Dakota Marshal

Chapter Four

One hot shower, one makeshift meal and one weird feeling later, Alessandra found herself pacing the cabin’s interior like a caged tiger. Time alone to think wasn’t necessarily a good thing, and she’d thought a lot in the five minutes it had taken McBride to shower.

He hadn’t shaved, though, she noticed when he emerged bare-chested and with his jeans only half-fastened.

“What?” Her unintentional stare had him looking down at himself. “Did I forget something?

No, but she needed to. It shouldn’t be legal for a man to be so sexy. Since she shouldn’t be thinking that way, she drew a deep breath and resumed her pacing. “You’re not bleeding.”

A smile played on his mouth. “You make that sound like a bad thing.”

“You should wear a bandage.”

Towel in hand, he held his arms out to the sides. “Say the word, Alessandra. I’ll even let you slip your poultice under the gauze just to show how much I trust you.”

Drumming up her own smile, she met his eyes. “You’re very brave, given the circumstances.”

“And your deteriorating mood,” he added.

“More like strained. It’s only been one day and, to this point, our separation’s been fairly amicable.”

He moved closer, his gaze fixed on hers with a smoky intensity that would have unnerved her if she hadn’t been prepared for the sexual punch.

“You won’t get around me with smoldering looks, McBride. After four years of marriage and eighteen months apart, I’ve developed an immunity.”

“You make me sound like measles.”

“You’re a different kind of danger, but still not something I need in my life right now.”

He continued his unswerving advance. “What is it you want, Alessandra?”

She opted to take the loaded question at face value. “To go home.”

“That’s not possible. What else?”

“Stability.”

“If you wanted that, you’d have stayed in Indiana and married the boy next door.”

He was getting very close. Wisdom dictated she move away. She didn’t.

“Trying to skew my thoughts won’t work, either, McBride.”

Another faint smile appeared. “It’s not your thoughts I want to skew.”

Okay, this was getting out of hand. She had every right to be annoyed at him for sucking her into the crazed vortex of his life. Her friends and his insisted he had a death wish, and while Alessandra didn’t disagree, she saw it more as a burning need to prove that he was the antithesis of his father. Wherever the truth resided, however, now wasn’t the time to delve into it.

Hooking a wistful finger in the chain around her neck, she toyed with the delicate links. “You didn’t have to change your lifestyle or your goals for me. I told you that before we separated. I’m not a cop or a U.S. marshal, though I do applaud both professions. I used the wrong word when I said I was looking for stability. What I should have said was ‘sanity.’ You know the deal, McBride, a halfway normal life where I’d be met at the door after work by my pet, not by a homicidal junkie who’s been hiding out behind our trash cans for the better part of the day, looking for a way to extract his revenge on the person who offered his girlfriend a deal in exchange for information.”

“That was one incident.”

“What about the guy who jumped out at us in a restaurant parking lot? Or the nut case who called our home and told me not to try starting my car? What about the candies that arrived courtesy of a drug lord you’d helped to expose?”

“There was nothing but candies in that box.”

“It was the gift giver not the gift that was the point. For the first three years of our marriage you were undercover more than you weren’t. And nothing got better when you ditched your badge and joined the U.S. marshals.”

“You knew what you were getting into.”

“Not as well as I knew what I was getting out of.”

Averting his gaze from hers at last, he regarded the darkened window. “Your point.” When he looked at her again, still at dangerously close range, she saw genuine regret in his features. “I never meant to involve you in this. Rapid City’s where I happened to be when I got hit, and you were the only person I knew I could trust.”

Okay, that wasn’t fair. Before it could fully ignite, the spark fueling her temper fizzled and died, leaving in its wake a jumble of feelings she couldn’t begin to separate.

“You always were good—” She halted as his gaze traveled past her and suspicion replaced regret in his features.

She turned but saw nothing in the misshapen shadows beyond the glass. “Is someone there?”

“Probably not. Get the lights just in case.”

It wasn’t exactly a reassuring remark. But she went for the switch and plunged the cabin into darkness.

“Now what?” she asked twenty silent seconds later.

“Shh.”

He eased them both away from the window. Woodsy night sounds filtered in. Beyond that, everything had gone still and quiet.

Then a twig snapped in the nearby trees, and Alessandra’s senses went on high alert.

Swearing softly, McBride reached for his gun in the back of his waistband.

One of the boards on the porch creaked. There was a rush of movement, a thud of feet and finally a crash as a rock flew through the front window. A split second later, the door slammed open. Emitting an attack cry, a man charged in, hands raised and clutching a very large ax.

EDDIE NOTICED the broken window first, then the tire tracks in the mud. Coming, going, maybe coming again. There was no truck in the vicinity, and no sign of movement inside.

It wasn’t quite dawn. The sky was lightening but the shadows would hide him for another twenty minutes. Plenty of time to get the deed done.

He was savoring the moment when a light went on. The front door opened and a man stumbled out. He was tall and dark haired, but too gangly to be McBride.

The fury that rose was swiftly expelled. Eddie looked at his vehicle, then back at the stranger currently doing his business off the side porch.

A half-naked woman emerged, wobbled in one direction, then the other, until she finally collided with the man. They giggled and staggered back inside.

The light winked out.

Should he do them, anyway, just for being in this remote cabin at this time when he’d been looking for McBride and the pretty veterinarian?

A nasty grin split his face. No. Leaving a trail of corpses was never a good thing. But he had extra guns, and as long as they were too drunk to walk straight, he might as well have a little fun. He’d cover his face with a bandanna, his head with a hat and do the stick-’em-up thing from behind.

If they had any information at all, they’d talk. Then depending on his mood, the inclination of his trigger fingers and whether or not they did something stupid, they’d either live or they’d die.

As for McBride and the pretty vet? Eyes on the prize, Eddie-boy. Bang, bang, cha-ching.

IT AMAZED ALESSANDRA that anything could shock her. However, a second wild-eyed, weapon-wielding youth in one night was too extreme even for McBride’s world.

The young man, trailed by a girl in Daisy Dukes and flip-flops, blasted across the threshold with a Tarzan yell and more fear than aggression in his eyes. McBride disarmed him easily, knocking the ax from his sweaty hands and pinning him to the wall. Alessandra shook off her momentary trance and intercepted the girl as she made a beeline for McBride’s back.

It took fifteen noisy minutes to sort through the confusion. Apparently the college-aged youth was Joan’s nephew. He had his aunt’s permission to use the cabin during his cross-state camping trip. Unfortunately for all of them, tonight was the night he and his girlfriend had reached Dead Lake.

Alessandra knew that she and McBride could have stayed in the cabin until morning. She also knew they’d be endangering innocent lives if they did. So they left. And drove for more than three hours before McBride agreed to stop.

Having been raised on a farm, Alessandra didn’t consider herself a wilderness wimp. But sleeping in McBride’s truck, then attempting to eat breakfast while swarms of mosquitoes, horse and deerflies did the same, proved next to impossible.

Deet was the only answer, and Alessandra wanted the sticky repellant gone as soon as possible. That meant another shower, this one in a crappy public facility that boasted slime-coated floors and a weak spray of barely warm water. They didn’t get back on the road until mid-morning.

More correctly, on the back roads. It was one wooded cow path after another, roughly stitched together.

“You know,” she remarked with a quick hiss of pain for her abused backside, “unless he’s taking this same route, which is unlikely for an escaped felon, Rory Simms will be in Mexico before we get out of the Black Hills.”

McBride maneuvered around a two-foot gouge. “Rory’s a slow mover, Alessandra. He’s an even slower thinker. He’s also not good on his own, which is why I figure he’s heading this way.”

“Am I supposed to accept that as an explanation?”

“He’s making his way to his contacts.” McBride divided his attention between the road, his laptop and the on-board map. “People his sister might not know about.”

“Okay, obvious next question, if she doesn’t know about them, how do you?”

He didn’t quite avoid a missing chunk of road and as a result almost bounced Alessandra out of her seat. “You should tighten that strap.”

She sighed instead. “Answer the question, McBride.”

“Rory likes hookers. Some hookers accept money for services other than sex. My source inside Casey Simms’s organization got a line on Rory’s favorite prostitute. He paid, she talked, we scored.” “You hope.”

“Yeah, there’s that. But from the text I got last night, X thinks that no matter where Rory appears to be going, he’s really taking an indirect route toward one of his contacts. As far as our particular route is concerned, think Eddie and the more twists and turns, the better.”

“At the risk of sounding repetitive, if Rory’s using the interstate or even a semidecent highway, he’ll be there and gone before we reach the next mountain pass.”

“We’ll see,” McBride said.

Too bruised and tired to pursue it, Alessandra let the subject drop. Keep talking and she ran the risk of biting her tongue off.

Although her pride seldom allowed her to complain, neither the day nor the traveling conditions improved. They weren’t going in anything resembling a straight line. By late afternoon, she figured they could be anywhere from the Big Horns to the Rocky Mountains.

Fanning her face slowly with a service station map, she finally asked, “Where are we, McBride?”

“About twenty miles from Ben’s Creek. There’s a good chance Rory will be there.”

“And hopefully Eddie won’t.” She stopped fanning to cock her head. “Isn’t Ben’s Creek north of Rapid City?”

He smiled in profile. “Your point being?”

“What happened to ‘we need to head southwest’? Never mind.” She waved him off. “Message from your X-man, indirect routes, et cetera. My brain’s running on empty at the moment. Are you sure about this source of yours?”

“Sure enough. I got an email update while you were texting your assistant about what we were doing at her cabin last night and why you won’t be coming into work tomorrow.”

She summoned a pleasant expression. “If I said I hate you, would you be kind and ditch me in Ben’s Creek?”

“I’ll take that to mean you want to stop. Next place we pass, I promise.”

True to his word, ten minutes later he pulled off the ancient two-lane highway that was probably only used by logging trucks now and into a dusty roadside clearing, complete with a tippy wooden shack, two gas pumps and a rear yard full of abandoned vehicles.

Alessandra took one look, stuck his hat on her head and shoved the door open. “I hate you, McBride. This place better have a washroom.”

To her relief, it had two. The man tearing a seat out of an ancient Oldsmobile took one look at her and stabbed a thumb at the shack. “Ellie’s my wife. Buy one of her blackberry pies, and she’ll let you use her private john.”

Alessandra thanked him, bought two pies and was immediately ushered into Ellie’s paying-customers-only washroom.

It smelled like pine cleaner and the toilet did flush—if she pulled really hard on the chain. The cold-water tap almost worked, as well. The mirror didn’t. A haze over the glass gave her face a tintype-photo look that would have made her laugh if she hadn’t glimpsed the remnants of an old bus through the window behind her. The thing had fallen on its side like a drunk elephant with its fire-blackened underside fully exposed.

For a motionless moment, Alessandra’s throat muscles seized, so badly that she couldn’t swallow. Voices swarmed in her head.

An elderly man: “I’m off to Chicago to visit my brother….”

A geek: “I’ll have this textbook read by the time we hit the city limits….”

A wispy woman from Arizona: “Excuse me, do you suffer from motion sickness…?”

A young marine: “I’m getting married in three months….”

Words and faces overlapped. She felt the floor moving, the bus skidding, rolling. She heard glass shatter, metal shriek, murmurs turn to screams.

With a huge effort, Alessandra tore her eyes from the mirror. But not until she saw another face that drifted in. McBride.

Sexy, smoke-gray eyes stared at her. “Don’t worry, I’m a cop. Give me your hand. I’ll get you out of here….”

“You all right, dear?” A rusty female voice shattered the spell.

Alessandra jolted back to the present. She breathed out, dried her hands and checked her reflection one last time. “I’m fine, thank you.”

When she opened the door, Ellie offered a toothy, yellow smile. “I thought maybe you’d passed out from the heat. We don’t get many customers here, us being so remote and all. When we do, I like to give them a special parting gift.”

Letting her smile grow bigger, she produced a knife from the pocket of her apron.

Chapter Five

The knife was the second thing McBride saw when he turned the corner inside the shack. The first was the startled expression on Alessandra’s face. He would have knocked the woman called Ellie through the paper-thin wall if Alessandra hadn’t glanced up and given her head a shake.

“It’s to cut the pies,” she told him quickly, and recaptured the woman’s attention with a smile. “Thank you, for the pies and the gift.”

Fifteen minutes later, and on the road yet again, McBride asked her, “You weren’t sure about that knife at first, were you?”

She examined the serrated blade. “No, and I put the blame for my mistrust squarely on your shoulders. I used to think people were basically nice and well meaning. Lately, I see everyone as a potential front for a hit man.” A sparkle in her eyes softened her words. “You are such a badass, McBride.”

“Had a chat with Eddie while he was holding you, huh?”

“Yes, and I relayed our entire conversation to you while you were bleeding all over that old logging camp. How’s your shoulder?”

“Poultice is helping.”

After she tucked the knife away, he felt her eyes slide in his direction. “Your way’s not working, is it?”

Damn. She knew him too well. Now it was time to either jump out of the truck or irritate her into silence by pretending not to know what she meant. He did neither.

“The dangerous cases just come to me, Alessandra. I don’t go looking for them.”

“Yes, you do. The more the danger, the more you like it. Because even though you balk at a by-the-book approach, you always get the job done. You were never meant to be married, or anything more than superficially involved with a woman. We made a mistake, an incredibly hot one for a while, but our marriage was wrong from the start. Death is your shadow, McBride. Except that one day the roles will be reversed. Death will be real, and you’ll be the shadow. I need you to sign the divorce papers.”

His stomach clenched, but beyond that, he didn’t react. Didn’t want to think about Alessandra as part of his past. He knew it was unfair to her, and really, if he’d been asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain to anyone, least of all himself, why he rejected the thought of divorce so completely.

“McBride, look out!”

When she made a grab for the wheel, he swore. Directly in front of them, in the middle of the road, stood a white-tailed doe and two half-grown fawns. He swerved, hit the brakes and felt the truck begin to slide.

The back end struck something—not one of the deer, he hoped—fishtailed and slammed into a large spruce. Which was the only thing that kept them from falling into the creek bed some thirty feet below.