The Lawman Meets His Bride (10 page)

She was grateful, of course, to have been spared the unwanted publicity. But it hardly seemed likely anyone would have deliberately spared her for benevolent reasons.

Unless, that inner voice whispered, somebody doesn’t want any attention on you. Because public attention is, after all, a form of protection….

She lost the thought as the argument between Beth Ann and Pattie escalated in volume.

“Spackoid!”

“Gumbah!”

“Zorch!”

“Boffo!”

“You two knock it off in there!” Dorothy called out. She sent Constance a puzzle-headed glance. “Did you understand
any
of that?”

Constance rolled her eyes. “Boffo vaguely rings a bell. I think it’s theater slang. But don’t ask me, I grew up in the geeks-and-nerds generation.”

“Neither one of those girls,” Dorothy lamented, “can get a decent grade in a foreign-language class. But they sure sound fluent in
some
thing besides English.”

“I just stopped to see if you need anything from the supermarket.”

Dorothy shook her head. She had never quite accepted the notion of such a huge store within the town limits. “I just went yesterday. Their meat is cheap, but none of these chain places has ever heard of a decent tomato. It’s all this genetically engineered stuff now. Thanks for asking though, hon.”

Constance was heading out the door when her mother called behind her. “Connie? You be careful, hear? That Quinn Loudon is still on the loose.”

“Oh, don’t worry so much,” her daughter assured her. “The whole thing’s a weekend wonder, that’s all. It’ll blow over soon.”

Despite her earlier worrying, Constance began to take heart at her own words. She probably
was
just being paranoid. It was only natural, of course, to be concerned about Quinn Loudon and even to wonder if he was being set up as he claimed. But her role in his drama was behind her. It was ridiculous to assume
she
was somehow involved any further.

Constance eased the white Taurus away from the curb and headed across town toward the supermarket on the eastern outskirts of Mystery. The day was still young. She resolved to get her shopping done, then go home and log onto the computer. She and Ginny
were in the process of designing a Web site for Mystery Valley Real Estate.

She eased over the railroad hump near the end of the street and signaled for a right turn onto Main. Her eyes cut to the rearview mirror, and in seconds her palms were sweaty.

A gray sedan was behind her, right turn signal slyly winking at her.

Without really planning to, Constance accelerated right on past the supermarket and bore due east toward the mountains.

The gray car followed her with the persistence of a jet contrail. No wondering about it now, she realized. There was definitely someone following her.

As it did yesterday, the car never pulled close enough so she could distinguish a face. She was sure, though, that it was only one occupant in the vehicle, the driver. She couldn’t be sure whether male or female.

She fought to keep her breathing even. The parking lots and buildings quickly dwindled away to fallow, winter-brown pastures and wheat fields on both sides. Dead ahead, the mountains rose precipitously, their uppermost gullies white with wind-packed snow.

Don’t
panic, she rallied herself. That’s the main thing, just keeping a cool head. Whoever this was must have deliberately eased off yesterday. Probably to put her off-guard.

Hazel’s comment was still fresh in memory.
Those feds are a fox-eared tribe, all right.

They’re toying with me, Constance told herself. Trying to unnerve me. Heaven knows why….

But other comments, less welcome than Hazel’s,
were also fresh in memory. Including Roger Ulrick’s accusation yesterday about Quinn Loudon:
You seem worried about his well-being.
Perhaps they had decided that any signs of sympathy made her a “collaborator.”

She had to consider another angle, one even more frightening. If Quinn Loudon had told the truth, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance the person following her—agent or not—was not carrying out legitimate orders in the pursuit of justice. But rather, to pursue the
obstruction
of justice. Whatever that required…

By now this person knew where she lived, of course. So throwing him off her tail was, at best, a purely symbolic gesture. In fact, the effort to do so only increased her own apparent guilt.

But the threatening tactics being used against her made Constance instinctively want to fight back. It was highly unlikely this person behind her knew the back roads and remote trails up in the mountains. She had done plenty of mountain-bike riding up there when she was younger. She knew the slopes as well as any Mystery native—which roads were blocked by wash-outs, which narrow fire lanes could be driven by car and which would bog a vehicle up to its axles in mud.

She felt her nervous stomach settle as determination and the lure of competition replaced her fear.

“Let’s go for a little ride, my impolite friend,” she muttered, toeing the accelerator.

In his feverish and delirious dreams, Quinn Loudon moved through successive patches of fog. As each dense fog thinned to harsh, burning sunlight, singsong voices rose, taunting him.

Children’s voices, reverberating off the brick walls surrounding a school yard:

Quinn! Quinn!

He’s our man!

His ma ’n’ pa

Are in the slam!

But sometimes, when the roiling fog cleared, the taunting children were gone. Instead, Jim and Ceil Westphal would be waiting for him to appear, love in their eyes. Jim tall and broad-shouldered and proud in his best dress uniform, badge flashing in the sunlight like diamond dust.

Then the fog would close in on him again, cloying and dense, clammy fog enveloping him….

Loudon lay semiconscious, his jacket folded under his head. He shivered violently, for it was colder up here. Inside his feverish head, the taunting voices rose again like the harsh squawking of crows.

Quinn! Quinn!

He’s our man!

His ma ’n’ pa

Are in the slam!

Constance put the rental car through its pacings and then some. She had expected a real all-terrain chase. But her pursuer ended up skidding into an erosion gully on the very first shale-littered slope.

She left him there, spinning his rear wheels and digging himself in deeper. Her first ebullient rush of
elation, however, gave way quickly to the gnawing question of Quinn Loudon and his whereabouts.

Constance followed a narrow fire lane until it debouched onto Old Mill Road. A right turn would take her back down into the valley and the safety of witnesses; a left turn, and she’d dead-end at the Hupenbecker cabin.

She turned left, telling herself this hunch she felt was completely irrational. Even if Loudon had returned, out of sheer desperation, to the cabin, he’d be out of luck. The place was locked up tight again.

The car twisted through the last crinkum-crankum turn, and the cabin suddenly lunged into view. She could see in a glance that all was well—no vehicles, and the shiny new padlock still secured the heavy slab door.

No need to even get out of the car. She was starting to back out when she abruptly pressed the brake pedal, then slid the gearshift into park.

When she turned off the ignition, there was suddenly only the silence broken by insect rhythms.

Might as well check out back, too, she decided. Just a quick peek, she added as she stepped out of the car. The car door made a hollow
chunk
sound that echoed down the slope.

It was the red, mud-splattered rear fender of the Jeep she spotted first when she reached a rear corner of the cabin. That was startling enough and made her heart begin to race.

But that same heart lurched hard, and she cried out when she spotted Quinn Loudon—or rather, his body—sprawled in the front seat.

However, he wasn’t dead yet. Her brief cry had
roused his eyelids halfway open. He lifted his head just long enough to recognize who had made it.

His handsome upper lip somehow stretched into a little ironic smile of welcome.

“A bad penny always turns up, huh?” he greeted her in a faltering voice.

Before she could even trust her own voice to answer, his smoky gray eyes lost their focus and he slumped unconscious.

Chapter 7

“M
r. Loudon? Mr. Loudon, can you hear me?”

Evidently he could, but all he could manage was an exhausted groan in response, then a slight nod of confirmation. He was shivering violently, his lips chapped and swollen, so dry and cracked they were bleeding; his complexion was ashen gray, and though his wound wasn’t doing any fresh bleeding, dried blood splotched his pants leg like a rust stain.

Constance lay the back of one hand against his feverish, beard-shadowed cheek. His breathing was still strong, but ragged and uneven.

“You are a bad penny,” she told him in helpless frustration. But she noticed, too, how long she hesitated to pull her hand away from his cheek. The humid warmth of his breath on her fingers made a soft, responsive warmth stir inside her.

One part of her, the logical part, voted to turn him over to the authorities right now. After all, she had
no right to second-guess the law no matter how oddly some of its minions behaved.

But as she watched his chest rise and fall, and studied the planes and angles of his handsome face, her heart pleaded with her head to hide him. Somebody meant to kill him, not simply arrest him. That gray car she’d just eluded back on the mountain slopes lent credence to his story. So did the lack of mention of the missing sheriff. She’d yet to hear what was behind the strange disappearance of Cody Anders.

“Mr. Loudon? Can you hear me?”

“Hear me,” he repeated, not quite coming round.

She fought to remain calm while she tried to think.
The gun.
She had to get that from him while she could. Then somehow she had to get him out of this cold.

She reached inside his jacket and felt the soft chamois holster. Her fingers closed round the checkered rubber grip of the weapon. Careful, she cautioned herself, keep the muzzle pointed away—

It was halfway out of the holster when his voice startled her.

“Won’t do either of us…any good,” he muttered as if half in, half out of a coma. But his eyes were open and looking up at her. “No bullets left.”

“You certainly had bullets on Friday,” she reminded him. “At the courthouse in Kalispell.”

“‘At the courthouse’ is right. I deliberately put those two slugs high in the wall, a yard over the marshals’ heads.”

His eyes closed for a few seconds, then opened slowly. “Anyway, it was the last two shells I had,” he assured her. “It’s been empty ever since.”

Her first blush of anger at herself, for being so gul
lible, passed quickly. What did it matter, she thought. I would have driven him anyway—he’d been intimidating enough without the gun. She was convinced he really would have steered them into a ditch if she hadn’t cooperated.

Something still held her back now, too. It would be only a few moments’ effort to dig out her phone and call 911. No gun threatening her this time, and obviously Quinn Loudon was too weak to manhandle a kitten. So why did he still have this hold over her?

“Mr. Loudon, you
must
get to a doctor. You—”

“No doctor,” he insisted. He tried to rise up on one elbow but gave up and slumped to the dashboard again. “Doctor’ll…turn me in…they’ll kill me.”

“Who? Who will kill you?”

But he was out of it again, skating along the borderline of awareness, groaning something incoherent. She realized she had to do something or he’d possibly die from exposure while she dithered.

She glanced at the Jeep. It was a sheet of mud from front fenders to rear, and broken-off bushes were wedged under the bumpers. The passenger-side mirror had been bent, too. But she spotted no serious damage. Evidently Loudon had resorted to four-wheel drive and left the roads completely at some point, no doubt to elude pursuers.

She doubted very much that he could have made it into Billings and back. Not with every cop in the state on the lookout for him.

Her mind worked quickly, settling on the least problematic plan of action. If she took her Jeep, and left the rental car here, that left her with the problem of explaining to the law just how she got her Jeep
back from him. It also left the thorny problem of who would bring her back up here to get the rental car.

For a moment she was tempted to call Hazel—the one person she knew who would keep a cool head and give sound advice. But another, more chilling thought occurred to her. Hazel’s power extended only so far—even she might be in harm’s way if dragged into this.

“No way around it,” she decided out loud. “I’m on my own.”

Her immediate course of action was now clear. Loudon’s deteriorating condition was first priority. She’d simply leave the Jeep where it was and let the authorities find it. That way there was no proof she had crossed paths again with Quinn Loudon.

She hurried around front, started the Taurus, and backed it around the corner of the cabin. She parked as close to Loudon as she could, then opened a back door of the car.

“Mr. Loudon? Can you hear me? Mr. Loudon!”

“Mr. Loudon,” he repeated in a whisper. “Hear me…”

“Mr. Loudon,
please
wake up. Wake up and help me.”

She never could have lifted him into the car by herself. He was well over six feet and powerfully built. But Loudon possessed just enough remaining strength to work with her when she tugged him up into a sitting position, then wrestled his bulk into the back seat of the car.

Exhaustion and loss of blood, aggravated by the colder air up here, had left him giddy, even silly.

“Bad girl,” he chastized her as she struggled to stuff his long legs into the car. “Naughty lady with
amber eyes. Helps criminal Quinn…there goes
her
spot in heaven…”