Czytaj książkę: «Marshal On A Mission»

Chapter One

The icy chill of déjà vu crept down her spine as if it had all happened only yesterday, and as if tragedy were about to happen again. Tara Munroe pushed the uneasy feeling away.

“It was a long time ago,” she assured herself. But today, for some reason, it felt like yesterday that her father had been murdered. She knew that some things you never recovered from. Painful experience had taught her that. Some things left a mark no matter how long ago they had happened. She took a breath, trying to go back to enjoying the beautiful spring day. But something seemed to hang over her like a shadow.

“Forget it,” she said to herself. She was being ridiculous, dreaming up trouble where there was none. Though it was the anniversary of that dreadful day. She took a deep breath. It wasn’t an anniversary to remember. Instead she had to think of it as what it was, a beautiful day, midmorning, midspring.

It was already comfortably warm, touched with the lazy humidity left by last night’s gentle rain. The sweet scent of petunias wafted from a planter on the city sidewalk. The flowers were early, grown in the local city greenhouse and just recently planted here. In the midst of downtown Pueblo, Colorado, the natural beauty of the flowers stood out against the brick and stone. The historic buildings that populated the downtown provided a touch of Old World to the city’s core. But it was the sweet, earthy scent of the flowers that made her fingers itch to pick up a paintbrush and transfer the vibrant colors onto canvas or cardstock for greeting cards or...

But she had other things on her mind today, less artsy things—like getting some cash to pay her rent.

The last thought dropped as she was shoved, the arm of a man ramming into her shoulder and throwing her off balance. She had to catch herself from falling as she fought for balance, the clasp on her purse releasing. The hand-painted bag flew open, spilling some of its contents on the sidewalk.

“Hey!” she said as she bent down to pick up her things.

The man was already ahead of her. But he glanced back. His eyes briefly met hers, and in that moment, she noticed dark hair that was thick, short and wild, and the tawny color of his skin that accentuated a thick scar. The scar ran crookedly across the top half of his cheek. There was anger in his dark brown eyes and a wildness that made her heart race in fear.

A few feet away, he squatted down to pick up a rectangle of off-white paper with an elastic at one end. It looked like a medical mask. But that seemed a weird thing to carry around, she thought as she watched him shove it in his pocket and walk away without giving her a second look.

Jerk.

His lack of manners had her fuming. She kept watching him. She wasn’t sure why, except that something about him felt a bit off. She watched as he crossed the street. Then he turned toward a familiar building, the same place she was headed: Pueblo First National Bank.

“Great,” she muttered. Sitting on her haunches, she picked up the remainder of her things from the sidewalk and put them back into her purse.

A few minutes later, she opened the door to the bank and was met by a rush of air-conditioned chill that made her feel like winter had returned. She shivered and stopped. The silence was heavy, different from the usual buzz of business. And when she looked toward the tellers, she forgot to breathe.

The tellers seemed frozen in place as two men stood with handguns aimed at them. A third man was in her peripheral vision, but it was a movement to her left, a fourth man, that got her attention. She recognized that lanky build, the faded jeans and the gray T-shirt. He turned, and their eyes met. Like the others, he wore a mask—the surgical mask she’d seen earlier, the one he’d dropped.

Shock raced through her. She knew those eyes. She’d seen that face. It seemed like forever as she stared into hard, wild eyes she’d never forget, and saw again the edge of that vicious scar...and something else. He was armed, and he was aiming that gun at her.

She turned, took two steps back to the door, ducked and pushed the door open just as she heard a sound that she’d heard so many times before. She knew that sound. Her heart seemed to stop and then speed up into a wild hammering that screamed at her to get out. It was the sound she’d heard so often as a child during hunting season on the small hobby ranch where she’d grown up. A gunshot.

Glass shattered in front of her. Her heart was pumping loud enough that she was sure everyone could hear it. She bolted through the lobby door, grabbed the outside door and yanked it open. She was desperate to escape. Another bang and more glass rained down around her. And then she burst onto the street.

She ran as hard and as fast as she could. She was in a state of panic for the first block as she almost collided with a woman going the opposite direction.

“Go back! Bank robbery,” she warned and repeated that warning at everyone she passed. Most looked at her oddly.

In the distance, sirens wailed. She waved wildly when the first of the sheriff’s vehicles arrived. The vehicles flew past her followed by the second, a third after that.

“Armed robbery,” she said in a panicked rush to the first deputy to pull over. “Four of them. They shot, they...” She was so freaked out she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. “I was there. I saw one of them on the street before the robbery.” What else had she seen? Her hands shook so hard that she could barely stand, never mind think of details.

“It’s all right,” the deputy said and opened the back door of his vehicle.

She stood there frozen as if the invitation had never been issued, as if the last minutes had never happened.

“Get in, miss,” the deputy said, his silver hair glinting in the sunlight. “You’re safe now.”

She looked at him and reality returned. She saw his badge, his uniform as he repeated his instruction. She crawled into the back seat, feeling only slightly safer.

“We’ve got a witness,” she heard the deputy report seconds later.

A block away, she could see the convoy of flashing lights outside the bank. “Was anyone hurt?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll take your statement at the office.”

She shook her head as panic ran through her. “I can’t remember his face or what happened. I’m sorry. I—” Her voice broke off. “I bumped into him earlier and I saw his face unmasked.”

“Unmasked?” the deputy repeated.

“Yes.” She nodded. “But now it’s just too much. Would it be all right to do this tomorrow? Everything is a blur.”

“No. We’d like to interview you when it’s fresh.”

But an hour later in the sheriff’s office, the deputy looked at her in frustration. She was blanking out on every question. She couldn’t help it. Only once before had she ever been this shaken and not even then. She’d been too young.

“I’m sorry, I’m just...” She paused, not sure what she was. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Traumatized,” he finished for her. “The morning will have to do.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s say eight o’clock. I’ll bring a sketch artist to your house and we’ll do a complete interview then.”

After that, he drove her home. It all seemed anticlimactic, yet more than a little frightening. Was she safe here? Was she safe anywhere? Her world had blown apart. She wrapped an afghan around herself and collapsed on her couch. She was a wreck. The fact that her usually organized mind couldn’t connect the dots of what had just happened terrified her.

An hour later, she was terrified all over again. She’d calmed down, realized that she was safe exactly as the deputy had said. And then she’d double-checked the contents of her purse and discovered that her artists’ guild card with her picture, name and address was gone.

She’d had it when she’d left home. She’d intended to go to a local art gallery and discuss some of her latest works with them. For that, she needed the card. She usually had it in her wallet but today she’d been in a rush, known she’d be pulling it out shortly and had slipped the card into her purse and not into the wallet. Had it fallen out? Had the man who knocked her to the ground also picked up her artists’ guild card? There’d been nothing on the sidewalk when she left. She’d double-checked. She could think of no other reason for its absence. Fear ran through her as she thought of the information he’d glean from the card.

She thought of calling the sheriff’s office and asking for protection. But she knew what happened to people who witnessed a crime. And the law could only do so much. Now that the men who had robbed the bank knew who she was and where she lived, she wasn’t safe. She couldn’t wait for someone else to give lip service to the fact that they might help her.

Witnesses died. That was a fact. She’d lived her whole life knowing that terrible outcome. She couldn’t wait. She couldn’t depend on anyone else to protect her. She needed to get away until things cooled down.

Within an hour, she had a flight booked and was packing her things for the drive to Denver International Airport.

“I’ll be back, and I’ll give my testimony,” she promised grimly as she locked the door of her house. And, she vowed as she gripped the wheel of her small pickup truck, not only would she live, but she’d make sure the jerk and his gang were put behind bars for the rest of their lives.

“YOU SCREWED THIS UP, you fix it!” snarled the man who liked to be called Evan. “Damn it, Luc, she saw you!”

Lucas Cruz held back the urge to slam his fist into Evan’s taunting mouth. Evan had been the last to join the gang and even before this, he had been the proverbial thorn in Lucas’s side. But there was no getting around it. Evan had seen the entire incident and he’d put the dots together. Because of that, he not only had to resolve a major screwup but he was being judged by the very men he’d led for the last few years.

“Not a problem,” he snarled. “I’ll fix it. Now, get out of my face before I—”

“Yeah, I’ll get out of your face,” Evan bristled. “When—”

“Shut the hell up,” Rico broke in with a look of disdain at them both. “Lucas knows what has to be done. And we all know that the last thing we need is the cops on our tail. We’re good now. But she opens her trap and it’s all done.” He glared at Lucas despite his words of support only seconds earlier. “I hope you have a plan.”

“I’ll deal with her. Meantime, carry on as planned,” Lucas said with steel in his voice. He’d had enough. One more challenge from Rico and he’d take him out. That was what he’d thought only yesterday but now everything had changed and Rico knew it. “Get out of state. Go to Albuquerque and I’ll meet you there. At the usual place. I know it’s not ideal—”

“Hell,” Rico snarled. “We could be caught because of your stupidity. She knows what you look like.”

He was on Rico, his hands around his throat threatening to choke the life out of him. Someone had him from behind and pulled him off.

“It’s over, Lucas, you don’t call the shots on this one,” Rico said with a knife’s edge to his voice. “Take Chen.” He gave the young man a shove.

Lucas had to fight to cool the anger that ran hot and blistering through his veins. He had to fight not to kill Rico here and now. But those feelings would only get in the way of what he needed to do. Rico was right about one thing: he’d screwed up royally. It was him the witness had seen—no one else. This was the first time there’d been a witness who had seen one of their faces. His face.

He couldn’t believe he’d screwed up so royally. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, or more accurately, not thinking. He’d thought nothing of it when he’d bumped into her on the street. She was a passerby, nothing more. She didn’t know who he was or what he’d done or what he planned to do. Instead of on her, his mind had been on the heist.

The last place he had expected her to go was the same bank he was in the process of robbing. She’d been on the wrong side of the street for that. So was he, but that was part of how he entered any bank, from the opposite side. That upped the chances that anyone who might see him wouldn’t connect him with the bank. He was also superstitious. He considered an approach from the opposite side to be lucky.

Their encounter had been an inconvenience—that was it. They’d bumped into each other and gone their separate ways. And now, she had to die for what she’d seen.

He grimaced. Bad luck had tailed him since the beginning of this robbery. To have the woman who’d gotten a clear view of him enter the bank in the midst of the robbery was the height of bad luck, or so he’d thought. But it got worse. The interruption allowed one of the tellers to set off the alarm. There’d been no time to do anything but get the hell out.

As a result, they’d run down a back alley, jumping into the nondescript SUV that had brought them there. By the time they were in motion, the sirens were shrill. The call had been too close, and it had all been downhill from there. They’d gotten away with a few thousand dollars, and only one step ahead of law enforcement. That was way too narrow of a getaway and too little of a take. The whole thing had been a fiasco from beginning to end.

She had no idea who he was, but she knew what he looked like. The authorities would soon have his face on file. Everything had looked grim until he’d remembered the card he’d picked up when her belongings had scattered on the sidewalk. He wasn’t sure why he had done it—it might have been instinct. What it turned out was to be a bit of good luck. He had the witness’s identity and her address. He’d had to wait until dark and even beyond that. It was around eleven, late enough that if the neighborhood wasn’t asleep, it had mostly settled in for the night.

“Slow,” he hissed in Spanish to the driver of the vehicle as they took the turn into the crescent where she lived.

“Here,” he said a minute later. “Stop.” They were half a block from her house.

He paused on the sidewalk. The few streetlights left the street shadowy and the houses in darkness. Despite that, he knew what the area was—he’d learned that immediately after finding her identity. It consisted of a middle-class group of mixed ethnicities, he thought with disdain. Some day he would buy and sell an area like this. Small cozy houses and neatly kept lawns as if the residents had nothing better to do than to monitor grass.

His hand dropped to his gun. It was there and ready. He hated being in this position. The only good thing was that they’d waited until dark. Most people had settled down for the night. No one would get a good look at them and if they did, they’d see Chen. Lucas was sending him in first.

He felt good about none of this. The only thing that was going to make him feel better was a bullet between the witness’s pretty brown eyes. With that thought leading the way, he followed Chen. They’d go in through the back door. The alarm-warning sticker on her door meant nothing. The cheap door frame cracked when Chen shouldered it the first time and broke after the second. Nothing worried Lucas, not even the lights that he flicked recklessly on. They were masked and, as far as the alarm, by the time any monitoring agency reacted, they would be long gone.

But within minutes he knew one thing—she wasn’t there. There was no vehicle in the driveway and the toiletries in her bathroom—the essentials anyway, like toothpaste and toothbrush—were missing.

He spewed a string of curses in Spanish. He always resorted to his native tongue when his emotions got the best of him. Time was running short. He sent his accomplice to check the living area while he moved to the kitchen. There, he saw his first sign of hope, a notepad on her kitchen counter. He went over and couldn’t believe his luck. She’d written down flight information and it told him exactly what he needed to know. Two minutes later they’d left her neighborhood behind. Ten minutes after that, he was on the phone to his brother.

He explained the situation to him. “Are you in?” he asked and knew what the answer would be. His brother would do anything for money. That was why he was involved in one of the smaller Mexican drug cartels. He was counting on Yago’s ties and his greed. He needed someone on her tail immediately. He needed someone in charge of catching her in Mexico and that someone was his brother, Yago.

“She won’t get far. I know people who know people, if you know what I mean.”

He did. He knew how the cartels worked and how they could find anyone. Or at least the bigger ones could. He had his doubts about the men his brother was linked with. They were brutal, but he wasn’t too sure about their intel. What he did know was that right now, his brother and his connections were all he had. One way or another, she’d be found. He rolled the beads he always carried between the fingers of his right hand. They were lucky beads stolen from the hand of a dying woman.

He dropped the beads into his pocket. He hoped she’d savor her freedom, or for that matter, her life. Soon, all that would end.