Unintended Target (Unintended Series Book 1) (11 page)

SEVENTEEN

Jack ripped into the cliff’s parking lot and headed straight to Chloe’s car on the far end, sitting by itself in the dark. Chloe was at his door before he’d even killed the engine.

She threw her arms around his neck and pressed the side of her face against his. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered, and began to shake.

“Hey,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. She buried her face in his shoulder, muffling her crying. “Hey, it’s okay.” He pulled back from her and turned her face towards him. “You hear me?” he asked, smiling reassuringly. “It’s going to be okay.”

Chloe straightened up. “It’s . . . it’s just that this is so . . . insane.” She felt something trickling down her arm and realized she was wet from hugging him. She scanned his soaked body. “What happened to you?”

“I’ll explain later. Now tell me what happened.”

The story poured out of her like a verbal deluge, as she told him everything about Ruby and Sampson and her escape. He interrupted only once, when he insisted on examining the vicious red welt on her neck caused by her near strangulation.

“. . . And so that’s why I needed your Jeep,” she finally finished.

“Okay,” he said, still confused, as he compliantly unlocked the Jeep’s security compartment. “And why is that?”

“Because I tossed my bag into your trunk when we walked up the cliff, and then we drove off with it still in there,” she explained, leaning past him to look inside the Jeep. “I think it must’ve slid around on some of those curves . . . yeah, here’s my lipstick,” she announced, pulling it out from underneath a pair of running shoes and handing it to Jack. Her hand dove in again, rummaging through the random clothes, tools, and clutter covering the compartment bottom. “And my receipts, and,” she said, her voice triumphant as she pulled out the manila envelope from where it had slid down behind a gym bag, “my mail.” 

“And you think that’s what they were after?”

“It’s the only thing connected to Ruby,” she said, turning it over to open it, and finding that the clear tape covering the flap was loose. “It’s loose, but sticky, like someone opened it then sealed it back.” She pulled off the tape, opened the metal brad, and pulled back the flap. It came off too easily. “Somebody’s been through this. Must’ve been Ruby,” she said wistfully.

She extracted a stack of mail from the envelope and started flipping through it. There was a letter from Tate’s insurance company containing papers to sign, correspondence from
Terra Traveler
, a couple of sympathy notes from friends, random bills, and then, in the middle, a lightly padded envelope with a return address of
Herbert K. Rohrstadt, Esquire, Attorney at Law, 1919 Westwood Avenue, Building 3, Suite J, Miami, Florida.

She tore the end off the envelope and shook it vigorously. The smallest flash drive she’d ever seen fell into her waiting hand.

“What’s on that?” Jack remarked, squinting to get a better look.

Chloe shrugged. “No idea,” she said, handing the empty envelope to Jack. “For Chloe,” was scrawled with a Sharpie on the drive. In Tate’s handwriting.

“Chloe,” Jack said, pulling a sheet of paper from the envelope and handing it to her. They hovered over it, shoulder to shoulder.

Dear Ms. McConnaughey,

I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get this to you. I’ve been out of the country for the last month, and only just learned of Tate’s passing. I send my deepest sympathies.

Tate left instructions with me to forward the enclosed to you should anything happen to him. As such, I have done so. I was further instructed to tell you that this is for your eyes only and that not even I have reviewed it.

If there is anything I can do to assist you with his affairs here in Miami, please let me know. Again, please accept my deepest condolences.

Sincerely,

/s/ Herb Rohrstadt

Herbert K. Rohrstadt

Attorney at Law

The letter was dated thirteen days before.

Chloe squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head. “No. No. No.” She sucked in a breath. “Please, please don’t let Tate be involved in this thing.”

“Do you know this Herbert—Herb Rohrstadt?”

She shook her head, choking back the threatening tears.

“You sure this is what they were after?”

“It has to be.” She flipped through the remaining envelopes. “There’s nothing else here.” Pain crossed her face as her thumb ran over her name printed on the flash drive. “They did something to Ruby because of this thing,” she said quietly, her voice starting to tremble. “I just know it. She was just trying to be nice. Holding my mail. What if . . . Jack, what if they knew she was a little nosy . . . what if she really did open this and they found out . . .” Eyes filled to the brim with tears met Jack’s. “If something’s happened to her . . . it’s Tate fault!”

Jack bent down so his green eyes were level with hers and covered her hand holding the flash drive with his. “First thing we have to do is get somewhere safe, see what’s on this thing,” he squeezed her hand, “and figure out our options. You up for that?”

Clamping her lips together determinedly, she nodded.

“You didn’t happen to bring a laptop?” he asked hopefully.

Her face fell. “No. I should have. I just didn’t think about it. I was in such a hurry to leave. It’s at the cottage, but—”

“There’s no going back there,” Jack interrupted. She nodded her agreement. “Mine’s on the boat. Or at least it was. We can’t go there either, though. We’ll have to try somewhere in the morning. One of those office-type copy shops or maybe a hotel.”

“What about Ruby?”

“If you’re sure she’s not in the house, I don’t think there’s anything we can do until morning. We’ll have to drive to another part of the island. Try to talk to some other authorities—somebody not connected to Sampson.”

Chloe started to reach for a curl to twist between her shaking fingers, then realized he still had her hand. She gently drew it from his grip and ran it through her hair. Tears dribbled from the corner of her eye. “Look, I’m really sorry, Jack. I didn’t want to involve you. I just wanted to get my stuff out of your trunk. You can go, they don’t want you. If I’d known that any of this—”

“I’m already in this. They searched my boat looking for that thing,” he said, nodding in the flash drive’s direction. “Besides, I couldn’t leave you alone now anyway. And you don’t have anything to apologize for. It’s not your fault.”

“No, it’s Tate’s. Again. Even from the grave he’s ruining everything.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe he was just—”

“He was just being Tate. But it doesn’t matter,” she interrupted, feeling that familiar, cold knot of exasperation that Tate had so often engendered tightening around her heart. She wasn’t willing to hear excuses for him. Not now. Sniffing, she felt her resolve swell, grateful to the anger for that at least. “What do we do now? Where do we go?”

Jack exhaled deeply. “I think I have an idea.”

EIGHTEEN

The motel was about half a mile inland in an undeveloped patch of the island, just outside Binghamton. They pulled into the parking lot in Jack’s Jeep, having already dumped Chloe’s car in a gully down one of the side roads leading into the woods. They’d camouflaged it with brush, hoping to buy a little time.

The long, narrow building hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in decades, its whitened wood peeling back where water and wind had tortured it regularly. A weathered wooden sign mounted on the roof read “Shores Motel.” Painted above the faded, royal blue letters were dancing, happy-faced starfish, one of which was missing from the middle. Two dozen private rooms stretched down the motel, with the lobby at the end closest to the road. Wild foliage, growing as high and as thick as it cared to, separated the edge of the property from the deep woods that stretched behind it.

“A
little
seedy?” Chloe questioned. “You said it was a
little
seedy.”

Jack shrugged. “Okay, maybe a lot seedy. But it’s clean, and out of the way,
and
the only traffic coming by here is for the motel. And we had to get out of sight. Sampson’s bound to be combing the streets for you. For us.” He pulled into a spot in front of the lobby. “I’ll get us a room.”

“You don’t think this is exactly the kind of place they’ll expect us to go?”

Jack shrugged. “I hope not. But I’ve got to get cleaned up, and we need to regroup. I’m not ready to drag anybody else into this yet. Are you?”

Chloe shook her head.

“We’re just gonna have to take our chances tonight.”

“You need a credit card or something . . . wait, no.”

Jack nodded in agreement. “We can’t use plastic.”

Chloe’s face dropped. “I’ve only got fifty, maybe fifty-five on me.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got enough to cover us for a while.”

“What about after that?”

He smiled and reached over to squeeze her hand. “We’ll drown in that river when we get to it.” He opened his door and stepped out. “I’ll be right back.”

Through the lobby’s large window, Chloe watched Jack approach the counter and ring the night bell. Eventually a yawning wide-mouthed teenager stumbled through the doorway behind the counter. It was well after midnight, and from the look of the boy’s tousled hair, Jack had woken him from a deep sleep. The two spoke briefly, then the clerk pushed the register to Jack. He signed it, slid the book back to the clerk, and tossed two bills on top of it. The clerk withdrew a key from a drawer and handed it to Jack. As he walked back to the car, the lobby lights flicked off.

“Number twenty-four,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “Thought it’d be better if we were on the end.”

He parked as far around the building as he could to hide the car from the road. Gathering what little they had, they walked the few yards to room twenty-four. The door squeaked noisily on its hinges as Jack swung it open.

Run down was an understatement. A queen-sized bed covered in a thin, flowered spread that had seen too many guests took up much of the room. The rest of the sparse furniture was mismatched and duct-taped together in places, and the standing lamp was missing all its bulbs. But it was clean and, as exhausted as Chloe was, that was good enough for her. She dropped her things on the floor and fell backwards onto the bed. Jack locked the door and latched the chain.

“I’m not moving from this spot,” she announced, closing her eyes. Jack sat down beside her.

“Why don’t you get some rest?” he urged. “I’ll stay up for a while.”

“You wouldn’t think I’d be able to sleep right now, you know?” she muttered. “But it’s all I want to do.”

“It’s fine.”

She breathed in deeply, ignoring the slightly ruined smell of the linens. She just needed to disconnect. To escape. Just . . . for a moment . . .

She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until the sound of running water ushered her back to consciousness. Groggily, she raised her left arm to her face and checked her watch. It was 1:03 in the morning. She had been out less than half an hour, but the heaviness in her limbs made it feel like it had been half the night. She squinted and blinked, trying to moisten her dry eyes.

“Jack?” she called out weakly.

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?” she asked, sitting up. The room was dark except for the sliver of light emanating from where the bathroom door sat slightly ajar.

“Just cleaning up,” he called from behind the door. “Go back to sleep.”

A glint of metal on the bedside table caught her eye. The sight of it chilled her.

“Jack,” she started nervously, “whose gun is that?”

“Mine,” he answered matter-of-factly from behind the door. “Or at least it is now.”

“I didn’t know you liked guns,” she said tentatively, lowering her feet over the bed’s edge.

“I wouldn’t say
liked
, exactly.”

She focused on the gap in the doorway. “So what did happen to you earlier, after I called?” She pushed off the bed and moved to the door, leaning her face into the gap. “You never said how you got all wet—”

The rest of her sentence was choked off by a horrified gasp as she caught a glimpse of Jack through the opening. She swung the door open to him sitting on the closed toilet lid, left leg propped up on the tub. Drops of blood from an ugly gash on his calf peppered the floor. A second gun lay beside him on the edge of the tub.

“What happened to you?” she shrieked, gaping at the wound.

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing?” she gasped, pointing at the blood. “How did I not notice that before? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Wasn’t important. It’s fine. I’ve pretty much stopped the bleeding.”

Her face contorted as she scrutinized the gash. “Is that . . . a gunshot wound?”

“Just grazed.”

“
Just grazed?
Are you kidding me? You need a doctor, Jack!” Nausea rolled over her as she pushed away thoughts of what could have happened to him.
All because of her. All her fault.

He pulled his leg back. “I’ll wrap it up and be fine. Besides,” he smiled, “it’s only a flesh wound,” he finished in a poor attempt at a cockney accent.

“That’s not funny,” she mumbled, as she took the rust-colored washcloth from him. “Here, let me do that.” She rinsed the cloth in warm water from the sink and wrung it out, a stream of reddish-brown trickling into the basin. She soaked the cloth again, then wrung it over the wound to irrigate it. After repeating the process several times and being certain the wound was free of debris, she hung the cloth over the edge of the sink and got up off her knees. “Don’t move,” she ordered and went into the bedroom.

Chloe returned with a long strip of white fabric and knelt down beside him. “Let’s just pray they washed the pillowcases sometime in the last decade,” she remarked as she wrapped the strip tightly around his leg twice to cover the wound, then secured it with a knot.

Jack checked the bandage for himself. “Not bad,” he admitted.

“This is insane,” she pronounced in a hollow voice, slumping dejectedly against the bathroom doorframe. Her gaze rolled up and settled randomly on a spot on the wall tile, where it stayed, zombie-like, for several long moments. “What are we gonna do?”

“You,” Jack started, peeling her off the doorframe and ushering her back onto the bed, “are going back to sleep. I,” he said, sitting down in a rattan chair by the bed, “am taking first watch.” He held one of the guns ready in his right hand, as he slid the second gun off the bedside table and held it out to her. “Take it.”

“But—”

“You need to be armed, Chloe. Understand? Now take it.”

She slipped the gun from his open hand and laid it beside her pillow. Jack eased forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he spoke.

“We’re going to do exactly what we planned. Tomorrow we find a computer, take a look at whatever’s on that flash drive, and figure out what’s going on. Then we’ll see about getting off this island and in touch with someone we can trust.”

Chloe rolled over to face him. “What happened to you, Jack?”

Ignoring her, he brushed a wisp of hair from her face. “Your forehead’s starting to bruise,” he said.

She pressed him. “Jack.”

He sighed heavily. “I went home and found the boat trashed. Then you called. Right after, two guys came at me, and, long story short, I got the jump on them. This,” he said gesturing at his leg with the gun, “is where one of them grazed me, but . . . well, he got it worse. I took the guns off them.” He leaned back in the chair. “Nothing else to tell, really.”

He made it sound so simple. So normal. As if any of this was normal. As if any of this could even be digested.

“How did you even
do
that?” she asked desperately. “One unarmed guy against two guys with guns? You could have been killed. And that’s the second time you’ve nearly been killed over me.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“You were lucky.”

“I prefer to think I was protected.”

She squeezed the pillow beneath her head and sighed. She just didn’t have the energy to wrap her mind around it. She drew her knees to her chest, wishing she could just go back to sleep. Back into nothingness. But the images lingered.

“He told me he was going to break my fingers one by one,” she said quietly, not meeting Jack’s gaze, and not knowing quite sure why she was telling him this.

“Who?”

“The detective. Sampson. He was twisting this one,” she said, and wiggled her pinky at him weakly. “But then the phone rang and he got called off.”

Determination shadowed Jack’s face as he turned her face to his. “You’re safe here,” he promised, certainty casing each word.

Safe
, she thought, sinking into his green eyes. She could wrap her head around safe.

“You hear me?” he pressed, his voice low and steady. “
Nothing
will happen to you here.”

Her need to believe him battled her fear. “I’m scared, Jack.”

He nodded his understanding, but a rock-steadiness emanated from him. “You. Are. Safe. We will work this out in the morning.” He gave her hand a small squeeze. “Now go to sleep or I’m going to.”

It sounded so good to her—sleep and safety. When she was asleep, none of this was happening. None of this was real, and Jack would be watching over her. Jack, her unexpected savior. This man she barely knew, who had put himself in harm’s way for her. Twice.
What would I have done without him?
The universe had sent him to her at exactly the right moment.

The thought momentarily sparked something in her belly that felt almost like . . . doubt. But she let the flash slip away as quickly as it had come. Because she needed to believe in him. There was nothing else. She simply had to.

She closed her eyes. “Jack?” she murmured.

“Yeeessss?” he drawled, feigning exasperation.

“Thanks.”

Rocking forward, he bent over her, soothingly tucked a few wisps of hair behind her ear and in a low voice whispered, “You’re welcome.” 

* * * * *

She was snoring.
A good sign.
He relaxed a bit, leaning into the chair as he watched her breathe, in and out, in and out. He ran a tired hand through his hair, resting it on the back of his neck where he could feel the beginnings of a knotted muscle. This was going to be harder than he thought. Much harder.