Jenna Ryan - Shadow Protector

“Right.” Sera extended her hand. “Give it back.”

Logan grinned. “He’s just pissed because he’s going to be spending a couple nights in jail.”

She wiggled her fingers. “Give it. I promise, I won’t shoot them.”

Clearly intrigued, he relinquished the weapon.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Benny spluttered.

“Don’t move,” Sera said and, taking aim, sent one of the pebbles on the ground between his spread feet zinging into the bushes behind him.

AN AMUSED LOGAN said little on the drive into town. That was fine with Sera. After changing her shoes, she climbed into his truck and let Etta James drown out the Bulley boys’ gripes.

Apparently, the police chief planned for her to stay in his home. It made sense, but it hardly set her mind at ease. The more time she spent with him, the stronger the feeling that she should know him.

They hadn’t met—she’d have remembered that in a minute. Seen his name then? Possibly. She could see it well enough on the lighted dash.

Michael Richard Logan. And, ding, there went another bell. Had her memory been more compromised than she realized?

Unable to answer that, she returned to the moment.

The Bulleys’ grumbles grew louder the closer they got to Blue Ridge. Inside the station, Logan handed them over to his deputy, Toby, a young man with bright red hair. “Separate cells,” he said and tossed the young man the keys.

The deputy looked like he’d rather drink arsenic. “Uh, Logan, er, Chief, I’m not sure—I mean, they’re my cousins. I can’t just, you know, put them behind bars.”

Logan searched through a drawer. “Don’t sweat it, Toby. You’re only the messenger.”

“But don’t messengers get shot sometimes?”

“Hang around here long enough, you’ll get shot one way or another,” Danny Bulley snarled. “Do what you gotta, Toby. Just know you won’t be getting no freebies for a good long while.” At Logan’s raised brow, he added, “Dinners.”

All in all, Sera spent less than fifteen minutes at the station. Ten more, and they were pulling up outside a very old, very large house that Logan informed her had come with the job.

Sera sensed his stare as he removed her bags from the back of his truck. With her skin prickling, she swung to confront him.

“What?” she demanded and received the kind of slow smile she really didn’t need to see right then. “Is it the gun?”

“Yeah, but it can wait until we’re inside.”

As he spoke, a drop of rain from clouds she’d failed to notice plopped onto her head.

“You’ve got about five seconds to decide … or not,” he amended when the night sky simply opened up.

If this had been San Francisco and she’d been going to work, Sera would have run. But here, in the middle of nowhere, with the lights of town a distant blur and her clothes already streaked with dirt, she simply lifted her face to the warm rain.

“I have to tell you, Logan, this qualifies as one of the strangest days of my life, and I’ve had some really bizarre days.”

He set his hat back on her head and picked up the heavy bags. “Courtesy of your patients?”

“Not even close.”

Hoisting her carryall, laptop and purse, she preceded him up a short walk to a porch that appeared to wrap around the entire farmhouse. She counted three floors, plus an L-shaped jut and an attic.

Lamps burned in three of the first floor windows. A dog barked deep inside.

“Her name’s Ella Fitzgerald. She’s a two-year-old golden retriever who thinks she’s a lap dog. Can you handle that?”

She smiled. “I love dogs.”

“Good, now how are you with …”

The door opened before he could finish and a small, thin woman with a frizzy gray bun whisked them inside.

She looked cranky, made rough tutting noises and, with a single sharp look, held them on the hallway mat.

“Moon Flower.” Logan caught the towels she tossed from the closet. “Also came with the job.”

“Use it.” The woman pointed downward. “I waxed the floors today.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call me Flo. You’d be Dr. Hudson, then. Sit, Ella. Her room’s ready, like you wanted, Logan—the one across from yours. If you have a moment, Doctor, my sister’s foot’s been troubling her. And before you ask, she drinks plenty of milk.”

Sera had no idea what to say. “I’m uh, glad to hear it.”

Logan hung their towels on the doorknob and removed the dripping hat from her head. “She’s not that kind of doctor, Flo, and she’s not here to work in any case.”

“I see. Fine then. Babe can just hobble around until that knot head who calls himself an MD decides to practice human rather than simian medicine. Room’s this way, Doctor.”

“Sera’s good.”

“You know, Babe can hardly walk some days. Doesn’t matter how much milk she drinks.”

“Phone’s ringing, Flo.” Logan nodded into the living room. “I’ll take Sera upstairs.” When the woman bustled off, he said, “Don’t ask. She was part of the original hippie movement. She lived in a bus for three years. The engine died after one. She met my dispatcher Fred thirty-seven years ago. They got high, got married and started their own business in Sacramento.”

“Would that be a hemp shop?”

He indicated a set of stairs that jogged to the right halfway up. “Fencing mainly, and not the white picket kind.”

“So thirty some years later, it’s only natural they’d be working for the chief of police in a northern Wyoming town.”

“Life meanders, Sera. Why don’t you tell me your shoot-’em-up story?”

Wet and dirty, with a big dog nosing her hip and a too-sexy man on the stairs behind her, Sera opted for the abbreviated version.

“An adopted aunt whose father was a Texas Ranger thought every girl heading to college should know how to fire a handgun. I put her off for two months. Then I got mugged and decided she had a point. Now can I ask you something? Or—no, I’ll rephrase. Will you answer a question for me? “

He walked behind her down a surprisingly homey corridor. “I might.”

She aimed a humorous look over her shoulder. “You said for every Jessie-Lynn there were fifty normal people in Blue Ridge. My question is, when do I meet one of the fifty?”

THE DRIVE THAT had taken Sig Rayburn two days going took him less than thirteen hours on the return trip. Fueled on bad coffee and hoarse from two and a half packs of cigarettes, he called his captain as he crossed the bridge into the city.

Ten minutes and a great deal of cursing later, the clearly out-of-sorts captain told him to report to his office at 9:00 a.m. and disconnected sharply.

Sig felt the sting but didn’t care. Sera would be safe in Blue Ridge. Logan would see to that. He’d done the only thing he could, the right thing, he was sure. All he could do now was wait and hope her memory would return.

Unlike Wyoming, it was misty and cool in San Francisco. Fog slunk around the piers and the lower half of the city. He had time to grab breakfast, thirty minutes of sleep and a hot shower. By eight-forty he was back in the alley where he’d parked his car. He gave the dented roof a pat and the door a kick to open it.

A man in a black hoodie plodded past, drinking from a bottle in a bag. Sig spared him an uninterested look, then sighed at the interior of his Ford. He’d be swimming in trash soon.

He heard the sound behind him as he started to slide in. The blow to the side of his head stunned him—almost as much as the sight of the man who’d delivered it.

“You,” he managed to croak.

Grinning nastily, the man stuck a gun in his throat. “No bandanna for you, cop.” He shoved the tip in deep. “I’m saving it for the shrink.” His face floated closer. “You’re gonna tell me where she is.”