The Perfect Outsider. Лорет Энн Уайт

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СКАЧАТЬ going to give you three words,” she said. “Radio, belt, Jesse. Can you memorize them for me? I’m going to ask you to repeat them to me in a little while, okay?”

      “Radio, belt, Jesse,” he repeated. “Got it.”

      His voice was beautiful, she thought, deep and husky like Matt’s used to be. Matt had been fair, but similar in stature to this man—an ace helicopter pilot she’d met on one of her very first recue missions. She’d loved going camping with Matt—loved the way fire smoke lingered in his checked lumberjack shirt, how the stubble on his cheeks grew rough in the wilderness. Emotion pricked into her eyes. June pushed it away, startled at the freshness of it all. It had been five years. She’d dealt with it.

      “You sure you don’t recall firing your weapon?” she said, trying another angle as she taped more butterfly sutures to the cut on his temple. Eager was watching obediently from the side, waiting for new directions.

      “No.”

      “But you knew you had a gun—you went for it at your hip.”

      “I … guess.”

      “And you’re sure you didn’t see a young mother and her children in the woods?”

      “No!” Frustration bit into his tone “I’m not the hell sure of anything.”

      He was scared of what was happening to him, thought June.

      “Why do you have that little red shoe?”

      He was quiet a moment, then his eyes flickered as if a memory suddenly crossed before them. “I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

      June wondered if he was lying.

      “That shoe—” she jerked her chin to where it lay “—belongs to a three-year-old twin. She and her sister call them their Dorothy shoes. They like to take them everywhere so they can put them on and click their heels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and be home safe whenever they need to be. Their names are Rebecca and Abigail. Their mother is Lacy Matthews. Lacy runs the coffee shop in town. They’ve been missing in these woods for two nights, and I’m thinking the girls will be wanting their magic shoes to take them home about now.”

      His gaze went to the shoe and he stared at it as if he’d never seen it before in his life.

      “There, that should tide you over,” she said as she applied a bandage over the sutures.

      He pulled up his jeans zipper, buckled his belt and immediately tried to get to his feet, but he swayed and slumped heavily back to the ground.

      “Easy, big guy,” she said, helping him back up by the arm. “You lost a fair bit of blood. Move too fast and you’re going down like a rock.”

      “I need to go—” He started to stumble through the brush, then swayed and leaned heavily on her. “I’ve got to get to …” His voice faded, and his features twisted in frustration.

      “Get to where?” she said.

      “I … Jesus, I don’t know. I was going somewhere. Urgent—had to do something … important, for someone. Something … dangerous.”

      A chill trickled down her spine.

      “Do something for whom? Samuel Grayson?”

      “I … The name feels familiar.”

      “Yeah,” she said bitterly. “He’d be the one who tattooed your hip. Can you walk, if you lean on me like this?” She hooked his big arm around her neck, taking the brunt of his weight across her shoulders.

      June began to help him up the bank. He was solid muscle and their progress was slow. When the bank got too steep, she let him climb in front of her while she supported him from behind. She also wanted to be in a position where she could draw her gun again if she had to.

      June’s immediate goal was to get this injured stranger into the safe house, further assess his condition and administer whatever additional medical aid she could. Then she was going to press him hard on the whereabouts of Lacy and the twins—he was her only clue right now.

      She’d also ask the others in the house if they’d seen him around Cold Plains. If they did recognize the stranger as one of Samuel’s cult enforcers, she’d keep him under lock and key, fetch Hawk Bledsoe and hand him over to the FBI.

      Hawk was one of the few people June could totally trust in this surreal, picture-perfect and sick little town. Four months ago Hawk’s sister-in-law, Mia, had been brought to an EXIT psychologist for “deprogramming,” which is how EXIT had got wind of the cult in Cold Plains.

      Mia had told EXIT there were other members who wanted to get out, but they had no resources and were afraid for their lives if they spoke out against Samuel. Mia had passed on the name of Hannah Mendes, a widow in her seventies with a ranch on the outskirts of Cold Plains. Hannah had been trying to set up a safe halfway house with the aid of her sister-in-law from Little Gulch over in the next valley. EXIT had contacted June and asked if she’d run the house and help Hannah with an evacuation program. They presently had five people in the safe house waiting to move into an EXIT program, and June had done the early stages of counseling with them. Lacy and her twins would have brought the number of occupants to eight.

      As they edged up over the ravine lip, rain was coming down hard again and the wind soughed, swirling mist like wraiths through the trees. Dawn had done little to dissipate the gloomy eeriness of the forest. June paused and gave the stranger some water. His face had a pallor that worried her, and he was weakening.

      “Where are we going?” he said, handing her water bottle back to her.

      “Shelter. A safe place.” Hooking his arm over her neck again, supporting his weight with her shoulders, June led him through the trees toward a hidden crevasse that would lead into caves and a tunnel to Hidden Valley on the other side of the mountain. That’s where the safe house was.

      As he began to lean more heavily on her, June prayed she wasn’t taking a cult enforcer, her worst kind of enemy, into the very heart of their safe house.

      Chapter 2

      As they neared the opening of the crevasse that led to the cave tunnel, the pager on June’s hip sounded. Tension whipped through her. She leaned her shoulder against the rock face, the stranger heavy against her body as she checked the page.

      Chief Fargo.

      Her pulse quickened. The police chief was probably wondering why she and Eager hadn’t shown up with the rest of the SAR team at first light this morning. June would never make it down there in time now, not if she had to take this injured man back to the safe house first. Sweat prickled over her lip.

      With the FBI’s noose tightening around Samuel, and with more and more of his Devotees disappearing into some rumored safe house, the entire town was on edge, looking for the traitor among them. The last thing June needed was to give Fargo, Samuel or anyone else in Cold Plains cause to suspect her.

      As part of her of her cover, June rented an outbuilding on Hannah Mendes’s ranch as her “official” residence in Cold Plains СКАЧАТЬ