Trapped by a Dangerous Man (2 page)

There wasn’t any good reason for me to go in there except that I was half-assedly looking for clearance Halloween decorations. My best friend Veronica, who had, sadly, recently moved several towns over, had a fuzzy black spider that sat behind her toilet, motion detectors in its eyes. Whenever someone used her bathroom, the timer waited until the unsuspecting visitor was nice and relaxed. Then the spider cackled out some cheesy taunt. The first time it got me, I almost had a heart attack, but then couldn’t stop laughing. The thing was supposed to sit near a door to frighten trick-or-treaters, but Veronica recognized an opportunity when she saw one.

I wanted one of those spiders. Couldn’t justify spending the fifty bucks she had paid, but I figured if the stores had any in stock a month after Halloween, the prices would be seriously marked down.

The only other people in the store were a mummified employee who looked like a shrunken apple when she smiled, and a nervous woman clutching the handles of an empty stroller. The nervous woman kept sending text messages. Her dark eyes were cold, but anxious.

She was probably hiding from the bitter wind, maybe waiting for her husband to return with the kid. I liked to watch people, to make up stories about their lives… the result of a childhood deprived of television.
 

Bells jangled as the door pushed open, and a tall man entered. He wore a long, dark coat and a cowboy hat angled low over his eyes. Still, I could see his square jaw, darkened with stubble. I half-expected him to set down a boom box and start whipping off his clothes.
 

I estimated he was about 6’3”, broad shoulders, surely in good shape under that coat. A man like that needed a good story. I decided he was a superhero, looking to replace a coffee mug that his arch-nemesis had destroyed. Superhero. Yummy. And maybe he needed a good woman by his side.
 

To my dismay, he approached the nervous woman, his head still down. She waited quietly, her lips pressed together.
 

In my line of work, I knew better than to assume that women were innocent and men were evil, but she was a foot shorter than he was, and as he closed in on her, he seemed stiff with contained anger. There were times to mind my own business, and times to get involved, and this was looking like the latter.

I circled around until I was close enough to overhear them. That was my magic gift: acute hearing. Ok, maybe I’d spent my last paycheck on a nifty little sound amplification device. After an enthusiastic honeymoon—during which I’d tried it out in restaurants, a shopping mall, a skating rink and, painfully, the noisy playground at my third-grader cousin’s elementary school—I’d left it in my coat pocket. The device hadn’t blown me away, but according to the online forums, there was a learning curve. I dug it out and wiggled it into my ear.

“… Can’t do it, Corbin,” the woman hissed.

Corbin,
I thought.
Interesting name.
 

Maybe she looked like a mouse, but there was an edge to her voice that told me she could handle herself. Me as backup wasn’t necessary.
 

If I were a better person, I would have stopped eavesdropping then and there. But if I were a better person, I could have found a higher calling than joining the family bounty-hunting and slime-catching business. Especially because my father made sure that Rob and I didn’t get a shot at the big fish. Not that anything larger than a minnow often swam our way, but when it happened, the opportunity invariably went to someone else, usually one of the middle-aged and male part-timers Dad allowed to skip work for weeks at a time.

Besides, I was dying to know what the woman couldn’t do; the reasons for her nervousness had taken on a fascinating allure, and I suspected that whatever was going on would be better than any inventions of my own. In short, I was being nosy.

Corbin didn’t answer the woman, and when she spoke again, panic tinged her voice. “Please don’t make me,” she whispered. In my ear, her words were as clear as if she were standing next to me.

“Cut the bullshit.” Corbin’s voice was thick with tightly controlled anger. Despite that, he had a deep, gruffly sexy voice, the kind that if you overheard in a restaurant, you’d sneak a glance to check out the owner. “We had a deal. I’m leaving tomorrow morning, and if you don’t come through…” He didn’t need to finish the threat. I shuddered and assumed the unfortunate woman was doing the same.

“But there are agents watching my house,” she insisted. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

Agents?
Another tremor ran through me. Curiosity had me dying to look at the unlikely pair, but self-preservation won out. I grabbed a handful of birthday cards.

“Find a way,” Corbin growled. “There’s a snowstorm. What better cover do you want? Remember that it’s your boyfriend on the line, and I’m not running a charity. If you want to keep him out of jail, you’ll make the trade. If you want to stay in my good graces—and believe me, Nellie, you do—then you’ll uphold your end of the deal.”

Nellie’s quiet sobs came in clearly through the amplifier, and I wanted to walk over and punch Corbin in the face. Not that I felt she needed someone to come to her rescue, or that she deserved it, but this guy was
such
a dick. That’s what most people didn’t understand about my job. I did it because yeah, I needed the crappy little paychecks, but I also got a bit of satisfaction from a job well done. Tracking down people who broke the law made me feel good. In my not-so-limited experience with minor criminals, they were assholes. Every so often there was a decent sob story that made me feel like a piece of human scum, but generally? They were the scum, and not even human.

“Should I make a phone call?” he snarled. “Or have you decided to follow through?”

“Yes, Corbin,” the woman stuttered. She was now crying loudly enough that the noise carried across the store, and the mummified woman came from behind the register to investigate.

Right. I needed to react as well, or it’d be weird. I looked up, and my gaze connected with Corbin’s emotionless eyes. Even in the shadow of his cowboy hat, I saw that his irises were a vivid shade of blue-green, the likes of which I’d never seen. The rest of his face was equally arresting. He looked away as the shopkeeper approached, but for a long moment, I stared at him, unable to breathe. He was gorgeous. Not just attractive, or sexy, but
gorgeous.
Square chin. Strong nose. A generous mouth that was lightly turning up in a forced smile, revealing straight teeth. And those eyes fringed by black lashes… oof.

Blushing, I tore my gaze away and pretended to be really interested in the “Menopause is a party” display in front of me. But the call to look at him again was too strong, probably made stronger by the realization that the man was certainly dangerous. I hurried out of the store, my head down.

Once outside, though, a plan started to form. This Corbin had been a little wet but not soaked when he walked in. That meant he had likely parked close to the door. I edged into the shadows afforded by a large pillar and waited.

Not a minute later, he came out. He didn’t look around him, just walked straight to a black SUV parked not far from where I hid. One glance at the license plate and I’d memorized it—a skill our father had drilled into us by the time we were eight, which was about when he’d started teaching us how to handle a knife and gun. It was a bit excessive, but I couldn’t completely fault Dad; he lived in a world where everyone was always trying to get away with something, and he wanted us aware of our surroundings, equipped to handle emergencies.

The second I had the license plate, I turned away. Looking longer wasn’t going to give me any extra information, and I didn’t want to be caught staring.

It was 7:00. Time for me to get to the diner and sit alone while my brother took his sweet time getting there. Or I could stop by the sheriff’s office, schmooze my way to a computer, run the license plate through the database and see what came up.

There were so many places where the story could have turned out differently, but it felt like every choice was predetermined.
 

~~~

And now I was driving out to the middle of nowhere, alone, to catch the biggest bounty of my life.

I fiddled with my car’s broken radio, jumping from station to station, trying to pick out the threads of voices through the permanent static. Everyone was talking about the weather, that it would be a blizzard for the history books. The worst of it would hit early the next morning. At least that’s what I thought they said. Happy weekend to me. It was already dark out, but if it hadn’t been, I had a feeling the sky would have been black anyway. The last two winters had been brutal, and it looked like Mother Nature planned a hat-trick.

The traffic stayed at a steady 30 mph. Too slow. Occasionally someone in an elephant-size SUV passed, but I, like the majority of vehicles on the road, couldn’t go any faster without risking a spin out. Besides, we were lined up neatly behind a snow plow and salt truck.

After almost ninety minutes, I reached my exit. Within half a mile, I was on unplowed roads.

That was ok. The conditions had deteriorated, but I didn’t need to go much farther, distance wise. The address attached to Lagos’s vehicle, which was registered to a John Browning, was only another half hour away. Longer in the snow. The directions hadn’t been difficult to memorize, and I’d had plenty of time to mentally rehearse while I waited in the diner.
 

The car slid through a snow drift, and I didn’t have a chance to panic before it came under my control again. I slowed even more and flipped on my turn signal despite the lack of other motorists.
 

If the road I was on was in bad shape, the one I needed to turn onto could have been an open field. I wiped at the inside of my windshield and peered out, the rhythmic thumping of my wipers strangely reassuring. Actually, maybe I
was
looking at an open field. Impossible to tell with certainty where the road ended. One more unlucky maneuver and I’d be tangled in an electric fence, scaring the hell out of the local bovines.

The smart thing to do was turn back. Or get a hotel in the area for the night. Except Corbin wouldn’t be there in the morning. He drove a mean truck, the kind that could shoulder through a blizzard. When it was time for him to leave, he’d go. And I’d have nothing but a pathetic story about how I almost caught Corbin Lagos. Which would be worth next to nothing since no one knew who he was, and every one of my dad’s bounty hunter friends had a string of “almost” to put even the most delusional fisherman to shame.

I glanced at my phone and discovered it was a little after 10:00, and my signal was weak. Not good. On the other hand, I wasn’t too far from my destination, and maybe my crappy phone would come through. So many unknowns, and as they piled up, I became less certain that I wasn’t making an enormous mistake.

How did that saying go? No matter how far down the wrong path you’ve gone, turn back.

Except turning back could be as dangerous as continuing. This storm felt like it had more than fourteen inches worth of snow in it. If that was the case, the highways would get shut down. Might already be shutting down.
 

I told myself I was being paranoid. I reminded myself that I couldn’t be too far from a hotel. And I thought of the look on my dad’s face when he learned that the daughter he refused to take seriously had reeled in two million dollars.
 

And it wouldn’t be going through the company, either. It would be mine, fair and square. It was after work hours and I wasn’t on an assignment. What I did in my own time was up to me. After all, if I failed, I wasn’t going to be reimbursed for gas money. Or the hotel.

Better not fail, then.

“What’re you waiting for?” I slowly stepped on the gas and turned the wheel, trying to feel the road underneath my tires. It felt like driving on a cloud.

But my loyal car straightened perfectly. The road was drivable. All I needed to do was get to the house and apprehend Lagos. At that point I could borrow his vehicle for a few hours, come back and pick up my car later. Or we could hole up in a hotel until the storm passed… I snickered.

Despite the gravity of my predicament, I found myself having a vividly lewd thought about Lagos in bed. A dangerous man worth millions of dollars. Ah, but it didn’t matter how hot he was. Assholes weren’t my thing.

I assumed he was an asshole—he had to be. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to investigate him at the station. Nancy handed me a copy of the Most Wanted list as soon as I walked in. Requesting the list was something I’d started back when my father first allowed me and Rob to work for him part time, in high school. Though to the old ladies in the sheriff’s office, I was probably still a zit-faced sixteen-year-old with bony legs and no friends. Maybe I’d been out of high school for six years, but the past spring one of them asked if I was graduating soon, and would I go to college?

And it was habit that made me glance at the list. After a few very confused moments, I realized that I was staring at a grainy, black-and-white photo of Corbin Lagos, public enemy #1.
 

Actually, he probably wasn’t any great danger to the average person; it didn’t work that way. Hell, if a man had a dozen kids and went long enough without paying his child support, he could get pretty high on the list, which said a lot about our little neck of the woods. Lagos had surely done something very, very naughty. I didn’t need to know what “various crimes” meant. Sure, it would have been better to know how dangerous he might be, but I could safely assume that he wasn’t wanted so the FBI could ask him a few gentle questions and send him home with a complimentary T-shirt and coffee mug.

Fact was, I didn’t really care. All that mattered was the money and the prestige I’d get for delivering such a large bounty all on my own.
 

The road suddenly felt different under the car, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another vehicle in some twenty minutes. With light from the moon muted by thickly falling snow, nothing but my headlights lit my way. The road was now either pristine or all previous tracks had been completely covered. Not good.