The Marshal's Hostage (18 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Everything happened so fast that Joelle didn’t have time to fight back. The hulk of a man threw her into the truck and before she could even bring up her arm to try to slug him, someone else rammed another gun into her rib cage.

And that someone was Sarah Webb.

Joelle wasn’t exactly surprised to see the woman. She wouldn’t have been shocked to see any of their suspects, but knowing her captor’s identity didn’t explain why all of this was happening.

Dallas launched himself at the truck, trying to open the door to get to her, but her captor had already locked it. And he started the engine and sped away.

Joelle’s heart was pounding now because they were clearly taking her to a secondary scene. Away from Dallas. Away from the ranch where his brothers might be able to help her get free.

She started thinking that she was about to die, but that wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the thought of Dallas being killed. And that’s exactly what she thought might happen when the driver calmly lifted his gun and fired.

Joelle heard herself scream because she thought he’d shot at Dallas, but she quickly realized he had fired overhead. The bullet slammed into the roof of the truck.

A warning shot.

Probably to get Dallas to back off.

He didn’t. Dallas latched on to the door handle, but the driver gunned the engine and sped away. She saw Dallas flung to the side. As horrible as that was, at least he hadn’t been shot. But Dallas didn’t stay down. He jumped to his feet and starting running after them.

“He won’t stop,” Joelle mumbled, and she turned toward Sarah. “He won’t stop until he has you behind bars.”

“And that’s why I have you,” Sarah said. Not calmly, either. There was a high pitch to her voice. More than nerves. Her hand was shaking, too. Probably because she’d never done anything like this.

That only made the situation more dangerous.

Joelle didn’t like her odds with a shaky kidnapper who wanted to do God knows what to her.

“I’m guessing this means you killed your husband,” Joelle said, trying to keep an eye on the driver, Dallas and Sarah. The mud was slowing them down, but Dallas was quickly losing ground.

“You already knew that,” Sarah insisted.

But Joelle hadn’t. Not until now, and
now
seemed a little too late.

“You and Dallas put it all together.” Sarah kept glancing back at Dallas, too. “And then you found the safe beneath the floor.”

Joelle shook her head and nearly blurted out what exactly was in that safe, but she decided to go with a question instead. “What do you think the CSIs will find that will implicate you?”

“Too much.” Sarah’s mouth was shaking now. In fact, nearly every part of her was. “I threatened to kill him, and he said he’d recorded the threat. That he’d lock it away to give to the cops if I tried to do anything.”

Joelle didn’t tell her there wasn’t a tape or anything else that would incriminate the woman. She just waited, listening, and she prayed that she could figure out a way to stop all of this before Dallas got hurt.

“I need Dallas to destroy everything in that safe,” Sarah continued. “As long as I have you, Dallas will do that. He’ll do anything to protect you. I could see it in his eyes.”

Yes, Dallas would indeed do anything to protect her, and that’s what scared Joelle most. She could no longer see him on the trail behind the truck, but at the speed they were moving, he’d soon catch up. And the hired gun behind the wheel might try to shoot him even if it meant Sarah had to rely on someone else to destroy evidence she believed existed.

“You just couldn’t leave it be, could you?” Sarah grumbled.

No. Not with the governor’s inquiry and not with Dallas’s prints on the knife. Of course, they now knew how the prints had gotten there.

“Why did you kill him?” Joelle asked. Not that she had a burning desire to know, but she wanted to keep Sarah talking while Joelle tried to come up with a way out of this.

“It was a bad day,” Sarah answered. She kept her attention nailed to Joelle. “Jonah ordered me to get Declan from the infirmary, but he wasn’t there. He’d sneaked out or something.”

“Because Webb had beaten him,” Joelle provided.

Anger flashed through Sarah’s eyes. “Because he deserved it. That brat was always causing trouble, and he’d started a firestorm that day. When I told Jonah that Declan wasn’t in the infirmary, he didn’t believe me.”

Joelle glanced behind them. Still no sign of Dallas. “Webb thought you were protecting Declan?”

“Yes!” Sarah said with a curse. “I wouldn’t do that. Not for him, not for any of you. None of you ever lifted a finger to help my boy, Billy, when Jonah was beating on him.”

“We were kids,” Joelle reminded her.

“Kids having sex. You were all disgusting as far as I was concerned, and if Declan had been where he was supposed to be, I would have taken him to my husband’s office.”

For no doubt what would have been another beating.

“Jonah said if I didn’t find Declan in five minutes he was going to give me what Declan was supposed to get.” Sarah’s mouth tightened. “I couldn’t go through that again. So I pretended to look for the brat, but I put on some gloves and used the knife that I knew had Dallas’s prints.”

“You wanted to set Dallas up?” Joelle shook her head. “Why?”

“I didn’t set him up. Well, not at first. I just wanted some insurance in case the cops pointed the finger at me. I locked the knife away, and the day they found Jonah’s body, I sent the knife to Owen and told him to make up a story about how he got it.”

So Owen had known for almost two months that Sarah had killed her husband. And yet he’d withheld that and instead implicated Dallas and had tried to force her into marriage. That shouldn’t have surprised her, but Joelle felt even more disgusted with the man.

“Unlike the rest of you, Owen was always a good boy,” Sarah concluded. Her gaze slashed to the driver. “Make sure everything’s all right at the house, that he has Kirby by now.”

Oh, mercy. “Why Kirby?” Joelle asked. “He’s a sick man.”

Sarah nodded. “And he’s my insurance policy. If Dallas won’t destroy that evidence for you, he’ll do it for Kirby. At least he’d better. I used every penny of my savings to hire these two to help me.”

So they were hired guns. Which meant they had nothing to lose. Sarah was paying them to do whatever she asked, even if meant sending Kirby to an early grave.

“You there?” the driver said into the ear communicator he was wearing, and he kept driving. Seconds later, he repeated his question.

Still no answer.

Good. Maybe that meant Harlan had stopped him.

Sarah cursed again. “He better not have failed,” she snapped. And she jammed the gun harder against Joelle’s ribs. So hard that it nearly knocked the breath out of her.

Clearly, the woman was working on a short fuse. Maybe even an unstable one. It was a risk—anything Joelle did at this point would be—but she was certain of one thing. Even if Dallas managed to destroy that evidence, Sarah wasn’t going to let them live.

Dallas and she were the ultimate loose ends.

With that realization slicing through her, Joelle gathered all her strength and breath. She dug her feet into the floor to anchor herself. Then she slammed her entire weight into the driver.

Thankfully, he hadn’t seen it coming. The steering wheel lurched to the left. So did the truck. And it flew off the trail right into the boggy ground. The jolt was instantaneous, as if they’d been in a collision. The truck jerked to a stop, tossing them forward into the dash and windshield.

The impact stunned her, and the pain shot through every part of her body. But she didn’t let it stop her.

She pulled back and started fighting as if her life depended on it.

Because it did.

* * *

D
ALLAS
RAN
AS
FAST
AS
HE
COULD
,
battling both the rain and the mud. He had to get to Joelle, had to stop her from being taken away from the ranch. But he also couldn’t risk another shot being fired. That’s why he stayed off the trail, behind the trees and shrubs.

He had to believe that shot had been meant for him. He couldn’t stand to think otherwise. No. He wouldn’t go there. He would get to her and he would save her.

His brothers were somewhere on the grounds. Maybe one of them would be able to stop that truck before it reached the main road. Of course, that was a risk for them, too, but he knew without a doubt that each of them would take it to save Joelle’s life.

Ahead of him, he heard the heavy thudding sound. And the scream. It was a woman’s, but it didn’t sound like Joelle. Still, that pushed him to pick up the pace, and when he threw back a low-hanging branch, Dallas spotted the truck sitting nose first in an irrigation ditch.

“Harlan has the other gunman!” Clayton shouted. He sounded close, but Dallas figured he was closer.

He hurried to the truck and threw open the first door he could reach—the one on the passenger’s side. Two people came spilling out. Both of them fighting. Both yelling.

One of them was Joelle, thank God. Alive and okay, for the moment at least.

The other woman was Sarah. And she was fighting, too, but she had the advantage because she had a gun in her hand. Joelle had a death grip on the woman’s wrist, but from what Dallas could tell Sarah’s finger was still on the trigger.

Sarah’s henchman, the driver, came scrambling across the cab of the truck and tried to latch on to Joelle. Dallas didn’t let him do that. He rammed himself into the man, knocking him away from the fray.

Unfortunately, that took Dallas away from it, too.

From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw Clayton approach them. His brother had his gun aimed and ready, but he didn’t shoot. Sarah and Joelle were practically wound around each other, and Dallas had no choice but to drag the gunman to the ground so he couldn’t try to help his boss.

“Harlan has the other gunman in custody,” Clayton called out. “And the guy’s already squealing about a plea deal to testify against his boss, Sarah Webb.”

Whether it was true or not, Dallas prayed that would make Sarah surrender.

It didn’t.

The woman kept fighting, kept trying to aim that gun right at Joelle.

Enough was enough. Even though the hired gun outweighed Dallas and was probably a lot stronger, he didn’t have the high stakes. He wasn’t fighting for Joelle’s life. Dallas rammed his elbow into the man’s jaw and followed it by bashing his gun across his face.

Cursing and spitting blood, the man reared up to charge at Dallas, but before he could do that, the shot rang out. From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw that Clayton had put a bullet in the man’s leg.

Dallas didn’t take the time to see if that would stop the guy. Clayton had his back, but Clayton still didn’t have a clean shot to stop Sarah. Praying it wasn’t a mistake, Dallas launched himself toward the woman, hauling them both to the ground.

The shot was deafening.

It blasted through Dallas’s head, and he could have sworn his heart, too. That’s because the bullet hadn’t hit him, and that meant it could have Joelle.

He heard himself shout out her name, but it sounded like an echo with the blast still ringing in his ears. Dallas latched on to an arm and gave it a fierce tug.

Joelle.

She was moving. Alive. But since she was coated in mud, he couldn’t tell if she’d been wounded.

Sarah came up off the ground. “I won’t let this happen!” she yelled. “I won’t go to jail for killing that bastard.”

And she pointed the gun right at Joelle.

Dallas still had hold of her arm, and he slung Joelle behind him. In the same motion, he aimed his own gun, praying that there wasn’t too much water or mud in the barrel.

He fired.

And his shot slammed into Sarah’s chest.

Unlike his brother, Dallas had to go for a kill shot. He couldn’t risk Sarah pulling that trigger.

The woman froze, the gun slipping from her hand and onto the ground. Her stare was frozen, too, fixed on Dallas. She said something.

Three words.

Words that Dallas didn’t catch because of the rain.

He didn’t get a chance to ask her what she’d said because Sarah dropped to the ground right next to the gun she’d just tried to fire at them.

Clayton hurried closer to cuff the injured gunman, but Dallas’s attention went straight to Joelle. He grabbed her, pulled her closer to make sure she hadn’t been shot.

“I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was as shaky as she was.

Dallas didn’t take her word for it. He swiped away the mud and looked for any signs of injury. She had some cuts and scrapes on her face, and while it turned his stomach to see them, it was far better than the alternative.

Relieved, he pulled her into his arms. “I’m sorry.” It was just one of the things he needed to say to her, but the others could wait.

“Sarah’s alive,” Clayton relayed to them, and he took out his phone and called for an ambulance.

Joelle pulled back and placed both hands on Dallas’s face. “Did you hear her?”

Her voice wasn’t just shaky now. It was pretty much frantic, and he wanted to dismiss it as part of the slam of adrenaline she was no doubt feeling.

But there was something else.

“Did you hear what Sarah said?” Joelle asked.

Dallas had to shake his head. Three words. But he hadn’t heard. “What?”

Joelle moved closer to him and put her mouth right against his ear. He heard the shuddering sound her breath made. “Sarah said
I had help.
”

Chapter Nineteen

Dallas was tired of waiting. Joelle, his family and he
had been through hell and back, and here he was waiting in his boss’s office for
his brother, Wyatt, to return with reports and updates. Yeah, he wanted to hear
those, but he also wanted to get Joelle out of there and try to ease that
worried look on her face.

They’d managed to shower off most of the mud and grime before
Saul had ordered them all to the marshals’ building so that Wyatt could brief
them. But all of them—Harlan, Clayton and especially Joelle—looked ready to
collapse. Dallas was sure he looked the same.

Dealing with adrenaline crash was always a bear.

Plus, there was all the other stuff going on. He’d shot a woman
just hours earlier. It’d been a necessity, but that didn’t make it easy to
swallow. As if Joelle knew exactly what he was thinking, she reached out and
slid her hand over his.

Their gazes met, and he saw a lot of emotion in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered, “for saving my life again.”

You’re welcome
didn’t seem like the
right thing to say. For that matter, neither did anything else he could come up
with. He didn’t dare tell her that it’d taken a dozen years off his life when he
thought she’d been hurt. So instead of words that were pretty much useless,
Dallas leaned over and kissed her.

Clayton made a sound of amusement. Harlan grunted.

Dallas ignored them and kissed Joelle anyway.

When he eased back, he saw a little heat mixed in with all the
worry.

“I had help,”
Joelle said,
repeating what she heard Sarah say. “What do you think Sarah meant?”

“You’re sure you understood her correctly?” Dallas asked.

“She did,” Clayton said. “I heard it, too.”

Great. That was not the verification Dallas wanted. He needed
this put to rest. Sarah had killed her abusive husband. End of story.

But maybe it wasn’t.

“You believe Sarah had an accomplice?” Joelle’s voice was
tentative. Clearly, she didn’t want that to be true, either.

“I don’t know,” Dallas said. But there were some things that
didn’t fit right in this. “According to the blood the CSIs found, it looks as if
someone dragged Webb down a flight of stairs. And he was buried over a mile away
from Rocky Creek.”

“Webb was a big man,” Clayton added. “It would have been next
to impossible for a woman Sarah’s size to do that all on her own.”

“Next to impossible,” Dallas repeated. “But still doable.”

Maybe.

Harlan made a
hmm
sound that
rumbled in his chest. “I’m thinking we shouldn’t be borrowing trouble.
Especially that kind of trouble.”

Before Dallas or the others could agree with that, Wyatt
appeared in the doorway. “You all right?” he asked to no one in particular.

“We are now,” Clayton mumbled. “Kirby, too.”

Dallas was about to demand to know what was in those reports
they were waiting on, but he frowned when his gaze landed on Wyatt.

Like Harlan, Wyatt was tall, around six-four, and right now he
looked more than a little imposing since he had a busted lip, a butterfly
bandage over a mean-looking cut above his eye, and blood all over the front of
his shirt.

“
You
all right?” Dallas repeated,
eyeing the blood. “I thought you were on prisoner transport duty before Saul
called you back in to help with this Webb mess.”

“I was. The prisoners didn’t exactly cooperate. Don’t worry,
they look a lot worse than I do,” Wyatt joked. And despite the busted lip, Wyatt
flashed Joelle one of his killer smiles. “How about you? My brothers taking good
care of you?”

She nodded, and her mouth quivered as she tried to return a
smile, but it didn’t quite happen. “We’re just anxious to hear what’s going
on.”

“Yeah, well, be prepared to hear a lot. Saul’s still tied up
with the locals, but he gave me the go-ahead to start things off.” Wyatt sat on
the edge of Saul’s desk and added a
where do I
start?
huff.

“All of you have been checked out by the medics, right?” he
asked.

They nodded, one by one. Joelle and Dallas had some bruises,
one particularly bad one on Joelle’s right cheekbone that made Dallas want to
punch the daylights out of the person who’d put it there. But he knew it could
have been much worse.

“Saul’s orders are that Dallas, Clayton and Harlan will take a
few days of paid leave while he sorts through all this,” Wyatt explained.
“Declan, Slade and me will be on other duties out of the county. In other words,
they don’t want us within smelling distance of the wrap-up.”

“You’re still thinking we did something wrong?” Dallas
asked.

Wyatt shook his head. “I’m thinking you did a lot of things
right, including catching a killer. But there’ll be a mess of paperwork. And
Saul doesn’t want anyone saying that any of you had a hand in giving it the
right kind of spin to benefit Kirby or anyone else.”

That wasn’t an unreasonable request. Besides, Dallas didn’t
mind having a few days off to settle things with Joelle. He hoped that would
mean coaxing her back to his bed. He’d been damn lucky to get her there the
night before, but that luck might not hold.

“First of all, Sarah Webb isn’t dead,” Wyatt went on. “But she
did go into cardiac arrest during surgery and is in a coma. The docs aren’t sure
if she’ll come out of it, but things aren’t looking good.”

That punched at Dallas harder than he thought, and Joelle gave
his hand another gentle squeeze. He’d never shot a woman before, and he prayed
he never have to again.

“I understand Sarah confessed to her husband’s murder before
Dallas had to shoot her.” Wyatt wasn’t looking at them but rather the
reports.

“Yeah,” Dallas confirmed. “And she also confessed to trying to
kidnap Joelle so she could force me to tamper with the evidence that the CSIs
found. She thought there was something incriminating in the safe.”

“There wasn’t,” Wyatt confirmed. “Not for her, anyway, but I’m
sure Sarah did some other things to try to cover her tracks. Like setting up
those trash cans so they’d spew smoke in the building where Joelle and you were
conducting an investigation.”

“An unauthorized one on your part,” Saul said, coming to the
doorway. Thankfully, he didn’t elaborate on that.

“Sarah was going to have Kirby kidnapped, too,” Joelle
volunteered.

Yet another reason for him not to regret shooting Sarah. What a
twisted woman to use a sick man to cover up her crimes.

Dallas looked around the room at the others to see if they were
going to offer anything else. None of them said anything to Saul about what
might have been a confession from Sarah before she collapsed.

I had help.

Hell, the woman had been bleeding out at the time she’d
muttered those words so she might not have had a clue what she was saying.
Judging from the others’ silence, they were taking the same stance.

Wyatt put the one report aside and picked up another. “Owen was
picked up the airport in San Antonio. He was trying to get on a flight to Mexico
because he figured that was better than going to jail once Joelle testified
against him.”

“Which I would have done. And I’ll still do it,” she
insisted.

Good. That would put Owen behind bars for a while. “You need to
add charges for him drugging Joelle and trying to shoot us in the woods.”

Wyatt shook his head. “That was Lindsey who did the drugging.
Owen’s not saying much, but she’s been a regular little chatterbox. Can’t shut
her up, in fact. She wanted to stop the wedding, and that’s why she drugged
Joelle.”

“And Lindsey sent those men after us?” Joelle asked.

“Nope. That was Sarah’s doing. One of her hired guns—the one
who Harlan nabbed outside the ranch house—is talking, too. Sarah hired the three
guys to kidnap Joelle because she wanted to make sure Joelle married Owen.”

“Owen?” Clayton and Dallas asked in unison.

Wyatt nodded, then shrugged. “It appears that Sarah was running
scared when she thought Joelle’s inquiry might lead to her arrest, and she
wanted to help Owen force Joelle to marry him so that Owen in turn would help
clear her name. If you hadn’t carried Joelle out of the church when you did,
then Sarah’s men would have forced her to walk down the aisle.”

His boss cocked his head and stared at Dallas over the top of
his reading glasses. “Just to clarify—you did take Joelle out of that church
because you were concerned about her safety, right?”

That was part of it, yeah. But he’d also done it so that she
wouldn’t release the report that he thought would incriminate Kirby.

“Yes,” Joelle answered for him. “Dallas was protecting me.”

“Good.” Saul sounded a little skeptical. He cleared his throat
and motioned for Wyatt to continue.

Wyatt went to the next report. “Owen agreed to turn over the
real knife, the one that Sarah sent him, as part of a plea bargain his lawyers
are trying to work out.”

“It’ll have my prints on it,” Dallas reminded him.

“Figured that, but we have Rudy’s statement that you picked up
the knife in Webb’s office. Then we have Sarah’s confession that she used the
same knife to kill her husband. That ties it up in a nice little package.”

It did, and it was one less thing for Dallas to worry about.
But the knife wasn’t all that Owen had hidden away. “And what about the
handkerchief with Kirby’s DNA?”

Saul shrugged. “That could have come from anywhere at any time.
No chain of custody to make it credible to link Kirby to a crime. Especially
considering that Sarah was more than willing to try to set up a marshal for a
murder that she committed. It’s not much of a stretch for her to try to frame
Kirby, too, with his own handkerchief.”

No. It wasn’t a stretch, and Dallas wanted to keep it that
way.

“Going back to the first attack in the woods,” Joelle spoke up.
“One of the gunmen said something, well, personal about me.”

Dirty little secret.
Dallas
remembered that, and now he realized the gunman might have been referring to
Joelle’s pregnancy.

“Owen could have passed on any info that he had about you to
Sarah,” Dallas reminded her. And they already knew that Owen had the baby’s
birth certificate.

“Yes,” she softly agreed, but he heard the anger mixed in with
that softness. He was right there with her. He hated that Owen, and Sarah as
well, had used their baby to try to get back at them.

“Anything I should know about this
personal
thing the gunman said?” Saul asked. “Didn’t think so,” he
said a moment later when none of them spoke up.

Wyatt picked up the next report. “Rudy probably won’t face any
charges except for the stunt he pulled at Rocky Creek when he locked out the
CSIs. We’ve got no proof, but we think Sarah might have been the one to take
that shot at him in the woods. There’s no love lost between those two.”

“No,” Clayton agreed. “And when Sarah realized she’d failed to
rile up Rudy enough to destroy the evidence in Rocky Creek, she probably took
her anger out on him.”

Wyatt nodded. “That’s my theory, too.” He picked up yet another
form. “And that brings us to Lindsey and her call about shooting Owen. She
didn’t. Sarah put her up to that by promising Lindsey that she’d help her get
Owen back. Sarah talked Lindsey into making that call with the hopes of luring
you and Joelle out to the house.”

“And it worked,” Joelle whispered.

What color she had in her face vanished. Well, except for that
god-awful bruise. Dallas knew it would raise Saul’s eyebrows, but he didn’t give
a flying fig about that. He leaned over and pulled Joelle to him.

She made a soft sound, and he heard the pain in it. Oh, yeah.
It was going to take a while for her to start forgetting this.

Saul cleared this throat again. “The governor wants you to call
him first chance you get,” he said to Joelle.

She managed a shaky nod. A nod that didn’t sit well with
Dallas. Of course, she had to call her boss. And of course, the governor would
want her back at work. But that would mean her leaving.

No.

That didn’t sit well with him at all.

Her gaze came to Dallas’s and he saw the tears shimmering in
her eyes. A bad mix with the bruises, scrapes and his own worry and
concerns.

“You were never practice,” Dallas heard himself say.

And he said it a whole lot louder than he’d intended. Actually,
it hadn’t been a good time to say it at all, but he couldn’t very well take it
back. Especially since it was true.

Joelle blinked. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Then she looked
around the room at the others.

“Could you excuse us a minute?” Dallas asked to no one in
particular, but he didn’t wait for an answer. He eased Joelle to her feet and
got her out of there.

By the time they made it out into the hall and to Dallas’s own
office, there weren’t any tears left in Joelle’s eyes. But there was a
Texas-size amount of confusion. He had a lot to tell her, and maybe what he said
in the next few minutes would ease some of that confusion.

But she spoke before he could ease anything.

“You’re sending me mixed signals, Dallas. One of the main
reasons I left you was because you never asked me to stay. Heck, you never asked
me to be your girlfriend. Or to even go on a date. You definitely never asked me
to be...yours.”

Yeah, and he was quickly coming to the realization that had
been one of the biggest mistakes of his life. Dallas tried to figure out the
best way to fix that, but after looking at Joelle, he decided to do what he
thought was best. Heck, it might be the wrong thing to do, too, but it would
make him feel a heck of a lot better.

Dallas pulled her into his arms, put his mouth on hers and
kissed her.

She went stiff for a few seconds. Hopefully because she hadn’t
seen the kiss coming and not because she objected to it. Dallas deepened it just
in case, and he finally heard the sound he’d been waiting for.