The Lawman Meets His Bride (11 page)

“If I were you,” she warned the semiconscious man, “I’d choose a different theme for my babbling. You’re pushing your luck.”

“Push my luck,” he repeated. “Quinn, Quinn, he’s our man….”

She got in behind the wheel and turned the heater on. Ignoring the deliriously rambling man in the back-seat, she wheeled onto Old Mill Road and headed back down the mountain. With each bend in the road, she expected to spot the gray sedan.

She fought to control her inner turmoil. No matter what her instincts told her about this stranger, she was still a criminal in the eyes of everyone else if she got caught helping him. Which naturally made her wonder how she could be doing something like this after the shame and humiliation Doug Huntington put her through.

True, most folks in Mystery had been too kind to openly pity her. But she’d felt it behind their greetings and small talk:
Poor girl, practically jilted at the altar.
Even though she was the one who called off the wedding, not Doug. Such events never got recorded accurately in township lore. Rather, they became what Hazel sneered at as “saloon gossip.”

But even saloon gossip, Constance realized, couldn’t exaggerate the mess she was in now.

The car shimmied hard as it rolled over a stretch of washboard road. Loudon muttered behind her, “His ma ’n’ pa are in the slam.”

Against all her expectations, Constance made it home without incident. Now she faced the problem
of where to put her abductor-turned-patient.

As the car nosed into the long driveway, she pressed her garage-door opener. Despite the clutter of bicycles, lawn mower, storm windows, and extra FOR SALE signs stored inside the attached garage, she was able to shoehorn the Taurus inside and just barely close the door behind her.

“Mr. Loudon? Can you hear me?” she asked as she opened the back door of the car. A single, unshaded, 25-watt bulb hanging from a long string was the only illumination.

“Hear you, Mr. Loudon,” he repeated. “Thirsty…Mr. Loudon thirsty, hear you?”

Once again he helped her just enough that she was able to get him out of the car. But he immediately slumped in her arms, his knees simply unhinging.

She knew she could never get him into the house while he was like this.

With his head and shoulders propped against her legs, she cast a quick glance around the cluttered garage. There was her old futon rolled up against the big box of Christmas-tree ornaments. She could leave him right there, she decided. At least for now, with plenty of blankets. Nobody ever came into the garage, anyway. It was the safest place in the house. But there was no heat, so if the temperature took a nose dive, he’d have to come inside.

She let him slide gently down to the floor, then moved her mountain bike and some other things, quickly clearing a little area to unroll the futon. When she had him resting comfortably on it, she opened the garage door and backed the rental car out onto the concrete parking apron. She came back inside and
shut the overhead door again with the automatic opener.

The only other door in the garage led into the kitchen, so she was able to quickly assemble some necessary items without opening the garage door again. Loudon was conscious the next time she bent over him. His variable eyes were almost teal in the dim light of the single overhead bulb.

“These should help with the fever and pain,” she told him, shaking two extra-strength caplets into her hand. Her other hand supported the back of his head while he drank from the glass of water she held to his lips.

He almost coughed up the caplets, but drank greedily. He even tried to tip the glass more when she stopped, but Constance kept pulling it back to slow him down so he wouldn’t choke.

“Well, Miss Adams,” he said in a weak but clear voice. “Looks like you’ve gone way beyond rendering good-Samaritan aid.”

“I don’t need a smirking lawyer to tell me that,” she assured him as she wiped a damp sponge over his face.

“Who’s smirking? I don’t feel
that
good.”

“It’s in your voice, not your face.”

He raised his bemused face enough to glance at her hands, busy at the front of his trousers.

“You say such things to me while you undo my belt? I’m receiving a mixed signal here,” he muttered weakly.

“I hate to rain all over your parade, but you’re not getting any signals whatsoever,” she assured him. “Either I ruin your trousers with the scissors, or I take them down. I have to look at your wound.”

Her practical, lecturing tone coaxed a smile onto his tired face.

“Look at my…wound,” he repeated, pausing suggestively and letting his tone tease her. “Promise not to peek anywhere else? I’m very bashful.”

“I’ll try very, very hard to control myself,” she assured him. “Now lift up your hips, I can’t…there.”

His trousers slid down, bunching around his muscular thighs. She was grateful for the long tails on his dress shirt. They made it easier to maintain some modesty.

“Roll over on your stomach,” she told him.

He complied, wincing at the effort.

Pressing her bottom lip between her teeth, she forced herself to study the angry, blue-black, puckered flesh where the bullet had entered the muscle of his thigh in back.

She bathed the area in hydrogen peroxide, then soaped it clean.

“It looks like maybe you got lucky,” she pronounced after a minute of close scrutiny. “I think the bullet went in at an angle and came out near the front.

“Yes,” she confirmed a second later, studying the muscular bulge of thigh muscle on the front of his leg. There was another wound there. An exit wound. She also held up the expensive fabric of his trousers. “Here’s a second small tear where the bullet must’ve come out.”

He seemed to ignore all this. Staring at her with those unsettling smoky eyes, he finally asked, “Why are you helping me?” A long pause ensued. “You know you’re harboring a fugitive.”

“Maybe I’m just a dumb female who hasn’t got a
clue. Or maybe I just like to live dangerously, Mr. Loudon. You know—another wholesome, hometown girl who secretly craves life on the edge with a bad boy.”

He mustered enough energy to give a little snort. “I’d say something sarcastic, but your ironic tone beat me to it.”

“By now,” she told him as she poured another glass of water from a plastic pitcher, “infection from your wound may have spread to your bloodstream. That might explain your fever. If you’re not allergic to penicillin, take these antibiotics. I’ll give you two now and another two every few hours.”

“Yes, Doctor,” he quipped. “Or is it R.N.?”

“My aunt Janet’s the nurse. These are left over from a strep infection last month.”

He swallowed two along with the entire glass of water.

“What day is this?” he asked suddenly as he handed the glass back to her. Their hands brushed as she took it, and both of them seemed momentarily startled.

“Sunday,” she told him. “It’s about 2:00 p.m.”

“You have got to be kidding.” He groaned as he collapsed back onto the futon. “I don’t
believe
I wasted more than an entire day driving out in the boonies. Driving in circles, at that.”

“Why did you come back to the cabin?”

He ran his hand over his face as if in exasperation. “I figured after I dropped you that you’d tell the authorities I was headed for Billings. That was the last place I wanted to go until the heat wore off. So I came back to Mystery. With no place to go or hide,
I found my way back to the cabin. It was my only salvation.”

“Roll over again,” she ordered. “I need to put a dressing on your wound.”

This time she had to help him. While she wrapped and taped the wound, he explained his aborted trip to Billings.

“You must have called in the cavalry on me right away,” he lamented.

“Excuse me, I was still a law-abiding citizen then. Hold
still,
” she added.

“They had a checkpoint set up before I got twenty miles. I shifted your Jeep into four-wheel and hit the slopes. Man, that thing walks up walls, doesn’t it?”

“I guess it does, now.
Please
stop wiggling, I can’t—”

“Well dammit, it hurts! Anyhow, I didn’t drive the whole time. I was too tired. I hid and slept for most of it. I followed whatever fire trails I could find, hit a couple dirt roads. God knows how I made it back to the cabin.”

“God knows,” she repeated ironically. “Just awful blessed, I guess. There, it’s bandaged. I put ointment on the dressing so it won’t stick. You can pull your trousers up now.”

“Thanks. You’re a good nurse—nice hands,” he observed as he wiggled his pants over his hips.

“I shall treasure that compliment in the locket of my heart.” Her tone altered, became more serious as she added, “To whom shall I send the bill—Roger Ulrick or Todd Mumford?”

His eyelids had begun to ease shut. Now they snapped wide open. He even tried to sit up, but abandoned the effort.

“You spoke with them?” he demanded.

“Spoke? It wasn’t exactly a coffeeklatch. They woke me up on Saturday morning in my motel room.”

She knew that even if she was wrong about Loudon, even if he was guilty, it wouldn’t matter if she told him what the D.A. and the FBI agent had asked her. He listened carefully, especially when she mentioned Ulrick’s emphasis on what it was that Loudon needed to get in Billings.

“Since those two interrogated me,” she concluded, “someone has been following me. Someone in a gray sedan. I gave him the slip today just before I found you. Whoever it is could be watching my house right now.”

He remained silent for some time after she quit speaking, letting all this soak in, his handsome, beard-scruffed features set rigid as granite.

“Mumford,” he finally told her, “is on the up-and-up. Straight-arrow and by the book. The quiet type who sees more than most people realize. I’ll vouch for him. But Ulrick?”

He paused, his cracked lips twitching into a parody of a grin. “Hearing he’s in the mix worries me. He’s way over his head in debt. First he took a tough hit on the foreign stock markets. Then he went through a messy divorce that’s still being litigated. He’s got some serious debt issues, or that’s the buzz around the office water cooler, anyway.”

“Serious debts? You mean, serious enough that he could be involved in these kickbacks you’ve been investigating?”

Loudon nodded. “Sure. He was on my list to check
out—the list they claim I compiled as bribery targets.”

“The news hasn’t mentioned that, I don’t think.”

“TV keeps it simple. But I knew it had to go further than just Jeremy Schrader and Brandon Whitaker. I can see Ulrick getting hungry for a little percentage, then, when the scam goes public, taking…extraordinary steps to cover up his dirt.”

“What would be ‘extraordinary steps’?” she asked.

He stared at her. His only words were, “Cody Anders would know.”

Quinn fell back against the futon while Constance left for the kitchen with the used gauze and cotton. A few moments later he began thinking. None of it settled well with him.

They would toss his apartment in Billings. And his office. That was all right, let them. They wouldn’t find it. He learned from the best. Always hide your hole card.

After all, his evidence boiled down to one computer disk full of geometric accusations and statistical innuendos. The mathematical equivalent, in law enforcement, of genetic match-ups. Probability science applied to routine phone and financial records to establish a pattern of money-laundering by Schrader and Whitaker—and others, if only he could have found time to prove it. Others like Ulrick and perhaps even Dolph Merriday.

He just hoped his evidence wasn’t too high-tech and “academic” for the court system. It lacked the drama of a tearful confession or a crime caught on video.

But once it sank in, it would surely shift the pros
ecutor’s focus away from him and onto them. With luck, the courts would use his data to subpoena a few key records. That additional data, in turn, could provide scientifically impressive evidence to trump their hearsay and planted evidence against him.

He started, realizing she’d returned from the kitchen. Now she stared down at him with those witchy amber eyes this time filled with inquiry, not hostility.

“What the hell am I doing?” she whispered as if for her ears alone.

“It’s dangerous enough that you’re helping me. But it’s absolutely reckless for me to be telling you what it is they want. I’ve already said too much.”

“
Now
you’re stricken with conscience?” The warmth of indignation rose in her cheeks. “You tell a lie to lure me into the mountains. You pull a gun out on me—”

“I object. I
showed
you the gun,” he corrected her. “It was never ‘on’ you. Technically, you know, it’s called ‘brandishing’ a weapon as opposed to a direct threat of force.”

“Listen to the lawyer crank it up,” she mocked him, gathering her medical and cleaning supplies. “No doubt you could lay a feather on a rock and prove it’s a sofa, too. But
I
won’t sleep on it. You know, you also stole my Jeep. And now, all of a sudden, you’re afraid to get ‘reckless’ with me? Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Quinn. I liked you better when you were simply an honest ruffian.”

“If you really feel that way,” he replied quietly, avoiding her angry eyes, “then why not just turn me in? There’s no gun
on
you now, is there?”

“Maybe I will,” she fired back over her shoulder as she headed toward the kitchen door.

“Go ahead. I’m damned if I’m begging your pity. Tell them I forced you again. Say I raped you, I won’t deny it. You’ll get out of this clean. If you’re awfully lucky, that is.”

She turned, one hand on the doorknob. “What do you mean, if I’m lucky?”

He was clearly tiring again, and it cost him an obvious effort to be heard across the width of the garage.

“I mean that, like it or not, it appears Ulrick either doesn’t believe, or is at least suspicious of, the answers you gave him in your motel room.”

“Maybe he’s given up on me,” she pointed out. “Nobody’s been here or even called.”