Lowell eased his forearm away from the back of Joe’s neck but held on to his arms. He slapped a cuff over one of Joe’s wrists.
“What are you-” Joe ended the question on a breathless profanity as the deputy started pulling his other arm into place to fasten the cuffs, stretching the ravaged skin over his gunshot wound.
“He’s hurt!” Jane cried out from across the room. “That bastard out there shot him. Don’t do that!”
Lowell stopped pulling on his arms and lifted the left side of his shirt. Cool air washed over Joe’s side, making the skin pucker.
“Holbrook shot you? Did you see him do it?”
“We didn’t see the shooter,” Joe admitted.
“It was him,” Jane insisted.
Joe turned his head to look at her. Garland had her hands cuffed behind her, and the struggle had mussed her hair and clothes, but otherwise she looked okay. She met his gaze, her eyes wide and scared but her chin high with determination.
“You saw him, then?” Lowell asked her as he pulled Joe around and clamped the cuff over his wrists in the front.
“She didn’t see him, either,” Joe answered before she could speak the lie he saw forming in her eyes. “But she did see him in the apartment where her friend was murdered.”
“So she says.” Garland nudged her forward.
“I believe her,” Joe insisted.
“Well, maybe you’re being straight with us, and maybe you’re not, but we can sort that out when we get back to the station.” Lowell gave Joe a little push. “Let’s go.”
The night air was bitterly cold, sliding under the collar of Joe’s shirt and racing down his spine. Lowell thrust Joe’s suede jacket into his cuffed hands when they reached the sheriff’s cruiser. “Hold on to that for me.”
He turned to unlock the backseat of the car. Joe saw the deputy’s service weapon snapped tightly into his hip holster, in easy reach. Slipshod. He’d have ripped his own underlings a new one if he’d seen them being so lax.
A moment later, he realized his own weapon was nowhere in sight. “What did you do with my Colt?” he asked.
Lowell turned to look at him. “What?”
A bark of gunfire shattered the quiet woods, and Lowell’s whole body jerked and spun, going down.
Something small and solid rammed into Joe from behind, pitching him against the car door as he tried to see what direction the fire was coming from. He heard a soft whimper-Jane-and then Deputy Garland shoved them both aside, unlocking the front door of the cruiser with one hand while trying to draw his weapon with the other.
A second gunshot cracked in the middle of the commotion. Garland grunted, his fingers clutching the car door. It swung open as he tumbled away and hit the ground with a thud.
Joe crouched behind the car door and looked over at the fallen deputies. Head shots, he realized with a sinking heart as he took in the damage. They were both dead.
With his hands cuffed, he couldn’t reach behind him to touch Jane, but he felt her huddled close. At least his body was shielding hers.
“Get into the cruiser,” he growled at her, moving to give her an opening while he scanned the darkness in front of them. “And stay low.”
While she scrambled into the front seat and curled into a knot in the passenger side floorboard, he threw the jacket in the car, then retrieved the deputy’s car keys from the ground and tucked them into his shirt pocket. He finally spotted movement as Clint Holbrook stepped into the opening, aiming Joe’s own Colt M1911 pistol at the door providing Joe with his only cover.
Adrenaline pumping like fire in his veins, Joe dropped and scrambled for the nearest deputy’s body, tugging the service pistol from the deputy’s hip holster. He whipped it up and didn’t take time to aim through the narrow space between the door and the cruiser’s chassis. He just snapped off a couple of rounds and threw himself into the cruiser’s driver’s seat, pulling the cruiser’s keys from his pocket.
Ignoring the howl of pain racing up and down his injured side, he twisted his body to turn the ignition key. The cruiser roared to life, the headlights slicing through the dark night. They lit up Clint Holbrook like a spotlight, making the man squint.
It wasn’t much of an advantage, but Joe did what he could to make the most of it, gritting his teeth against the agony as he twisted his body twice more, first to pull the car door shut and then to put the car into gear.
He hit the gas and went straight at Holbrook, forcing the man to dive toward Joe’s truck to avoid being rammed. Holbrook jerked the truck door open and took cover behind it, lifting his gun toward the cruiser.
The deputy’s vehicle probably had a bulletproof windshield, but Joe didn’t want to risk finding out. Growling through the pain, he turned his body to reach the gearshift again and slammed the cruiser in Reverse.
There was limited space to get between the deputies’ bodies and the dark sedan parked behind and to one side of where the cruiser had originally been, but Joe gripped the wheel and gave it a shot. The passenger side of the cruiser caught the sedan’s side mirror, bending it a bit and making a loud scraping noise as they passed, but they made it through the gap and onto the gravel drive.
Joe didn’t have time to do more than glance out the window to see what Holbrook was doing. He saw the man make a run for the sedan, firing the Colt as he ran. A thud hit the side of the cruiser. Jane made a soft mewling noise that made Joe’s heart drop like a rock.
“Jane, are you hit?”
“No. Just go!”
He spun the steering wheel, reversing the direction of the cruiser, and shifted to Drive. He gunned the engine, making the cruiser shimmy across the loose gravel a few seconds before he righted it and headed down the mountain road with the pedal to the floor.
He knew he had a good jump on Holbrook, but he didn’t let up until they reached the main highway. He kept an eye on the rearview mirror for signs that Holbrook had caught up with them, but he saw nothing.
Still, he remembered the GPS tracker from before. Holbrook had been outside with the cars for a while. He couldn’t assume the man hadn’t put a tracker on the cruiser as well, in case one or both of the deputies had managed to escape his assault.
“Jane, you can get up in the seat now.”
She pushed herself up to the passenger seat, meeting his quick gaze with wide, frightened eyes. “The deputies?”
He shook his head.
She uttered a soft curse. “Are you hurt?”
He felt blood oozing down his injured side, but he didn’t think it was serious. “I’m okay. You?”
“A little bruised up, I think, but not bad.” She wriggled a little in the seat. “Damn it, why didn’t they cuff me in front, too?”
“How limber are you?” he asked.
She gave him a look. “I’ve never had to find out.”
“If you can manage to get your hands in front of you, there might be an extra handcuff key in the glove compartment.”
He forced himself to keep his eye on the darkened highway ahead, though the soft grunts and noises Jane was making tempted his gaze in her direction more than once. After a couple of minutes he heard her release a deep sigh and a soft, triumphant “Yeah!”
He glanced at her and saw she now had her hands in front of her. “Good girl,” he said quietly.
She rooted through the glove compartment, spilling some papers and a flashlight into the floorboard before she emerged with a paper clip. “No key, but maybe we can make this work.”
She pulled the coils of the paper clip open, twisting the flexible wire into a modified L shape with a small downward bend at the tip.
Joe pulled the cruiser over onto the shoulder of the highway and put it in Park, looking at the bent paper clip in her hand. He released a soft laugh.
She looked up at him, her eyebrows quirked. “What?”
“I should’ve known you’d know how to shape a handcuff lock pick.”
She looked down at the clip, her expression crestfallen. “I didn’t even realize-”
