Are you sure about this source of yours?”
“Sure enough. I got an email update while you were texting your assistant about what we were doing at her cabin last night and why you won’t be coming into work tomorrow.”
She summoned a pleasant expression. “If I said I hate you, would you be kind and ditch me in Ben’s Creek?”
“I’ll take that to mean you want to stop. Next place we pass, I promise.”
True to his word, ten minutes later he pulled off the ancient two-lane highway that was probably only used by logging trucks now and into a dusty roadside clearing, complete with a tippy wooden shack, two gas pumps and a rear yard full of abandoned vehicles.
Alessandra took one look, stuck his hat on her head and shoved the door open. “I hate you, McBride. This place better have a washroom.”
To her relief, it had two. The man tearing a seat out of an ancient Oldsmobile took one look at her and stabbed a thumb at the shack. “Ellie’s my wife. Buy one of her blackberry pies, and she’ll let you use her private john.”
Alessandra thanked him, bought two pies and was immediately ushered into Ellie’s paying-customers-only washroom.
It smelled like pine cleaner and the toilet did flush—if she pulled really hard on the chain. The cold-water tap almost worked, as well. The mirror didn’t. A haze over the glass gave her face a tintype-photo look that would have made her laugh if she hadn’t glimpsed the remnants of an old bus through the window behind her. The thing had fallen on its side like a drunk elephant with its fire-blackened underside fully exposed.
For a motionless moment, Alessandra’s throat muscles seized, so badly that she couldn’t swallow. Voices swarmed in her head.
An elderly man: “I’m off to Chicago to visit my brother….”
A geek: “I’ll have this textbook read by the time we hit the city limits….”
A wispy woman from Arizona: “Excuse me, do you suffer from motion sickness…?”
A young marine: “I’m getting married in three months….”
Words and faces overlapped. She felt the floor moving, the bus skidding, rolling. She heard glass shatter, metal shriek, murmurs turn to screams.
With a huge effort, Alessandra tore her eyes from the mirror. But not until she saw another face that drifted in. McBride.
Sexy, smoke-gray eyes stared at her. “Don’t worry, I’m a cop. Give me your hand. I’ll get you out of here….”
“You all right, dear?” A rusty female voice shattered the spell.
Alessandra jolted back to the present. She breathed out, dried her hands and checked her reflection one last time. “I’m fine, thank you.”
When she opened the door, Ellie offered a toothy, yellow smile. “I thought maybe you’d passed out from the heat. We don’t get many customers here, us being so remote and all. When we do, I like to give them a special parting gift.”
Letting her smile grow bigger, she produced a knife from the pocket of her apron.
Chapter Five
The knife was the second thing McBride saw when he turned the corner inside the shack. The first was the startled expression on Alessandra’s face. He would have knocked the woman called Ellie through the paper-thin wall if Alessandra hadn’t glanced up and given her head a shake.
“It’s to cut the pies,” she told him quickly, and recaptured the woman’s attention with a smile. “Thank you, for the pies and the gift.”
Fifteen minutes later, and on the road yet again, McBride asked her, “You weren’t sure about that knife at first, were you?”
She examined the serrated blade. “No, and I put the blame for my mistrust squarely on your shoulders. I used to think people were basically nice and well meaning. Lately, I see everyone as a potential front for a hit man.” A sparkle in her eyes softened her words. “You are such a badass, McBride.”
“Had a chat with Eddie while he was holding you, huh?”
“Yes, and I relayed our entire conversation to you while you were bleeding all over that old logging camp. How’s your shoulder?”
“Poultice is helping.”
After she tucked the knife away, he felt her eyes slide in his direction. “Your way’s not working, is it?”
Damn. She knew him too well. Now it was time to either jump out of the truck or irritate her into silence by pretending not to know what she meant. He did neither.
“The dangerous cases just come to me, Alessandra. I don’t go looking for them.”
“Yes, you do. The more the danger, the more you like it. Because even though you balk at a by-the-book approach, you always get the job done. You were never meant to be married, or anything more than superficially involved with a woman. We made a mistake, an incredibly hot one for a while, but our marriage was wrong from the start. Death is your shadow, McBride. Except that one day the roles will be reversed. Death will be real, and you’ll be the shadow. I need you to sign the divorce papers.”
His stomach clenched, but beyond that, he didn’t react. Didn’t want to think about Alessandra as part of his past. He knew it was unfair to her, and really, if he’d been asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain to anyone, least of all himself, why he rejected the thought of divorce so completely.
“McBride, look out!”
When she made a grab for the wheel, he swore. Directly in front of them, in the middle of the road, stood a white-tailed doe and two half-grown fawns. He swerved, hit the brakes and felt the truck begin to slide.
The back end struck something—not one of the deer, he hoped—fishtailed and slammed into a large spruce. Which was the only thing that kept them from falling into the creek bed some thirty feet below.
Several seconds passed before Alessandra released a slow breath. “If it’s any consolation, we missed the deer. Did we damage anything?”
“Only the outer edges of my pride.”
Her eyes danced a little. “So nothing important, then.”
“I’ll let you know in a minute.”
It didn’t take half that time to determine that the rear axle was bent. Not undrivable, but the work needed would cost more than just money.
With Alessandra’s help, McBride changed the flattened left tire and limped the truck the rest of the way to Ben’s Creek.
One of the things he’d always appreciated—and, yes, loved—about Alessandra was that she never bitched or berated. She did what she could, what she had to and left the rest to him.
The unpaved road widened, the terrain began to open up and the woods thinned as they approached the valley town of Ben’s Creek. Small houses dotted the landscape. He saw a kid with an iPod, train
