Hold Your Breath (Search and Rescue) (10 page)

“Tomorrow should work.” He headed for his truck. “I’ll see if Wilt’s available to respond to any calls while we’re gone.”

“Great. So I’ll see you tomorrow at, what, seven thirty or so?”

He gave her a hard look over the hood of his truck. “Good try. I’ll be here tonight after the board meeting.” Scowling, he added, “I’d rather you not be alone at all, especially after it gets dark. Why don’t you attend the board meeting with me?”

Appalled, Lou stared at him, hoping her expression fully conveyed her horror at the idea. “Why don’t you just shoot me in the face, because I think I’d prefer that to sitting through a two-hour meeting where people squabble about county ordinances and the acceptable decibel level of old Mr. Zarnecki’s generator.”

His eyebrows rose. “You’ve been to one of these meetings then? I haven’t seen you there.”

Shaking her head, she explained, “My mom is very much into civic responsibility, and she dragged me, kicking and screaming, with her. Also, when I was in high school, our neighbor was in a grudge match with my stepdad. Their weapons were city ordinances and arcane state laws about fence lines and swimming pools and tree branch heights. It got pretty ugly. My mom insisted I attend the city council meetings with them in a show of familial support.”

He blinked. “Sounds brutal.”

“It was. So, no, I’m afraid I must decline your kind invitation to the board meeting tonight. But I do promise to stay inside with my doors locked and my shotgun within easy reach.”

“Good.” He opened his truck door.

“Um, you do realize that last part was sarcastic?” she asked. “I mean, not the locking the door part, since I will do that, but the shotgun thing. I don’t actually own a shotgun.”

He looked at her as if she’d just said she didn’t believe in eating food. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll bring one of mine.”

She paused to digest that. “Ah…okay. So it’s a shotgun kind of sleepover then. Good to know.”

With an amused snort, he climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the pickup’s door. His truck came to life with a roar. After lifting his fingers off the steering wheel in a manly wave, he followed the deputy’s example and executed a neat three-point turn before heading down the driveway toward the county road.

Although she was shivering, she watched him leave, turning to enter her cabin only when his pickup disappeared from sight and she could no longer hear its engine. But as she walked inside, her trembling got worse instead of better. Her warm little home felt foreign and too exposed, as if her stalker had, through his uninvited nighttime visit, turned her walls transparent.

She hovered in the entryway for a few more seconds before grabbing her laptop and her truck keys. Hopping into her own pickup, she headed to town.

* * *

Lou loved libraries, all libraries. They’d been her refuge and her comfort when she’d been growing up. Even the tiny, underfunded Simpson Library made her stomach warm with a feeling of happy familiarity.

After waving to Bart, the sole librarian, and getting the usual suspicious glare in return, she set up camp in the back corner. Although several rows of shelving provided some privacy, she knew from previous visits that Bart was sure to make multiple passes through the stacks closest to her, making a big show of reshelving books. Lou was pretty sure his real motivation was to check that she wasn’t doing anything shady, like tearing out pages of reference books or using her penknife to carve “Lou + Callum” in the wooden table.

This mental image brought a flood of worries about Callum, his new status as her roommate, and all the potential awkwardness that situation could have. It was hard enough being near him at training, and that was when he had on multiple layers of clothing. Living with him was going to create a bunch of uncomfortable situations. Undressing and showering and brushing her teeth with him in the next room seemed so…
intimate
. Just the thought of the upcoming night made her skin heat. With enormous effort, she shoved all Callum-related thoughts out of her mind and focused on HDG research.

Although Callum—damn, she just thought about him again!—had warned her about trying to force facts to fit favorite theories instead of letting the facts form the theories, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a little Internet research. Since the conversation with the sheriff and his son was fresh in her mind, she started surfing the web for information about local militia groups.

There was nothing specific about the antigovernment group Callum had mentioned, the one that had taken over the old Miller compound, but there was oodles of information about militias. It was fascinating, especially when she thought about how the local group was located less than ten miles from her cabin.

She was engrossed in reading about an illegal weapons raid on a compound in Michigan when a voice made her jump.

“Lou, right?”

Her first instinct was to slam her laptop closed, but she settled down quickly, realizing that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. Instead of acting like she’d been looking at porn, she glanced up casually and saw the sheriff’s son smirking at her from across the table.

“Yeah,” she said, belatedly answering his question. “Hi, Tyler.”

“What are you doing here?” Pulling out the chair across from her and flipping it around, he straddled the seat and laid his arms over the back.

“I needed a change of scenery,” she said, lowering the top of her laptop, since it looked like Tyler was settling in for a chat. She didn’t mind too much, though. Despite the sulky attitude, he seemed like a nice kid, and her eyes were starting to get a little fuzzy from staring at the computer screen without a break. “How about you? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“It’s been out for, like, an hour.” He jerked his chin toward the clock on the wall. It was almost four thirty.

“Wow. I didn’t realize I’d been working on the computer for so long.” She scrunched up her face. “No wonder I can’t focus my eyes anymore.”

“I do that sometimes.” At her questioning look, he clarified, “Get caught up in the computer. Just messing around online, and then I realize that I’ve just wasted hours doing nothing.”

Reaching her arms overhead, she stretched out her tight muscles. “Yeah, it happens.” Cocking her head to the side, she regarding him curiously. “So what are you doing in the library instead of…well, whatever kids do after school nowadays?”

He snorted. “Yeah, ’cause you’ve been done with school for, what? Like, two years?”

“High school? Try eight years.”

“Yeah? You look younger.”

Lou turned what wanted to be a laugh into a cough. Was this little punk
flirting
with her? “You never answered my question.” When he looked confused, she added, “Library?”

Dropping his gaze to the table, he shrugged. “Dad’s at work, so the house is really quiet. I come here to do homework sometimes. Bart’s not the best company, but…” He shrugged again as his words trailed off.

She felt a surge of empathy, his explanation sharply reminding her what it felt like to be that lonely, awkward kid. Maybe he hadn’t been flirting. Maybe he was just desperate for company. He looked uncomfortable and a little embarrassed, so she changed the subject.

“Did your friends have any other theories about the guy found in the reservoir?” Once the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. What kind of person tried to pump a teenager for information on a dead guy, especially when that information came from other clueless high schoolers?

But Tyler immediately sat straighter, his eyes brightening. He didn’t seem to mind the topic. “Tons. It’s all anyone talks about at school. Simpson isn’t the most exciting place, you know. The only stuff that happens is, like, some girl broke up with some guy or, you know, the Masons’ shed burned down or whatever.” He smiled.

Actually, with headless, floating dead guys popping up in reservoirs and tire-slashing, honey-dribbling stalkers on the loose, Lou could’ve done with a little less excitement lately. Instead of saying this, she just made a noncommittal sound that could have been interpreted as agreement.

“Some people have some crazy ideas,” Tyler continued, “like that there’s a serial killer living in Simpson, or that some occultists cut his head off as, like, a present to the devil, but the most popular theory is he got on the bad side of the Freedom Survivors.”

“Freedom Survivors?”

“That militia group outside of town.”

Lou made a face. “What kind of name is the Freedom Survivors? It makes it sound like they survived freedom.”

He shrugged. “What would you call them?”

“If I got to pick the name?” She thought for a moment. “How about Liberty or Death? Or maybe Soldiers of Freedom?”

“Like the video game?”

“No, like—” She was interrupted by someone clearing his throat. The throat-clearer sounded annoyed, so she was not too surprised to see that it was Callum.

“Hi,” she said with a sunny smile, knowing that would aggravate him even more. She had to take her fun where she could find it.

“Sparks,” he said, politely enough, although there was a growl somewhere underneath her name. “Is there a reason you’re not answering your phone?”

She glanced down at the coat hanging over the back of her chair. The phone was buried in one of the pockets, silenced as was only polite in a library. “The ringer’s off.”

Closing his eyes, he looked a little pained. “Would you mind turning your ringer
on
for the remainder of the day?”

“Sure.” She glanced at the clock. “I should head home anyway.”

“Have you eaten yet?”

“No.” As if on cue, her stomach growled. “I’m starving, actually.”

“Want to go to Levi’s for some barbecue?”

Her eyes widened. “With you?”

“If you want to sit at separate tables, we can.” He really was the king of sarcasm. Before she met him, she’d thought she’d ranked pretty high in sarcasm royalty. Callum made her feel like an amateur.

She smiled. “I might take you up on that. Only if you’re especially irritating, though.”

He either grimaced or suppressed a smile—she wasn’t sure which—and then turned to the teenager listening in on their conversation. “Tyler.”

“How’s it going?” Tyler asked flatly, his expression surly again.

Callum obviously took the question as a greeting rather than an actual inquiry, because he turned to Lou and asked, “Ready?”

Nodding, she stood and pulled her coat off the back of her chair. As she shoved her arms into the sleeves, she looked at Tyler. “Thanks for sharing your theories with me. Good luck with that homework.”

“Sure, whatever.”

She grabbed her laptop, slid it into her bag, and gave Tyler a final wave. He just lifted his chin in response without looking at her, his eyebrows pulled down in a glower. He focused on the top of the table, rubbing his thumb over a nick in the wood with almost violent force.

As Callum escorted her past a scowling Bart and through the exterior door with his hand on her lower back, she eyed him curiously. “How’d you know to look for me here?”

He tipped his head toward her truck, parked on the street in front of the library.

“Oh.” She grinned. “Those are quite the investigatory skills. I chose well when picking my HDG research partner.”

He just shrugged in obvious agreement, which made her laugh. The barbecue place was only six blocks away, so they left their trucks parked at the library and walked.

“Did you find out anything interesting from Rob’s kid?” he asked. His hand still hadn’t left her lower back, which was a little distracting. Nice, but distracting.

“Just that he’s lonely, doesn’t like going home to an empty house,
does
like to hit on older women, could be a little jealous of you because you get to eat barbecue with the wonder that is
moi
, and works on his homework in the library after school. Also, there are some crazy stories about our HDG circulating around the high school that involve serial killers and devil worshippers. Oh, and the local militia group has a really stupid name.”

He blinked, apparently processing. “He hit on you?”

“That’s what you pulled out of that mess?” She frowned. “The poor kid’s lonely, like I said. Where’s his mom, do you know?”

“Sydney had some mental health issues—probably still does. She’d take off for a week or a month and then come back to Rob and their kid for a while. She left for good about nine years ago.”

“Poor kid,” she said again. “Poor Rob.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Don’t get all sappy for the sheriff.”

“I’m not getting sappy for the sheriff,” she huffed. “I just feel bad for the guy—single dad, messed-up ex-wife…”

“Why do women always want to fix broken men?” he grumbled.

Stopping in front of Levi’s, she turned to face Callum. “I don’t want to fix him or do anything to him. He is nice—and really hot, of course—but he kind of intimidates me, to be honest. He’s so…in control of things. Official.”

“So I’m not official? You’re obviously not intimidated by me.” He nudged her toward the door, and she started walking again.

“You’re official.” As she stepped through the door that Callum held open, she tried to figure out the difference between the two men and put it into words. “You’re just…
my
official. It’s different.” She closed her eyes briefly when she heard the words come out completely wrong. “Never mind.”

But Callum apparently didn’t want to drop it. “I’m
your
official, huh?”

“And I am intimidated by you sometimes.” She waved at Levi’s wife, Bonnie, and took a booth in the corner. Callum did some quick maneuvering so he could have his back to the wall. Since she really didn’t care if she had a clear view of the restaurant and everyone in it, she settled on the other side of the booth without complaint. “Just not so much anymore, especially since we’ve started the HDG research. Now it feels like we’re partners, rather than the drill sergeant/peon relationship we had before.”

Bonnie arrived with menus, a couple of glasses of water, and two straws, dispensing everything with the competence of years of experience.