The truck rolled another few feet down the slope and the Angelmaker stopped, pressing down the parking brake. Now, for the ice. Warmer would be better, but with a little rain, it should melt soon enough. Still, it was nerve-wracking having to leave everything here and not know exactly
when
it would happen.
The Angelmaker pulled the plastic off the first ice block and wedged it beneath the front left tire, then walked around the front of the truck to do the same on
the other side. Stood for a minute and worried about the set-up. What if the blocks didn’t hold when the brake was released, and the truck went careening over the edge right now?
Relax. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. If it happened now, even if the truck burst into flames, no one would see it. This quarry was in the middle of nowhere and had been abandoned for years.
So, get on with it. It was getting late and there was still more to do back in town. Busy night.
Gently, gently, the Angelmaker opened the driver’s side door to reach the gear shift. Easy, now. Not
neutral
—that would be a dead giveaway—but
drive.
The gear shift moved without resistance, and the parking brake held. With one leg hanging from the open driver’s side door, the Angelmaker leaned out as far as possible, ready to jump if need be, then took a deep breath and released the brake.
The truck lurched—a couple of inches, that’s all. The Angelmaker’s breath caught. The ice blocks held.
Relief rushed in. This was it; it would work. Jack was finished and his demise would waylay Erin Sims even if her own accident didn’t. Nick Mann’s head would spin.
The Angelmaker sucked in a cold lungful of air, the power a heady sensation. The end was near. There was only one thing Jack had left standing in the way: Reverend Carl Whitmore.
Erin’s eyes burned. Lights. Too many lights, glaring in the night. And voices, one of them calling, “Lady, lady,” and the other more distant, speaking in code.
Needs assistance… Eleven-eighty on Holcomb Bridge Road one mile south of Tulle, request an ambulance, code 3…
Erin dragged to the surface and might have groaned. Her ribcage was on fire. Her rental car seemed to be at an angle in the ditch. A deputy had his upper body halfway through the passenger side door, reaching for her.
“Dr. Sims, look at me. Dr. Sims.”
She turned to the voice but tears blocked her vision. She wiped at them and her fingers came away sticky. Not tears. Blood.
“It’s just a scratch,” the deputy said. “Don’t worry about that.” At the same time he said it, he pressed a thick pad against her forehead. “Dr. Sims, where are you from? Tell me your phone number, say your name. Jesus, say
something
that tells me you know who you are and what’s going on.”
“Jack Calloway tried to kill me.”
The deputy blinked. “That’ll do.”
Nick took the call from Fruth as he pulled into his driveway. He sent a pair of deputies to Hilltop House to pick up Jack and confiscate his truck, checked in with Dana for thirty seconds, then headed to Holcomb Bridge Road at the speed of sound.
Two-thirty in the morning. Apparently, Erin had left Nick’s house to go to her motel and wound up in a ditch. She was claiming to deputies that a dark pickup truck had purposely run her off the road.
Jack had a dark pickup truck.
“So do about two thousand other Hopewell residents,” Quentin reminded him.
Sims was at the hospital getting patched up. Nick and Quent poked around the accident site for ten minutes, then Quentin caught a ride back to Nick’s house while Nick headed to the hospital.
“You’re full of surprises,” he said, walking into a
curtained-off section of the emergency room. She sat at the foot of a gurney, working the buttons on her blouse.
“Jack Calloway ran me off the road,” she said.
“I heard.”
Her face was the color of soap. Her eyes, normally a vibrant green, looked gray. The buttons wouldn’t cooperate with her fingers. The doctor had said she was lucky: Her car had been stopped by a rise in the ground before it spun out of control and she had suffered only cuts and bruises. She’d be fine.
But he wasn’t sure he would be. She was on his turf now, at his
house,
for God’s sake, and some son of a bitch—Jack?—had tried to hurt her. She might very well have been killed. The weight of that knowledge rode on Nick’s chest like a boulder.
“Did you go get him?” she asked.
“Of course. He’s not home.”
Her eyes widened. “See? What have I been telling you? It’s the middle of the night. Where is he?”
“We’re looking for him. For the record, there are 1,946 dark pickup trucks registered to residents in this county. Are you sure you can’t pinpoint the make?”
“What make does Calloway drive?”
“That’s not helping,” he said, then homed in on her face. Six stitches crept along her hairline where her head had struck the window. A bruise rose near her temple, just above the scrape she’d picked up in Florida.
He took her chin, angling her face for a better look, and the fear in her eyes settled in his gut. She probably didn’t think it showed; hell, she probably didn’t even know it was there, buried beneath all that bravado. But it
was
there, and a parade of images marched through his mind: a wife afraid to attend a party, a daughter terrified
of nightmares, and now, a woman putting up a tough front for her brother. Nick had always considered himself a capable man, but fear was his downfall. It was beyond his control. It was insidious and untouchable. It rendered him as useless as an empty gun.
He dropped his hand, stepping back before he did something stupid—like pull her into his arms, or murmur a promise he couldn’t keep.
Everything will be all right… I’ve got it covered.
“There’s no need to get dressed,” he said. “They’re checking you in ’til morning.”
“I don’t need to stay until morning.” She eased herself off the bed. “I need to get on with things.”
“Things?”
“Public persecution. The ruination of storybook villages. You know.”
His jaw ground. He took her by the shoulders; she winced. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But you need to lay low. Take a day or two to heal, give me some time to figure this thing out.”
Let me keep you safe.
“Justin doesn’t have a day or two.”
She picked up her jacket from the bed, started to slip an arm into the sleeve before the pain made her think better of it. Nick bullied down the impulse to help and watched her lay the jacket carefully over her arm rather than putting it on. She started for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“You have cabs in Hopewell, I presume.”
“Erin, for Christ’s sake,” he started, then saw by the tilt of her chin that he wasn’t going to win. Her brother’s life was ticking away. She had a battle to fight. But no matter how hyped she felt right now, when the shock and adrenaline wore off, she was going to crash.
And he wanted to be there when she did.
Nick chose not to examine that fleeting notion; he just took her elbow. “Mann’s Taxi, at your service.”
Dana met them at his kitchen door. “I sent Quentin to bed in the guest room. And the kids are all lined up in your bed, Nick. They wanted to sleep together and I didn’t know at the time it would be all night.”
“That’s fine,” Nick said. “Thanks.”
She turned to Erin. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Sheriff Mann refuses to take me back to my motel room, that’s all.”
“Good,” Dana said, and disappeared up the stairs.
Erin waited, uncertain what should happen next, as the sheriff took off his jacket and dropped his holster over a chair. He pulled out the gun and checked the safety, then slid it onto the top shelf of a cabinet—a father accustomed to having guns in the house. For the first time since he’d left to go after Rebecca, Erin really studied him. His short hair was a mess and the knuckles of his right hand were bruised. He looked ragged and rough and exhausted, insanely handsome, with an air of protectiveness that clung to him like a scent. For Rebecca, for his town.
For her. The idea was so foreign, Erin didn’t know what to do with it. She’d never had someone watching out for her before. That was
her
job.
She took a deep breath and regretted it halfway through.
“Did they give you anything for pain?” Mann asked.
“They told me to take Ibuprofen and try not to sneeze.”
He went away and when he came back, ran a glass of water and held out four pills. “Don’t be a hero.”
Erin was no dummy. The night was getting to her. She swallowed the pills and wondered about Justin’s night.
Did he lie awake in order to make the nights pass by more slowly? Did he have any idea how hard she was trying?
And where had Huggins gone after he left her in the ditch? Was he running away again? Buying drugs and picking out his next victim?
“We have to find him,” she said, though she knew it was an empty thing to say. “What do we do to find him?”
Mann’s gaze settled on her face. “We find a couple of pillows and blankets and get a few hours of sleep.” He held up a finger when she started to interrupt him. “We’re running a check on all dark pickup trucks in the area, and I put out an APB specifically on Jack’s. Everyone in fifteen counties is looking for him or a truck with damage.”
“What about the women?”
“What women?”
“The ones he may be trying to seduce right now, or killing. He could be out trolling for someone, right this minute while we’re standing here doing nothing. There could be another woman who just disappears or he could decide to run where I’ll never find him or he could wait a little while and then come back for m—”
“Erin.” The sheriff cupped her upper arms, his strength a palpable thing. A wave of something she didn’t recognize threatened to buckle her knees. “No one can hurt you here.”
“It’s not that.”
“It is that. Someone hit your motel room and has taken two swipes at you in a car. You’re afraid. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Afraid? Erin? Erin was a warrior, not a victim. She was the unflinching sentinel who fought for her clients and the tireless soldier who fought for Justin. Fear wasn’t in her constitution.
And yet, for no good reason, her knees began to shake and a chill prickled her skin and—
The tears took her by surprise, but Mann seemed to have been waiting for them. He thumbed them away, saying nothing, then pulled her against his body and held her. Gently, as if she were made of blown glass.
Erin sank into it, his sheer tenderness wreaking havoc in her brain. For a fleeting moment she had the sensation that anyone in the circle of Nick Mann’s arms had to be safe from the evils of the world. He was hard and powerful and resilient. There must be nothing he couldn’t fight and win—
Dana’s story poured back in.
Beating the hell out of Yost… suspended from duty… accused of setting up the murder…
Erin shifted. Mann opened his arms and took a good long look at her.
“Ah. So you got the scoop on me, huh?”
Lord, she might have been staring at him. She looked down. “Dana,” she said, then jumped to defend her. “She wasn’t gossiping, really, just—”
“There wasn’t anything I was trying to hide. I told you to Google me. Dana just saved you the trouble.”
Right. As if Googling him weren’t the first thing she’d been planning to do when she got back to the motel. It’s just that she never got there.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “So, knowing what you do now, are you afraid to stay here? Afraid I might have hired someone to shoot my wife and daughter?”
“No, of course not.” And it was the absolute truth. “I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Hmm,” he said, and his gaze dropped to her lips. Made her aware that she’d just moistened them with her
tongue. “Then maybe you’re thinking about letting me hold you again, letting me kiss you.”
Heat flooded Erin’s belly. Dear God, she did want to sink back into his arms. The mere idea made her joints turn to butter. And the thought of kissing him… She almost swayed.
Mann ran his hands down her arms. “I’d like to think being with me makes you weak-kneed,” he said, with the ghost of a smile, “but I’m afraid this is normal. Your limbs feel like they’re turning into Jell-O. Pretty soon your head will be weightless, then it’ll hurt like a bastard. Adrenaline rushes are great while they last, but afterward, it’s hell.”
Oh. Yes, that’s what it was. “You’ve been here before,” she managed.
“A time or two.” A feral glint came to his eyes. “But I won’t let it happen to you again.”
He swore to Allison that he had everything covered, that she’d be fine.
Erin looked up into those colorless eyes, surprised by the desire to console him. It must be tiring lugging that kind of guilt around.
His hand tightened on her arm and she realized he was right. Her head was suddenly weightless. “I’m okay,” she said, “I can take care of myself.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, with utter insincerity. He ushered her to the sofa and reached into a blanket chest by the hearth. Came up with a fluffy blue pillow and a down-filled throw. “Lie down, get some sleep. You’ll still be sore in a few hours, but your nerves will be calm again. I’ll be in the den, since the kids are in my bed.” He tossed one last look in her direction as he walked out. “In case you need anything.”
C
ARL
W
HITMORE WAS
an early riser. Most days, he had breakfast around five; he was ashamed to admit that since his wife had died his standard fare was a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and a glass of prune juice. By six, he was usually sitting at his office computer, working on sermons. He liked to do that before the church office opened at ten. Ideas were fresh in the mornings, and there were no interruptions.
Today, the church office wouldn’t open at all. The church secretary, Eloise, had taken a personal day to go visit an ailing relative in Toledo. Carl would have the whole day free. He’d work on sermons in the morning, fit in a hospital visit, then maybe go home early and rake some leaves. Yet another task his wife had usually done.