hotshot lawyer like you? I’m sure you can get me off without even any jail time,” Dede said, keeping the pistol pressed into his back.
“You can’t possibly think that I can make all of this go away. You pulled a gun on a sheriff’s deputy and escaped from two mental hospitals and a jail cell.”
“I did what I had to do,” she said, pressing the gun barrel into his back. “When the time comes, I know you can make a judge understand that. Anyway, what would you have done under the same circumstances?”
He didn’t know. He thought of his brother Dalton’s criminally insane first wife. The law didn’t always protect people. Oftentimes it was used against the person who needed and deserved protection the most.
Dede took him around to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Get in and slide across the seat. If you think about doing anything stupid, just think about your part in helping Frank take everything—including my freedom from me—in the divorce.”
He climbed in and slid across the seat, keeping what she had said in mind. He had helped put this woman away—just not well enough, apparently.
She followed, never taking the gun off him and leaving him little doubt that she really might shoot him if he tried to escape.
Shifting the weapon to her left hand, she inserted the key and started the pickup, then hit the child locks and reached over to buckle him in. “Just in case you’re thinking about jumping out.”
As if he could reach the door handle the way she had him hog-tied.
The wipers swept away the accumulated snow on the windshield. The glow of Christmas lights on the houses blurred through the falling snow, a surreal reminder that Christmas was just days away.
Dede turned on the heater, then shifted the truck into gear and, resting the pistol on the seat next to her thigh, drove away from the sheriff’s department.
Her composure unraveled him more than even the gun against her thigh. This woman must have nerves of steel. For just a moment, though, he thought he saw her hands trembling on the wheel, but he must have imagined it given the composed, unwavering way she had acted back in the jail.
They passed only one vehicle on the way out of town. A van with a state emblem on the side, but the driver was too busy trying to see through the falling and blowing snow to pay them any mind.
Lantry consoled himself that the deputy would soon be found in the cell and a manhunt would begin for the escaped prisoner and her hostage.
“You’ll never get away with this,” he said, his throat dry as she took one of the narrow back roads as if she knew where she was going.
He recalled that she’d spent the past twenty-four hours before her arrest with Violet Evans, a woman from the area. It was more than possible that Dede had gotten directions from the local woman.
“I suppose all this seems a little desperate to a man like you,” she said quietly.
“A little desperate?” He looked over at her, then out at the storm. He could feel the temperature dropping.
The weatherman had forecasted below-zero temperatures and blizzard conditions. Residents had been warned to stay off the roads because of blowing and drifting snow and diminishing visibility.
Lantry had little doubt that the roads would be closed soon, as they had been earlier in the month during the last winter-storm warnings.
“You know, it’s funny,” Dede said as she drove. “Thanks to Frank, I’ve been forced to do things I wouldn’t have even imagined just months ago. I suppose that is nuts, huh?”
Lantry studied her, not wanting to know what had pushed her over the edge. “Would you have really shot that deputy?”
“Of course not. What do you think I am? That deputy never did anything to me. Unlike you,” she added. “You helped Frank get me locked up in a mental ward.”
Lantry didn’t want to go down that road. The wind rocked the pickup. Snow whipped across the road, forcing Dede to slow almost to a crawl before the visibility cleared enough that she could see the road ahead again.
The barrow pits had filled in with snow. Only the tops of a few wooden fence posts were still visible above the snowline.
“My brother will be combing the countryside searching for me,” he said. Outside the pickup window he could see nothing but white. There were no other tracks in the road now. No one would be out on a night like this. No one with a brain, he amended silently.
“Shane will call in the FBI since kidnapping is a federal offense,” he continued. “This time they’ll lock you up and you’ll never get out. Do you have any idea where you’re headed?”
He glanced over at her when she didn’t answer. Her angelic face was set in an expression of concentration and determination.
“The best thing you can do at this point is turn around and go back,” he said. “If you turn yourself in, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you get a fair hearing.”
“I’m touched by your concern, Mr. Corbett. But I’m crazy, remember? If I get caught, they’ll just put me back in the looney bin and throw away the key, and then the men after me will kill me. By then, they will have murdered you, so you’ll be of little help.”
She shifted down as a gust of wind rocked the pickup and sent snow swirling around them.
“But if we don’t get caught,” she continued, “I might be able to keep us both alive. So in the grand scale of things, kidnapping you seems pretty minor, don’t you think?”
He hated that her logic made a bizarre kind of sense. She wasn’t going to turn around and take him back, that much was a given.
In the rare openings between gusts, blurred Christmas lights could be seen along the eaves of ranch houses. But soon the ranch houses became fewer and farther between, as did the blur of Christmas lights, until there was nothing but white in the darkness ahead.
They were headed south on one of the lesser-used, narrow, unpaved roads. Between them and the Missouri Breaks was nothing but wild country.
“What now?” he asked as the wind blew in the cracks of the pickup cab and sent snow swirling across the road, obliterating everything.
“You’re going to help me save our lives—once I convince you how much danger you’re in.”
It wasn’t going to take much to convince him of that, Lantry thought as he noted the gun nestled between her thighs and the Montana blizzard raging outside the pickup.
DEDE GRIPPED THE WHEEL AND fought to see the road ahead. Mostly what she did was aim the pickup between the fence posts—what little of them wasn’t buried in snow on the other side of the snow-deep barrow pits.
Between the heavy snowfall and the blowing fallen snow, all she could see was white.
She didn’t need Lantry Corbett to tell her how crazy this was. But given the alternative …
Nor did she want to admit that the lawyer’s
