to shoot me.” She looked at the water glass. “I should have stayed,” she said, her voice a mutter now. “I should have confronted him.”
Well, she wasn’t talking to him any longer.
“But there was all that blood,” she continued. “And Billy Joe just collapsed and died. So I ran. I thought I had to save myself so I could find my mother before she died. But now she’s going to die anyway. Oh, I don’t know what to do.”
“Whoa, damn it! Slow down.” Mack did his best to put everything she’d said into logical order. If she wasn’t just crazy, then she’d been through some kind of horrible trauma. “Hannah. Let’s start over and take this slow. Who was going to shoot you? Whose blood did you see and who is Billy Joe?”
She stared at him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he was doing there, in her reality. Then she blinked. “Oh.” She shot up out of the chair and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. “I apologize,” she said. “I think I’ve made a mistake.” She looked at the business card in her hand, then stuffed it into her jeans pocket and ran out the front door.
“Hannah, wait!” he called. He started to run after her, but his protective instincts kicked in.
Good riddance, he thought when he heard the outside door slam. She had to have come here for money, then lost her nerve and tried to make up some kind of story. She’d never make it as a grifter. Her heart-shaped face gave too much away. He’d watched the kaleidoscope of expressions that flitted across her features as she’d listened to her cell phone ring. Bewilderment, fear, anger, resignation, each taking its turn, then the cycle had started all over again.
He felt sorry for her. Whoa. That was the kind of thinking that could get him into deep trouble, if he let himself get drawn in. He was lucky she’d run out when she did. Good riddance, indeed.
While his brain was congratulating him for dodging that bullet, he found himself rushing out the front door. She’d made it down his long sidewalk to her car, digging a large ring of keys out of her purse and unlocking a dark blue Toyota.
Mack used his phone to snap a shot of the rear of her car just as she climbed in. The license plate was from Texas. And even from half a block away, he could see two bullet holes in the bumper near the plate. Recent ones.
Maybe she hadn’t been making it all up.
Although he had the snapshot, he jotted the license plate number down on a small notepad that he always carried. When he put the pad back into his shirt pocket, it seemed to burn his skin. He sighed. He was going to regret this.
No. That wasn’t accurate. He already did. But even as he thought that, his mind had already latched on to the mystery of Hannah Martin. Kidnapping, murder, blood, pursuit, death.
“Who are you, Hannah Martin?” he muttered. “And why did you come to me?”
Chapter Three
Hannah drove straight from St. Charles Avenue to her motel in Metairie in an exhausted haze. But now, sitting in her parked car, her brain was whirling, replaying every second of the past hour.
What had possessed her to place all her hopes of saving her mother on an old photo of a friendship from more than thirty years before? All she’d done was exhaust herself driving and waste over twelve of the precious hours her mother had left before her body went into toxic liver failure. All she’d gained for her trouble was the not-so-sympathetic ear of Kathleen Griffin’s handsome if grouchy son.
She turned off the engine and got out of the car. As soon as she put weight on her knees, they gave way. She barely managed to grab at the door frame to keep from falling. Her heart raced, her head felt weird—light and heavy at the same time—and the edges of her vision were turning black. It had to be exhaustion and hunger.
After a few seconds, she gingerly let go of the hot metal door frame and tested her ability to walk. Not too bad. But her hands trembled so much that it took her three tries to insert her key card into the motel’s door.
Once she was inside with the door closed, the tears she’d been holding back ever since she’d watched Billy Joe collapse and die came, as if floodgates had opened. She flopped down onto the bed and grabbed one of the pillows to hug as she cried. But within a couple of moments, she clenched her jaw and wiped her face.
That was enough of that. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to figure out what she was going to do. Here she was, eight hours away from her home, and if someone asked her why she’d driven all that way, she wouldn’t have been able tell them. In fact, she’d run away again as soon as Mack had started questioning her. He’d made her realize just how little she’d thought about what she was going to do.
What if she drove back to Dowdie and did what she should have done—gone to Sheriff King? For that matter, what if she’d gone to him about Billy Joe’s obvious involvement in something illegal? Would things be completely different now? Would Billy Joe be in jail instead of dead and would her mother be safe and sound at home, preparing to go for dialysis later in the week?
Or would she and her mother be sitting in an interrogation room trying to explain to the sheriff that they knew nothing about what Billy Joe was or was not doing?
When she’d raced to the Toyota and taken off with Billy Joe’s killer on her heels, she had actually considered going to the sheriff—for about ten seconds. Until she reminded herself that in her world, authorities like the police or Children’s Services had the power to destroy her life.
From long ago when she’d been barely old enough to understand, her mother’s admonitions were ingrained in her. If you tell the police Mommy fell asleep with a cigarette and started a fire, they’ll take you away from me and put you in an orphanage. You can put the fire out, can’t you, sweetie? Just put it out and don’t tell anybody. Then we’ll be safe. We’ll take care of each other.
And they had. Her mother had raised her alone. It had been just the two of them against the world. Then, when the roles had become reversed as her mother’s cirrhosis worsened, Hannah had taken care of her without regret—until the moment she’d witnessed a murder and run away.
Suddenly, Hannah remembered the phone call she’d gotten while she’d been standing outside Kathleen Griffin’s apartment. She blotted her cheeks on her shirtsleeve then fished inside her purse for her phone. Her fingers touched the smooth paper of the envelope, but she pushed it aside. Whatever was inside it wasn’t going to help her right now. In fact, it might make things worse.
She found her phone and sat there holding it, not wanting to look at the display. Maybe she’d misread the caller ID. Maybe her exhausted mind had merely overlaid Billy Joe’s name over whoever had really been calling her. But when she looked, the display definitely read “B.J.” Her heart jumped, just as it had earlier.
Someone was calling her from Billy Joe’s phone. There were only two possibilities. The man with the red tattoo, who’d shot Billy Joe in cold blood, or the sheriff.
As she’d peeled out of her mother’s driveway in her haste to escape Billy Joe’s killer, she’d prayed that the man would keep shooting at the Toyota until he’d emptied his gun. She’d prayed that one of their unconcerned neighbors would hear the shots and call the sheriff, and that the sheriff would catch him red-handed and charge him with Billy Joe’s murder. And she’d prayed that everybody in town would become so wrapped up in the murder that they’d forget about Hannah Martin.
She accessed new voice mails. There were two. If it was the killer who had called her, had he really been dumb enough to leave a message? She skipped the message from the sheriff’s office without listening to it and played the second incoming message.
“Where’d you go, Hannah?” She cringed and swallowed against a sick dread that settled in her stomach. That wasn’t the sheriff. It was the man with the red tattoo on his hand. She’d never forget that awful voice as long as she lived.
“I know you don’t want to talk to me, but