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A biker gang? Seriously? Someone drove by when she desperately needed help and it was these guys? She stayed crouched down low.
The first rider roared past her. A dozen more filed by after him. Should she ask them for help?
The decision was made for her. The rider in the front slowed, made a U-turn across the highway, and then headed back. He rode up closer to her and stopped. Then he put his hand down to the side and made a backing motion. The other riders came to a stop a few yards away. He killed his engine.
Now what? There was no point in hiding, so she stood. Her calf muscles registered a cramped, painful protest.
He pulled off his helmet and rested it on his thigh. “Need some help?” He stayed seated on his chopper. His hair was dark and short, almost a military cut. His eyes were hidden in the shadows cast by the other riders’ headlights.
He didn’t smile, but his tone was friendly enough. The fact that he wasn’t trying to charm her made him seem somewhat more trustworthy.
At this point, what did she have to lose? “I had a little trouble,” she said.
He nodded. “I can see that.”
“And I can’t get reception on my phone.”
He kicked out the kickstand on his motorcycle and stood up. Medium height. Medium build. Not a huge guy, but there was something imposing about the way he moved, nevertheless. He swung a leg over his bike and started toward her, his heavy boots crunching atop the loose gravel on the road. She was already pressed up against her car or she would have backed up. He finally stopped a couple of paces away from her, reached a leather-gloved hand into his pocket and pulled out a small satellite phone. He glanced at the screen. “Here, my phone’s working.”
She hesitated to close the gap between them. But if he meant her harm, why would he go through such an elaborate act? She reached for the phone, her trembling hand betraying her fear. “Thanks.” The wallpaper on the screen was a black oval with a silver sword in the middle. Beneath it were the words Vanquish the Darkness. Olivia had no idea what that meant. She wasn’t about to ask.
* * *
The woman was in trouble and Elijah could tell it went well beyond her battered car. He’d spotted her crouched by the car, eyes wide with fear, looking like a cornered coyote ready to bolt.
Elijah continually scanned his surroundings, paid attention to small details and saw a lot of things other people never noticed. “Head on a swivel” was the term they’d used over in the sandbox. The practice of looking everywhere, all the time, was a skill he’d first learned in Iraq and later used in Afghanistan. A habit that had kept him alive, and one he didn’t plan to ever lose.
The woman watched him warily while she looked up a contact on her own phone and then punched the numbers into his. He didn’t mean her harm, but she didn’t know that. He’d left his phone on speaker and she didn’t change the setting, so a few seconds later he was surprised to hear a familiar voice say, “Elijah, honey, is that you?”
The woman stared at him, eyes widened. Her jaw dropped slightly. “Aunt Claudia?” she finally said into the phone. “Is that you?”
There was a pause, and then, “Olivia?”
“Yes!”
Elijah could practically see relief cascading over Olivia as her shoulders relaxed.
Olivia. So this was the grandniece Claudia Sweeney had been telling everyone in town about for the past two weeks. The first blood relative to come visit the eighty-year-old woman in as long as Elijah could remember. Of course she was bringing trouble with her. She hadn’t seen fit to visit her great-aunt in the past, which meant she was probably here now because she wanted something.
He watched her shift her weight back and forth, nervously glancing up and down the highway. She was trying to outrun some kind of trouble, which meant she was bringing it to the doorstep of a woman who’d always treated Elijah like family. If her problems caused harm to Claudia, she was going to find herself moving on a lot sooner than she thought.
“Are you already here in town?” Claudia asked.
“Not yet,” Olivia answered. “I’m still on the highway.” She glanced back toward her car. “I’ve had some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” Concern was evident in the way Claudia carefully spoke each word. “And why are you calling on Elijah Morales’s phone?”
Olivia turned back to face Elijah and moved the phone slightly away from her face. “Is your name Elijah Morales?”
He nodded once.
“Do you know my great-aunt Claudia?”
“Claudia Sweeney? Yes.”
She knit her brows together. “How do you know her?”
“We’re neighbors. And we go to church together.”
She stared at him, and then turned her gaze to his buddies before finally turning back to him.
“Do all of you guys go to church with my aunt?” She strung out the words, hesitating between each one, as if they didn’t quite make sense when she put them together.
Elijah felt one corner of his mouth twitch slightly upward with the hint of a half smile. Yes, he was well aware that they didn’t look like your typical church group. For himself, he certainly wasn’t pretty as a picture. The scars on his face were small, but people noticed them. Some of his fellow riders looked a little rough, too. He chose his friends based on their character and gave no thought to how they looked to anyone else. But how do you explain that in a few quick seconds to a woman who looks as if she’s on the verge of panic?
You don’t.
He glanced at her car jammed up against a sapling that had nearly snapped in half, and then he looked back at her. “It’s a crazy world.”
She actually laughed. Only once, but it seemed to help calm her. Eventually he would press her a little harder for details on what had happened. Right now he just wanted to help her hold it together, assist her with her car and get her someplace safe.
“Olivia!” Through the phone, Claudia was trying to get her attention.
“I’m here,” Olivia mumbled, sounding dazed.
“Why don’t you hand the phone back to Elijah? Let me talk to him and find out where you are so I can figure out what we need to do.”
“Okay.” Olivia held out the phone to Elijah. “She wants to talk to you.”
“I’ll have your niece on her way as soon as I can,” Elijah said into the phone.
“Would you take me off speaker?”
“Sure.” He hit the button. “You’re off speaker.”
“Is she really all right?” Claudia asked.
Elijah wondered that himself as he started walking around her car to take a closer look. The glow from a dozen motorcycle headlights gave him a pretty decent view. There were the expected scrapes and scratches along the sides of the car that probably came from the rocks and trees once she’d gone off road. But there were dents on the back bumper, too.
“She seems all right,” he said into the phone. “Her car’s wrecked, though. One of us needs to hang up and call Ricky so he can fire up his tow truck and get her car.”
“I’ll do that right now,” Claudia said.
After they disconnected, he walked down the highway looking for the spot where Olivia’s car had left the road.
He found it. It looked as if Olivia had turned off the road deliberately. If there were skid marks showing she’d tried to brake, it was too dark to see them.
“A tow truck will be here soon,” he said when he got back to her. “Want to tell me what happened?”
“I ran off the road.” She turned away, suddenly very interested in looking everywhere but at him.
She was hiding something.
Elijah would have to find out what that was. Claudia Sweeney might be Olivia’s blood relative, but she’d been Elijah’s neighbor for his entire life. He was not about to let anything happen to her. Painted Rock was full of people he cared about. If trouble was coming to his town, he wanted to know about it.
TWO (#ulink_0847150d-7a8f-56c1-97a6-9a2662e5bf20)
As soon as Olivia’s car was loaded onto the flatbed of the tow truck and Olivia was safely stowed in the cab with Ricky, Elijah’s fellow riders headed for their homes while Elijah rode ahead to Claudia’s house to wait for Olivia’s arrival. He wasn’t leaving until he knew exactly what was going on.
“It’s a shame Olivia had car trouble on top of everything else,” Claudia said quietly.
“Yes, ma’am,” Elijah agreed. He didn’t know what “everything else” was, but he would find out.
He was sitting on his motorcycle in front of Claudia’s house, a frontier Victorian with pink, yellow and lavender gingerbread. Claudia stood near the bottom of the wooden steps leading to the wraparound porch. At just over six feet tall, Claudia’s regal bearing hadn’t been stooped by the advancing years. But it had turned her formerly auburn hair to silver. She wore it tied in a loose bun, like usual, but in honor of her niece’s visit, she’d dressed up in a long denim skirt and a red flowery blouse. Two of her dogs, Jasper and Feldspar, sat by her feet while the third, Opal, nosed around a flower bed.
“So you and the guys were just out riding and happened to come across Olivia?” Claudia asked.
“We were coming back from a home visit. We dropped off a gift card to the grocery store, then rode around and gunned the engines a few times for the kids. I took the oldest kid for a short ride, we handed out a few toys and then we left. We were on our way back when I saw her.”
The tow truck with Olivia’s car finally turned into the circular drive. Elijah got off his bike and walked over to stand beside his adopted “aunt.” She clenched her blue-veined hands with impatient excitement while waiting for Olivia to climb out of Ricky’s tow truck. Elijah hadn’t breathed a word of his wariness about her grandniece to her. She’d been so anxious for this moment, he didn’t want to spoil it. Not unless he had to.
The tow truck squeaked to a stop and Olivia opened her cab door. Elijah strode over and offered up a hand to help her out.
“I can manage,” she said tightly, so he stepped back.
Ricky hopped out of the driver’s side of the truck and started to pull Olivia’s luggage from the compartment behind the cab.
Elijah grabbed a couple of bags. If that annoyed Olivia, too bad.
Olivia grabbed a duffel bag and frowned at him. “Thanks for your help, but I can take care of things from here.”
She thought she could dismiss him? That was cute.
He walked beside her across the drive and caught her biting her bottom lip when she saw an Oso County Sheriff’s Department patrol car pull in.
Ricky had called for a deputy while they were still out on the highway. Olivia had stepped away to talk to the lawman when he arrived, so Elijah hadn’t been able to hear their conversation. Deputy Bedford was newly assigned to Painted Rock. He’d been pretty closemouthed after talking to Olivia, walking around with a flashlight and looking at her car and at the surface of the road.
Since it was impossible to see very far down the winding road in the darkness, even using the spotlight on his patrol car, Bedford had wanted to drive down the highway and look for skid marks or debris. He’d told them he’d meet them at Claudia’s house to wrap up the incident.
Elijah and Olivia reached the bottom of the porch steps and set down their bags.
“You made it!” Claudia cried out in delight, wrapping her arms around her niece and rocking her slightly from side to side.
“Finally.” Olivia’s voice was muffled as she obediently stayed wrapped in her great-aunt’s enthusiastic embrace.
Elijah couldn’t see any resemblance between them. Claudia, with her big bones and impressive height, towered over Olivia, who was average height, but scrawny looking.
Ricky yelled out “good-bye” as he jumped back in his truck and headed for his garage with Olivia’s car.
Deputy Bedford got out of his patrol car carrying a clipboard.
“Good evening, Mrs. Sweeney.” He nodded at Claudia as he walked up. Claudia and Olivia were still at the bottom of the porch steps, each with an arm wrapped around the other. Elijah noticed Claudia tightening her hold on her niece as the deputy came closer.
“I saw some fresh skid marks on the road that came from wider tires than yours, just as you described,” Bedford said. Olivia nodded.
“Any chance there’s a bigger story you want to tell me?” Bedford added.
“What do you mean?”
Bedford looked at her for a moment. “Someone taps your bumper twice, passes you, then comes back and forces you off the highway. That doesn’t sound like an accident. That sounds personal. Who would do that? And why?”
Those were the questions Elijah wanted to ask.
“Someone threatened to kill me back in Las Vegas,” Olivia said. “Maybe the guy who drove me off the road tonight was him. Maybe not.” She glanced at Claudia, her eyebrows raised in an unspoken plea for understanding. “I’d hoped I’d get away from him here, but now it looks like I’ll have to move on.”
So that was why Olivia had come to Painted Rock. She was running for her life. And potentially putting Claudia in harm’s way.
Deputy Bedford cocked his head slightly to one side. “Who was the man who threatened your life?”
“His name is Ted Kurtz. He’s an attorney in Las Vegas.”
“The man you testified against? I ran your name through the computer. As soon as I saw the pictures, I recognized you from the news stories on TV.”
Olivia had been on TV? Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away. If anything made the news there, it usually made the news in Painted Rock. But Elijah didn’t have much time for TV. “What happened?” he asked.
Olivia glared at him. Then she turned back to the deputy and lifted her chin, as if daring him to take his best shot. She was tough. Elijah had to give her that. She might have looked terrified crouching by her car out on the highway, but she’d looked determined then, too.
“I worked at a safe house for battered women in Las Vegas,” Olivia said, her voice flat and emotionless. “We had a woman stay with us on three different occasions over the course of about six months. Eventually she told us her name, Marion Kurtz, and that her husband was Ted Kurtz. He’s a big-shot defense attorney with links to organized crime.”
Her gaze shifted to something just beyond Elijah’s shoulder. Sorrow filled her eyes and the defiant line of her lips slackened. Elijah knew from experience what was happening. She was looking into the past.
“We tried to get Marion into counseling, get her out of danger, get her to file a police report and press charges. She’d show some interest, but then she wouldn’t follow through.” Olivia’s voice began to waver a little. “Finally, Marion came in with a black eye, a broken nose and a split lip. She said she was ready to press charges and leave her husband.”
Elijah dreaded hearing where her story might go.
“But she didn’t leave him and she never filed a police report. She decided to give him one more chance after he promised he would change. A week later Marion ended up in the hospital ICU, unconscious for two days.” Olivia’s voice caught, and she stopped talking for a few seconds to clear her throat. “When she regained consciousness, she claimed it had been a random attack. But later, she told me her husband had done it. She wouldn’t repeat that to the police, though, because Ted told her she wouldn’t survive if she did. He’d defended people in court who owed him favors. People who could make her disappear.”
Claudia reached over to brush the hair from Olivia’s face. “Honey, given the situation, no one can blame you for what you did.”
Olivia looked up at her. “If it hadn’t been for you...” Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I knew his alibi was a complete lie,” she continued. “I wanted to make any potential jurors question it, so when I testified before the grand jury, so they could determine whether the case would go to trial, I claimed I saw him at a time and place when I actually didn’t.”
“Oh, honey.” Claudia shook her head.
“I saw Marion in the hospital. I saw what he did to her. I was angry and I wanted to do something to make sure he wouldn’t be able to hurt her again.” Olivia shoved her hands in her pockets. “I regretted the lie almost as soon as I told it. A few days later I retracted my statement.”
She turned to Elijah. “Without enough evidence to move forward with the trial, the charges against Kurtz were dropped. Charges were filed against me, but they were eventually dropped, too. Marion had permanent hearing loss and some other physical issues, but she did file for divorce. Things looked like they were blowing over.
“Then three weeks ago Kurtz came up to me while I was walking down a sidewalk. I didn’t see him coming—he was just suddenly there beside me. He told me he was going to kill me. Things hadn’t blown over for him. Old rumors about him had taken on a new life. Stories that he was violent, that his hair-trigger temper made him unhinged. That he’d hurt people before.
