Desperado Lawman

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“Maybe, but you’re standing by Joey for your own reasons, not because you think there’s any possibility he’s telling the literal truth.” He narrowed his gaze on her. “Why is it so important to you that he doesn’t go back into protective custody? Is there another threat to him you’re not telling—”

Connor broke off abruptly. From the parking lot outside had come the solid thunk of a car door closing, and even as he strode to the window he heard a second thunk. He pushed the drapes aside and saw an unmarked sedan almost identical to his own, two men standing by it in neatly unobtrusive suits and with expressions of grim alertness as federal issue as their car.

He let the curtain fall closed. “Your ride’s here,” he said shortly. “When you get to Albuquerque, take my advice and don’t count on Area Director Jansen cutting you as much slack as I have. You should have come clean with me from the start.”

“I’ve come as clean with you as I can, Agent Connor. I know you don’t accept that, but it’s true.”

Tess bit into her lower lip. She shook her head, her gaze searching his.

“The thing is, Virgil, I think you do believe in monsters,” she said slowly. “You just can’t admit it, because if you did your world wouldn’t be controllable anymore. What happened that made you build that rigid box around yourself? Did you go up against them once and lose?”

His first impression of her had been correct, Connor told himself tightly, slipping his gun into his shoulder holster. The woman was more than a little out of touch with reality.

“I don’t see operating on logic and reason as being boxed in,” he grated. “Which is why I’m not the one who’s going to have to tell a nine-year-old boy that I’m not the person I let him think I was,” he added.

He regretted his comment even before he saw the suddenly stricken look in her eyes. “Sorry, that wasn’t necessary,” he muttered. “Whatever I thought when I first saw you with Joey, you’ve convinced me that you only wanted to—”

“No, you’re right.” The husky tones came out unevenly. “I shouldn’t have acted as impulsively as I did. I should have thought things out more logically, like you say.”

She was finally beginning to see the light. Connor felt obscurely relieved. Her attitude would be a deciding factor in Jansen’s decision whether or not to—

“I should have stayed away from the highways and stayed on the back roads.” She exhaled sharply. “Dammit, I should have taken Joey up on his suggestion to show me how to hotwire a car in that diner parking lot when mine broke down. We would have been long gone by the time you got there.”

She hadn’t seen the light. She was never going to see the light. Her stubborn defiance was going to land her behind bars, he thought angrily. And it wasn’t his problem anymore.

“I would have caught up with you sooner or later.” Two sets of footsteps were approaching along the concrete walkway. He grasped the doorknob as he heard the soft squeak of a sole outside. “Be thankful this didn’t turn out any worse than—”

Whenever he thought about it afterward, for the life of him Connor couldn’t remember how the gun got into his hand. Even after racking his brains to reconstruct his actions, the nearest he would ever get to an answer was the dim recollection that his right hand had already been moving across his body as the door had opened.

They looked like agents. One of them was displaying an ID case with a photo and badge, and the other was reaching into an inner suit pocket, presumably to obtain his own identification.

“Agent Connor? I’m Agent Petrie and this is my partner, Agent Malden.” The one holding out the ID case snapped it shut and gave a thin-lipped smile. “Area Director Jansen sent us to—”

Even as the logical part of Connor’s mind was telling him the men confronting him had to be what they appeared to be and that he was about to make the worst mistake of his career, he made his move.

“Tess—get down!”

His shout cutting explosively across Petrie’s words, Connor swung the gun he was holding around in a powerful arc toward the two agents.

Chapter Five

“Don’t let Skinwalker get me, Tess!” Joey cried frantically.

Eyes still wide with shock at Connor’s shouted warning, Tess whirled around to the bed, where her nephew was sitting bolt upright, his face drained of color. His gaze was dark with terror; he was staring at nothing.

He was having a nightmare. Relief flooded through her as she rushed to his side, but on its heels came quick fear.

“It’s okay, Joey, I’m here.”

Wrapping her arms around his shaking shoulders, she saw awareness returning to his eyes, and her own bewildered gaze darted back to the doorway in time to see the revolver in Connor’s hand smash against the cheekbone of one of the agents standing in front of him. The air rushed from her lungs as completely as if she had taken the blow herself.

Virgil Connor had just attacked one of his own people. Either he’d suddenly lost his sanity, or…

…or he’s working against the Agency. The terrifying possibility seemed the only explanation for what she was witnessing, but it didn’t make sense. If Connor had no intention of allowing her and Joey to reach Albuquerque, then why had he phoned Area Director Jansen? And why had—

She froze. Caught off guard, the man Connor had struck had staggered sideways and fallen to his knees outside the door. An object spun from his grasp and clattered to the ground.

The object was a gun. And Malden had been reaching for it before Connor had reacted.

“Under the bed!” Tess tightened her grip on her nephew’s shoulders. “Get under the bed and stay there until I say it’s safe to come out, understand, Joey? If something happens to me, do what Connor says.”

Mutely he nodded. Any other nine-year-old would be firing questions at her, she thought, as he scrambled off the bed, but someone had made the monsters real for Joey.

Deep inside Tess a hot flame of rage ignited, flared dangerously high and then steadied into an icy fury. Whoever that person was, she told herself, she would make him pay for what he’d done….

If she and her newfound nephew got out of here alive.

In the few seconds it had taken to attend to Joey, the confrontation at the doorway had evolved with frightening speed. She took in the situation with a glance.

Petrie had obviously gone for his own weapon when his cohort, Malden, had fallen. It would have been simple for Connor to have thwarted the agent’s intentions by opening fire, except for the possibility that a stray bullet from any ensuing gun battle might have found an innocent victim. As he had outside the diner, Connor had chosen not to take that risk. She saw worriedly that he’d dropped the revolver he’d used to disable Malden.

The man who’d identified himself as Agent Petrie had no such scruples. Even now he was attempting to bring the automatic in his grasp into position, but Connor, his height and weight definite advantages, was gaining the upper hand. Petrie’s features contorted in agony, his right arm bent back at an angle, but still he didn’t release his grip on his weapon.

“Drop the gun, or the next thing you hear’ll be the sound of your arm breaking,” Connor ground out. “I’ve heard that sound once or twice myself, and believe me, it takes the fight right out of a man.”

The epithet Petrie grunted out in reply was made even more graphically obscene by the raw fury in his tone. Tess saw a flicker of distaste and reluctance cross Connor’s face.

“If that’s the way you want it,” he said briefly. With no discernible effort, he forced the other man’s arm back further, and from between Petrie’s thin lips came a whistling noise.

“All…all right,” he gasped. The fingers that had been clenched so tightly opened in defeat and the gun he’d been holding fell to the worn scrap of carpeting by the door. “Ease off, damn you!”

“Not until you tell me who sent you to kill Joey Begand,” Connor said. She heard an edge of cold rage in his tone. “What happened to the real backup Jansen was sending me? Did you and your partner ambush them along the way? And how did you intercept a secure communication between an area director’s office and an agent in the field anyway, dammit?”

With every question he increased the pressure on Petrie’s arm, and again a breath whistled painfully in the man’s throat. Incredibly, this time it was accompanied by a rusty laugh.

“You’re not even warm, Fed. Yeah, we were sent to eliminate the kid, and if we could we were supposed to make it look like you snapped and shot him yourself. But we didn’t intercept—”

The first shot caught Connor high on the shoulder, breaking his hold on Petrie. Even as Tess’s horrified glance took in Malden, still prone, but with his trouser leg pulled up to reveal an empty ankle holster, the man fired a second time. His wavering aim missed Connor and hit Petrie.

In the middle of Petrie’s forehead a small, neat hole appeared. On the open door behind him was a brilliant explosion of scarlet. His eyes wide and sightless, slowly he collapsed to his knees, pitching face forward onto the carpet. Instant nausea rose in Tess.

But there was no time for squeamishness. Already Malden’s unsteady aim was swinging back toward Connor. Forcing herself not to think about what she was doing, she threw herself across Petrie’s lifeless body, her outstretched arm scrabbling past him for the automatic pistol he’d dropped only seconds ago.

Her fingers closed around it. Clumsily she flicked the safety off, raised herself onto her elbows and squeezed the trigger.

The report of her shot was overlaid with another, louder discharge that came from behind and above her. As if swatted by a giant hand, Malden lifted off the ground, completing a half roll before landing again, this time on his back. One knee jerked up and then slid back down.

She’d just killed a man. This time when the bile rose in her throat, Tess knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep it down. Scrambling to her feet, she took a lurching step across Petrie’s body toward the door, her gaze fixed on the tired clump of bushes just beyond the walkway.

“No!”

Connor’s arm shot out as she stumbled by him. Almost losing her balance, she struck blindly out at him.

“Let me by, Connor. I’m going to be—”

Five years ago she’d gone backpacking in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Tess recalled. It had been in the weeks following the Joy Gaynor incident—which was why, on her third morning out, she’d found herself standing on a ledge a hundred feet above a valley staring into the charcoal predawn and waiting for the sun to show itself over the horizon before doing what she’d decided to do.

The sun hadn’t shown itself. Instead the heavens overhead had split open with a crash so loud that she’d clapped her hands to her ears in pain and had nearly fallen from the ledge.

But she hadn’t fallen, and the dozens of lightning strikes that had lit up the mountains over the next hours hadn’t touched her. It had been as if some Great Being had chosen that way to show her that her time to die wasn’t upon her yet, no matter what she’d intended.

When the storm had passed, she’d hiked out of the mountains, had driven back to Albuquerque and had handed in her resignation at work—just a formality, since she’d known she no longer had a future with any legitimate newspaper. Within days she’d landed her job at the Eye-Opener, and although she’d known she couldn’t put the past completely behind her, gradually she’d learned not to dwell on it.

But she’d never forgotten how that first crack of lightning in the Sangre de Cristos had sounded, Tess thought now—as if the very mountains themselves were being split asunder. So, as Connor jerked her backward, her first thought was for Joey, still hiding under the metal bedstead and a prime target for any bolt of lightning following the one that had just lit up the night in front of the motel unit, so close to Connor’s parked sedan that it actually seemed to have come from the car.

Her second thought was the realization that what she’d just seen wasn’t lightning at all, but an explos—

“Take cover! The gas tank’s going to blow next!”

Before she could react to Connor’s hoarse command, a deafening whump! came from the vicinity of the sedan. Tess had a glimpse of the car lifting off the pavement before a towering fireball of yellow flames hid it from view.

“Dammit, woman—down!”

One strong arm snugging her tightly to his body, his other hand spread protectively wide against the back of her head, Connor pulled her to him. She felt herself flying through the air, his arms around her.

They hit the motel room floor heavily a heartbeat later, Connor on the bottom and taking the brunt of the fall. In one swift movement he hooked an ankle around the nearest leg of the dresser, yanking it in front of them, but not before Tess felt a stinging sensation in the back of her thigh.

Against the front of the dresser she heard several fast thuds, as if tennis balls were being volleyed at it. Across the room the telephone jingled once and smashed to the floor. With a high, icy sound of glass shattering, pieces of the dresser’s mirror flashed around them, while sheered-off metal from the explosion outside turned into flying shrapnel.

The bed was in the safest area of the room, shielded by the half-open door of the unit from the storm of debris. Thank God she’d told Joey to hide under there.

From the parking lot outside came a metallic groaning noise that ended with a jarring crash. The abrupt silence that followed was broken only by the roar of flames.

“The car just collapsed onto its axles,” Connor muttered from somewhere near her ear. “You okay?”

He was still holding her, but as he spoke he loosened his grip and peered intently into her face. Tess nodded.

“I…I’m okay.” She heard the tremor in her voice and changed her nod to a shake of her head. “No, I’m not okay. How could I be? I…I killed a man, Connor. He was going to kill us and I didn’t have any choice, but I took a life. I killed a man.”

“You killed my car. I killed Malden,” Connor said abstractedly. He began to get to his feet. “We’ve got to get Joey out of here before the police arrive and decide to engage in a jurisdictional pissing contest with me. I’d win, but I don’t want to waste time getting into it with—”

He paused, his glance sharpening on her. Swiftly he sank back down beside her and took both her hands in his. “I killed him, Tess. I fired just before you did, and my bullet caught him in the upper chest. Your bullet was lower, which was why it ricocheted off the pavement into the car’s gas tank.”

The apparent lack of emotion in his voice was belied by his tight grip on her fingers. Virgil Connor wasn’t the man she’d first seen him as, Tess thought slowly, her gaze locked on his. She had the sudden certainty that he wasn’t even the man he saw himself as. He’d glimpsed her horror at the belief that she’d been responsible for taking Malden down, and some part of him had needed to take that horror away from her.

He got to his feet, pulling her up with him. She saw the spasm of pain that crossed his features, and realized with a start that a similar spasm had involuntarily crossed hers.

“You’re hurt.” His brows drew together. “Where?”

“My leg twinges, that’s all. I think I pulled a muscle when we landed on the floor.” He was all business again, she noted. She followed his lead. “Forget me, what about you?”

As she spoke she remembered what had happened just prior to Malden’s death. She bit back a gasp.

“You were shot, weren’t you?” Placing one palm on his chest, she began to draw aside the right lapel of his jacket. His hand clamped around her wrist, but too late to stop her.

Beneath the suit fabric one whole side of the formerly white shirt was drenched in blood. This time her gasp was audible.

“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” she said decisively. Releasing his lapel and shaking off his hand, she stepped out from behind the dresser. “Joey!” Ignoring the state of the room, she sped over to the relatively untouched area near the bed and knelt beside it. “Joey, it’s safe to come out now. Are you all right?”

“I think so.” Amazingly, as the nine-year-old scooted out on his back from under the bed like a mechanic from under a car, his eyes shone with excitement. “Wow, that was something, huh? What happened—did they use a rocket launcher or—”

His mouth dropped open as he surveyed the room. “Holy sh—”

“They didn’t use a rocket launcher,” Tess interjected quickly. “And Joey, listen to me—both of those men who came to hurt us are dead. One of them doesn’t—” She took his hands. “One of them doesn’t look so good, so when we walk out I want you to keep your eyes on me, okay? This isn’t like in the movies, and I don’t want you to see it.”

Partly visible, hunkered down on the other side of the door, Connor was covering Petrie with a blanket. But she didn’t want to take the chance of Joey catching sight of anything that might fuel his already-disturbing nightmares.

“Okay, Tess.” Joey swallowed. He squared his shoulders, his gaze still on hers. “I won’t look, but I’m not sorry they’re dead. They came here to kill me, didn’t they? They prob’ly didn’t figure on running into you.”

Connor had been right, Tess thought helplessly. She should have nipped Joey’s hero-worship of her in the bud two days ago, but now wasn’t the time to set him straight. She stood.

From somewhere farther down the row of units came raised voices, the first she’d heard since Connor had opened the door to Malden and Petrie. Obviously, some of the motel’s guests were gathering the courage to investigate.

“I guess they didn’t,” she said weakly. “But Connor was the one who mostly fought them off, and he got hurt. We’re going to have to take him to a hospital right away.”

“No, we’re not.” Connor strode toward them. “For all we know those two weren’t working alone. We’re going to put some distance between us and this place, and then I’m going to contact Jansen again and arrange a secure meet.”

Before she could protest, he went on, his tone impatient. “It’s not your call, Tess. Come on, let’s go.”

The body by the door was just a shape beneath the blanket Connor had thrown over it, and although Malden still lay outside on the walkway, mercifully his prone figure was obscured by shadows. Still, as she hurried Joey by, Tess found herself envying Connor’s seeming unconcern.

He was Belacana, non-Navajo, she reminded herself. To him a dead body was just a dead body. Even if he understood what an Enemy Way was, the concept of a warrior undergoing a ceremony to rid himself of the ghosts of those he’d killed wouldn’t fit his logical view of the world.

She didn’t know how much credence she put in the old beliefs herself, she thought unhappily as they headed across the parking lot. All she knew was that she wished she had some—

“I got corn pollen,” Joey said beside her in a small voice. His backpack slung over his shoulder, he fumbled under the grimy neckband of his tee. “I think you’re supposed to sprinkle some on your tongue and your head. That’s what Mac told me when he gave it to me, anyway.”

“Mac? John MacLeish?”

Connor was ahead of them, but from the stiffening of his posture as she spoke, Tess knew he’d heard her reference to the man the FBI was hunting. Too bad, Agent, she thought with a spurt of defiance. If you think I’m going to take this opportunity to see if Joey’s memory’s starting to come back, you’re wrong. Right now us two Dineh have more important business to attend to.

“Yeah. He said the worst thing that could happen to a man was if he forgot who he was and where he came from. He told me I should be proud to be one of the People.” Joey glanced up. “Some kids had been ragging me, calling me a dumb Indian.”

“I see.”

She did see, Tess thought. The hardscrabble environment of the streets was a perfect breeding ground for ignorance and racism; although also, from what she understood Joey to be saying, equally a place where a homeless man’s rough kindness could reveal itself in giving the gift of pride to a child. For the first time she found herself wondering what kind of person the mysterious MacLeish was. A killer, yes, judging from the Agency’s case against him. But he’d seemingly behaved with compassion and sensitivity toward the boy.