Roxanne Rustand - Duty To Protect

“Yeah. But—”

“Okay. So we’ll do the woman with his gun. Get the angle right and the investigators will think she stabbed him, then he managed to turn and fire in self-defense before he went down.”

The cop swore, low and fierce. “Opportunity. Means. But just try and give me a plausible motive.”

“Her dad’s murder. She…figured Todd blew their cover.”

“So a mousy little librarian was able to kill a guy this size? With his self-defense training? Tell me another one.”

“We’ve got time. We can fix this scene—make it look right. No one will ever know different.”

The rising argument between the two men faded away as the walls of the garage started to spin. Todd? Todd Hlavicek?

She wobbled away from the door, her heart in her throat and her knees quivering as she half fell against the front fender of the Blazer.

Todd was her only current contact in the Witness Protection Program. He was the only one in the area who should have known about her adoptive family’s involvement in the WITSEC program and their whereabouts…yet loose cannon implied that his loyalty had been bought.

Had he betrayed her family for money? Had he been coerced? Either way, the fact that he was dead reemphasized just how dangerous her family’s old enemies were. How long they could hold a grudge.

She was the only one left, and she was going to be next.

She had to get out of here. But the garage door was closed and the noise of rolling it up would rumble like thunder in this enclosed space, alerting the men inside. Trying to reach someplace safe on foot would be useless. This was a quiet neighborhood of large yards and inexpensive 1940s ramblers filled with people she didn’t know. As always, she’d carefully avoided friendships with the neighbors. Whose life could she dare risk by begging for sanctuary?

The muffled argument inside the house stopped abruptly. Had they heard her?

Oh, Lord—please, please…

She whirled around, jerked open the SUV’s door and threw herself inside, slamming her hand against the locks as she searched for the keys she’d dropped in her pocket.

Her fingers closed over them and she tried to push the key into the ignition. Fumbled. Tried again.

Please…please…please…

A scream threatened to tumble from her lips when the kitchen door flew open and flooded the garage with light. The cop stood in the open doorway, his face a mask of anger, his right hand already reaching for the service revolver at his side.

With shaking fingers she tried the key again. Felt it slide home. The engine roared when she shoved the gearshift into Reverse and floored the accelerator. Tires squealed as the vehicle launched backward, splintering the flimsy garage door.

A deafening explosion enveloped her as the front windshield shattered and something hot whistled past her ear.

Throwing her weight against the pedal, she flicked a last glance at the two men racing after her. One grabbed at her car door but fell away as the SUV shimmied, nearly out of control. She swung it into a wild arc, over a trash can. She rammed the gearshift into Drive and again floored the accelerator. The SUV crossed an edge of the lawn and shot toward the highway.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

The sounds were distant. Toylike. Surreal—until the rear windshield shattered into a glittering network of crystalline fabric. They would be on her tail the minute they reached their vehicles.

She wasn’t armed. She had no experience in high-speed driving. She had to make it two full blocks to the freeway ramp, and pray the Chicago rush hour traffic was still heavy. If she could disappear into that bumper-to-bumper mass of frustrated and impatient drivers before her pursuers caught up, she might have a chance to live until tomorrow.

God hadn’t listened to many of her prayers over the years, far as she could tell, and she’d long-ago drifted away from the silent, one-way conversations she’d had with Him as a child. Yet He must have tuned into her pleas today.

She had no illusions about her odds of evading a determined cop with any number of high-speed chases under his belt. But she hadn’t noticed a cruiser parked near her house and there hadn’t been a civilian’s car parked nearby, either, other than Todd’s black Taurus sedan. If the other two had left their cars far enough away to avoid the curious eyes of neighbors, she could be in luck.

A patrol car still hadn’t shown up in her rearview mirror when she slipped into traffic on I-90 and changed lanes until she was flanked by one semi to the right and another at her rear bumper for cover. Please, God, be with me. Please.

At the Elgin exit she white-knuckled the steering wheel. Held her breath. Then veered off at the last second and wound through the residential areas for twenty minutes, making sure no one had followed, before she headed for the far edge of the Metra commuter train parking lot and pulled in next to the battered Ford Focus she’d left there earlier, for the disappearance she’d planned for tomorrow.

Then, she waited.

Waited.

Waited.

Waited, her hands trembling and heart pounding, until the last train of the night left at 10:15, and no one was in sight. Each endless minute had ratcheted up her tension—but she couldn’t risk the curiosity of anyone who might still be lingering in some unseen corner of the station. One misstep, and someone might remember her.

And then she would be as good as dead.

Finally, she pulled her hat low over her newly dyed auburn hair and quickly transferred her duffel bag and suitcases from the SUV into the trunk of the Focus.

After plugging in her GPS, she began her new route on quiet backcountry two-lane roads.

She had no doubt that her Blazer would be discovered in the morning. The shattered front and back windows would ensure a great deal of interest by the local police. The license plates would be easily traced to her latest identity.

But the Focus would buy her time.

Bought with cash from a sleazy little car lot in a bad part of town, she’d given the seller a false name she fabricated on the spot, stashed the car at the commuter train station. Then she’d taken the Metra downtown and used the city bus system for the final leg of the trip home.

Maybe her pursuers would expect she’d decided to lose herself among the eight million people of the Chicago area. With luck, that’s exactly where they’d search, and eventually they would give up.

Now she just had to make it to the Greyhound bus station in Moline, on the Iowa-Illinois border, pay cash for a ticket to Deer Lodge, Montana, and catch the midnight departure.

And then finally she’d be free.

The Greyhound pulled off the freeway near Ogallala, Nebraska, and stopped at a truck stop with a well-lit mom-and-pop café. Next to it lay a parking lot overflowing with cars and trucks, and beyond that, a Travelodge hotel with Welcome to the Western States Regional Bowling Championship Contestants and No Vacancy lit on its sign.

Through the café’s large front windows Emma could see a long lunch counter and a half-dozen booths, already populated by a crowd of trucker types hunched over large coffee mugs and massive servings of heart-attack-on-a-plate trucker specials.

The bus driver and the dozen other passengers piled out and made a beeline for the café and restrooms. Emma wavered. The darkness in the bus throughout the night had been reassuring, the passengers dozing and otherwise keeping to themselves. But bright lights and the intimacy of the limited seating in the café could provoke conversation and curiosity, something she’d worked hard to avoid.

The granola bars and cans of Coke in her duffel would just have to do, along with the tiny restroom at the back of the bus.