Cowboy Alibi

Chapter Six

The River Lodge Diner’s lunch crowd had been brisk, but by one, the bustle of activity had begun to wind down. Only a handful of locals remained at the diner counter, nursing cups of coffee and chatting.

On his stool at the end of the counter, Clint had a ringside seat for the hick-town follies, taking in the latest gossip, from fisticuffs at the local churches to salacious speculation about the new high school football coach and the head majorette.

The pay phone on the wall near the bathrooms rang. The older waitress, Doris, finished filling his cup, set down the coffeepot and went to answer.

Clint could make out only a few words of her end of the conversation-“doctor” and “prescription”-but not much else. However, the furrow in Doris’s brow deepened as she talked to whoever was on the other end of the line, piquing his curiosity. He was tempted to feign a trip to the bathroom to get close enough to hear more, but she hung up before he could make a move and returned to the counter to check on the younger waitress’s progress.

Boyd Jameson returned from the cashier’s desk and glanced up and down the lunch counter, looking for any errors in the waitresses’ work. Doris came back to the counter and poured coffee for a pair of big-rig drivers at the end of the counter.

Jameson made a grumbling noise but the bell over the front door distracted him. “Customers,” he barked.

Doris was already untying her apron. “Sorry, Boyd. My shift ended at one. Let Alice get it. She’s good with the customers. Here’s my ticket pad.” Doris handed him the order book and disappeared into the back of the diner, leaving Boyd to bark a terse order at a nervous young waitress, who scurried off to seat the new arrivals.

Boyd looked Clint’s way, his scowl disappearing and his game face appearing. “More coffee, sir?”

“I’m good,” Clint said, his mind still on Doris and the mysterious phone call. “You know, I was hoping I’d find that dark-haired girl working here today-curly brown hair, freckles, kind of thin-”

“That’s Jane. She doesn’t work here anymore.”

Clint looked at the restaurant manager, contemplating his options. If he was going to find her anytime soon, he needed to start making alliances.

He pulled out his business card and handed it to Jameson. The restaurant manager’s eyebrows arched upward.

“Clint Holbrook,” he said to Jameson. “Call me Clint. I’m looking for the woman you call Jane Doe. She’s wanted for murder in Wyoming and other crimes back East. And I think your friend Doris might know where she is.”

Gone to get more supplies. Don’t worry-I’ll be back.

JOE STARED at Jane’s neatly penned note and cursed. He should have handcuffed her to the bed spindles when the thought had first occurred to him.

At least this time she’d left his gun behind, safely tucked into its holster on the bedside table.

He pushed himself to his feet, struggling with a wave of dizziness and nausea. He waited for it to pass before he went to the bathroom.

After relieving himself, he moved to the narrow sink and turned on the tap. He splashed cold water on his hot face and looked up at his reflection in the mirror. His face was ashen, dark circles purpling the skin beneath his bloodshot eyes. He looked as bad as he felt, and that was saying something.

He touched the bandage on his side, wincing as the cloth pulled against the ragged wound. How had he managed to get himself into such a helpless state, forced to depend on the whims of a woman he didn’t trust with his dog, much less his life?

He wandered around the bedroom, gritting his teeth against the pain. Pain he could handle. But he couldn’t afford weakness. And if he kept lying around here, giving in to the injury, he wouldn’t be prepared to deal with whatever danger Jane Doe was about to bring into his life with her latest stunt.

He knew all too well that where Jane went, trouble followed.

JANE SLUMPED in the front seat of the Silverado outside the Fill-Mor gas station on Route Five, trying not to draw attention. She had a long wait; the station was at least an hour from Trinity, and it would take a little while for Doris to get her doctor to call in the antibiotics prescription.

She’d already passed the time by using some of her dwindling cash reserves to stock up on food and first-aid supplies, but after a while, she’d realized she could loiter inside the food mart only so long before people started to notice her.

She didn’t like being away from Joe this long. It wasn’t likely that he’d sleep the whole time. And while she’d left him a note, she’d been deliberately vague about where she was going. She knew that would worry him. But knowing exactly what she was doing would worry him more.

She closed her eyes a moment and took a couple of deep breaths through her nose to calm her rattled nerves. The scent of leather mingled with another scent-dark, rich, masculine. The smell stirred a memory, the feel of Joe’s hands on her face, the touch of his lips on hers, tender yet demanding.

They’d known each other before Idaho, back in a place called Canyon Creek, Wyoming. That kiss the night before had proved that their relationship had been far more complex than she’d previously believed.

But did she really want to know just how complex?

She rubbed her gritty eyes, regretting the sleepless night. Whether she liked it or not, she and Joe were being hunted by a man who’d already proven he was capable of cold-blooded murder. And she suspected he had a big advantage over them.

He knew who she really was.

She closed her eyes against the glare of sunlight reflecting off the plate-glass windows at the front of the food mart, and tried to settle her chaotic mind. For five months, she’d lived second to second, afraid to be still for fear that she’d finally start remembering something. Angie had always found that sentiment strange-not wanting to remember? But Angie didn’t live with the bone-deep certainty that her past was something she wanted to escape, not uncover.

Nothing that had happened to her over the past few days had done anything to change her mind about that.

But she couldn’t run away anymore. Her past was the danger now. She had to figure out a way to unlock the door to where her memories lay, or she and Joe might not get out of this mess alive.

An image flashed through her mind without warning. A man’s face. Not the blue-eyed man she’d seen in her apartment but someone a little older, with thick black hair streaked at the temples with silver. He was handsome, but his dark eyes were shifty and restless, moving constantly.

Full of secrets.

A loud rapping noise jerked her upright. Jane snapped her eyes open, squinting against the glare, and almost wilted with relief when she saw Doris Bradley’s warm eyes looking at her through the truck window.

Doris stepped back, giving her room to open the door of the truck. Jane hugged the older woman, grateful for a friendly face. “Thank you so much for this, Doris. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

Doris handed her the small white bag. Inside, Jane could hear pills rattling. “I wish you could tell me what’s going on,” Doris said.

“I promise, one day I’ll tell you everything.” Jane put the bag in the truck and turned back to Doris. “How much did this cost you?”

Doris waved it off. “Not enough to worry yourself about. You’re not hurt, are you? Or sick?”

Jane shook her head, averting her gaze from Doris’s.

She could see the curious questions in Doris’s eyes, but to her relief, the older woman didn’t ask them aloud. Jane couldn’t have answered them, anyway. She’d already put Doris in enough danger as it was.

Doris gave Jane another swift hug. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

“I will,” Jane said, although she knew she couldn’t put Doris in the middle of her mess again. “Listen-you be careful driving back, okay?” And be careful who you talk to, she added silently, watching Doris drive away with a sinking heart.

There were so few things in her life that felt familiar or comfortable, and watching one of them drive away felt like the ground shifting beneath her feet.

She climbed into the truck and buckled her seat belt, looking at the pharmacy bag on the seat beside her. She hoped it was worth the effort Doris had made-and the hell she’d catch from Joe when she returned to the cabin.

THE DOOR to the cabin swept open before she even stepped onto the porch. Joe filled the doorway, his hair mussed and his eyes blazing. “I suppose I should be glad you left the gun behind this time.”

She stopped on the top step, gauging his mood. Angry but not spitting fire. It could be worse. “Didn’t want to leave you unprotected.”

He looked at the plastic bags she held in both hands. “Shopping couldn’t wait?”

“No,” she said seriously. “It couldn’t.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, his eyes narrowed and dark with tension. Then he stepped back, beckoning her to enter the cabin.

A shudder of awareness tingled through her as she slipped past him in the tight confines of the doorway and entered the great room. He led her to the long leather sofa near the fireplace and sat, his gray gaze watching her as she settled beside him and gave him a quick once-over. He looked pale and feverish, but at least he was awake and relatively alert. She deposited her purchases on the coffee table and reached up to test his temperature.

He caught her hand, trapping it against his face. “You didn’t have to sneak out.”

Her hand tingled where it lay trapped between his rough palm and his beard-stubbled jaw. “You wouldn’t have let me go alone, and you needed your rest.”

“I wouldn’t have let you go at all,” he corrected with a wry grimace. He released her hand, and she dropped it to her lap, curling her fist against the lingering sensation still buzzing through her fingertips.

“Maybe that’s why I had to sneak,” she murmured.

“Fair enough,” he admitted. “Did you get some ibuprofen?”

“Yes. And something better.” She reached into one of the plastic bags and retrieved the small paper sack with the bottle of antibiotics. “Amoxicillin. You’re not allergic to penicillin or anything like that, are you?”

His brow furrowed, his gray eyes dark with alarm. “Where did you get those?”

“Does it matter?”

He grabbed the bottle and looked at the label. “Doris? Your friend at the diner?”

“She has chronic ear infections-all she has to do is call her doctor and he calls her in a prescription because it happens so often.”

“And now she knows where we are.”

“No-I met her on Route Five at a gas station. She doesn’t know where I went from there.”

He raked his fingers through his hair. “You shouldn’t have risked it.”

She placed her palms on either side of his face, worried at how hot he felt. “You have a high fever. Your wound may be getting infected. I’m not even sure the amoxicillin is going to work, but it was worth the risk to find out. So shut up and take it.”

He pressed his lips together, his eyes flashing with irritation, but he opened the prescription bottle and shook out a tablet.

Jane opened a bottle of water and handed it to him. Reading the directions on the label, she said, “You need to take two now, then one in the morning and one in the evening until they’re gone.”

He added another tablet to his palm and put them in his mouth, washing them down with the water. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and met her concerned gaze. “What else did you get?”

“Like I said, I got some ibuprofen, too.” She opened the bottle and shook out a couple of caplets. He downed them with the rest of the water and set the empty water bottle on the table.

“I don’t suppose you got any real bandages this time, did you?” He picked up one of the plastic bags from the coffee table and started going through the contents.

“As a matter of fact, I did.” She took the bag back and pulled out a box of gauze pads she’d found at the convenience store. “Let’s see how that wound is doing.”

He followed her to the bedroom, close enough that she could feel the heat of him washing over her back. He sat on the bed and started unbuttoning his shirt, wincing as the movements jarred his injury.

“Easy,” she murmured, moving his hands away from the buttons and taking over. Her fingers shook a bit as she finished unbuttoning the shirt, especially with Joe’s smoldering gaze fixed on her face.

Heat flooded her cheeks, making them burn, but she focused on keeping her trembling fingers steady enough to guide the buttons through the holes until his shirt lay open, baring his lean, muscular chest and flat stomach.

She stepped back, licking her dry lips. “I think you can take it from there.”

The corners of his mouth quirked slightly as he eased out of the shirt and laid it on the bed beside him. He slanted a look at her. “Why’d you come back here?”

The question caught her by surprise. “What?”

His gaze followed her as she pulled the chair up next to his bed and sat. “You had the truck, the cell phones. All the money. You could’ve left me here and gotten away. Nobody could’ve stopped you, not for a while.”

That he was asking such a question at all made her stomach hurt. “That’s what you think of me?”

He didn’t answer aloud, but the wariness in his eyes, darkened by something that looked very much like pain, told her the answer to her question. She looked away, sickened.

The image of a dark-haired man flickered through her mind-the same handsome face, same silver-flecked sideburns she’d remembered before when she was waiting outside the food mart for Doris.

She was watching him, somewhere in the midst of a crowd. She felt small and scared. Scared of him. Scared of what he wanted from her.

His green eyes met hers in the crowd and he gave a nod. Her stomach clenched, but she moved forward into the crowd, following his gaze until it settled on a heavy-set man in the front row. The man with the sideburns blinked twice and looked away. She bit her lip and bumped into the heavy man. “Sorry, mister.”

He spared her a half glance and returned his attention to the dark-haired man and his busy hands as they dealt a new hand of three-card monte. He never felt her small hand slip into his back pocket and remove his wallet.

“Let’s get this bandage changed. Okay?” Joe’s voice pulled her out of the memory.

She forced herself into action, trying not to give in to the hot tears pooling behind her eyes as she gathered her supplies and went to work. The redness around the ragged edges of the bullet wound hadn’t increased since the last bandage change, to her relief. She cleaned it as gently as she could, reapplied some antibiotic ointment and taped the new gauze in place. “How’s that feel?”

“Better,” he said, his voice tight. “Thank you.”

She couldn’t meet his gaze. “You’re welcome.”

“No, I mean thank you for everything. The antibiotics-that was resourceful. I appreciate the trouble you went to.” She still heard anger and distrust in his voice, but apparently he was too much of a straight-shooting cowboy not to express gratitude where gratitude was due.

“I just hope they help,” she said.

“Me, too, because we need to get out of here soon.”

“I told you, Doris doesn’t know where I went.”

“All she has to do is let it slip that she saw you at a gas station halfway to here and people will know we didn’t keep going to Boise. People know you were Angela Carlyle’s roommate. Somebody may even remember she brought you here once. We need to move on as soon as we can.”

“Maybe tomorrow. But I want to give the antibiotics some time to work before we try to make another long drive in the truck. Okay?”

He considered her words with a slight frown but nodded. “Okay.”

“Good.” She stood. “I’ll go make soup for dinner. We have chicken noodle and chicken noodle.”

“Actually, I think I’d like to have some chicken noodle if that’s okay,” he said with a half smile that faded quickly. His gaze grew serious and wary, and her heart sank.

“Chicken noodle soup it is,” she murmured, heading back to the kitchen before the tears she’d been fighting all day escaped her eyes.

She heated the soup in a saucepan, waiting on a stool at the breakfast bar while it came to a simmer. Angrily knuckling away the tears under her eyes, she thought about her most recent memory. So, a murder suspect, a con artist’s henchwoman and now a pickpocket, too.

What other hidden sins would come back to haunt her before this was all over?