Packing Heat

by Penny McCall

  It would have been a good plan, if not for porch lights and barking dogs marking their path through the pitch black. The residents of this little town might be in for the night, but they weren’t sleeping. And they were probably armed.

  “We have to get out of town,” Cole said, echoing her thought process. “Every one of these people has a gun in the house, a hunting rifle if nothing else. We keep this up and it’s only a matter of time before somebody takes a shot at us.”

  “Not if the police get to us first,” she said, red and blue lights flashing against the white siding of the nearest house.

  The police cruiser pulled into the driveway and two state troopers jumped out, one of them sporting a lemon meringue hairstyle, the other a nice lump on the jaw. Both of them displayed a singularity of purpose born of humiliation.

  Lemon Meringue Guy stayed in front of the house, but the other cop came around the back, right toward the spot where Cole and Harmony crouched behind a rotting old shed Harmony suspected had once been an outhouse. This time his gun was in his hand.

  “Keep to the shadows,” Cole said, which was great in theory, not so much in reality.

  Harmony took off after him, but suddenly there was light everywhere, not to mention puddles, ditches, fences, a variety of gardening equipment, and the odd gnome. Cole blasted through every obstacle, Harmony struggling to keep up in his wake and quickly losing him in the darkness. The good news was that she’d lost the cop, too. She didn’t delude herself he’d stay lost forever.

  “Man,” she wheezed when Cole appeared out of nowhere, dragging her behind a handy thicket of lilac bushes.

  “Fake a twisted ankle,” Cole said, trying to shove her back out into the open. “I’ll circle around and take out the cop.”

  Harmony grabbed two handfuls of shrubbery and refused to be thrown under the bus. “You’ll take off.”

  “You’re the one who keeps saying we have to trust one another,” Cole reminded her, his voice low but fraught with frustration.

  “Fine, you fake a twisted ankle,” she said. “I’ll circle around and take out the cop.”

  “How are you going to manage that?”

  “These hands are lethal weapons,” she said, holding them up, French manicure and all.

  She could all but see Cole rolling his eyes. “Twisted ankles are chick territory, and the cop is less likely to shoot a woman.”

  “Wow. You managed to be a chauvinist twice in one sentence.”

  “I’ve always been an overachiever,” Cole said.

  “Then you might be able to handle chick territory,” Harmony said. “With a little help.” She kicked him in the shin, and when he jackknifed to clutch at the assaulted body part she planted her foot on his butt and sent him stumbling out from behind the bushes.

  “Hey,” the cop yelled, “I mean, freeze.”

  Harmony heard the pounding of feet as she cut the opposite way around the bushes, coming up behind the cop and kicking him in the knee. She used her gun butt on the back of his head at the same time, and he crumpled into a satisfying heap at her feet. And then he jumped back up and lumbered toward her, murder in his eyes and his gun completely forgotten for the more primal urge to strangle her.

  Harmony danced out of his way, heart pounding, no idea how she was going to live up to her big claims to Cole, let alone avoid arrest, when the cop dropped again. This time he didn’t get back up. Any self-congratulatory urges or notions of delayed reaction died when she saw Cole behind the cop. The look on his face was . . . bloodthirsty.

  “You didn’t, uh . . .”

  “He’s not dead,” Cole said, “but it won’t be long before his partner finds him or he wakes up.” He took her by the wrist again. “And then we’re going to discuss your definition of teamwork.”

  “I can walk by myself.” Harmony gave her arm one good, twisting yank that broke his grip, then she set off, getting about two steps before the heel of her shoe caught on some obstacle unseen in the utter darkness and she fell on her backside, hitting Cole below the knees and nearly taking him down with her.

  “You can walk,” he said, his face a white blur above her. “It’s staying upright that seems to be a problem.”

  “Stop manhandling me,” she hissed as she climbed to her feet.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t fall on top of you.”

  “It’s these shoes,” she whispered back. “They’re not exactly outdoor gear.”

  But they made her look like she had a mile of leg. “We have to go cross-country,” Cole said, putting her incredible mile-long legs—and how they’d feel wrapped around him—out of his mind before he lost the blood flow to his brain. “We don’t have a choice.”

  “Then we go cross-country.”

  They didn’t go fast enough for Cole’s preference. He kept the pace down for Harmony’s sake, not to mention his own. He couldn’t afford for her to fall again and maybe turn an ankle. But it worked against them.

  They hit the edge of town and headed into the woodland beyond, Cole pulling her to a stop behind a handy tree while he got his bearings. Noise had a tendency to travel in the country, and there wasn’t anything to mask it, no crickets chirping, no frogs croaking, no sounds of the sidewalks being rolled up since that had apparently happened while they were in the restaurant.

  The troopers were crashing through the underbrush, swearing and making enough noise to wake the dead as they split up and went in different directions. He and Harmony were both wearing dark clothing, but there was enough moonlight coming through the trees to reflect off their skin like neon. If the cops looked in the right direction . . .

  Harmony curled her hand around his arm, and all Cole could think was that he ought to be paying attention to the guys with the guns. But her face was close to his and her breath was short, heat and excitement pumping off her. He was right there with her, adrenaline sparking along his nerve endings, but it wasn’t fight or flight he was thinking about.

  She turned to him, started to speak, and he took her mouth. She sank in, just for a moment, her lips softening under his, her breath easing out on a small moan, her tongue tangling with his. And then she punched him in the gut.

  There wasn’t a lot of oomph behind the shot—they were too close for that—but it was enough to startle a grunt out of him, and that, coupled with her snarling, “What are you doing?” was all it took to get the other cop’s attention. He sent up a shout for his partner and came after them at a run.

  “Keep up,” Cole said, pointing himself into the darkness and setting a ground-eating pace, not full speed, but fast enough to put some distance between himself and Pennsylvania’s Finest without slamming into a tree trunk or stumbling into a hole. His heart was chugging like a freight train, from a combination of exertion, fear of arrest, and the conflicting urge to either kiss Harmony Swift or throttle her. She wasn’t exactly helping the situation.

  “Every man for himself?” Harmony said, breathing hard, her voice dripping sarcasm.

  “You’re not facing another twenty years in jail,” he shot back, “not to mention what they’ll tack on for this little field trip,” but the important thing was she was right behind him. She was the key to exoneration, he told himself. He almost believed it—he might have believed it if that kiss wasn’t still sizzling across his skin like heat lightning, if he didn’t taste her again with every breath he took.

  Think, he told himself, or there won’t be any more kisses, or wide skies, or choices. There wouldn’t be any more freedom, which was enough to send his hormones packing and re-engage his brain.

  The troopers weren’t stupid enough to keep blundering around in the dark with no idea where they were going. Sooner or later they’d stop and do what he’d done, listen for sounds of movement. He pulled Harmony into a copse of saplings big enough to hide them both, and they froze except for their breath steaming on the chill autumn air. Sure enough the night was silent, the cops playing the waiting game, too.

  Harmony was on the
same page, head cocked, listening hard. All her attention was on the threat, Cole figured, or she never would have shifted closer to him, one hand on his stomach, the other creeping around his waist. Cole moved away, far enough to keep himself from being muddled by her again.

  After a minute or two there was some crashing and swearing behind them, but it seemed to be headed in the opposite direction, back toward the town. Cole didn’t believe for a moment it meant they were off the hook. But they had some breathing room.

  “What now?” Harmony asked, her voice no more than a breath of sound—with an unmistakably arctic overtone. Pissed off, Cole realized with a mental eye roll. One minute she was cranky because he’d gotten close, now she was angry that he wanted distance. Typical woman.

  “Hear that?” he said close to her ear. He couldn’t resist brushing his lips, just a whisper of a touch, over her skin.

  She shivered, but she moved away. He had to admire her self-control. It was a hell of a lot stronger than his, especially since taunting her had only backfired on him and it took her saying, “Seventeen more years of jail,” to shock him back to the fugitive-on-the-run stuff.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Harmony asked, just as the faint throb of an engine was joined by the mournful wail of a train whistle. “Are you talking about the train? Or the dogs?”

  Cole listened some more and off in the distance, in the direction of the town, he could hear the baying of hounds. “Crap.”

  Harmony put a hand on his arm before he could walk away. “Maybe we should circle back around to the Explorer instead.”

  “They’ll have a trooper watching it by now, and even if they don’t, the dogs will catch up to us before we get there.”

  “That train isn’t going to wait for us.”

  “There’ll be another.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know.” And he was done arguing. “I’m for the train. Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”

  “You’re not leaving me a choice,” she muttered.

  “I know how you feel,” he said, because he really didn’t have a choice either. He’d made it while they were sitting in the woods that morning. He’d go along with Harmony’s plan, and he’d do what she wanted, for exactly as long as it took him to complete his own agenda: find the new evidence by himself or, if she was playing him and there was no new evidence, hack into those frozen bank accounts and siphon some of the money off for himself, enough that he could go anywhere and be anyone he wanted without trouble or hardship. It wasn’t stealing, the way he saw it. It was payback for nearly a decade spent in hell—not to mention his life’s work stolen from him.

  Harmony took his arm, this time dragging him off at a tangent from the direction he’d been going.

  “What?” she said when he hauled her to a stop. “The train is this way.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. The sound came from up ahead.”

  “The sound came from over there,” Cole said, correcting back to their original course.

  “Fine,” Harmony said, “you go that way and when I get to the train I’ll—Hackett! Damn it, put me down.”

  Cole straightened, hiking her a little higher, then bending his knees until he was low enough to snag her duffel from the ground where he’d dropped it—not easy with a hundred twenty pounds of pissed-off, struggling FBI agent draped across his shoulder.

  “Hold still.”

  “Put me down.”

  “I wonder what’s in here,” he said, unzipping her duffel and digging into it until he heard the jingle of chain.

  She went immediately still.

  “Not so much fun when the cuffs are on the other wrists,” he said, his brain making the leap from her restrained in the backseat of the Explorer, to him back there with her—Okay, that was a mental picture he really didn’t need at the moment. It was going to be difficult enough to lug her around without any other . . . impediments.

  “We’ll do it your way,” she said, the tone of her voice and her body language pretty strong arguments against the pretense that she’d given in, even when she added, “I promise.”

  Cole wasn’t sure putting her down was the right decision, but there was the trust issue. He set her on her feet, stepping back out of striking distance, for which he received a look that smoldered, and not in a good way. She was keeping track, that look said, and there’d be a reckoning.

  “Lead on, Moses.”

  “Cute,” Cole said, and struck out for the train, hoping like hell he was right and they didn’t have to wander around for forty minutes, let alone forty years. Aside from the whole going back to jail program, he really didn’t want to look like an idiot.

  And then he heard the dogs again, and getting to the train was more about the possibility of ending his life as a chew toy than appearing directionally challenged. He took Harmony by the wrist, and when she couldn’t keep up with him in her impractical heels, he wrapped an arm around her waist, boosted her off the ground and ran, flat out. The train whistle sounded closer, but so did the dogs, and he barely registered Harmony prying at his arm because his world narrowed down to the train whistle and the dogs, the dogs and the train whistle, all of them on a collision course.

  They broke out of the woods, Cole’s lungs burning, his thigh muscles shaky, and there was the train—on the other side of a ditch, up a hill, moving slowly away from them—already halfway gone. The dogs, sad to say, were right behind them. Cole looked over his shoulder and saw them straining at their leashes in the wildly oscillating flashlight beams of their handlers. Way too close for comfort. Or rational thought.

  He dropped Harmony on her feet and towed her through the ditch, ankle-deep in water, and up the hill on the other side without stopping, boosting her through the open door of an empty freight car as it chugged by. He tossed her duffel in after her, and then his strength started to flag. Lifting weights was something you could do in the pen, running not so much. He didn’t have the stamina or the lung capacity to keep up with the train, and it started to pull off without him. Harmony hanging out the door yelling, “Get your butt moving, Hackett,” did nothing to motivate him. And then she shrieked, “The dogs,” pointing over his shoulder with a touch of real panic on her face, and he dug deep, put on a burst of speed, and threw his upper body onto the edge of Harmony’s freight car just as a hound latched onto his pant leg.

  Harmony hit the floor on her belly, grabbing him by the armpits, and pulling for all she was worth, but he had a full-grown hound hanging off his leg, deadweight, and he could feel himself slipping.

  And then Harmony let go.

  chapter 5

  A COUPLE HUNDRED POUNDS OF CONVICTED FELON plus eighty pounds of homicidal hound equaled disaster for Harmony’s one hundred twenty pounds. And getting dragged head first off a moving freight train wasn’t going to make her day, even without the yapping, snarling pack of dogs. So she let go of Cole. And grabbed the first thing that came to hand—an ear of feed corn, which was hard as a rock. She winged it at the dog. The corn bounced off its skull without any discernible consequence.

  Cole was having more of an effect, kicking the leg with the dog attached to it, trying to scrape it off with his other foot. And he was yelling at her the entire time, swearing, making threats, promising retribution, as he slid farther and farther to the edge of the car. The dog finally let out a yelp and disappeared into the darkness below the speeding train, just as Harmony braced herself with her back against the very edge of the open door and reached for Cole. He grabbed onto her, dragging himself into the car an inch at a time. He wasn’t very careful about where he put his hands.

  “Jesus,” he said, flopping on his back, breathing hard, “my life flashed before my eyes.”

  “Let me guess,” she said, rubbing the places his fingers had dug in, including her right breast, “puberty, college, jail. All woman-free zones in your case.”

  “Too bad I can’t say that
now.”

  “It’s a big freight car,” Harmony said, climbing to her feet. She lurched to the far end, taking her duffel and her laptop case with her.

  “I think we should get off,” Cole said, his voice just barely loud enough to carry over the sound of the train clattering down the tracks, “while we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’m not jumping off this train while I’m wearing a dress.”

  “Your choice, but I’m not hanging around until this thing gets to the next station.”

  Cole was still lying in a heap by the door, so despite his big talk she wasn’t all that worried about him taking off on her. Especially when she stripped off her jacket and lifted her skirt.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him sit up.

  “Dogs and cops,” he said. “Waiting. For us.”

  He seemed to be really worried about the possibility of arrest, but he still wasn’t moving. And she could feel him watching her.

  Not that he could see that much, but she turned her back anyway, unbuckled her clutch holster from around her thigh and tightened it up to fit around her ankle.

  “I’ve never been into James Bond,” Cole said, “but I’m beginning to see the attractions of being a spy.”

  “I’m not a spy.” She slipped her clutch piece into its holster and straightened. “And James Bond isn’t exactly a realistic version of what I do.”

  “Hell, Cupcake, you’re not a realistic version of what you do. You’re more like FBI Barbie.”

  “Cupcake?” She tore a pair of jeans out of her duffel and dragged them on, then whipped her dress over her head. “FBI Barbie,” she fumed, shimmying into her bra and whipping around to face Cole.

  It was pitch-black away from the door, but it felt like she was standing in a spotlight, bright and hot and exposing. She fumbled her T-shirt on and slipped into her shoulder holster, feeling a lot better when she tucked her Smith & Wesson into it. Nothing like a loaded firearm to inspire confidence.

  “Don’t call me Barbie again,” she said.