Sheriff's Runaway Witness (Scandals 0f Sierra Malone Book 1) Page 10

  Her stomach clenched when she thought of him, sitting across the truck’s center console from her, not even an arm’s length away. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to an attractive man, so close she could almost hear his vital signs humming, smell his aftershave. And she had to smile inwardly at that thought, remembering awakening that morning to the sound of him swearing in the bathroom next to the tiny bedroom in which she’d slept, and then finding him later in the kitchenette, clean-shaven, with his jaws scrubbed rosy and dotted with bits of blood-speckled toilet paper.

  Then…she thought of the way she’d trusted him, and fear clenched cold in her belly. Did she trust him, really? Was he being a little too nice? Sure, he’d said it was his job to rescue and protect her, but hadn’t his job ended when he’d delivered her safely to the hospital? Did his job really include taking her and her newborn son into his home, taking her shopping, buying her clothes, personal stuff—a toothbrush?

  What does he want?

  It swept over her again—the fear and suspicion and uncertainty. It came back to her like a movie scene on replay, recalling Izzy in her habit, telling her not to trust anyone.

  Then it hit her.

  Izzy! Oh, God, I forgot about Izzy. What if Carlos—how could I be so selfish? What have I done?

  “Rachel? Rachel.”

  The sharp edges of J.J.’s voice woke the big old dog sleeping beside the baby carrier in the backseat, and penetrated the fog of fear inside her head. She turned her head away from the window and caught the glance of concern he threw at her, realizing only then that her hands were curled into fists and pressed against her cheeks.

  “You were a million miles away,” he said, and the side of his mouth she could see was tilted in a John Wayne lopsided smile. He glanced up at his rearview mirror and said, “It’s okay, Moon—go back to sleep.” Then he looked at her again, and the smile vanished. “What’s wrong?”

  She opened her mouth, then shook her head and looked out the window again, seeing nothing but a blur this time. How could I have forgotten Izzy? My dearest friend, and I just left her there. If anything has happened to her…

  “Rachel.” His voice was quiet but insistent. “What’s wrong? Tell me. If it’s something to do with Carlos—”

  She shook her head rapidly, as if that would dislodge the awful images that wanted to invade there. Flashes of Carlos’s face, suffused with rage, his hand raised, his fist coming at her. Her head exploding with shock and pain. She drew a shuddering breath. “It’s…my friend. The one I told you I borrowed the habit from. She insisted I go—I didn’t want to leave her there. I didn’t. She said Carlos wouldn’t harm a nun, but I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything Carlos wouldn’t do. If he’s hurt her—”

  “Whoa, wait, slow down.” The pickup lurched and Moonshine sat up as he pulled off onto the wide sandy shoulder and stopped. He threw the lever, putting the truck in neutral, then turned in his seat and reached for her. She felt his hands on her arms, her shoulders, holding her firmly but not hard. This time, she held herself rigid and didn’t give in to the desire to take refuge in the harbor he offered. Because what she really longed to do was lean forward and lay her head against his chest and have his arms come around her, because something beyond all reason was telling her he had the power to make everything right again. She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t have the right to feel safe, not with Izzy—

  “Come on, now, take it easy, okay? Just take a deep breath, calm down and tell me what happened.”

  She nodded and dropped her eyes, avoiding that steely green gaze and fastening hers instead on a tiny nick on his cheek where he’d cut himself shaving. Staring at that spot, that small vulnerability, she felt a kind of peace come over her, along with a strange urge to touch the cut place. She couldn’t recall ever having that kind of impulse with Nicholas. Nicky had guarded his personal privacy religiously. She’d never have dared to invade his personal space unless he invited her to.

  She shook off the distraction along with the dangerous impulse to trust this man she barely knew. Allowing herself to become so dependent on a man just because he’d saved her life once and was inexplicably helping her now was just foolhardy. This was real life, not one of her grandmother’s old cowboy movies, and you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats. The fact that J. J. Fox reminded her of John Wayne didn’t automatically make him a good guy.

  On the other hand…the man was a cop, and if Izzy was in trouble, who else could she turn to?

  She brushed at her cheeks and straightened up, doing her best to ignore both the dog panting over her shoulder and the pang of regret she felt when J.J. let go of her arms. “My friend, Izzy—Isabelle—we’ve been best friends since Catholic school. We went to med school together. I quit my internship when I met Nicholas, but she went on, and she’s a doctor now. She works in a free clinic in South Los Angeles.”

  “And, I take it, this friend is also a nun?”

  Rachel nodded. “Well, technically, she’s a sister, since she’s not cloistered. But anyway, she came to visit me, and she was wearing a habit, which she doesn’t usually. But…she was wearing it this time because she had a plan—” she pressed her fingers to her lips to cut off a gulp of laughter that was too perilously close to a sob “—to help me escape from Carlos’s compound.”

  “I’m guessing Carlos is the one who gave you those bruises?” His voice was hard and dangerous, and the dog growled low in her throat.

  She jerked her glance toward him, saw the same hardness reflected in his eyes. She felt a little chill go through her. “That’s not—”

  “Look, I’m a cop, okay? I’m a detective, and a damn good one. I’ve seen bruises like the ones you’re wearing, and they don’t come from car crashes. I’m guessing you’re worried about your friend because somebody hit you, most likely with a fist. If not Carlos, then who?”

  She closed her eyes and let go a breath, soft with defeat. “When the letter came—Sam Malone’s letter—I read it and signed for it while one of Carlos’s guards stood there and watched me. What could he do—short of killing the messenger, I guess. But of course, as soon as the messenger left, he went to tell Carlos. Carlos demanded that I give him the letter, and when I refused, he went ballistic. He, um…” She cleared her throat and swallowed hard.

  Watching her struggle with it, J.J. felt a wave of a familiar emotion that was more anger than sympathy. What was it about women who’d been beaten up, that they so often seemed humiliated? As if it was somehow their fault.

  After a moment, Rachel pulled herself together and continued matter-of-factly, “I knew he wouldn’t kill me or beat me badly enough to risk harming the baby. He really wanted the baby. Nicholas’s son.” She paused, but J.J. just watched her, keeping his face expressionless, his feelings to himself.

  She shrugged and went on. “So Izzy came, we switched clothes and I left in Izzy’s car. She’d left some money for me in the car—I couldn’t take anything with me—no cell phone, no ID, to make it harder for Carlos to find me, you know? The only thing I took with me was the letter.” She looked helplessly at J.J and he saw tears flood into her eyes again. She finished in a whisper, “And…I left her there.”

  She paused then, gazing at him, it seemed to him, as if awaiting his judgment. He had none to give her, not even absolution, and wasn’t sure why.

  Taking refuge in action, he spoke to his hands-free car phone, instructing it to connect him with Katie. He turned back to Rachel to ask for her friend’s address and cell phone number and the address of the clinic where she worked. She gave him the information, then turned in her seat to gaze at her baby, still sleeping soundly in his carrier in the seat behind hers, while he passed it on and told Katie what to do with it.

  And all the while he was doing that, for some reason he was thinking about that morning, when Katie had arrived at his trailer with her arms full of clothes for Rachel and stuff for the baby. There’d
been some laughter and hugs and a few tears on the part of both women, and J.J. had watched it all from across a gender divide that at times seemed to him both unfathomable and unbridgeable. And what he felt then, more than anything—besides frustration, maybe—was envy. Here were two women, strangers until yesterday, now beginning a friendship, sharing emotions, tears and hugs, and it was all so simple and trusting, truthful and joyous, nothing hidden, nothing held back.

  He couldn’t even imagine being that way with a woman. Not even with this one. Why was that? he wondered. Okay, so there was the fact that she had trust issues, and he had ulterior motives. So why wasn’t there something so simple as the cop-slash-protected-witness relationship between them? Okay, so he’d also delivered her baby and saved her life and maybe she’d formed some kind of dependence on him that she was fighting…

  It was making his brain hurt, trying to figure it out. Why, he wondered, did relationships between men and women have to be so damn complicated?

  She turned to face him as he broke the phone connection and put the idling pickup truck into drive. He could feel her ink-black eyes on him but given the nature of his thoughts, was trying his best to avoid them. So, without looking at her, he glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled onto the blacktop highway.

  “Okay, S.B.C.S.D.—uh…that’s San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department—is going to ask L.A.P.D. to check on your friend. They’ll let us know as soon as they know anything.” He flicked a glance at her as he brought the truck up to speed. “Okay?”

  She nodded and murmured, “Thank you.”

  Her voice sounded remote, a little subdued, and he thought, Damn. Now I’ve probably wounded her.

  She probably thought he was making judgments about her and the abuse she’d suffered.

  He suddenly wished it was easier to talk to her about things like…well, things he felt deeply about. He wished he could explain to her how he felt about people who preyed on the vulnerable and weak. Bullies. He’d already told her about going off on that child killer, and sure, he’d had an ulterior motive for doing that, hoping to get her to open up to him in return. But maybe someday he would tell her about the time his dad had backhanded him for talking trash to his mother, and how later he’d found his dad weeping out in the front yard. How he’d tried to slink away, but his dad had seen him and beckoned to him, saying “Come on over here, son, I want to tell you something. And I don’t want you ever to forget it.” And his dad had laid his big, hard hand on his shoulder and said with tears in his eyes, “May the Lord strike me dead if I ever lay a hand on you again, and may He do the same to you if you ever raise your hand to someone who ain’t big and strong enough to hit you back. Because He didn’t make me a man to bully the weak. It’s only animals that do that. You hear me, son? We got to do better than that if we want to call ourselves men.”

  But he couldn’t tell her about that, and the way his dad had grown taller in his eyes that day, because it made him feel exposed and vulnerable to even think about it. He couldn’t recall ever telling any woman about that—maybe not anyone, period, not even his mama. Even thinking about it now, at this moment, thinking he might want to tell this woman someday was a surprise to him. That he might consider letting this woman see him like that…well, it was a puzzlement.

  He cleared his throat and frowned at the empty road in his rearview mirror. “Reason I did it that way is, I don’t want anything to lead back to me, maybe give Carlos a clue which way you went. Just in case he’s got your friend’s communications monitored.” He tried a smile that didn’t work. “Not being paranoid, just careful.”

  She gave a soft snort. “You’re not being paranoid, just realistic. I’m telling you, Carlos has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “You’re pretty sure Carlos can’t trace you to your grandfather?” At least this felt like a safe subject to him.

  “Well, my grandmother didn’t have anything to do with my grandfather during my lifetime. At least, not that I know about. And when she died I didn’t find any contact information among her papers—no addresses or phone numbers, not even old ones. That’s why I thought the letter from Sam Malone might be a way out for me, because there’s nothing to connect me to him.”

  Which probably wasn’t true, of course, in this information age, but J.J. didn’t point that out to her. The connection would be a matter of public record, it just might take a little while for a determined searcher to ferret it out. At the very most, he figured it would give them a little time to prepare. Because from what he knew of the man’s reputation, it was only a matter of time before Carlos Delacorte came for his grandson.

  Chapter 7

  “That must be it, I think—over there,” J.J. said, pointing.

  Rachel nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at her, but she just sat gazing past him through the side window of his truck as they paused, idling, on the rutted and rocky dirt road. Across a hillside strewn with rocks and juniper trees, manzanita and sagebrush and pinon and bull pines, they could just make out a bit of red Spanish tile roof showing between guardian spires of tall evergreen and poplar trees.

  She hadn’t said more than two words since they’d left the desert behind, and he hadn’t, either, content to let his navigation system tell him where to turn even though she had the map that had come with Sam Malone’s letter spread out across her lap. Except for the couple of times she’d turned around to check on her baby, still sound asleep in his carrier, she’d sat and stared out the windows. It seemed to J.J. there was something suspenseful about the way she gazed upon the passing scene. He could almost hear anticipation coursing through her body like a beating pulse.

  Respectful of that tension in her and tied up in his own thoughts, he’d offered no comment as the road wound up and over a mountain pass, then down into a fertile valley where fat cattle grazed in lush green pastures along the highway. Here and there the pastureland was broken by flat brown fields where sprinklers offered up lacy plumes of spray to the wind, or tractors crawled along through clouds of dust, carving furrows in the silt. Across the fields, following the curves of mountains lumpy with boulders and steep slopes splashed with the vivid orange of poppies, a thick line of trees marked a river’s course, the dense thicket of willows and cottonwoods just now showing variegated shades of spring green.

  They passed farmhouses in various stages of disrepair and tracts of modest homes shaded by cottonwoods and evergreens. And a church, a simple rectangle of old-fashioned, white-painted clapboard with its spire pointing heavenward, that reminded J.J. of the game he and his sisters had played when they were kids…fingers interlaced, palms together, index fingers forming the steeple. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people….

  Just past the church, the breathy female voice of his navigation system instructed him to turn right, onto a paved road that arrowed across the fields and crossed the river—a mere creek by North Carolina standards, but not bad for Southern California, no doubt well fed by melting snow this time of spring—on a low wooden bridge before beginning the climb up into a canyon tucked away in those forbidding mountains.

  Before long they’d left behind all other signs of human habitation and the pavement had petered out entirely, giving way to the track they were now on, which had led them up and over hills and down through boulder-clogged gulleys, negotiating switchbacks that meandered through fields of yet more boulders adrift in seas of wildflowers: lupine and poppy, owl’s clover and little yellow daisylike flowers J.J. didn’t know the names of.

  He thought now—grudgingly—as he gazed across the hillside at the deep dark evergreen trees standing guard over Spanish tile rooftops, that at least old Sam Malone had chosen a pretty nice spot in which to retire from the world. It beat the hell out of a Las Vegas hotel.

  “It’s beautiful,” Rachel said finally, as if she’d come to some sort of decision.

  Because he didn’t want to admit she’d closely echoed his own thoughts, J.J. s
aid sourly, “Wouldn’t want to have to evacuate this place in a hurry for a forest fire.”

  “Evidently a cup-half-empty person,” she remarked without censure.

  He shifted the truck into drive. “Just call it the way I see it.”

  “Maybe you should try looking at things another way.”

  He glanced over at her and found her looking back at him, and in the mirrors of her dark eyes saw twin images of himself he didn’t much care for. The locked gaze lasted longer than it should have, and when he finally broke it he felt edgy and frustrated and was thinking again about complications.

  “Maybe,” he said, and drove on.

  A short distance farther on, the road curved sharply to the left then dipped into a deep gully choked with willows and bumped across a graveled streambed now hubcap-deep in spring snowmelt runoff. It would be dry in another month, he imagined. In a summertime thunderstorm, a flashflood down the channel would be capable of washing a truck like his, or any vehicle unlucky or stupid enough to get caught trying to cross it, clear down to the river.

  And that was just fact, he told himself, and had nothing to do with his cup being half-full or half-empty.

  Not far beyond the creek, the road ended at a T intersection. Directly ahead, beyond a whitewashed rail fence, a grassy meadow stretched away to the foot of a mountainside covered with the same granite boulders and mixed vegetation they’d just navigated their way through. More fat black cattle and a few horses grazed in the lush spring grass or dozed in the dappled shade of new-leafed cottonwood trees. To the right, a dirt road followed the fence to the far end of the meadow and a cluster of buildings shaded by more of the huge old cottonwoods. J.J. could make out what appeared to be a farmhouse and an assortment of barns, stables and miscellaneous equipment, typical of a working ranch.

  “We go that way,” Rachel said, pointing to the left. Her voice sounded as breathy as the navigation system’s, only not so much sexy as scared.