Lost in Shadows Page 4

  The road became even worse than the goat trail they’d just left. He hung onto the dash to keep from bouncing into the ceiling as they jostled over the irregular surface. If there was a surface. Maybe they were hopelessly lost in the woods already—Hansel and Gretel on wheels.

  Ryan bit her lip in concentration, the dashboard lights cast her face in a ghostly glow. He liked the way her hands played over the steering wheel and gearshift, as if she and the car were one. She had long, slender fingers, but her nails were short, much shorter than any of the women he knew in the city. She wore no makeup, no nail polish, no jewelry except for a plain gold band on her left hand.

  Oh, yeah, she had mentioned a husband. A cop. Brother in arms. He looked up at the photo of a man in dress blues, the vibrations had caused it to slip from the rubber band holding it in place, and it teetered, ready to fall to the dash at any time.

  The best ones were always taken, Lucky thought with a sigh. Like Chase’s wife-to-be, KC. Or his newfound friend, VD Ryan.

  Guess he’d never have the chance to get to know her better. Oh, but it would have been fun...A wave of fatigue engulfed him. As he closed his eyes for a moment, the memory of Ryan’s hands dancing over his body, checking him for injuries, morphed into something more sensual.

  He imagined her face hovering over him, biting her lip as she slowly teased his clothes away from his body. And what luscious, thick lips they were, he could almost taste them—

  The car came to an abrupt stop.

  “End of the road,” Ryan announced.

  Lucky’s eyes popped open. Trees, coated in white, loomed all around them, shimmering with menacing intentions in the headlights. He looked back, there was no sign of any road in the snow. The forest was dark, silent and ominous.

  “Where the hell are we?” he asked.

  “Lost River Wilderness Area. Where’d you think we end up? On the Capitol Beltway?” She turned on the map light and looked over at him. “Didn’t you have a plan when you told me to get off the road? Did you even look at a map before you came up here?”

  “It was a spur of the moment thing,” he muttered. “Supposed to be my day off—I’m meant to be at a wedding right now.”

  “If she loves you, she’ll wait.”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “My plan was for us not to get shot by some local yokel cops who are probably working for the wrong people.”

  “So you’ve never been out here before?”

  “My idea of country living is a picnic on the Mall near the reflecting pool. If I really feel adventurous, I’ll head over to the Jefferson Memorial.”

  She was silent, her eyes upon him, their intensity increased by the glow of the dashboard lights. Lucky felt as if he had somehow let her down. Almost getting her killed and then stranding them in this godforsaken wilderness probably had something to do with that.

  “All right,” he said. “Here’s the plan. We wait out the storm here, then head back out. There is a way back out, right?”

  She shook her head, reached into the back seat and handed him a water container. “Drink. You need fluids.”

  He took the water but waited until she answered his question before he followed her order.

  “This storm isn’t going to let up for a few days,” she told him. “Which is good because it will keep your friends from tracking us, at least not without spending a lot of time and effort.”

  “Believe me, these guys have all the time, manpower and money they need. No storm is going to stop them for long.”

  “They want to kill you that bad?” She was chewing on her lip again, obviously unhappy with the ramifications of her hitchhiker and his fervent pursuers.

  “They want what’s in this computer that bad.”

  “The only way off the mountain from here is the way we came in. Either that or hiking the Lost River trail down to Route Fifteen in Goose Creek.”

  “So we’re stuck.”

  “We are if you can’t walk.”

  Wait here—wherever the hell here was—to die, or walk out? Damned right he could walk.

  “Not a problem,” he told her, hoping he wasn’t lying.

  “Right, then that’s the plan.” She looked over at him. “Guess we’re stuck together for a while, Mr. Secret Agent man. You know my name. Wanna tell me yours?”

  “Cavanaugh, Ed Cavanaugh. My friends call me Lucky.”

  She shook her head when she heard his nickname. “I’m guessing your friends are into irony. All right, Agent Cavanaugh, how’s about you let me do something for that wound? Hate to have you pass out and fall off the side of the mountain or something.”

  He set the computer on the dashboard and allowed her to help him out of his jacket. He was surprised by the amount of blood that had pooled inside the leather coat. His stomach clenched as a wave of nausea swept over him.

  “Don’t you pass out on me, Cavanaugh,” she ordered.

  Lucky grit his teeth, no way he was going to faint, not in front of her at any rate.

  “How long before The Preacher’s men figure out where we are?” he asked.

  She pulled back, and he immediately missed the warm comfort of her touch. “The Preacher? He’s the one after you?”

  Lucky sighed. “Yeah. Trust me, Ryan, I don’t like it any better than you do.”

  “That guy is nuts—and so are his followers. There’s a lot of them around here, so they’ll have locals helping in the search. Folks that know the mountain.” She gently pried loose his blood-soaked fleece pullover and the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore beneath it. “This you were wearing to a wedding?”

  “I left my tux in DC.” His voice broke when she hit a sensitive spot on his collarbone.

  “They’ll have dogs, and they’ll know as soon as the weather clears which road we took,” she went on, flushing the wound with a stream of water.

  “Won’t our tracks be hidden by the snow?” he asked, his teeth chattering from the cold water pouring over his naked flesh. The pain, that he could pretty much block out—with help from Ryan and her distracting presence.

  “The car won’t be. And there are only a few roads this side of the gorge we could have taken. By morning they’ll find the car.”

  Damn, that was sooner than Lucky expected. What was the good of being out in the middle of nowhere if the bad guys could find you so easily? Eric Rudolph hid out for years, why couldn’t they? Then he remembered the contents of the computer files he’d skimmed.

  “We’ll be near a phone before then, right? I have to get this information to Washington.”

  She leaned back and looked at him as if he were a slow learner. “I told you, no cell phones here. The nearest phone is down the mountain at Faye’s Diner.”

  “Don’t you have a phone at your place?”

  “No. I do have a shortwave radio, though. That would get you through to the real world.”

  “Which one is faster to get to?”

  “My place. But either way, we can’t make it there tonight.”

  “We can’t wait here for them to find us.”

  “I know a place we can go. Let me get you patched up first.”

  She squirmed past him, between the seats, into the back of the car. Nice ass, he couldn’t help but notice. Not skinny—instead, firm, round with something to hold on to.

  Stop it, she’s married. How could he forget with hubby’s picture gazing down at him? While she had her back turned, he reached up with his good hand and swiped at the photo. It skittered down behind the dash and out of sight.

  Ryan turned, perched on the back seat with a red nylon first aid kit open on her lap. She shrugged out of her parka and pushed up the sleeves of her wool shirt.

  “Tilt your seat back,” she told him. Lucky did as he was told, and soon she was leaning over him, ministering to him, her generous bustline in his face. She removed his shoulder harness and set it to one side, then began picking bits of charred cloth out of the wound.

  “Good news,” she said as he turned his he
ad and tried not to look at either the blood or at her breasts. “The bullet went clean through. Bad news is that I think it may have cracked your collar bone, and if you don’t get to a hospital, it will probably get infected.”

  “How long?”

  She shrugged, her breasts moving in synch with her body. Talk about something to hold onto. Best pain distraction he’d ever been treated to.

  “Day or two.” She kept working, and he shut his eyes. His imagination didn’t stop, though. “Wanna tell me what happened? How you got shot?”

  No, he didn’t. He’d rather not think about Tillburn or his brains leaking out onto the floor beneath his body. But she deserved to know, they were in this together now.

  “Another agent needed backup for a meet and greet. It was supposed to be routine, none of this cowboy and Indian crap.”

  “And,” she prompted. He jerked as she tugged on a deeply imbedded piece of debris. “Sorry.”

  “Tillburn, the other agent, thought these guys were strictly amateur. Anyway, we get there, and these guys want some pretty exotic stuff. They acted like pros. Organized, no chit chat. One guy in a suit working the computer, their leader wearing a silk polo and slacks straight out of GQ. I knew there was something hinky, but Tillburn had his hooks sunk, kept going.” He straightened at the memory.

  “Damn, that’s how they knew—the leader, Whitney had an iPhone. Must’ve taken a picture of Tillburn, sent it to the computer guy who ran it on some kind of facial recognition software.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” she said. “This is gonna hurt, so hang on.” She reached her hand out for him to grab.

  “It isn’t, it means every agent in the Justice Department could be compromised.” She poured some kind of antiseptic onto his wounds, and he winced. He squeezed her hand harder than he intended as the pain seared through him like liquid fire. Finally she finished, and he let out the breath he was holding.

  “Sorry,” she said, keeping his hand in hers for a long minute.

  Lucky liked the way her fingers fit just right with his, not too long, not too short, as if they were designed to be together. Her husband probably thought the same thing, he thought with a grimace.

  She reached to the front console and pulled out a few tea bags. “My emergency stash,” she said with a smile.

  “I did promise you tea and crumpets,” he said. He watched her unwrap the tea bags and squirmed away when she moved to place them on his wound. “What the hell?”

  “Relax. The tannin is a natural coagulant. And since I don’t have any gelfoam or Quik-clot handy, it’s the best I can do for now.”

  Lucky had no idea what she was talking about, but she seemed to know what she was doing, so he let her pack his wound and dress it. Then she helped him to sit up, steadying him as his head spun for a minute. He watched with fascination as she fashioned a sling out of his shoulder holster and slid it on over top of his clothes.

  “What happened to Tillburn?” she asked in a low voice.

  He winced as she lifted his arm into the makeshift sling. “He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Vinnie was silent for a moment. They could be killed as well—very nearly were back on the road. This wasn’t some action movie on the big screen, this was real life and Vinnie had already lived through too much during her time in the city. She knew what kind of damage men with guns could do, had seen it firsthand.

  Wasn’t that the reason she ran away from the city to start with?

  Cavanaugh seemed to pick up on her thoughts. “Thanks,” he said, adjusting his arm in the sling. “I can take it from here. Give me a map and show me where to go, and I’m out of your hair.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him and glared. Did he really think he was going to ditch her, that she would let him go and get himself killed? Idiot. City boy.

  He wouldn’t make it a hundred yards without getting lost, map or no map. Her gaze raked over him. Skinny, lean body, he was in good shape, but those clothes, those boots, totally unsuitable for moving across rough terrain. Especially with one arm out of commission, courting sepsis, near to shock with blood loss.

  He met her stare, his hazel eyes flashing with gold flecks in the glow of the overhead light. Vinnie startled as he reached out a hand, stroked her left ring finger.

  “Go on,” he urged. “You’ve got a husband to get home to.”

  She blinked hard against the tears his words triggered and turned her head away. He lifted his hand to gently cradle her chin, moved her to face him.

  “Hey, did I say something wrong?” His voice was filled with regret, and he leaned forward so that their foreheads were almost touching. “I’m sorry, Ryan, I didn’t mean—”

  “Michael,” his name emerged tangled with unshed tears, “my husband, is dead. Was killed, shot.”

  His face registered his shock and regret, and his hand fell away from her. “Hell. I’m sorry.”

  She shook free of the wave of grief that had ambushed her and busied herself cleaning up the first aid supplies. “You couldn’t know.” She handed him the Camelbak once more. “Drink all you can while I pack.”

  “Hey,” he called after her as she left the back seat and ventured out into the snow to open the hatchback where most of her gear was stowed. “I meant what I said. I’ll go alone.”

  “You won’t make it alone,” she told him.

  “I can make it—” He opened his door. He started to stand but slipped in the snow, and she rushed to keep him from falling.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” he said, leaning against the car, his breath forming little clouds that the wind scudded away in an instant.

  “You want to wait here, shoot it out with them, cowboy?” He frowned at that and she returned to her packing. “You got a better idea, tell me now.”

  “I vote for calling the auto club, snagging the presidential suite at the Ritz, ordering champagne and strawberries from room service and sharing a long hot soak in a Jacuzzi,” he said. “What do you say?”

  She smiled at his resilience. He had to be in pain and obviously wasn’t relishing a night bivouacked on a mountain in the snow. “Sounds great. Tell you what, Cavanaugh, we get off this mountain in one piece, and I’ll take you up on that.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that promise, Ryan,” he said. Something in his voice made her look up, but his gaze was focused into the darkness before them.

  Vinnie busied herself with the gear. He was a strange bird. She’d thought he almost kissed her, before she told him about Michael. She was glad he hadn’t, she didn’t need that kind of complication in her life. It hurt too much to even contemplate getting involved with another man. No one could ever love her like Michael had.

  She was an all or nothing kind of girl—at least that was what Michael said. He told her she wasn’t a girl he could date or be casual friends with, announcing his intentions to marry her a few hours after they first met.

  At first, she’d been turned off by his outspoken aggressiveness. His Irish temper and her Italian one mixed like whiskey and fire, leading to furious battles and even more intense reconciliations. He’d proven to be just as stubborn as she was, eventually wearing her down until she relented. Only time in her life Vinnie had ever given in, but it was worth it. Together they had made a life so rich, so full, as if the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts.

  Right up until the night she watched him die. And was helpless to save him.

  Vinnie blinked away tears, her hands fumbling as she filled a Nalgene bottle from the five gallon jug parked in the back of the Forester. She looked over at the man whose life she had saved tonight. Another city boy, Irish like Michael, another lawman, another man who carried a gun.

  One of the good guys, Lucky had said—she’d seen that in his eyes when she first helped him.

  She’d keep her promise, she vowed, jutting her chin up to the heavens, daring God to try to stop her this time. Ed Cavanaugh was going to make it out of here alive.


  All or nothing. She smiled, hearing Michael’s voice in her memory. She was just that kind of girl.

  CHAPTER 6

  The black spots before his eyes and the lightheadedness passed once Lucky found his sea legs. Or rather snow legs.

  He moved around to the back of the car to where Ryan was sorting a variety of equipment.

  The woman had ropes, a whole clip of metal implements that he thought were for rock climbing, but could have been some kind of kinky sex toys for all he knew, first aid supplies, MRE’s, a wide assortment of socks, long underwear, and Gortex outer garments, both a wet suit and a dry suit, a hard hat with a lamp attached, and more tools than he’d ever seen outside of a Home Depot.

  Jeezit, he was on the lam with Smokey the Bear. He had the distinct impression that VD Ryan was the kind of woman who liked to be prepared for whatever life threw her way and who didn’t appreciate being chucked a curve ball.

  Like a shot-up ATF agent on the run from the worst posse of outlaws on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

  “Any of this stuff irreplaceable?” he asked, grabbing a set of jumper cables and a roadside flare.

  She glared as he rummaged through her belongings. “Why? Do you think they’ll take it when they find the car?”

  “Honey, when they find the car, they’re also gonna find a nasty surprise.” He came upon a camp stove with a can of white gas. “Oh yeah, this is going to be a beaut.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked as he doused the front seats with the fuel. “Hey! Stop that!”

  “You’ve got insurance, don’t you?” He popped the lid, wrestled with the battery connections.

  “It doesn’t cover turning my car into a bomb.”

  “Got any duct tape?” he asked as he struggled to open his Leatherman with one hand.

  She traded him a roll of duct tape for the Leatherman, opened the multi-tool and returned it to him. Lucky turned to grab the jumper cables but she was right there, holding them out to him. Smart girl, his Smokey.