I Got You, Babe (13 page)

“No! I ’m not going to prison for a crime I didn’t commit!”
Prison.

All at once she was assaulted by the memory of the “scared straight” program she’d been through as a teenager. The harsh, mocking voices of a dozen female inmates pounded inside her head.

You ’11 love the food here, blondie. Maggots are one of the four major food groups.

Hey, baby, whatcha think of my dress? Pretty snazzy, huh? Get yourself locked up and you can have one just like it.

See this scar? Knife’s a wicked thing. Didn’t even see it comin ’.

Whatsa matter, chickie? Don't cry. You ’11 have plenty of friends in here. We ’11 even introduce you to Big Maude. She just loves pretty little blondes like you.

Renee’s stomach churned. The memory of those terrible hours swirled around in her mind like a scene from a horror movie. She couldn’t do it. If she let John take her back to Tolosa, her life would become a living nightmare.

The gun felt heavy in her hand, straining the muscles of her forearms until she desperately wanted to drop it. But she couldn’t. The weapon she held was the only thing standing between her and incarceration. She took a deep breath and closed her finger around the trigger.

“I can’t let you take me to jail,” she said, her voice shaking so badly she could barely speak. “I-I have to stop you somehow. I have to.”

She raised the barrel of the gun a notch. John’s eyes widened and he held up both palms. “Now, Renee...”

She’d never fired a gun before, so she didn’t know how it was going to feel. It would be loud, and it would probably knock her right off her feet, so she braced herself, preparing for the worst. She couldn’t say John looked panicked, exactly, but there was an unmistakable flash of apprehension in his eyes.

“Take it easy, Renee. Think about what you’re doing.”

No. She’d thought enough. It was time for action.

“I’m sorry, John.”

She took a deep breath, zeroed in on her target, closed her eyes...and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 7

“
Y
ou shot my car?”

John watched, dumbfounded, as antifreeze-tinged water glugged out of a bullet-sized hole in his radiator.

“You shot my car?”

Renee stared down at the gun in her hand. “Uh...yeah. I guess I did.”

In a fit of angry frustration, John did what he should have done the moment she got her hands on his weapon: he strode over and yanked it right out of her hand.

“What have you got against cars?” he shouted, stuffing the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “You torch one, you shoot another. What’s next? A hangman’s noose? The guillotine?”

Renee took a tentative step forward, peering at the bullet hole. “I got the radiator, right? Can a car run without one of those?”

“Sure it can! As long as you don’t mind overheating the engine and cracking the block!”

“Cracking the block. That’s bad?”

“About two thousand dollars’ worth of bad!”

“So it wouldn’t be a good thing to drive the car when the radiator is, well...shot.”

All at once he understood. So that was why she’d done it. Instead of disabling the cop, she’d disabled his car.

John didn’t know how much more of this he could take. He had five shots left, but it would take only one to solve all his problems. After dumping her body into the lake, he could get a good night’s sleep, wake to a bright, sunshiny morning, call the auto club, get his radiator fixed, then proceed with his life as if he’d never set eyes on Renee Esterhaus. And she’d spend the rest of eternity making Satan sorry he’d ever bargained for her soul.

Okay.
So it was just a fantasy. But at least he could do the auto-club part. He took the keys from Renee, then grabbed his cell phone from the car. He flipped it on.

Nothing.

He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then looked back at Renee with an accusing stare.

“Okay, so I made a call.”

“I don’t give a damn about the call! You ran down the battery!”

A look of sudden understanding came over her face, and her gaze turned speculative. “You can charge it again, can’t you? You have your charger, right?”

When he kept on glaring, a subtle yet distinct wave of relief passed over her face that said it all:
I shot your car. I took out your communications. We’re not going anywhere, now, are we?

John tossed his phone back into the car and slammed the door, furious with Renee, but even more furious with himself. He was a cop, for God’s sake. He’d arrested some of the vilest, most evil people who’d ever drawn breath, yet he couldn’t manage to outwit a woman half his size who clearly had a screw loose.

“You think you’re real smart, don’t you?” he told her. “Well, you’re not. You’ve only delayed the inevitable. If we can’t drive out of here, we’ll walk. First thing in the morning.” He took a few threatening steps toward her, backing her against his car. “And you’ll behave yourself every step of the way, or I’ll make you wish to God you had.”

His words were intended to instill in her a heaping dose of fear and respect. Instead she gave him a stony stare that would have put Medusa to shame. “Well. We’ll just see about that.”

Her go-to-hell attitude astonished him. She acted as if she were the one being wronged here. As if she didn’t belong behind bars. As if he were the absolute scum of the earth for suggesting she not resist arrest.

He gave her a warning stare. “Don’t mess with me, Renee.”

She stood up straight and pushed herself away from his car, bumping him off balance and forcing him to take a step backward.

“I am
not
an armed robber. I am
not
a car thief. And I don’t care what I have to do—I am
not
going to jail!”

Her gaze bored into him, those blue eyes hot with anger. Strangely enough, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt that familiar little heart skip that had become his body’s way of telling him he’d better watch his back.

That’s crap,
he told himself in the next instant, furious that he’d let her rattle him, even for a moment. “Oh, no. You
are
going to jail, even if I have to use my last breath to drag you there!”

“Then get your last breath ready, buster. You’re going to need it!”

She elbowed past him and started down the path, and John had to fight his gut reaction to reach out and yank her right back around again. What good would it do? Did he really think the bone-rattling shake he wanted to give her would dislodge that smart-ass attitude?

She reached the cabin, fumbled the door open with her bound hands, then went inside and slammed the door behind her. The noise rocketed through the silence of the forest, tripping his anger one more time, and he spewed a string of curse words so virulent the pine trees wilted. What in the hell had he done to deserve all this?

He looked at his wounded radiator. It was going to cost him hundreds of dollars to get it fixed, and it would take him hundreds of years to get reimbursement for the damages. He looked at the dark clouds that obscured the moon and threatened rain, thinking about the miles of dirt road they had to navigate tomorrow on foot. Then he looked back at the cabin. What other tricks did Renee have up her sleeve that would make him wish he’d never been born?

He sighed. Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.

Renee never imagined that merely walking along a calm, wooded road could be such an excruciating experience.

The forest was nice enough. In fact, in the daylight it was downright picturesque. Streaks of bright morning sun shot through the canopy of pine trees, casting cool shadows on the forest floor. Birds were chirping tentatively, as if they weren’t quite sure it was safe to venture out again after last night’s rain. It was a fairy-tale forest. A weekend-in-the-country forest. A forest this quaint and charming should have a yellow-brick road winding through it, with Dorothy and company skipping along, full of optimistic good cheer as they headed for the Emerald City.

Instead, rain had turned the road into a potholed mud bath, Renee wasn’t the least bit optimistic, and she was headed for jail. And Dorothy had a whole lot more congenial company than the man who was slogging through the mud beside her right now. John wore a scowl that had become a permanent part of his face, and he threw off so much negative energy that he practically blew her off the road.

He’d fallen asleep last night before she had, leaving her to shiver in the dark with her bound hands tied to the frame of the sofa bed with a length of twine he’d found in a kitchen cabinet. She’d stared at him in the light of the dying fire, mad as hell at him. At the same time she couldn’t take her eyes off him. For a moment she’d imagined he wasn’t a cop at all, just the very sexy, anonymous man she’d met in that diner.

No. Stop thinking about him as a man. He’s a hard-ass cop holding a great big grudge, who doesn’t care that he might be dragging an innocent woman to jail.

Yeah, he’d looked pretty good lying there in bed last night, only to wake this morning and turn into Nasty Cop all over again. He hadn’t even taken the tape off her wrists to let her go to the bathroom. She’d had to twist herself into a pretzel to accomplish what should have been a relatively simple task, which had forced her to reconsider her natural assumption that all people, even pissed-off cops, were in possession of a heart.

Then he’d gotten all bent out of shape just because she’d used his toothbrush.
Please.
He could kiss her last night, but she couldn’t use his toothbrush this morning? If she’d known how much her invasion into his personal space irritated him, she’d have swished his manly extra-strength deodorant stick around in the toilet bowl.

As they walked along the muddy road, she turned to him for yet another plea. “John, will you please take this tape off my wrists?”

“I told you three times already to shut up.”

She glared at him. “What’s the matter? Did we get up on the wrong side of the lumpy sofa bed this morning?”

“You’ve already proven you’ll do anything to stay out of jail, so why should I take a chance?”

“Because it would be a nice thing to do, maybe?”

“It’s not my job to be nice.”

“As a taxpaying citizen, I beg to differ.”

“Major advantage of prison life, Renee. You won’t be paying taxes for long.”

She huffed with disgust. “Would it kill you to let me be just a little bit comfortable?”

“The last time you were comfortable, you stole my car.”

“I
told
you I had every intention of giving it back to you!”

“Did you also have every intention of giving back the money you stole from that convenience store? And pulling the bullet back
out
of that clerk you shot? Did you have every intention of doing that, too?”

“I didn’t shoot anybody! And I didn’t rob anybody! How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how many times you tell me. You’re going to jail.”

What had made her think she could talk him into anything? She might not have a prayer of escaping jail. Not on John’s shift, anyway. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to pour her heart and soul into the fight right up to the moment they tossed her into the cell and clanged the door shut.

“John? How many people do you suppose you’ve taken to jail?”

“I don’t keep track.”

“Just an estimate. A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Probably. And before the day’s out, I’ll be able to add one more to the list.”

She really wanted to bite at that one, but she forced herself to remain calm. “Gee, that’s a lot of guilty people. Or maybe,” she ventured, “some of them were innocent.”

“All of them were innocent.”

“What?”

“Just ask them. They’ll tell you.”

A hundred nasty responses swelled through her mind, but she stopped herself before they came rushing out of her mouth. Cops didn’t like insults. She’d learned that the hard way once during a Black Sabbath concert at Texas Stadium when she was sixteen. Full of her usual nasty belligerence, she’d told a rent-a-cop to get his fat ass out of the way because he was blocking the stage, and she’d ended up with an even worse view—from the parking lot.

She’d almost forgotten about that night, but now the feeling was razor-sharp again, just as she’d felt it back then.
Cops are the enemy.
Intellectually she knew that wasn’t right. Stay within the law, and you had nothing to fear. That was what she’d told herself all the years since then.
You can change. Make a new life for yourself. A life you can be proud of.
But that wasn’t right, either, was it? She’d stayed within the boundaries of the law, and look where she’d ended up anyway.

Unfortunately it appeared that John was just like every cop she’d ever encountered. Hard, jaded, don’t-give-a-damn kind of guys. Did jerks get into law enforcement, or did law enforcement turn them into jerks?

“How many times do you think somebody’s looked guilty,” she said, “but they really weren’t?”

“Give it a rest, will you, Renee?”

“But it’s only logical that—”

He came to a quick halt and faced her. “If you don’t shut up—”

“What?” she said. “What are you going to do if I don't shut up?”

He took a few threatening steps toward her. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, bordering his angry eyes and making him look dark and dangerous. She knew that baiting this man was like dangling fresh fish over a shark tank. But instead of maiming her, as his expression said he was considering doing, he merely shook his head with disgust, wheeled around, and stalked up the road.

Renee felt a flush of exhilaration at winning round one. Could it be that the big, bad cop wasn’t so big and bad after all?

She trotted to catch up. “John. Slow down.”

He sped up again, his long strides taking him several paces ahead of her. She caught up again and strode alongside him.