitch!”

  Hearing the threat in his voice, she turned to look and saw his right fist flying toward her just in time for her to flinch away. More enraged than ever for having missed her, Mac leaned between the seats, shoving the gun up beneath her jaw.

  “I’m not asking you a damned thing. I’m telling you. Turn the car around now and pull off the road where I said, or I swear to you, when your cowboy shows up, all he’ll get for his efforts is the shock of finding your brains spattered everywhere—before I kill him.”

  Even worse than the threat of her own death was the idea of how devastated Jake would be to find her, and how destroyed her children would be by yet another brutal loss. Maybe she’d been wrong before, too quick to give up hope. Every minute she remained alive was another minute she might find some way to escape, or at least to convince him to leave the children and Jake out of this.

  “Move!” Mac bellowed at her.

  She forced herself to nod, the movement painful with the pistol’s muzzle grinding into her jawbone. When he pulled it back, she managed to say, “Just give me—let me breathe a minute.”

  “You don’t have ten seconds,” he said. “Not if you don’t listen.”

  Casting up a silent prayer, she checked for traffic and then made a U-turn. In moments she turned, and thick evergreen branches scraped along the Jeep’s sides as it wallowed downhill on the overgrown and deeply rutted trail.

  “Over there, behind that boulder,” he said, pointing out a patch of shadow, where no one would ever see or hear them. Where he could leave her for the animals, just as he had left her father’s blood-soaked corpse.

  Chills raced through her body as the memory flashed before her eyes.

  “Go on, pull in,” he urged. “Then give me the keys and we’ll make that call.”

  We, he’d said, which meant he didn’t plan to kill her. At least not until he uses me as bait.

  Would there be a chance for her to speak on the phone, an opportunity to warn Jake that regardless of anything Mac promised, he planned to kill them both? She glanced up, meeting his gaze in the rearview mirror. In the cruel depths of his eyes she saw nothing but her death—hers and Jake’s both—and for all she knew, he would make good on his threat and go after the kids, too.

  Once she’d pulled in and shut off the engine, he pointed the gun between the seat backs and held out his other hand. “The keys,” he reminded her. “Now.”

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “Jake was wrong. The money’s never been at the house. It was in the—”

  “You’re lying!”

  When he drew back his arm to hit her, she reacted too fast for thought, flinging the keys as hard as she could, straight into his face. With an enraged shout, he deflected them, but the split second’s distraction was all she needed to jump out of the car and take off running.

  She knew it was insanity. He was far bigger, far stronger—and armed. Thinking it would be harder to hit a zigzagging target, she raced around the boulder and threaded her way through tightly packed trees back toward the road, praying that her smaller size and greater agility would give
her an advantage. If she could only survive these first few moments, she could lose herself, hide herself, and then flag down a motorist when she heard one coming.

  But the thudding footsteps just behind her assured her she would never get the chance.

  Chapter 17

  Slumped over in the front seat of his cruiser, Harry weakly pushed the deflated airbag away from his face. With the movement, pain poleaxed him, an explosion in his sternum that had him clutching at his chest.

  Too much pain, he thought miserably, regretting not the things he’d done but only their unintended costs—costs that might now include the life of his best friend’s daughter.

  Sitting in the seat beside him, Myrtle stroked his sweat-dampened hair with her spectral hand and offered him her saddest smile, a smile that told him that for all his attempts to shield her from his burdens, she understood his struggle.

  But in those beautiful brown eyes he’d loved so long, he read a final request. You have to stay strong, Harry...strong enough to do what’s right.

  “I will, I swear it,” he said through gritted teeth, funneling every atom of stubbornness into reaching for the radio.

  Fresh agony eclipsed his vision, and stars roared to the surface of the sudden darkness. An instant later they were spiraling together, forming a ball of blinding brilliance. With his eyes scrunched closed against the white light, it came to him that Myrtle wasn’t the only one urging him to fight.

  In an echo of his nightmares, Deke Mason once again reached out his hand. Reached and then pointed straight at Harry—a terrible reminder of his guilt.

  * * *

  Sunlight gleamed off metal, and Jake’s stomach dropped when he spotted the car nose-down in a shallow culvert not far off the road. The lights were still flashing, though the siren had fallen silent, and there wasn’t a single other vehicle in sight.

  The choice tore at him. Uncertain he was even driving in the right direction, did he delay his search for Liane, giving Mac an even greater lead? Or did he drive past a man he might be able to save, quite possibly leaving him to die?