Blue Ridge Ricochet

Nicki tucked her own dark hair under a protective cap and headed to the sink to wash her trembling hands. She kept her tone calm and light, hoping her agitation didn’t show. “Gotta snow a lot more than this to keep people away from breakfast at Dugan’s.”

Trevor Colley entered the kitchen from the front area, moving at a quick pace for a man his size. His barrel chest and linebacker shoulders seemed to take up half the kitchen when he stopped next to where Nicki was preparing the griddle. “You’re a good ’un to come in so fast, Nicki,” he said in a gruff voice that rumbled like thunder. It was all the thanks he’d give her. Trevor wasn’t one to gush.

“Quite a crowd for a snow day,” she commented, cracking a couple of eggs for the first order clipped to the order wheel. Two eggs, sunny-side up, hash browns and bacon. “Something up?”

Trevor gave her an odd look. “You tell me. Del McClintock brought four of his boys with him. They brought their girls, too. Should I worry?”

Nicki supposed it was a good thing that Trevor believed she might know the answer to his question. It suggested that people were starting to connect her with the Blue Ridge Infantry. Which meant, hopefully, that the BRI members themselves were starting to think of her as one of them.

That was her goal, wasn’t it?

“No, don’t worry. If you have any trouble with them, come get me.”

Trevor frowned at her but went back out to the front of the diner, leaving her and Tollie to get the orders filled.

As she laid out the strips of bacon on the griddle to fry, the image of Dallas Cole’s rainbow-hued collection of scrapes and bruises filled her head. Her whole body went cold and numb, and for a second, she thought she was going to be sick.

Oh, God. She’d taped a sick, injured man’s hands behind his back and locked him in her cellar without even feeding him breakfast first. She hadn’t even left him a bucket if he needed to go to the bathroom. Which he couldn’t do with his hands duct-taped, anyway.

What the hell had she been thinking? Had she lost her ever-lovin’ mind?

But what else could she have done? Dallas had insisted on calling the FBI. Maybe it had been a trick—maybe the whole thing was a setup to prove she wasn’t who she said she was. Maybe it had been a test. But if that was the case, she had no idea whether she’d passed or failed.

But what if he was legit? She certainly couldn’t let him bring the FBI swarming into River’s End at this point. Even if it didn’t end up blowing her cover, every BRI member in town would crawl back in the holes where they’d come from, and it’d be months, even years, before she could get this close to the group’s inner circle.

She was doing what she had to do. She was. She just had to get through this morning and she could hurry back home and let him out before anything bad happened.

Assuming something bad hadn’t already happened.

* * *

THERE WASN’T AN inch of his body that didn’t hurt in some way, including the new scrape on his inner wrist from the nail protruding from the wooden shelf where the beautiful but treacherous Nicki kept her canned goods. But Dallas was damned if he was going to be bound and locked in by the time she got back from her shift at the diner.

Who the hell was she? Was she connected to the militia members who’d taken him captive a few weeks earlier? If so, why had it taken her all night to decide he was safer behind a lock and key?

Everything had changed when he told her he wanted to call the authorities. That had been the catalyst. He’d seen fear in her eyes, not unlike his own reaction when she’d pinned him down and taped up his hands. His mention of the authorities had made her feel just as trapped as he felt now.

But why? What was she hiding?

The tape around his wrists snapped apart as the sharp edge of the nail head finally broke through the last of the fibers. He pulled his arms apart, groaning as the stretched muscles of his chest and shoulders put up a painful protest. He worked them slowly for a moment, taking care not to make his condition any worse than it already was.

He had to find the strength to get past that locked door and get the hell out of this crazy woman’s cabin.

There were no windows in the cellar, no doors visible besides the one at the top of the stairs. As much as his wobbly legs protested the idea, he had to go upstairs and try to figure a way to get through the locked cellar door. Ramming it open was no option, given his weakened state.

But maybe he could pick the lock.

He’d already spent nearly an hour searching the cellar for something to cut himself free of the duct-tape bonds. He’d found a small, rickety cabinet in the corner that held a box of tools. He’d had no luck using the garden shears he’d found inside to cut himself free because he couldn’t get the blades turned to the right angle behind his back to cut the tape. But there had been other tools in the box that might work to unlock the door, hadn’t there?

He crossed to the box lying on the top of the rough-hewn cabinet and started to pick through the contents, looking for something—

There. A jumble of old paper clips, some of them hooked together, some twisted apart. If he was very lucky, the lock on the door at the top of the stairs would be a simple spring-driven lock, and he could use the paper clip to push it open.

But if it wasn’t...

He grabbed a pair of pliers and twisted one of the bigger paper clips until he’d fashioned a crude tension wrench, then curled the tip of one of the smaller clips into a modified hook, hoping they’d work well enough to get the job done.

“Picking a lock isn’t as hard as you’d think,” an FBI special agent had told Dallas once, and then he’d proceeded to explain just how to beat a pin-and-tumbler lock. “It’s all about the pins. That’s how a key works—getting the pins in the right position to turn the cylinder.”

He carried his tools up the steps and slid his makeshift tension wrench into the keyhole, turning it one way, then the other, until he was satisfied which way the cylinder had to turn to open. Applying a little pressure to move the cylinder just out of position, he inserted the second paper clip into the keyhole.

His hands shook and his legs began to ache, feeling as if they’d suddenly lost the ability to hold him upright, but he kept at his probing examination of the lock’s internal workings. One by one, he painstakingly pushed the pins up until they caught on the ledge, clearing the cylinder. Finally, the last pin clicked into place, and he used the larger paper clip to turn the lock.

The dead bolt slid back into the door with a soft click, and he gave the door a push open.

He eased into the kitchen and looked around, squinting as bright daylight assaulted his eyes. Around him, the cabin was quiet and still.

He looked around the house to make sure he was still alone, then checked out the front door to assure himself Nicki and the Jeep were still gone. Then he went into the bedroom to find the phone.

But it was gone, no longer sitting on the bedside table where it had been the night before.

He checked the floor on either side of the table and even crouched to check under the bed. No phone.

A room-to-room search of the cabin revealed no sign of the missing phone. Nor did he find a computer or any sort of modem or router with which to access the internet if he wanted to reach the authorities that way instead.

He sank into one of the kitchen chairs and willed his wobbly legs to stop shaking. He clearly wasn’t going to be able to call in the cavalry, so he was going to have to get the hell out of this cabin on his own somehow.

But first, he needed something to eat. Some of his unsteadiness might be from sheer hunger. He pushed himself to his feet and crossed to the refrigerator, bracing himself to find it as empty as the bedside table had been. But the refrigerator was well stocked, and he grabbed a couple of eggs from the carton for his breakfast.

She had plenty of cookware in her cabinets, too. Made sense, he supposed—she’d said she worked as a diner cook, hadn’t she? As he heated a pat of butter in one of the pans on the stove, he grabbed a couple of slices of bread from the bread box and stuck them in the toaster.

The smell of toasting bread and frying eggs made him almost light-headed with hunger, but once he’d wolfed down his breakfast, he felt considerably better.

But did he feel well enough to walk out of these woods to seek help?

He left the pans for Nicki to wash—the least she could do, considering she’d locked him in her cellar—and took another look around the house, this time for some sign of who Nicki really was and what had compelled her to lock him up rather than let him call the authorities for help.

She’d admitted to knowing who he was. Which meant she had to know that he’d disappeared somewhere between Washington, DC, and wherever he was now. That foul play was suspected.

Or was it? Did people think he’d disappeared on his own? He’d been on the phone with a man named Cade Landry when those BRI thugs had run him off the road and dragged him out of his banged-up car. But Landry had been a fugitive. For all Dallas knew, he still was. He might not have had the opportunity to tell anyone what he’d heard over the phone.

So what, exactly, did Nicki think she knew about him?

There were no personal items anywhere around the cabin, he realized after another search of the place. She probably had her driver’s license and other ID with her, since she’d taken the Jeep into town, but most people had other personal records scattered around the house, didn’t they?

Back at his apartment in Georgetown, he had a whole four-drawer filing cabinet full of tax information, personal records, vehicle papers and more. He even had a box in his closet filled with things he’d kept from his high school and college days.

As far as he could tell from his search, Nicki had nothing like that stashed anywhere around the cabin.