Zach’s face lit up. “Really?”
Carly smiled and nodded. “I’m not sure when, but soon.”
“Maybe they can get me out of here.”
“Maybe,” Carly said.
“We all want that, Zach,” Linc said.
Zach studied the book in front of him. “My dad never liked them. He used to get mad at my mom when we went over to see them. I wouldn’t want him to hurt them.”
“The police won’t let that happen,” Carly said.
Zach’s eyes came up to her face. “What if they never catch him?”
Carly thought about the man who had beaten his son and the woman who lived with him, a man so filled with rage, he had destroyed her home.
She looked at Linc and said the words she knew were true. “Then Linc will keep you safe.”
* **
With a few more hours of work left to do, Carly went back to the truck yard while Linc drove on to the ranch, leaving Frank to accompany her home.
At the end of the day, she sat at the wheel of the F-150, with Frank in the passenger seat, ready for trouble. Under a short-sleeved flowered shirt, his shoulder holster held a big black semiautomatic pistol. The red-haired, freckle-faced Magnum wasn’t nearly as handsome as Tom Selleck, but he was definitely taking his job seriously. Carly had actually come to like him.
Currently she didn’t believe she was in too much danger. After the phone call last night, she didn’t expect to hear from El Jefe for at least a few more days, maybe not until next week, which gave them some time.
She wondered how he’d known about the FBI’s involvement, but the man seemed to have spies everywhere so there was no real way to know.
Carly prayed the drug lord wouldn’t call at all, but she was a realist. El Jefe was determined to force her cooperation, though she had no idea why he was so fixated on Drake Trucking. Why not coerce some other company into helping him?
But with the embezzling scheme, the murder, and her abduction, he had already invested a great deal of effort in bringing her to heel. With a man like El Jefe, it might be no more than exerting his power. She continued to thwart him, which wouldn’t go over well with him.
Nor would it look good for El Jefe to back down in front of his men.
Whatever the reason, she couldn’t suspend her life waiting to hear from him. She had a business to run and so did Linc.
She thought of the conversation they’d had at breakfast that morning and the plan they had come up with.
“El Jefe’s going to call you sooner or later,” Linc had said. “When he does, he’s going to demand you make the pickup and delivery he wanted you to make Tuesday night.”
“I know,” Carly said darkly.
“McKinley couldn’t wear a wire, but what if the truck itself werewired? What if there were cameras and listening devices hidden inside and out? We could record everything that happens.”
She brightened. “Oh, wow, I like that.”
“Good, then while I’m in Dallas, I’ll get everything set up. I know who to call to get it done.”
No surprise there. Though fitting a truck out with fancy surveillance gear was bound to cost a fortune, Carly didn’t argue. There was no way she could win a battle with Linc over money. He could afford it, and lives were at stake.
She took a sip of her coffee. “We’d have the installation done in Dallas, right?”
“That’s right. We’ll make it look like an ordinary run, but instead of picking up a load, the truck will go to Tex/Am Transport. We can get the job done there.”
“How do we know which driver we can trust?”
“Easy. I’m going to drive. I’ll take the truck out late tomorrow night. You work the schedule around so all the drivers are back before midnight. I’ll go in after that, take the rig to our yard, and have the installation done while I’m at work the next day. I’ll bring the truck back here that night.”
