Deception Lake Page 4

  “Technically, I attacked him first.”

  “Because he was attacking your friend.”

  “Who hates me and doesn’t want the police involved. What if she lies and says I assaulted someone?”

  “Wow, you really don’t trust her, do you?”

  “I broke her trust. She owes me nothing.”

  “Then maybe you should just get your truck, follow me back to town and let’s get on with our fishing trip.”

  Jack could tell by Riley’s tone that he didn’t like what he was saying any more than Jack did. But he was right. Mara Jennings didn’t want him anywhere near her life, and he sure as hell couldn’t fix what he’d broken.

  Still, the idea of leaving her out here to fend for herself went against every instinct he had.

  He’d half expected to find his truck had been towed away, but the Ford F-150 was still sitting there on the side of the narrow gravel road, about thirty yards from the cabin’s driveway. Mara’s little blue Mazda car wasn’t anywhere around, however.

  Had she gone back to work?

  As Jack opened the passenger door of the Bronco, Riley asked, “Should we expect you at dinner?”

  Jack turned to look at his brother-in-law. “I don’t think so.”

  Riley’s mouth flattened to a thin line, but he didn’t look surprised. “Be careful, Jack.”

  Jack nodded and closed the door, walking slowly across the crunchy gravel to his truck. He settled in the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition. But he didn’t start the truck.

  Instead he settled down to wait.

  * * *

  HER CELL PHONE rang while she was loading the data sanitization programs on the computers she had to leave behind. She glanced at the display. Alexander Quinn.

  She ignored the call and shoved the lone laptop computer she was keeping into her backpack. She’d packed light for the bugout. She wasn’t exactly a clotheshorse to begin with, and the less she had to carry with her, the better to make a complete escape.

  It might be a relief, really, to go underground again. No more pretending to be someone she wasn’t.

  Someone she never had been.

  The phone rang once more. Quinn again. With a grimace, she answered the phone. “What’s up, boss?”

  “What happened to Jack Drummond?”

  “What happened?” She should have known he’d already heard about the visit to the urgent-care clinic. Purgatory was a small town, and not much went on there that Quinn didn’t know about. “He fell down the porch stairs and split his skull on the gravel. He’s fine.”

  Although she couldn’t say that for sure, could she? She’d left him at the clinic to fend for himself.

  “Fell down the steps?”

  A flutter of alarm twitched through her gut as she realized maybe Quinn knew something she didn’t. “Yes. Why? How do you know about what happened?”

  “Someone saw you with Drummond at the clinic.”

  She bit back a sigh. Damn small towns. “I didn’t want him to sue me. Or, more to the point, you, since this is your property.”

  “And he just fell down the stairs. Unaided?”

  “You think I pushed him?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I didn’t.” It was a grizzly of a camouflage-clad intruder who did the pushing, she added silently. “And I made it clear to Drummond that I don’t care to see him again.”

  “I’ve looked into Jack Drummond’s past,” Quinn said.

  That fast? She glanced at her watch. Nearly seven. There were no windows in the secret room, but the day had already been waning before she finished packing. She would be out of daylight when she finally hit the road.

  Maybe that was better. Easier to disappear in the dark.

  “Not curious?” Quinn asked when she didn’t respond.

  “Not particularly.” A lie, of course. Curiosity was one of her most enduring traits. And one that often got her into considerable trouble.

  And Jack Drummond was, if nothing else, an intriguing creature in all the wrong ways.

  “He’s been off the rodeo circuit for two years,” Quinn said. “Retired after a bull ride gone wrong crushed his pelvis. He’s lucky he can walk.”

  She hadn’t noticed any sign of infirmity. But she supposed she wouldn’t have. She’d been trying very hard not to pay any attention to Jack Drummond at all.

  “Is there a point to telling me this?” she asked.

  “He used to have quite the reputation as a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-riding cowboy.”

  She knew his reputation had been well earned. She knew that better than most people did. “Used to have?”

  “Four years ago, he stopped drinking. I don’t know if he stopped womanizing, but the stories about his bedroom exploits subsided around that time. The only thing he kept doing was riding, and from what I hear, he became increasingly reckless about it, which led to the accident that ended his career.”

  Four years ago, Mara had walked into an Amarillo honky-tonk to meet Jack for a date and found him wrapped around a pretty blonde barrel racer he’d met while waiting for Mara to arrive. He’d been three sheets to the wind already, and when he spotted Mara, he’d just smiled a drunken smile and shrugged.

  Just shrugged, as if to say, what’s a cowboy to do?

  God, she hated him for that.

  She’d never believed for a second that he’d change. Not for a second. Men like Jack Drummond barreled their careless ways through the world, leaving destruction in their wake, and almost never suffered the consequences.

  “Maybe he just hides it better now,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Quinn conceded. “Or maybe something happened to change his behavior.”

  She knew what he was suggesting. She’d never told him about what had happened in Amarillo, but Quinn was smart enough to guess.

  “I don’t care,” she said flatly, looking at the duffel bag lying at her feet. She didn’t intend to stick around Purgatory for another hour, so what Jack Drummond had or hadn’t done four years ago meant nothing to her.

  Nothing at all.

  “Why do I think there’s something you’re not telling me?” Quinn asked.

  “Because you’re a suspicious old spook,” she snapped back. “Go bother someone else.” She ended the call, her hands shaking.

  Stop, she thought, forcing her hands to go still. She took a couple of long, deep breaths, tried to clear her mind of the clutter that Jack Drummond’s unexpected invasion of her life had wrought.

  The data-shredding programs she’d fed into her remaining computers were nearly finished. Anyone, Quinn included, who tried to figure out what she’d been working on would fail.

  The information she needed to continue her work was saved on three portable flash drives sewn into the padding of her backpack, safe enough for the moment. Once she reached her next bolt-hole, she’d try to find a safer place to keep them.

  It was time to leave Mara Jennings behind for good.

  Chapter Four

  Darkness fell across the woods surrounding Mara Jennings’s cabin, aided by lowering clouds that cocooned the cabin in a misty veil. Rain had not yet started to fall, but the air outside the truck was cool and damp with the promise of precipitation when Jack got out to stretch his legs.

  Nothing had stirred around the cabin for a couple of hours. No cars had passed his parking place going in either direction. He checked his watch as he climbed back into the truck—not even eight o’clock yet.

  Where the hell was she?

  Suddenly, light flickered on inside the cabin.

  Jack sat forward with a start.

  A dark silhouette glided past the one window Jack could see from his vantage point. It was hard to make out distinguishing characteristics like height or shape, but he supposed it might have been a female.

  Had Mara been in the cabin this whole time? Or had an intruder made his way inside without Jack seeing him?

  He’d unpacked his Colt pistol and load
ed it while he was waiting for something to happen. He checked it now, making sure he had a round chambered, and reached for the door handle.

  The light in the cabin went off.

  Jack froze in place.

  A second later, the front door opened and a dark-clad figure slipped out onto the porch. It crossed to the steps and began to descend, coming out of the shadow of the porch roof.

  Despite the darkness of the cloud-covered night, Jack’s eyes had adjusted enough to the low light to make out Mara’s pretty oval-shaped face as she lifted it toward him.

  She froze in place when she spotted his truck.

  He knew she probably couldn’t see him sitting there in the cab, watching her. Maybe she’d just assume his brother-in-law drove him back to the hotel for the night and they’d pick up the truck in the morning.

  After a few more seconds of complete stillness, Mara edged toward the tree line to her left, closer and closer to the woods. If she entered the dense thicket of trees and underbrush, he’d lose sight of her completely.

  Would that be so bad?

  “Yes,” he whispered, the hiss of breath loud in the quiet truck cab. It would be bad, because the woman was clearly in trouble. Someone had tried to attack her that afternoon and now she was sneaking out of her house with a duffel bag and a backpack and disappearing into the woods. After dark.

  What the hell was going on with her?

  Gunfire split the silent mountain air, impossibly close. Ducking on instinct, Jack peered through the truck’s passenger window, his heart rate tripling in the span of a few seconds.

  Was she shooting at him?

  A rustle of bushes caught his attention just before Mara raced onto the road in front of his truck. A second shot rang out as before, and Mara halted with a jerk. She pitched forward, disappearing from his view.

  Jack’s heart stuttered as he scooted toward the driver’s door, jerking twice at the door handle before he managed to get it open.

  Keeping low, he moved toward the front of the truck and peered around the bumper.

  Mara lay facedown on the gravel, her eyes half-open and her breath coming in harsh gasps.

  For a second, Jack wasn’t sure what to do. He might consider himself a man of action, but most of the action had to do with planting his tail on the back of an enormous, angry bull and trying to stay there for eight seconds. He was a pretty good shot with the Colt pistol gripped tightly in his right hand when he was standing at a shooting range with nothing else going on, but he’d never been shot at in his life.

  “Mara?” he whispered, looking for blood in the dark gravel beneath her body.

  In the woods to his right, the whisper of movement in the bushes spurred him into action. Scrambling forward, he grabbed Mara by the upper arms and dragged her around the truck. She struggled weakly against his grip, but he managed to get her tucked between him and the door of the truck.

  “Where were you hit?” he asked quietly, daring a quick peek over the bed of the truck.

  “Are you with him?” she asked in a raspy growl.

  “What?”

  “The man with the gun—are you with him?”

  Jack heard more movement in the woods. A lot closer this time.

  Without taking time to answer her, he moved her to the side and pulled open the door of the truck. “Can you get in?”

  Her eyes met his, glittering in the dim glow of the truck’s dome light. He felt her wriggle against him, the slide of her body against his sending an unexpected, badly timed flood of heat pouring into his groin. She turned around, the curve of her bottom brushing against him and sparking more fires as she scrambled into the truck cab ahead of him. “Get us out of here.”

  He pulled himself behind the wheel and turned the key. The truck growled to life.

  “Is there a faster way out of here than backward?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Hold on.” He put the truck in Reverse and hit the gas pedal. The Ford truck jerked backward, spraying gravel as he braked, spun the steering wheel into the resulting slide and whipped the truck into Drive, shooting forward.

  Beside him, Mara’s hands gripped the dashboard as she struggled to keep from tumbling onto the floorboard. “Go!” she rasped.

  Another gunshot rang out. Jack heard the screech of metal on metal and realized the last shot had hit the truck. He swallowed a profanity and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

  “Left or right?” he asked seconds later, forced to brake when they reached the T intersection with the winding road that had brought him there from the main highway.

  “Left,” she said after the briefest of hesitations.

  Right would take them to the highway, he knew. He wondered where she was taking them.

  He watched the rearview mirror as he barreled along the narrow two-lane road that appeared to hug the curvy contours of Deception Lake. Riley and Hannah had taken him fishing there earlier that morning, he realized, though probably on a different part of the lake, since nothing about this road or these woods seemed familiar to him.

  He spared a quick look at Mara. “Where are you injured?”

  “My pride,” she answered in a hard, flat tone.

  “You were shot.”

  “My duffel took the bullet. It knocked me down and winded me, but I’m not shot.”

  He wasn’t sure he believed her. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he could believe a single thing she’d said to him since they ran into each other at the diner a few hours earlier.

  “Who was shooting at us?”

  “Us?” She looked at him from beneath the tangled fringe of her auburn bangs, wide-eyed and rattled.

  “I’m pretty sure there’s a bullet hole in my truck, so yeah. Us.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was lying. At least, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Maybe she didn’t know exactly who’d ambushed her in her cabin or who had started taking potshots at them from the woods.

  But she had a theory, one she had no intention of sharing. He could hear the secret hiding in her voice.

  Fine. He could table his curiosity a little longer, while they got as far away from the gun-wielding maniac in the woods. But as soon as they found a safe place to stop and regroup, he was going to ask a lot more questions.

  And she was damn well going to answer them.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME they reached the point where the lakefront road ended in a T intersection with another highway, the rain that had been threatening all afternoon hit with a vengeance, pelting the truck and limiting visibility to a few dozen yards. The highway at this end of the lakefront road was the main artery leading from Purgatory to the little mountain hamlet of Poe Creek about fifteen miles north.

  Like Purgatory, Poe Creek had never managed to become a tourist destination as so many little towns in the Smokies had, but its close proximity to the mountains as well as a main road to Douglas Lake ensured that there were a handful of hotels and motels in the area, including several small, cheap places where a few bucks could get the night clerk to look the other way when you rented a room with cash and no identification.

  She directed Jack to head north, shifting her duffel bag to her lap and setting the backpack on the floorboard at her feet. She took time to buckle her seat belt—the last thing she needed was the Tennessee Highway Patrol to flag them down for breaking the state’s seat-belt law. “Can you belt yourself while driving?” she asked.

  Jack shot her an incredulous look. “A little busy trying to see ten feet in front of the truck at the moment.”

  “Hand me the buckle and I’ll do it for you.” She knew, in the greater scheme of things, seat-belt safety laws were way down on the list of things she needed to worry about at the moment, but doing something—anything—that would restore a sense of control was a good thing in her book.

  Jack passed the seat belt across his lap and shoulder, and she took the buckle he held out to her, pulling it down into place and connecting it
with the latch at his hip. Her fingers brushed his thigh as she finished, making the skin of her knuckles tingle where they’d touched the denim-clad warmth of his muscular leg.

  She pulled her hand back into her lap and grabbed the duffel bag, inspecting the hole that had ripped through one end of the sturdy canvas.

  “Are you sure you weren’t hit?” Jack shot another worried glance her way.

  “Positive.” She made herself look away from his dark eyes, a little unnerved by the attention. She’d spent most of the past few years of her life cultivating an aura of invisibility, making herself as unobtrusive and unremarkable as possible—a complete turnaround from her first twenty-three years of life, when all she’d craved was attention and she’d gone out of her way to find spectacular, outrageous ways to make it happen.

  She’d learned the hard way that the wrong kind of attention could be downright deadly.

  “Where are we going?” Jack asked.

  She didn’t like the way he used the word we, as if he thought he was any part of what she had planned. For all she knew, he was involved in this whole mess she’d managed to land herself in the middle of. How could she be sure that he just happened to be there, picking up his truck, at the moment she tried to make her escape and ran into another camouflage-clad man on a mission, this time carrying a rifle?

  She couldn’t be sure it was the same man who’d accosted her on the porch of her cabin. Neither could she be certain he wasn’t.

  In short, she didn’t know who was after her. Or why.

  Though the “why” part of the equation was pretty limited. Either it was the project she’d been working on for Alexander Quinn that had drawn unwanted attention to her, or it was something from her past rising to bite her again. Either way, she had to get as far away from Purgatory as she could, as fast as she could.

  And she had to do it flying under the radar, which meant the last thing she needed slowing her down was a cowboy with no idea who she was or what kind of unholy mess he was swaggering into.

  “Not going to answer?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

  “Just go until I tell you to stop.”