drunk isn’t a big deal,” he pointed out. Escobar might not have cared that his brother was inconvenienced and out a few hundred dollars for the fine, especially if Mac was guilty. But something bigger like desertion or murder, something that carried a bigger punishment than a night in jail and a fine, that he very well might care about.
“What does it matter if the cops are corrupt?” Bailey asked. “You can turn MacGregor over to the state cops or the state bureau of investigation or the Army or someone.”
She was right about his options. There were any number of agencies who would be more than happy to make an arrest on a double homicide. But the question mattered because he didn’t want to kill any cops, not even dirty ones, along with MacGregor.
“You are intending to turn him over,” she said tentatively when he offered no response.
He scowled at her. “I told you, I’m no murderer.” He had killed a lot of people, but not one who hadn’t been trying to kill him at the same time. If he needed the rationalization, he had no doubt Mac would try to kill him, too. But he wasn’t intending to rationalize his actions. His plan was simple: Mac was going to die.
One way or another—self-defense or cold-blooded murder—Logan was going to kill him.
The sun had long since set when they finally stopped for the night. Bailey, so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open, roused when Logan pulled up to the entrance of a motel a few hundred yards off the interstate in El Paso. As he went inside, she straightened in her seat, then looked around.
Light spilled from everywhere—street lamps, neon signs, headlights—to dispel the night’s darkness. The area was typical for its location—fast-food restaurants, motels ranging from good to beyond seedy, bars, gas stations and convenience stores. This particular motel—not good, but not seedy—shared its parking lot with a two-pump station and a convenience store and its roof with an establishment identified in pink neon as Pepe’s Cantina. The vehicles on the motel side of the lot were mostly big rigs, on the cantina side, mostly pickups and nondescript sedans. Logan’s GTX stood out, while her car would have blended right in.
Logan returned with a key, hardly noticing that she was alert, and drove to the side lot away from Pepe’s. She’d passed the last two hundred miles in an exhaustion-induced fog, wanting desperately to stretch out somewhere and sleep. He’d shown no such interest, though, and damned if she was going to whine or plead for a break.
He parked in front of Room 17, hefted his duffel out of the trunk, then left her to retrieve her own bags and close the trunk. By the time she did so and made it to the sidewalk, he was already inside the room, turning on lights and lowering the temperature on the air conditioner.
The room was about as clean as she expected—she wouldn’t walk barefooted on the carpet, but crawling under the covers wouldn’t give her the willies. She dropped her bags on the bed farther from the door. Only the need for the bathroom and a slathering of moisturizer on her wind-burned skin kept her from joining them.
Feeling marginally better when she came out of the bathroom, Bailey grabbed her tote off the bed, set it on the counter next to the sink, then spun back around. Her suitcase was where she’d left it, Logan’s duffel was where he’d left it and the door was closed…but there was no sign of Logan. She reached the door in three strides and jerked it open. The GTX was still parked outside, but its owner was nowhere to be seen. Damnation! Where had he gone, what was he doing and why had she let him out of her sight?
Walking back into the room, she closed the door hard. The rush of air sent a piece of paper fluttering from the foot of the first bed onto the stained carpet. Gone to Pepe’s for a beer, it read in sharp, bold letters.
Great. Instead of crawling into bed and getting the sleep she craved, she was going to spend the next however long in a smoky, noisy bar drinking a beer she didn’t want just so she could keep an eye on the partner who didn’t want her. Wonderful.
“Lexy, I hope you appreciate this,” she muttered as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door.
Pepe’s Cantina didn’t disappoint. As bars went, she’d been in worse—Thelma’s immediately came to mind—but she’d seen plenty better. The lighting was too dim by half, the music too loud by half, the air too polluted to breathe. Before she’d gone ten feet inside the door, a niggling pain started in her forehead with the intention of becoming a full-blown headache.
After giving her eyes time to adjust to the low light, she scanned the crowd. There were a lot of men wearing cowboy hats, a lot of women with big hair. Everyone’s jeans were tight, their smiles bright, their moods cheery. They’d come out tonight with the goal of having a good time and, by God, they weren’t going to fail.
Except for the lone man standing at the bar. He leaned his elbows against the scarred wood, dangled a bottle in one hand and gazed at the couples on the dance floor with a nine-mile stare.
She made her way across the room, slid onto the stool next to him and ordered a beer before swiveling to face him and smiling brightly. “If you’d mentioned you wanted a beer, I would have walked over with you.”
“If I’d wanted you to come with me, I would have mentioned it.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth and took a healthy swallow. “I figured you’d be snoring away by now.”
“I don’t snore.”
“Of course you don’t. That was just a funny little rattle the car developed a hundred miles ago.”
She would have said she hadn’t slept in the car—tried to, wanted to, even drifted into a state of semiconsciousness, but never actually slept. But she didn’t argue the point with him. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Why would I be?”
“Because you drove over six hundred miles today.”
He glanced at her for a moment before twisting farther around to catch the bartender’s attention and order another beer. “Six hundred miles is nothing,” he said, then added, “However, six hundred miles with you…”
The bartender delivered both beers at once. Bailey took a sip of hers, cold and sour, and thought longingly about the bed awaiting her. If she offered a respite from her company in exchange for his car keys, would he agree? Maybe. Definitely, if he had a spare set of keys somewhere.
Turning the stool, she faced the dance floor, as Logan was doing, and took another small sip of beer. Without a doubt, he was the best-looking guy in the place, as well as the least approachable. Though the women gave him admiring looks, not one hit on him, asked him to dance or even did more than smile hesitantly on the way past.
She wasn’t so lucky. She’d managed to down maybe a third of her beer when a bear of a man walked right up to her, stopping a little too close and greeting her with a grin. “Hey, darlin’, wanna dance?”
He was very big, broad-shouldered and muscular. His beard was neatly trimmed, his long hair pulled into a ponytail. He wasn’t scary or even unattractive. He just roused zero interest in her. She smiled politely and said, “No, thank you.”
“Oh, come on. I’m good on the dance floor.”
“I’m not.”
He gave her a long look that started at her face and drifted its way down to her toes, and the grin widened. “Now I don’t believe
