Luck of the Draw Read online

  “Garrett, I saw your reaction when you walked in there and saw her lying in that bed. You looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  He glanced at the closed hospital room door. “That’s exactly what it was. A ghost from my past.”

  * * *

  DR. BULLOCK PASSED THEM in the hallway, a stern look on his face. “Visiting hours are long over, Sheriff.”

  Sid nodded and considered taking the rancher down to his office to find out what had happened back there in that woman’s room. But he didn’t want to give Garrett that long to think about it.

  “Let’s talk in the waiting room,” he said as he ushered a shaken Garrett Sterling into the nearest room. Neither spoke as he closed the door behind him. When he turned, he saw that Garrett was sitting in one of the waiting room chairs, his face in his hands again.

  “Are you all right?” Sid asked, seeing that the man wasn’t.

  It took a moment before the rancher pulled himself together. There was a haunted look in his blue eyes when he finally looked up. It was clear that recognizing the woman had rocked the big cowboy, something that surprised Sid.

  Garrett didn’t rock easily. Earlier, after seeing what he believed was a murder, he’d been shocked and upset, but he’d kept his cool. The rancher had managed to take him right to the spot where he’d thought he’d last seen the couple—before he’d fired the warning shot. Before he’d heard the answering four shots and had seen what he thought was someone lying in the grass dead. Garrett had even managed to give him a pretty good description of the two people along with the SUV the woman had taken off in after the shooting.

  But right now, the rancher looked as if a gust of wind would knock him over, which made Sid more than anxious to hear about his connection to the suspect lying in that hospital bed.

  Garrett cleared his throat. “I don’t know where to begin.” He cleared his throat again. “You might remember. It was in all the papers. About two years ago? I’d been down in Missoula in law school. It was late at night.” Garrett swallowed and met his gaze. “I had this sudden craving for chocolate milk.” He shook his head. “I always wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t walked into that convenience store that night.”

  Sid did remember now that Garrett had brought it up. He sat back in his chair, trying to understand what any of that though had to do with what was happening now. He could see that the rancher was still trying to make sense of all of this and struggling. Realizing he knew the woman had clearly been a blow, one he was still trying to absorb.

  “I saw her when I walked into the convenience store. She had the kind of face that caught a man’s attention. I went to the back, found a small container of chocolate milk and was on my way to the counter when I heard the man come in.” Garrett grew quiet for a moment, a distant look in his eyes. “It still makes my heart pound when I think about it. The man had a gun, was visibly agitated and demanded that the young male clerk behind the counter empty the money from the cash register into a bag and then open the safe.”

  Sid was trying to remember if he’d heard anything about a woman in the store that night. “Where was she?”

  “She’d been about to check out when the robber came in, so only a few feet away. She’d frozen, just like me. The maybe nineteen-year-old behind the counter was all thumbs trying to open the cash register and swearing he didn’t know how to open the safe. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I was wondering how much money I had in my wallet and if I could talk the robber down.”

  Sid groaned inwardly, having dealt with what sounded like a junkie or at least a very nervous criminal. Reasoning with them wasn’t usually a viable option.

  “The robber was getting more upset and nervous by the moment. Before I could move, he grabbed the woman, held the gun to her head, and told the clerk that he would kill her, then everyone else in the place, if he didn’t open the safe.”

  “You saved her,” Sid said, realizing that’s all that could have happened since he was guessing that the woman was alive and now in a hospital room down the hall. The convenience-store robbery had brought Garrett fifteen minutes of fame as a hero two years ago, but six months after that the rancher had dropped out of law school. Sid had always wondered if the trauma of what had happened had made him change his mind about working in a profession where he would be brushing elbows with criminals.

  “The robber hadn’t seen me behind him,” Garrett said, continuing his story. “I took one hell of a risk with that woman’s life, but I cold-cocked the guy—”

  “With a can of beans.” That part had definitely made the news.

  Garrett nodded. “The robber dropped to the floor, but he’d fired a shot and pulled the woman down with him. They were both lying at my feet. I couldn’t tell if the woman was hit or not. I knelt down to shove the robber’s gun out of the way and see if she was all right when the convenience store door opened and the second one came in armed and just as agitated. He had apparently been waiting outside in the getaway car but had rushed in when he heard the shot. The young clerk behind the counter had hit an alarm when the first robber came in because I heard sirens as all hell broke out. It all happened so fast. I leaned over the woman to protect her. I heard the shots and had assumed it was the second robber killing the clerk.”

  “But it turned out that the clerk had a gun behind the counter, drew it and emptied the pistol into the second robber,” Sid said, still waiting to see what this story had to do with the woman down the hall. “And the woman?” he prodded.

  Garrett sighed. “I was still covering her when she whispered, ‘Can you get me out of here before the police come? I can’t be involved in this.’ I realized that I hadn’t seen her car outside when I’d pulled up so she must have walked. I handed her my pickup keys, whispered my apartment address, and she took off out the back. The young clerk didn’t see any of it. He had dropped behind the counter and was bawling his eyes out. I stayed and talked to the police. The clerk and I both said we didn’t know who the woman was, only that she had left, which was true. The cops just assumed she’d been terrified and had run.”

  Sid couldn’t believe what he was hearing and said as much. “You lied to the police? Weren’t you curious why she didn’t want to deal with the cops?” He let out a bark of a laugh. “Hell, I would have been worried that I’d never see my pickup again—let alone that everything of value would have been cleaned out of my apartment by the time I got there.”

  Garrett chuckled. “It did cross my mind, but when I got to my apartment, she was waiting for me. She told me she was an undercover cop and had she not gotten out of that convenience store when she did, her cover would have been blown.”

  He stared at the rancher. “And you believed her?”

  “I wanted to,” Garrett said with a sheepish grin. “We’d both just gone through something terrifying together. We were both thankful to be alive and safe.”

  Sid knew what was coming, even though he found it hard to believe since Garrett seemed the most sensible of the Sterling brothers. “You became involved with her.”

  “I guess it wasn’t surprising that we found comfort in each other that night. And the next and the next.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “About five months. Amazing months. Then she disappeared as if she’d never existed. I tried to find her, worried since as far as I knew she was still an undercover cop.”

  “Let me guess, when you went down to the police station, they said they’d never heard of her.”

  Garrett let out a rueful chuckle. “They convinced me she wasn’t an undercover cop and that I’d been conned. They’d never heard of anyone by the name of Joslyn Charles. I looked for her, even hired someone to find her.” He shrugged. “It was as if she’d never existed. I never saw her again—until today.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  STILL SHOCKED BY what Garrett had told him, Sid decided to hang
around the hospital in the hopes that the woman regained consciousness—and could talk. He had no idea what had happened up on the mountainside but after the story Garrett had told him about her, he was definitely more interested in hearing her side of it.

  That Garrett had known this woman in the biblical sense was crazy enough—add to it the way he’d met her and how she’d turned up in his life again. His gut told him it hadn’t been a coincidence.

  His cell phone rang, startling him from his thoughts. He saw that it was the coroner calling and picked right up.

  “Sam, you’re working late tonight,” he said without preamble.

  “You brought me an interesting case. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep once I saw the body on my table.” Possible homicides were rare in Whitefish. Sam Samuelson didn’t get a lot of interesting cases, the sheriff knew.

  “How so?” he asked.

  “You probably didn’t notice given that his body was found in the pouring rain, but once the lab tech came in to take his fingerprints, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Altered fingerprints.”

  The sheriff had heard of criminals attempting to keep their fingerprints from coming up on federal and state databases. The most common way was scarring by biting, cutting, sanding or burning with heat or a chemical.

  “Looks like they were deliberately burned off. Trying to burn off his fingerprints had to be extremely painful and such a waste since we will probably be able to get an ID on him through his DNA,” Sam was saying.

  “Let’s get his DNA to the lab as soon as possible. I want to know who this guy is.” And how he ended up with the woman Garrett had known as Joslyn Charles on the mountain across from Sterling’s Montana Guest Ranch. He was even more anxious to get the woman’s DNA results.

  * * *

  WALKING OUT TO his pickup, Garrett still couldn’t believe the woman he’d seen across the ravine was the same one he’d rescued at the convenience store two years ago. The same woman he’d known intimately. Worse, a woman he’d done more than think about marrying.

  He realized after seeing her again, that he’d never gotten over her. There’d been a few women over the past twenty-four months, but none he’d been serious about. Joslyn had always been there, tucked away in the corner of his heart—the heart she’d broken when she disappeared without a word.

  Her disappearing had been so abrupt. Their last night together hadn’t been any different than any of the other nights they’d spent together. There’d been chemistry between them, a passion that had left him completely enamored. He’d thought that she’d felt the same way. Then she’d just taken off, leaving him with a lot of questions, no answers and a whole lot of pain.

  The hardest part had been not knowing what had happened to her.

  He’d checked the hospital, the police station, everywhere he could think to look. He’d watched the news, thinking she might have had an accident and was either dead or in a coma and couldn’t call. He’d come up with all kinds of scenarios, all of them a fool’s dream. Joslyn was fine. She was just gone.

  Sliding behind the wheel, he sat in the cool of the pickup’s cab, still shaken. Joslyn Charles. She’d dropped into his life just as crazily as she had the first time. Now, all his instincts told him it couldn’t be a coincidence. Not again.

  The rain outside had turned to drizzle and fog now moved like a ghost through the hospital parking lot. The pickup cab had begun to feel cold. He told himself he should go home. But what he wanted to do was go back into the hospital to Joslyn’s room. He needed to talk to her.

  Unfortunately the sheriff had a deputy outside her hospital room and he’d heard Sid give both the doctor and the deputy instructions that no one was to go into her room except hospital personnel.

  When Garrett had said he needed to talk to her, the sheriff had been adamant. “I have a dead man over at the morgue with what appears to be four bullet holes in him. Maybe her name is Joslyn Charles. Maybe not. But the woman has some explaining to do and it’s going to be to me first and foremost.”

  Oh, she certainly had some explaining to do, Garrett thought. Not that he had any idea what he would say to her at this point. What do you say to the woman who you had fallen in love with years ago who’d lied to you about everything and then had disappeared without so much as a goodbye note? How much of what he thought they’d had between them had been a lie? All of it?

  He sat for a moment longer debating what to do before opening his pickup door and getting out again. He wouldn’t try to talk to her. But if he could get another look at her... He had to know if he was mistaken. Maybe she just resembled Joslyn. After all, it had been two years. There must be a hundred, well, at least a dozen women with her bone structure. Even with her eyes. Even with her mouth.

  All the way to her room, he tried to convince himself that he was wrong. The woman in that hospital bed was a stranger. She had to be because otherwise, the woman he’d known as Joslyn Charles had disarmed a man and shot him four times, killing him. What woman her size could physically do something like that? Not the woman he’d known. He remembered how scared she’d been that night in the convenience store. She’d frozen in place—just as he had. That alone should have been a clue back then that she wasn’t an undercover cop. Otherwise, wouldn’t she have tried to disarm the man? Wouldn’t she have had a weapon on her?

  Pushing open the hospital door, he headed for her room. But as he came around the corner, he spotted the guard outside her room. The deputy saw him and stood as Garrett approached.

  He tried to think of what he could say to get inside her room, but he needn’t have bothered. Her hospital room door opened and Sheriff Anderson stepped out.

  Garrett saw his expression and felt his heart drop to his boots. “Is she...?” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word dead.

  Sid quickly shook his head. “She’s okay. What are you doing here again?” He sighed and motioned for them to step away from her door.

  Garrett followed him down the hall, his mind racing. Had she confessed? Had she turned out to be someone else other than Joslyn Charles? Of course she had. But what had the woman in that room told the sheriff to make him react the way he was?

  Sid stopped and turned to him. “She says she can’t remember anything. Not even her name. Not anything.”

  For a moment Garrett was too stunned to speak. Was she lying? He thought about the blow to her head up on the mountainside and apparently another one that the doctor had mentioned from the car wreck. “But even if it’s true, it’s probably temporary, right?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Doc says maybe, maybe not. I’m waiting on the autopsy report and ballistic results, but from the powder residue on her hands, she definitely fired a gun recently.”

  “Do you know who the man is yet?”

  Sid shook his head.

  Garrett raked a hand through his hair, his Stetson dangling from the fingertips of his other hand. He knew what was bothering him. “That man was so much larger and stronger than her. How could she—”

  “You firing that shot had to have saved her life,” the sheriff said as if he’d been giving it some thought as well. “You distracted him for a second, maybe she kicked him in the nuts, grabbed the gun still clutched in his hands, turned it enough to point the barrel at his chest and simply fired and kept firing.” He shrugged. “Or she had her own weapon. Either way, she had to have gotten the jump on him because he was distracted just long enough at hearing your gunshot. I’d say you probably saved her life.”

  “I need to see her again.” Sid started to make a disapproving face. “I just need to look at her. I swear it’s Joslyn Charles but what if it just looks like her?” He could see that the sheriff was weakening. “I won’t be able to sleep until I know for sure.” Like he would be able to sleep anyway.

  “Fine. Take a peek. You heard the doctor give specific orders that she was not to be dis
turbed for the rest of the night.”

  Garrett nodded and stepped to the door. He took a breath, let it out and pushed. The hospital room door swung open.

  There was faint light coming in through the window enough that he could see her. She was lying on the bed, her head raised a little. Her long dark hair fanned out over the pillow like a dark, ominous wave. The white bandage on her head was as pale as her skin. It didn’t seem possible, but she was more beautiful than he remembered.

  Suddenly, her eyes flew open as if sensing him staring at her. Amber flashed and then focused—on him. And in that moment, Garrett saw something that stopped his heart.

  Recognition. She knew him. Her eyes closed at once, the dark lashes dropping like a curtain back onto the pale skin of her cheeks.

  Amnesia my ass, he thought. He stood, heart pounding, waiting for her to open her eyes again. No matter what she might call herself now, the woman who’d killed a man just hours ago was Joslyn Charles, a woman he’d saved two years ago and had foolishly fallen head over heels in love with.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GARRETT TRIED TO get his head around all of this. Joslyn Charles. How could it be after all this time? It made no sense, but none of that mattered. He remembered her—and she remembered him.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” Dr. Bullock said, drawing him away from her hospital room. “Deputy, I don’t want another person other than a nurse going into that room tonight. Is that understood?” He looked to the sheriff, then to Garrett. “You both need to leave.”

  Sid touched his arm. The last thing he wanted to do was leave. He wanted to see the woman again, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. At least not right now.

  The sheriff walked him out. All the while, Garrett battled the thoughts whirling around in his head. He needed to tell Sid what he’d seen. The recognition in her gaze. She knew him. She was lying about not remembering anything. She was a liar—not that that news should have come as a surprise. But given what else had happened, that could be the least of it, he feared.