Authors: Nichole Christoff
I paused with a palm on either side of the sink, let my head hang for a long moment. I heard the squeak of the step in the stairwell and knew that Barrett was near. Without a word, he joined me. Standing at my shoulder, his fingertips slipped over mine where I clutched the towel to the countertop. His touch was gentle and it made me ache inside.
“I’m fine,” I said, maybe more to myself than to him. “Vance wasn’t going to— He didn’t want to—”
I couldn’t say the word.
But then, I didn’t have to.
“Jamie…” Barrett breathed.
He nuzzled my temple. And I closed my eyes. Barrett kissed my cheek—and I began to tremble.
Slowly, his palm swept along my bare arm. His other one slid around my waist. He whispered, “When I saw Vance…with his hands on you…You were right.”
“I was wrong.”
“No.”
“Yes. Vance grabbed me by the face so I’d listen to him. Pamela’s attacker squeezed her by the throat to—”
“Jamie—” A tremor racked Barrett’s strong body. And mine shivered in answer. “I want you to go home. I want you to forget about me. If anything ever happened to you because of me—”
“Nothing will happen.”
But that wasn’t true. Because something was happening at that moment between us. Barrett knew it as well as I did.
His breathing grew hard as his hands skimmed my skin. And my heart skipped beats when his lips brushed my bruises. I got lost in his touch, lost in his intensity, lost in my love for him. Until his skillful fingers found the hook on the fly of my trousers—and released it. He slid the zipper south, too. And I grabbed his wrist to halt him.
“Just once, Jamie. Let me be good to you just once.”
But once wasn’t going to be enough for me.
And I couldn’t tell him that.
I knew sex wasn’t difficult to come by and if that were all I wanted, I could find it anywhere. With Barrett, however, I wanted something else. I wanted something more. Already, I felt a loss because he didn’t love me. And I knew a quick tumble tonight would only leave me feeling bereft tomorrow.
My conscience concurred.
Don’t
do something you’ll regret,
it warned.
Stop
before you get hurt,
my heart pleaded.
But these words got tangled together in the heat of the moment. And when I spoke, I said something else altogether.
“Don’t stop,” I told him.
And Barrett didn’t.
He eased my trousers from my hips, stroked the soft lace of my panties. The sensation had me burying my face in his strong shoulder. I was ready for this. Ready for him. So ready.
But a creaking on the stairs stayed his hand—and sent a chill crawling over me.
“It’s your grandmother,” I reasoned.
“Or it’s Vance.”
Barrett was in the hall in a flash.
“Hey!” he yelled.
Boots hammered on the stairs, one pair after another.
I zipped up, snatched up my turtleneck, and got myself together on the run. Vance had my weapon. And if he fired it at Barrett, I’d never forgive myself.
Chapter 30
I stumbled down the stairs in time to see Barrett bolt through the front door. Theodore raced from the back of the house, barking all the way. She shot past me in the foyer, but I was only a step behind her when she launched onto the porch.
She lunged at the dark bumper of a car tearing up Mrs. Barrett’s lawn in its haste to get away. Full-on night had descended while I’d been getting tangled up with Barrett. But in the light of the rising moon, I could make out the outline of the vehicle.
It was Eric’s silver Mercury.
The driver didn’t bother with switching on the headlamps. He flew down the lane—and almost smashed into Elise’s Volvo rolling in from the opposite direction. She hit the horn, swerved just in time to avoid a crash.
Halting before the porch, she sprang from her car. The Mercury was just a small, black smudge out on the road now. I never got the chance to see who was inside.
“Who was that?” Elise demanded.
“A man, I think. It was too dark to see,” Barrett said, pacing on the walkway and glaring after the car as if he could will it to come back. “It wasn’t Vance.”
He wasted no time placing another call to Luke Rittenhaus. In the meantime, I helped Elise get the groceries and her grandma into the house. I strongly advised the women to keep Theodore close and to lock up the house for the night.
And then I got in my Jag.
“Where are you going?” Barrett slid into the passenger seat beside me.
I had the phone book open in my lap. And I was perusing the map in the front of it. “I didn’t see Vance’s truck. Do you think he could be driving Eric’s car?”
“It sounded like he took off in his truck after Theodore chased him from the kitchen.”
This was true. I could’ve sworn I’d heard it, too. But I hadn’t heard the car arrive. Of course, I’d been rather busy at the time. Acknowledging as much—even to myself—made me blush. I was glad for the moonlight so Barrett couldn’t see the color in my cheeks.
But then he said, “Jamie, about what almost happened—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I didn’t know if he meant Vance’s attack. Or what we’d nearly done upstairs. But I didn’t want to discuss it in either case. “You should go in the house. I don’t like that your grandmother and sister are vulnerable.”
“I don’t like it, either, but they’re inside and Luke’s got a patrol car on the way. You’re the one out here alone.”
I had an emotionally distant father, a horse’s ass of an ex-husband, and the friendship of men like Marc who offered nothing more than to pass through my life from time to time. So all in all, alone was the only way I knew how to be. I didn’t point this out to Barrett, however.
Instead, I said, “I want to go after Vance. He’s got my nine. And even if he didn’t come back to shoot me full of holes with it, I have a couple of questions for him.”
“About Pamela?”
“Among other things. You said it yourself, Barrett. Vance has been keeping something from you. Something about Eric, maybe. And Marc would love to know more about Vance’s meeting with that Llewellyn guy.”
“Have you been in touch with Marc much?”
I took his meaning. Barrett’s double entendre should’ve felt gratifying. Except it didn’t. Because he hadn’t asked about Marc out of jealousy. If he had, it would mean he cared for me as much as I wanted him to. But he swore he didn’t, so to read more into his remark would be wishful thinking on my part. And as far I knew, wishful thinking had never gotten a girl like me anywhere.
“Buckle up,” I told him, “if you want to go along for the ride.”
Barrett complied.
“I want to try two more McCabes listed in the phone book,” I said, cranking the engine and heading out to the road. “If they’re Vance’s relatives, he may be crashing at one place or the other.”
Barrett pulled the directory from my lap, tipped it to see my pencil marks in the dashboard lights. “One’s his brother. The last is his uncle. There’s no way they’d let him in the door.”
“Well, he’s got to be living somewhere, since the family closed up his mother’s house.”
But thinking of Vance’s mother’s house gave me an idea. The place was empty. Which meant the brothers had sold off her household belongings. Or they’d stored them somewhere. If they’d stashed them in a basement or a barn, maybe that’s where Vance slept nights.
When I told Barrett as much, he said, “Turn left ahead.”
I did and we drove on into the night. Until a glow on the horizon suggested we were getting close to some outpost of civilization. Four miles more and I saw structures in the manmade haze.
Under the blast of a dozen pole lights, warehouses of corrugated steel lined up on a gravel lot. They were surrounded by a ring of chain-link fencing. Razor wire tumbled across the top of the barrier. A rolling gate set into the fence kept interlopers out. Powered by the keypad mounted on the post next to it, it wouldn’t open without a code.
STORE YOUR STUFF
, a banner clinging to the chain link read,
AT SAFE, SECURE HIDDEN HILLS STORAGE
.
But what Hidden Hills believed it was hiding from, I had no idea. After all, it sat inside the town’s corporation limit. But while it was locked up tight and was as bright as a state-of-the-art surgical suite inside the town line, just outside the boundary the tired lamps at the business next door cast light as yellow as a urine specimen. Behind a rusting wall full of graffiti, it was a junkyard and salvage center, but its bald tires and broken-down vehicles spilled out to meet the edge of the road. Camouflaged among the wrecks was a pickup truck in a familiar shade of squash.
“Bingo,” I said, and coasted to a stop.
I reversed into the shadows between the two establishments. Quickly, Barrett and I checked over Vance’s truck. He wasn’t in it.
“Got a PIN for the storage facility’s gate?” Barrett whispered.
I glanced at him and grinned. Because here’s the thing about many people and keypads: in an effort to come up with a code they can remember, folks can make a major mistake. Afraid they’ll forget their numbers, they choose a simple sequence. Like one, two, three, four. Against my advice, my clients did that all the time. And usually, they ended up regretting it.
I’d have been willing to bet Old Reliable would’ve worked here, too. But then the gate mechanism would grind into gear. The chain drive would shake and rattle as it dragged the panel open. And Vance—if he was inside the facility—would be alerted to our coming up behind him.
Not smart.
“You go your way,” I whispered. “I’ll go mine. Look for a break in the fence. If his brothers didn’t give him the code, Vance might have to climb his way in.”
Barrett wanted to protest. I could see that desire cross his face clearly, thanks to the harsh cast of the lights. But I took to my heels like my shoes were on fire.
I jogged along the grassy verge bordering the fence line, kept my eyes and ears peeled. Overhead, the powerful lamps buzzed. And the buildings that had appeared pristine from the roadway looked shabby up close.
About two minutes in, I found what I was looking for. The razor wire at the top of this portion of the fence sagged. And that was enough for a man like Vance to get a leg over it.
I shed my jacket, tossed it over my shoulder like a limp towel.
And sticking the toe of one beautiful brown-patent-leather-and-peacock-velvet oxford into the diamond made by the interlocking chain, I began to climb. I hooked my fingers into the wire. The links were cold and thin and they bit into the joints of my fingers just like the twine from the straw bales had. But I bore down and ignored the discomfort. Inch by inch, I boosted myself upward.
At the top of the fence, the razor wire was indeed floppy. I could see where it had been beaten down by time and maybe by Vance’s traversing it. I grabbed my jacket, laid it across the wire. It made a pretty good barrier. But not a perfect one. It wouldn’t take much for one of the razor-sharp edges to poke through my coat. And slice into my thigh.
Being ten feet in the air, however, I didn’t have a lot of options.
And I had no room for error.
Gingerly, I swung one leg over the fence, then the other. I even managed to extricate my coat as well. After all, it wouldn’t do to leave it as evidence of my passing.
On the far side, I descended partway, climbing down the fence as I’d climbed up, with fingers and toes. When a jump wouldn’t damage my ankles, I dropped the remaining distance. I hit the ground with a thump, bending low as my knees absorbed the shock.
No sirens went off. No caretakers with shotguns flew out of the buildings to fire at me. And no snapping, snarling guard dogs galloped toward me.
I ran for the cover of the first building, flattened myself against it. A row of overhead doors provided little alcoves that would shield me if I had the sense to stick to them. Numbers stenciled in white paint above them provided order.
There were three sizes of doors. Some of them were small, like the entrance to a house. Most were midsized, like a single-car garage door. But a few were massive. I imagined boats big enough to cruise Lake Ontario behind every one of them.
All the doors were locked, however.
I worked my way to the end of the warehouse, peered around the corner. I saw no sign of Barrett. And no sign of Vance.
Easing to the north face of the building to try the doors there, I came to a standard door with hinges and a triple-insulated pane for a window. This had to be the rental office. I pressed my face to the glass. No one lurked inside, but the interior decorating would’ve done Jim Rockford proud. A metal desk made to look like wood grain and a brown plaid desk chair took up most of the room. There was a single filing cabinet, too. And a monstrous 1970s table lamp served as a night light, thanks to a low-wattage bulb.
With the tail of my turtleneck, I grasped the doorknob, just to test it out. A tremor passed through me like a low-voltage shock. Startled, I practically jumped out of my skin. And realized the knob wasn’t electrified. My cellphone, in my trouser pocket, was vibrating.
Immediately, my phone lit up with an incoming text.
WHERE R U?
Barrett had typed.
Great. First, he wanted to get rid of me. Now he wanted to keep tabs on me.
With speedy thumbs, I replied,
OUTSIDE UNIT OFFICE
.
A moment later, the shadows morphed to form Barrett’s beautiful boxer’s body. Together, we checked the remaining units occupying the building. And between this warehouse and the next, I walked through an invisible cloud that made my eyes water. It stank of cat pee but stronger. This was ammonia and it was a dead giveaway that someone, somewhere, in one of these storage areas, was cooking methamphetamine.
Meth may’ve been the drug of choice for many, because it was cheap and could be made in your kitchen, but it was also a poisonous concoction and highly volatile. Illegal labs routinely caught on fire, if they didn’t explode first. The stench emanating from this one promised one hell of a flash and burn.