Manhunt in the Wild West (4 page)

With no way of knowing where al-Jihad had eyes and ears, they had to be careful not to make it obvious that the terrorist had a traitor among his small crew.

“Just hang on for a few hours, Chelsea,” Fax said quietly, his words echoing in the cave. “Help should be on its way soon.”

Then, knowing he’d done the best he could for her, he paused at the cave mouth and looked back at the six bloodied bodies, five of which weren’t going to wake up ever again.

“Collateral damage,” he murmured. Uncharacteristically, he found himself regretting that he couldn’t have saved the others, hadn’t even tried. And, as he walked into the sunlight, he found himself wishing that he believed he was going to live long enough to see pretty Chelsea Swan again, under better circumstances.

But as soon as he caught himself thinking along those lines, he squelched the emotions.

There was no room for softness around men like al-Jihad, and Fax had a job to do. That took priority, period.

“She’s coming around.” Chelsea felt a couple of light taps on her face, and heard a babble of voices close by, but she couldn’t quite grasp what any of it meant.

Reality and recognition were distant strangers. Cocooned in a warm lassitude, she felt too lazy to move, too tired to care that moving was impossible.

“Are you sure none of this is her blood?” a second voice asked, this one female.

“Positive,” the first voice answered. “She doesn’t have a single laceration on her, just the bump on the back of her head.”

“Then where’d the blood come from?”

“From one of the others, looks like.” Another series of taps on her face. “Chelsea? Can you hear me?”

She moaned and swatted at the hand that was gently slapping her. At least she tried to swat. She failed, though, because her arms didn’t move.

“Here she comes,” the first voice said, sounding pleased. “Okay, kiddo. I need you to open your eyes now. Can you do that for me?”

Chelsea did as she was told, squinting into the fading light of dusk, which showed that she was inside a cave of sorts. The details were lost to the shadows and the glare of handheld lights, but she was aware of numerous people inside the small space, most of them cops.

A paramedic was crouched over her. Behind a plastic face shield, his brown eyes were dark with concern. It wasn’t the concern that confused her though; it was her sudden, utter conviction that his eyes were the wrong color. They weren’t supposed to be brown; they were supposed to be…

Blue, she remembered. Ice-cold blue.

The memory of the man’s eyes unlocked a flood of other recollections. She gasped as the memories swamped her, slapping her with terror and confusion, and the unbelievable realization that Jonah Fairfax, double murderer, had done exactly as he’d promised. He’d saved her.

But as the pieces lined up in her brain—sort of—they didn’t click. He’d said the drug would take twelve hours to wear off, and she’d been abducted near lunchtime, yet she could see dusk outside.

“What day is it?” she asked, her voice cracking from disuse and whatever drug he’d stuck in her system.

The paramedic said, “Tuesday. Why?”

Which meant she’d only been out for a few hours. “How did you find me?”

“Anonymous tip,” he said, looking past her to confer with someone outside her line of vision.

Her brain jammed on the information, which didn’t make sense. Fairfax had said something about the escapees being well away by the time she came around, but she’d only been out for a few hours. Had he changed his mind and made the call himself? Had—

The spiraling questions bounced off each other inside her throbbing skull and logjammed, and a sudden shiver wracked her body. “I’m f-freezing,” she managed between chattering teeth.

“We’re working on that,” the paramedic replied. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiff.”

It wasn’t until he and his partner lifted her that she realized she was on a stretcher, swathed in blankets and strapped down, which explained the feeling of immobility.

She was aware of commotion around her as she was carried out of the cave and back along the wooded trail. She caught glimpses of concerned faces, many of them belonging to cops she saw in the ME’s office on a regular basis. She wanted to stop and talk to them, wanted to tell them what had happened to her, but her lips didn’t work right and the light was all funny, going from the blue of dusk to a strange grayish-brown and back again.

When they reached the ambulance, Sara was there waiting, tears coursing down her cheeks when she saw Chelsea. Her lips moved; the words didn’t make any sense but Chelsea knew her friend well enough to guess Sara was apologizing for leaving her out on the loading dock.

It wasn’t your fault,
Chelsea tried to say.
Don’t blame yourself. I’ll be okay—Fairfax saved me.
But the words didn’t come out. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but let the world slip away as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

Everything faded to the gray-brown of unconsciousness.

She surfaced a few times after that—once as she was being wheeled through the hospital corridors, the fluorescent lights flashing brightly overhead, and once again during some sort of exam, when she heard doctors’ and nurses’ voices saying things like, “That doesn’t make any sense” and “Check it again.”

She didn’t come around fully until early the next morning. She knew it was morning because of the way the light of dawn bled pale lavender through the slatted blinds that covered the room’s single window, and the way her body was suddenly clamoring for breakfast and coffee, not necessarily in that order.

A quick look around confirmed that she was, indeed, in the hospital, and added the information that homicide detective Tucker McDermott was fast asleep in the chair beside her bed.

The realization warmed her with the knowledge that her friends had closed ranks around her already.

She knew Tucker through the ME’s office, and more importantly through his wife, Alyssa, who was a good friend. Alyssa, a forensics specialist within the BCCPD, was quick-tempered and always on the go. In contrast, Tucker was a rock, steady and dependable. He might’ve had a flighty playboy’s reputation a few years back, but marriage had settled him to the point that he’d become the go-to guy in their circle, the one who was always level in a crisis, always ready to listen or offer a shoulder to lean on.

He made her wimpy side feel safe.

She must’ve moved or made some sound indicating that she’d awakened, because he opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times, then smiled. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

“I’m—” She paused, confused. “That’s weird. I feel fine. Better than fine, actually. I feel really good.” Energy coursed through her alongside the gnawing hunger, but there were none of the lingering aches she would’ve expected from her ordeal. Lifting a hand, which didn’t bear an IV or any monitoring lines, she probed the back of her head and found a bruised lump, but little residual pain. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel the brain fuzz of prescription-strength painkillers. “What did the doctors give me?”

Tucker shook his head. “Nothing. By the time you arrived, your core temp was coming back up and your vitals were stabilizing. They decided to let you sleep it off and see how you felt when you woke up.”

“I’m okay,” she said weakly, her brain churning. “Okay” wasn’t entirely accurate, though, because the more she thought about her ordeal the more scared and confused she became, as terrifying images mixed with the memory of the convict who’d saved her life, and the coworker who’d lost his.

“Jerry’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked softly.

She remembered the gunshot, remembered him falling, even remembered him lying in the van, limp in death, but a piece of her didn’t want to accept that he was gone. She wanted to believe he’d been stunned like she’d been. Not dead. Not Jerry, with his cold nose and ski-bunny girlfriend.

But Tucker shook his head, expression full of remorse. “I’m sorry.”

Chelsea closed her eyes, grief beating at her alongside guilt. She should’ve done something different. If she hadn’t been staring at Fairfax, she might’ve been quicker to recognize that there was a problem with the delivery. She might’ve been able to—

“Don’t,” Tucker said. “You’ll only make yourself crazy trying to ‘what if’ this. If you’d done something different, they probably would’ve killed you, too.”

“They did, sort of,” Chelsea whispered, her breath burning her throat with unshed tears.

Tucker shifted, pulled out his handheld, which acted as both computer and cell phone. “You okay if I record this?”

She nodded. “Of course.” No doubt she’d have to go through her statement over and over again with a variety of cops and agents, but this first time she’d rather talk to Tucker than anyone else.

Haltingly at first, she told him what had happened, her words coming easier once she got started, then flowing torrentlike when she described waking up in the van and realizing she’d been kidnapped by the escapees, followed by Fairfax’s strange actions. She kept it facts only, reporting what he’d done and said, and figuring she’d leave it to Tucker and the others to draw their own conclusions.

When she was done, she glanced at Tucker and was unsurprised to see a concerned frown on his face.

“That sounds…”

“Bizarre,” she filled in for him. “Like something from a not-very-believable action movie. I know. But that’s what happened.”

He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t believe her. Or rather, he probably believed that
she
believed what she was saying, but thought her so-called memories were more along the lines of drug-induced hallucinations shaped by her penchant for spy movies that always included at least one double agent and a couple of twists.

Then again, she thought with a start, what if he was right? She felt terrible that she’d been paying more attention to Fairfax’s butt than to her job and the potential security risks, opening the way for Jerry’s murder. What if her subconscious had taken that guilt and woven a fantasy that cast the object of her attraction as a hero, making her lapse, if not acceptable, then at least less reprehensible?

“Maybe I’m not remembering correctly,” she said after a moment.

“The info about Rickey Charles fits,” Tucker said, though he still sounded pretty dubious. “He was found dead in his holding cell this morning.”

Chelsea sat up so fast her head spun. “He what?”

Tucker winced. “I should’ve phrased that better. Sorry, I went into cop-talking-to-ME mode and forgot you knew him.”

“What did he—” Chelsea broke off, not sure how she was supposed to feel. She hadn’t cared for Rickey and couldn’t forgive that he’d apparently made some sort of deal with the escapees, but she wouldn’t have wished him dead under any circumstance.

“It was murder concocted to look like a suicide,” Tucker said succinctly. “I guess, based on what you just told me about what the driver said to you out on the loading dock, that Rickey was supposed to have signed off on the bodies, delaying discovery of the switch. When he turned up in the holding cell instead, someone working for al-Jihad killed him either to punish him or to shut him up, or both.”

Which would mean that someone in the PD—or at least someone with access to the overnight holding cells—was on the terrorists’ payroll, Chelsea thought. She didn’t say it aloud, though, because the possibility was too awful to speak.

Tucker nodded, though. “Yeah. Big problem. That’s why I’m here.”

He hadn’t stayed with her strictly to keep her company, she realized. He’d stayed because the BCCPD had figured it might not be a coincidence that the ME who’d missed his shift that morning had wound up dead. Tucker’s bosses—and her own—thought she might be at risk, that whoever had killed Rickey might go after her next, looking to silence her before she told the cops anything that might help lead them to the escapees.

Except she didn’t know anything that would help, did she?

“Don’t worry,” Tucker said, correctly interpreting her fears. “We’re keeping the story as quiet as possible, and letting the media think you’re dead, too. If the escapees are following the news, they have no reason to think you’re alive.”

Unless Fairfax had told them for some reason. But why would he, when he’d been the one to save her?

She didn’t know who to trust, or what to believe, and the confusion made her head spin.

She sank back against the thin hospital pillow, noticing for the first time that she was wearing nothing but a hospital johnnie and a layer of bedclothes. “Can I—” she faltered as the world she knew seemed to skew beneath her, tilting precariously. “Can I get dressed and get out of here?”

His expression went sympathetic. “Yeah, you’re cleared…medically, anyway. Since your purse was still at the office, Sara used your key to grab clothes, shoes and a jacket for you, along with a few toiletries.” He gestured. “They’re in the bathroom, along with your purse. The keys are in it.”

He didn’t offer to help her, which told her it was a test: if she couldn’t make it to the bathroom and get herself dressed unassisted, she was staying in the hospital until she could.

She’d been telling the truth, though. She felt fantastic—physically, anyway—and was able to make it to the small restroom and get dressed without any trouble.

In the midst of pulling on her shirt, she paused and frowned in confusion when she saw that there wasn’t any discernible mark where the injection had gone into her arm. He’d jammed the tip of that ampoule in hard enough that it should’ve left a mark. Did that mean it hadn’t happened the way she remembered?

It didn’t take too many minutes of staring at her own reflection in the mirror for her to conclude that she didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to figure it out standing in a hospital bathroom. She emerged to find Tucker waiting for her, with his cell phone pressed to his ear.

“You shouldn’t be on that thing in here,” she said automatically, her med-school training kicking in even though the actual risk was relatively minor.

“I’m off,” he said, flipping the phone shut and dropping it in his pocket. “You ready to go?” He indicated the door with a sweep of his hand.