by Rachel Lee
She opened her eyes and saw Buck watching her with evident concern.
“I’m sure,” he said, “you don’t want to come to the La-Z-Rest with me. I’m equally certain you don’t want me to know where you live. So where else will you feel safe while we talk?”
Haley nodded as her mind stopped reeling. The whole town was going to be talking if she and Buck stood here any longer. “Do you know where the college campus is?”
“Yeah. I walked around some today.”
“I’ll see you there in fifteen minutes.” She didn’t offer him a ride. That would make people talk, too. But over on the college campus there were people who weren’t local. A stranger wouldn’t stick out and tongues wouldn’t start wagging. “There are some benches in the center of the quad.” And there’d still be plenty of students and faculty around at this hour, even if it was summer.
“Fifteen minutes,” he agreed.
She drove off, glancing at him in her rearview mirror, and wondering what the heck she had just gotten into.
* * *
Buck had spent the day wandering. A need to know the physical territory was ingrained in him. He’d hit a surplus shop and found a decent pair of lace-up boots he could run in, and added some extra jeans and some shirts that would fit in around here, although he didn’t go for anything approaching the perennially popular Western look. A ball cap suited him better than a cowboy hat, and he wasn’t putting anything on his feet that might keep him from moving fast.
He could have run to the campus. In fact, he would have liked to run, it would have felt good, but he figured it would draw attention. A brisk walk would have to do, and he still arrived at the quad on campus before Haley.
He sat there on the bench, wondering if she would even show, or if he’d find himself talking to a couple of cops, explaining why he was harassing a nice local girl.
He wondered about it, but he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t worry about much, and he was fairly sure that even a superficial background check would reassure the cops. The stuff they’d never see, the stuff so deeply classified it would never see the light of day, was another story. But nobody could get at that.
So he waited, pondering how best to gain Haley’s trust after having given her plenty of reason to think he was either crazy or a con man. He could see it from her point of view. Seeing things from other people’s points of view was one of his gifts—and one of his curses.
She was right to be dubious, and he sure as hell hadn’t given her a thing to reassure her. Wild story from a stranger. Great start.
But she showed up. He heard the car door slam and turned his head in time to see her coming his way.
She was still wearing the simple black dress she had worn at the funeral home and he couldn’t resist giving her the once-over. Trim figure, shapely calves, delicate ankles. Even so modestly dressed she wouldn’t ever fail to catch a man’s attention. Much to his surprise, she carried two large cups of takeout coffee and when she reached him, she handed him one.
“Okay,” she said as she sat on the bench beside him. A group of young men and women emerged from a building and started walking across the far side of the quad from them. Not long after, a smaller group appeared.
“I’m waiting,” she reminded him.
“Somebody know you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “I hope you trust whoever it is.”
“More than I trust you right now.”
“Just tell me you didn’t tell them the whole story.”
“Of course not! Sheesh, Buck, I don’t believe it myself yet. It sounds like something out of a movie.”
“I’ll give you that.” He put his coffee on the ground beside his feet and pulled out his wallet. Opening it, he flipped out his military ID and his commercial driver’s license. “The ID doesn’t say much, but maybe it’ll help.”
She peered at the two laminated cards in the dim light from a nearby pole. “How can you still be military and drive a truck?”
“Ex-military. I have privileges because I was medically discharged. That card means I can use base facilities, like the exchange and the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“That’s a long story for another time. There’s a more pressing matter.”
Slowly she handed the cards back to him, but her eyes were on his face. “Buxton Devlin,” she said slowly. “It looks real, I guess. But Buxton?”
“My mother’s maiden name. She died having me and my dad named me for her. I guess he figured Mary wouldn’t work.”
Humor sparkled briefly across her face. “I guess it wouldn’t.”
“Anyway, Buxton became Buck real fast. My dad shortened it when I first started talking and couldn’t get the whole thing out right. Good thing, too, since I was a military brat. It was easier navigating childhood as Buck.”
“That probably would have been true almost anywhere.” She paused, waiting. Okay, his name appeared to be real, but what else could she be sure of? A little childhood story hardly added up to a huge heap of truth.
He shoved his wallet into his jeans pocket and picked up his coffee. “This is hard.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not used to having to prove my credentials. I either worked solo, or with a group of other MPs. Either way, I had a badge. Explaining this to someone who doesn’t have any background...” He paused, then shrugged. “I’ll try. Ask questions. I’ll answer what I know.”
“Okay.” She was agreeable to that. Her eyes followed another group walking toward the little student union, hardly more than a coffee shop, but a great place to gather.
“Before I left Seattle on my last run, my boss asked me to keep my ear to the ground. It seems some shipments are getting messed up and they can’t figure out how or why.” He stopped. “Maybe I need to backtrack.”
She just nodded and waited.
“We’re pretty careful about what goes on our trucks. Drivers are supposed to be extra careful, because when we sign for a load, we’re responsible for it until it reaches the next terminal or destination for off-load. You get that?”
“Perfectly.” It seemed sensible to her.
“Okay. Well, everything that comes into the terminal for shipping is in crates or containers. Those are all labeled. Everything has a bar code. So we scan those labels every time we move anything around. When my truck gets loaded, I stand there, count crates, and every crate is scanned while it’s being loaded. I have a manifest of what they said they were going to load, to compare to the scan of everything that goes on my truck. It covers my butt, and covers the company. So when I pull out of the terminal, I know my manifest matches exactly what’s on the truck.”
She nodded. “Makes sense.”
“It does. And it works. Or it did until about four months ago. Then something started to go wrong. My boss said they couldn’t find anything wrong at the terminal. No mismatched scans or anything. But somehow, by the time trucks arrived in Denver, the cargoes had changed. Some crates arrived late and on different trucks. And it’s getting more frequent.”
Suddenly she understood. “What I saw in the lot!”
“Maybe. Bill, my boss, figured something had to be happening along the road, and he asked me to keep an eye out because I used to be an MP.”
“Why not just call the authorities?”
“Because we’d have a federal investigation. Interstate commerce and all that. The head honchos are afraid they’d shut us down by opening and searching every crate going in and out of our Seattle terminal. It would kill business. So he doesn’t want to do that if we can solve the problem ourselves. I guess he figures that if I can nail something down, we can put the authorities on the right track without sacrificing all our business.”
She sipped coffee, noting that her hand had started to shake a little. It matched the uneasy fluttering in her stomach. “It just got bigger, didn’t it? Ray,
I mean.”
“I’m seriously wondering about that. I could drive that stretch of road blindfolded. No reason for a truck to roll. Or for a driver to be dead.”
She had to put her coffee down as her heart started to climb into her throat. “What do you want from me?”
“I want two things. The first is to keep an eye on you, because you might have seen the very kind of cargo switch I was supposed to be looking out for. A few people already know what you saw. I’m worried about you. That’s why I told you not to say any more about it. Maybe word won’t get around, but I can’t be sure.”
“What else?” Her voice sounded a little thin even to her.
“Give me cover. People are going to start wondering why I’m hanging around. Like you said, this isn’t a dream vacation spot. So let me hang around, doing the lovesick-puppy thing. I’ll ask you out. You can keep saying no. I’ll look like a fool, but not in a way that arouses any suspicion. In the meantime...”
She turned to face him. “Yes? In the meantime what?”
“Well, you can let me know if you hear or see anything. Just me. I’m going to keep a pretty close eye on that truck stop, but there are other things. For example, the Liston family got an anonymous donation for that fancy funeral.”
Haley gasped. “I wondered. Oh, man, I wondered. They’ve never had any money, and I know how much I had to cut back on my own mother’s funeral last year. I looked at that... Do you know how much it costs to have a two-night wake? Or a coffin like that?”
“Thousands.”
“More than a few thousand. How did you find out they got a donation?”
“I heard somebody talking.”
“Well, I heard somebody talking, too. Apparently Ray had been telling at least one person that he was about to come into some money.”
“Money.” He almost spat the word. “Well, that would tend to confirm it.”
“Confirm what?”
“Where there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of danger. Money and power are the two biggest corruptors, and when either gets involved, lives don’t seem to matter. I just wonder why they contributed to the funeral. Can’t be much conscience in somebody who would kill to keep a secret.”
“But folks around here do stuff like that. People would have chipped in so the Listons could bury Ray. They would have.” She remembered the offers she had received to help pay for her mother’s expenses. Offers she had been able to turn down because she had just enough. “Maybe that’s all it was, folks chipping in.”
“Maybe. But then you have Ray talking about coming into money.”
She didn’t like the way this was making her feel. She looked around at the familiar quad, in darkness now, and realized her world had shifted hugely. Would she ever see her friendly little town in quite the same way again? She suddenly experienced the most childish urge to close her eyes, as if that would make it go away. Like hiding under the bedcovers when you thought a monster was in the closet. How much protection did refusing to see give you? Zip, she thought unhappily.
One of her neighbors might be involved in something so ugly he was willing to kill. She shuddered. “I don’t want any part of this.”
“I don’t think you get the choice anymore. You saw something. If the wrong person knows...”
She didn’t need him to finish the thought. Another shiver ran through her and she leaned over to throw her coffee into the trash can at the end of the bench. Then she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and looked out at the alien world she had just landed in. If the wrong person knew. She had no idea who the wrong person might be. The Listons, who had asked her if she’d told the police that Ray had seemed fine? Claire or Hasty, who had heard what she told Micah and Sarah when they came in to ask questions? No. She couldn’t believe any of them could mean her any harm.
“Haley...” All of sudden, strong arms wrapped around her, hauling her close. She should have resisted, but that embrace felt so good, and those arms felt so strong and protective. It had been way, way too long since anyone had hugged her, and her throat tightened as she realized how much she had missed that kind of comfort. So much, evidently, that it felt good even from a stranger.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he murmured. “That much I can swear. Not one bad thing is going to happen to you.”
“You can’t promise that,” she said weakly into his shoulder. “Nobody can.” Life had certainly taught her that lesson the hard way.
“I can. It used to be my job. Nobody’s going to hurt you. They’ll have to get through me first.”
“Why? Why do you care?”
“Because I do. Some things I just care about. You’re at the top of my list right now. Besides,” he added in an evident attempt to lighten the moment, “I’ve had my eye on you for months. You’re a temptation, woman.”
A feeble laugh escaped her. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
He moved her back so that his dark eyes stared straight into hers. “It should. It’s been a long time since I had any desire to camp on a woman’s doorstep.”
The words left her speechless. She could see he meant them by the look in his eyes, and sexual heat began to drizzle through her until it pooled achingly between her thighs. Rationally she knew her reaction was foolish, but rationality had nothing to do with it. She’d been noticing this man for months, even daydreaming about him in ways she hadn’t daydreamed about anyone since high school. Every time she saw him, she felt that same pull, that same desire for something to happen between them.
Now something was happening, and it was not at all what she’d imagined. Almost unconsciously, she clamped her thighs together, wishing she wasn’t abruptly aware that every breath she took made her shirt slide over nipples that were suddenly sensitive even through her bra. She made herself look away from him, trying to get her grounding. Trying to think sensibly. Trying to regain her self-control.
As soon as she looked away, his arms dropped from her. The loss of his touch was almost enough to draw an incautious protest from her. She bit it back. There were more important things. This man had just told her she might be in danger. She couldn’t afford to lose sight of that.
“This is hard to take in,” she said after a minute.
“It’s not the usual way of looking at things,” he admitted. “And I could be wrong about you being in any danger. God willing, I am. I just don’t want to risk it.”
That was reasonable, she supposed. She tried to shake off the feeling that the deepening shadows around her might hold a threat. God, she wasn’t used to thinking this way. Life had dealt her its blows right out in the open.
And now here she was, putting in place the first building blocks of a future, and some guy came virtually out of nowhere to tell her that she might wind up like Ray? All because she had glimpsed something in the truck-stop parking lot?
Deal! Her brain almost barked the order at her, and she stiffened. If she could say nothing else about herself, if there was one thing she knew about herself for certain, it was that she dealt with life’s curveballs. All of them.
She sat up straighter, drew a breath and thought, All right. This is how it is. Now what was she to do about it?
There was one thing she knew instantly, of course. “Well, you’ve successfully made me afraid to go home alone.”
“I’m sorry. Like I said, I’m not sure you’re at risk. But equally, I can’t be sure you’re not. You saw something that nobody was supposed to see. You saw the driver of the other truck, right?”
“Yes. He came in for coffee, too.”
“And you saw the transfer of cargo.”
“I think I did. It’s not easy to see that parking lot clearly from inside the restaurant at night.”
“But you mentioned it. Others may have mentioned it after they heard what you told the police. Regardless, if I was that other driver, I’d be feeling a bit edgy. You could identify him. Maybe you could describe his truck. He might lie low and wait, but then aga
in, killing Ray seems awfully stupid to me. If you want a quiet operation, you don’t draw attention to it by murder.”
She looked straight at him. “Do you think Ray was killed because of me?” The thought made her heart quail.
“Actually, no. I suspect Ray had irritated them in some other way. Maybe by talking about coming into some money. Something made them think he was a liability. But again, that’s my guess. I’m not even going to be sure of that until I see the accident reports.”
“How will you do that?”
“I’m going to talk to the cops in a few days.”
He couldn’t have said anything more likely to make her believe he was exactly what he said he was. “Why would they talk to you?”
“Because I’m here on behalf of my company. And they’re going to do a background check on me and find out I used to be a cop just like them. They’ll talk.”
She nodded, believing it. Cops were a tight bunch.
“As for your apartment...if you don’t mind me knowing where you live, I’ll go home with you and check it out. Then I’ll leave and you can rest comfortably.”
She sat quietly, common sense battling with more primitive needs. She liked this man. She liked his attention, but what did she really know about him? She’d seen couple of IDs, but she had no way of knowing if they were real.
For all she knew, this was flimflam, and she didn’t have any means of checking it out. So...did she want him to know where she lived? Heck, the way he had glommed on to her might put him squarely on the side of the wrongdoers. If there were any wrongdoers. She couldn’t even know that for certain.
All she knew was that he seemed determined to frighten her and then set himself up as her savior. When she thought of it that way, her internal alerts started to go off.
“No, thanks,” she said, standing. “Don’t follow me.”
There were other ways of dealing with all of this, but none of them involved inviting Buck Devlin any further into her life. As for going home alone, she did that every night, and she’d never been afraid until this man had suggested it.
All of a sudden she didn’t like him.
