Zach's Law (16 page)

Teddy straightened and returned her dart pistol to her purse. “Where’s Zach? Ryan might have a bomb.”

“He left two. Zach’s defusing the second one now. If he can’t do it, we’ve got five minutes before it blows.” Lucas’s sharp blue eyes narrowed. “Is that blood on your cheek?”

“From my arm. It started bleeding again.” She lifted a hand to wipe away the smear of blood, and Lucas swore softly. He returned his gun to its shoulder holster and produced a snowy handkerchief from his pocket.

He was tearing the square of linen in two as he moved to stand before her and, obviously seeing her anxious impatience, explained quickly as he began to wrap one of her wrists. “If Zach sees blood on you, he’s likely to go
right around the bend and do something really crazy. Did that bastard do this?”

Suddenly aware that she could no longer even move her left arm, Teddy concentrated all her will on just remaining on her feet and coherent. “No, I did that getting loose.”

“Must hurt like hell,” he commented with sympathy.

“I can’t feel anything,” she responded honestly. “Can’t move my arm, either.”

“Josh said you were wounded yesterday.”

“Ummm. Ryan hit my arm. That’s why I screamed.”

Lucas’s handsome face went decidedly grim, but he said nothing. He wrapped her wrists as carefully as possible, noting quickly that the blood on her sweater was obvious, but only close up. She was very pale, but clearly determined to remain on her feet. He admired both her courage and her obvious strength.

She’d done a damn good job of getting herself out of this mess, and he wouldn’t soon forget the resolution in her small face as she’d
expertly aimed that gun at him. He wondered if Zach knew what a tough lady she really was.

He gently tugged the sleeves of her sweater down to hide the makeshift bandages, then said, “Let’s go.”

Teddy was grateful that he kept a light but firm hold on her right arm as he led her from the room. She wasn’t at all sure she could have made it on her own.

The house was a large one, the bedrooms they passed sparsely furnished, most of them with covers over everything. A curving staircase led down into an open foyer, and Josh Long was waiting for them at the bottom.

Teddy was dimly aware that some silent signal passed between the two men, but she had no time to react before Lucas had hurried away and Josh swung her easily up into his arms.

He carried her toward the front door.

“Wait! Where’s Zach?”

“He’ll be along. Dammit, Teddy, be still!”

She dug into reserves of strength she hadn’t known she had and struggled harder to escape
him, staring back over his shoulder as he carried her from the house. “No! Put me down! I want to go to Zach—”

“It’d be more than my life’s worth to let you go back in that house,” he told her grimly. “Teddy, he’ll be fine. If he can’t defuse the bomb with a minute left, Lucas’ll pull him out of there.”

Wildly, she said, “Pull him out? He won’t be able to pull him out! He’s a damned
army;
nobody could pull him out. He’ll stay till the last bloody
second
and get his stubborn, macho hide blown to bits. Josh, let me go!”

“Listen to me,” Josh ordered harshly. “Now that you’re safe, the single thought in Zach’s mind is to get Ryan. And he is not about to let himself be blown to bits while that man is still walking around. There’s nothing in that house worth dying for. He’ll come out, Teddy.”

That
argument made sense, but rational though it was, nothing could ease the agonized fear for her man. Still, she forced herself to stop struggling, and when Josh set her on her feet at
the edge of the woods, she didn’t try to run back into the house. She stood perfectly still, staring toward the house, her nails biting into her palms.

“How much longer?” she asked in a husky whisper.

Josh, who had rarely taken his eyes from his watch, replied tautly, “A minute and a half.”

“He has to come out.” She barely recognized the queerly conversational voice as her own. “He just has to, that’s all. He doesn’t even know if … if we—He can’t die not
knowing
. He won’t do that. Even if it isn’t likely, it’s still possible, and he’d want to know. He’d want to—
Zach!
”

Josh leaned back against a sturdy tree and, in a detached manner, watched his hands shake. Then he looked up to see Zach being engulfed by a distraught redhead. Speaking to Lucas as the other man reached him, he said heavily, “I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.”

“You and me both.” Lucas was looking a
bit white around the mouth, but his voice was steady. “A minute twenty-five left on the clock, and he never turned a hair. Is there
anything
that can shake that granite foundation of his?”

Josh glanced again toward the couple several yards away and spoke softly. “One thing. One small thing.”

   Teddy found that she could move her left arm, after all, at least enough to get it around Zach’s neck. And she gloried in the strength of his arms as they held her tightly against him. In a fierce, shaking tone she said, “Don’t you
ever
do that to me again!”

He hugged her, hard. “I’m sorry, honey. I should have known he’d go for you,” Zach murmured against her neck. “It’s my fault he got you.”

Teddy drew back and stared at him, hardly aware that her boots dangled well above the ground. “Since when d’you read minds?” she
demanded, finding that much of her strength had returned in the security of his embrace.

“I know his mind,” Zach said gruffly. “I should have known what he’d do.”

Teddy said something derisive, and it wasn’t “malarkey.”

Zach grinned in spite of himself. “You never should have learned words like that. Or at least not learned how to
use
them like that.”

Peering at him owlishly almost nose-to-nose, she said. “Listen, when I was a little girl, I played jacks under my father’s boardroom tables. They usually forgot I was there. I learned how to use a
lot
of words I shouldn’t have learned.”

He kissed her and then set her gently on her feet but kept an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll have to tell me, maybe I’ll learn something.”

Suddenly remembering that the danger was far from past, she said fiercely, “I’ll tell you a few of them now if you’re planning to do something crazy!”

“Who, me?” Zach looked up as Josh and Lucas approached, both weighted down with Teddy’s bags and as much of Zach’s equipment as they could carry.

Succinctly, Lucas said, “I say we get the hell out of Dodge.”

“And head for Tombstone,” Josh murmured. “Zach, weren’t there supposed to be some federal marshals called up here? Now would be the time. I’d say there was a fair amount of physical evidence in the house.”

Tombstone. OK Corral. Gun battle
. Finally, the remainder of Josh’s comments sank in. With a slight start Teddy exclaimed, “Ryan left fingerprints, I know that. He wasn’t wearing gloves when he tied me to the bed, and he touched the headboard. I’ll bet he touched the explosives too.”

Zach looked down at her. “When he tied you to the bed? He tied you to a bed?”

“I didn’t tell him that,” Lucas murmured.

Since Zach was on her left side and that arm had gone numb again, Teddy couldn’t
manage a reassuring hug. But she did manage a bright—and slightly wary—smile. “He was a perfect gentleman,” she said, editing the truth somewhat. “And I’m just fine, after all.”

“You screamed,” Zach said, his voice going placid and remote in a way she recognized.

“I was scared,” Teddy retorted stoutly.

Josh and Lucas, fascinated spectators to this, looked back and forth as though at a tennis match.

“You were hurting.”

Teddy, who still had hopes of getting her warrior through all this without him going berserk and spilling precious blood, like his own, wasn’t about to admit that Ryan had nearly caused her to pass out with his cruel blow.

“You weren’t there,” she told him.

“I know pain when I hear it.”

“Your imagination.”

“There’s blood on your sleeve.”

“I did that getting loose.” Hastily, she
looked at the other two men. “Can we go now? Let’s go.”

Lucas started slightly, jolted rudely from fascination, then turned. “This way,” he directed carefully, after clearing his throat.

They were all silent as they made their way through the woods to where Lucas had parked his van. Their stuff was loaded, then Zach helped Teddy into the backseat, climbed in after her, and pulled her securely onto his lap.

She didn’t object.

The other two men got in front, with Lucas driving, and it wasn’t until the van pulled out onto the main road that Zach spoke.

“West?”

Josh half turned to look at him, his eyes narrowing at his friend’s tone. “That’s the way the semi went. Why?”

“Because,” Zach said heavily, “the guns are supposed to be waiting east of here. Along with Kelsey, probably Hagen, and by now, half a dozen federal marshals. That’s why.”

Teddy rested her head on Zach’s shoulder
and closed her eyes. She didn’t really pay attention to the ensuing discussion but remembered it all very well later.

Josh used the van’s radio to contact the helicopter where Rafferty was to relay several messages. On a particular frequency he was to summon the marshals to the house. On another frequency he was to contact Josh’s wife—who was apparently in search of someone named Kelsey—and explain where the guns were supposed to be but probably weren’t. And on yet another frequency he was to try to contact Hagen, on whom all four of the men seemed somewhat determined to get their hands.

After that Teddy went to sleep.

   The van rolled along in silence for a while, until Zach was certain Teddy was asleep. Then, directing his words at their driver, he said, “Now you can tell me.”

Lucas glanced in the rearview mirror, then at Josh, and sighed. “When I found her, she
was fine, Zach. I don’t know how she’d managed to get herself loose, but she was on her feet—and ready for anything. She had a gun pointed at me and looked like she knew how to use it.”

“Gun?”

“Yeah. Put it in her purse.”

With less hesitation this time, Zach dug into Teddy’s purse and produced the gun. He stared at it for a moment, and then his lips twitched. In a slightly unsteady voice he said solemnly, “She was loaded for bear, all right.”

“That’s what I thought,” Lucas agreed.

Zach cleared his throat. “The four-legged kind.”

After a beat Lucas said blankly, “What?” and Josh looked back over his shoulder at the gun and began smiling.

“Real bears,” Zach explained. “Furry bears. I don’t know much about dosage, but I’d say this would have decked a hungry grizzly bent on getting his next meal. You certainly would have taken a nice long nap.”

“Are you saying—”

“Tranquilizers, Luc. This is a dart pistol.”

Lucas let out a long-suffering sigh. “Figures,” he said.

   She was nothing more than a shadow, dressed all in black, and made not a sound as she moved into the warehouse. But she didn’t continue to lurk in the darkness; instead, she moved confidently into the dim circle of a so-called security light, folded her arms, and waited.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Kelsey moved into the circle, looking more pained than surprised. “Don’t tell me you trailed me here,” he begged. “I know you’re good, but you’re also supposed to be out of touch these days.”

Raven Long smiled at him, her merry violet eyes dancing. “We never gave our contacts away—even to each other, remember? And I kept mine. They got me within twenty miles of
here. I’d already settled on the munitions dump as the likeliest place when I got word you were here for sure.”

“Got word from whom?”

“Josh—via Rafferty. You just might be guarding the wrong rat hole, chum.”

Kelsey stared at her for a moment, then said several things he must have learned in rough places. Still exercising his colorful vocabulary, he found a crowbar and pried off the lids of several crates. His language became more colorful as each crate was opened.

Raven didn’t look to see what he’d found; she didn’t have to. Interspersed among his more colorful phrases were listings of such things as machine parts, nuts and bolts, hubcaps and crankshafts.

In a detached tone she said, “I suppose the art collectors must have some pretty shrewd people working for them. Or else Ryan met with them and arranged it. They waited until this shipment was spotted and then somehow got in and replaced the crates with dummies.”

In a tone approaching a groan Kelsey said, “And the boss pulled back the marshals when he found out your gang was coming in on this. He said there’d be too many watchers for the job. Great. That’s just great.”

“Where are the marshals?” she asked briskly.

Kelsey got a grip on himself. “An hour or so away. With Hagen.”

“You can reach them?”

“Sure.”

“Then you’d better. Rafferty’s in a helicopter following the semi, and what is presumably Ryan’s car. Josh, Lucas, Zach, and a lady named Teddy are in a van somewhere behind. Everybody’s heading west.”

For a moment Kelsey allowed himself to be unwillingly fascinated. “A damned convoy, for crying out loud.”

Politely, Raven said, “Would you mind very much getting a move on, old pal? I’d like to be with my husband before we have to circle the wagons.”

“I hope you have wings.”

“Next best thing. I have a foreign job with a lot of horses under the hood.”

Kelsey winced. “Can I drive?”

“No.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Raven followed him from the warehouse. Bracingly, but with a hint of laughter in her tone, she said, “Be brave, Tonto. I can hold horses on a curve.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what you said the
last
time.”

T
EDDY CRAWLED UP
beside Zach despite his gesture to stay back, and peered over the top of the hill where they all lay prone. Ignoring her various aches and pains, she said in a low voice, “Now what?”

In an idle tone Josh said, “Anybody got an Uzi?”