Читать книгу Deception Lake - Пола Грейвс - Страница 11
ОглавлениеDarkness fell across the woods surrounding Mara Jennings’s cabin, aided by lowering clouds that cocooned the cabin in a misty veil. Rain had not yet started to fall, but the air outside the truck was cool and damp with the promise of precipitation when Jack got out to stretch his legs.
Nothing had stirred around the cabin for a couple of hours. No cars had passed his parking place going in either direction. He checked his watch as he climbed back into the truck—not even eight o’clock yet.
Where the hell was she?
Suddenly, light flickered on inside the cabin.
Jack sat forward with a start.
A dark silhouette glided past the one window Jack could see from his vantage point. It was hard to make out distinguishing characteristics like height or shape, but he supposed it might have been a female.
Had Mara been in the cabin this whole time? Or had an intruder made his way inside without Jack seeing him?
He’d unpacked his Colt pistol and loaded it while he was waiting for something to happen. He checked it now, making sure he had a round chambered, and reached for the door handle.
The light in the cabin went off.
Jack froze in place.
A second later, the front door opened and a dark-clad figure slipped out onto the porch. It crossed to the steps and began to descend, coming out of the shadow of the porch roof.
Despite the darkness of the cloud-covered night, Jack’s eyes had adjusted enough to the low light to make out Mara’s pretty oval-shaped face as she lifted it toward him.
She froze in place when she spotted his truck.
He knew she probably couldn’t see him sitting there in the cab, watching her. Maybe she’d just assume his brother-in-law drove him back to the hotel for the night and they’d pick up the truck in the morning.
After a few more seconds of complete stillness, Mara edged toward the tree line to her left, closer and closer to the woods. If she entered the dense thicket of trees and underbrush, he’d lose sight of her completely.
Would that be so bad?
“Yes,” he whispered, the hiss of breath loud in the quiet truck cab. It would be bad, because the woman was clearly in trouble. Someone had tried to attack her that afternoon and now she was sneaking out of her house with a duffel bag and a backpack and disappearing into the woods. After dark.
What the hell was going on with her?
Gunfire split the silent mountain air, impossibly close. Ducking on instinct, Jack peered through the truck’s passenger window, his heart rate tripling in the span of a few seconds.
Was she shooting at him?
A rustle of bushes caught his attention just before Mara raced onto the road in front of his truck. A second shot rang out as before, and Mara halted with a jerk. She pitched forward, disappearing from his view.
Jack’s heart stuttered as he scooted toward the driver’s door, jerking twice at the door handle before he managed to get it open.
Keeping low, he moved toward the front of the truck and peered around the bumper.
Mara lay facedown on the gravel, her eyes half-open and her breath coming in harsh gasps.
For a second, Jack wasn’t sure what to do. He might consider himself a man of action, but most of the action had to do with planting his tail on the back of an enormous, angry bull and trying to stay there for eight seconds. He was a pretty good shot with the Colt pistol gripped tightly in his right hand when he was standing at a shooting range with nothing else going on, but he’d never been shot at in his life.
“Mara?” he whispered, looking for blood in the dark gravel beneath her body.
In the woods to his right, the whisper of movement in the bushes spurred him into action. Scrambling forward, he grabbed Mara by the upper arms and dragged her around the truck. She struggled weakly against his grip, but he managed to get her tucked between him and the door of the truck.
“Where were you hit?” he asked quietly, daring a quick peek over the bed of the truck.
“Are you with him?” she asked in a raspy growl.
“What?”
“The man with the gun—are you with him?”
Jack heard more movement in the woods. A lot closer this time.
Without taking time to answer her, he moved her to the side and pulled open the door of the truck. “Can you get in?”
Her eyes met his, glittering in the dim glow of the truck’s dome light. He felt her wriggle against him, the slide of her body against his sending an unexpected, badly timed flood of heat pouring into his groin. She turned around, the curve of her bottom brushing against him and sparking more fires as she scrambled into the truck cab ahead of him. “Get us out of here.”
He pulled himself behind the wheel and turned the key. The truck growled to life.
“Is there a faster way out of here than backward?” he asked.
“No.”
“Hold on.” He put the truck in Reverse and hit the gas pedal. The Ford truck jerked backward, spraying gravel as he braked, spun the steering wheel into the resulting slide and whipped the truck into Drive, shooting forward.
Beside him, Mara’s hands gripped the dashboard as she struggled to keep from tumbling onto the floorboard. “Go!” she rasped.
Another gunshot rang out. Jack heard the screech of metal on metal and realized the last shot had hit the truck. He swallowed a profanity and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
“Left or right?” he asked seconds later, forced to brake when they reached the T intersection with the winding road that had brought him there from the main highway.
“Left,” she said after the briefest of hesitations.
Right would take them to the highway, he knew. He wondered where she was taking them.
He watched the rearview mirror as he barreled along the narrow two-lane road that appeared to hug the curvy contours of Deception Lake. Riley and Hannah had taken him fishing there earlier that morning, he realized, though probably on a different part of the lake, since nothing about this road or these woods seemed familiar to him.
He spared a quick look at Mara. “Where are you injured?”
“My pride,” she answered in a hard, flat tone.
“You were shot.”
“My duffel took the bullet. It knocked me down and winded me, but I’m not shot.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if he could believe a single thing she’d said to him since they ran into each other at the diner a few hours earlier.
“Who was shooting at us?”
“Us?” She looked at him from beneath the tangled fringe of her auburn bangs, wide-eyed and rattled.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a bullet hole in my truck, so yeah. Us.”
“I don’t know.”
She was lying. At least, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Maybe she didn’t know exactly who’d ambushed her in her cabin or who had started taking potshots at them from the woods.
But she had a theory, one she had no intention of sharing. He could hear the secret hiding in her voice.
Fine. He could table his curiosity a little longer, while they got as far away from the gun-wielding maniac in the woods. But as soon as they found a safe place to stop and regroup, he was going to ask a lot more questions.
And she was damn well going to answer them.
* * *
BY THE TIME they reached the point where the lakefront road ended in a T intersection with another highway, the rain that had been threatening all afternoon hit with a vengeance, pelting the truck and limiting visibility to a few dozen yards. The highway at this end of the lakefront road was the main artery leading from Purgatory to the little mountain hamlet of Poe Creek about fifteen miles north.
Like Purgatory, Poe Creek had never managed to become a tourist destination as so many little towns in the Smokies had, but its close proximity to the mountains as well as a main road to Douglas Lake ensured that there were a handful of hotels and motels in the area, including several small, cheap places where a few bucks could get the night clerk to look the other way when you rented a room with cash and no identification.
She directed Jack to head north, shifting her duffel bag to her lap and setting the backpack on the floorboard at her feet. She took time to buckle her seat belt—the last thing she needed was the Tennessee Highway Patrol to flag them down for breaking the state’s seat-belt law. “Can you belt yourself while driving?” she asked.
Jack shot her an incredulous look. “A little busy trying to see ten feet in front of the truck at the moment.”
“Hand me the buckle and I’ll do it for you.” She knew, in the greater scheme of things, seat-belt safety laws were way down on the list of things she needed to worry about at the moment, but doing something—anything—that would restore a sense of control was a good thing in her book.
Jack passed the seat belt across his lap and shoulder, and she took the buckle he held out to her, pulling it down into place and connecting it with the latch at his hip. Her fingers brushed his thigh as she finished, making the skin of her knuckles tingle where they’d touched the denim-clad warmth of his muscular leg.
She pulled her hand back into her lap and grabbed the duffel bag, inspecting the hole that had ripped through one end of the sturdy canvas.
“Are you sure you weren’t hit?” Jack shot another worried glance her way.
“Positive.” She made herself look away from his dark eyes, a little unnerved by the attention. She’d spent most of the past few years of her life cultivating an aura of invisibility, making herself as unobtrusive and unremarkable as possible—a complete turnaround from her first twenty-three years of life, when all she’d craved was attention and she’d gone out of her way to find spectacular, outrageous ways to make it happen.
She’d learned the hard way that the wrong kind of attention could be downright deadly.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked.
She didn’t like the way he used the word we, as if he thought he was any part of what she had planned. For all she knew, he was involved in this whole mess she’d managed to land herself in the middle of. How could she be sure that he just happened to be there, picking up his truck, at the moment she tried to make her escape and ran into another camouflage-clad man on a mission, this time carrying a rifle?
She couldn’t be sure it was the same man who’d accosted her on the porch of her cabin. Neither could she be certain he wasn’t.
In short, she didn’t know who was after her. Or why.
Though the “why” part of the equation was pretty limited. Either it was the project she’d been working on for Alexander Quinn that had drawn unwanted attention to her, or it was something from her past rising to bite her again. Either way, she had to get as far away from Purgatory as she could, as fast as she could.
And she had to do it flying under the radar, which meant the last thing she needed slowing her down was a cowboy with no idea who she was or what kind of unholy mess he was swaggering into.
“Not going to answer?” he asked, sounding incredulous.
“Just go until I tell you to stop.”
The look in his dark eyes should have given her plenty of warning, but she still found herself slamming forward into her seat belt as he whipped the truck onto the shoulder of the road and put it into Park.
“I realize that I owe you money and an apology for the things I did, but that goes only so far.” Jack spoke in a low, twangy growl that reminded her of a week she’d spent in Wyoming when she was just eighteen, partying with frat boys who’d taken her along for their spring break trip out West. She hadn’t even been attending the university where frat boys had been students; they’d picked her up at the little diner where she’d been working part-time as a waitress and brought her along for the ride.
That she hadn’t been left raped or dead in Jackson was a miracle; sure, the frat boys had tired of her quickly when she wasn’t willing to be shared around the group, but at least they hadn’t forced her to do anything. They’d just abandoned her to find her own way back to school in Massachusetts, and thanks to a very nice cattle rancher and his wife, she’d managed to scrape up enough cash for the bus ride home.
The cattleman had spoken in the same low, slow Western drawl that Jack had just used, with the same dark tone of sad disapproval. She felt herself folding in on herself, like one of those hard-shelled armadillos she used to watch amble across the backyard of her childhood home.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” she answered.
“And you’re not going to tell me who we’re running from.”
“I don’t know that, either.”
Neither of her answers was a complete lie. She wasn’t sure where he’d be going once she ditched him. And she wasn’t sure whether the man who’d accosted her that afternoon was the same man who’d shot at her tonight, or what his exact reason for targeting her might be.
So many reasons came to mind.
“We should get back on the road,” she said after Jack sat silent for another long moment. “We’re sitting ducks on this shoulder.”
“Which brings me back to the question, where are we going?”
“Poe Creek,” she answered.
“And that’s where?”
“North on this highway.”
His lips thinned to a grim line as he put the truck in drive and eased back onto the highway. “I wish I’d just taken your advice and given that seven grand to charity.”
“Not too late,” she muttered.
“You know damn well it is too late, Mara.”
His words fell into a thick, tense silence broken only by engine noise, the squeak of the windshield wipers and the relentless drumbeat of rain on the roof of the truck. She kept her gaze angled forward, on the headlights cutting through torrents of rain that looked as if heaven’s floodgates had all opened at the same time on this narrow stretch of four-lane highway.
The dashboard clock read eight-twenty. She’d left the house at five till eight. How was it possible that less than a half hour had passed?
“We should go back to Purgatory,” Jack said a couple of minutes later. “My brother-in-law is a deputy sheriff in Alabama. He can help.”
“No.”
“Are you running from the police or something, Mara?” He asked the question with a hint of humor in his tone, as if he thought he knew her so well, knew that she couldn’t possibly take one step over the line between right and wrong.
He didn’t know her at all.
“I just don’t want to involve anyone else in my problems.”
“Too late for that, darlin’.” There was that western Wyoming twang again, gravelly, deep and compelling, with just a hint of Texas at the edges.
She didn’t let herself look at him. His voice was disarming enough. She didn’t need to see the lean angles of his jaw or the dimples that played around the corners of his mouth when he smiled. She had a lifelong habit of falling for the wrong men, and she knew Jack Drummond was as wrong as it got. In so many ways.
Jack switched to the left lane and began to slow down. She sat forward in alarm. “What are you doing?”
“Turning around,” he answered as he swung the truck into a U-turn and headed toward Purgatory.
“Jack, no. Please.” She reached across the seat and grabbed his arm.
He shot a look at her. “What are you so damn afraid of, Mara?”
“Please, let’s just go to Poe Creek like we planned.”
“Like you planned. I wasn’t consulted. And you won’t tell me what’s really going on here. Besides, my truck, my way.”
“Then let me out. I’ll walk.”
“In the pouring rain.” Skepticism edged his voice. “For miles.”
Before she had a chance to come up with a response, the rain-washed road visible ahead in the truck’s headlights took on an eerie red glow. A minute later, she spotted red flashing lights on the road ahead, coming from multiple emergency vehicles.
Sinking a little lower in the seat, she peered through the windshield, trying to see through the rain to get a better idea of what was happening on the road ahead.
“Accident?” Jack murmured.
It was hard to make out their exact location in the driving rain, but she thought the vehicle ahead must be pretty close to Salvation Bridge, which crossed Black Creek about a mile outside Purgatory’s tiny downtown district. As Jack slowed to a stop behind a couple of other vehicles that had been ahead of them on the road, she could just make out the back of a tractor trailer rig lying on its side.
“Truck jackknifed,” she said bluntly as one of the cars ahead of them pulled a U-turn and started back in the other direction. “Must be blocking the whole bridge.”
“Is there another way into town?” he asked as he and the car ahead of him pulled forward to where a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer was making sweeping arm gestures to indicate they should turn around, as well. As she opened her mouth to answer, he slanted a hard look at her. “And would you tell me the truth if there was?”
“You know you can go back by the lake road,” she answered, trying not to let her anxiety show. “If you want to risk driving past a guy with a rifle who knows what your truck looks like.”
His mouth tightened, but he didn’t reply.
A few moments later, they passed the turnoff to Deception Lake, and she let herself breathe deeply again.
Jack broke the silence a couple of miles farther up the road. “What’s the plan, Mara? Since you’re getting your way, the least you can do is let me in on it.”
“There are motels there. It’s on the way to a lot of tourist destinations that stay booked up, so the extra motels help ease the overbooking situation.”
“And motels are going to solve your problem with the gun-toting crazy person how?”
“I need a safe place to think.”
“To think. Think about what?”
About ditching you, she thought, keeping her expression neutral. “About who could be doing this to me.”
Jack was silent for so long she couldn’t keep from taking a peek at him. He was staring forward through the windshield, his eyes narrowed and his lean jaw set like stone.
“What?” she asked when the silence between them stretched to the snapping point.
He slowed the truck and pulled over onto the shoulder again. His gaze turned to meet hers, and in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, his eyes were as black as midnight. When he spoke, the words came out in a low rumble. “Who the hell are you?”
