Cowboy Alibi

Chapter Twelve

“Joe?” Melissa Blake’s soft voice registered surprise and just a hint of wariness. “Are you all right?”

Joe hadn’t prepared himself for the rush of emotion that washed over him at the sound of his stepmother’s voice. They hadn’t talked since Tommy’s funeral-the first time in over twenty-five years-and even then, it had been a quick, awkward exchange, both of them too wrapped up in grief and anger to meet each other halfway.

“Joe?”

He swallowed the painful lump in his throat. “I’m fine, Melissa.”

A long pause on her end made him wonder if she’d hung up on him. But she spoke finally, her voice thick with emotion. “I’ve been so worried about you. You know what the news is saying about you-”

“It’s a lie.”

“I know it’s a lie,” she said firmly. “The news is also saying you were shot.”

“Just a graze. Listen, I don’t have much time.” He looked across at Jane, who sat on the opposite bed, her anxious gaze fixed on his face. “I need to get back to Wyoming, but I don’t want to risk taking public transportation.”

“I can send you money to rent a car or something-”

“Thank you,” he said, touched by the offer, “but I’d have to show ID and a credit card. I can’t risk that, either. I need you to meet me here and rent the car for me. Do you think you can get away without notice?”

“When and where?” she asked without hesitation.

He swallowed hard and looked at Jane. “I need you to take the first flight you can find to Reno. Tonight.”

“Reno? Tonight?”

“I’m sorry-I know it’s an imposition-”

“I’ll be there. Let me arrange it and I’ll call you right back with the flight information. Is this the number you want me to use?”

“Yes.” He’d called her on the disposable cell phone he’d bought when they’d first hit town. He had a couple hundred minutes to burn-surely enough to get them back to Wyoming safely. “I’ll wait for your call.”

He rang off and looked at Jane. “She agreed.”

“I heard. Was that hard?”

He found the sympathy in Jane’s eyes as unnerving as his phone call with his estranged stepmother. He looked away from her, pressing the heels of his hands against his gritty eyes. Was he ever going to get a decent night’s sleep again? Weariness was fogging his brain, weakening him.

He’d spent the past year shoring up the defenses Jane had dismantled during the few months of their relationship. That she’d knocked down years’ worth of emotional walls so quickly had come as a shock the first time around. That she was starting to knock them all down again, after all she’d put him through, scared the hell out of him.

His cell phone rang, giving him a start. He looked at Jane. She licked her lips and glanced down at the phone.

He answered. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Melissa said. “I found an afternoon flight out of Jackson Hole. I can make it, no problem. The flight arrives around ten o’clock at the Reno airport.”

“Got it. Listen-you need to pack some food in your bag. I don’t want you to have to leave your room until you check out the next day. Take enough to get you through.”

Melissa paused. “Do you think I could be in danger?”

“I’m trying to make sure you aren’t,” he replied. “Thanks for this, Melissa.”

“I’m just glad you’ve given me a chance to repay you,” she said, her voice dark with tears. “I’ll never forgive myself for being too cowardly to stay and fight for you.”

Joe tamped down the emotions her words evoked, trying to stay focused on the present. He and Jane needed to spend the afternoon resting up for the long drive back to Wyoming. He couldn’t afford to wallow in old regrets.

“When does she arrive?” Jane asked after he hung up.

“Ten.” He stretched out atop the motel bed. “Better try to get a long nap, or we’ll fall asleep at the wheel.”

She lay facing him, her eyes wide with apprehension. “Are you sure you want to take me back there with you?”

He turned to face her. “It’s why I went to Idaho in the first place.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “That seems so long ago.”

“Five days.”

“Is that all?”

He nodded, his eyelids drooping. Rolling onto his back, he let them shut. “Get some sleep,” he murmured.

Her soft sigh was the last thing he heard as he drifted off.

CRAMPS, low in her belly.

A rain-washed scene viewed through the metronomic swish-swish of windshield wipers.

Fear and dread, deep and paralyzing, slowing the world to a terrifying crawl.

The world around her went dark and hazy, disjointed sounds and images that she couldn’t piece together into a coherent whole. Someone asked her name and she said, “Sandra.” But that wasn’t her name. Not anymore.

She’d left Sandra behind in Wyoming, along with the last of her hope. And Joe.

The thought of him brought fresh pain, deeper and broader even than the cramping in her abdomen. She needed Joe. Where was he?

She lay swaddled in agony, the world around her disappearing in a haze of pain and fear. She called Joe’s name and a soft female voice answered, offering to call him for her. But she shook her head, closing her eyes and her mind to everything that was happening.

Jane woke with a start, her heart racing. She pressed her hand to her aching chest and tried to grab the disappearing fragments of memory. She had a sense of pain. Fear. She strained for more but nothing connected into any sort of narrative she could make sense of.

In the other bed, a snuffling sound drew her attention. Joe lay asleep, his breathing slow and steady. She stared at him, overwhelmed with a fierce, unfamiliar sense of joy. For a moment, she’d had the terrible sense that he was gone from her forever, but the sight of him drove out the fear, leaving her weak and trembling with relief. She slid off the bed and made it halfway across the space between them before she stopped herself.

What was she going to do? Crawl into bed with him?

She sank onto the edge of her bed and watched him sleep, slowing her breathing to match his. Her pulse calmed in response, approaching normal. But she knew that sleep was now out of the question.

Pushing to her feet, she crossed to the window. Afternoon had begun to creep into evening, the desert sun dipping toward the Sierra Nevada range west of town. Jane watched the shadows on the rough-hewn mountains deepen, creases and folds appearing out of nowhere as if the crags were aging before her eyes.

She checked her watch. Almost five. Five hours to go before they had to meet Joe’s stepmother at the airport.

Then home to Wyoming.

She smiled bleakly at the thought. Home.

If you judged such a concept by family connections, she was already home. Her father still lived here in Reno, had apparently done so for at least eight years and maybe more. Put down roots.

And she was leaving here without asking the questions that only her father could answer.

She let the curtains drop and turned back to look at Joe. He was sleeping deeply. God knew he could use it. Between his injury and their adrenaline-fed flight south to Nevada, he’d slept little in the past few days. She couldn’t wake him now just to appease her curiosity.

But she couldn’t just sit here and do nothing, either.

Moving silently, she shrugged on a light jacket, picked up one of the room keys from the bedside table and crossed to the door. As quietly as she could, she opened the door and slipped outside.

The setting sun brought dipping temperatures, carried on a light breeze that lifted her hair and made her burrow deeper into her jacket. She gazed up the busy street, feeling a bit disoriented, as if still trapped in whatever nightmare had jarred her awake. A vague sense of foreboding lingered with her, making her queasy.

She finger-combed her hair back from her face, trying to settle her still-rattled nerves. She felt the need to do something constructive with the last few hours of their time in Reno. But what?

To begin with, she could at least go down to the front office and buy one of the Reno city maps the desk clerk had told her about on the phone earlier. She and Joe had never picked one up, sidetracked by finding her father waiting for them outside their room.

The front office was little more than a small kiosk located at the western end of the squatty two-floor motel. A young woman about Jane’s age, with short blond hair and pale blue eyes, looked up as Jane entered. Jane saw a flicker of recognition in the other woman’s eyes and something clicked into place. “Ashlee.”

The desk clerk’s eyes widened. “So you remember.”

Jane shook her head. “Not really. Just-pieces.”

Ashlee flattened her hands on the glass top of the front desk, her expression guarded. “Long time no see.”

“You’re the one who told my father where to find me.”

“I thought the old man would want to know.”

“You still work for him?” Jane asked.

“No. Got out of that a few years back. I have a baby now.” Ashlee reached for something under the desk and came back with a wallet. She opened it and showed Jane a photo of a little girl with blond ringlets and eyes as big and blue as her mother’s. “That’s Kathryn. She’s two.”

Jane smiled, although a phantom pain raced through her insides. She tamped it down. “She’s beautiful.”

“She’s mommy’s little angel.” Ashlee put the wallet away and looked at Jane with a furrowed brow. “What happened to you, Shan? Why don’t you remember anything?”

“I don’t know,” Jane admitted. “What do you remember about me?”

“We were friends-we kind of had to be, since we were the youngest in the crew. My daddy was your daddy’s right-hand man. They planned a lot of the scams together.”

“Did I tell you where I was going when I left Reno?”

Ashlee shook her head. “We’d drifted apart by then. My pop had gone out on his own, so we didn’t see much of you and your pop anymore. I just heard you took up with some older guy and he took you out of here.”

“Was his name Clint? Clint Holbrook?”

“I don’t know. I never heard the name.”

Another dead end, Jane thought.

“Are you and your fellow going to be in town long? Maybe my husband and I could take you out to dinner-”

Jane shook her head. “We’re heading out of town soon. But it was nice to see you. Listen-on the phone this morning, you mentioned I could buy a city map here-”

Ashlee reached under the counter and pulled out a map. “Here. On me.”

Jane took the map and smiled her thanks. “It was good to see you again, Ashlee.”

“I hope you get your memory back, Shan. Some of the old times are worth remembering.”

Jane smiled at Ashlee and gave a little wave before she headed out of the office into the waning sunlight.

“Going somewhere?” The sound of Joe’s low drawl made her jump.

She whirled to face him, placing her hand over her pounding heart. “Don’t do that!”

“What? Sneak around?”

She sighed and started walking back toward the motel room. “I just came down here to get that city map we never got earlier.”

He fell into step. “Planning on a little sightseeing in the next couple of hours?”

“I thought we might go look for the Lady Luck if you woke up in time.”

He put his hand on her arm, stopping her in the middle of the walkway. “You want to see your father?”

“I may never see him again,” she said softly, surprised by the bleak emotion accompanying that thought. “I just don’t want to leave without asking him a few more questions about my former life. Can you understand that?”

The hand on her arm moved gently, his touch becoming a caress. “Yeah. I can.”

They returned to the motel room together and unfolded the map on Joe’s bed. Jane found Pridemore Avenue on the map. “It’s about twelve blocks from here.”

“Better grab a jacket, then.”

She looked at him. “We’ve got a long drive tonight once we get that rental car. I don’t think you need to walk twelve blocks in the cold.”

“You’re not going by yourself.”

“I know that. But I have an idea.” She picked up the phone and rang the front desk.

Ashlee answered. “Front desk.”

“Ashlee, it’s Shannon Dugan,” Jane said. “Do you have a car?”

“PRIDEMORE is up ahead,” Joe said from the passenger seat. He was playing navigator while Jane drove, though he’d questioned that arrangement when she admitted, as she belted herself behind the steering wheel, that she wasn’t entirely sure she knew how to drive a stick shift.

But apparently she did, because she handled the borrowed Honda Prelude with skill, negotiating Reno’s busy streets without any difficulty. He suspected that more of her memory was coming back to her-in pieces, perhaps, but sliding back into her consciousness little by little, making her feel more at ease with the world she lived in.

Joe could tell that she was growing nervous about seeing her father again. He laid his hand on her shoulder and gave a little squeeze. “It’s going to be fine,” he assured her. “We’ll find Harlan, you can ask him the questions you want to ask him, and then we can go.”

“I’m not sure what I want to ask him,” she admitted.

“You said you think he knows more about Clint Holbrook than he’s telling. You could start there.”

Jane turned the Honda onto Pridemore Avenue and glanced his way. “How much farther?”

“Two blocks up, according to this map.” Ashlee had given them the actual address of the Lady Luck, marking it for them on the map before she handed Jane the keys to the Honda. Joe wasn’t completely at ease putting their safety in the hands of a former con artist Jane barely remembered, but having the car at their disposal would at least make them more mobile if they ran into trouble.

The Lady Luck Tavern was a two-story storefront building in the middle of the block, with only a neon beer sign in the window to differentiate it from the other shabby-looking shops and offices surrounding it. A small sign advertised parking in the rear, but Joe spotted an open parking slot on the street half a block up and suggested that Jane park there instead. “I don’t want to get trapped in a back parking area,” he explained.

Traffic on this part of Pridemore Avenue was light, and the cars parked along the street were older-model vehicles for the most part, a few of them well past their primes. As he and Jane crossed the street and headed for the tavern entrance, he noticed that the dark-tinted tavern windows allowed for no good look inside. It gave him an uneasy feeling, and on instinct he reached behind him to feel for the holster and weapon that wasn’t there.

He dropped his hand back to his side and caught Jane’s arm as she started for the door. “Wait a second.”

She looked up at him. “What is it?”

Before he could answer, he heard a muffled cry coming from somewhere behind the building.

His instinct was to go back to the car and get the hell out of there, but Jane exclaimed, “That’s my father!” and started running toward the narrow alley between the tavern and the insurance company office next door.

Cursing softly, he ran after her, grabbing her arm before she darted into the open area behind the building. “Wait a second!” he hissed.

The sounds of a struggle echoed through the alley, and Joe had to hold on to her to keep her where she was. “Someone’s hurting him!” she whispered urgently.

“You stay right here.” He crept forward to the edge of the building and peered around the corner.

In the dimly lit parking lot at the back of the bar, two large, muscular men took turns pummeling Harlan Dugan while the older man tried to fend off their blows.

It was a warning beating, Joe recognized immediately, not a real attempt on the old man’s life. The thugs were pulling their punches too much to be really serious about it, like a couple of tomcats toying with a scared mouse.

He didn’t see either man carrying any weapons, though he supposed they might have weapons concealed beneath their jackets or in their boots. It wasn’t a risk he wanted to take, however. Not with Jane’s life at stake, too. Better to call 911 and tell the cops there was an assault taking place in the parking lot of the Lady Luck. He turned to tell Jane his decision.

But she was nowhere in sight.