Читать книгу Agent Daddy - Alice Sharpe, Alice Sharpe - Страница 9

Half an hour later, Faith found out what she was getting into with Colin’s car seat. The sedan seemed to reverberate with the baby’s outraged protest.

“Noelle, honey, could you give Colin a toy or a cracker or something?” Faith asked, voice raised to be heard.

Noelle, strapped into the back next to her brother, said, “It won’t work, Ms. Bishop. Nothing works in the car.”

“I thought babies liked to go for rides,” Faith said, thinking of her nieces who always seemed to quiet down once the engine started.

“Not Colin,” Noelle yelled with what sounded like a hint of pride.

The weather hadn’t changed, except that the skies were darker than ever. Faith tried to think of somewhere besides her apartment where she could take small children and could think of nothing. Shay didn’t have a mall or an indoor playground, and she hadn’t had a chance to make any friends outside the school.

“Where are we going?” Noelle asked, her voice smaller now, unsure, barely audible over her brother’s tirade.

“I don’t know,” Faith mumbled. And then, because there really wasn’t another choice, she added, “My place.”

After a few moments, Colin’s cries grew a little less raucous, and as Faith negotiated the wet streets, she thought back to her meeting with Luke Tripper.

As she’d confessed to him, she’d heard about him first from the teacher she replaced, and then around the school. The bus story had intrigued her from the moment she heard it, maybe because she’d brushed against evil last spring, barely surviving a malicious attack. To hear about a man who ran back and forth to an overturned bus risking his life to save others reassured her in some odd way that people were still good. The look in his eyes when he admitted he hadn’t saved everyone had touched her deeply.

So she’d wondered what he would be like—and had built a mental image of a hero: strong, fearless, able to leap tall buildings. Luke Tripper looked as though he was all those things.

He was as tall as her brother, Zac, but not as lanky, more muscular, broad-shouldered, body trim and fit, thick, dark hair cut short. And those eyes. Smoldering, yes, but also focused and intense. She’d found herself struggling not to tell him her deepest, darkest secrets.

Add to that a sophisticated air at odds with boots and jeans and a hat that looked as though it had been around the block a time or two. That inconsistency was due, no doubt, to the fact he’d only been a rancher for four or five months. Before that he’d been an FBI agent, rumored to have done covert work. The veneer left over from that career no doubt explained her desire to confide in him. Only her pledge to herself that she would solve her own problems kept her mouth shut.

Besides, Trip had enough troubles of his own.

Faith fought against a stab of pure, unadulterated self-pity. Sure, she missed Puget Sound, old friends and family, but she was in debt up to her eyeballs with medical bills and Shay was the only place she could find a decent job.

There was another reason for her decision to move, too, and it had to do with her father and brother. Last May, Zac had married Olivia, Faith’s best friend, and had adopted her four little girls. He was sheriff in Westerly, his life was busy and full, and he was happier than Faith had ever seen him.

Meanwhile, after twenty years of being a widower, her father had discovered love right in his own backyard with Olivia’s mother, Juliet Hart. The two were getting married in Hawaii over the holidays. Faith had told them she was too busy with her new job to travel to explain why she wouldn’t be at the ceremony. She hadn’t wanted to admit the truth: she couldn’t afford the trip. She hadn’t confided in either her father or her brother that her insurance hadn’t begun to cover expenses.

The point was, both the men in her life had moved on, and yet she knew their happiness was affected by her own sense of detachment, and it killed her. She was tired of pretending everything was okay and was determined to solve her own problems.

Where did that leave the little ache in her gut when she thought about Luke Tripper? In her gut, she supposed, buried and secret where it belonged.

Faith’s apartment was actually the basement of a two-story house in the worst corner of the worst part of Shay. The price for paying off her mountainous medical bills was living in a terrible neighborhood with a landlady named Ruby Lee who gave Faith the heebie-jeebies.

As she drove around the house to reach her private entrance in the back, some of her tension dissipated. The main garage was closed and the house looked dark. Hallelujah, it appeared Ruby wasn’t home. Faith parked under the lean-to attached to the garage.

“This is where you live?” Noelle asked as Faith helped her unbuckle her seat belt and collect her backpack. Noelle looked a lot like her uncle. Same dark brown hair, only on Noelle it was long and braided. Same deep brown eyes.

Faith took Colin out of his seat. The baby grabbed her around the neck and immediately stopped fussing, rubbing his damp eyes with a plump fist. Poor little guy looked tired.

“This is where I live,” Faith said as the rain pounded the fiberglass roof of the lean-to. Holding tightly to Colin and the diaper bag Trip had left in the school office, she took Noelle’s hand. “Let’s run between the raindrops to the front porch, okay?”

They dashed the ten feet to the feeble overhang covering the door. Faith struggled to keep up with Noelle, her left leg protesting a bit at the unevenness of the ground.

Juggling baby and belongings, Faith dug for her keys. She found they were unnecessary, as the door pushed open when she touched the knob. Had she forgotten to lock up when she left that morning?

No way. She couldn’t take the children into a compromised house. For a second she stood there, unsure what to do.

As she raced through her options, the porch light went on and the door opened wide.

Faith gasped as Noelle shrank back against her legs. A man of about twenty stood facing them. Dressed in black denim jeans and a torn black sweatshirt with a metallic lightning bolt bisecting the front, muscles bulged in his arms, jet black hair flopped over his forehead. He held a hammer in one hand.

“David,” Faith said, catching her breath and laying her free hand on Noelle’s damp shoulder. “You scared me.”

“I came to fix the cabinet you told Ma was bothering you.” His gaze slid to Faith’s hips and stayed there.

“Did your mother let you into my place?”

“I have my own key.”

“Your own key? Who gave you a key?” she demanded.

“I’m helping Ma. I’m taking care of things around here from now on. I’m taking care of you.”

Like hell you are, Faith thought. “Are you finished with the cabinet?”

“Almost.” He turned and walked back into the heavily shadowed room, disappearing into the kitchen alcove.

“Let’s get out of the rain,” Faith said, shepherding Noelle inside, turning on lights, trying to dispel some of the gloom. The basement, which she’d rented furnished, looked even worse with bright lights. There wasn’t a single Christmas decoration, and Faith could only imagine how cheerless it struck a five-year-old. The child stayed right against her legs as a few banging noises came from the kitchen.

“It’s done,” David said, appearing in the opening between Faith’s very modest living room and the kitchen. “You want to check it?”

“No. I’m sure it’s fine.”

David looked at Noelle again, then at Colin. “Ma said no kids.”

“I’m just watching them—they don’t live here.”

“Oh.”

“Well, thanks. But next time, please make an appointment.”

He lifted one lip, revealing a pointed incisor.

The door opened behind Faith. She and both children swiveled to look at the newcomer. Ruby Lee bustled into the room, closing the door behind her, sandwiching Faith, Colin and Noelle between herself and her son. She wore a black rain coat and silver rain boots, a silver rain hat riddled with holes, tied under her chin. Her makeup looked as though it been applied with a trowel. If today ran true to form, within six hours she’d be drunk, pounding on Faith’s door, makeup sliding down her cheeks.

“You fix the cabinet?” Ruby asked.

David’s reply sounded sullen. “Yeah.”

“Then go check the bathroom door.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Faith said quickly.

“You told me it wouldn’t lock,” Ruby said, narrowing her eyes.

“It doesn’t, but right now I have guests—”

“Now or never,” David said, stepping closer to Faith, his overmuscled body radiating a primal heat that made Faith want to gasp for air. She retreated toward Ruby. He added, “No time like the present, right?”

“I said no kids,” Ruby said, staring at Colin. For the first time, Faith realized Colin’s tiny fingers had clutched her coat collar so tight it strained against her throat, half choking her. Could the baby sense the tension?

“Will you please both leave?” Faith asked.

“There’s work to be done. David is here now,” Ruby insisted, her eyes slightly unfocused, as though she’d started drinking early today.

“Then we’ll leave,” Faith said.

“You don’t gotta go,” David said, lifting the hammer, flexing his muscles. “Come show me what you want done. Ma can watch the babies while I…service you.”

“I’m not watching no kids,” Ruby said.

Faith’s mouth had gone dry at the innuendo in David’s voice. She looked at Ruby again, hoping her landlady would intercede; but that was dumb, help wasn’t coming from that quarter. She repeated, “If you won’t go, we will. But before we do, let me make myself clear. I don’t like people having keys to my home, not even you, David. It undermines my feeling of safety.”

“This ain’t your place, it’s mine,” Ruby reminded her. “And what’s mine is David’s.”

David advanced again, his gaze challenging. “Maybe you want me to come back later tonight after you dump the kids. Maybe you want a little one-on-one.”

It was all Faith could do not to punch him. She gritted her teeth and said, “Absolutely not.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You too good for me, is that it, Miss Bishop?”

At that particular moment, Faith didn’t know what to do about this situation, but she did know she wasn’t going to subject either child to another moment of it. Without answering David, she reached around Ruby and opened the front door. Noelle practically bolted, running back to the car heedless of the rain or the puddles.

Even Colin’s enraged screams as Faith backed down the driveway were a better alternative than one more moment in that basement hellhole. She glanced back once to see David standing in her open door, holding the hammer in one hand, tapping it into the open palm of the other, his belligerent gaze tracking her retreat.

THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME since Trip had returned to Shay that he’d had cause to go to the police station. The accident he’d been involved with earlier in the year had been handled by the highway patrol, while the fire that claimed the life of his sister and her husband had been investigated by the sheriff’s department, since the ranch wasn’t within the Shay city limits.

He’d heard rumors the department wasn’t run very well and, as he stepped up to the counter and found himself eye-to-eye with a kid wearing a slipshod uniform and reading a comic book, his expectations fell even further.

“I want to talk to whoever is in charge of the Gina Cooke investigation,” Trip said.

The kid looked blank. “Gina who?”

“Is there a detective here, maybe? Your boss?”

Now the boy looked more comfortable. “You want to talk to the Chief?”

“Sure.”

The boy nodded, turned around and hollered, “Chief Novak? Someone here to see you.”

“Thomas Novak?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

At that moment, a ticked-off-looking man about Trip’s age strode into the front area from the back. He wore a tight green uniform, buttons straining down the front. Heavy black frames perched ponderously on the bridge of his nose. Glaring at the teenager, he said, “Damn it, Lenny, how many times have I told you come get me, don’t shout?” He looked up from the cowering Lenny, met Trip’s eyes and rocked back on his heels. “I’ll be.”

“It’s been a long time,” Trip said. “You’re ‘Chief’?”

“That’s right. I heard you were back out at the ranch. Sorry about your sister and her husband. Hell of a thing.”

“Thank you,” Trip said. If Lenny hadn’t called Novak by name, Trip was pretty sure he would never have merged the skinny kid from their high school days with the corpulent man standing in front of him. “We need to talk.”

“You here about Gina Cooke?”

“That’s right. I have some information you might want—”

“See that, Lenny,” Novak interrupted, as he took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a tissue he plucked from a box on the counter. “Mr. Tripper here is a FBI big shot but he’s going to take the time to help us out. Isn’t that nice?”

Lenny slid Trip a glance.

“Gina is my babysitter,” Trip said. “And I’m no longer with the Bureau.”

“I know that.”

“You went out to my place when you found her car—”

“I was just following procedures. The hunt is over.”

“You found here? Where?”

“We haven’t found her, but we figured out what happened. She ran off with that boyfriend of hers.”

“Peter Saks?”

“Yeah.”

“My housekeeper said you found Gina’s car abandoned.”

Novak folded his glasses into his shirt pocket and leaned on the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Her car was found outside the Quik Mart on Apple Street. She apparently stopped there every day to buy a cup of coffee before heading out to your place. What got a pedestrian to call in was she’d left the window open and the rain was pouring in. Then there were the keys in the ignition.”

“A bad habit of hers,” Trip said.

“That’s what I hear. We sent someone out to your place to see if she showed up for work and someone else to talk to the girl’s boyfriend and her mother. The mother said Gina always leaves her keys in the ignition and that she and the boyfriend had a fight. The boyfriend wasn’t at home, neighbors said he packed up this morning and told them he was going on vacation.” He shrugged. “That Quik Mart is right on the way to the interstate. We figure Saks ran across her, maybe even waited for her to show up there if he knew it was her habit to stop. Maybe he talked her into a little make-up trip. It looks like she decided to go with him. End of story.”

Novak straightened and looked at Trip as though daring him to challenge these conclusions.

“And Gina’s mother is comfortable with this supposition?” Trip asked after a long moment of debating whether to share his suspicions about Neil Roberts with the chief.

“Says it makes perfect sense. Says her daughter was a pushover for Peter Saks.”

“Where did Saks go, exactly?”

“The neighbors don’t know. Camping, maybe.”

“In this weather? In December?”

“Maybe he went south. Hell, it’s a free country.”

Trip stared at Novak. “I can see where you’re coming from, but the fact Gina didn’t call bothers me. It’s not like her to just leave.”

“There you’re wrong,” Novak said. “Her mother said she ran off without a word a year or two ago.”

Trip hadn’t known that. “Gina told me Saks had a history of domestic violence.”

Chief Novak flipped his hand. “The boy’s a hothead, that’s all.” The big man heaved a sigh that put even greater pressure on his buttons and added, “Listen. I know you had a fancy career in the FBI. I bet it sucks to be out of the action. But this is my town, so why don’t you just go back to ranching?” Novak slapped his hands on the counter. Case closed.

Trip left before his temper got the better of him.

IT WAS GETTING DARK. The rain had let up, but the temperature had dropped, making the roads icy. Faith had taken the children to a big-box store where she changed Colin’s diaper and fed him some of the dry cereal and fruit she found in the diaper bag. She’d bought Noelle a banana, they’d returned to her car and now it seemed the baby had fallen asleep. By the hush in the backseat, Faith thought it likely Noelle had nodded off as well.

How had her life gotten to this point?

Six months before, she’d known who she was and what she wanted. It had been her friend, Olivia, who wanted out of Westerly, not Faith. And now she was driving two very small children around on a stormy night in a town she barely knew, while their uncle tried to find their babysitter. To add insult to injury, she couldn’t even take them somewhere decent, somewhere warm, somewhere safe because her landlady and her son made the Bates Hotel seem like a day spa.

“Ms. Bishop?” Noelle said. Guess she wasn’t asleep after all.

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Can we go home?”

Home. “Well, I don’t want to run into those people again—”

“My home,” Noelle said. “Mrs. Murphy makes cookies sometimes.”

They were at the northeast edge of town. Faith knew Trip lived on a ranch with the children, she knew about where it was, as she’d passed a sign on one of her weekend drives. It was called the Triple T.

Dare she drive to his house? Would he think she was being pushy? Did it matter what he thought?

“What kind of cookies?” she asked as she headed out to the highway. At this point, any decision was better than no decision.

“Sometimes chocolate with peanuts, only Uncle Trip doesn’t like peanuts, so now she leaves them out.”

“I sure hope she made some today,” Faith said.

“Me, too.” It was quiet for a mile or two, and then Noelle spoke again, her voice ominous this time. “Uh-oh, Ms. Bishop.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Colin is waking up.”

IT WAS ALMOST DARK by the time Trip pulled up in front of the Quik Mart. Gina’s car was nowhere in sight. For a second, it crossed his mind she’d come back for it, or her mother had taken it or the cops had impounded it, and then he remembered the way Gina always parked on a hillside, facing down, when she came to the ranch, in case the engine wouldn’t start. There was a slope beyond the store. He topped the hill and looked down the road that bordered a ravine on one side and a few stores on the other side, and sure enough, there was Gina’s car, pointed downhill.

Gina’s car windows were up now and the doors were locked. The car itself looked like it always did, battered and old, the tattered front seat bare, except for a fluff of something very white and purple, just visible on the passenger side, stuffed between seat and seat back. Trip hitched his hands on his waist and looked up and down the street. A gas station on the corner, a flower shop and a shoe repair directly opposite. He checked his watch and decided he could spare a few more minutes.

The man in the shoe repair shop worked in the back and came to the front only when he heard the bell ring over the door. Trip asked him about the car across the street, but the repairman hadn’t even noticed the police, let alone a nineteen-year-old woman. He did say he’d seen the car there before.

The flower shop was better staffed. The three female employees, all in their thirties and all smiling up a storm, agreed they’d seen Gina’s car parked on the hillside before, but none of them had actually seen her, not today, anyway. Since Trip didn’t have a photo to show around, there wasn’t much else to be learned.

He went to the service station last. It was an independently owned station, with higher prices than could be found elsewhere, hence it appeared to do a neighborhood kind of business. There were no cars at the pumps, but there was a man in the garage, sitting on an overturned box, lights blazing around him. It looked as though he was in the process of dismantling an engine.

Trip stood there for a moment, watching. Late twenties, pudgy, somehow familiar, dressed in blue coveralls, extremely focused on his job. The mechanic was picking up little pieces and wiping them with a grease rag, dropping some into some kind of solvent, arranging others in a pattern of sorts.

The guy gave no indication he was aware of Trip. Mindful of the need for haste, Trip stepped into the light and said, “Sorry to bother you…”

At the sound of Trip’s voice, the attendant jumped up. Sandy hair, sparse mustache over full lips, blue eyes, a couple of grease smudges on his cheek. His overalls were too big for him. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t hear you drive in.”

“I didn’t drive in, I walked. I don’t need gas, I just want to ask you a couple of questions.” As the mechanic perched back atop his box, Trip added, “You look like you know what you’re doing with that engine.”

“Been taking ’em apart since I was a little kid.”

“You look familiar,” Trip said. “You from around here?” Too late he realized he’d fallen into interrogation mode.

The kid didn’t seem to mind. “More or less,” he said.

Trip introduced himself and stepped closer, hand extended.

“Eddie Reed,” the guy replied, but raised grease-stained hands to explain why he didn’t return the shake. He added, “I know who you are, Mr. Tripper. I came to your place looking for work a few weeks ago.”

“I don’t—”

“Your foreman, that Mr. Plum guy, he said you just hired someone else.”

A big clock on the wall ticked away another ten seconds before Trip added, “I’m wondering about the car across the street. The green one that’s been parked there most of today.”

“What about it?”

“Did you see the young woman who left it there this morning?”

“I don’t come to work till two o’clock,” Eddie said. “What does she look like?”

“Oh, around twenty, long red hair, tall. Pretty girl.”

“She special to you?”

Trip ignored the question. “Did you see anyone matching her description?”

“No, sorry. I saw the cops nosing around, that’s all. Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure. Probably not.”

This earned Trip a long glance, until Eddie, apparently losing interest, went back to his task with a nimble-fingered finesse Trip envied. How did a man get that comfortable with engines? At his father’s knee? Trip thought of his own father, the man who had started the Triple T Ranch, the man who could fix anything, the man Trip had given up emulating two decades before.

“Thanks anyway,” Trip said.

“Sure. Hey, I hope it works out.”

“You hope what works out?”

“The girl. I hope you find her.”

“Yeah,” Trip said. “Thanks.”

Walking out of the garage, Trip dug from his pocket the paper on which Faith had written her number. Standing in the light shining through the gas station window, he flipped open his cell phone right as it rang.

“Trip here.”

“This is Faith—”

“I was just going to call you.”

“Listen to me,” she pleaded. Her voice sounded anxious and in the background, he heard Colin screaming.

“What—”

“I’m on the road to your house with your kids. Someone is following really close behind me, so close his lights blind me and I’ve tried to get away from him, but he speeds up when I do.”

“Where are you exactly?” he yelled as he ran to his truck. None of this made any sense. Why was she driving the kids out to the ranch?

“I don’t know where I am, not exactly, but there are hardly any cars out here. I passed something called Tyrone Gardens a few minutes ago.”

“I’m coming,” he said, estimating time in his head. “Don’t stop, whatever you do, and don’t speed up if you can help it. I’ll call ahead to the ranch. I know where you are…I’ll be there.”

“Okay,” she said, almost drowned out by a high-pitched scream that had to be Noelle. His gut tightened as she whispered, “Oh, please hurry.”