Baby Breakout Read online

  How did one set a price for a man’s life, though? Because in testifying against Jed and sending him to prison, this man had cost Jed his life.

  Jed sighed. “But then he was homeless when he testified against me. This probably seems like a castle to him compared to the parking garage he was living in.”

  And it probably did because the yard was well kept, all the windows and trim freshly painted. There was pride in ownership. Was there pride in what he’d done to achieve the house?

  If so, she would never be able to convince him to do the right thing. This man obviously felt no guilt over sending an innocent man to prison. If he had felt any remorse, he probably would have been back on the streets, lost in the bottle.

  She knocked on the front door, anger making her pound so hard that the door opened.

  “I don’t like this,” Jed remarked.

  “It’s broad daylight.” Not like the eerie predawn hours when they had found Marcus Leighton dead in his office.

  “Crime happens even during the day,” he replied, reminding her how naïve she was.

  Growing up in Miller’s Valley with her great aunt had been like growing up in a fifty-year-old time warp. There was no crime or criminals in Miller’s Valley. Everyone but her aunt had always left their doors unlocked.

  That was another reason why, in addition to caring for her aunt, Erica had returned to Miller’s Valley. After the fiasco with Jed and Brandon, she had wanted nothing to do with city life anymore. This house was in a smaller town, the witness having chosen to leave the city behind, too.

  Jed stepped in front of her and pushed the door open the rest of the way using just his broad shoulder. Then he called out, “Hello?”

  “Maybe he’s gone,” she said. But then she noticed the suitcase by the door.

  He had intended to leave, probably after seeing the press coverage of Jed’s escape from prison, but he hadn’t gotten very far. The house was small and open, so it was easy to locate him without taking more than a couple of steps over the threshold. His body lay facedown by his back door, as if he had tried to make a run for it when the killer had come in his front door.

  Jed crossed the living room to the kitchen and knelt beside the man, feeling his neck for a pulse. From the blood pooled on the linoleum beneath the body, Erica doubted he would find one.

  He turned toward her and shook his head. “He’s already cold.”

  “We were too late,” she said. Her stomach churned with regret that they hadn’t been able to save the man and that they hadn’t been able to talk to him or Leighton. Or that woman who had lied about leaving Jed alone with Brandon. Had she really committed suicide, or was it murder as Jed suspected?

  From the bullet hole burned through his bloodied shirt, this man had obviously been murdered. He could not tell them now who had paid him to lie on the witness stand.

  Jed cursed. “We were too damn late again.”

  “Should we search the place?” she asked. “And try to find something linking him to whoever paid for his testimony against you?”

  She was out of her element here, just as she had been from the first moment she had met Jedidiah Kleyn. But she had never been more so than now. She was a small-town bookkeeper, not a trained investigator. She had no idea how to behave at a murder scene, but at least she had managed last time and this time to control her stomach and her hysteria. She would not get sick, and she would not freak out and dissolve into sobs of hysteria.

  Jed stood up. The knees of his jeans were stained with the dead man’s blood. “No, we should get the hell out of here.”

  “But what if we miss something that could help clear you…” They couldn’t help this man anymore, but maybe they could still find something that would aid Jed in his quest.

  “He wouldn’t have missed anything,” Jed said, his voice rough with certainty and bitterness.

  He definitely knew who had set him up. While he might not have been sure before, as he’d claimed to Rowe, he was obviously convinced now.

  She glanced around, trying to discover what had cemented his conviction. But she saw nothing. “Are you sure?”

  He jerked his chin down in a quick nod. “He’s too smart and too thorough. The only thing he left here is a trap for me to get caught.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the front door.

  But as he stepped toward the open doorway, shots rang out. The jamb, inches from his head, splintered. “Damnation…”

  He slammed the door shut, but shots pinged against the steel and shattered the small rectangle of glass near Jed’s head. Her hand still clasped in his, he pulled her along with him toward the back door. She stumbled over the body, slipping in the blood.

  Jed half lifted her across the corpse and pulled open the back door. “We have to run for it,” he told her as the front door creaked open, propelled either by the bullets or someone’s foot.

  Her heart pounded so hard, she could barely hear him. “Where do we run?”

  “We can’t get to the car,” he said. “We’ll have to run out back, into the woods.”

  He stepped out first onto the driveway at the side of the house, and then he pulled her out just as shots were fired inside.

  Something whizzed past her head. If not for him pushing her toward the woods, she might have frozen, her muscles paralyzed with fear. But he kept her moving even as more gunfire erupted.

  The backyard was wide-open with no trees or structures to deflect the bullets. He stayed between her and the house, shielding her with his body as if muscle and flesh could deflect metal.

  She ran faster, her legs burning with the effort. She did not want him to take a bullet for her. And she suddenly remembered the game at the carnival where the contestant shoots the air rifle at the row of ducks.

  But she wasn’t the contestant with the air rifle; she was one of the ducks—waddling back and forth until the gun knocked her down.

  And just a couple of yards from the woods line, she fell. She sprawled across the weeds at the edge of the lawn, her body too numb with fear for her to tell where she had been hit.

  * * *

  JED SPRAWLED ON TOP OF ERICA, protecting her with his body as more shots rang out behind them. More than one gun fired at them. He turned his head and peered over his shoulder.

  In black uniforms with the sun glinting off the shiny badges on their chests, police officers fanned out from the house, coming toward them. But instead of identifying themselves or telling Jed and her to stop, they just kept firing.

  Hoping Erica wasn’t hit, Jed clutched her close. Then he rolled with her down the back slope of the lawn and into the trees. Without giving her a moment to catch her breath or for him to catch his, he dragged her up and, half carrying her, ran deeper into the woods. Briars and branches caught at his clothes and scratched his head and face.

  Erica gasped and panted for breath, but she didn’t slow down—just pressed close to his side as he wrapped his arm tight around her. She kept pace with him as they ran deeper and deeper into the woods. But then the crack of a shot echoed within the forest, sending birds rising up from tree branches and flying off in a frenzy. This gunshot came from ahead—not behind them.

  Erica stopped short against him, realizing as he had that they were surrounded.

  Trapped.

  The police officers had been like deer hunters flushing out their prey to the hunter who would make the kill shot.

  The killer.

  Jed couldn’t see him; he wasn’t showing himself again—maybe because he intended to let Erica live. Or maybe because he had been in hiding for so long that he wasn’t used to being out in the open.

  Or he didn’t want the police officers to see him. But hell, they had probably already seen him when he had paid them to help him set this trap. Maybe they didn’t act out of a sense of vigilante justice but out of greed. Had they been promised more money if Jed didn’t come out of these woods alive?

  The officers were getting closer. Twigs and branches snapp
ed behind him as Jed pulled Erica down into some thick brush.

  She pressed her hand to her mouth, as if trying to hold back a scream or maybe just the sound of her panting breaths. She had kept pace with him through the woods, running faster than he’d thought she would be able—especially if she’d been hit when she’d first dropped to the ground at the edge of the lawn.

  But then fear had probably made her oblivious to her pain and given her speed. She stared up at him, her eyes wide with questions he couldn’t answer.

  He didn’t know how to save them. He had no gun—no weapon besides the little scalpel Macy had given Erica. Rowe wouldn’t give him a gun—only the use of the vehicle and the burner cell phone.

  He could call Rowe, but talking would reveal their hiding place. And Rowe would never get to them in time to save them.

  Then there was no time at all for him to do anything as the cold barrel of a gun pressed into the nape of his neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he mouthed the words to Erica.

  He would never get to know his daughter now, and he had cost the child her mother, as well. After witnessing his murder, she wouldn’t be allowed to live, either.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I want my mommy!” the little girl whined from her car seat in the back of the vehicle her daddy had given Macy when she’d graduated high school.

  Macy glanced at the rearview mirror, but instead of checking for vehicles following them as she had constantly been doing, she met her niece’s frightened gaze. Tears welled in the child’s big, chocolate-brown eyes.

  “I know, sweetheart,” Macy commiserated with the toddler. She’d once wanted her mother, too, but Beatrice Kleyn had never been a mommy. She’d never been as loving and warm as Erica was with her daughter.

  The woman had done a great job of raising her baby alone. It was obvious how much she loved Isobel. So Macy was moved that Erica had trusted her to keep the child safe. And Macy would protect her niece from all physical harm. But could she protect her from the emotional harm of losing her mommy?

  Rowe had been right to get angry over her allowing Erica to stow away with Jed. She would have given up the blonde woman’s whereabouts before her brother had driven off if she hadn’t identified so well with the woman’s need to help the man she loved.

  And no matter that she hadn’t been at his trial, Erica Towsley loved Jed. She’d claimed she wanted to help prove his innocence for Isobel’s sake, so that her daughter would grow up knowing her father.

  But Macy had seen the way Erica looked at Jed—the same way Macy looked at Rowe—like he was the only man in the world. Maybe Erica had doubted him before, and maybe she feared what he might do if he’d gone off alone to confront witnesses and track down evidence to clear himself, but she loved him.

  Hopefully that love wouldn’t cost Erica Towsley her life and little Isobel both her parents…

  * * *

  “DON’T MOVE,” A DEEP raspy voice warned.

  Erica couldn’t have moved had she wanted to. Jed was wrapped tightly around her, once again using his own body to shield her.

  But then some of the tension eased from him, and he whispered, “Rowe?”

  “Shh…”

  The DEA agent crouched down in the brush with them, keeping low while branches and twigs snapped around them. The taller trees blocked the late afternoon sun, casting them in shadows.

  Erica held her breath but her heart pounded so hard that the sound of it echoed inside her head. Could the gunmen hear it, too? Would she be the one who gave away their location? Who cost them all their lives?

  Several long moments of silence passed before Rowe’s hoarse whisper advised them, “Let’s go…”

  Jed caught his arm and stopped him from moving from their hiding place. “The police weren’t the only ones firing at us.”

  “You saw that guy again?”

  He shook his head. “No. But he’s here.”

  A furrow creased Rowe’s brow. Then he reached beneath his jacket in the back and pulled out another gun. “I didn’t want to do this…”

  Arm an escaped felon?

  Jed hesitated before reaching for the weapon, and then he closed his big hand around it. “Thank you.”

  Rowe didn’t accept the gratitude, just shook his head as if disgusted with himself. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They backtracked through the woods. But instead of coming up to the yard that was swarming with police officers and crime-scene techs, they snuck through another yard several houses over that was thick with weeds and overgrown trees, offering them cover.

  The men kept her in the middle, both of them shielding her. But she caught the glint of metal as someone raised a gun behind them. “Down!” she yelled as she crouched low.

  Bullets whizzed over their heads. But the men didn’t drop to the ground. Rowe took the lead, running toward the street. He clicked a button on a key chain and a sliding door opened on the side of a van parked near the curb.

  Jed lifted her into the back and jumped in behind her as Rowe slid behind the wheel. Before either door shut completely, he was tearing away from the curb. Rubber squealed as he careened around a corner and onto another street.

  Erica’s heart raced, and she trembled with nerves and fear.

  “Are you hurt?” Jed asked her. “Were you hit?”

  She shook her head, realizing now that she’d only fallen earlier because Jed had knocked her down and knocked the breath from her lungs. She was alive, but she was mad as hell and not just about getting shot at.

  She reached into the front seat and smacked Rowe’s shoulder. She didn’t really care that he had rescued her and Jed. She cared only about one thing—his promise to protect her daughter. “Why did you leave her?”

  “Who?” Rowe asked, sparing her only a quick glance in the rearview mirror as he continued steering the van around tight curves at high speeds.

  Hysteria rose, pressing on her lungs and stealing away her breath more than the mad dash through the woods had. “Isobel! Where’s Isobel?”

  Jed grabbed her shoulders, as if trying to calm her down. She shook off his grasp, though, refusing to be comforted.

  She had trusted Macy and Rowe to keep her daughter safe. Why, after everything she had been through in her life, had she been stupid enough to believe she could trust anyone?

  “She’s fine,” Rowe assured her. “Don’t worry about her.”

  “She’s right to worry,” Jed said, and his words offered more support than his touch. “You promised that you would stay with her. But you used this damn phone—” he pulled it from the pocket of her jeans; she was surprised that she hadn’t lost it in the woods “—to track us.”

  “Macy insisted that I keep an eye on the two of you,” Rowe said. “She took Isobel to safety and made me follow you to keep you safe.”

  “How do you know they made it to safety?” Erica asked, her panic increasing.

  “Yeah, how the hell do you know?” Jed echoed her question. He apparently didn’t care any more than she did that Rowe had saved his life; he cared more about their daughter’s and his sister’s lives.

  She felt closer to him now than she had even when they had made love.

  “Take us to her,” she pleaded. “I have to see her.” She had to hold her baby close and never let her go again.

  “You can’t see her now,” Rowe said.

  “Where did Macy take her?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “It’s better for her if you don’t know…”

  She sucked in a breath of pain. Was that what child protective services would say when they took Isobel away while the police eventually took Erica off to jail for aiding and abetting a fugitive?

  “You can’t go anywhere near her right now,” Rowe explained, “because you would only put her in danger.”

  Erica posed a threat to her own daughter? Because the police were after her now or because the killer was?

  * * *

 
“BE GOOD FOR AUNT MACY.” Erica spoke into Rowe’s cell phone, her voice shaky but forced into sounding bright and happy, too.

  Jed already knew that she would do anything for their daughter; she was a great mother. To give Isobel her father was the reason that Erica had put her own life in jeopardy.

  It was a miracle that she hadn’t been hit with all the shots that had been fired at them. He shuddered now, thinking of how much danger she’d been in…because of him. Love hadn’t motivated her into tagging along, though—at least not love for him. But love for their daughter…