Chapter 5

Blaze dozedoff and on for an hour before he finally gave up on sleep and rolled out of bed.

Lily was dead to the world, but he still moved quietly as he pulled a work shirt out of his closet along with a pair of clean jeans. He laced his boots and strapped on his weapon and then went into the other room to get his heavier raincoat.

He saw the file lying on the table next to her bag and he didn’t worry about overstepping the boundaries of privacy one bit as he flipped it open to the papers inside. He studied the picture of Jackson Coltraine and read through the particulars of his crimes and arrest. He was considered armed and dangerous, and the thought of Lily going up against someone like that didn’t sit well with him. It wouldn’t hurt to start his own search and see what he came up with.

He left her a note so she’d know he was at the station, and then flicked the lock as he closed his front door behind him. The front porch was no protection against the driving horizontal rain, and he pulled his hood up as it immediately battered against him.

The rain sliced at his face as he hurried down the stairs and into his truck. The drive to the station was short and he pulled into his spot, parked the truck, and ran to the back entrance where he coded himself in.

It was pandemonium. All of his dispatchers were on the phone, and his cops were soggy and dripping all over the floors. One of his deputies was asleep at his desk and the smell of strong coffee was overpowering.

He heard Lieutenant Nathan Boone’s irritated voice on the phone as he walked toward his office. He hung his jacket on the peg and waited until Boone got off the phone before peeking his head in the other man’s office.

“Everything okay?” Blaze asked.

Boone had been a cop for twenty years. He was seasoned and hardened, and there wasn’t much of anything that could rattle him. He’d turned down a promotion for captain twice because he didn’t want to sit behind a desk until he retired. Blaze could understand and respect that. He was behind a desk more than he wanted to be as the sheriff.

“I thought you were going home to get some sleep,” Boone said. “You look like something the cat dragged in. Or something the bounty hunter dragged in.”

Blaze gave him a rude hand gesture and Boone threw back his head and laughed.

“I got enough sleep to last me awhile,” Blaze said. “Who was that on the phone?”

“That was Earl Wilkins telling me he was going to take his boat and round up some extra hands.” Boone rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair, propping a booted foot on the corner of the desk. “That fool is going to end up swamping the boat and then we’ll have to stop what we’re doing and go rescue the whole lot of them. He says it’s obvious we’re understaffed since no one has been out to check on them, so they’re going to take matters into their own hands. He wanted to know if he can shoot if he finds people looting.”

“Good God,” Blaze said, imagining the worst outcome. “Earl is a hundred and fifty years old. He couldn’t see the Titanic if it was right in front of him.”

“That was pretty much my thought too. I assured him there was no reason for him to leave his house. He has a generator and plenty of food and water. But he told me if Rory Jenkins from down the road tried to come steal some of his provisions?—”

Boone glared at him when Blaze couldn’t quite hold back a snicker. “I kid you not the man said provisions, as if we’re in the middle of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He said if Rory tried to steal from him, then he was going to shoot him dead as a doornail.”

“He just wants an excuse to shoot Rory because Rory Jr. got Earl’s granddaughter, Jo Beth, in trouble and didn’t offer to marry her. Rory Jr. ran off to join the army instead, and I’ve heard it’s because his father told him to take the first train out of town and take it fast.”

Boone winced and Blaze nodded in agreement. If Rory Jr. ever came back to Laurel Valley, they could have a real problem on their hands.

“I can’t tell you how comforting it is to know that of the three thousand full-time residents in this town, over half of them are registered firearms users,” Blaze said, shaking his head at the horror.

“I wouldn’t feel too comfortable with those statistics,” Boone said. “Because you know the other half are unregistered users. This is the middle of nowhere. Everyone and their dog has a gun. Heck, even my housekeeper keeps a gun in the pocket of her apron.”

Blaze sighed. “Yeah, my sister keeps a gun in a hollowed-out book in her office at the library.”

Boone pressed his fingers to his eyes. “I didn’t need to know that. The library is city property. Can she do that?”

“I gave her a special permit,” Blaze said. “Considering the trouble we’ve had with the drug trade around this area, I felt it was better to be safe than sorry.”

Boone grunted and dropped his feet to the floor. “This is why I’m glad you’re the sheriff. You get to deal with the politics and backlash from the people. And I can just pretend I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said. “I’ve got a new respect for all my commanders over the course of my career. Being in charge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And speaking of safety, I got a look at the paperwork on the skip Lily is tracing. Jackson Coltraine. He’s Caucasian. Brown and blue. About six foot. He comes from money, so he’s not going to be used to roughing it, and he caught the flu a few days back in South Dakota. He held a small-town doctor hostage and then bashed him over the head after he gave him some samples to treat the symptoms. It’s slowed him down quite a bit. And with the rain and flooding?—”

“You think he’s going to hide somewhere he can get easy access to food and stay dry,” Boone said, finishing his thought.

“Yeah. And with no way in and out around Mill Pond, I was thinking he might try to hit either the Coleman or Newton barns, or maybe those empty cabins that head up into the mountains. Things are pretty deserted around here now that the season is over. It might be worth checking out.”

“Agreed,” Boone said, rubbing his eyes. “But we’ve got to keep this quiet. All we need is mass hysteria because there’s a fugitive on the loose. Earl Wilkins will be shooting at everything that moves.”

“Too late.” Blaze scrubbed his hands over his face and wished he’d been able to get more sleep. “Lily showed Coltraine’s picture to Linda when she stopped at The Lampstand for lunch yesterday. Every person I ran into last night while trying to clear the roads and area mentioned it to me.”

“Great. Now Earl will want to get his boat and gather a posse to hunt down Coltraine. Fool of a man makes me wonder how he keeps getting elected to the city council.”

“His daughter is one of the vote counters,” Blaze said. “And I think he figures his city council seat is like the supreme court. He’s appointed for life and he’ll have to die before his seat opens up.”

“It must be nice to be so old the rules no longer apply,” Boone said. “But I reminded him while we were on the phone that he was the only council member to vote down hiring extra deputies, so we might be a little slow getting out to his place unless there’s an emergency.”

Blaze laughed but felt the headache behind his eyes. “I’ll look forward to his call telling me I should fire you.”

Boone grinned. “I knew you would. That’s why I did it.”

“I need to ask you something,” he finally said to Boone.

“Is this about the bounty hunter?” Boone asked. “You seem a little old to need pointers, but I’ll give it my best shot.”

“You’re such a comedian,” Blaze said. “It’s no wonder you’re single.”

“I tried being married. Cops and marriage don’t go well together.”

Blaze grunted. He wasn’t wrong. Law enforcement life was hard on marriages and it took work from both parties. “You just haven’t met the right woman.”

“Now you sound like my mother. Something is bothering you. What is it?”

Blaze blew out a breath, feeling a little uncomfortable at mixing his personal life with his professional life.

“Last year when Lily came into town looking for her brother, I had you do the background check on her.”

Boone’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah, you did.”

“What did you leave out of your report?”

Boone gave him an inscrutable gaze and finally let out a sigh. “I wasn’t keeping anything from you. I just figured you wanted the high points. She didn’t have a criminal record and she’d been a cop for a couple of years. We already knew Jacob was her brother and he’d picked the wrong side of the law.”

“I’m not blaming you for anything,” Blaze said. “I told her I ran a make on her when she came into town. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have secrets. We all do when this is the career we’ve chosen.”

“Don’t you think those are her secrets to share?”

“I do,” Blaze agreed, but the worry was gnawing at him. “But I’m worried about her. About what I see in her. There’s this hell-bent determination to put herself in the line of fire no matter what. As if she has to prove herself. We both saw it when she waded into that fight at the River Rock Bar to take her brother into custody. And I know she’s chomping at the bit now to get out in that water and track down her skip. I need to see that file. She’s hurting. And she talks in her sleep.”

Boone opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a file. “I figured you might, so I’ve got it here. I don’t know what happened between you two the last time she was here, but I have my sources at the courthouse.”

Boone raised his brows in question, but Blaze stayed silent.

“You haven’t asked for my advice?—”

“This is true,” Blaze said.

“But I’m going to give it to you anyway because I have been married before and communication seems to be a big deal where women are concerned. Apparently, they don’t want you to fix things. They just want to talk about it.”

Blaze grunted. “If you can fix something, why wouldn’t they want it fixed?”

“A question for the ages,” Boone said, shrugging. “All I’m saying is to leave the file alone and just ask her what you want to know.”

Blaze stared at him stubbornly, so Boone pushed the file across the desk. He knew he was prying. And he knew there was truth to what Boone was saying. But somehow he found himself opening the file anyway.

He was greeted by the sight of her picture taken at the academy. She looked much the same as she did now, only there was a na?vety in her eyes in the photograph that had long since been lost. Her long dark hair was slicked back from her face in a tight bun, and her class-A uniform was crisp and fresh.

She had the instincts of a cop, and he knew without a doubt that they would make a good team professionally as well as in their personal lives. But there was something that had caused her to hand in her badge and gun and leave her training and everything she’d worked for behind.

It didn’t take him long to find it. He read the transcript of her last call—the domestic that could have ended her life just as easily as her partner’s. His heart broke for her. He knew what that kind of pain was like, and how the memories didn’t discriminate between dreams and reality. Those memories could creep into the mind at any moment, and they could become debilitating if you let them run rampant and didn’t control them.

Lily had no family she could lean on, and she’d admitted herself there was no one in her life she could share the burden with. But she needed to share it with someone. She would only be living a half life, never achieving her purpose or full potential as long as that moment in time held her captive.

“You should have taken Boone’s advice,” Lily said from behind him in a voice cold enough to give him frostbite. “If I’d wanted you to fix me then I would have told you what was in that file.”