Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (28 page)

Take it easy,
he told himself. The gun, a Winchester 30.06 he’d had since he was sixteen, was a very reliable weapon. And he was a very good shot.

He was thinking how best to approach the house when a sliver of bark flew off the trunk of the pine tree just inches from his face.

Call jerked backward, into deeper cover, swearing a silent curse. Shouldering the rifle, he scanned the forest in the area where the shot had come from. The powerful scope was useless in the dark, but it didn’t really matter. The shot hadn’t come from that far away.

Call glanced up at the sky, searching for an opening in the clouds. They were moving pretty fast, the wind picking up, beginning to rustle the branches on the trees. He counted the seconds and estimated the speed at which they traveled, made a guess how long it would take before they broke apart and a trickle of light illuminated the landscape below.

One, two, three. He shouldered the rifle and fired off a shot an instant before the roiling clouds parted. His opponent returned fire just as a thin coil of light swept down through the trees. Call squeezed the trigger and the man went down. It was a head shot. He didn’t get up and he wasn’t going to.

One down
.
Two to go.

His blood was racing, his palms damp, and yet he felt a strange sort of calmness settle in. The odds were evened up a little. At least they had a chance.

Or that’s what he thought until he heard one of the men shouting his name from inside the house.

“All right, Hawkins! Fun’s over! Throw down your weapon and come join the party—or your girlfriend is gonna dance her last dance.”

Sonofabitch!
Call closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree trunk, fighting for control. He’d been afraid they would use Charity as bait. She was the single lure he couldn’t resist.

He hauled in a steadying breath. “All right, take it easy! You win! I’m coming out!”

“Call, no! They’ll kill—” He heard Charity’s terrified voice and the crisp echo of the slap that silenced her warning.

A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. Knowing he had no choice, Call tossed his rifle out into the open, watched it slide to a halt in the dry pine needles and earth. He raised his hands above his head, stepped out of the sheltering trees, and started walking across the clearing toward the house.

The wooden porch steps felt rough beneath his bare feet. The sweet scent of blooming summer flowers seemed incongruous in the moment. Call pulled open the door and the minute he stepped inside, the lights went on in the kitchen. Charity stood in front of a man in military fatigues, a pistol pressed against the side of her head. A second man, dressed in black with a stocky build and long, fine strands of hair combed over the top of his nearly bald head, stood just a few feet away.

Call drew closer, his attention fixed on Charity. Her face looked pale, except for the red mark on her cheek. His hands unconsciously fisted. “Are you all right?”

She swallowed then nodded.

“Your concern is touching, Hawkins,” said the man in black. “Unfortunately, in a few more minutes, how well she’s feeling ain’t gonna make a damn.”

There was something in the air, an unpleasant odor like rotten eggs that seemed to be growing stronger by the minute.
Propane.
Call’s shoulders went tense. The men intended to blow up the house—with him and Charity in it!

“Get over here,” the man in black commanded. He flicked a look at his friend. “Tie him to one of the kitchen chairs.”

Stalling for time, Call didn’t move. “If you’re going to kill us, at least have the decency to tell me who hired you. Why was someone willing to go as far as murder to stop a little company like MegaTech?”

“I don’t know why. King wants you dead. He’s payin’ me the big bucks to make sure it happens and that’s what I’m gonna do. Now get over here … and don’t do anything stupid or the girl gets it before you do.”

Call started walking, trying to gauge when to make his move. There wasn’t enough gas in the house to go off with a gunshot but there very soon would be. And if he were going to die—if they were both going to die—he wasn’t going down without a fight. He had just reached the man in black when he saw Charity start to turn. Her hand jerked upward from the pocket of her robe. She spun and slashed at the man behind her and blood erupted on his face.

Call leapt forward, slamming into the man in black, knocking him down on the kitchen floor, grabbing the hand that held the weapon. A few feet away, Charity stabbed her assailant again. He shrieked in pain as the knife sank into his shoulder and his gun went flying across the floor out of sight.

Call struggled with the man in black, both of them fighting for the pistol, first one on top and then the other. Call slammed the man’s wrist down hard on the floor and the gun careered across the linoleum. From the corner of his eye, he saw Charity scrambling to pick it up. Call punched his opponent in the face, jerked him up, and hit him again. They were on their feet and slugging away. Call slammed a punch into the stocky man’s stomach, hit him hard in the jaw. He went down like a fallen tree limb, his head banging the wall as he slid into a heap on the floor.

Call whirled toward Charity, saw that she had found the pistol and was aiming it in the middle of the unconscious man’s chest. Her feet were splayed, both hands wrapped around the grip of the gun, but she was shaking so hard he thought if she fired she would probably hit him instead of her target.

Unfortunately, the man behind her, covered in his own blood, had also retrieved a weapon. It was pointing at the center of Charity’s back.

Call stood frozen, every muscle tense. In the next few seconds, one of them was going to die and he vowed with everything inside him it wasn’t going to be her.

“Get down!” he shouted, diving forward, knocking her onto the floor, covering her body with his. But the loud report slammed into the room before she could possibly have escaped the close-range, deadly bullet.

For an instant his heart just simply stopped beating.

Then his gaze swung to the man with the gun. For the first time Call realized the shot hadn’t come from the assailant’s weapon. His glance jerked to the front room window. In the shadows outside the living room, Toby stared down the barrel of the rifle he pressed against his shoulder, leveled at the men in the kitchen. Charity’s attacker was dead, slumped against the wall, a bullet in the center of his forehead.

Call moved swiftly, lifting himself away from her, pulling her to her feet. Her face was completely drained of color, her fingers still wrapped around the pistol, but she was alive and safe. Relief hit him so hard he felt dizzy.

“It’s all right,” he said gently, pulling the gun from her stiff, shaking fingers. “Everything’s going to be fine.” He eased her into his arms and felt her trembling, tightened his arms around her, said a silent, grateful prayer.

Toby ran through the front door, hurrying toward the kitchen. “You two okay?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here in the middle of the night,” Call said, “but I’m damned glad to see you.”

“I was over at Jenny’s.” The kid’s face turned a little bit red. “She sneaked out to meet me. We heard the gunshots. I figured you might need some help.”

Call felt the faint tug of a smile. “Open the rest of the doors and windows. The place is filling up with propane.”

“Jesus!” Toby raced off to complete his assignment.

“Keep an eye on him,” Call said to Charity, handing the pistol back to her, watching her hold it with a steadier hand. “Shoot him if he makes a move. I’m going out to shut off the gas valve.”

By the time he returned, the windows were open, the house rapidly airing out. Toby held the pistol and Charity had gone into the hall to help Ross Henderson.

“I called the police,” Toby said. “I told them what happened. They said they’d send an emergency chopper. It’ll be here by the time it’s light enough to land.”

“Good work.” Call and Toby tied up the man in black while Charity worked to stem the flow of blood from Ross’s chest wound.

“His breathing’s pretty even,” she said when Call was finally able to join her, “but he’s lost a lot of blood.” He could see the red-stained towel she pressed over the wound.

“Help’s on the way. Hang in there while I check on the others, find out if they’re still alive.”

“I think they are. I took the knife from Jim—I remembered seeing him strap it on his leg. I think they shot them with some kind of sleep dart.”

Call went out to check on the guards and found, as Charity had said, they were unconscious but still breathing. Smoke and Kodiak had also been sedated, but seemed to be all right.

Call thought of how close they had all come to dying and along with the fury still seething inside him, a single word repeated itself in his head.

King.

Gordon Speers was in business with a man named Tony King. Call had never known exactly what role the man played at Global, but he was thinking he might know now.

It was going to be interesting to see what the guy in black had to say about Tony King.

“Call?” Charity’s voice still sounded shaky as he walked back into the house.

“Both of them are still pretty deeply under,” he said, “but they’re breathing okay and their heartbeats seems steady.”

“Thank God,” she said. A memory surfaced of Charity standing in the kitchen with the barrel of a gun pressed against her temple, and his stomach rolled with nausea.

Call forced the memory away. He didn’t want to think of the gut-clenching moment he had been certain that she was dead.

Or the way, in that moment, his heart had crumbled to dust inside his chest.

The emergency helicopter arrived, its rotary blades whirling, stirring up dust and dirt. White-coated medics appeared and raced inside the house. Charity waited tensely as a second chopper arrived, setting down in a wide spot on the road across the creek. Uniformed officers streamed out of the chopper and over the bridge onto Call’s property and immediately set to work.

Quickly assessing the situation, they began the mop-up procedure, dealing with the dead man outside and the one in the house, arresting the man in black, whose wallet identified him as Stanley Nathan Grossman, a resident of Los Angeles, California.

Standing next to Call, Charity watched as Ross Henderson, his condition stabilized, Jim Perkins, and Randy Smith were loaded efficiently aboard the hospital chopper. A few minutes later, its rotary blades began to turn, lifting it into the sky, carrying it off to the medical facilities in Whitehorse.

“It looks like they’re going to be all right,” Call said.

Charity’s eyes stung with tears. “Thank God.” All of them had come so close to being killed … so very close.

A detective named Murphy, a tall, heavyset man who seemed to walk hunched over against an imaginary wind, began what seemed an endless round of questions. After the arson fire in the cabin, the police were aware of the possible threat to Call’s life. He mentioned Grossman’s reference to a man named King and told the detective he believed that stopping MegaTech from completing its research program was the motive for the attacks.

The sun was well up by the time the mop-up was near completion and Murphy asked Call to take another look at the three assailants.

“You sure you didn’t recognize any of them?” the detective asked.

“Not much left to recognize of the one I shot,” Call said.

“How about the other two?”

“I’ve never seen Grossman before.”

Charity waited as Call walked with Murphy over to the stretcher where the second dead man lay. One of the officers had wiped off the stripes of black face paint the man had applied below each of his eyes.

Call frowned. “Now that you’ve cleaned him up, I think I’ve seen this one before.” Charity watched as he examined the scar below the man’s left ear. “Yes, I’m almost certain it’s him.”

“When did you see him?” Murphy asked.

Something shifted in Call’s expression and his features seemed to close up. “Four years ago. Unless I’m mistaken, this guy did some handiwork in the condo my family and I were renting up at Lake Tahoe.”

Call looked at Murphy and even from a distance, Charity could see the pain in his eyes. “My wife and daughter were killed in a car accident a few days later. After that, I stopped work on MegaTech and everything else.” His voice sounded sandpaper-rough. “I was supposed to be in the car the night they were killed.”

“I see.” Murphy wrote something in a little spiral notepad as Charity walked over to join them. “So you hadn’t worked on the project for years, but recently you started things up again.”

Call nodded. “About eight months ago.”

Murphy didn’t say any more. The connection was obvious and Call undoubtedly saw it. His face was paper white and one of his hands had started to tremble. Charity reached over and caught his fingers. They felt icy cold.

“Are you all right?”

He swallowed, nodded. “Give me a minute.” Turning, he walked away. She watched him disappear into the forest, out of sight among the trees, and an ache for him rose in her heart.

“Tough news to deal with,” Murphy said.

“Yes, it is.”

The detective fell silent and the minutes ticked past. When Call returned to where they waited, his features looked cast in stone.

“Anything else you need from me?” he asked.

“Not right now. We’ll let you know what turns up.”

He nodded. Murphy returned to his men. The detective left a couple of Mounties there just to be safe, though none of them expected any more trouble. Murphy and his men climbed aboard the chopper and a few minutes later, the helicopter lifted away. It rose above the trees and disappeared out of sight, and quiet settled over the house.

Toby approached from inside. “If you don’t need me anymore, I’m going back to Jenny’s. She’ll be worried. I’ll let her know everyone here’s all right, then I’m heading back to town.”

Call extended a hand. “Thanks, Toby … for everything.” Toby returned the handshake. Call clasped the boy’s shoulder, pulled him into a rough male hug, then stepped away.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Toby said gruffly. Turning, he walked back to his van where it was parked out of sight down the road, and except for the two Mounties some distance away, Call and Charity were left alone.

They didn’t go back inside the house. Instead they went around to the back and sat down in the swing on the deck. Kodiak and Smoke had finally awakened, but the dogs were still groggy and slept off and on at their feet. Charity could hear the water in the little feeder creek trickling over the rocks and boulders, and a red-tailed hawk soared in the pale blue, early morning sky.

Murphy had suggested they should pack a bag and head into town. The policemen would accompany them. Call intended to stay in Dawson till the house could be cleansed of blood and death and put back in livable condition.

Charity wondered how long it would be until he actually returned.

For herself, she still had the plane ticket Call had bought her when they were in Vancouver. Tomorrow morning, she would catch the commuter to Whitehorse and from there fly back to New York.

The thought made her heart hurt. She looked up at him and knew he wasn’t thinking about her leaving. He was thinking about what had happened to his family four years ago.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he finally said, sitting like a statue on the edge of the swing.

“No. They were trying to kill you even then. If you’d been in the car, they would have succeeded.”

Call braced his elbows on his knees, bent his head and ran a hand over his face. “They must have forced her off the road. It was dark that night. Amy was in the back in her child seat. They probably couldn’t see her. They must have thought I was the one behind the wheel.”

“I wonder how they knew.”

“The same way they knew I was staying with you in the cabin that night. Or maybe the phones were tapped.”

“You said the car blew up afterward. That would fit their pattern.”

“Yeah.”

“The police are going to catch the men who did it,” Charity said. Next to her, Call sat stiffly, his features drawn and tight, as if his skin were stretched over wire instead of bone. She wished she could touch him but she knew he would only pull away.

“Yes, I think they’ll catch them.” He looked tired, so exhausted it was all she could do not to put her arms around him. If only he would turn to her, let her comfort him in some way.

“Once they’re arrested,” she said, “this will all be over.”

Call straightened on the swing, making it rock back and forth. “Will it?”

“It will if you want it to be.”

He turned away, stared off toward the mountains.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” she said softly. Call made no reply and her chest squeezed hard. “I won’t be coming back.”

He turned to look at her, his beautiful blue eyes full of turbulence. Still he said nothing.

“I know this is probably not the time, but I don’t think another time will be any better.” She reached over and caught his hand, cradled it between both of hers. “I love you, Call. I know that isn’t what you want to hear. I love you. I didn’t plan it. I never wanted it to happen but it did and I couldn’t leave without telling you.”

Call’s fingers tightened for an instant over hers, then he pulled away. “I care for you, Charity. You know I do. Tonight, when I thought you’d been shot …” He closed his eyes and shook his head, trying to block the image. “I care, Charity. But I don’t love you. I won’t let that happen. I won’t love you or any other woman. I know what it’s like to love someone and then lose them. I couldn’t survive that kind of pain again.”

Charity fell silent. A lump swelled in her throat and her chest ached. Her heart felt as if it were being torn to pieces. She was in love with Call Hawkins but he didn’t love her in return and there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do to change things. He’d been honest from the start. He had told her that what they shared couldn’t last.

She felt the sting of tears and stood up from the swing. “I’ll go get my things. If you’re ready, I think it’s time we started down the mountain.”

It was over.

She was going home, leaving without a word to Maude or Jenny. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have the heart to face them. She knew what they would see in her eyes if she did.

Her farewell to the Yukon was more painful than Charity could have imagined. They spent the night after the shooting in separate rooms at a small motel in Dawson and part of her wished she could say good-bye to him there. The other part wanted to stretch out every moment, to memorize her last few seconds she would have with him, knowing they would be her last.

They arrived at the small local airport just minutes out of town and her throat closed up when she saw Maude and Jenny waiting on the sidewalk in front of the terminal.

“Toby told us what happened last night,” Maude said. “He said you was leavin’.” Maude was dressed in her usual flannel shirt and worn, faded Levi’s, but her pipe was missing and her face looked lined and sad.

Charity tried to smile. “It’s time I went home … back to the city where I belong.”

Maude shook her head, moving the soft flesh beneath her chin. “Never was a gal fit in better up here than you. Maybe you’ll come back some day.”

But she knew she wouldn’t. Her adventure was over. She thought of Rachael Fitzpatrick, who had come to the Yukon so long ago. Rachael’s journey had ended in pain and heart-ache when she had lost the man she loved. Charity’s adventure was over long before it should have been. The cabin was gone. Kodiak was staying behind with Call. Even the little puppy she had loved was lost. And her heart—her heart was irreparably broken.

“I have to go,” Charity said softly.

Maude just nodded in that sage way of hers. “You’ll do what’s best, gal. Like you’ve always done. But we couldn’t let you go off without sayin’ good-bye.”

Her throat clogged with tears. “I planned to come and see you before I left—then those men tried to kill us and …” Her voice trailed off as she thought of the awful scene at the house.

“It’s all right,” Maude said. “We’re here now. That’s all that matters.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she looked at her two dear friends. “I’m going to miss you both. I’m going to miss you so much.” She hugged the older woman, hanging on longer than she should have, thinking how much she had come to love the tough old sourdough, thinking that Maude had become one of the closest friends she’d ever had.

Then she turned to Jenny. “I’m going to miss you, too. Be happy, Jenny. Life is short. Make the most out of every moment.”

Jenny nodded, tears in her pretty green eyes.

“Take care of Toby.”

“I will.” Sunlight glittered on the small gold rings in Jenny’s ears. The young girl smiled but Charity could see she was fighting not to cry. “Toby said to tell you he hates good-byes. He says he’ll see you next time you come to the Yukon.”

Charity just nodded. Her chest ached so badly she couldn’t manage to speak. She knew it was time to go inside. Past time, really.

“Take care of yourselves,” she said. Picking up the small canvas duffel bag Call had loaned her, loaded with her few remaining clothes and the nugget she had gotten from her aunt, she waited while he opened the door, then walked past him into the tiny terminal.

Call watched her in silence as she checked in at the counter, then returned to where he stood waiting. He looked even more exhausted than he had last night and she wondered what demons he fought inside his head.

It seemed minutes, it seemed hours, until the loudspeaker announced the departure of the Air North commuter flight to Whitehorse and she prepared to depart for the gate. She didn’t try to be bright and sunny. She knew it wouldn’t work. Instead she turned to Call and felt the warm, salty wetness of tears sliding down her cheeks. Though his eyes were a troubled dark blue, he was still the handsomest man she’d ever seen. She wished he would open his arms so she could walk into them. She wanted to hold him so badly she trembled.

She looked up at him, so tall and unbelievably handsome, and more tears trickled down her cheeks. “I meant what I said. I love you, Call. I probably always will.”

Call didn’t move. His eyes locked with hers and his throat moved up and down but he made no effort to speak. Then he reached for her, dragged her hard against him, and his arms tightened around her. She could feel his heartbeat, as ragged as her own.

“I’ll miss you, Charity. I’ll never forget you.” He bent his head and very softly kissed her. “I wish things could be different. I wish I could be a different man.”

She gazed at him through a well of tears. “Life is just hard sometimes.”

“Yeah,” he said, “life is just hard.”

She forced herself to step away. “Good-bye, Call.”

“Good-bye, Charity.”

Charity bit down on her trembling lip. Turning, she walked away. She didn’t stop until she got inside the plane.

If Call was still there, she couldn’t see him.