Читать книгу Blue Ridge Ricochet - Paula Graves - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWhat have I done?
The question rang in her head, over and over in rhythm with her pounding heart, as she muscled the Jeep down the mountain to the main road that led into town.
She’d tied a man up and locked him in her cellar. Had she lost her bloody mind?
The cell phone peeking out of her purse presented a powerful temptation. She had never felt this great a need to talk to another human being in her life. Calling Alexander Quinn was out of the question—he’d never answer a call from her cell phone and risk blowing her cover.
But her cousin Anson might answer. She could shoot the breeze with him, avoid anything incriminating. Just hearing a friendly, familiar voice might be enough to knock the edge off her nerves, right?
She dragged her gaze back to the road as her wheels slipped a little on the slick surface. No. No calling anyone from her past, no matter how freaked-out she felt at the moment.
She’d agreed to this job. She knew what was at stake.
Hell, that was why she’d just imprisoned a man in her cellar, wasn’t it?
Despite the weather, the parking lot of Dugan’s Diner was half-full when she pulled her Jeep into one of the employee parking spots and entered the kitchen through the employees’ side door.
The only other person in the kitchen was Tollie Barber, one of the kitchen assistants who helped out with food prep and handled some of the easier cooking duties. She was busy at the counter, processing potatoes for hash browns, her frizzy blond curls tamed by a hairnet. She darted a quick gaze at Nicki. “So much for a snow day, huh?”
Nicki tucked her own dark hair under a protective cap and headed to the sink to wash her trembling hands. She kept her tone calm and light, hoping her agitation didn’t show. “Gotta snow a lot more than this to keep people away from breakfast at Dugan’s.”
Trevor Colley entered the kitchen from the front area, moving at a quick pace for a man his size. His barrel chest and linebacker shoulders seemed to take up half the kitchen when he stopped next to where Nicki was preparing the griddle. “You’re a good ’un to come in so fast, Nicki,” he said in a gruff voice that rumbled like thunder. It was all the thanks he’d give her. Trevor wasn’t one to gush.
“Quite a crowd for a snow day,” she commented, cracking a couple of eggs for the first order clipped to the order wheel. Two eggs, sunny-side up, hash browns and bacon. “Something up?”
Trevor gave her an odd look. “You tell me. Del McClintock brought four of his boys with him. They brought their girls, too. Should I worry?”
Nicki supposed it was a good thing that Trevor believed she might know the answer to his question. It suggested that people were starting to connect her with the Blue Ridge Infantry. Which meant, hopefully, that the BRI members themselves were starting to think of her as one of them.
That was her goal, wasn’t it?
“No, don’t worry. If you have any trouble with them, come get me.”
Trevor frowned at her but went back out to the front of the diner, leaving her and Tollie to get the orders filled.
As she laid out the strips of bacon on the griddle to fry, the image of Dallas Cole’s rainbow-hued collection of scrapes and bruises filled her head. Her whole body went cold and numb, and for a second, she thought she was going to be sick.
Oh, God. She’d taped a sick, injured man’s hands behind his back and locked him in her cellar without even feeding him breakfast first. She hadn’t even left him a bucket if he needed to go to the bathroom. Which he couldn’t do with his hands duct-taped, anyway.
What the hell had she been thinking? Had she lost her ever-lovin’ mind?
But what else could she have done? Dallas had insisted on calling the FBI. Maybe it had been a trick—maybe the whole thing was a setup to prove she wasn’t who she said she was. Maybe it had been a test. But if that was the case, she had no idea whether she’d passed or failed.
But what if he was legit? She certainly couldn’t let him bring the FBI swarming into River’s End at this point. Even if it didn’t end up blowing her cover, every BRI member in town would crawl back in the holes where they’d come from, and it’d be months, even years, before she could get this close to the group’s inner circle.
She was doing what she had to do. She was. She just had to get through this morning and she could hurry back home and let him out before anything bad happened.
Assuming something bad hadn’t already happened.
* * *
THERE WASN’T AN inch of his body that didn’t hurt in some way, including the new scrape on his inner wrist from the nail protruding from the wooden shelf where the beautiful but treacherous Nicki kept her canned goods. But Dallas was damned if he was going to be bound and locked in by the time she got back from her shift at the diner.
Who the hell was she? Was she connected to the militia members who’d taken him captive a few weeks earlier? If so, why had it taken her all night to decide he was safer behind a lock and key?
Everything had changed when he told her he wanted to call the authorities. That had been the catalyst. He’d seen fear in her eyes, not unlike his own reaction when she’d pinned him down and taped up his hands. His mention of the authorities had made her feel just as trapped as he felt now.
But why? What was she hiding?
The tape around his wrists snapped apart as the sharp edge of the nail head finally broke through the last of the fibers. He pulled his arms apart, groaning as the stretched muscles of his chest and shoulders put up a painful protest. He worked them slowly for a moment, taking care not to make his condition any worse than it already was.
He had to find the strength to get past that locked door and get the hell out of this crazy woman’s cabin.
There were no windows in the cellar, no doors visible besides the one at the top of the stairs. As much as his wobbly legs protested the idea, he had to go upstairs and try to figure a way to get through the locked cellar door. Ramming it open was no option, given his weakened state.
But maybe he could pick the lock.
He’d already spent nearly an hour searching the cellar for something to cut himself free of the duct-tape bonds. He’d found a small, rickety cabinet in the corner that held a box of tools. He’d had no luck using the garden shears he’d found inside to cut himself free because he couldn’t get the blades turned to the right angle behind his back to cut the tape. But there had been other tools in the box that might work to unlock the door, hadn’t there?
He crossed to the box lying on the top of the rough-hewn cabinet and started to pick through the contents, looking for something—
There. A jumble of old paper clips, some of them hooked together, some twisted apart. If he was very lucky, the lock on the door at the top of the stairs would be a simple spring-driven lock, and he could use the paper clip to push it open.
But if it wasn’t...
He grabbed a pair of pliers and twisted one of the bigger paper clips until he’d fashioned a crude tension wrench, then curled the tip of one of the smaller clips into a modified hook, hoping they’d work well enough to get the job done.
“Picking a lock isn’t as hard as you’d think,” an FBI special agent had told Dallas once, and then he’d proceeded to explain just how to beat a pin-and-tumbler lock. “It’s all about the pins. That’s how a key works—getting the pins in the right position to turn the cylinder.”
He carried his tools up the steps and slid his makeshift tension wrench into the keyhole, turning it one way, then the other, until he was satisfied which way the cylinder had to turn to open. Applying a little pressure to move the cylinder just out of position, he inserted the second paper clip into the keyhole.
His hands shook and his legs began to ache, feeling as if they’d suddenly lost the ability to hold him upright, but he kept at his probing examination of the lock’s internal workings. One by one, he painstakingly pushed the pins up until they caught on the ledge, clearing the cylinder. Finally, the last pin clicked into place, and he used the larger paper clip to turn the lock.
The dead bolt slid back into the door with a soft click, and he gave the door a push open.
He eased into the kitchen and looked around, squinting as bright daylight assaulted his eyes. Around him, the cabin was quiet and still.
He looked around the house to make sure he was still alone, then checked out the front door to assure himself Nicki and the Jeep were still gone. Then he went into the bedroom to find the phone.
But it was gone, no longer sitting on the bedside table where it had been the night before.
He checked the floor on either side of the table and even crouched to check under the bed. No phone.
A room-to-room search of the cabin revealed no sign of the missing phone. Nor did he find a computer or any sort of modem or router with which to access the internet if he wanted to reach the authorities that way instead.
He sank into one of the kitchen chairs and willed his wobbly legs to stop shaking. He clearly wasn’t going to be able to call in the cavalry, so he was going to have to get the hell out of this cabin on his own somehow.
But first, he needed something to eat. Some of his unsteadiness might be from sheer hunger. He pushed himself to his feet and crossed to the refrigerator, bracing himself to find it as empty as the bedside table had been. But the refrigerator was well stocked, and he grabbed a couple of eggs from the carton for his breakfast.
She had plenty of cookware in her cabinets, too. Made sense, he supposed—she’d said she worked as a diner cook, hadn’t she? As he heated a pat of butter in one of the pans on the stove, he grabbed a couple of slices of bread from the bread box and stuck them in the toaster.
The smell of toasting bread and frying eggs made him almost light-headed with hunger, but once he’d wolfed down his breakfast, he felt considerably better.
But did he feel well enough to walk out of these woods to seek help?
He left the pans for Nicki to wash—the least she could do, considering she’d locked him in her cellar—and took another look around the house, this time for some sign of who Nicki really was and what had compelled her to lock him up rather than let him call the authorities for help.
She’d admitted to knowing who he was. Which meant she had to know that he’d disappeared somewhere between Washington, DC, and wherever he was now. That foul play was suspected.
Or was it? Did people think he’d disappeared on his own? He’d been on the phone with a man named Cade Landry when those BRI thugs had run him off the road and dragged him out of his banged-up car. But Landry had been a fugitive. For all Dallas knew, he still was. He might not have had the opportunity to tell anyone what he’d heard over the phone.
So what, exactly, did Nicki think she knew about him?
There were no personal items anywhere around the cabin, he realized after another search of the place. She probably had her driver’s license and other ID with her, since she’d taken the Jeep into town, but most people had other personal records scattered around the house, didn’t they?
Back at his apartment in Georgetown, he had a whole four-drawer filing cabinet full of tax information, personal records, vehicle papers and more. He even had a box in his closet filled with things he’d kept from his high school and college days.
As far as he could tell from his search, Nicki had nothing like that stashed anywhere around the cabin.
He sat on the bed and looked around the small bedroom. Simple gray curtains on the window. Plain pine dresser that matched the bedside table. The bed was little more than a mattress and box set on a metal frame. No headboard or footboard. Plain gray sheets and pillowcases, plus a couple of matching waffle-weave blankets that acted as the bedspread.
A large woven rag rug stretched over the hardwood floor next to the bed, the hodgepodge of blues, grays, black and white offering only a little more color than the rest of the decor.
Drab surroundings for a woman as vibrantly beautiful as his hostess-turned-captor.
He pushed himself up from the bed and looked around, trying to make sense of all that had happened to him over the past twelve hours. And no matter which way he looked, it all came back to the same thing.
Nicki.
Who the hell was she? And what did she want from him?
* * *
BY NINE THIRTY, the breakfast crowd began to thin out, but Del McClintock and part of his posse lingered, nursing cups of coffee and chatting quietly in one corner of the diner. Nicki wasn’t sure he was actually waiting for her to end her shift, but Trevor kept shooting troubled looks between her and the corner whenever he popped into the kitchen to check on things.
Nicki ignored her boss, taking advantage of the lull in customers to clean the griddle in preparation for the next crowd of hungry diners. She also tried hard not to think about the man locked in her cellar, without much luck.
People didn’t starve to death in two hours. And if worse came to worst on the bathroom end of things, she could run to the thrift store in Abingdon to pick up some clean clothes for him.
Everything would work out. She’d figure it out somehow.
Trevor stuck his head in the kitchen door. “Bella’s here. Her mama’s neighbor’s takin’ good care of her, looks like, so she told Bella to come on in for the lunch and dinner crowds. That is, if you’re ready to leave.” Trevor shot another look toward the dining room, where Del and his friends were still lingering at a couple of the tables near the window.
“Yeah, I’m ready. I know Bella wanted the hours, and I have some things to do today.” Like release a man from her locked cellar and somehow figure out a way to convince him she wasn’t some sort of psychopath.
But what about Del McClintock? The whole point of agreeing to come in for the morning shift was Trevor’s comment about Del and some of the other guys from the BRI being there.
And now she was going to slip out the back and not even talk to him?
Damn you, Alexander Quinn.
One minute. She could take one minute to go say hi to Del.
She grabbed her purse and her coat, and headed out through the door leading to the front of the diner, ignoring Trevor’s troubled look. Several of the people with Del had left while she was cleaning up, but he was still there, along with Ray Battle and Ray’s girlfriend, Tonya. Ray sent Del a smirking look as Nicki approached.
“Hey there, Del.” She pasted on a friendly smile. “Can’t get enough of my cooking?”
“Never.” Del smiled back at her, his straight white teeth flashing. He was a good-looking man, tall and hard-muscled, which couldn’t be said of all the BRI members she’d met over the past couple of months. He was also better educated than most, which made her wonder why he’d hooked up with a group like the Blue Ridge Infantry.
Then again, there were lots of people in the world blessed with good genes and good fortune who didn’t have the moral fiber to make anything of themselves despite the raw material.
Del had been in the army, or so he claimed. Nicki had no reason to doubt him. But he had left the service as soon as he could manage, coming back home to join his father at Cortland Lumber in a town a few miles east of River’s End, working in the sawmill.
As in, the business owned by Wayne Cortland, one of the most ruthless—and efficient—criminals to operate in southern Virginia until his death almost three years earlier.
According to the files Alexander Quinn had given Nicki to study, Wayne Cortland had pulled together a disparate group of black hat hackers, mountain meth cookers and members of the Blue Ridge Infantry to fill his organization. The hackers were the brains, the BRI served as the muscle and the meth cookers were the source of money.
But ever since Cortland’s murder at the hands of his own son, those three groups had been struggling to take over the remains of the organization and keep it going on their own.
Nicki was pretty sure Del McClintock was part of the BRI’s attempt to take over the drug business for themselves. And at least two or three of the guys in his entourage were hackers.
But what she hadn’t yet discovered was who had taken over as head of the Virginia branch of the BRI. Quinn believed that the unknown leader might be the key to toppling the whole organization, from the group in Virginia to the branch in Tennessee.
What they needed was someone inside, close to the top man, who could funnel information to Quinn and, through him, to the authorities.
Nicki planned to be that someone. And thanks to a little tidbit Del had let drop a week ago, she had an idea how to make it happen.
“Were you serious about what you said last week?” she asked, lowering her voice so that only the people at Del’s table could hear. “About me picking up some work for you? You know, medical work?”
Del’s eyes narrowed, and she was afraid she’d overplayed her hand. But his expression cleared. “If you think you’re up to it. It’s not exactly legal.”
“It’s just me doing a little first aid as needed, right?” She flashed him a grin. “And if you and your friends want to show me a little gratitude with gifts of cash, who’s to say there’s anything wrong with that?”
“Exactly.” Del’s smile was deceptively attractive, making him look genial and harmless when she knew he was anything but.
Nicki hid a little shiver and brightened her smile. “So you’ll let me know if you need anything, right?”
“Absolutely.” He winked at her. “Can you stick around?”
“I wish,” she lied. “But last night I picked up a stray cat, and I’m afraid he’s making a mess on my floors as we speak.”
“We shoot strays at our place,” Ray said with a grin.
You would, she thought. She forced a laugh. “I guess I have a soft heart. Or a soft head. Whichever. See y’all later.” She gave a little wave and headed out the front door, keeping a smile on her face until she was certain she was safely out of sight.
She blew out a pent-up breath and allowed herself a little tremble. She had to figure out a way to get over her revulsion, especially if Del required her to be a little more than just friendly and flirtatious in order to give her the breaks she was looking for.
But the thought made her sick. Which was silly, really—there’d been a time in her life when a guy like Del McClintock had been her particular brand of temptation. Dangerous, shady and handsome as sin.
Sort of like the injured man tied up in her cellar at home.
Damn it. What had she been thinking?
* * *
THE SOUND OF a vehicle engine drifted into the cabin, stirring Dallas from a light doze. He pushed himself up to a sitting position on the sofa, his nerves jangling, and tried to reorient himself as the engine noise grew closer. The nap on the sofa hadn’t done much for his aches and pains, but he felt a little stronger than he had even this morning. Food and activity to work out the kinks from his weeks of captivity had gone a long way to restoring some of his earlier vigor.
But would it be enough to give him the edge over his feisty captor?
He glanced through the narrow gap between the curtains of the front window and spotted Nicki’s Jeep pulling into the gravel driveway outside the cabin. She pulled to a stop and cut the engine, but she didn’t get out right away.
What was she doing?
A minute ticked by. Then two. Dallas’s legs began to ache again from the stillness of waiting.
When the Jeep door opened and she got out and turned toward the cabin, he pulled back from the window and took up a position against the wall by the door. When she entered, the door would hide him until it was too late to prepare herself for his ambush.
At least, that’s what he hoped.
Her footsteps ascended the wooden steps of the porch slowly. Deliberately. Inside Dallas’s chest, his heart took a couple of hard leaps into a higher gear. He braced himself with a deep breath, preparing his limbs for action. He was still weaker than he liked, but his size and the factor of surprise would give him an edge.
He heard the rattle of keys in the door and pressed himself flat against the wall.
The door swung open with a creak of the hinges, and her boots hit the landing with a thud. He heard a soft huff of air escape her lungs as she stepped into the cabin and started to close the door behind her.
He hit her hard and fast, shoving her to the floor beneath him. Her soft cry of shock gave him the briefest moment of triumph, before his body landed flush against hers, his hips driving hers into the hard floor.
She started to struggle, her thighs opening as she kicked her legs toward him. The movement settled his hips more firmly into the cradle between her thighs, and, for a moment, he couldn’t think. Couldn’t come up with a single rational thought. All he could do was feel. The heat of her body under his. The softness of her curves, how perfectly they seemed to mold to his own lean hardness, welcoming him as if their bodies had been fashioned by a master craftsman to fit together in seamless perfection.
