Читать книгу Lawman Lover - Lisa Childs, Lisa Childs, Livia Reasoner - Страница 8

“Jed told me I could trust you,” he said. Rowe had been a fool to believe a killer. But what choice had he had? His flimsy shiv hadn’t even fazed the muscular giant, neither had any of the trick moves he’d learned growing up on the streets of Detroit.

He grimaced, his body aching from the well-placed blows Jed had used to subdue him. And the stab wound throbbed in spite of, or maybe because of, Macy’s additional stitches.

If Rowe hadn’t trusted the man, he would have wound up dead—at Jed’s hands or another prisoner’s. But still he shook his head in self-disgust. Someone in his own office must have betrayed him. So trusting a stranger, even though he hadn’t really had any option, had been crazy.

“I should have known better than to believe a prisoner professing his innocence,” he berated himself.

“Jed is innocent, and you can trust me,” she assured him. Then she swung his leg back onto the tray and shoved him down.

“Get back in the drawer,” she whispered, as footsteps approached with the squeak of rubber wheels rolling over tile.

“I’ll be trapped in there,” he said, the panic rushing over him again.

She shoved the drawer, sending it—and him—inside the cool cabinet. He hooked his toe so it wouldn’t close all the way. But she must have been satisfied, because she scrambled into the hall. The wheels ground to a halt as she breathlessly told someone, “I got it.”

What? Him?

Through the crack the drawer was left open, he studied the morgue, determining his escape route in case she had told the coroner the truth. But she walked back in alone—pushing a gurney.

He waited a moment, making sure no one else followed her. As if she had forgotten all about him, she just stood there and stared down at the body bag on the gurney. Breathing hard, he planted his palms against the top of the drawer and propelled the tray out the door.

“You okay?”

Her face pale and eyes wide and dark, she just shook her head. “No.”

Son of a bitch…

Not her brother. Even if Jedidiah Kleyn wasn’t innocent as he claimed, he didn’t deserve to die like this just because he had helped Rowe instead of killing him.

“No…” he murmured, a knot of dread moving from his stomach to his chest. He jumped out of the drawer and walked over to the gurney. Then he reached for the zipper of the body bag and pulled it down, over the battered face of the man who had helped him.

But it wasn’t Jed. It was the other man, the one who had been scared but agreeable to aiding Rowe’s escape. Rowe stared down at the bruised and broken body of the gray-haired prison doctor.

“Son of a bitch…” he cursed low and harshly. “I did this….”

As if rousing herself from a nightmare, Macy shook her head. “You were already on your way here in a body bag when this happened.”

“But it’s my fault,” he said. “They beat him to death because of me.”

Damn it. Damn it. If only there had been another way to get out…a way that hadn’t involved an innocent man winding up dead.

“What if he told them you’re not dead?” she asked, her voice cracking with fear. “Will my brother be coming here in the next body bag?”

“Macy—”

Anger flushed her face. “How could you use him like this? You put him in danger.”

Just getting sentenced to Blackwoods had put Jedidiah Kleyn in mortal danger. More prisoners left like he had, in body bags, than on parole. That was part of the reason he’d been given his undercover assignment at the penitentiary. The other part of the reason had been the drugs that moved more freely than the bodies in and out of the prison.

“You have to help my brother,” she pleaded. “You have to get him out before he winds up dead, too.”

Rowe glanced down at Doc’s battered face. If the elderly physician had talked, it was probably already too late for him to save Kleyn. The elevator dinged again, and Rowe groaned. Was this one her brother, just as she feared?

“I don’t know who that is,” Macy murmured, horror and dread glistening in her dark eyes. “It can’t be…”

“It’s not,” he said.

“No,” she agreed, and jerked her head in a nod that had her ponytail bouncing. “The van didn’t have time to get to the prison and back again. It’s not Jed.”

Yet.

“Then it’s someone you’re not expecting.”

She cursed and bit her lip. With a ragged sigh, she reached for the instrument tray and grabbed up a scalpel. She studied him a moment, as if she had just realized that the easiest way to save her brother was to prove that he had really killed the undercover DEA agent. Rowe’s dead body would be all the proof she needed.

“I can’t help your brother if I’m dead,” Rowe pointed out.

“Get on a gurney,” she whispered.

He hesitated a moment, wondering if she intended to plunge the scalpel into his chest the minute he lay down.

“Please,” she murmured. “You have to—your life isn’t the only one at risk now.”

Hers was, too, just as Jedidiah Kleyn had worried would happen when Macy helped Rowe get out of the morgue. The only promise the prisoner had extracted in exchange for helping Rowe was that the DEA agent keep his little sister safe.

The sound of heavy footsteps echoing down the corridor compelled him to move. Whoever had come down to the morgue had not come alone. He had no more than jumped on a stretcher than Macy draped a sheet over him and pushed him into the hall. As she drew the morgue door shut behind them, the click of a lock echoed with finality. Through the sheet, he glimpsed shadows—several of them—walking toward the stretcher and Macy.

“Good evening, Warden James,” she murmured. “How can I help you?”

By turning over the only man who had ever escaped Blackwoods Penitentiary and the corrupt warden’s reign of terror?

MACY BIT HER LIP AND WISHED back her greeting. But the warden didn’t react to her recognizing him. Everyone in Blackwoods County knew who Warden James was, so he probably would have reacted more had she pretended not to know him.

She held the scalpel beneath the edge of the gurney she clutched and realized how ineffectual the weapon was as she stared up at the broad-shouldered prison warden. With his bald head and big build, the fifty-something-year-old was an intimidating man. He didn’t need the muscle he had brought with him, but four heavily muscled and armed guards stood behind him.

If they wanted to see the body under the sheet, she wouldn’t be able to stop them, even with the scalpel. Her heart pounded hard and fast with fear that she had made a horrible mistake. She would have been smarter to lock her and the prisoner inside the morgue, rather than out of it.

“Get Dr. Bernard out here,” Warden James said. The man was obviously used to everyone jumping to obey his commands.

If he had really ordered her brother to kill an undercover agent, Jed would not survive his show of disobedience.

She swallowed hard and replied, “He left for the evening.”

“Then you need to call him and get him back down here. Now,” the warden insisted, a jagged vein standing out on his forehead as he barely contained his rage.

“I don’t have the doctor’s private numbers, and I’m not sure where he is, sir,” she murmured, barely able to hear her own voice over the furious beating of her heart. Now she understood why everyone in Blackwoods County feared Warden Jefferson James whether they were confined in his prison or not.

“I’m just waiting for a funeral home pickup.” Forcing away her nerves, she gestured with a steady hand toward the gurney.

“So you have a key to the morgue?”

She shook her head. It wasn’t really a lie since she wasn’t supposed to have a key to the morgue. “No. Dr. Bernard left me in the hall here, waiting. The funeral home’s driver is late.” Her friend wasn’t actually going to show at all, but hopefully the warden wouldn’t check her story.

“Who does have a key?” James persisted.

Despite the tension quivering in her muscles, she managed a shrug. “Maybe the hospital director?”

“Can you call him down here?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, sir, the phones don’t even ring down here after hours. And I can’t leave this body unattended until the funeral home gets here.”

“Why not?” Warden James asked, his already beady eyes narrowing with suspicion. “It’s not like he’s going to walk off.”

A couple of his goons uttered nervous chuckles of amusement.

“Is it?” the warden asked. Now he focused on the DEA agent’s sheet-covered body.

Macy willed the sheet not to move with Rowe’s heartbeats or his breathing. “Of course not, sir. It’s protocol for the hospital and the state that a body never be left unattended outside the morgue. I might lose my job if I leave.” And her life if she stayed and the warden lifted that sheet. If he was willing to kill an undercover DEA agent, he would have no problem killing her. And then her brother…

Her eyes widened as she imagined the sheet shifting a bit as if sliding off Rowe’s body, and she accidentally bumped into the gurney so that the wheels lurched a couple of inches across the linoleum floor. The sheet moved, too, but didn’t slide off any farther. Nothing of Rowe was visible beneath it but the outline of his long, muscular body.

The warden stepped back with a slight shudder of revulsion. How could a man who was so often around death be unnerved by it? “I don’t give a damn about protocol,” he said. “I need to talk to your boss right now.”

“If you go to the main desk upstairs, they can help you,” she said. “They’ll be able to reach Dr. Bernard at home and have him come back to the morgue.”

The warden glared at her before turning and heading toward the elevator. Like devoted dogs at his heels, the guards followed him. Macy waited until the doors closed on him and his henchmen; then she exhaled the breath she’d held and her knees weakened. She stumbled against the gurney and sent the wheels rolling forward a few feet this time.

Still covered with the sheet, the body rose, like a ghost rising from the dead. Then Rowe shrugged off the shroud and turned to her. He expelled a ragged sigh as if he’d been holding his breath. “That was close.”

“That was crazy,” she said, trembling in reaction to the confrontation. “I thought for sure he was going to lift the sheet. You were moving.” She reached out to smack him, as she would have her brother, but this man wasn’t her brother. He was a potentially dangerous stranger, so she snatched back her hand before she could connect with his bare skin and muscle.

“I wasn’t moving,” he said, his already impressive chest expanding as he filled his lungs. “I wasn’t even breathing.”

In her fear, she had only imagined the sheet slipping then. “The warden kept staring at you like he knew I was lying….”

Thank God he had not called her on that lie.

“I thought your brother was lying,” Rowe admitted.

“About his innocence?” She bristled with indignation. “He is innocent.”

“I thought he was lying, or at least exaggerating about you,” he said, as he slid off the gurney, “but you are really smart. You think faster on your feet than some agents with years of experience on the job.”

“I feel like a fool,” she said, because he was probably playing her for one. “I should have called the police, or at least told Dr. Bernard about you.” She could have trusted her boss to help her; he had treated her very well the past three years.

“You’ll get me and your brother killed,” Cusack warned her.

“I only have your word that will happen,” she pointed out. And she had been stupid to take his word for anything.

“Remember what happened to Doc,” he advised her. “Why do you think he died?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It could have had nothing to do with you. A prisoner could have freaked out on him.” So many ODs came to the morgue from the prison, the inmates overdosing on controlled substances to which they never should have had access. It was very plausible and overdue for the DEA to investigate the drug problem at Blackwoods Penitentiary.

“Then why did the warden show up here?” he asked, his blue eyes bright with anger. “He’s looking for me.”

“And I probably should have turned you over to him.” But she couldn’t take the risk that Jed wouldn’t get hurt or, worse, wind up like Doc, if she talked.

Trusting this stranger, though, was putting her own life at risk. Warden James was not going to be happy if he learned that she had lied to him. So she had to make certain that he never learned the truth.

“I THINK YOUR BROTHER DID kill me and send me straight to hell,” Rowe grumbled as he zipped up the sweatshirt Macy had tossed over the seat a minute before. “First a body bag and a coroner’s van.”

“Then a slab in the morgue,” she murmured over her shoulder.

“And a cold unventilated drawer.” It had also been dark and confining, reminding him of those closets he’d been locked in so many years ago.

“I didn’t shut it all the way.”

He leaned through the partition separating the back from the front seat. “No, you didn’t, or I would have suffocated and wouldn’t be taking this ride right now—” Rowe shook his head in disbelief “—in the back of a hearse.”

“You couldn’t just walk out of the morgue,” Macy said, her voice muffled as she stared straight ahead, peering through the windshield. She steered the hearse down the narrow road which, like every other road in Blackwoods County, wound around woods and small, inland lakes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

“No, I couldn’t, not with Warden James and his goons hanging around the hospital,” he agreed. So he’d had to trust Macy Kleyn again and rely on her quick-witted thinking to get him out of the hospital unseen.

He lifted his gaze from the windshield to the rearview mirror hanging from it, and caught the reflection of headlamps burning through the darkness behind them. His gut knotted with apprehension. “But someone still might have followed us.”

In the rearview, Macy’s wide-eyed gaze met his. “Someone’s following us?”

“It’s possible.” Given his recent run of bad luck, highly probable.

“Or maybe you’re just paranoid,” she said, her voice light even though her eyes, reflecting back at him from the rearview mirror, darkened with fear.

“Paranoia isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” He touched the wound on his ribs that Macy had had to add stitches to completely close. If her brother had obeyed the warden, that knife would have gone deep enough to kill Rowe.

Who within the administration had given him up? His handler or someone else in the office? He had worked with his handler, Agent Jackson, before. Hell, after six years with the DEA, he had worked with everyone in his department and a few others. He would have never suspected one of the special agents of blowing someone’s cover. But it was the only way the warden could have learned his real identity.

So Rowe had no idea who he could trust—besides Macy Kleyn. And if he’d gotten her brother killed, he was certain she would turn on him, too. “Because sometimes everybody really is out to get you.”

“I know.” She jerked the wheel, abruptly turning off the road. The hearse barely cleared the trees on either side of it as it bounced over the ruts of a two-track road. She shut off the lights but not the engine as she continued, blind, through the trees.

“Where the hell did you learn to drive like this?” he asked, that paranoia making him suspicious of her now. Her brother had said she was studying to become a doctor, not a stunt driver.

“EMT class.”

“So how did you wind up working in the morgue?” he asked, with a sense of revulsion as he remembered the coldness and the closeness of that drawer she’d kept shutting him in.

“I applied for a job as an ambulance driver,” she explained, “but the only opening at the hospital was in the morgue.”

She had given up school and her choice of career to be close to her brother—a brother Rowe might have gotten killed just as he had Doc.

Remembering the frustration and worry in his voice when Jed had told him about his younger sister, Rowe said, “Now that we’re away from the hospital, you need to drop me off somewhere and then forget that you ever saw me.”

She snorted out a breath that stirred her bangs. “Not likely.”

“Macy, I appreciate what you’ve done, but I can’t ask you to do any more.” He couldn’t allow her to get involved any deeper than she already was. He wouldn’t break his promise to the man who had gotten him out of Blackwoods alive.

“I’m not doing this for you,” she said as she pulled up behind a building. After shutting off the engine, she jumped out. Seconds later the back door of the hearse opened. Moonlight glinted off a row of smokestacks on the corrugated steel roof.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked as he crawled out of the hearse.

“Hell is right.” She tossed his earlier words back at him. “The crematorium.” She jangled a ring of keys in her palm.

“You have the keys?”

“It’s my second job,” she explained. “Unofficially.”

“That’s why the hearse was in the parking lot?” He’d been surprised when she had rolled his gurney out to that particular vehicle.

“Yes, Elliot took my van and left the hearse. We have an arrangement.”

“And that is?” And who the hell was Elliot?

“I fill in for him when he has a gig. He’s a musician. He pays me cash, and I don’t tell his dad, who owns this place, that Elliot’s not doing his job.” Her teeth flashed in the moonlight as she smiled.

“Nice arrangement—if neither of you mind a little blackmail.”

“What’s a little blackmail between friends?” she said with another quick smile and a shrug. “It’s going to work out well for you.”

“It already has. You got me past the warden.” He glanced back toward the road, but he could see nothing other than the dark shadow of leafless trees swaying in the cool night breeze. Yet if someone had been following them, they may have just shut off their lights, too.

Were they sneaking up on them now? He had no weapon, nothing to defend himself and her. Lying under that sheet in the morgue had been the hardest thing he’d ever done—relying on her to protect them both. Her brother hadn’t exaggerated about her at all. Macy Kleyn was damn smart.

Too smart to be risking her life for him.

Macy rattled the keys as she fingered through them, obviously searching for the right one. “Are you warm enough in the sweatshirt?” she asked as she huddled in her parka.

Winter was officially over, but northern Michigan had yet to get the memo. Rowe ignored the wind biting through the shirt to chill his skin. He had more to worry about than the weather.

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

“It’s freezing out. Elliot might have a coat inside,” she said. Finally, she jammed a key in the lock and pushed open the back door.

He hesitated outside. Even though it was damn cold, he would rather be out in the open than confined anywhere else. Ever. Again.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“We’re going to burn the wrong body.”

“What?” He glanced back to the hearse. He had made damn certain that he’d been riding alone back there. While he’d done his share of skeevy undercover assignments, this one had been the stuff of horror movies since the first moment the prison bars had slid closed behind him. And it had only gotten worse since he’d escaped. “Whose body are we going to burn?”

“Yours.”

He laughed at her outrageous comment. “Yeah, right. You’re funny, too.” Kleyn hadn’t shared that tidbit about his kid sister.

“I’m not kidding.”

“Then you’re crazy.”

Her teeth flashed in a quick smile. “You’re not the first one to call me that.”

When she flipped on a light, he studied her. “Have you been called that because you believe your brother is innocent?”

She jerked her head in a sharp nod.

“And because you quit school to move up here to be close to him?”

“That wasn’t about being close to him,” she clarified. “It’s about proving his innocence.”

“That may be impossible to prove,” he warned her. No matter how smart Macy Kleyn was, she wouldn’t be able to prove the innocence of a guilty man.

“Alone,” she admitted. “It would be. That’s why I want…” Her gaze skimmed up and down his body, over the black sweatshirt that molded like a second skin to his chest and over the faded jeans.

If she kept looking at him like that, Rowe had a feeling he would give her whatever she wanted. “Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess? I don’t have time for games, Macy.”

He had already wasted too much time that he should have spent putting distance between him and Blackwoods Penitentiary. A lot of distance.

“I know,” she agreed. “So lie down.”

His heart kicked his ribs. Maybe he really had died, but he’d gone to heaven instead of hell…if Macy Kleyn wanted him. “What? Why?”

“Lie down on this,” she said, and pointed toward a metal table. “And play dead again.”

“We’re out of the morgue,” he reminded her.

“But we’re not done yet.” She picked up a Polaroid camera.

He had trusted her before and she hadn’t betrayed him. Yet. With a sigh, Rowe lay down. “I’m getting a little too good at playing dead.”

“We have to do this right, or you won’t just be playing.”

“We?” There she went with the word Rowe had always made a point of never using. “I just needed your help to get out of the morgue. I don’t need anything else from you.”

“Really?” she asked, her lips curving into a smug smile. “Do you have a cell phone? Someone to call if you did? A ride or a vehicle to take you somewhere Warden James won’t find you? Or the police who will be looking for you when news of your escape from prison gets out?”

He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ground together. She was right. He had none of those things. No one he could trust. But he had made a promise. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I’ll help you.”

“You’re not even convinced I’m telling you the truth,” he said. She was too smart to completely trust him despite his knowing about her childhood accident.

“But if you are telling the truth and I don’t help you, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“What happens to me is not your responsibility,” he said. No one had ever really taken responsibility for him. Not his parents and now not even the handler who should have pulled him out weeks ago when he hadn’t heard from Rowe.

“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “But I would never forgive myself for wasting this opportunity to help Jed, too.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. He suspected she wasn’t talking about just keeping her brother out of trouble with the warden. “What do you want?”

“Close your eyes.”

He, who had always had problems with authority, did as she said. And a light flashed behind his lids.

He sprang up. “What are you doing?”

“Shut up. Dead men don’t talk.”