The Lawman Meets His Bride by Meagan McKinney Page B

that you’d tell the authorities I was headed for Billings. That was the last place I wanted to go until the heat wore off. So I came back to Mystery. With no place to go or hide,I found my way back to the cabin. It was my only salvation.”
    “Roll over again,” she ordered. “I need to put a dressing on your wound.”
    This time she had to help him. While she wrapped and taped the wound, he explained his aborted trip to Billings.
    “You must have called in the cavalry on me right away,” he lamented.
    “Excuse me, I was still a law-abiding citizen then. Hold still, ” she added.
    “They had a checkpoint set up before I got twenty miles. I shifted your Jeep into four-wheel and hit the slopes. Man, that thing walks up walls, doesn’t it?”
    “I guess it does, now. Please stop wiggling, I can’t—”
    “Well dammit, it hurts! Anyhow, I didn’t drive the whole time. I was too tired. I hid and slept for most of it. I followed whatever fire trails I could find, hit a couple dirt roads. God knows how I made it back to the cabin.”
    “God knows,” she repeated ironically. “Just awful blessed, I guess. There, it’s bandaged. I put ointment on the dressing so it won’t stick. You can pull your trousers up now.”
    “Thanks. You’re a good nurse—nice hands,” he observed as he wiggled his pants over his hips.
    “I shall treasure that compliment in the locket of my heart.” Her tone altered, became more serious as she added, “To whom shall I send the bill—Roger Ulrick or Todd Mumford?”
    His eyelids had begun to ease shut. Now they snapped wide open. He even tried to sit up, but abandoned the effort.

    “You spoke with them?” he demanded.
    “Spoke? It wasn’t exactly a coffeeklatch. They woke me up on Saturday morning in my motel room.”
    She knew that even if she was wrong about Loudon, even if he was guilty, it wouldn’t matter if she told him what the D.A. and the FBI agent had asked her. He listened carefully, especially when she mentioned Ulrick’s emphasis on what it was that Loudon needed to get in Billings.
    “Since those two interrogated me,” she concluded, “someone has been following me. Someone in a gray sedan. I gave him the slip today just before I found you. Whoever it is could be watching my house right now.”
    He remained silent for some time after she quit speaking, letting all this soak in, his handsome, beard-scruffed features set rigid as granite.
    “Mumford,” he finally told her, “is on the up-and-up. Straight-arrow and by the book. The quiet type who sees more than most people realize. I’ll vouch for him. But Ulrick?”
    He paused, his cracked lips twitching into a parody of a grin. “Hearing he’s in the mix worries me. He’s way over his head in debt. First he took a tough hit on the foreign stock markets. Then he went through a messy divorce that’s still being litigated. He’s got some serious debt issues, or that’s the buzz around the office water cooler, anyway.”
    “Serious debts? You mean, serious enough that he could be involved in these kickbacks you’ve been investigating?”
    Loudon nodded. “Sure. He was on my list to checkout—the list they claim I compiled as bribery targets.”
    “The news hasn’t mentioned that, I don’t think.”
    “TV keeps it simple. But I knew it had to go further than just Jeremy Schrader and Brandon Whitaker. I can see Ulrick getting hungry for a little percentage, then, when the scam goes public, taking…extraordinary steps to cover up his dirt.”
    “What would be ‘extraordinary steps’?” she asked.
    He stared at her. His only words were, “Cody Anders would know.”
     
    Quinn fell back against the futon while Constance left for the kitchen with the used gauze and cotton. A few moments later he began thinking. None of it settled well with him.
    They would toss his apartment in Billings. And his office. That was all right, let them. They wouldn’t find it. He learned from the best. Always hide