The Perfect Outsider (3 page)

Her only solution—if one could even call it that—was to take this stranger back to the safe house and hold him there until she could fetch FBI Agent Hawk Bledsoe. It was risky, but she didn’t have time to think further.

“I’m going to help you, okay?”

He nodded.

“I’m putting this gun away.”
Please don’t let this be a mistake…
“And if you hurt me, you’re going to die out here, alone, understand?”

His eyes remained locked onto hers. “I don’t hurt people.”

She holstered her Glock. “How would you know?” She shrugged out of her backpack as she spoke. “You don’t even know your name.”

Crouching down next to him, she opened her pack and removed her first-aid kit. His pulse was within range, and he was breathing okay—she’d seen that much.

“Can you move your limbs? Any numbness in your extremities?”

He grunted. “No. Just…weak.”

Blood loss was her priority now.

“I’m going to cut open the bottom of your jeans. I want to take a look at that injury on your leg,” she said as she reached for her scissors and began splitting open the base of his pants. The gash on his head was bad, but the one on his leg could be worse—she needed to see what she was dealing with.

He groaned in pain as she peeled the bloodied and rain-soaked denim off a deep gash on his calf.

He was going to need sutures.

She worked quickly to clean and dry the wound as best she could, shielding him from the rain with her body. There was no arterial damage or obvious fracture—just a big surface gash probably caused by sharp rock during his fall.

Pulling the edges of the cut together, she applied butterfly sutures from her kit. Then she wound a bandage tightly around his calf, urgency powering her movements.

“This should work as a temporary stopgap,” she said as she began to clean the cut on his temple.

His gaze caught hers and she stilled for a second—the intensity in his eyes was disturbing. He smelled faintly of wood smoke.

“You been camping?” she said.

He inhaled sharply as disinfectant touched his cut. “I—I really don’t know.” Then, as he thought deeper: “Do I have a backpack with me?”

“I can’t see one.”

He closed his eyes, clearly straining to remember. Then he swore softly again. “I feel as if I might have had a pack or something. That I was going somewhere…important.”

The cut on his head, if ugly, was also superficial. However, given his apparent memory loss, he could be suffering from some sort of intracranial hemorrhaging due to blunt-force trauma, which could become dangerous.

“I’m going to give you three words,” she said. “
Radio, belt, Jesse.
Can you memorize them for me? I’m going to ask you to repeat them to me in a little while, okay?”

“Radio, belt, Jesse,”
he repeated. “Got it.”

His voice was beautiful, she thought, deep and husky like Matt’s used to be. Matt had been fair, but similar in stature to this man—an ace helicopter pilot she’d met on one of her very first recue missions. She’d loved going camping with Matt—loved the way fire smoke lingered in his checked lumberjack shirt, how the stubble on his cheeks grew rough in the wilderness. Emotion pricked into her eyes. June pushed it away, startled at the freshness of it all. It had been five years. She’d dealt with it.

“You sure you don’t recall firing your weapon?” she said, trying another angle as she taped more butterfly sutures to the cut on his temple. Eager was watching obediently from the side, waiting for new directions.

“No.”

“But you knew you had a gun—you went for it at your hip.”

“I…guess.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see a young mother and her children in the woods?”

“No!” Frustration bit into his tone “I’m not the hell sure of
anything
.”

He was scared of what was happening to him, thought June.

“Why do you have that little red shoe?”

He was quiet a moment, then his eyes flickered as if a memory suddenly crossed before them. “I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

June wondered if he was lying.

“That shoe—” she jerked her chin to where it lay “—belongs to a three-year-old twin. She and her sister call them their Dorothy shoes. They like to take them everywhere so they can put them on and click their heels like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
and be home safe whenever they need to be. Their names are Rebecca and Abigail. Their mother is Lacy Matthews. Lacy runs the coffee shop in town. They’ve been missing in these woods for two nights, and I’m thinking the girls will be wanting their magic shoes to take them home about now.”

His gaze went to the shoe and he stared at it as if he’d never seen it before in his life.

“There, that should tide you over,” she said as she applied a bandage over the sutures.

He pulled up his jeans zipper, buckled his belt and immediately tried to get to his feet, but he swayed and slumped heavily back to the ground.

“Easy, big guy,” she said, helping him back up by the arm. “You lost a fair bit of blood. Move too fast and you’re going down like a rock.”

“I need to go—” He started to stumble through the brush, then swayed and leaned heavily on her. “I’ve got to get to…” His voice faded, and his features twisted in frustration.

“Get to where?” she said.

“I… Jesus,
I don’t know.
I was going somewhere. Urgent—had to do something…important, for someone. Something…dangerous.”

A chill trickled down her spine.

“Do something for whom? Samuel Grayson?”

“I… The name feels familiar.”

“Yeah,” she said bitterly. “He’d be the one who tattooed your hip. Can you walk, if you lean on me like this?” She hooked his big arm around her neck, taking the brunt of his weight across her shoulders.

June began to help him up the bank. He was solid muscle and their progress was slow. When the bank got too steep, she let him climb in front of her while she supported him from behind. She also wanted to be in a position where she could draw her gun again if she had to.

June’s immediate goal was to get this injured stranger into the safe house, further assess his condition and administer whatever additional medical aid she could. Then she was going to press him hard on the whereabouts of Lacy and the twins—he was her
only
clue right now.

She’d also ask the others in the house if they’d seen him around Cold Plains. If they did recognize the stranger as one of Samuel’s cult enforcers, she’d keep him under lock and key, fetch Hawk Bledsoe and hand him over to the FBI.

Hawk was one of the few people June could totally trust in this surreal, picture-perfect and sick little town. Four months ago Hawk’s sister-in-law, Mia, had been brought to an EXIT psychologist for “deprogramming,” which is how EXIT had got wind of the cult in Cold Plains.

Mia had told EXIT there were other members who wanted to get out, but they had no resources and were afraid for their lives if they spoke out against Samuel. Mia had passed on the name of Hannah Mendes, a widow in her seventies with a ranch on the outskirts of Cold Plains. Hannah had been trying to set up a safe halfway house with the aid of her sister-in-law from Little Gulch over in the next valley. EXIT had contacted June and asked if she’d run the house and help Hannah with an evacuation program. They presently had five people in the safe house waiting to move into an EXIT program, and June had done the early stages of counseling with them. Lacy and her twins would have brought the number of occupants to eight.

As they edged up over the ravine lip, rain was coming down hard again and the wind soughed, swirling mist like wraiths through the trees. Dawn had done little to dissipate the gloomy eeriness of the forest. June paused and gave the stranger some water. His face had a pallor that worried her, and he was weakening.

“Where are we going?” he said, handing her water bottle back to her.

“Shelter. A safe place.” Hooking his arm over her neck again, supporting his weight with her shoulders, June led him through the trees toward a hidden crevasse that would lead into caves and a tunnel to Hidden Valley on the other side of the mountain. That’s where the safe house was.

As he began to lean more heavily on her, June prayed she wasn’t taking a cult enforcer, her worst kind of enemy, into the very heart of their safe house.

Chapter 2

A
s they neared the opening of the crevasse that led to the cave tunnel, the pager on June’s hip sounded. Tension whipped through her. She leaned her shoulder against the rock face, the stranger heavy against her body as she checked the page.

Chief Fargo.

Her pulse quickened. The police chief was probably wondering why she and Eager hadn’t shown up with the rest of the SAR team at first light this morning. June would never make it down there in time now, not if she had to take this injured man back to the safe house first. Sweat prickled over her lip.

With the FBI’s noose tightening around Samuel, and with more and more of his Devotees disappearing into some rumored safe house, the entire town was on edge, looking for the traitor among them. The
last
thing June needed was to give Fargo, Samuel or anyone else in Cold Plains cause to suspect her.

As part of her of her cover, June rented an outbuilding on Hannah Mendes’s ranch as her “official” residence in Cold Plains while she worked two days a week as a paramedic for the urgent-care ambulance service.

Hannah covered for June on all the other nights and days she spent working at the cave house in the mountains. The ranch was likely the first place Fargo might go looking for June when she didn’t show up for the search party or answer this page. Fargo might see June’s truck still in the driveway, start asking questions. Hannah could come under scrutiny, as well.

June cursed to herself—she was going to need a damn fine explanation to satisfy Fargo.

This community with its seemingly picture-perfect facade was like a ticking time bomb. June just wished the FBI would hurry up and get something they could actually use to take Samuel down and prosecute him before the whole place blew sky-high, Waco-style.

She hooked her pager back onto her belt and tried to get her patient moving again, but his legs were buckling under him and he appeared to be fading in and out of consciousness. Worry speared through June—he might need a hospital. But it was too late even to consider trying to make it all the way back into town with him in this condition. And then there’d be questions.

The cave house was closer, safer.

“Hey, you,” she whispered, lightly slapping the side of his rugged cheek with her palm. “Can you hear me?”

He moaned. His complexion was deathly pale and blood was seeping into the white bandage on his head. The sutures must be pulling loose.

“Listen to me—I’m going call you Jesse, okay?
Jesse,
can you hear me?”

His eyes flickered, as if with sudden recognition.

“Good. Now, stay with me, Jesse. We’re almost there.”

June’s muscles burned as she maneuvered Jesse through the narrow rock crevasse. At the end of the crevasse there was an apparent dead end hidden by a tangle of creepers. June moved the curtain of vegetation aside, exposing the opening to a large cave. These mountains were riddled with them. She clicked on her headlamp, and helping Jesse bend over, they entered the gloom.

“Where are we?” he said.

“A cave. At the back is a tunnel that leads to a valley on the other side. We’re going to a shelter built into more caves on that side.”

The tunnel was wide, but the roof was low, which meant Jesse leaned even more heavily on June as he was forced to bend double. June’s energy began to sag under the weight of well over six feet of Marlboro Man. In close proximity, his stubble rubbed against her cheeks, and June realized peripherally that she had not had a man like this in her arms since Matt had died.

Her pilot had been all rugged brawn and macho power, as well, an A-type personality in total command of his life. Until the one rescue mission that had burned him.

There was always the one mission, thought June. Post-traumatic stress disorder was a little-acknowledged aspect of rescue work, and it often went undiagnosed, as it had in Matt’s case. She should have seen it.

She should have given Matt the benefit of the doubt—she should have realized he was incapable of leaving the cult on his own and she should never have given him the ultimatum that had sent him over the edge.

June braced her hand against the cold cave wall as she struggled to catch her breath. She thought she’d managed to put the guilt from the past in perspective, but now it was haunting, so very real again, in the shadows of this cave. It was this stranger—he was doing this to her. Something about his physical presence reminded her too much of the only man she’d ever truly loved. And now the ghosts were coming back.

She glanced at Jesse—when his memory returned, if it returned, would he be friend or foe?

He slumped suddenly to the floor of the cave, trying to grab onto the wall as he went down. June dropped to her knees besides him. His breathing was shallow, his skin cold, clammy. Urgency bit into her.

“Jesse, hang in just a little while longer. We’re almost there.”

She struggled to help him up, and as they shuffled along, the tunnel grew narrower, darker. Her headlamp started to flicker, the battery dying. Shadows leaped and lunged and the air grew dank, musky. A bat fluttered past her face, making a soft wind.

The journey through the crevasse and tunnel combined was less than a mile, but tonight it felt endless. June’s breath was ragged and she was perspiring with the effort. Then suddenly she saw faint light ahead. Relief washed through her body.

They were almost through into Hidden Valley, a narrow delta on the other side of this mountain range. It was inaccessible by road—the only way in was via this secret tunnel or by foot over the mountains, or to fly in by chopper. It was where an eccentric architect-turned-survivalist had chosen to build a large house into a deep warren of caves, and it was in this house the architect had lived, quietly and off-grid, until his death. He’d left everything he owned to his sister, who’d helped turn it into a safe haven for escapees from Samuel Grayson’s lethal cult.