and knees were scraped raw from hitting the sidewalk. The street was dark. No BMW. No Landry Jones.
Three sets of eyes stared at her at ground level, only one set human. The dogs were big and wonderfully muttlike. The man knelt next to her, looking scared and upset.
Willa began to cry. “That car that was chasing me….”
“It went on past,” the man said.
Her hands and knees began to ache and she saw that her dress that she’d bought especially for the showing was ruined. Her new shoes were back down the street where she’d kicked them off.
“Are you sure the car was chasing you?”
One of the dogs licked her in the face. She put her arm around its neck, hugging it tightly for a moment before she dug her cell phone out of her purse and punched in 911.
Chapter Three
Landry couldn’t believe how badly things had gone. What a nightmare. Simon was dead. So was Zeke. Zeke.
He put his head in his hands. What the hell had happened?
Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that, he thought as he gingerly touched his side. He’d been lucky. Although the wound had bled like hell, it hadn’t been life threatening. Still, he’d had a hell of a time finding a doctor to stitch him up and make sure it didn’t get infected. It wasn’t like he could just walk into an emergency room. By law, doctors were required to report gunshot wounds.
He’d had to find a doctor he could trust not to turn him in. He couldn’t chance using Freddy D.’s or any of the ones the cops knew about.
The wound, though, had turned out to be the least of his problems. Since that night, he’d been a hunted man. Willa St. Clair’s eyewitness testimony that he’d shot Zeke Hartung down in cold blood had every cop on the force and the feds after him—not to mention Freddy D. and his boys.
For days Landry had been on the run, keeping his head down, but he’d known from the get-go that he couldn’t keep this up. He had to find that damned disk. The proof he needed was on it. Without the disk, he was a dead man.
He’d come close to getting the girl—and in the long run, the disk. He still had a few friends on the force he could trust, ones that wouldn’t believe he was a dirty cop, even if he was, and one of them had given him the safe house location where Willa St. Clair was being held.
Unfortunately, Freddy D.’s men must have had an inside source as well because they hit the house before Landry could.
He’d almost had Willa St. Clair, though. He’d been so damned close he’d smelled the citrus scent of her shampoo in her long blond hair. But she’d managed to get away from not only him, but also Freddy D.’s men. The woman had either known about the hit on the safe house or she was damned lucky.
Like the night of her art show. If that fool with the two dogs hadn’t come out of nowhere, Landry would have caught up to her, got her into the car and he’d have the disk by now and be calling the shots instead of running for his life.
But she’d seen him kill Zeke and he had known getting her into the car that night would have been near impossible if she’d been alone. Landry was good but he couldn’t have taken on the guy with the two big dogs, too. And Freddy D. had said T and Worm would be nearby. If they’d seen him kill Zeke, then he couldn’t be sure what those two fools would do.
He would be sitting behind bars right now or dead if he hadn’t gotten the hell out of there.
So he’d disappeared into one of the small old-fashioned motels along the beach, blending in as best he could with the tourists, waiting for his cell phone to ring with news.
Since the safe house hit, he’d been hot on the trail of Willa St. Clair. His one fear was that someone would get to her before he did. There was no way she would last long out there on her own. That’s why he had to get to her first. It was now a matter of life and death. His.
His cell rang. He took a breath, hoping that one of his cop friends he could trust had come through for him. But Zeke had friends too, friends who were taking his death personally and would shoot first and ask questions later if they found Landry.
“Hey,” he said into the phone.
“This may be nothing…but I ran her cell phone. Willa St. Clair made a couple of calls. You want the numbers?”
Landry closed his eyes and let out the breath he’d been holding. “Oh, yeah. I owe you big-time.”
“Yeah, you do.” His friend read off the numbers. One in Naples. The other in South Dakota.
He hung up and tried the Naples one first. An answering machine picked up. She’d called a law firm? He almost hung up but heard something in the recording that caught his attention.
“…if you’ve called about the apartments on Cape Diablo island…”
Cape Diablo? Where the hell was that?
Five minutes later, a Florida map spread across the table in his motel, Landry Jones found Cape Diablo in an area known as Ten Thousand Islands at the end of the road on the Gulf Coast side almost to the tip of Florida.
The only other call Willa St. Clair made had been to South Dakota to probably friends or parents. So he was betting she’d rented one of the apartments on Cape Diablo.
Landry couldn’t believe his luck. The woman was a novice at this. Plus she had no idea about the type of people after her. Or the resources they had at their disposal. She thought she’d found herself the perfect place to hide, did she? Instead, she’d just boxed herself in with no way out.
WILLA PULLED the baseball cap down on her now short curly auburn hair and squinted out across the rough water. The wind blew the tops off the waves in a spray of white mist. Past the bay she could see nothing but a line of green along the horizon.
She glanced at the small fishing boat and the man waiting for her to step in. He called himself Gator, wore flip-flops, colorful Bermuda shorts and a well-worn blue short-sleeved vented fishing shirt. His skin was dark from what he professed had been most of his fifty-some years in the south Florida sun.
“You want to go to the island or not?” he asked, seeming amused by her uncertainty.
“Maybe we should wait until it’s not so rough out there,” she suggested.
He laughed and shook his head. “We wait, the tide will go out and there is no going anywhere until she comes back in. You want to wait until the middle of the night?”
She didn’t, and this time when he held out his hand she passed him the two suitcases and large cardboard box, containing what was most precious to her.
He set everything in the bottom of the boat and reached for her hand. She gave it to him and stepped in. The boat rocked wildly, forcing her to sit down hard on the wooden seat at the front of the boat. “I haven’t been in a lot of boats.”
“No kiddin’,” he said, and started the outboard, flipping it around so the boat nosed backward into the waves.
She grabbed
