Jack immediately hit the accelerator, and while he continued glancing around them, he made a call using the control on his steering wheel. A few seconds later, a woman answered.
“Teagan,” Jack said.
Caroline knew that was his partner, Marshal Teagan Randolph. She’d heard Jack give Lucille the marshal’s contact info in case there was an emergency and she couldn’t reach Jack. That meant he must trust the woman, but Caroline didn’t want anyone else brought into this just yet. She was about to tell him that, too, but he cursed before Teagan or she could say anything.
“What’s wrong?” Teagan immediately asked.
“We have a tail,” Jack spat out. “I’m on the east farm road about twelve miles from Longview Ridge. I need backup right now.”
Chapter Three
The moment Jack said someone was following them, Caroline jerked her body around to look out the back window of his truck. She groaned, no doubt seeing exactly what Jack had caught sight of.
A black four-door sedan with a heavily tinted windshield.
The fact that it was a car made it stand out in a place where most folks drove trucks. Maybe a crazed groupie/killer wannabe hadn’t gotten the memo on that, and had failed to blend in.
Jack hadn’t had a choice about requesting backup. He’d noticed the sedan pulling out of a ranch trail just moments after he had driven past it. Of course, it was possible this wasn’t someone after Caroline, that it was just a driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe even someone who’d gotten lost, but Jack couldn’t risk not having an extra gun if something bad went down. Or rather, if somethingworsewas going down.
Thebadhad already happened.
There was no scenario Jack could come up with that made Kingston Morris showing up just yards from the safe house a good thing. Which was why he should have called for backup even sooner. Unfortunately, Jack had let himself get distracted with Caroline’s bombshell. Now that he’d remembered he was a lawman and not her former lover—or the son of a murdered sheriff—he would press her more on why she’d lied. Press her more, too, on the bits of so-called evidence from the night his dad had been killed. For now, Jack just kept an eye on the car behind them.
“Are Caroline and Lucille okay?” Teagan asked. “Areyouokay?”
“So far.” Jack wanted it to stay that way.
“Do you think it’s that guy, Kingston Morris, who you asked me to run?” Teagan added.
“Possibly.” But the more honest answer would be “Yes.” It would be hard to believe it was a coincidence that an Eric groupie to appeared on a security camera and then someone else showed up on this remote stretch of the road.
“There’s no immediate threat,” Jack added to his partner, “but I want backup in place.”
“Understood.”
Jack opened his mouth to give Teagan some instructions as to what he needed her to do, but Caroline tugged on his arm to get his attention. At first he thought that was because she’d seen the person behind that dark windshield, but she merely stared at him. No one had ever accused him of having ESP or even being tuned in to nonverbal cues, but he got this one all right.
Caroline didn’t want him to mention that she’d gotten her memory back. Since he couldn’t see why Teagan would need to know that right at this exact moment, Jack nodded. Obviously Caroline was good with the nonverbal, too, because she blew out a breath of relief.
“I need you to run the plates on a black sedan for me,” Jack continued with Teagan. He could hear his partner typing away on her keyboard. No doubt arranging for the backup he’d requested. But she could multitask, too, so he rattled off the license plate number to her.
“It’s a rental car,” Teagan said just moments later. “I’ll find out who rented it.”
Jack was betting the person who’d done that had used an alias. Well, unless Kingston or the person in the sedan was truly an idiot. That wouldn’t make this situation less dangerous, becauseJack knew from experience that idiots could kill just as well as smart people. The idiots just didn’t tend to get away with it, but that didn’t make their victims less dead or instances like this any less lethal.
The seconds seemed to drag before Teagan came back on the line. “Lee Zeller’s in the field about twenty miles from you. He’s the closest marshal for backup.”
Jack kept his speed at a steady pace and considered his options. Zeller wasn’t one of them, and he glanced at Caroline to see if she agreed. Judging from the way her forehead creased, she did. Which meant she’d been doing some investigating and had likely hacked her way through the filters in multiple files.
He was getting better at picking up the unspoken stuff.
“Bad choice for backup?” Teagan asked Jack when he didn’t respond.
Teagan could read him. She’d been Jack’s partner for two years and had read all the files on his father’s murder.
Zeller had been involved in an investigation that Jack’s father was running at the time he was gunned down. Sex trafficking. Zeller hadn’t been a suspect in that case. Heck, there’d been no hints of any wrongdoing on his part, but Jack didn’t like the way these particular lines had intersected. Because it would only rattle Caroline even more, he didn’t want anyone from his father’s investigations playing backup for him.
Well, no one who wasn’t family.
