Night's Landing (33 page)

In the meantime, it was his job to keep Sarah Dunnemore alive.

She didn’t see it that way. She walked just ahead of him, her energy not flagging even slightly. “You’re not responsible for me. It’s my decision to go after Conroy.”

“You have your own way of looking at things.”

“That’s right, I do.”

The trail had descended toward the river—they were only fifteen feet above the water now—and cut steeply back up toward the Poe house. Conroy Fontaine had the skills to hide in Central Park in the middle of a rainy early May day and pick off two marshals. He’d killed two presumably highly trained bodyguards. He’d wormed his way into the Dunnemores’ lives. Nate had believed the guy was just another reporter looking for a story.

“Conroy wants the pardon so he can get his money and his recognition,” Sarah said. “He doesn’t want to kill me. That’s not what this is about.”

“Let the SWAT negotiators talk to him. They’re the experts. What if you find Fontaine and end up screwing it up?”

That caught her up short. She broke her stride. She was in the shade of a cedar tree growing precariously up out of the limestone, between the path and the river. For a split second, Nate thought she was going to back off. He heard the rustling noise above them.

A huge black snake dropped from the cedar and landed on Sarah, latching its fangs onto the right side of her neck, its thick body writhing and wriggling. It had to be five feet long.

Simultaneously Conroy Fontaine leaped from the tree, its branches halfway out over the river, and made a sprawling dive into the water. Sarah screamed in shock and tried to pry the snake off. “Don’t shoot it!”

The snake wrapped itself around her arms and was going for another bite. Fontaine had used it as a distraction. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Trust me.
Please
.”

Nate jumped to the edge of the path and pointed his gun at the water, saw Conroy swimming toward a boat anchored in a small, shallow cove just downriver from the bluff below the Poe house.

Making his escape.

“Stop him,” Sarah said. “Don’t worry about me.”

She staggered backward over the roots of the cedar tree and went feetfirst over the edge, wrestling with the damn snake all the way into the river.

Nate ran past the cedar and tore his way down an eroded section of riverbank, slipping on the wet rocks and dirt. He could see the snake scurrying away from Sarah in the water. She came up for air and waved Nate on as she swam toward shore. Her strokes were strong, determined.

She’d be all right.

Conroy was twenty yards downriver, climbing into his boat.

Nate had a shot. A difficult one, but he’d take it if he had to. He raised his weapon, feeling a jolt of pain from his injured arm. “Freeze, Fontaine.”

Fontaine flopped onto the pilot’s seat. “You won’t shoot me.” His voice was raspy, breathless, as he shouted across the water at Nate. “I know where the Dunnemores are.”

The guy was in bad shape. But he was right. Nate didn’t want to shoot. Keeping his gun pointed in the general direction of the boat, ignoring the pain in his arm, he ran up the short stretch of embankment to the shallow cove, positioning himself above Fontaine.

He had one chance.

Without hesitation, Nate jumped, landing on Conroy, knocking him down and sticking the HK in his face. “Don’t move.”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

His words were slurred, his body fiery hot even after being in the cold river water. “Where are the Dunnemores?” Nate asked quietly.

“Fuck you.”

“Was it a bluff? Do you have them?”

Sarah was on shore, scrambling along the eroded bank, blood from her snakebite dripping down her neck. “My parents—”

“Get the pardon,” Conroy screamed at her, trying to jerk his head up against Nate’s hold. “It’s not too late. Call President Poe. I’m his brother. He’s never known his true family. I’ll tell him everything about us. I’ll share the money with you.”

Nate had heard enough. The guy’s condition was worsening from the snakebite. “You need a doctor.”

Conroy vomited, what looked like mostly river water spewing out over the boat. He was shivering violently, panting, sweating. Nate got him to his feet. “The parents,” he said. “Come on. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier for you if you tell us where they are.”

But he was unconscious, slumped against Nate.

Sarah splashed out into the river, water up to her waist. “John Wesley, don’t die.”

Juliet was behind her, looking as if the current would sweep her away. But her voice was steady, firm. “Ouch. God, you’re a mess. Look at that neck. What happened to the snake?”

“He’s okay. It was just scared.” Sarah was hardly aware of what she was saying. She squinted at Juliet. “Ethan?”

“He’s greeting the SWAT guys.”

Sarah shook her head. “Nicholas Janssen had Ethan’s wife killed. Ethan’ll go after him.” She reached into the boat and touched Conroy’s hand. “Please, don’t die.”

Nate wasn’t optimistic. He looked at Juliet. “You’ve got him?”

“No problem. I’m in rough shape, but I can handle someone unconscious.”

He helped her into the boat and turned his weapon over to her, then climbed out. Blood flowed freely from Sarah’s snakebite. He had no idea if that was good news or bad news. Above them on the bluff, he saw the first of the black-clad SWAT guys.

“Shit’s hitting the fan,” Juliet said unnecessarily.

Sarah clawed at him. “My parents. It’s been an hour.”

But one of the first wave of SWAT guys to reach them told her that they’d just got word from Joe Collins. The Dunnemores were safe. Dutch authorities had them in Amsterdam. One of Janssen’s bodyguards had grabbed them at Schiphol Airport—Conroy must have offered him part of the five million to work on his behalf.

No Janssen. He’d apparently slipped out of the country.

As Sarah had predicted, Ethan Brooker hadn’t stuck around to greet the SWAT guys.

He’d disappeared.

Sarah sat in Granny’s rocker on the front porch of the log house that had always been home, a safe haven, and tried to drink some of her sweet tea punch. Her snake, though angry and frightened, hadn’t released any venom, just left a single nasty bite on the side of her neck. She’d had it cleaned and bandaged in the E.R.

Conroy Fontaine—John Wesley Poe—wasn’t so lucky. By the time they reached the hospital, there was nothing doctors could do for him. He died fifteen minutes later.

He’d lied about so much, but not that John Wesley Poe was his real name.

When she was a teenager, his mother had heard about the Poe sisters and the baby they’d found on the doorstep. Pregnant, unmarried and broke, she created the fantasy that her baby and Leola and Violet Poe’s baby had the same father. She named hers John Wesley—why she’d given her child the same name as the man she would later tell him was his half brother remained a mystery—and changed her name legally to Poe.

Agents searching out Conroy Fontaine’s background in Memphis had dug up that story with little effort. Francine Poe was long dead. After Wes Poe was elected governor and then president, everyone who’d known her and her little boy remembered her crazy tale.

Nate came out onto the porch and sat on another rocker next to Sarah. His arm was freshly bandaged, and she’d overheard an E.R. doctor giving him a stern lecture about taking it easy for a few days.
You’ve been shot, need I remind you
?

Sarah sipped more of the tea punch, her snakebite aching, her mind fighting off the memory of going into the river with the fat, wriggling cottonmouth. Once it realized it was in the water, it released its grip on her neck and tore off to safety. “Conroy—it’s hard to think of him as John Wesley—would have had a better upbringing if his mother had left
him
on Leola and Violet’s doorstep, too.”

“They were up there in age when he was born, weren’t they?”

“They’d have seen to it he got to a good home.”

“Why didn’t they do that with the president? Not that there was anything wrong with their home, but two maiden sisters living alone out here on the river, World War Two raging—” He shrugged. “It can’t have been an easy decision to keep him.”

“They believed he belonged here.” And Sarah left it at that, angled a quick smile at him. “You’ll have to watch my documentary.”

He smiled back at her. “Sarah Dunnemore, Ph.D.” But he tilted back in his chair and hoisted his feet up onto the porch rail, a warm breeze bringing with it the smells of grass, flowers, river. Nate, who’d been in marshal mode for hours, glanced at her with those incisive, impatient blue eyes. “Why would our young John Wesley Poe think the president would grant Nicholas Janssen a pardon if you asked him? It’s got to be more than your pretty gray eyes.”

Sarah looked straight ahead, across the shaded lawn to the river and didn’t answer.

“What do you have on the president?” Nate asked quietly.

“You have a suspicious mind, Deputy.” She laid on the sexy southern accent but still didn’t look at him. “The Dunnemores and Poes have been neighbors for a lot of years. I’m sure we can tell many tales about each other.”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to come out now. The media’s descending. You’ve got the Secret Service crawling all over this place. The FBI, the marshals, the ATF, your local sheriff—they’re all going to want to know why Conroy Fontaine/John Wesley Poe thought President Poe would grant a fugitive a pardon if only he could manipulate you into asking him.”

“And I could tell them I have no idea,” she said. “I could tell them that Conroy never discussed his reasoning with me when he had me in the cave.” She glanced sideways at him. “Here’s a question for you. Should I have tried to scream when he grabbed me in the cottage kitchen and put the gun to my head?”

“You should have trusted your instincts, which is what you did.”

“How long before you and Ethan realized he had me?”

“Seconds. We didn’t want to get you killed.” His eyes narrowed, darkened. “It was not a good moment.”

She felt a rush of warmth, but warned herself against reading too much into it, too much into the sparks that had flown between the two of them for days. They both had so much to process. And yet, she didn’t want him to go back to New York. She wanted to keep him right here, sitting with her on the front porch.

“I trusted you to deal with your snake,” he said.

Back to what she had on the president of the United States. She was smart to remain on her guard. “I left you no other choice.”

“I could have kept you from doing that kamikaze, feetfirst dive into the water, or I could have gone in with the two of you.”

“And got bit, too.”

“The point is that I trusted you to handle yourself.”

“Thank you, and I trust you to do your job as a marshal and therefore tell your superiors if I tell you something about the president, who is, after all, your ultimate boss.”

“So you’re saying you do have something on the president?”

She groaned.

“All right. Don’t tell me. I’ll read about it in the papers.”

He didn’t seem irritated or even that curious, just satisfied that he was right and she did have a presidential secret.

He tilted back in his chair. “I’ll bet it has something to do with snakes.”

“You’re like the cottonmouth that had hold of my neck. You won’t let go, will you?”

“Ah, Sarah.” He grinned at her, his tiredness evident underneath, but a light of humor and pure, deliberate sexiness shone in his eyes. “I’d love to latch onto you in about a dozen different ways right now. But don’t compare me to a snake, okay?”

“You’ve seen more cottonmouths since being here than I’ve seen in the last ten years—” But she sighed, and set her glass down, gazing again at the river. “Wes was a self-made businessman when I was in high school, a millionaire with political ambitions and a desire to serve the public. Leola and Violet were still alive. He’d drive out here to see them. Evelyn, his wife, often didn’t come.”

“Sarah…”

She pretended not to hear him. “It was a hot day. Muggy. Rob and I were home from school. I didn’t know Wes was here. As I told you, I’d been visiting Leola and Violet—they didn’t know, either. He and Ev had just lost their fourth child. Ev was very depressed. There were rumors she was suicidal.” Sarah shut her eyes and rocked back into the chair, feeling herself at almost seventeen, practically skipping back from the Poe house. “Wes believed he was at fault, that his ambition, the pressures of his work, had hurt their chances of having a child. He came out to the river to pull himself together. It was the low point in his life, in his marriage.”

“He told you all this?”

She nodded, opening her eyes, wishing she could slow her mind, stop the pace of the images repeating themselves. “He was standing on that narrow ledge in front of the cave where Conroy had taken Juliet. I heard him from the path. He was sobbing. I don’t think—” She broke off a moment, searching for the right words. “He’s not one to cry in front of other people.”

Nate picked up her iced-tea glass and took a sip. “Think he was going to jump?”

“I don’t know. I’ll never know.” She rocked back in her chair. “I don’t think he intentionally went out to the ledge to jump. I think he just found himself there. It’s not that much of a jump—there’s no guarantee he’d have died even if he had planned to commit suicide.”

“Water’s deep there, current’s strong.”

“He’s an excellent swimmer. Not that it matters if he’d wanted to die.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Who’s telling this story?” But he’d brought her back to the present, and that was where she needed to be to continue. “He surprised a water moccasin on the ledge. I saw it. It came after him—they can be very aggressive when they’re startled. Wes panicked.”

“And you?”

“I grabbed the snake and threw it in the water.”

Nate smiled. “You and these snakes.”

“The story got told differently than how it was.”

“That’s one way of putting it. He said he saved you from the snake. That he saw you on the ledge and you were the one who panicked.”

“Ah. You’ve done your research. No, he said none of that. It was how the story got told. It was how people wanted it to be. A high school girl and a man who would be president—wouldn’t you want him to be the one to save her from the snake?” She looked out at the river, smelled it on the breeze. “He simply never corrected it.”