Buch lesen: «Fatal Response»

ONE

The chrome of Fire Engine 7 gleamed in the glow of the dim lights hanging overhead. Erin Taylor ran one finger along the grille of the monstrous vehicle, then buffed the streak off with her sleeve. She could bust out a rag and work on it, but she’d done that an hour ago. Since she was the only person pulling overnight duty in the station of the Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Department, there wasn’t anyone but herself to come along and undo her work.

Great. The dark hours were stretching longer than usual, and it wasn’t even midnight. Maybe it had to do with knowing where she could be right now...at a weekend training conference in Nashville. But she’d had to pass the opportunity along to Mark Jennings so her father wouldn’t be left alone for an entire weekend. His safety came first, even if it sometimes hindered her career...or derailed her life.

Not that things were ever going to change. Dwelling on it would only make her feel worse.

Drumming her fingers on her thighs, she wandered to the large garage doors at the front of the building and stared through the windows into the darkness. Mountain Springs slept quietly about a mile away. They hadn’t had a call in a couple of nights, not even for a medical emergency. On this moonless autumn evening, everything was still.

But a growing restlessness had her prowling the station. She’d organized the small kitchen. Considered baking brownies. Had tried to sleep on the small bed in the bunk room at the end of the hall. Every time she settled in and closed her eyes, something drove her to her feet.

The same kind of instinct had kicked in when the woods north of town caught fire in a lightning storm a couple of years ago. Her subconscious had caught the scent of smoke before her nose realized it was there. She’d already been halfway to the station when the alarm sounded.

There was no smoke tonight, simply a weird twinge in her gut that kept her from relaxing.

It probably had to do with the car.

For nearly two weeks, an older dark sedan had turned into the front parking lot of the station, turned around and left. The engine never shut off. The driver never left the vehicle. Each time, the only indication the car was there was headlights sweeping through the windows on the bay doors as the car made its turn.

She’d mentioned the car to her cousin Wyatt, a Mountain Springs police officer, at lunch after church on Sunday. They’d ultimately decided it was a new parent with a sleep-resistant infant.

Still, the random drive-bys poked at her creepy-meter a little bit.

With a slight shudder, Erin checked the front door for the third time to make sure it was locked. The back door was as tight as the front, the music of crickets and frogs drifting in from the back of the building.

Erin pivoted on her heel to go back to the office. There were always grant proposals to write. As one of two paid members of the mostly all-volunteer department, the bulk of the office work fell to her. At least it made the nights go faster.

A muffled scrape crept through the back door. Erin leaned toward the sound. She’d strapped bungee cords on the large trash cans to keep the critters out. With the fire station situated on the edge of a broad mountain meadow, all kinds of wild animals drifted past the building. She’d seen everything from adorable baby raccoons to black bears that could swat her into eternity with one swipe of a massive paw.

One time of having to clean trash strewn across the property by an unseen animal when she was a rookie volunteer had been enough to make her double-check the security of those trash cans.

Still, the heavy plastic likely wouldn’t be able to withstand a bear. If the noise continued, she could always flip on the lights and scare the creature across the meadow and into the woods.

Hand on the switch, she listened, the hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention.

Tires screeched on the road to the station, and headlights swept across the doors of the bay. An engine revved as it strained through the gears.

Somebody was flying along the short road that ended at the station. There’d been problems in the past with drag racers on the straightest stretch of road in the county, but the presence of the fire station had put a stop to racing when it was built twelve years earlier. With at least one firefighter constantly on duty, even the craziest of kids was smart enough to know a quick race would end in a phone call to the police.

Whoever was out there was coming in hot.

Lord, help me if they’re bringing in an injured child. With the closest hospital nearly half an hour away, it wouldn’t be the first time a Mountain Springs resident had forgone 911 to bring their emergency straight to the nearest help.

Flipping on the outside floodlights, Erin shoved open the back door as a small red sports car slid to a halt in the center of the rear parking lot. The driver’s door flew open, and a young woman jumped out. She spotted Erin and hefted a large padded envelope over her head. “Don’t hurt him! Please!”

Someone must be in the back seat of the car. Erin stepped away from the building. “Is someone in the car who needs—”

“I came alone.” Her voice shook, pleading as she held the envelope out toward Erin, although a good twenty feet separated them. “Please. Just...please.”

Erin eased back toward the building and snaked her hand behind her, feeling for the door handle. If this stranger was high or on a mental break she needed assistance, but she could easily turn violent. “Ma’am? Can I help you with—”

“Don’t hurt him!” The woman rounded her car and stepped cautiously toward Erin, holding out the package. “Please, I don’t know—”

An engine roared and tires screamed as another car accelerated and skidded around the side of the building.

It was the dark sedan that had driven by so many times.

The stranger’s eyes widened in panic. She froze, directly in the path of the oncoming headlights.

Adrenaline streaked in a flashover through Erin as she took two steps away from the building.

The car’s engine revved higher as it swerved toward the woman.

It wasn’t slowing. Throwing her hands over her head, Erin tried to yell a warning, but her throat constricted. No! Stop! There was no way this was happening. Nothing she could do to prevent it.

Time slowed. A dull, crunching thud tore the air as the dark four-door slammed into the young woman. Her body was hurled limply onto the hood of the car. The windshield cracked into a spiderweb from the impact of her head. She dropped to the ground and rolled.

The sedan skidded around the corner of the building and disappeared in a shriek of tires, leaving behind the sharp smell of tire rubber and an unearthly silence.

Erin’s breath came in hard gasps. A ringing in her ears drowned out the silence as the horror of the past minute gripped her in a momentary paralysis. Her mind screamed she should run, curl into a ball, call for help...

But she was the help.

Her training took over. Alert for sounds of the other vehicle’s return, Erin bolted for the broken body crumpled on the ground. Lord, let there be a pulse. Breathing. Anything.

She dropped to her knees and let her gaze sweep the victim who lay on her side, eyes staring vacantly into the darkness.

Swallowing a cocktail of grief and fear, Erin reached out to search for a pulse she was certain she would never find.

Footsteps pounded on the pavement at the far side of the building. The sound rocked Erin back on her heels and she whipped toward the approaching steps, her mind racing with prayers and fear.

A figure appeared at the dark corner, running toward her. In the shadows, she couldn’t make out features, could only tell it was a man. But there was something familiar—

And then the man was awash in light, the silence shattered by the sound of an engine roaring closer.

* * *

There was no time to think.

Army Sergeant First Class Jason Barnes sprinted toward the woman who stood silhouetted in the headlights of the oncoming car, refusing to question if he could outrun the vehicle sliding around the corner of the fire station with its engine revving into a high whine as it accelerated.

He couldn’t allow anyone else to die on his watch.

The roar of the engine grew closer, the lights brighter. He’d never make it. He’d never reach her in time. The car was too fast.

The ache in his knee made him too slow.

He was a couple of meters from her when tires screeched and rubber burned. The vehicle skidded sideways to a halt, scraping the passenger door against the brick building.

At the same moment, Jason reached the woman and grabbed her by the waist, dragging her with him to safety behind the Mustang belonging to his buddy Seth’s wife, which sat at an odd angle on the concrete. They were safe...unless the driver got out and came after them.

He looked over his shoulder, shielding the woman, as the rear tires spun and the dark older-model sedan skidded around the side of the building, the driver nothing more than a hulking shadow in a fleeting glimpse through the rear window.

Then the woman he’d rescued, the one he still held to his chest with one arm, repaid him for saving her life by driving her head into the side of his jaw. “Let me go.”

Shock relaxed his hold and she stumbled forward, barely catching herself by planting both hands on the trunk of Angie’s car. She regained her balance, then turned toward him with all of the suddenness of a summer tornado.

A very familiar tornado.

The air left his lungs in a rush, and he had to dig deep for enough air to say her name. “Erin?”

For the first time, her eyes met his, her face shadowed by the floodlights behind her. But there was no doubt, none at all

He’d rescued his ex-wife.

For a moment, there was zero sign of recognition, but then her eyes widened and she gasped. “What are...? Where did you come from?” She backed away from him slowly, glancing over her shoulder, then back to him as her jaw set in something that might be fear. “Did you do this?”

“Do what? Save your life?” Wait. No. This was not about them. He couldn’t let this become the discussion he’d played out in his head for years.

He had to find Angie Daniels, and Erin had been standing in front of Angie’s Mustang while a second car bore down on her.

Angie’s car, Erin beside it. Nothing computed. Right now, he couldn’t focus on the parts that didn’t make sense. He had to focus on finding Seth’s wife.

Staff Sergeant Seth Daniels had called the members of their team an hour earlier and asked them to search the county for Angie because it was too soon for the police to get involved. All the man knew was he’d awakened from a dead sleep a few minutes after midnight to find his wife and her car missing.

Jason had stopped at Seth’s and taken his buddy’s phone in order to track Angie’s whereabouts with an app her husband had installed. When the team had returned from Iraq a few months earlier, bruised and wounded, the paranoia had hit them all. Dogged by rumors of retaliation by some of the terror cells they’d infiltrated, each man had done what it took to make sure his family was safe.

Those safety measures included knowing where their loved ones were at all times.

The trail had stopped here, at the Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Department. And now Jason stood by Angie’s car...with a woman he’d never imagined he’d see again. A woman who was accusing him of... Of what? “Where’s the person who was driving this car?”

Erin didn’t answer, simply turned her back to jog to the front of Angie’s vehicle, where she knelt so he could no longer see her.

“I asked you a question, Erin. I need an answer. How did this car get here?” He rounded the rear of the Mustang and stalked toward Erin, who bent over something on the ground. “Where’s the woman who...?” His gaze fell on a familiar pair of boots splayed on the pavement. On a growing dark pool at Erin’s feet.

No.

It couldn’t be.

This was a nightmare. The helplessness of his history leaking its way into his subconscious. There was no other way any of this made sense, the only way so many incongruous pieces of his life could be packed together on the cement drive of a back-road fire station. The only way Erin could be in front of him, her head bent over Angie’s body.

“Tell me she’s alive.” Because if she wasn’t, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t call Seth and tell him his wife, the woman whose existence had kept Seth alive in the dark days after the incident overseas had nearly killed them all, was gone.

Erin rose and turned to walk toward him, her boots leaving dark imprints on the shadowed ground.

Jason didn’t want to think about what those tracks were made of. He tried to step around Erin, but she blocked his view and pressed a hand to his chest, backing him around the rear of the car. “Don’t look. If you know her at all... Don’t look.” She’d slipped into the cold professional mask he’d seen on her one too many times, the one that said she’d seen horrors he couldn’t unsee for her.

The one that said she was protecting a victim’s family.

The one that told him Angie Daniels was dead.