Kitabı oku: «Lakeside Peril»

To Bennie Riggs and the former Hog Wash Bar and Grill in Oklahoma City.

Many thanks to Glen and Tina Hughes for answering my questions about Oklahoma and oil! This one goes out to the men and women who work on the oil patches all over the world. I appreciate your hard work!

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Bible Verse

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Dear Reader

Extract

Copyright

ONE

Someone was watching him.

He could feel the hair on the back of his neck rising while the purr of his pulse vibrated an all-too-familiar warning.

He never could relax, not really. Not even at a biker dive in the Florida Panhandle where he was trying to mind his own business.

Hunter Lawson took a sip of the club soda dripping with condensation and slowly lifted out of the chair where he sat on the deck of the Hog Wash Rib Joint.

A woman stood outside the open barn doors leading from the interior of the rickety restaurant that mostly accommodated bikers needing to wash their rides, eat some good food and get into a fight every now and then.

She was definitely not a biker chick.

But she stared at him with a determination that meant business. Harmless but lethal, all the same.

Hunter observed people. Doing so was his nature. So he took his time accessing this woman standing in this place. Didn’t match up.

She was serious and svelte. Sleek in a country girl kind of way in her jeans and tan leather jacket. Her boots looked hand-tooled. Her eyes shone a deep golden-brown and her hair—the afternoon sun loved her hair. It was a russet gold that surrounded her face like an intricate frame. The look in her eyes shouted trouble.

Being a private investigator brought him in contact with a lot of interesting people. But this one was different. His gut burned with a hot warning.

“What?” Hunter asked, his hands out.

“I... I need a word with you, Mr. Lawson.”

“Okay.” Hunter motioned to his favorite table on the deck over the Millbrook River. “Step into my office.”

Her expensive-looking boots clicked toward him and in the next instant a dark sedan zoomed by and entered the street side of the parking lot. A window came down. A gun came out.

Hunter saw the gun, glanced at the woman and then did what he had to do. He ran straight for her and tackled her to the ground.

While silenced bullets spewed all around them.

* * *

Chloe tried to find air, tried to see over the brawny shoulder that shielded her face. “Let me up,” she said, struggling.

“Stay still!”

He held her there but shifted, still covering her. She heard a motor revving and tires screeching. The car sped away, dirt and rocks flying in its wake. People came out of the restaurant, shouting and talking, pointing to where Hunter and Chloe lay. She’d barely heard the zing from the silencer, but the people inside must have seen him diving over her.

“Are they gone?”

He lifted himself up to stare down at her, his breath warm on her neck. His eyes a smoky gray that washed her in a questioning darkness. “I think so.”

He sat up and held out his hand to help her do the same. “You okay?”

Chloe wasn’t sure how to answer that. Now that she’d found Hunter Lawson, a slow panic began to set in. What if he recognized her? What if he didn’t even remember her? What if he told her to get lost? And how could she explain to him that someone was trying to kill her?

Taking her quiet for shock, he snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. “Hey, stay with me. Talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she said, wishing she’d stayed in Oklahoma. Her friend Bridget Winston had tried to warn her that this was a bad idea. “Just a few scrapes and bruises.”

And the imprint of him becoming a human shield still on her heart. He was big and strong and smelled as fresh and earthy as the fall air around them. He looked every bit as mysterious and unapproachable as people had tried to tell her. Dark, inky hair hovered over his collar in choppy, rebellious curls. Tanned, muscular arms and jean-clad legs. Battered cowboy boots. Dark aviator shades that he’d lost somewhere when he’d dived for her. And a concealed weapon tucked against the waist of his jeans.

Chloe had heard rumors regarding this man, but none of them quite lived up to seeing him in the flesh. She rubbed her sweaty palms against her jeans, her heart going into overdrive with each breath she took. Could she convince him to help her?

Please, Lord, let him listen to me.

He stood and helped her up. “Care to explain?”

“In private, yes,” she replied.

People stood around everywhere, some with drinks in their hands. Leather moto jackets and tattoos, beat-up boots and graffiti T-shirts. Women clinging to their men, their gazes moving over her with cool curiosity while their attitudes told her to back off.

“Hunter, you all right, man?”

Hunter nodded to the bartender she’d spoken with earlier. He’d warned her, too. Explained to her that Hunter wasn’t a talker. He only came here to sit out on the deck and watch the river roll by.

Well, her arrival had certainly changed all that.

Hunter glanced at her and then turned back to the bartender. “Yeah. Just someone trying to use me for target practice.” He shrugged. “What else is new?”

“Do I need to call the police?” the burly man asked, his disapproving eyes on Chloe. He gave her a look that blamed her for all this action. And he was right.

“I’ll take care of it,” Hunter replied. Then he turned to Chloe and gave her his own harsh glare. “Just as soon as this nice lady explains to me why someone’s shooting at her.”

Reassuring herself that he wouldn’t remember her because they’d never even met, Chloe swallowed back her trepidations and tried to find her footing. She wasn’t giving up now. Not after making the agonizing decision to come across the country to find him. That shooter was proof of what she already knew.

“Can we go somewhere else and talk in private?” she asked.

He glanced at the crowd. The spectators didn’t seem fazed by gunshots. They moved as one back into the restaurant, laughing and talking. “That depends on what we need to talk about.”

“I want to hire you,” she said, blurting it out because she was afraid the shooter would return. Or that Hunter would tell her to get lost.

He guided her to another table that was hidden from the street by a big weathered fence. “Sit here.” Then he walked to the street side of the deck and looked both ways. Satisfied for now, he turned and stalked back to her. “Let’s start with your name.”

Chloe’s heart rate increased. “Chloe Conrad.”

His expression went from interested to intense, rage boiling up in his eyes. “What did you say?”

“Chloe. My name is Chloe.”

“I heard that part,” Hunter replied, standing. Would he leave her here? “Tell me your last name again.”

She gave him a look of resolve. Followed by a look of disappointment. “Conrad,” she said. “Yes, as in Conrad Oil. But I hope that won’t be a problem.”

His frown darkened, a vein throbbed along his jawline. “Conrad Oil. You’d better believe that’s a problem. Sorry, lady, I’m not for hire.”

Then he dropped a ten by his forgotten drink on the other table and stalked out to his waiting bike.

Chloe couldn’t believe he’d just up and walked away without letting her explain. Marching out to the parking lot, she caught up with him before he cranked the big black motorcycle. “Hey!”

He didn’t move. Just stood there with his back to her, his hands on his hips, his head down.

Chloe swallowed and forged on. “It’s about my sister, Laura. Somebody murdered her. And I’m pretty sure they’re after me now.”

* * *

Hunter stared down at Chloe Conrad, every vein in his body running hot with the sure knowledge that he needed to get on his bike, drive away and never look back.

But he couldn’t do that. He had to understand why she’d come here all the way from Oklahoma to find him of all people. Since they’d just been shot at, he could only assume she was telling the truth. “What makes you think your sister was murdered?”

Her eyes became burnished with relief, but her expression filled with caution. “A small-engine plane she was piloting went down a few months ago. The authorities ruled it as pilot error, but Laura was an experienced pilot. I know something isn’t right, but no one will believe me.”

Her words echoed over Hunter and he remembered the sensation of thinking the same thing when his older sister had died in a car crash over three years ago. Something had not been right about the accident. No one had believed him, either.

At least no one from the Conrad family had believed him.

But he’d proven them all wrong.

“I can’t help you,” he said, the agony of the past hitting him in the gut.

“No,” she said, grabbing his arm to keep him from trying to leave again. “Do not walk away from me. I hired a pilot to fly me down here even though I was afraid to get on a plane after what happened to my sister. I’ve been careful and I did my research. You’re supposed to be the best at what you do and I know you’re licensed in both Florida and Oklahoma, but if you treat all your clients the way you’re treating me, you must have a lot of time to sit around staring at the water. Why won’t you listen to me?”

He heard that. Surprised by the bit of fire that had just exploded inside this pretty package, Hunter glanced down at her soft, warm hand holding on to his wrist with a tight grip. But he still wasn’t convinced that he should be the one to help her. “Those people will come back. You need to get out of here.”

“I can’t leave now,” she said, her voice quiet, defeated. “If I get back in my rental car, they’ll find me and kill me and then there won’t be any justice for Laura. You might hate my father and my stepbrother, but Laura deserves more. A lot more.”

Hunter closed his eyes, willing her to go away. But he couldn’t send her out there to be slaughtered. When he heard a car turning into the drive, he glanced up and saw the same dark sedan. They were back.

He grabbed her and lifted her toward the bike. “Get on,” he said, swinging his leg over the seat. Seeing the panic and fear in her eyes, he reached out for her. “Now!”

She stared at the car for a split second and then hopped on the motorcycle.

“Hold on,” he said over his shoulder.

She wrapped her slender arms around his stomach, causing him to experience a strange, heavy discomfort followed by an acute awareness.

The dark car stopped, idling, the driver watching.

Hunter cranked the bike and took off behind the building and cut through on a side street. He had only minutes before the sedan would find them. So he zigzagged through the back streets and zoomed up and down alleys and driveways before he finally headed out to the one spot where he thought they’d be safe for a while.

He took her to the camp house.

TWO

Hunter didn’t want to talk about anything that had to do with the Conrads, but he was deep into this now. He parked the bike up underneath the fat pilings that held the house sturdy and high off the ground and protected it during storms. Out over the water, a golden sky shimmered against the waves like a lace curtain. The sun was setting off to the west, but it cast out muted rays that turned the horizon into a kaleidoscope of color.

“We should be okay here for a while,” he said as he helped Chloe off the motorcycle. She felt light in his arms, but the darkness in her eyes told of her exhaustion. “This place is secluded and off the beaten path.”

Hunter knew he needed to help her. It was that simple.

But oh, so complicated. It went against every cell in his body to help anyone connected to the powerful Conrad family. This would be a betrayal of his sister’s memory.

“Where are we?” she asked, glancing around at the fishing gear, four-wheelers and boats stored underneath the broad, square wooden house. She tossed her hair away and straightened her heavy leather jacket.

“We call it AWOL,” he said. “It’s a man cave I own with three of my friends. We hang out here on weekends and fish and...try not to talk much.”

That won him a quiet smile.

“I see the water,” she said, looking out past the palm trees and dense tropical foliage. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s the big bay,” he explained. Hunter liked the openness of the water. He could breathe here. Most days.

He liked Florida. Funny how he’d just realized that.

“How did you wind up here?” she asked, probably to stall the inevitable questions he needed to ask her.

But he answered her, needing the time to gauge her and study her. Maybe get a feel for who she really was.

“Friends,” he said.

He’d come down here a couple of years ago to visit Blain Kent after returning from one last tour of duty. Blain now worked for the Millbrook Police Department as a detective. They’d met in Oklahoma at a place similar to the Hog Wash when Blain was passing through years ago. Almost got in a fight over a pretty woman, but when she’d told off both of them, they laughed and spent the rest of the night playing darts and talking shop, since they were both headed for deployment.

“A lifetime ago,” he said, shaking his head.

He’d tried to put Oklahoma behind him.

Now it was staring him in the face with a pretty smile and sad eyes the same color as the sunset.

Blain was a former marine and this summer he’d married Rikki Alvanetti. Hunter had wound up in Special Forces. He still didn’t like to talk about what he’d been through, so nobody bothered him about it. And he wasn’t planning on going the way of his three buddies. Unlike Blain and their friends Rory Sanderson and Alec Caldwell, Hunter had no intention of settling down. Marriage and a family were not in his future.

He was a loner. Always had been.

He remembered how Alec, Blain and even Preacher had each brought a woman here. Now Alec and Blain were married and Preacher was next. Hunter had promised that would never happen to him.

But here he stood with a woman he didn’t want to help, a woman who represented a big hurt in his lousy life. He would not take her inside this house. And yet he had to keep her out of sight.

She didn’t ask any questions after he’d given her the lowdown, telling her only what he wanted her to know.

Motioning to a planked picnic table, he walked her over to the wooden Adirondack chairs the guys had built last summer. The table and chairs were hidden behind a thick row of bamboo stalks, but it gave him a good view of the road and the shell-covered lane leading up to the house. They could use the table as cover if they had to. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Satisfied with their surroundings, he stared at Chloe. “I need you to level with me.”

“I told you, I need a private investigator,” she said, stepping near before she sat down, her brown boots tight against her jeans, her perfume more exotic than the lilies Preacher had planted down by the shore. “And I’m willing to pay whatever price you name.”

She smelled of money. Her family had a lot of it. He needed money, but he wondered what taking on her case would cost him. He didn’t want any Conrad blood money.

She must have sensed his dilemma. “You saw those men. They won’t stop until I’m dead.”

“I kind of got that part after the fun we had back at the Hog Wash,” he said. “You need to tell me everything, starting with why you came all this way for me when there’s plenty of PIs in Oklahoma.”

She looked out at the water glistening in a rich yellow-orange beneath the bronze sky, a second’s worth of hesitation holding her still. “Because I heard that you lived here now and that you’re licensed in both Oklahoma and Florida.” Glancing over at him, she added, “I also heard you were the best.”

“Who told you about me?”

Another evasive silence. “What does it matter? I’m here now. I thought I’d covered my tracks, but they followed me. I need someone I can trust.”

He let out a sigh. “Be honest. I like honesty.”

Her beautiful, defiant gaze hit him square in the face. “So do I. And that’s why I’m here.” She hesitated one more time before she sent him a worried stare and then plunged ahead. “Gerald Howard said you’d done some work for him.”

Hunter grabbed the hair falling over his forehead and grunted. How had this nice October day gone from bad to worse in the span of a few minutes?

“I don’t like Gerald Howard,” he said, irrational feelings closing in on him from all sides. “He’s a slick lawyer with his own agenda and he’s your father’s right-hand man. I parted ways with Howard a long time ago. I don’t get him recommending me for anything.”

“I know you don’t like Mr. Howard,” she retorted, her words rushing together as swiftly as the bay’s choppy current. “But he respects you and he says you deliver on the job.”

“Yeah, I do my job,” Hunter replied. Ignoring the irritating sensations she’d dredged up, he added, “Even when I don’t like my clients.”

“You don’t have to like me,” she retorted. “You just need to believe me when I say they are all involved.”

“Who are they?” Hunter asked, figuring that was a loaded question. “Who doesn’t believe you?”

“The sheriff in Conrad Corner, for starters.” She glanced out at the water, a dark sadness that Hunter recognized coloring her eyes. “And just about everyone else there, too. Possibly including my father.”

Conrad Corner, Oklahoma. Hunter didn’t want to think about that dingy little town thirty miles west of Oklahoma City. He’d been running from that place since he’d returned stateside.

But he did believe one thing Chloe Conrad had said.

The sheriff in Conrad Corner was corrupt, so if the sheriff had refused to help her, there had to be a reason. And not a good one. Her father owned as many people as he did acreage.

“Keep talking,” he said.

She had just become his client.

* * *

Chloe let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, tears of relief burning through her eyes. No one, not even her distraught family, wanted to delve into what might have happened on that deserted airstrip this past spring. But she’d found some details that made her believe finding Hunter Lawson was her only hope. Now she had to convince him to help without sharing all those details with him. Yet.

Knowing Hunter might actually believe her helped her to go on. “Over the last few months I’ve gone from mourning my sister’s plane crash and death to promising myself to find out who killed Laura. Because besides knowing that Laura was an expert pilot, I found something else that disturbed me.”

He drummed his fingers on the weathered table. “What?”

“Her apartment had been ransacked. Everything had been tossed around and knocked over. It happened a few days after her funeral.”

“Did you report it?”

“Yes, but...nothing of value was missing. I don’t think they found what they were looking for, since I’d already taken out a box of personal papers and files earlier in the week.”

“So what happened after that?”

“I went through the files and papers I found at her apartment when I went to clean it out a day or so after the crash. My mother asked me to do it.” She tugged at her jacket, took another breath. The anguish of going into that apartment tormented Chloe even now. “My sister was a social reporter. She did human interest stories for a humanitarian website and worked as a beat reporter at the Conrad Chronicle. She wasn’t into hard news. Laura had such a good heart she always looked for the best in people.”

“What did you find in the files?” Hunter asked, his tone quiet but his eyes cutting like gunmetal.

He wanted to be done with her. Discomfort and impatience radiated all around him like a mantle. Chloe decided now wasn’t the right time to give him all the details. She had to gain his trust bit by bit.

“Some reports and notes regarding several parcels of land near Conrad. Land that my family secretly owns.”

“Your family owns half of Oklahoma.”

“But this is land that my father somehow bought up in bits. I think he’s been quietly sitting on it for years. It looks as if someone bought it up under another name, even though the sales are public record. I couldn’t understand why Laura would be interested in that until I studied these reports.”

“What did the reports say?”

“From what I could gather, the land has been in a holding pattern with a company called Wind Drift Pass. Laura’s notes indicated it was some sort of shell company. No one knows that Conrad Oil is involved with the transactions. But I think Laura found out something regarding this land, something that caused her death. She’d made notes indicating that Conrad Oil owned the land. I believe she was gathering information to confront someone. Or expose someone.”

He sat back in his chair. “Big corporations use shell companies a lot to avoid paying taxes.”

“Yes, but why would Conrad Oil use one for land that hasn’t been developed yet? What are they trying to hide?”

“Why don’t you ask your father that question?”

She sat silent for only a second, but Hunter’s eyes turned a deep gray. So he answered the question for her. “Because you don’t trust him.”

Chloe hated to admit it, but it was the truth. And Hunter had asked for the truth. She gave him as much of it as she felt necessary for now. “I don’t trust anyone.”

He nodded. “Ah, so that explains it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. Had he already figured it all out?

He leaned up in his chair, his gaze pinning her. “Why you came to me.”