One Hot Forty-Five Read online

  Lantry had heard his share of pre-divorce stories over the years. He didn’t want to hear Dede Chamberlain’s, didn’t want to feel any sympathy for her. Marriage was a choice, and she’d stupidly married Frank.

  Those big blue eyes filled with tears. She bit her lower lip as if fighting to hold them back. “I know those men are why Frank turned on me—and why they’re now trying to kill you.”

  He couldn’t help but ask. “Didn’t you question him about what was going on?”

  “He said I was imagining things. But one night after he’d had a few drinks, he seemed to be the old Frank I’d fallen in love with. He said that he’d believed a man could change, could overcome his past, even his upbringing. I said I believed that too, but he said we were both wrong. That his past had come back to drag him down, and there was no escaping it.”

  “What does any of this have to do with him trying to kill you or me?” Lantry asked impatiently.

  “Didn’t you ever ask yourself why it wasn’t enough for Frank to just divorce me? He had me committed so no one would believe anything I said.”

  And it was working, Lantry thought.

  “Last week Frank called me and warned me they would try to kill me and that I had to get out of the hospital.”

  Lantry rubbed the back of his neck. His head hurt, and he needed sleep. “You do realize how crazy this all sounds, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “They’re counting on you not believing me. That’s why you have to get me out of here so—”

  Lantry let out a laugh. “I don’t think so. I’ll take my chances with Frank and his boys. But thanks.”

  “They tried to kill you once when they rigged your Ferrari,” she said grabbing the bars of her cell, calling after him as he started to turn away again.

  “Lamborghini,” he said, turning back to her.

  “Whatever. All those kinds of cars look alike to me,” she said and glanced at her watch. “We don’t have much time, Mr. Corbett. I’m your last hope. Once they kill me, there won’t be anyone who can save you.”

  Why was he still listening to this woman? Because of an uneasy feeling that her story was just crazy enough to be true.

  “How did you get to Montana anyway?” he demanded, wanting to trap her in a lie so he could wash his hands of this whole business and get back to bed. “Frank took all the money, the cars, the houses—”

  “I have my own money, Mr. Corbett.” There was a hard edge to her voice. “I didn’t marry Frank for his, no matter what he led you to believe.”

  Lantry couldn’t hide his surprise. He had wanted to believe she was a crazy gold digger. It made what Frank did to her easier to be a part of. “Even if I believed that Frank’s buddies tampered with my car, they had other chances to kill me after that. So why haven’t they tried?”

  “I suspect they didn’t know where to find you,” she said. “Ed has got to be in Whitehorse by now. Claude is either still at the hospital or on his way here. If I have to go back in the mental hospital, he’ll kill me. He came close in Texas. I’d be dead right now if Violet and Roberta hadn’t broken me out. I know all this is hard for you to believe—”

  The cell-block door opened, and his brother stuck his head in, motioning to him.

  “Hold that thought,” Lantry said to Dede, shaking his head at how foolish he was to buy into any of this. So the woman had her own money and she was no dummy, her story was still preposterous.

  “We just got a call,” Shane said. “A stolen vehicle believed driven by one of the patients Dede Chamberlain escaped with has been spotted. The patient, Violet Evans, is from here. The sheriff and I are going out there now. Are you about through with your client?”

  “She’s not my client,” Lantry snapped irritably. His cell phone rang. He checked it. “I need to take this.”

  “Deputy Conners will be here in case you get any ideas about breaking her out,” Shane joked.

  Lantry mugged a face at his brother and took the call as the cell-block door clanged shut. “So, what did you find out?”

  “How about ‘Hello, James, sorry to wake you too damned early in the morning and ask you to track down my wrecked car.’”

  “Sorry.” James Ames was a close friend and a damned good mechanic. “You found it? And?”

  “The brake lines weren’t cut.”

  So it was just as he’d suspected. Dede Chamberlain was delusional.

  “The steering mechanism was hinky, though.”

  “Hinky?” He glanced down the line of cells at Dede, then turned his back to her.

  “I’ve never seen one torqued quite like that from an accident,” James said. “What did you hit?”

  “Nothing. I just suddenly lost control of the car. Are you saying it had been tampered with?” Lantry said, keeping his voice down.

  “Only if someone was trying to kill you.” James laughed as if he’d made a joke. “I guess in your profession that’s always a possibility, though. Guess they missed you this time.” He was still chuckling when Lantry hung up.

  He glanced back at Dede again. She was holding on to the bars, watching him with that hopeful look on her angelic face again. Damn.

  As he walked back to her cell, he pictured Frank Chamberlain, a handsome, well-to-do, powerful man in Houston who didn’t need to resort to murder to get what he wanted. “You say Frank called to warn you. But if Frank wanted to protect you, why didn’t he break you out himself?”

  “How did Frank tell you he made his fortune?” she asked, the change of subject giving him whiplash.

  “A killing on Wall Street.”

  She smiled ruefully. “He told me his grandmother left him the money.”

  Lantry had never cared how his clients made their money as long as he got paid. Frank Chamberlain had paid right away. The check had gone through, and Lantry had put the case behind him and gone to Montana for a family meeting on the Trails West Ranch, where his father and new wife had just settled. He hadn’t planned to stay so long, but he’d gotten involved in some family legal business and then it was almost Christmas….

  “Frank lied to both of us, and worse, involved us in his past.” Dede met his gaze with a challenging look. “You’re starting to believe me, aren’t you?”

  The woman didn’t know a Lamborghini from a Ferrari. Did he really think she knew the brake line from the steering mechanism?

  “Even if I bought into this, the state is sending someone to pick you up in—” he glanced at his watch “—less than—”

  Her bloodcurdling scream made him jump back. She began to rattle the bars, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded and reached out to stop her.

  She grabbed the front of his shirt and the strings from his bolo tie. He heard fabric rip as he tried to pull away, the bolo tie tightening around his neck. The door to the sheriff’s office clanged open, and the still-wet-behind-the-ears deputy came running toward them.

  It all happened so fast. Lantry made the mistake of trying to calm her, afraid he would hurt her if he pulled away too hard. Dede had wound her fingers into the fabric of his shirt and was hanging on to his bolo tie as if it were a lifeline.

  The deputy jumped into the middle of the ruckus.

  Lantry didn’t see her get the deputy’s gun. It just suddenly appeared in Dede’s hand, pointed at the two of them at the same time the screaming stopped.

  In the deafening silence that followed, all Lantry could hear was the blood pounding in his ears as he stared at the woman with the gun.

  Dede was so calm now he shuddered to see that she knew her way around weapons and probably the steering mechanisms on Lamborghinis as well. He couldn’t believe how he’d been taken in by her. Probably the same way poor Frank Chamberlain had.

  The deputy had turned a sickening shade of green.

  “Take it easy,” Lantry said, not sure if the words were meant for Dede or the deputy or himself. “Don’t do anything rash.” How could she do anyt
hing more rash than what she’d just done short of shooting them both now at point-blank range?

  She barked out instructions to the green deputy, who did as he was told. “Now put the plastic cuffs on the lawyer. Loop them through that fancy belt of his.”

  “Like hell,” Lantry said.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to see anyone get hurt here, do you, Mr. Corbett?”

  He glared at her.

  She pointed the deputy’s pistol at the young man’s heart. “Make sure they are good and tight.”

  Lantry had no option. He couldn’t take the chance she would shoot the deputy.

  “Now open the cell,” she said, still holding the gun on the deputy. “Hurry up. We don’t want to see any innocent people get hurt because you didn’t move fast enough.”

  As instructed, the deputy opened the cell and traded places with her. Dede closed the cell door, keeping the pistol on Lantry, and took the keys.

  “Come on, Mr. Corbett. We’ll be leaving now. Cross your fingers that no one tries to stop us. As crazy as I am, who knows what I might do?”

  Lantry bit down on a reply and, with the gun barrel pressed into his back, let her lead him out of the sheriff’s department and into the snowy, still-dark early morning.

  Chapter Two

  There were no cars in the parking lot other than Lantry’s pickup and the deputy’s beat-up old Mazda, both covered with snow. The blizzard Lantry had been warned about on the news had finally blown in.

  “Just a minute.” Dede reached into his coat pocket and dug out his cell phone and keys. She hit the automatic lock release, the lights of the pickup flashing on.

  As Dede walked him to his pickup, wind whirled the large, thick flakes around them as if they were in a snow globe.

  He could imagine how ridiculous the two of them looked. Him in handcuffs tethered to his belt and a petite woman in a Santa costume holding a gun on him.

  But unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around at this hour—and in the middle of a blizzard—to see them.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Lantry said as they reached his pickup. “This is only making your situation worse.”

  “A hotshot lawyer like you? I’m sure you can get me off without even any jail time,” Dede said, keeping the pistol pressed into his back.

  “You can’t possibly think that I can make all of this go away. You pulled a gun on a sheriff’s deputy and escaped from two mental hospitals and a jail cell.”

  “I did what I had to do,” she said, pressing the gun barrel into his back. “When the time comes, I know you can make a judge understand that. Anyway, what would you have done under the same circumstances?”

  He didn’t know. He thought of his brother Dalton’s criminally insane first wife. The law didn’t always protect people. Oftentimes it was used against the person who needed and deserved protection the most.

  Dede took him around to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Get in and slide across the seat. If you think about doing anything stupid, just think about your part in helping Frank take everything—including my freedom from me—in the divorce.”

  He climbed in and slid across the seat, keeping what she had said in mind. He had helped put this woman away—just not well enough, apparently.

  She followed, never taking the gun off him and leaving him little doubt that she really might shoot him if he tried to escape.

  Shifting the weapon to her left hand, she inserted the key and started the pickup, then hit the child locks and reached over to buckle him in. “Just in case you’re thinking about jumping out.”

  As if he could reach the door handle the way she had him hog-tied.

  The wipers swept away the accumulated snow on the windshield. The glow of Christmas lights on the houses blurred through the falling snow, a surreal reminder that Christmas was just days away.

  Dede turned on the heater, then shifted the truck into gear and, resting the pistol on the seat next to her thigh, drove away from the sheriff’s department.

  Her composure unraveled him more than even the gun against her thigh. This woman must have nerves of steel. For just a moment, though, he thought he saw her hands trembling on the wheel, but he must have imagined it given the composed, unwavering way she had acted back in the jail.

  They passed only one vehicle on the way out of town. A van with a state emblem on the side, but the driver was too busy trying to see through the falling and blowing snow to pay them any mind.

  Lantry consoled himself that the deputy would soon be found in the cell and a manhunt would begin for the escaped prisoner and her hostage.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” he said, his throat dry as she took one of the narrow back roads as if she knew where she was going.

  He recalled that she’d spent the past twenty-four hours before her arrest with Violet Evans, a woman from the area. It was more than possible that Dede had gotten directions from the local woman.

  “I suppose all this seems a little desperate to a man like you,” she said quietly.

  “A little desperate?” He looked over at her, then out at the storm. He could feel the temperature dropping.

  The weatherman had forecasted below-zero temperatures and blizzard conditions. Residents had been warned to stay off the roads because of blowing and drifting snow and diminishing visibility.

  Lantry had little doubt that the roads would be closed soon, as they had been earlier in the month during the last winter-storm warnings.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Dede said as she drove. “Thanks to Frank, I’ve been forced to do things I wouldn’t have even imagined just months ago. I suppose that is nuts, huh?”

  Lantry studied her, not wanting to know what had pushed her over the edge. “Would you have really shot that deputy?”

  “Of course not. What do you think I am? That deputy never did anything to me. Unlike you,” she added. “You helped Frank get me locked up in a mental ward.”

  Lantry didn’t want to go down that road. The wind rocked the pickup. Snow whipped across the road, forcing Dede to slow almost to a crawl before the visibility cleared enough that she could see the road ahead again.

  The barrow pits had filled in with snow. Only the tops of a few wooden fence posts were still visible above the snowline.

  “My brother will be combing the countryside searching for me,” he said. Outside the pickup window he could see nothing but white. There were no other tracks in the road now. No one would be out on a night like this. No one with a brain, he amended silently.

  “Shane will call in the FBI since kidnapping is a federal offense,” he continued. “This time they’ll lock you up and you’ll never get out. Do you have any idea where you’re headed?”

  He glanced over at her when she didn’t answer. Her angelic face was set in an expression of concentration and determination.

  “The best thing you can do at this point is turn around and go back,” he said. “If you turn yourself in, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you get a fair hearing.”

  “I’m touched by your concern, Mr. Corbett. But I’m crazy, remember? If I get caught, they’ll just put me back in the looney bin and throw away the key, and then the men after me will kill me. By then, they will have murdered you, so you’ll be of little help.”

  She shifted down as a gust of wind rocked the pickup and sent snow swirling around them.

  “But if we don’t get caught,” she continued, “I might be able to keep us both alive. So in the grand scale of things, kidnapping you seems pretty minor, don’t you think?”

  He hated that her logic made a bizarre kind of sense. She wasn’t going to turn around and take him back, that much was a given.

  In the rare openings between gusts, blurred Christmas lights could be seen along the eaves of ranch houses. But soon the ranch houses became fewer and farther between, as did the blur of Christmas lights, until there was nothing but white in the darkness ahead.

  They were headed south on one o
f the lesser-used, narrow, unpaved roads. Between them and the Missouri Breaks was nothing but wild country.

  “What now?” he asked as the wind blew in the cracks of the pickup cab and sent snow swirling across the road, obliterating everything.

  “You’re going to help me save our lives—once I convince you how much danger you’re in.”

  It wasn’t going to take much to convince him of that, Lantry thought as he noted the gun nestled between her thighs and the Montana blizzard raging outside the pickup.

  DEDE GRIPPED THE WHEEL AND fought to see the road ahead. Mostly what she did was aim the pickup between the fence posts—what little of them wasn’t buried in snow on the other side of the snow-deep barrow pits.

  Between the heavy snowfall and the blowing fallen snow, all she could see was white.

  She didn’t need Lantry Corbett to tell her how crazy this was. But given the alternative…

  Nor did she want to admit that the lawyer’s arguments weren’t persuasive. There was a time she would have believed everything he said and been ready to turn her life over to him, thinking he would save her.

  But this wasn’t that time. Too much had happened to her. And too much was at stake. A part of her wished she’d been honest with Lantry back at the jail, although she doubted it would have swayed him anyway.

  She couldn’t let herself forget who this cowboy was or the part he’d played in bringing them both to this point in their lives.

  This Lantry Corbett, though, looked nothing like the man she’d only seen on television. This blue-eyed cowboy hardly resembled the clean-shaven, three-piece designer-suited lawyer who she’d been told would eat his young.

  She’d thought she had the wrong Lantry Corbett when she’d rolled over on her cot in jail earlier and had seen the cowboy standing outside her cell. This man wore a black Stetson, his dark hair now curled at the nape of his neck—not the corporate short haircut he’d sported in Texas—and he’d grown a thick black mustache that drooped at the corners and made him look as if he should have been from the Old West.

  Maybe even more surprising, he looked at home in his worn Western attire. This was no urban cowboy, and the clothing only made him more appealing, accentuating his broad shoulders and slim hips. Even the way he moved was different. Tall and lanky, Lantry had walked into the jail with a slow, graceful gait in the work-worn cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans that hugged those long legs.