Blindside

“It’s too late for us, pumpkin,” Katie told her daughter, “he waited as long as he could, and then he met Sherlock and she proposed to him. She was more in need than we were. What could he do?”

Miles wanted to laugh, but he was just too tired to do more than blink.

By the time Katie walked out of Dillon’s hospital room, two Advil in her system, Keely’s head rested on her shoulder, and she was sound asleep. Ten minutes later, Katie eased down into the front seat of Miles’s rented Ford and settled Keely on her lap. Miles fastened the seat belt. Then he paused, and both of them realized they didn’t want Sam to be alone in the backseat.

It would be a tight fit, but they could do it. Miles said, “Sam, do you think you can hold real still?”

“Sure, Papa,” Sam said, so tired his voice slurred like a drunk’s.

“Okay, I want you to sit on my lap, but since I’m driving, you can’t move a whisker.”

Katie had given people tickets for such stupidity, but she didn’t say a word. It would work.

Once Miles had the seat belt around both of them, Sam nearly touching the steering wheel even though Miles had pushed the front seat all the way back, Katie said, “Maybe you’d best stay at Mother’s Very Best tonight, Miles. The other Feds are staying there.”

He was silent for a long moment as he started the car.

“It’s not that I don’t want you at my house. It’s something else entirely.”

12

S he paused, saw that both children were asleep, then said, her voice low, “Something’s happened, Miles.”

His hands were fisted around the steering wheel. “Tell me.”

“It seems that Fatso/Clancy got out of the van before it blew. They haven’t found him yet. The hunt will begin in earnest early tomorrow morning, at first light. If he’s still in the forest, he might be dead of his wounds or pneumonia by morning. But I don’t think we’ll get that lucky.”

His right hand thumped the steering wheel. Sam jerked, but didn’t awaken. “So there’s still danger.”

“Well, yes. I felt much better thinking he was dead and accounted for, given what’s happened. I’m hoping that he’ll run as far and as fast as he can. At least when we catch him, we’ll have a chance to get out of him why he and Beau took Sam.”

“That would make me feel a whole lot better. There wasn’t a ransom note. Everyone was thinking a pedophile had taken him. Now? I don’t have a clue.” He paused, then added, “I guess you don’t think he’s dead.”

There was such hopefulness in his voice, but she didn’t lie. “No, I don’t. Life is never that neat and tidy. When you mix criminals in, things really get mucked up.”

“So that’s why you want me to stay at this B and B in town.”

“It might be for the best.”

“Wouldn’t we be just as safe with you and your deputies, Sheriff?”

“Two deputies will be in front of the house all night and there will be lots of people there tomorrow. Either way, you should be fine, but it’s up to you, Miles.”

“If you’ll have us, Sam and I would like to stay with you. He knows your house, Sheriff, he’s comfortable with Keely and with you. I don’t want to take him to another strange place unless I’m forced to.”

“No, you don’t have to. But please remember, Clancy and Beau came back to my house to get Sam again. I’m not really sure Clancy is going to hightail it out of here.”

“Ah, I don’t think you know this, Katie, but I was in law enforcement myself until five years ago, in the FBI. Savich and I worked together, as a matter of fact, and that’s how we became friends. I can handle myself and a gun, if the need arises.”

She shook her head at him. “I knew there was something about you, something that made me think you’d been in the military, or something.”

“Yeah, I can just imagine how bad-ass dangerous I looked holding two children in my arms.”

It took them a good twenty minutes to get there, never going faster than twenty miles an hour. The rain had slowed to a drizzle but a low-lying gray fog blanketed the ground. The air was bone-numbing cold, pregnant with more rain.

The children continued to sleep all the way back to Katie’s house, a neat two-story with a wide porch built in the forties. It was just outside Jessborough proper, along a road lined with tulip poplars, set back on five acres that were mostly covered with hardwood trees-beech, red maple, white ash, sassafras.

Miles said, “Do you know, I can’t see the mountains, but I know they’re there, nearly in your backyard.”

“Just wait until morning. Fall is the most glamorous time of the year. So many different trees, so many bright colors, each one distinctive. Come back, say, the end of March and it isn’t so pretty.”

Miles pulled the Ford in behind the deputies. Katie waved to them, then handed a sleeping Keely to Miles to put on his other shoulder. She watched him pause a moment and stare at the still smoldering van and the boarded-up front window. Then he took the children into the house.

Katie was pleased the car was parked right out in front, as conspicuous as could be. No way Clancy could miss them. They also had a huge thermos of black coffee on the front seat between them, enough, they assured her, to last them until doomsday, or later.

It was nearly 2 a.m. when Katie handed Miles a cup of hot chocolate and pointed to a big easy chair.

“Why don’t you drink this. I find hot chocolate always slows me down even if my brain is revving. I’ll bet it’ll send you right off to sleep.”

“Your headache under control?”

“Oh yes. But how did you know?”

He smiled at her. “I just knew.”

She couldn’t help herself and smiled back. “It’s been an eventful day,” she said and both of them sipped the hot chocolate.

She closed her eyes in bliss as it warmed her belly.

“An understatement. Both kids were boneless. I just poured them into their beds. It’s always amazed me how a kid can do that.”

Katie smiled. “Thank you for taking care of Keely. My sweats are warm even if they don’t fit Sam very well. I haven’t had time to wash his clothes. We can do that first thing in the morning. Sam’s a brave kid, Miles.”

“Yeah, he is. Obviously it’s you who deserves thanks for saving my son’s life. I owe you, Katie, I owe you forever.”

“You’re welcome. Remember, Sam saved himself. It was luck that I was driving really slow and Keely saw him.”

Miles said, “When I put Keely to bed while you were drying my clothes, she still had that blanket Hilda gave her at the hospital. She didn’t want to give it up.”

“She didn’t mention Oscar? That’s her rabbit. They’ve been inseparable since she was six months old.”

“She sleeps with her rabbit?”

“Oh, sure. Does Sam have a favorite animal he sleeps with?”

“Yes,” Miles said. “A big stuffed frog named Ollie. It’s really ratty, but Sam refuses to let it go.”

“Wait just a second.” Katie left the living room only to return a few seconds later, a big green frog under her arm. “Would you look at this sitting in her closet-her grandmother, my mother, gave it to her for Christmas last year. Maybe Sam would let it be a stand-in for Ollie.”

He smiled, the first one Katie had seen. “You have a name for the critter?”

“Oh yeah, she’s Marie.”

“Sam might not want a girl.”

“Trust me. Green isn’t girly. And you’ll make it Martin.”

She watched him close his eyes again, saw the tension flooding back over him, and waited. After a minute or so, he said, “Best I can tell, Sam was taken out of his own bed close to dawn, early Friday morning. It’s been like an unending nightmare.” He swallowed convulsively. Katie just let him talk.

“I went to get him up for school, and he wasn’t in his bed. I thought he was in the bathroom and I went yelling for him to hurry up. It took at least five minutes before I realized he was gone, that someone had taken him. My first thought was a sexual predator, and believe me, the FBI checked that out immediately. Then we all wondered if it was some sort of revenge-after all, I’d been in the FBI myself and captured some bad guys. Since I own a good-sized company, it could have been ransom. They spoke to my sister-in-law, to some of my employees, even a couple of friends. It all takes time, so they’d really just gotten started. But no matter what the agents said, no matter what they did, all I could think about was some child molester had gotten him.”