Alison Kent's Blah Blog

I actually may have posted the beginning chapters to this book previously, but this seemed like a good time to do it again and share how I handled the two teens running for their lives, then gunshots. Next a dog is beaten, and Mick is hogtied and sadistically dragged along rocky ground by two thugs on ATVs. It’s a LOT of reading, so you have been warned!!

Prologue

“Run, Liberty! Run, run, run!”

She couldn’t run because she couldn’t see where she was going. Didn’t he get that? She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. He was out of his mind.

“Jase, I can’t!” She sobbed, choked, stopped, and wailed. “I can’t!”

She spit hair from out of her mouth, spit dirt, swore she spit bugs. It was gross and disgusting, and he was never going to get away with what he’d done anyway, so why did she have to run?

Jase came back to where she stood clawing her hair from her face. He grabbed her wrist and jerked her forward, practically breaking her arm. “You better move your ass or I’m going to leave you here, got it?”

She nodded, whimpered, stumbled along behind him. She was wearing her best pair of sandals and she’d spent all afternoon doing her toenails for tonight’s date. And now it was all ruined.

Ruined.

Ruined because Jase was stupid and greedy. Stealing money from the printing and office supply store where he worked-what was wrong with him? They paid him more than minimum wage, good enough money to take her out for a salad and Diet Coke any time she wanted to go.

All he had to do was make the store’s deliveries and daily deposits, running some of the money into Odessa or El Paso because of the banks being bigger or something like that. Why did he have to be stupid enough to take what wasn’t his? Why did she have to-

“Jase!” She tripped, wrenched her wrist from his hand and went down to the ground in the dark. Dirt clods and rocks the size of Lego pieces dug into her hands and her knees.

She pushed up to a kneeling position, picked the grit from her palms. Tears blurred her eyes and made it impossible to see anything. It was too dark to see anything anyway. The moon was out, but they were in the middle of freakin’ nowhere on his father’s ranch.

She just knew they were lost, and wished at least they were lost on an island with a beach like those people on that show she used to watch before her parents got religion and banned TV from the house. She hated Texas and was never going to forgive either of them for moving her away from California and all of her friends.

Jase skidded to his knees beside her, throwing more dust into the air for her to gag on. She tried not to cough, tried not to cry. She even held back yelling at him for being so dumb since it hadn’t done any good so far. But then he pulled her head to his chest and cuddled her close, and she forgot why she was mad.

This was all she wanted, being with a boy who liked her, away from her parents and the stupid way they tried to run her life, even though she knew she was really lucky. A bunch of girls her age at school had been promised by their parents to men old enough to be their fathers.

Men already married to two or three other women. It made her sick to her stomach to even think about it! Like who would want to sleep with a guy and get sloppy seconds?

“Liberty, listen.” Jase set her away from him, lifted her chin. “I know you’re tired and scared, but we’re almost there. We’ve got to be. I just didn’t know it would take so long on foot. I’m usually on my ATV.”

Yeah. Not to mention he was usually stoned since he used the hunting blind to smoke pot. “They’re going to find us anyway.”

“Maybe.” He sat back, rubbed his hands up and down his thighs, the denim all scratchy and loud in the really quiet wide open spaces. “But maybe we can hide out until this shit blows over.”

Dumb. He was dumb, dumb, dumb. And she was dumb to hang out with him.

“It’s not going to blow over, Jase. Your boss is going to send Holden Wagner after you, you know that. Holden freakin’ Wagner! God! He takes care of all the legal stuff with the businesses in town, and he’ll take care of you, too!” She pulled away, curled into a ball on the ground, totally ruining her outfit.

Holden Wagner was a big shot lawyer in Earnestine Township where she and Jase lived, and one of the most powerful men she’d ever met. Everyone knew him from the church and from around town, Earnestine being such a dinky dot on the map and Holden being the only lawyer and into everybody’s business.

A lot of girls at school thought he was hot. Liberty supposed he was. He was only like thirty-five or something, and wore clothes that she’d never seen anywhere but in People Magazine or on the People’s Choice Awards.

But, still! He could turn a molehill of evidence into a big fat mountain and put Jase away forever! Then what would she do? Who would she have to date? How would she ever get away from this dump? She didn’t have anyone else on her side!

Jase tried to clear his throat. “Yeah, well, Holden’s not really the one I’m worried about.”

Liberty heard the break in his voice and grew still. “What do you mean, he’s not the one you’re worried about? Who else is there?”

“Holden may be all powerful, but even he can’t get away with murder. I’m not so sure that’s the case with the guys I’m dealing with here. The amount of money I took? It can’t be legal, which means they won’t be going to the sheriff. They’ll be taking care of it themselves.”

She sat up slowly, her ears ringing with the word murder. Murder! Her heart thudded in her throat until she thought she would never again be able to breathe.

“Jase? What’s going on?” Her hands were shaking so badly she drew up her legs to her chest and tucked her fingers in the pits of her knees. Her voice cracked and she barely managed to whisper, “Tell me what’s going on.”

Jase sighed, hung his head. Light from the moon made his bleached blond hair look white, the spikes look like tufts of dead grass. The hoop in his ear sparkled. Sweat ran down his cheeks from his temples. “It wasn’t only a couple grand like I said.”

“What are you talking about?” Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!

“It was a couple hundred grand. There’s no way it was all the store’s money.”

She started rocking back and forth where she sat. “You stole two hundred thousand dollars?”

He shoved both hands through his hair, clamped them down on top of his head. “The deposit slip said one thing, but there was an extra two hundred G’s in the bag.”

“So you just kept it? Not even knowing whose it was?” She sounded hysterical. Shoot, she was hysterical! “What is wrong with you? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about us, Lib,” he yelled back, really screaming now. His voice echoed in the night. “I was thinking about you. I want us to get out of here. Me off the ranch and away from my dad. You so far away from your parents that they could never force you to marry some old geezer.”

He was rocking now, too, and almost crying. “This town is fucked up, Lib. Pastor Straight’s hold over everyone is insane. It’s like a commune or a cult, and the way the church treats the women is as bad as the Taliban. I’m not going to stay here. I want you to come with me. We only have to hide out a few days, wait for whoever the money belongs to to lose our trail, then we can hitch to Mexico.”

Everything he was saying suddenly made so much sense. She’d been so wrong. He wasn’t stupid. Not if he could get her out of here. He was smart, and she decided then that she loved him and wanted to be with him forever. “Don’t you think they’ll look for you in the hunting blind?”

“No, see, that’s the beauty of this.” He scooted closer, excited now. “My dad tore down the blind two seasons back. He hasn’t leased out that plot since and has no idea I put it back up and come out here all the time.”

She didn’t respond right away, and he went on. “We’ll only stay tonight if it makes you feel better. We’ll hide out long enough to come up with another plan. That’s all we’ve gotta do, Lib. That’s all.”

His desperation tugged at her heartstrings like he was playing music just for her. “Okay, okay. But I broke the thong on my shoe and have to go barefoot. I don’t know if I can keep up with you.”

He got to his feet, brushed dirt from the butt and knees of his jeans. “C’mon. I’ll piggyback you.”

He was so totally cute sometimes. She shook her head. She could do this. She could. “No, I’ll be fine.” She pulled off the scarf she’d wrapped around her waist like a belt. “I’ll just tie the shoe to my foot-”

“Shh. Listen.” He backed a couple of steps away. “Do you hear that?”

She did. A diesel engine grinding hard as the truck it belonged to fought the uneven terrain. She knew the sound well. Eighty percent of Earnestine’s population of just under four thousand drove the same.

She finished tying her shoe to her foot, though didn’t know why she bothered. They’d issue her some pair of tacky granny lace-ups in jail, because back in California she’d watched enough cop shows to know she’d be charged as an accessory. Unless she was killed, too, she thought with a big fat ugly-sounding sob.

“Stay here,” Jase ordered. “Don’t move. I’m going to draw them away.”

“No, Jase!” Panic rose in her throat and tasted like the bad cheesy ranch dressing she’d had on her salad at the Dairy Barn.

“I’ll lose them and circle back to get you. Just stay put.”

He would never find this place again. She’d be lost out here forever. “Wait! I’ll come with you!”

But he was already running away. “I love you, Liberty. I love you!”

“Jase, no!” She couldn’t even see him anymore. He’d vanished into the darkness. She was alone with dirt and rocks and creepy crawly things. This was all so sucky and so so stupid.

The truck was getting closer. She could hear the gears shifting, hear men shouting. Shaking like mad, she wrapped her arms around her knees and tucked her chin to her chest, praying Jase was as fast dodging tumbleweeds as he was dodging tackles on the football field.

A second later she heard a loud thudding pop. What looked like a bottle rocket arched up and burst in the sky. A flare, she realized, just as she heard the voices yelling.

“There he is!”

“Get the sonofabitch!”

“Go, go, go!”

The driver gunned the truck, drowning out any further words she might’ve heard. She felt the dampness on her cheeks only when her tears soaked into the knees of her jeans.

The second shot she heard was not from a flare gun. Neither were the three that followed. When she heard Jase scream, her entire body jolted. When she heard laughter and howling, she began to shake uncontrollably.

It wasn’t until she heard footsteps behind her that she managed to go blessedly numb.

She lifted her chin, lifted her gaze, watched the figure of a man come toward her like a ghost out of the dark. Once he was near enough for her to see him better, her being numb came in handy. She couldn’t react. Not to his camo fatigues. Not to his assault rifle. Not to the knife hanging from his belt halfway down his thigh.

When he reached her, he held out a hand. She gave him her fingers, eerily white against his black skin, and he pulled her to her feet. Then he pointed toward the sky.

“Do you know of the North Star, Miss Mitchell?”

Oh, God, he knew her name. He knew her name! It sounded strange when he said it; his accent reminded her of the rapper Sean Paul that Jase was constantly listening to. It was like Jamaican or something . . .

“Miss Mitchell? The North Star?”

She nodded, her teeth chattering as she found the point in the sky. “My folks used to take me and my brother camping when we lived in California. Before they got all into Jesus and we moved here.” At least here she’d met Jase. They were like two peas in a pod, both hating Earnestine.

Or at least they had been . . . “What happened to Jase? Where is he? He didn’t mean anything bad by taking that money. We just both want to get out of this town-”

“You must do what I say now, Miss Mitchell, and not worry about your Mr. Bremmer. Do you understand?” He took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him. “There is nothing you can do for him now.”

She nodded, tears welling in her eyes, wondering if her hair would look as good as his did in dreadlocks, wondering if she would ever see Jase again, wondering where she was going to go because she couldn’t go home.

Wondering how anyone could be so nice when he took the bandana from his head and used it to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“You follow the North Star for an hour and you will come to the county highway. You walk and you do not speak of tonight to anyone. You do not ask questions. You act as if none of what you heard or saw happened. If you do, you may very possibly die. And I may very possibly be the one to kill you. Do you understand?”

She didn’t understand anything. “Nothing,” she wanted to scream. Instead, she asked, “Where am I supposed to go?”

“You are only supposed to walk. That is all that you can do now.” He placed his hand in the middle of her back and pushed. “Now go. Go before it is too late.”

She’d only gone twenty steps when her shoe came off. She was not going to be able to walk like this for an hour and turned back to tell him so, but he was nowhere to be seen.

God, if her parents hadn’t gotten all righteous and moved here for the family’s spiritual good, she would have dozens of places to go and people to help her. If she actually made it to the highway, maybe she could hitch to El Paso and find a library where she could get on the internet.

She had to find that Website. The one she’d overheard Sherry Petersen whisper about to Teresa Monaghan the day after Sherry’s sister went missing and her wedding to Mr. Gaston was canceled.

Sherry swore her sister was with the woman who ran the rescue shelter for girls escaping the arranged marriages in Earnestine. What was it? What was it?

All Liberty could remember was something about a barn.

One

One week later . . .

The structure shimmered like a mirage on the horizon.

Waves of heat danced above the hard-packed earth and around the hulking concrete bunker, non-descript, deceptive. A squat bulge like a pregnant belly atop the life teeming below where the Spectra IT command center monitored the crime syndicate’s Western U.S. activity.

And where the syndicate’s filthy lucre was sent to begin the process of laundering. Deposits here, wire transfers there. This bank, that bank. Tricky sleights of hand.

Mick Savin dropped his binoculars and squinted against New Mexico’s fireball of a sun glaring angrily over the Chihuahuan Desert. He was barely over the Texas border, but the bloody bitch in heat seemed to beat down with twice the number of red-hot hammers she had fifteen miles ago.

He’d left his Range Rover parked just inside the gate off U.S. Highway 62 and had hoofed it the two hours it had taken to get here-here being deep inside the seventy thousand acres of working cattle ranch that served as Spectra’s cover.

His own cover, provided by the Smithson Group, the covert spy organization paying him a hell of a hefty salary, was that of a hunter scoping out prime locations for mule deer season. He had his paperwork in order and every reason to be exactly where he was . . . almost.

His leased plot, the one designated in the documents above the Rover’s driver’s side visor, was approximately sixteen clicks north.

The fact that he’d run across the bunker’s location at all was pure dumb luck.

Up until a month ago, he’d been chasing leads gathered in Coahuila, Mexico by Smithson Group operatives Eli McKenzie and Harry van Zandt. The pair had managed to nail down a nice hard body of evidence before the explosion-the one that had wiped the holding center for Spectra’s kidnapping and prostitution ring off the map along with a good chunk of Smithson intel.

All these weeks later, and Mick was still blowing the stench of that fireball out of his nose. The trail he’d most recently been following, the one that brought him to New Mexico to begin with, had been part of the continuing effort to tie up the loose ends of the mission that had kept Eli and Rabbit in Mexico for months.

Three days ago, Mick had been in Carlsbad looking for the missing girl who Stella Banks, Eli’s woman, had originally headed south of the border to find, when he’d picked up thirty seconds of a scrambled communication.

In a panic, he’d relayed it to Manhattan and to Tripp Shaughnessey at the communications desk in the SG-5 ops center. Tripp had only been able to narrow the broadcast to an area boxed in roughly by Fort Bliss, Alamogordo, Denver City, and Odessa.

SG-5 had hustled to get Mick in, get him outfitted, and done so quick-like-a-bunny once they’d narrowed down the location of the Spectra IT command center. Mick had taken it from there . . . and ended up here.

He eased from his stomach onto his side and let out two sharp bursts of a whistle. FM, the herd-dog mix he’d picked up at the El Paso pound, trotted over on monstrous feet, shoulders rolling, tongue lolling inches from the ground.

The dog had been the final addition to Mick’s cover, and so far man and beast had bonded enough that he’d stopped thinking of returning the mutt to his original fate. Then again, he didn’t exactly see FM fitting in at SG-5’s headquarters in Manhattan.

Hell, as it was, he barely fit in in Manhattan. He did a lot better making his way in and out of The Bronx, and figured if he kept the dog, he might get with Hank Smithson about retiring FM to the Smithson Group principal’s Saratoga County horse farm.

After all, the mutt had been recruited as an SG-5 operative. Like Mick himself. And like the others-Christian, Tripp, Julian, Kelly John, Eli, and Harry. And, once this mission was done, if it all went down as planned, FM would’ve earned the doggie retirement.

“C’mere, F.”

The dog plopped onto his belly, haunches raised and ready, tail busting a move like nobody’s business. Mick couldn’t help but grin as he slipped the chip from his camera into one of several slots cut into the sturdy leather collar ringing FM’s solid neck and disappearing into his thick ruff.

“Whew, dude. You are in desperate need of hosing down.” The dog’s mouth clamped shut, his ears perked as far as floppy triangles could, his bright brown eyes grew sharp. Once Mick had gotten a whiff of more than dog, he took the comeback to heart. “Yeah. You’re right. Me, too.”

At that, FM started in with the smiling panting thing he did, doing a belly crawl closer as if he couldn’t get enough of Mick’s love. And since Mick wasn’t getting any love anywhere, he let him.

“Yeah, okay, that’s enough. It’s time to go.” He rolled up into a sitting position and reached for his canteen, poured a good long pull onto a stone that was smooth and bowled in the center. “We’ve got a bloody long hike back to the truck, so drink up, mate.”

FM lumbered to his feet like the old fart he was and lapped up the water. Mick, his bones feeling just as ancient and creaky, did the same, tilting back his head, tilting up the canteen, cooling off with what water he didn’t swallow then capping the rest for later.

His eyes were closed, and he was using his bandana to mop them free of water when the dog first growled. It was a fierce sound. A terrifying sound. A gut-curdling, ball-shriveling sound that he hadn’t heard since recruiting the mutt. He’d be damn well happy not to feel it shiver through his bones again in this lifetime.

Bloody hell. “F, what is your problem?”

And then he heard it, too. He heard it long before he saw it. His ears were clear, his eyes still blinking away the salty sting of sweat and the clean wash of water. An engine. An ATV. Roaring as the driver guided the four-wheel drive utility vehicle over the rough and rocky landscape.

Make that two drivers gunning two ATV’s over the rough and rocky landscape.

He settled his sunglasses back in place, making sure the sports strap around his head was secure, then bent and snagged his backpack and khaki outback hat from the ground. As the dog moved to stand protectively in from of him, he jammed his hat into place.

Reaching to scratch between FM’s ears with one hand, he held the strap of his pack with the other, lifting it onto the toe of one boot. His nape tingled in that way it had of telling him he wasn’t going to like much of anything here about to go down.

The first ATV pulled up on his left, the second on his right. Both drivers wore ball caps pulled low, reflective lenses, Wranglers, hiking boots, and snap-front, short-sleeved, Western-cut shirts in hideously ugly plaids. They also wore weapons that didn’t fit the theme.

Weapons he’d seen most recently on the streets of Kabul and Baghdad. Spectra thugs, he quickly determined If not, he was a monkey bone’s uncle.

“Howdy, mates.” He raised a hand in greeting as they left their rides running and approached on foot. “Hard to believe having navigated my way around the world, but I’m bloody well convinced that I’m lost.”

“Mr. Savin?”

Mick nodded, his nape itching and twitching fiercely enough now that he had to resist the urge to scratch at the bugs that weren’t really there crawling over his skin. “That would be me.”

“We located your vehicle back at the road, but you weren’t on your lease.” This from the first one’s clone.

“Well, I’m damn glad you found us or me and the mutt might’ve ended up walking in circles for days.”

Clone one nodded. Clone two, being a clone, did the same. Somehow Mick wasn’t mollified. The reflective lenses, he decided. He couldn’t see their eyes. Couldn’t see what was going on in their same Spectra-washed brains.

FM wasn’t so handicapped. His ruff stood in a fierce ring around his neck. A feral growl rumbled from his body into Mick’s where the dog now sat on his foot.

Number one spoke next, while number two returned to his ATV. “We won’t let that happen.”

“Good deal, eh dog?” Mick bent, scratched F’s ears again, calming the animal as best he could. He needed the dog. He couldn’t afford to have him go off on the clone brothers and risk getting himself shot. Not with all the surveillance intel stored in his collar.

In the end, Mick should’ve been more in tune to his partner’s instincts. When the dog growled and lunged forward, he grabbed for his collar and missed seeing the rope. Number one swung the butt of his rifle, caught the mutt in the jaw. FM whimpered and went sprawling.

The rope sailed through the air and cinched Mick’s arms tight against his upper body. “What the bloody fuck is going on, mates?” he growled. “I don’t remember reading about this particular guided tour in your brochure.”

Number two, at the other end of the rope, jerked Mick down to the ground. “What you did read was that trespassers would be shot.”

From where he sat, Mick felt a surge of panic burst at the base of his spine and rise. “Trespassers, mate. Not poor lost fucks getting used to the terrain.”

A second rope appeared in the hands of number one. Wordlessly, he sauntered over like a man with all the time in the world, a man loving his job, and used one end of the rope to bind Mick’s feet.

That done, he tossed the other end to his partner who gloated like a big bad steer wrestler having thrown his quarry to the dirt-the problem being that Mick didn’t much like the impotent comparison.

He cast a quick glance at FM as the dog stirred where he’d crumpled two meters away. The sigh of relief Mick started to breathe was sucked quickly away, however, when clone one produced a hunting knife and returned. The muscles between Mick’s shoulder blades seized, relaxing only marginally once the other man made his intentions known, slicing into Mick’s backpack.

He swore under his breath, grimacing as the pack was upended and the contents-camera, satellite phone, binoculars, energy bars-tumbled to the ground. Losing the equipment was a pain in the ass, but the real issue was the pack. He’d secreted away too many tools of his trade in the padded straps and thick leather base.

Clone one tossed away the pack like yesterday’s garbage, squatted to examine the contents. He looped the binoculars around his neck, the camera strap over one shoulder, shoved the phone into a pocket. After a sniff at one of the energy bars, he left those on the ground.

And then he grinned at Mick and pushed up to his feet. “We’re going to escort you back to your truck now, Mr. Savin. And hopefully next time you won’t be so quick to get yourself lost.”

Jesus bloody hell. He grabbed tightly to the taut rope circling his upper body, dug the heels of his boots into the ground. But his palms were already sweating, already slipping. He was unbelievably fucked. “I’m good with walking, mates. Seriously. Just point me the right direction and you won’t see me back until opening day.”

He watched-impotently-as the two men climbed onto their vehicles, his only saving grace the fact that one man held both ropes, saving him from being ripped apart. He’d simply be dragged to his death instead. The clones revved their engines, laughed like hyenas, revved them again.

He had a switchblade strapped to one calf, his SIG to the other, no time or way to get to either. He wasn’t worried about shooting or stabbing himself; the holster and sheath were both secured. But either one would’ve gone a long way toward stopping this crazy shit before it got started.

Then it was too late. One hard jarring tug, and he was on his way to the great ops center in the sky. He did what he could to stay upright, to use his ass as a snowboard, but at the first awkward jerk of his legs, he went down.

He felt his shoulder go out first, two of his ribs seconds later. A shearing shredding land mine of fire gutted the upper half of his body. He barely managed to hang onto the rope with one hand, to keep his head off the ground, his chin to his chest.

He shoved his useless fingers into his pants to keep his entire limb from dragging the ground and tearing away, and prayed the terrain would keep the machines from topping out their speed. He failed to take into account the duality of the mean streaks running down the bonehead clones’ spines. They knew every bump, rock and crater and hit them all.

Heat and dust and pain engulfed his hips, his knees, his torso. His spine stretched, threatened to snap. His head bobbed, smacked back. The cowboys up ahead yee-hawed. He thought briefly of FM, briefly of his Smithson Group partners and Hank, briefly of all the women he’d never known.

And then he didn’t think of anything anymore.

#

If not for the dog, she never would have stopped.

She would have kept on driving, lost in thought-she had enough going on in her life to remain indefinitely, permanently mentally adrift-and man and beast would have both ended up as buzzard bait.

But Neva Case had always been a sucker for the underdog-canines included-and so she pulled her gleaming black, dual axle, crew cab pickup to the grassy shoulder, shoved open the driver’s side door, and jumped down.

“C’mon, pooch. Let’s see what you’re all about,” she crooned softly, circling around the truck’s bed to where the dog, a blue heeler mix-the markings were right, the fur too thick and too long to be pure-struggled to his feet to warn her off.

His growl was feeble, making her doubly glad she’d stopped. “You look a bit on the wobbly side, pooch. How long have you been out here?”

She took a step closer, leaned down and held out a hand to share her scent. His snarl lessened. His bared teeth vanished. He whimpered slightly, and when her next step took her closer, he offered his head to be scratched. She did, checking the tags on his collar, her hand coming away covered in blood.

“Oh, my.” She squatted in front of him, let him give her a closer inspection while she carefully examined him, looking for a wound, finding a nasty gash along his lower jaw and a lump the size of half a Ruby Red grapefruit. “I see a visit to Doc Hill in your immediate future, pooch. Maybe he’ll know where you belong. Your tags don’t even tell me your name.”

“FM.”

Her head snapped up. Her gaze honed in on the voice, searching the highway’s shoulder between the road and the property line. She pushed up to her feet, made her way around the far side of the truck.

A man lay in the scrub brush halfway between the barbed wire fence and her front bumper. His clothes and skin were coated with dust as if he’d been discarded like so much garbage a day or so ago.

No one besides those dumping trash had reason to stop on this long stretch of rural highway between New Mexico and Texas. Trucks pulled stock trailers. Trucks hauled hay bales and feed. Trucks barreled from one one-horse town to another without a single law officer looking their way.

If not for the dog . . . if she hadn’t stopped . . . she swallowed to clear away the borrowed trouble weighing heavily in her throat and picked her away slowly through the knee-high brush.

“Oh, dear. Oh, my.” He couldn’t be more than half alive. “Oh, hell.”

One arm lay at an angle it was never meant to bend. She winced at that, winced at the streaks of blood on his face and his nearly shaved head. His chest barely rose when he pulled in a breath. In fact, he didn’t breathe at all for so long she thought he had died while she’d been standing there staring. His clothes were shredded, the cord of his hat tangled around his neck with his sunglasses’ strap.

Moving him could be risky. Leaving him here while she went for help more so. He was obviously drifting in and out of consciousness; right now, he appeared dead to the world. If not simply dead. She reached down to loosen the constriction beneath his Adam’s apple.

His eyes flew open, and she stopped, her fingers on the very hot skin of his throat. He didn’t speak, he didn’t move, he didn’t blink. He just stared, his gaze intense in a way that unnerved her when she considered his condition. If was as if his entire life was flashing before his eyes . . .

Damn him! He had better not die on her now.

“I’m going to load you and your dog into my truck and get you both to a doctor.” She went back to work on the uncomfortable binding that couldn’t be making it easy for him to breathe. “I’m not sure how smart it is to move you, but I can’t leave you here.”

He didn’t respond except to close his eyes. She was fairly sure the response wasn’t one voluntarily made. He was out of it again, which was probably a good thing since there was no way she’d be able to get him into her truck without a lot of undignified manhandling.

She walked back to where she had parked, let down the tailgate and considered her options along with the boxes of supplies she’d picked up in Carlsbad stacked in the bed. Twine, beads, filament, stones to be polished, charms, crystals, jewelry hardware, and more of the same.

The only thing she could do with any of that would be to accessorize him. She did, however, have a rope, a blanket, and a comealong behind her second seat, as well as two six-foot, one-by-twelve planks she’d picked up for Candy’s new workbench. Neva figured those would go a long way toward getting him where he needed to be.

He was a big man, she’d guess a bit over six feet tall and at the moment, at least two hundred pounds of dead weight. This was not going to be easy. Moving him even a little bit would hurt him like hell were he aware of her lugging him around like a feed sack.

From the cab, she grabbed the rope and the blanket and tossed both out the passenger side door to the ground. The comealong needed to be positioned where she could get the right leverage to muscle him up the plank ramp.

She hopped from the bumper into the bed and fastened the hook and ratchet end to the stake hole on the driver’s side nearest the cab. That done, she released the tension on the strap and reeled it out until there was no strap left to reel, finally tossing it to hang over the open tailgate.

Once she’d jumped to the ground, she slid one of the planks out of the bed, leaned it on the tailgate, and wedged it into the shoulder’s hard-packed dirt. Dusting her hands together, she then grabbed up the blanket and rope and returned to the man.

He hadn’t moved or regained consciousness, and she hoped she wasn’t about to do him more harm than good. She could radio Candy, of course, and have her send out Doc Hill. But he’d have to close the clinic and make the trip, and then basically do what Neva was already set up to do.

Besides, waiting for Ed to get here would drive her totally nuts. She had absolutely no tolerance for delay and very little patience these days for anything, especially since the first brick of what she’d thought her very safe world had recently come huffing and puffing and blowing down around her.

She laid out the rope in a wide zigzag then unfolded the blanket on top, arranging the set-up as close to the man as possible before moving to stand at his feet. Taking hold of his ankles, she slowly lifted his hips, sidled over and lowered him onto the blanket.

He lay awkwardly crossways, and with that arm at the angle it was, she hesitated on how best to straighten him out. She stared down into his dirty face for a moment, at his dark brows that furrowed even while he was passed out, at the stubble of both beard and hair, at his lips that were dry, cracked, parched . . . she had a bottle of water in the cab . . . no, she needed to move him while he remained oblivious.

The dog, FM, sat at the fence line watching, his lolling tongue nudging her to hurry. He needed water, too. The man’s mangled arm was fortunately on the far side. Standing on the blanket, she slid one hand beneath his nape and the other beneath his shoulder until she reached his spine.

Squatting to lift with her legs, she hefted his weight up and over and promptly fell flat on her ass. She groaned at the thud, and the rush of air from her lungs. All this time she’d been so proud of her upper body strength. Too bad her balance was shot, but at least he was on the blanket.

It was when she got back to her feet, had swathed him like a mummy and was binding him up, that she saw him watching her again. She stopped, stared, wanting to reassure him without frightening him because the look in his eyes spoke of pure panic. Could she blame him? Unable to move and faced with a wild-looking, freckled and red-headed Amazon?

She moved nearer his head and, smiling, crouched down. “I’m Neva. I’m getting ready to winch you up into my truck and take you to the doctor.”

“The dog?” he croaked out.

“Let me get you some water-”

“The dog?” he demanded again, this time sharply, gruffly, expending so much effort he ended up closing his eyes.

“Him, too. Though he is in better shape than you look to be.”

“His collar?”

She frowned, glanced over to where the dog now sat half-crouched, his tail sweeping back and forth. “Still there.” Though she knew from checking earlier that the tags showed only vaccine information and a shelter address. Nothing about his current owner.

When she looked back, the man was again unconscious, and so she wasted no time hoisting the end of the rope coiled around his ankles over her shoulder and dragging his heavy self to the truck.

Once there, she lifted his legs onto the slanted plank, wrapped the comealong strap around his ankles, secured the hook, and climbed up into the bed. After ratcheting the slack until the strap drew taut, she tucked into the lever with the full force of her one hundred forty pounds and winched him up one slow quarter at a time.

When his head finally hit the truck bed, her biceps were screaming, her shoulders burning, and sweat ran like the Rio Grande into her eyes. She didn’t even bother removing the strap or the rope or the blanket from her living bundle. She simply jumped to the ground and snapped her fingers at the dog. He trotted over, bounded up the ramp, and settled in at his master’s side.

Neva slid the plank next to the duo and latched the tailgate. She did make one last circle around the truck to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything, forgetting anything, or missing anything belonging to the man. That done, she climbed behind the wheel and collapsed-but only for the thirty seconds she allowed herself to catch her breath.

She had no time to stop and smell roses, lilies, or even manure, and so she turned the key in the ignition and put the rig on the road. And then she reached over and turned off the CB radio before it had a chance to cackle to life. Candy was waiting on the supplies and wouldn’t be happy with the delay or with Neva being incommunicado.

But Candy would just have to deal. As long as she’d lived and worked with Neva, as far back as their relationship went, the duality of their backgrounds on which it was based, any upset suffered wouldn’t last long, leaving Neva to let that worry go and focus on the one in the here and now.

Because there was something about the added cargo in the bed of the truck that left her itchy and rubbing the backs of her fingers beneath her chin. If she hadn’t already been in a precarious position, looking over her shoulder at every pin she heard drop, finding him wouldn’t have caused a blip in the circle of her personal radar.

And more than likely a simple explanation existed for the condition of her mummy man. Unfortunately, she couldn’t come up with anything that worked in context. Had she found him busted all to hell up in a parking garage or behind a club or in a halfway house in Houston where she’d once lived, that would be one thing. This was another.

He was out of place. One hundred percent out of his element. Staring at the endless road ahead, she thought back to what she had seen. The goatee and mustache that were clipped and shaped, while the rest of his beard was a day’s growth waiting to be shaved. The same with his hair; it was just long enough to visibly hint at a dark coffee brown.

No man in Pit Stop wore GQ-styled facial hair or purposefully shaved his head. And then there was the tattoo. Not a simple Cupid’s arrow piercing a heart or the word M-O-M. No American flag or John Deere logo. This one wore an intricate tribal design, a series of angles and arches, circles and swirls that cupped the base of his skull and his neck.

He also wore combat boots instead of Lucchese’s, camouflage fatigues instead of Wranglers. And the sunglasses caught up with a sport strap around his neck were Oakleys and cost two hundred dollars at least. She could see him in Houston’s Montrose. In LA or Soho. On a Calvin Klein billboard hawking boxer briefs.

She reached over, the sweat running down her spine an uncomfortable tickle, and notched up the blower on the AC. The man wrapped like King Tut in the bed of her truck was as indigenous as she was to the counties encompassing US Highway 62 between New Mexico and Texas.

And she couldn’t help but wonder if the business that brought him here went as far underground as did hers. Or if he posed a more personal threat and was here to put an end to what she’d been doing the last five years.

All she knew for sure was that any man hoping to take her down would have to take her out in order to succeed. And wasn’t that a comforting thought?