Page 124 of South of Nowhere

Then Alisette Lark—aka Sergeant Tamara Olsen, her fake name in this operation—gave a coy smile as she looked down at the telltale bulge in the front of his slacks.

Her voice was amused as she said, “Don’t tell me, Waylon. Not the uniform?”

Foley grinned then nodded toward the bed. “Leave it on. Well, just the top. Not the rest of it. Obviously.”

54.

The center of his universe was alive.

John Millwood’s heart was thudding—and not from the effort of trooping through the woods like an Eagle Scout in pursuit of a merit badge.

Fiona was alive.

He was about two miles south of Hinowah, and a half mile west of where he’d parked on Route 13 a half hour earlier, when he began pushing through viny and dense woods. He paused and gazed about him in a slow circle.

Green and brown, green and brown…

Then he kept trooping along, secure in the knowledge that she was safe.

He would soon find her!

In fact, he didn’t mind a brief delay.

It would give him time to refine her punishment. Something appropriate, to assure that she would never, ever pull a stunt like this again.

Millwood had taken the advice of that man Shaw for as long as he could: shower, warm up in the motel room. He’d sat at the cheap desk, reading emails and making some work-related calls. He’d gotten some sleep, but then wakened, agitated. And finally the impatience and antsiness got to be too much.

Hehadto get out of the room and hunt for her himself. And so he had driven back toward Hinowah to the spot where he and Shaw had found her car. Below the highway, down the steep hillside, he could see flashing lights. The workers were probably trying to get the car out of the water.

Damn her. Responsible for losing a fifty-thousand-dollar car? True, Fiona had bought it and she had made the payments, but every penny in a family belonged to the man—the head of the household. That was just the natural order of things.

And so it was in effecthiscar that she’d destroyed.

He was going to ask the emergency workers if they’d seen her but he first ran into a man in a battered pickup, parked on the shoulder of Route 13, two hundred yards from the dissolving levee. Wearing coveralls and a safety vest, he was, it turned out, part of a sandbag-filling group of volunteers that had been told to stand down and keep way back from the levee for some safety reason.

Had he, by any chance, seen a young blond woman in the woods?

The man had turned down the volume of a country-western station and said, “Well, yesterday, yessir. There was a woman. She was wearing a stocking cap, so I don’t know what color hair, but yessir.”

He’d pointed to a ridge of rocks to the south of that miniature mountain Millwood had learned was named Copper Peak. Where he’d gone for his goddamn swim. (Her frigging fault too, of course!)

And then the bombshell: She had been carrying a couple of heavy gym bags, the worker had told him.

Millwood felt the emotion unleashed within him.

First, elation that she was alive.

Second, undiluted rage. The sneaky little whore had some plan. She’d taken her luggage from the carbeforeit went into the water. And that meant she’d planned it all out. She’d driven the car into the river on purpose.

The video was to trick him.

God, the sense of betrayal had been almost overwhelming.

Now, he pushed along the overgrown mining trail, looking for any sign that she’d passed this way.

He paused and took a hit of whisky from his leather and silver flask. Bushmills. His favorite. Fiona hadn’t liked Irish whisky at first but then he kept pushing her. (One time she’d said, “Don’t be a nag,” and he’d given her his “hurt” look—he really perfected it—and she could see he felt bad about it. She’d taken one sip, shivered, then another, as he kept insisting. Finally, she said yes, he was right. Shedidlike it.)

If only she’d listen to him the way she should!

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