She watched him, moving with loose-limbed grace on long legs, and thought of JRR Tolkien"s Strider. It
would be a good nickname for him.
The thought made her grin. Strider had been quite a hero, after all. She doubted Zeke thought he"d done anything heroic today, but he had.
He"d saved her life.
Chapter 6.
Carrying bags of food into a little motel on top of a hill, Mattie and Zeke sprawled on the two double beds in the room. "Your malt, madame ," Zeke said. "Your cheeseburger. Fries." He reached deeper into the bag. "Ketchup, pickles, salt."
Mattie grinned. "What a guy. But that would be mademoiselle , not madame ." "Give it back, then." "You"d have to kill me first," she said. "I"m about to starve." She bit into the thick, greasy burger.
Heaven.
"Me, too. Riding in the open air will definitely give you an appet.i.te."
Her head, after wearing the helmet all day, felt extraordinarily light. "My head feels like it did after I cut
my hair."
Zeke looked up, raising an eyebrow. "That was why I couldn"t figure out who you were your hair. On TV, they showed a picture of you with it long. Real long."
"TV?".
"Yep. You were a featured story on that mysteries program a week or two ago." He dipped fries in
ketchup, lovingly. "That"s what was driving me so crazy. I knew I"d seen your face and that it was important. It was on television." Her heart squeezed. "You"re kidding." "Wish I was. That"s why you have to keep yourself scarce. The police in Kansas City have a reward out for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of some guy in Kansas City. You"re wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of three men in a trucking warehouse." Mattie felt faint. The reward was no doubt for Brian. "I wonder how they knew to look for me." An image of the night that had sent her running tried to surface, but Mattie wasn"t ready for it yet. "How much is the reward?"
"Twenty-five thousand dollars." Zeke squeezed another ketchup packet onto the hamburger wrapper he was using as a plate. "He"s a big-time bad boy." Mattie closed her eyes. "He"ll kill me if I go back there."
"Who is he, Mattie?" Zeke waited, hamburger in hand, for her answer. "He described your hair, too." "It was the only thing that stood out about me." A tinge of bitterness ached in her. Now Brian would know her hair was gone. Cutting it had all been for nothing. Putting her hamburger aside, she wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and opened her heavy leather purse. At the bottom, coiled like a silky snake, was her braid. She pulled it out.
It unfurled from her hand to swing between them, a golden brown rope nearly three feet long. "It might be kind of sick to keep it," she said, "but I couldn"t bring myself to throw it away." Without speaking, Zeke touched it with one long finger. An odd expression crossed his face. He looked up. "You must have been really scared, to cut off that much hair."
"I was. I am." She coiled the braid around her wrist, remembering the feel of it swishing over her back, brushing her hips. Cloaking her. "But I didn"t have a choice." "You"re a brave little mouse, Miss Mary," he said, and there was a rumbling, almost painfully seductive note to his voice. "You seem so vulnerable, but you"ve done what you had to do. I don"t believe I"ve ever met a woman quite like you."
She touched the quivering leap in her belly, but couldn"t tear her gaze from the green waters of his eyes. Something flickered there, warm and approving. She felt herself flush and hurriedly lowered her head. "Not too many women carry around a braid, that"s for sure."
"That wasn"t what I meant."
"I know." She picked up her hamburger. "Who was with him this morning?"
"I guess the redhead is the one you"re running from?"
"Brian Murphy. And I"d guess it was Vincent Paglio with him. A dark man with a pockmarked face?"
"That"s the one." He narrowed his eyes. "Who are they?"
"What did they say on TV?" she countered, unwilling to say more than she had to.
"I don"t remember," he said with a hard edge.
Mattie glanced up in surprise. His mouth was set in sharp lines, and his eyes had gone very, very cold. Suddenly, she wondered if she"d gone from the frying pan into the fire. "I didn"t ask for your help," she said, wounded by his icy expression.
"That"s true," he said. "I guess you"d rather be a Jane Doe at the county coroner"s office right now, huh?"
The terror of that bullet-riddled ride down the highway flooded back. "No," she said. "I didn"t mean that."
"Well, then, why don"t we get this story out of the way? Notricks, honey. I"ve been burned before and I wouldn"t take kindly to having it happen again."
Carefully, she set aside her food and tucked her feet under her legs. She took a deep breath and opened the locked box in her mind. "Brian Murphy was my fiance," she said at last. "He used me as an alibi so he could kill three men. Or rather, he tried to use me as an alibi."
Zeke waited.
Mattie went on, her words emotionless as she tried to keep her memories from overwhelming her. "He"d taken me out to dinner and we stopped at a party afterward. Something happened there, something that made him really angry. He made a couple of phone calls one of them to Vince."
She closed her eyes. "I should have stayed at the party."
Silently, Zeke handed her the milk shake. She took a sip and gave him a brief history of the trucking firm and Brian"s successful bid to bring it back from the brink of ruin. "I know now that he was transporting something illegal but I didn"t know that then."
"Drugs and guns," Zeke said. "The guns are the big problem. The police found a truckload of AK47s in the warehouse."
Guns. Mattie thought of the strife tearing cities including Kansas City to pieces. "He used to talk about the gun problem like he really cared," she said, and felt betrayed and stupid all over again.
"Makes a nice smoke screen, right?"
Mattie nodded cynically. "Anyway, that night he drove us over to the warehouse, said he just needed to check something and we"d go to my house. We went in and he made a couple more phone calls. I could tell he was just furious about some kind of shipment that had been waylaid."
She had begun to feel uneasy by then. The warehouse was dark and shadowy and felt somehow threatening. Dressed in a taffeta gown and high heels, Mattie didn"t want to sit down anywhere, so she paced the small office as Brian made his phone calls.
"It started to bother me, that he wouldn"t say what was going on and that he was so angry. It was almost like he was afraid."
Three other men had shown up at the warehouse, men Mattie didn"t like. "Brian told me to drive his car to my house and he"d have someone give him a ride there in the morning to pick it up. I was tired and a little annoyed, so I did."
"You would have been his alibi," Zeke said.
"Exactly." A hundred times, a thousand, she"d wondered what would have happened if she"d made it home. "I got almost all the way to my apartment before I realized I"d forgotten my purse, which had all my keys in it. I had to go back."
Her mouth dried and she crossed her arms over her chest. "I could hear an argument when I got to the door, so I slipped to one side, behind a truck. I was just going to be inconspicuous, get my purse and get out of there."
She started to tremble and hugged herself closer. "I got to the office, grabbed my purse and was on my way out when Brian um-" Her voice shook. She pressed her lips together and took a breath. "When he started shooting. I heard it before I saw it there was so much noise it echoed all through the room. It washuge, there were so many bullets..."
Blood everywhere. One of the men slammed against the truck she was hiding behind and he fell, his life spilling out on the floor all around. "I was frozen, kind of. I couldn"t think what to do. He fell right by my foot and blood got on my shoe."
She stared at the floor, seeing in memory the traumatic moment. She gestured toward the mess she could see. "It was just everywhere. I"d never seen anyone shot except in the movies. I couldn"t believe how much one person could bleed."
"Mattie."
She ignored him. "I looked up and Brain was standing there with this enormous gun and there was this look on his face I knew he was going to kill me, too. So I ran."
Zeke moved abruptly, came to sit next to her. He took her hand. "You don"t have to tell me any more. I"m sorry-"
"I slipped," she said in the same dull voice. The shivering in her limbs grew nearly uncontrollable. Distantly, she felt Zeke"s strong arms encircle her, warm and steady, but she couldn"t stop the unreeling filmstrip. "I fell," she said. "Right in that man"s blood. It got all over me. My knee. My hand. But I couldn"t stop. I ran out and stole Brian"s car. I just started driving."
"I"m sorry, Mattie," Zeke said again, and tucked her head into his shoulder. "I shouldn"t have asked."
"I don"t know how he found me," she said. "I don"t know how the police knew I was there."
"You probably left prints at the scene."
"My hands-" she held them up "-got b.l.o.o.d.y."
He caught her hands in his own. "I"m sorry, Mattie."
The trembling eased a little as she absorbed his strength and warmth. "But how did Brian find out I was in Kismet?" she said, lifting her head. "I"d never been there before. Never even heard of it before I got on the bus."
"It isn"t as hard as you might think to track someone. You must have dumped the car, right?"
She nodded, feeling calm enough to pull away from him before she made a fool of herself.
"He started there, I can tell you." He let her go. "It"s the police looking for you, Mattie, not him. They said on that program that they"ve been trying to put him away for years, but hadn"t had anything solid to go on." He cleared his throat. "The men he killed were undercover detectives. They almost had him."
"I thought you said you didn"t remember the program."
"I wanted to hear your side."
"Wanted to make sure I told the truth."
He was unapologetic. "Yeah."
Mattie nodded.
"Why don"t you just turn yourself in? It would be the easiest way and you"d be doing a good deed."
"No." The word was flat and harsh. "He might not be able to kill me himself, but he"d find someone to do
it."
"If his house of cards is collapsing and it sounds like it is he won"t have the power to do that."
"No."
He shrugged. "Suit yourself."
She sighed, suddenly exhausted by the whole day. "I will."
"How did you get mixed up with someone like that?"
"I didn"t know he was like that until that night. I met him at Ma.s.s. He used to bring his mother."
"Ma.s.s?"
"Yes. He seemed like a good Irish Catholic guy. He had a big family, a successful business. I really
thought..." She trailed off.
"Thought what?"
"That I was finally going to have a family of my own," she said quietly. "Losing that dream was almost
worse than anything else."
"I understand that," Zeke said. "More than you know."
She looked at him intently, curious at the sound of old pain in his words. His expression was so bitter,
she decided not to breach it. She shifted and groaned at the pull of muscles in her body. All over her body. "I had no idea riding a motorcycle was so much work," she said ruefully.