The Lawman Meets His Bride (18 page)

Connie felt the words tight in her throat. “You be careful too, Hazel.”

Chapter 11

A
s promised, Hazel showed up a few hours after their phone conversation. She gave Quinn Loudon a frank, appraising once-over while Constance took her coat from her and hung it in the hallway closet.

“Quinn,” Hazel confided in a low voice, “I admit I don’t think very much of your profession—or some in it, anyhow.”

“You’ll have to do better than that to insult me,” he assured her. “I’ve already come to that same conclusion myself.”

Hazel nodded, as if his response confirmed her every instinct about him.

“But that aside,” she went on, “I don’t care two jackstraws what the news is saying about you. Connie says it’s all sheep dip, so I do, too. You’re brash and reckless, maybe, but the rest of this is basically lawyers eating lawyers.”

Quinn could only smile at the old dame’s manner.
Just as Connie had told him, she was immediately reigning over everything with matrician authority.

“It’s sheep dip, all right, Mrs. Mc—”

“Hazel.”

“Hazel. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

He edged up to the wide front window and glanced outside. The only vehicles in sight were the rental car and Hazel’s cinnamon-and-black Fleetwood.

“No one seems to be watching me,” Hazel told him as Constance returned to the living room. “Not yet, anyway. I’m not so sure about my place, though.”

“You’ve seen someone?” Constance asked as the two women settled on the sofa.

Quinn stayed in the shadows near the window, listening to them while watching the last daylight fade. It had been gray and gusty all day, the temperature never climbing out of the thirties.

“I haven’t,” Hazel replied. “But I’ve told my hands to keep a good watch around the place. Steve Kitchens, he’s one of my wranglers, has been breaking some green horses up near the house these past few days. He’s noticed a brand-new SUV cruise past the Lazy M several times. It’s a Ford, all silver.”

Hazel paused a moment to emphasize her next point. “We get the occasional tourists, of course, and they’re welcome to stop and take pictures. Hell, sometimes I yak their ears off for ’em. But Steve says these fellows don’t look like tourists. One of ’em has plenty of old scar tissue around his eyes—the sign of a bare-knuckles brawler, Steve says, and that young scamp should know—he’s got plenty of it, too.”

Constance turned troubled eyes toward Quinn.

“Like I said,” he told her matter-of-factly, “men
like Roger Ulrick and Dolph Merriday hire out their dirty work. All the more reason why you should bail out, Connie, and let me go it alone from here.”

“All the more reason,” she corrected him firmly, “that
we
get you to Billings so you can get whatever it is you need to clear up this mess and make the real bad guys go to jail.”

That was all Hazel needed to hear. When Quinn tried again to argue it was too dangerous, Hazel used her status as elder matron to simply speak over him.

“My first plan,” she informed them, “was simply to drive Quinn myself. But the weather man has scotched that. Why, thank you, dear.”

Constance poured her visitor a cup of coffee from a carafe on the glass-topped table in front of the sofa. She’d made it strong and served it black, for Hazel liked her coffee “strong enough to float a horseshoe.”

“Weather advisories are posted for the front slopes,” Hazel resumed. “Bad snow and ice storms over the foothills and plains east of the mountains. One thing I can’t handle so well anymore is a two-ton Cadillac on icy roads.”

She leveled her shrewd gaze on Constance. “But you, young lady, can drive like I used to—a little dare-devil when you want to be.”

“I’ll take on some bad weather,” Constance assured her. “But the problem is getting past the roadblocks. And even if I’m not followed, all the authorities are alerted to the rental car.”

“You won’t be in the rental car. If a car would do it, I’d just let you take mine. But you’ll be in your Jeep, which you’ll need for my plan.”

Even Quinn turned away from the window to stare at Hazel, brows arched in curiosity.

“My Jeep’s been seized,” Constance reminded her. “It’s crime-scene evidence.”

“Not really,” Hazel said coyly. “Quinn, you’re the legal-eagle, you tell her.”

Constance saw him smile when he caught on to her meaning.

He looked much better now, she noticed, though pale and drawn from incessant worry and danger.

“Your Jeep,” he explained, “was not part of any crime scene. You aren’t wanted for anything, I am. The law has a right to hold it because it was used in criminal flight, but only for forty-eight hours for a crime-lab sweep. Sounds like
you’re
the legal-eagle, Hazel.”

“Shoo, I didn’t know about that law until I called a certain…friend in the legal tribe.”

“But the Jeep’s in Billings,” Constance pointed out.

“Not anymore. Right now it’s parked in the hay barn behind my house. The gas tank is full, and so is the jerrycan on the bumper. I sent a couple of my hands to Billings last night to drive it back.”

“But—won’t authorities be watching for the Jeep again, too?” Constance wondered.

A sly twinkle appeared in Hazel’s Prussian-blue gaze. “Eventually, sure. But I reached a certain sporting understanding with that friend I mentioned. It will be another twenty-four hours before the computers know the Jeep was released. After that, the law could be all over you two like cheap perfume.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Quinn repeated. “It could be done, all right, if that bad weather isn’t
too
bad. And if we can get the Jeep around the initial roadblock.”

“That’s covered, too,” Hazel told him confidently.

She glanced outside. “Good, it’s getting dark now. Quinn, how spry are you feeling?”

“Spry enough,” he assured her, “thanks to Nurse Connie. What’s your plan?”

A youthful deviltry sparked in Hazel’s eyes, and suddenly Constance understood how much her friend was enjoying all this. And come to think on it, Hazel
never
shied away from driving in bad weather!

“I unlocked the rear doors of my car before I got out,” Hazel informed him. “We’re going to count on darkness. You’ll sneak out the back right now and go around the corner of the house to my car. Jump in the back and stay down on the floor.”

She turned to look at Constance.

“Honey, remember when you and your brother Dwayne were younger, how you used to ask me if you could use the old Summer Trail to ride up into the mountains?”

Constance nodded. Dwayne was twenty-four now, a graduate student in geology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was still a full-fledged biking enthusiast, while she had tapered off as her business grew. The Summer Trail led from the pastures near the Lazy M up to the high-country pastures and line shacks. It was seldom used now by cowboys and had long since become the valley’s best mountain-bike trail in summer weather.

“The helicopter is grounded tonight because of wind gusts. There’ll be a full moon,” Hazel hurried on efficiently. “I checked the almanac. Of course there will be clouds, too, so you’ll have to drive carefully. But you should be able to follow the Summer Trail without using your lights. That’ll get you out of
the valley. You can connect with secondary roads to get across the mountains and on to Billings. Are you up to all this, hon?”

Connie nodded, afraid that her voice would give away her inner fear.

“That’s the girl! I’ll get Quinn into the hay barn where the Jeep is. You wait a half hour after I leave, then drive to my place. Make sure you dress warm. I’ve talked to some of my boys, and we’ve got a little diversion planned. When you hear all hell break loose up by the house, that’ll be your signal to skedaddle. Just drive right out the back of the barn and follow that rock line fence between my land and Eric Rousseaux’s property. It turns into the Summer Trail.”

Hazel stood up, and Constance followed suit. Both women went to the hall closet together to retrieve Hazel’s coat.

“You’ll have to move quick to beat this bad weather blowing in,” Hazel warned her. “You’ll be okay once you make the interstate. But even in the Jeep,
don’t
get trapped up there in the high country in winter.”

No doubt her fears were betrayed in her eyes, Constance thought, for Hazel gave her an encouraging hug—and Hazel wasn’t the “huggy” type.

“Connie, I know I was wrong once. We both were. But I think this Quinn Loudon is a keeper. I really do, and deep down, so do you. I know all we’re doing looks bad, but public perception be damned. Do what you believe is right, and risk the consequences.”

“Well,” Connie answered with a grim twist to her lips, “you know how the saying goes—fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”

Hazel hugged her again.

Connie fought unwelcome tears.

Constance hated waiting. She spent the next half hour pacing and worrying while the twenty-four-hour news channel hummed steadily with the latest NASA goof. Now and then wind whipped up to a bluster and rattled the windowpanes. It seemed an omen, the cold and the snow, but she refused to dwell on it. She’d thrown her lot in with helping Quinn. There was no turning back.

She used part of the time to change into denim jeans and a thick cable-knit sweater. She selected her fur-lined sherpa jacket and warm gloves flexible enough to let her drive in rough terrain.

She ventured into the living room, her eyes glancing at the clock. But then a familiar name blared in the background of the TV.

“…Anders’s bullet-ridden body was retrieved from the gravel pit just before dawn today. Dolph Merriday, the prosecutor in the Loudon case, stated earlier he believes Quinn Loudon a likely suspect in the murder of Sheriff Anders. Now for the real story—the weather…”

Stunned, Constance stared blindly at the television. Long minutes passed. Loudon had mentioned Cody Anders. Sheriff Anders could clear him. Now the man was dead. And Quinn the prime suspect.

Lowering her head to her shaking hands, she took stock of herself and the situation. If Loudon had killed Anders, there was no point in mentioning he could clear him. That point, along with Ulrick’s nasty surveillance, was still enough for her to believe in Quinn. Her very soul believed him also. But that soul had
been duped before by handsome smiles and earnest stories.

But Doug wouldn’t have died if she’d withdrawn her belief in him.

Quinn Loudon would surely perish if she abandoned him now.

She stood and turned off the TV.

There was no point in wallowing in her worries and anxiety. Hazel told her to follow her heart. The man who’d made such tender love to her last night was no con artist and certainly no killer.

She grabbed her coat and car keys. There was no turning back from fate and destiny. She believed Quinn Loudon. Hazel even believed him.

And this time, if she must put her own life on the line to prove he was the good person she believed him to be, then she would do it. Do it or perish. From a bullet or a broken heart, she didn’t know which.

Yet.

Exactly thirty minutes after Hazel and Quinn left, Constance turned the thermostat down, locked up the house, and went outside to the rental car.

She spotted no one in the early evening gloom and chill. But once on the road to the Lazy M, headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. They stayed far enough behind her to raise doubts but prove nothing.

The vehicle either stopped or turned off when she swung into the driveway of the Lazy M. She saw that Hazel had parked way out back in front of the hay barn—obviously to make it easier for Quinn to sneak into the barn unobserved.

Fighting off nervous jitters, she parked right under the powerful halogen yardlight. She was clearly illu
minated as she crossed to the front door and pressed the nacre bellpush.

Hazel’s housekeeper, Donna, immediately escorted her through the huge double parlors of the old ranch house, on through to the utility room at the rear of the house.

Hazel was waiting there for her.

“Anybody who might be watching this place from the road,” Hazel told her after Donna left, “can’t see this part of the yard. Stay behind that line of evergreen shrubs, hon, and go straight to the barn. Remember, wait for the diversion out front, then kick spurs to that Jeep. Good luck!”

Feeling like a character in an espionage movie, Constance ran through the shadows to the big, looming barn. She cast a glance eastward. In the pale moonglow she watched the rapid onsweep of dark clouds. They clustered over the nearby mountains like black rocks piling up.

“Quinn?” she called uncertainly in a low voice after she stepped inside.

“Quinn, where
are
you?”

It was shadowy and dark, but she could see her Jeep parked at the far end of the barn. It faced the open rear doors, all ready to go.

“Quinn? Where are you?”

For a moment, dark panic gripped her like an icy hand squeezing her heart. My God, maybe they’d grabbed him already. Maybe he was even—even dead already, and now they were waiting for her.

Suddenly the barn became a huge, hungry maw waiting to swallow her up. She was on the verge of turning around and bolting. Only abject fear held her in place.

“Quinn! Dammit, Quinn, are you here?”

“Loudon’s bolted, lady,” rasped a sinister voice behind her, “so you’re next.”

She cried out, nearly fainting. A hand covered her mouth, another turned her around forcibly.

“Gotcha!”

Almost instantly, she traded her fear for angry indignation. She almost slapped him. “How can you fool around at a time like this?”

“Hey, what better time than now? I need a good laugh. So do you.”

“You need a laugh… My God, I almost had a heart attack! It’s still thumping!”

He pressed his hand intimately to her sweater front. “Hey, that’s good for you, It’s like flooring a car to blow out the carbon.”

“That’s stupid, and so was your prank.”

“You’re right. It was just something a little nuts to break the tension.”