Carla Neggers - Night’s Landing

“Information.”

The man had a slight, indefinable accent and sharp features. Juliet examined her knee. No blood. “What kind of information?”

“The Rob Dunnemore investigation.”

“Come on. I’m a lowly deputy marshal. Nobody tells me anything.”

He slapped her across the face. Hard. She had to stiffen her neck muscles to keep him from knocking her damn head off.

Her lip swelled almost immediately, and she tasted blood.

She didn’t say a word.

The man was going to get his information from her. Then he was going to kill her. The scenario was crystal clear to her.

“The other marshal,” he said. “Winter. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

He popped her another one on the mouth. “You will tell me what I want to know.”

His accent took some of the menace out of his words-she decided they’d have scared the hell out of her in his native language. But Juliet recognized her reaction for what it was. Bravado.

Let your fear work for you.

Who’d told her that? Her instructors at the academy? Her father?

The car had pulled into the morning rush-hour traffic. The driver was blond, older than the guy beside her in back. There was no one in the front passenger seat. Neither man wore a mask or a disguise. More bad news, since they obviously weren’t worried about her providing the police with their description.

Her door was unlocked.

This fact registered almost automatically-she wasn’t sure she’d even looked at the locks. It was as if she knew. This is your escape. This is what you have to do.

American car. These guys were foreign. Maybe they didn’t know how to lock up?

Just then the guy next to her realized his mistake. “The locks! Idiot!”

But Juliet was already making her move. In one swift, well-practiced maneuver, she pushed open the door of the moving car and hurled herself out.

She heard the guy in the back seat swear in another language. French? Italian? Not Spanish. She sort of knew Spanish.

She slammed onto the pavement and used her karate and tai chi skills to control her full-body roll even as she felt the pain tear through her.

Brakes screeched all around her.

She scrambled to her feet. A yellow cab came to a hard, crooked stop so close to her that she had to fall onto its hood to keep from ending up under it. Another car rear-ended it, and it was all she could do not to slide off the hood.

“You stupid, fucking bitch,” a man yelled out the window of another car.

She didn’t exactly blame him.

“Call the police,” Juliet told the cab driver, who was staring at her through the windshield, frozen behind the wheel. “Nine-one-one. Now. Tell them a federal officer’s been hurt. A U.S. marshal.”

The driver nodded, his hands shaking. “You shot?”

“No. Hurt.”

God, she couldn’t breathe.

Had she cracked a rib?

She felt a searing pain in her upper right thigh and glanced down as she eased off the hood of the cab.

Blood. Road rash. Nasty road rash.

A half-dozen other cars and cabs stopped. A young man identified himself as an E.R. nurse and asked if she needed help.

“Yes.” Juliet could feel him and another guy helping her off the hood. “Yes, I think I do. I’m a federal agent. The car I was in. Did you get its plate number?”

“No, ma’am. Please, try not to talk. Let’s have a look-”

“I’m okay. I need a car. I need to go after those assholes-”

“Ma’am. Please.”

They got her to the curb. She heard sirens. She saw a police officer. I’m fine…I’m fine. She didn’t know what she said aloud and what she only thought, but they all got the idea that she wasn’t going to let herself get strapped onto a gurney and stuck in any damn ambulance.

While she was still arguing, Joe Collins pulled up in his black G-man car. It was the first time he hadn’t looked amiable. “Get in the fucking ambulance,” he told her. “I’ll see you at the E.R.”

“You don’t give me orders-”

“I’m quoting your chief deputy. He’d said you’d be like this.”

He rolled up his window and drove off.

Juliet looked at the stunned E.R. nurse who’d helped her in the first moments after she’d leaped out of the car. “So. Okay. I guess I’ll get in the ambulance. But I’ll walk. No stretcher.”

Sarah knocked on the side of the screen door to Ethan’s cottage. When there was no answer, she debated a half second, then stepped inside, knowing she was violating the basic trust between them. He wouldn’t sneak around in the house when her family wasn’t home. But she’d slept fitfully, dreaming of water moccasins, haunted by Rob’s warnings and Ethan’s own words that she was too trusting.

And she’d slept alone. Her own doing. When they’d arrived back at the house after visiting Conroy, her mind was racing, her body quivering from nerves and fatigue. Nate had touched her shoulder gently, even kindly, and suggested she take a hot bath and fall into bed.

They’d gone too fast. They both knew it.

As she moved into the kitchen area, she fought back a memory of Granny Dunnemore greeting her at the cottage, leaning on her cane, by then a tiny, old woman who’d wanted nothing more in her last years than her own independence. More than a decade after her death, the place still reminded Sarah of her father’s mother. Ethan kept it tidy and clean, but it had an unlived-in quality that she couldn’t pinpoint. It was if Ethan had only lit here temporarily, superficially, and never intended to dig roots.

His coffee mug was in the sink. Instant coffee. Somehow it seemed to fit.

She had no idea where he was. She’d noticed in her first days home that, like her, he was an early riser. He could be working on the fence or out in the fields, tinkering in the shed-the finicky riding lawn mower was often in need of repair.

She checked the small bedroom. The place was furnished, with all the necessary utensils and linens, but it looked as if Ethan hadn’t added anything of his own. She pulled open the bedroom closet and found only his work clothes and one pair of dress pants that looked unworn. That fit with his image of the West Texas good ol’ boy.

She did believe he was from Texas. His accent hadn’t sounded fake to her. The rest-she wasn’t sure. During her troubled night, she’d replayed their conversation at the fence in her head, remembering how cogent and well-spoken he’d been. How he’d warned her not to trust him so easily.

Maybe she shouldn’t.

She sat on the small sofa in the living room and opened the trunk that served as a coffee table, then almost let it drop shut on her hand.

Ammunition. Boxes of different caliber bullets. There were four boxes for a.38-caliber weapon, six for a 9 mm.

“Ethan…holy…” Granny’s presence kept Sarah’s language in check.

Under the boxes was a small photo album, the old-fashioned kind that set the pictures in little black triangles instead of between pieces of plastic. She lifted it out and opened to a picture of Ethan standing on a beach with a slender, dark-haired woman in a bathing suit.

Sarah flipped through the pictures slowly, all of them shots of the couple on the beach-a tropical beach. Florida, the Caribbean. Ethan looked younger, happy, strong and superfit-nothing like the polite, slow-talking gardener in overalls she’d come to know.

He looked more like a man who could slam Conroy Fontaine into a refrigerator and scare the hell out of him.

Conroy had called early. He was coming over for prune cake before lunch.

She glanced at the boxes of ammo. Presumably Ethan had guns to go with the bullets. Where? Did she even want to find them?

Time to get the marshal.