Loe raamatut: «High Speed Holiday»

ONE

Was a cop ever really off duty?

Chief of Police Sylvie Laurent didn’t think so. She freed her hands from her wool gloves and pocketed them in her winter police coat.

Then she unclipped her gun holster.

Trouble never waited for her to clock in, and it wasn’t about to start now.

Even when it posed as a good-looking man sporting a golden tan.

“You’re not in Kansas anymore,” she mumbled aloud, heading the stranger’s way. Or, with his bronze skin maybe she should say Cali.

He appeared like a black sheep against a sea of snow white—the snow-covered grounds of Spencer Speedway, as well as the paled complexions of the townspeople he pushed through. It would be months before any of them glowed a golden bronze like that, maybe not ever.

So, who was he? And why was he here?

A group of local children with cotton candy frozen to their cold faces cut in front of her, innocent to the possible threat at the annual Jingle Bell Jam celebration. The Christmas event put on by the Spencer family for longer than Sylvie could remember wasn’t a tourist attraction. It was something the Spencers offered to their employees every year to start off the holiday festivities. That included pretty much everyone in Norcastle, New Hampshire, but it did not include this guy.

A horn from the racetrack blew. Sylvie kept walking, even though she knew she was expected down in the pits. The small 1940s reproduction cars called Legends were set to compete on the track in ten minutes. Sets of snow tires strapped under the carriages of the tiny vehicles would give the crowd some excitement as the teen division of drivers raced to the finish line in the annual Legends snow race. Her son would be among them—and expect her to be on the sidelines.

Duty calls. Sorry, Jaxon.

The stranger’s eyes met hers, chilling her with their hold. There was something about their ice-blue color that was so familiar. With one blink, he took them away and dismissed her.

Bad move, mister.

Sylvie picked up her steps to cut him off, but three teenage boys stepped in front of the guy, blocking her path. Just a few feet from making contact, she ran into one of the boys, knocking something to the ground. A glance down and her plans changed in an instant.

A can of beer lay in the snow.

She picked it up. “Belong to you?” she asked one of the teens, noticing his bulkier-than-normal parka. A closer look at all three boys, the same age as her fourteen-year-old son, and she noticed they were all smugglers today.

Sylvie took her last look at the black sheep’s retreating back and decided he would have to wait.

“Unless you boys want to be cuffed and stuffed in the backseat of my cruiser, I suggest you hand over the alcohol you have in your pockets.”

Bret Dolan, the son of Norcastle’s mayor, flicked his straight, dirty blond bangs from his eyes and lifted a defiant chin to Sylvie.

Like father, like son.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the boy spouted. “That’s not ours. That was already on the ground. We just have a couple sodas.” The boy lifted a cola out of his pocket. “See?”

Sylvie reached inside her navy blue uniform coat. “Shall I call your parents, Bret, for the show when I search you? I’m game for an audience.” Sylvie took out her cell phone. She checked the bars and saw none, but she didn’t let on about the lack of coverage, which was spotty in these mountains on most days.

On a huff, the Dolan kid reached into his other pocket and withdrew a can of beer. He jammed it over to Sylvie.

“Crack it open and pour it out,” she instructed without touching it.

“Really? You can’t be serious.” Bret’s distaste for the whole event became even more evident as each of the boys followed suit with the same task, their lifted spirits at getting away with something doused right along with the six-pack of beer now on the snow around them.

“I’m very serious. I care for your safety, Bret, even if you don’t see that right now.”

“You don’t care for me. You just hate alcohol because your mother drank herself to death when you got knocked up.”

The horn from the racetrack blew again, but its penetrating sound paled in comparison to the pulsing of blood pumping behind Sylvie’s ears at Bret’s remark. She bit back a lethal response. She was sure the boy was only repeating what he’d heard his father say. “Why aren’t you racing today, Bret? You should be out there.”

“Mind your business,” the boy spouted off. Again his dad’s words. She let Bret’s disrespect go...for now.

“The next time I catch you, I take you in,” Sylvie said. She looked Bret in the eyes, holding his attention on her. “Tell your mom I said hi.”

He blinked a few times. Then he sent her a scathing look as his friends dragged him away.

She hoped someday he would see that she cared for his safety, his and his mom’s. She prayed it would be soon. For now, though, she had a stranger to find.

Sylvie hit the button to her radio on her shoulder. “Preston, Buzz, Chief here. I know you’re at the track. Be on the lookout for an adult male in his early thirties, shaggy black hair and black leather coat, about six feet in height. Not from around here. Just want to make sure he’s not about to cause any problems.”

“10-4, Chief” came a response from one of her lieutenants.

Scanning the crowds in the grandstand and still finding no sign of the black sheep, she entered through the fence marked Authorized Personnel and sought out the number eleven coupe her son drove. He weaved his tiny yellow car in a wavy line with the other racers, who were warming up their reflexes for the start of the race. The yellow flags waved, but as soon as the lead car approached the starting line, it would be go time.

She hadn’t missed it after all.

As a single parent with a full-time job there was a lot she missed in her son’s life. It caused a wedge.

She sighed at the growing distance between her and her son and thanked God that Jaxon was behind the wheel today and not smuggling alcohol with Bret and his gang.

Thank You, Lord, for watching out for him when I can’t. Just as You watched out for me fourteen years ago. You never left me to raise him alone.

Unlike Jaxon’s birth father.

Unlike everyone else in her family.

The starting horn blared. The green flags waved like crazy. The crowds behind her in the towering grandstand cheered. The race was on.

Sylvie watched her son take the lead from the number eight car. His tiny vehicle roared as its motorcycle engine was pushed to the max. She fisted a hand in the air. “Go, Jaxon!”

Her son had been racing cars since he was six, starting with little go-karts. It wasn’t a cheap sport, by any means, but Sylvie worked extra shifts to give him something he could be proud of and work toward, something that kept him off the streets. She hadn’t been too excited about him following in his birth father’s footsteps, but she lived in a racing town and it was hard to steer Jaxon in other directions. Her brother was out in the world following circuit after circuit, racing on tracks in strange and exotic locales now. She’d barely heard from him since Mom had died.

Jaxon lost the lead, and Sylvie snapped out of her reverie, especially when his wheels swerved off to the left.

What was he doing? Sylvie rushed forward a few steps, but knew she couldn’t get any closer to the track to find out. She scanned the area for Roni Spencer Rhodes, her son’s trainer and owner of the racetrack. Would Roni know if something was wrong?

Sylvie spotted her friend in a white down coat and matching hat and scarf, her long red hair whipped a bit in the cold wind. She wore a headset that had to be connected to Jaxon. Sylvie headed Roni’s way, but as she approached, she noticed out of the corner of her eye someone else approaching Roni.

The stranger!

He had no business being behind the fence.

His ice-blue eyes targeting Roni dead-on said otherwise.

The race became immediately forgotten. Sylvie reached for her weapon. “Stop right there!” She raised her voice to be heard over the motors.

The unidentified man came to an abrupt halt.

Sylvie took three determined steps, her hand curled around her gun’s handle. A bang from the track echoed through the valley, bouncing off the surrounding White Mountains and back again.

The man flew forward at her and fell to his knees. Sylvie withdrew her gun and took aim. The crowds in the grandstand inhaled and shouted at the same time. Had they all seen her draw her weapon?

Or was something else going down on the track that claimed their attention?

A quick glance showed a mass of cars piling up and flipping. Number eleven’s wheels were overturned.

Jaxon!

Sylvie wanted to run to him but the stranger now lay facedown on the snow, blood spatter around him, stark in its rich contrast of dark on light, like the man himself.

He was injured.

But how?

Torn between him and her son, Sylvie holstered her weapon and dropped to the stranger’s side. A hole in the arm of his leather coat showed where an object had entered his body. Something flying off the track?

She inspected at a closer range.

No. A bullet.

Sylvie took in the perimeter in short, jerky perusals for a shooter in the area.

No time. She had to first take care of the victim.

She lifted the man under his arms and dragged him behind a snow pile. A groan told her he was conscious.

“Sir, I’m Chief Sylvie Laurent. Can you tell me your name?” she yelled over the ensuing chaos around her.

“Ian Stone,” the man groaned and moved to turn.

“Stay still, Mr. Stone. I’m calling for help.” Sylvie reached for her radio.

“No!” The man raised his good hand. “No help.” He pushed himself to his knees. Blood seeped from his left shoulder, his other hand stretched across his wide chest to staunch the flow.

“Ian, I need to get you to the hospital. And you need to stay down. The shooter is still out there.”

He shook away from her grasp. “Help the drivers. Not me.” He stood up and mumbled, “I should have known they would take me out. I should have known this was too good to be true.” He half ran, half staggered to the fence exit. The alarmed crowd of spectators behind it swallowed him whole.

A war waged in Sylvie. She had to go after him. What if he bled out and died? She couldn’t have a murder in Norcastle. And a murder it would be. She knew a gunshot when she saw one. The crash had muffled the sound, and the mountains...

Sylvie looked to the lofty peaks overlooking the racetrack.

The mountains were hiding a killer. The marksman could be out there somewhere on Mount Randolph. He could go after Ian Stone again.

Sylvie hit her radio to call her team, but all emergency personnel were flooding the track to help the drivers, the kids.

The place she needed to be, too.

Jaxon.

Sylvie zeroed in on her son being lifted from his car, awake but limping, his pale blond hair that matched her own shielded his eyes, but he was talking. Her heart lodged in her throat as she watched him enter one of the ambulances opened and ready to whisk him off to the hospital. The police and paramedics had everything under control, and he was in good hands.

Sylvie stepped in the direction Ian Stone had staggered off in, the direction she was needed most.

Her conflicted steps turned to a full, determined run.

She’d known Ian Stone was trouble the second she’d laid eyes on him.

But apparently, someone else did, too.

* * *

Ian slammed the door of the studio apartment he’d rented the day before. Carrying a pharmacy bag, he put it between his teeth as he tore off his coat and dropped it to the wood floor of the old factory mill, now turned into living quarters. The brick building was one of many along the river in this old New England mill town—a place he supposedly had been born in thirty years ago, but hadn’t known existed until two weeks ago.

The bullet hole in his arm said someone wasn’t happy about him finding out.

Pain from his shoulder seared like an unrelenting burn. Of course it had to be his already injured arm. Two weeks ago he’d had surgery on his shoulder for a bad rotator cuff, an injury he’d had for years but left unrepaired for lack of funds. Working construction these past two years for Alex Sarno had finally given him enough to check himself into a hospital for the procedure.

But how would he pay for a gunshot wound?

The Spencer money perhaps? And not because he’d taken a bullet on their property. According to the guy who’d shown up in his hospital room after the surgery, their money was also his money.

All these years he had an inheritance to claim and never knew.

Thirty years ago, a car was pushed over the side of a mountain. The crash left two very rich parents dead and their three children orphans. Except when the smoke cleared and the blaze was extinguished, only two children were accounted for. Little eighteen-month-old Luke Spencer’s body had never been recovered.

Instead, he grew up across the country in a cabin in the Washington mountains, playing the unwanted son to Phil and Cecilia Stone.

Ian bit hard as he ripped off his green T-shirt, the words Sarno Construction scrawled across the front. His wound seeped blood, but not at an alarming rate. He would live to collect his inheritance and soon the T-shirts would read Sarno and Stone. Alex had already offered him a partnership. The idea of being a business owner was more than a dream come true. Things like this didn’t happen to Ian Stone, or Ian the Idiot as his father called him too many times to count.

But he wasn’t Ian Stone, if he believed the guy in his hospital room. He was the missing sibling, Luke Spencer.

Judging by the poor welcome home, however, his brother and sister didn’t want to share the wealth. But would they take another shot at him to see they didn’t have to?

Ian bounded around the sofa bed and pulled the blinds closed just in case. With his teeth he ripped the package of cleansing wipes open.

A bang on his door jerked him alert.

“Now’s not a good time!” he shouted. He hoped it was just the landlady, Mrs. Wilson or Wilton, or whatever. A busybody was what she was. So many questions. Where are you from, Mr. Stone? Do you have family in Norcastle, Mr. Stone? Perhaps I know them. What are their names?

“But at least she didn’t shoot me,” he muttered, then seethed when the alcohol splashed over his wound.

The door knocked again, harder.

“Go away!” he yelled, biting through the pain.

“Ian Stone, this is Police Chief Sylvie Laurent. I need you to open this door.”

The cop from the track? The one with the eyes. Great. “I did nothing wrong. Leave me alone!”

“Sir, I didn’t say you did anything wrong. But you were shot right in front of me. It’s my job to make sure you live. Open this door, or I will call for backup and do this the hard way.”

Backup? That’s all he needed, people in uniform taking sides. They’d probably arrest him for extortion. Ian figured he could play the victim to the little slip of a woman they called chief. The fact that she was the chief stumped him.

She shouldn’t be too hard to get rid of.

Ian opened the door ajar. “I’m fine, Officer, really. I can take care—”

The door banged in on him with a force that sent him backward. She jammed a thumb over her shoulder as she pushed past him. Dark blotches of blood drops lay stark against the snow behind her. “You’re dripping. You are not fine. Now take a seat,” she commanded, pointing to the stool at the breakfast bar.

The cop washed her hands, ignoring the fact that Ian remained standing. She removed a pair of latex gloves from a compartment on her belt. “Sit,” she said and slapped them on.

He obeyed and she quickly cleaned his wound and prodded around for the bullet.

Her ministrations killed, but Ian wasn’t about to let on in the presence of this small, but tough, woman. While on the stool, their eye levels matched.

Green.

He smiled.

“I’m sorry I’m hurting you,” she said without glancing up from his wound.

“Hurting? Nah, not at all. I could stay here all day.” He leaned closer to her face, zeroing in on her almond-shaped eyes. “They’ve got to be jade.”

“What does?” she asked absently.

“Your eyes. They’re the inspiration of epic poems. Marlowe, Yeats, Ovid. I’m not sure any of the greats would do them justice. When I saw you at the track, I thought it was a trick of the sun, but it wasn’t. Has anyone ever told you how beautiful they are?”

A startled look from under long curved lashes came his way. Her eyes narrowed. “Has anyone ever told you, you are a glutton for pain?” She pushed her finger through his wound.

Ian yelled out and bit down under her digging. He moaned and gagged and stopped breathing as she continued, succumbing under her thumb to being a puddle of feebleness.

Her gloved fingers removed the bullet and she held it up to him with a brilliant smile of victory. “Got it.”

The slug blurred in front of him and he gagged again. “I think I’m going to pass out.” He’d still yet to breathe.

“It’s possible. You also need stitches to stop the bleeding.” She put the bullet in a small plastic bag she took from another belt compartment and reached for the bandages. “I need to take you to the hospital.”

“No.” Ian straightened, swallowing the bile rising in his throat. “You obviously know what you’re doing. Just do what you have to do and stitch me up.”

She applied butterfly bandages to pull the holes closed, but shook her head. “Sir, these won’t hold. You need to let me take you.”

“You gonna pay for it?”

She stilled her hand. “You don’t want help because of finances?”

“More like lack of them.”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“You obviously never had to enter a hospital without a way to pay for your visit.”

The chief frowned.

He’d upset her. The idea of hurting her made him feel like a creep. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“We all have our stories, but I can tell you the hospital will not turn you away, no matter what yours is. Trust me. Let me bring you. It’s only about a thirty-minute ride.”

“Thanks, but you can save the gas.”

“I have to go there anyway. That crash at the track? My son was in it. He’s probably already flipping out that I’m not there.”

Ian studied the officer’s face for what she wasn’t saying. He detected a glimpse of fear, and suddenly she wasn’t just a cop. She was a mom. “Was he badly hurt?” Ian asked.

Her eyelids closed on a sigh. “No, I thank the Lord that he walked away. Barely, but he walked.” She reopened them and got back to work on his arm. “So you see, I do need to get over there. We’re all each of us has.”

“No dad in the picture?” He felt odd asking, as if it was any of his business.

“Not needed.” Her answer was even stranger.

But then Ian thought of his own old man, and understood her statement perfectly. “The man who raised me died recently. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. Not needed. I get it.”

“So, you’ll let me take you?”

“I have a feeling that’s not really a question.”

“It’s not, and every second that goes by is making my son feel abandoned.”

“Way to tack on the guilt. Fine. For your son’s sake. Let me grab another shirt, then my coat...what’s left of it.”

Sylvie taped the gauze in place and he reached for his duffel bag, his clothes still jammed inside, unpacked.

“Did you just arrive in Norcastle?” she asked pointedly, obviously fishing.

“I came in on the bus yesterday.”

“Were people shooting at you before you came to town?”

“Nope. Is this how your town welcomes newcomers?”

“Hardly. I’d lose my job for sure. Any idea who did this?”

“Yup.” He grunted as he slipped his arms into a chambray shirt, stained with dirt from many hours on the job.

“Well, do tell. I can’t help you if you’re withholding information.”

“The Spencers.”

Sylvie let out a laugh. Such a loud, robust sound for one so small. Ian pictured the chief of police issuing orders in the same tone. People would take notice of her, although she’d had his attention long before she opened her mouth to speak. Still, he didn’t like her laughing at him, and that’s what her reaction felt like.

“What’s so funny, Chief?”

“You are. Roni and her brother Wade are not trying to kill you. You’re completely wrong about that. Why would you think they want you dead?”

He snatched his MP3 player and headphones from the bag and stuffed them in his front blue jeans pocket. “Because they have something that belongs to me, and they don’t want to give it up.”

“Well, I don’t believe they’d put a bullet in your arm, no matter what they have of yours, but I do plan to find who did pull the trigger. There hasn’t been a premeditated murder in Norcastle in thirty years, and I want to keep it that way.” She opened the door and scanned the area before telling Ian to follow her to her cruiser.

“Who was the unfortunate victim, then?” Ian asked—as if he didn’t know.

Sylvie opened the passenger-side door for him, then came around the front of the car. Once behind the wheel, she replied, “Actually, it was Bobby and Meredith Spencer. Wade and Roni’s parents.”

And mine.

Ian faced front, revealing nothing to the local PD. He couldn’t be sure the police could be trusted. After all, his parents were murdered, pushed over the side of that mountain in their car, and the police thirty years ago called the crash an accident.

Had the police been a part of the crime?

Did they know why he had been taken from the scene?

Ian peered out from the corner of his eye at Sylvie. It was too soon to tell her.

He looked to her eyes again. Long lashes curled like a perfect Pacific Ocean wave. He didn’t believe them to be fake. She wasn’t wearing a swipe of makeup. Perfect, creamy skin, a hint of blush from the cold. She looked like a porcelain doll, so pale compared to his baked skin.

“You hanging in there, Stone?” she asked, giving her attention to him for a brief moment while she drove. “You look a little...off. Not feeling light-headed, are you?”

“Just a bit,” he said, but had to wonder if it was more from her presence than the loss of blood. He cleared his throat and scanned the mountains out his window. “I’m just not feeling the love in this town.”

“You’ll be safe with me, Ian. I promise I won’t let another shot find its mark. It’ll be me before it will be you.”