Safe by the Marshal's Side. Shirlee McCoy

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      TWO

      One hour and five minutes.

      That was how long Annie had been sitting silently in the back of Hunter’s SUV. Sophia had drifted off to sleep minutes after the ride began. Annie wished she could fall asleep as easily. She was exhausted, but too wound up and scared to close her eyes.

      Hunter had said everything would be okay, but it didn’t feel okay. It felt as if she was running away again, killers on her trail.

      An image flashed through her head—blood on old linoleum. Joe gasping for breath. She thought she could smell the sharp scent of gunfire in the air.

      “Where are we going?” she asked. Anything to stop the memories.

      “Another safe house,” Hunter responded tersely. He’d been on his radio twice since they’d left the safe house. Neither conversation had made him happy. Not enough information to go on. That was what he’d told her when she’d asked for an update on what had been thrown into the safe-house yard.

      That hadn’t surprised her. In the time that she’d known him, he’d proved to be a man of few words. Usually that didn’t bother her. Live and let live. That was the way her parents had raised her. Be kind, be patient, show love. Those had been the tenets of their faith, and they were the keystones of Annie’s, too.

      Right at that moment, though, she was out of patience with Hunter. “Can you be a little more specific?”

      “No.”

      “Why not?”

      “It’s better if you don’t know the address.”

      That seemed to be his argument for everything. It’s better if you stay inside. It’s better if you don’t call your family. It’s better if you sit in the back of my car and be quiet and let me figure everything out.

      “It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone where we’re going.”

      “I know.”

      “Then tell me. I’m an adult. I have a child. I think I have the right to know.”

      “You picked a bad night to assert yourself, Annie.”

      “The way I see it, I should have asserted myself a long time ago,” she replied. She’d spent a year going by a new name, living as a different person and doing absolutely everything Hunter had told her to do. She hadn’t questioned him because she’d wanted to protect Sophia.

      The baby. Don’t let anything happen to the baby.

      Joe had gasped those words with his last breath. Late at night, when it was quiet and dark, they’d echo in Annie’s head until she had to get up and touch Sophia’s cheek, make sure that she was okay.

      “Only you can decide that,” he said calmly. “But for the record, I’m following protocol. That’s what’s kept you safe for a year.”

      “You’re not the only one who wants to keep me safe, Hunter. I have a vested interest in it, too. I have a baby who needs me. I have to make sure I’m around for her.”

      “She’s not really a baby anymore, is she?” he asked. “A couple of days ago, she said my name. Clear as day.”

      He was trying to distract her. A new move for Hunter. He usually stuck to facts and figures and orders. Maybe he sensed how close to the edge of panic she was.

      Her parents had told her not to testify.

      They’d begged her to move to a new town, stay away from St. Louis and forget what she’d seen. They’d been afraid that if she agreed to testify, she’d end up like Joe. At the time, Annie had thought that Joe had been an innocent bystander, a guy who’d gotten in the way of a robbery and been killed because of it. She’d wanted nothing more than to see his killers thrown in jail, so she’d refused her parents’ advice.

      She’d received a lot of new information since then, but she still wanted the men who’d killed her husband to pay for their crimes.

      “Someone found me at the safe house, Hunter,” she finally said. “Talking about Sophia won’t change that.”

      “I know, but I thought it might help you relax.” He glanced into the rearview mirror, offering a rare smile. It changed his face, made him less austere and more approachable.

      “It’s hard to relax when someone wants me dead.”

      “We don’t know that there’s a price on your head.”

      “But you think that Saunders and Fiske want to keep me from testifying against them. You told me that if they killed Joe, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” She’d believed him because she’d seen the look in Luke Saunders’s eyes after he’d shot Joe. Triumph. Excitement. Just thinking about it made her stomach churn.

      “Unless they’ve been able to arrange for the hit from their prison cells, what happened tonight could just be—”

      “I saw the person at the back fence. I know something was tossed into the yard. Don’t try to tell me that it was some New Year’s reveler. I’m not going to believe it.”

      “I wouldn’t lie to you, Annie,” he said quietly, and she thought that he probably meant it.

      But Joe had said the same thing so many times, she’d almost СКАЧАТЬ