Vickie Taylor - The Lawman's Last Stand

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

Gigi looked over her shoulder. The Mercedes was right behind them. The gun hung out the window.

“Duck!” Shane shouted. Several rounds dinged off metal. She couldn’t tell where. Keeping her head as low as she could and still see over the dashboard, Gigi pressed the accelerator to the floor.

“All right, get ready,” Shane called.

She glanced up warily. “Ready for what?”

He dropped into the passenger seat and climbed across the console until he was practically sitting in the driver’s seat with her. “Ready to hit the brakes and make a hard right turn.”

“Why?”

“Because the road ends right up there.”

“What!” She raised her foot to stomp on the brake, but he quickly kicked her foot away. Then he stomped on the gas.

“Move over,” he yelled.

Move? Move where? She crushed herself against the door, giving him haphazard control of the Jeep.

He pushed the accelerator to the floor once again and locked his fingers around the steering wheel. “Hold on! Five…four…”

The road ahead disappeared into nothingness. Gigi grabbed the door handle.

“Three…”

She let go of the handle and wrapped her arms around the headrest of the seat.

“Two…”

Her heart stopped, she let go of the headrest and, in a moment of sheer desperation, coiled herself around him. She buried her cheek against his chest.

“One… Now!”

Shane stood on the brake and yanked the steering wheel viciously around to the right, sending the Jeep fishtailing into a tight curve surrounded by a choking cloud of dust and gravel hail. Gigi ground her chin into him and held on.

He jerked the wheel back to the left, pulling the Jeep out of the spin within feet of the cliff and driving parallel to the precipice.

Over his shoulder, she saw that the driver of the car had finally seen the danger ahead. He was reared back from the steering wheel, elbows locked straight as if could push himself away from the cliff by physical force. The big sedan’s brakes ground and groaned with the effort, but couldn’t stop his momentum in time. Just as it slid to a halt, the nose of the Mercedes edged over the embankment. The car tottered forward, then back, coming to an unsteady rest with the front half of the car hanging precariously over the edge. A shower of pebbles clattered down the slope, then all went quiet.

Shane stopped the Jeep. Slowly Gigi uncurled her fingers from the front of his shirt and looked up at him.

He had the audacity to grin. “Antilock brakes aren’t so nifty when stopping fast is more important than stopping straight.”

“I can’t believe we just left him there. Aren’t you going to arrest him or something?”

Gigi glanced at Shane. His once golden tanned complexion had jaundiced. He hadn’t said a word in the ten minutes since he’d ordered her to drive, leaving the man who’d ambushed them dangling off the side of a cliff. For an experienced federal agent, he wasn’t taking a little thing like a shoot-out too well.

His eyes drifted shut. “You want to cross an open field in front of a man with a gun and try to take him down, you go right ahead, honey. Me, I prefer not to go out in a blaze of glory. At least not today.”

“You could have kept him pinned down or something while I went for help.”

“Yeah, I could have. Except the nearest help is in town, better than half an hour away, and I’m out of ammo.”

“Out of ammo?”

“Well, not technically out. I’ve got one round left. In case of emergency.”

“Don’t you carry extra?”

“Sure. In the glove compartment of my Blazer.”

The same Blazer that was twenty miles back in the other direction, at the rest stop, along with his police radio and his cell phone, no doubt.

Shane’s lips curled into a weak smile. “Besides, I wasn’t sure you’d come back for me.”

Gigi didn’t know what to say to that. She was desperate to get out of this town and away from Shane, but leave him one-on-one with an armed assassin… No, she wouldn’t do that. Would she?

“I would have sent someone back, at least,” she grumbled.

Shane sighed. “Well, I guess that’s something.” His eyes pulled open slowly, as if the small act required tremendous effort. “We’ll stop at the first phone we see and call the deputy, although I doubt he’ll find anything by the time he gets out to that cliff.”

Gigi’s stomach turned. The last thing she needed was more cops involved. “Then why bother?”

He scowled. “Because he’ll want to start a search for the guy before anyone else gets shot at, so why don’t you help things along by telling me who the hell that was and what he wanted.”

Gigi steered the Jeep off the county highway and braked to a stop behind a stand of birch. With shaky hands she shoved the transmission into neutral and shut off the engine.

His head rolled toward her. “What are you doing?”

“I need to stop.” Despite her best efforts at control, her voice cracked a little on the last syllable.

“We need to keep going.”

“I said I need to stop.”

He raised his eyebrows and cranked up one corner of his mouth. “You couldn’t have gone before you left the house?”

She wouldn’t dignify that with an answer. She reached up automatically to push her curly bangs out of her face until she realized she didn’t have bangs anymore. She’d almost forgotten. She lowered her hand, yanked at the door handle on the Jeep and bounced out of the vehicle.

“Where are you going?” he called out behind her.

“For a walk.”

“Lady, there’s a man out there with a gun. And you want to take a hike in the woods?”

Everything she knew about Shane Hightower told her this wasn’t going to be easy. He was smart, stubborn, and took his job very seriously. Some might say he was obsessive about it. So how was she going to talk him into walking away? Or letting her walk away?

The way she saw it, only one tactic had a chance of working. She stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. “That man is exactly why I want to take a hike. A very long hike. Who knows where I might end up? California maybe. Or Seattle.”

He snarled like a rabid dog. She heard the door on the Jeep open and close, and then his footsteps pounding up behind her. “Who is he?”

She faced him. “I have no idea.”

“No idea? Really? He just showed up and shot at you for no reason. Just like you were all dolled up and sneaking out of town to see your sick aunt.”

He reached up with his left hand and pulled on the fake hair. “Your wig is crooked.”

She slapped his hand away and slid the hairpiece off. With the pins removed, her short curls sprang free. She bent over, shook her head and fingered through the tangled mass. When she looked up, his eyes had narrowed again, and faint, pinched lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“That’s better,” he said, clearing his throat. “Now the contacts.”

She blinked out the tinted lenses and shoved them in her pocket, oblivious to whether or not they’d be ruined. “Happy now?”

“No.” She didn’t doubt him. He didn’t look happy. “Who was that guy?”

“I told you I don’t know.” She started walking again, and he followed, the hairpiece swinging from his fist.

“And I told you I’m not buying it,” he said. “If you don’t start talking quick, you’re getting back in that Jeep and we’re going to town. You can sit in a cell at the sheriff’s office until your tongue loosens up.”

“You can’t do that!”

He caught up to her in one long stride and swung her around to face him. He loomed over her, purposely using every bit of his six-foot-one frame to intimidate her, she was sure. She searched his blue eyes—the same ones she used to think so soft—and found them hard as glaciers. A queasiness started in her stomach and worked its way up into her throat. He wasn’t going to let her go.