Packing Heat (5 page)

“Listen,” he said.

“Is that what I think it is?” Harmony asked, just as the faint throb of an engine was joined by the mournful wail of a train whistle. “Are you talking about the train? Or the dogs?”

Cole listened some more and off in the distance, in the direction of the town, he could hear the baying of hounds. “Crap.”

Harmony put a hand on his arm before he could walk away. “Maybe we should circle back around to the Explorer instead.”

“They’ll have a trooper watching it by now, and even if they don’t, the dogs will catch up to us before we get there.”

“That train isn’t going to wait for us.”

“There’ll be another.”

“When?”

“Don’t know.” And he was done arguing. “I’m for the train. Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”

“You’re not leaving me a choice,” she muttered.

“I know how you feel,” he said, because he really didn’t have a choice either. He’d made it while they were sitting in the woods that morning. He’d go along with Harmony’s plan, and he’d do what she wanted, for exactly as long as it took him to complete his own agenda: find the new evidence by himself or, if she was playing him and there was no new evidence, hack into those frozen bank accounts and siphon some of the money off for himself, enough that he could go anywhere and be anyone he wanted without trouble or hardship. It wasn’t stealing, the way he saw it. It was payback for nearly a decade spent in hell—not to mention his life’s work stolen from him.

Harmony took his arm, this time dragging him off at a tangent from the direction he’d been going.

“What?” she said when he hauled her to a stop. “The train is this way.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. The sound came from up ahead.”

“The sound came from over there,” Cole said, correcting back to their original course.

“Fine,” Harmony said, “you go that way and when I get to the train I’ll—Hackett! Damn it, put me down.”

Cole straightened, hiking her a little higher, then bending his knees until he was low enough to snag her duffel from the ground where he’d dropped it—not easy with a hundred twenty pounds of pissed-off, struggling FBI agent draped across his shoulder.

“Hold still.”

“Put me down.”

“I wonder what’s in here,” he said, unzipping her duffel and digging into it until he heard the jingle of chain.

She went immediately still.

“Not so much fun when the cuffs are on the other wrists,” he said, his brain making the leap from her restrained in the backseat of the Explorer, to him back there with her—Okay, that was a mental picture he really didn’t need at the moment. It was going to be difficult enough to lug her around without any other . . . impediments.

“We’ll do it your way,” she said, the tone of her voice and her body language pretty strong arguments against the pretense that she’d given in, even when she added, “I promise.”

Cole wasn’t sure putting her down was the right decision, but there was the trust issue. He set her on her feet, stepping back out of striking distance, for which he received a look that smoldered, and not in a good way. She was keeping track, that look said, and there’d be a reckoning.

“Lead on, Moses.”

“Cute,” Cole said, and struck out for the train, hoping like hell he was right and they didn’t have to wander around for forty minutes, let alone forty years. Aside from the whole going back to jail program, he really didn’t want to look like an idiot.

And then he heard the dogs again, and getting to the train was more about the possibility of ending his life as a chew toy than appearing directionally challenged. He took Harmony by the wrist, and when she couldn’t keep up with him in her impractical heels, he wrapped an arm around her waist, boosted her off the ground and ran, flat out. The train whistle sounded closer, but so did the dogs, and he barely registered Harmony prying at his arm because his world narrowed down to the train whistle and the dogs, the dogs and the train whistle, all of them on a collision course.

They broke out of the woods, Cole’s lungs burning, his thigh muscles shaky, and there was the train—on the other side of a ditch, up a hill, moving slowly away from them—already halfway gone. The dogs, sad to say, were right behind them. Cole looked over his shoulder and saw them straining at their leashes in the wildly oscillating flashlight beams of their handlers. Way too close for comfort. Or rational thought.

He dropped Harmony on her feet and towed her through the ditch, ankle-deep in water, and up the hill on the other side without stopping, boosting her through the open door of an empty freight car as it chugged by. He tossed her duffel in after her, and then his strength started to flag. Lifting weights was something you could do in the pen, running not so much. He didn’t have the stamina or the lung capacity to keep up with the train, and it started to pull off without him. Harmony hanging out the door yelling, “Get your butt moving, Hackett,” did nothing to motivate him. And then she shrieked, “The dogs,” pointing over his shoulder with a touch of real panic on her face, and he dug deep, put on a burst of speed, and threw his upper body onto the edge of Harmony’s freight car just as a hound latched onto his pant leg.

Harmony hit the floor on her belly, grabbing him by the armpits, and pulling for all she was worth, but he had a full-grown hound hanging off his leg, deadweight, and he could feel himself slipping.

And then Harmony let go.

“Jesus,” he said, flopping on his back, breathing hard, “my life flashed before my eyes.”

“Let me guess,” she said, rubbing the places his fingers had dug in, including her right breast, “puberty, college, jail. All woman-free zones in your case.”

“Too bad I can’t say that now.”

“It’s a big freight car,” Harmony said, climbing to her feet. She lurched to the far end, taking her duffel and her laptop case with her.

“I think we should get off,” Cole said, his voice just barely loud enough to carry over the sound of the train clattering down the tracks, “while we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m not jumping off this train while I’m wearing a dress.”

“Your choice, but I’m not hanging around until this thing gets to the next station.”

Cole was still lying in a heap by the door, so despite his big talk she wasn’t all that worried about him taking off on her. Especially when she stripped off her jacket and lifted her skirt.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him sit up.

“Dogs and cops,” he said. “Waiting. For us.”

He seemed to be really worried about the possibility of arrest, but he still wasn’t moving. And she could feel him watching her.

Not that he could see that much, but she turned her back anyway, unbuckled her clutch holster from around her thigh and tightened it up to fit around her ankle.

“I’ve never been into James Bond,” Cole said, “but I’m beginning to see the attractions of being a spy.”

“I’m not a spy.” She slipped her clutch piece into its holster and straightened. “And James Bond isn’t exactly a realistic version of what I do.”

“Hell, Cupcake, you’re not a realistic version of what you do. You’re more like FBI Barbie.”

“Cupcake?” She tore a pair of jeans out of her duffel and dragged them on, then whipped her dress over her head. “FBI Barbie,” she fumed, shimmying into her bra and whipping around to face Cole.

It was pitch-black away from the door, but it felt like she was standing in a spotlight, bright and hot and exposing. She fumbled her T-shirt on and slipped into her shoulder holster, feeling a lot better when she tucked her Smith & Wesson into it. Nothing like a loaded firearm to inspire confidence.

“Don’t call me Barbie again,” she said.

“You kicked me in the shin,” he shot back. “If that’s not a Barbie move I don’t know what is.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, right up to the moment the cop jumped back up and came after you.”

“And if you hadn’t horned in I’d have dealt with him.”

“How? Scratched his eyes out? Or maybe you could have strangled him with your designer jeans.”

That stopped her. “How do you know these are designer?”

“Even in jail there’s television. Any show with supermodels was real popular.”

“There’s a mental picture I could live without. And just for the record, I was taught there’s no wrong way to handle a situation as long as you come out of it alive and with your goal accomplished.”

“Next time ask for help.”

“Next time I’ll just pretend it’s you.”

She slung her jacket back on and pushed her feet into a pair of running shoes, stuffing her dress into her duffel before she shouldered it, along with her laptop. “So, how do we do this?” she asked, stepping into the open doorway, the wind whipping cold across her skin.

“They don’t teach you how to jump off trains in FBI school?”

“They don’t teach any of this in FBI school.”

Cole came to stand beside her, looking, as she was, down at the ground rushing by. “Just jump,” he said. “Gravity will take care of the rest.”

“Just jump,” Harmony repeated. Or get shoved, which was what Cole did when she balked at the idea of flinging herself into the darkness and taking the landing on faith.

She slammed into the ground feet first, tried to go into a tuck and roll but wound up flopping uncontrollably, arms and legs windmilling, until she came to a graceless stop. In a marsh. Facedown. If not for the cold water seeping through her clothes she would have stayed where she was, taking stock and getting her breath back, but she jumped up immediately, only to have Cole blunder into her and knock her down again—and then fall on top of her.

“Oh, there you are,” he said, not making any effort to get off her. In fact, he was resisting her efforts to shove him off, laying the whole hard length of his body on hers. The parts of her that had managed to stay dry were losing that battle. And Cole was getting aroused. Big surprise. The man had been in jail for eight years, a picket fence with a convenient knothole would probably turn him on.

“We’re in the middle of a swamp,” she said. “It’s cold and wet.”

“Not from where I am.” His hand crept up from her hip, spreading heat and making her forget about the cold air and the frigid water and the possibility there were state troopers combing the railroad tracks for them. Until she realized his fingers were inches from her gun.

She slipped her left leg out from under him, braced her hand on his left shoulder, at the same time hitting his right arm at the elbow and when it collapsed she flipped him off her. He landed on his back next to her with a satisfying little splash. “How about now?”

“Let me guess—they taught that in FBI school?”

“You’re lucky I used my FBI training,” she said, climbing to her feet. “My self-defense instructor taught me to use my knee. Or my hand.”

Cole levered himself upright. “I get the knee. I’m guessing I wouldn’t like what you’d do with your hand, either.”

“I’d grab your testicles and squeeze as hard as I could for as long as I could. It’s for getting away from a rapist.”

He sucked some air in through his teeth. “Makes me glad I’m just a terrorist.”

“You’re not a terrorist; you were just a dumb kid.”

“Yeah,” he said on a rush of breath, “and now I don’t even have the excuse of youth. What are you doing?”

“Looking for my laptop,” Harmony said, walking a couple more steps back along the path she’d have taken when she came off the train. “It has to be around here somewhere.”

“Shit. Why the hell didn’t you hang onto it?”

“Hmmmm, let me see. Because somebody shoved me out of a moving train and I was busy trying not to break my neck?”

Wisely, Cole decided not to respond to that, pacing along about five feet away from her, back toward the train tracks. Luckily, it wasn’t far away, and it was dry. Her duffel hadn’t fared so well. Harmony slung the laptop case over her shoulder again, but when she took the duffel from Cole it weighed at least five pounds more than it had, and she could hear it dripping. So much for dry clothes, not to mention ones that didn’t chafe.

But she was still alive, still free, and as far as she knew, Richard was all right, too. As long as there was hope for success, a little chafing was a small price to pay.

“So what’s the plan?” Cole wanted to know.

“Start walking.” And that’s what she did, scanning the darkness ahead and praying for inspiration. What she got was Cole, sounding like the voice of her own insecurity.

“Where?”

“We head west.”

“Do you know where west is?”

“I will as soon as the sun rises.”

“Sunrise isn’t for hours. I’d like to get dry and warm some time in the near future.”

Harmony stopped, looking back to where he was still standing by the railroad tracks. “You should be used to privation.”

“Even in jail I got a bed and a hot meal.”

“You’ve had the hot meal. That will have to do for a bed.”

Cole came over to her and peered in the direction of her pointing finger. “What is it?”

“A big, red barn.”

“How do you know it’s big? And how do you know it’s red?”

Harmony took another look. The ground rose up gradually away from the tracks, and at the top of a distant hill sat a farmhouse, outbuildings, and something that was definitely a barn, its distinctive roof shape a darker patch against a sky studded with a million stars. “It’s a lot bigger than the rest of the buildings,” she said. “Does the color really matter? It’s close and it will be warm.”

“What about the farmer? I’m assuming there’s a farmer in your mental picture, probably wearing overalls and holding a pitchfork.”

She huffed out a slight laugh. “Who’s the one with the imagination?”

“I had a lot of time to develop it in jail,” Cole said.

“Don’t get out of practice. You’re going to need it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Cole smacked her on the backside as she walked by. “But it always helps to have inspiration.”