Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(21)
Author: Hope Ramsay

“Your license is expired,” he said.

“I don’t drive much,” she answered.

“I’m going to have to keep this.”

She watched her ID disappear into his shirt pocket. She was in deep, deep trouble, even though she had never done anything illegal in her whole life.

“That was my bus you just waved off, you know. The Greyhound only comes through here once a day. And—”

“You mind telling me where you were last night after eleven o’clock?” he asked.

“I was at the apartment above the Cut ’n Curl.”

“Alone?”

“Of course I was alone.”

“So you don’t have an alibi.”

“An alibi for what?”

His shoulders raised and lowered a fraction of an inch. “Someone broke into Lovett’s Hardware last night and made off with more than a thousand dollars in cash. It looks mighty suspicious that you’re leaving town this morning.”

She put her fists on her hips. She was not going to let this guy push her around. She was innocent, and he’d just fixed it so she had to stay in town another day. “Are you trying to tell me I’m a suspect in a robbery just because I’m standing here waiting for a bus?”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me to answer a few questions.”

“But that’s absurd. I’m not—”

“Please do not make me cuff you, because I will.”

The chief was serious. He thought she had knocked over the hardware store. “You think I robbed the store?”

The muscle in his cheek twitched again. “That’s a possibility I haven’t ruled out yet, but that’s not why I’m taking you in for questioning.”

He snagged her by the upper arm in a firm grip.

Jane dug in her heels and tried to resist. In the next instant, she found her cheek pressed up to the warm metal of his cruiser’s hood and her right arm twisted back behind her back. It happened so fast that she didn’t have an instant to get scared or to even feel any pain when Stone Rhodes slapped a pair of handcuffs on her.

“I told you not to resist. Resisting an officer of the law is not a smart move—not for a woman in your position, anyway.”

“I have a right to know why you’re doing this,” Jane said in a voice that was surprisingly calm given the fact that she was terrified.

“Ma’am, you have the right to remain silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…” Chief Rhodes continued his recitation of her rights. When he was finished, he pulled her away from the hood, opened the car’s back door, and started pushing her down into the seat.

As the first instant of shock wore off, a million scenarios danced through her head. Woody had been found dead somewhere with her luggage in the back of his Coupe DeVille, and someone thought she had bumped him off. Only then she remembered that the luggage tags didn’t say Wanda Jane Coblentz. They said Mary Smith. Maybe Clay had told Stone about the two different IDs.

Disappointment and something like despair hollowed out a place in her middle. She had known this feeling once before, in Lexington, and she had been running from that for the last seven years.

Clay pushed through the doors of the hardware store, then turned around and relocked them. He stretched out the kinks in his back and yawned. That couch in Pete’s office was about as lumpy as a three-humped camel.

He needed a shower and a new lease on life.

Unfortunately, there were roadblocks in the way of those needs. He’d have to face Ricki for the shower, since she was crashing in the guest room of his little saltbox house on Baruch Street. Facing Ricki right now seemed like a monumental task.

And as for a new lease on life—well, that was not in the cards. Especially after last night, when Cousin Alex had accused him of stealing the thousand dollars from the hardware store.

Why would he do a thing like that? Clay wasn’t wanting for money. He didn’t even take a salary for helping out at the store. He was doing it for Pete and Arlene—a notion completely lost on Alex.

Well, at least the crisis at the store had saved him from the possibility of having Ricki climb into bed with him. He wasn’t sure he could resist her if she did a thing like that.

But Clay wanted to resist. Ricki couldn’t be his soulmate, could she? A soulmate wouldn’t run off with someone else, would she?

Well, the crisis at the store had been kind of a good thing, in that sense. It had given him distance from Ricki, in addition to this crick in the neck.

He chuckled out loud. “Shoot,” he said to himself as he stretched his back a second time. “I’m starting to think like Wanda Jane, putting a positive spin on everything that happens.”

He was hugely disappointed that he hadn’t had a chance to talk or sing with Wanda Jane. Ricki, Ray, Dottie, and Dash had all conspired to scare her away before that could happen last night. But she was still here, so there was hope. And if he bought all that crap from Miriam Randall, then Jane was in the running for the position of his soulmate.

An adolescent anticipation clutched his gut. He was looking forward to catching sight of that little gal. And when he saw that dark hair, and those deep brown eyes, and those curves, his heart would do a little dance in his chest. It was going to take a whole boatload of will power not to find some excuse to pop into the Cut ’n Curl just to get a glimpse of her. Yup, soulmate or not, he was definitely in lust with Jane.

Clay turned from the door, and that’s when he noticed Stony’s cruiser up by Bill’s Grease Pit. His big brother was handcuffing some poor soul who was laid out flat on the hood of his car.

Clay’s mood improved some more. It sure did look like Stone had nabbed the bad guy. Maybe his brother had recovered the money, too, which would be good, since Lovett’s Hardware was holding on by its fingernails. It was comforting to know that Stony was on the case—making an arrest right there in front of God and everyone.

Which wasn’t exactly a huge crowd this time of morning in Last Chance, but that hardly mattered.

His brother pulled the suspect back off the hood of his cruiser, and Clay’s heart slammed right up against his windpipe. That wasn’t some poor soul his brother was manhandling. It was Wanda Jane. And this wasn’t what he’d had in mind for his first glimpse of her today.

Something deadly gripped his chest, and he took off up the street. He arrived just about the time Stone slammed the back door and locked Jane in.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Clay demanded.

Stone turned, squared his hat, and started walking around the cruiser toward the driver’s side. He said nothing.

“Stony, answer me.”

His brother stopped. “Look, Clay, this isn’t your business, so just back off, okay?”

Clay looked down through the car’s back window. Jane was sitting there wearing the clothes she’d been wearing last Wednesday night. Her face had turned the color of ashes, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

She stared straight ahead, her hands cuffed behind her back, looking just like a scared jackrabbit. Clay ducked down and pressed his hand against the glass. She looked up at him, visibly struggling against her emotions.

Wanda Jane had to be guilty of something. After all, she carried two IDs, each with a different name. But somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to believe she was a bad person. Down on her luck, on the run, in need of rescue—yeah, he could believe all those things. But she wasn’t bad. She just needed some help.

He nodded down at her, trying to let her know he wasn’t going to let Stone haul her off without trying to help her out of this jam.

He looked up at his brother, who was standing in the open doorway on the driver’s side studying him. “Back off, Clay,” Stone said. “We all know you collect needy people. But you don’t need this kind of trouble.”

“And what kind of trouble would that be?”

“In a word…” His brother’s gaze narrowed. “Murder.”

Chapter 10

Woody West strolled up to the ticket agent at the Atlanta bus station and prayed to God Almighty that he might turn up some sign of Mary Smith. The bus station was his last chance.

It was amazing how a broad as dumb and naïve as Mary could disappear so completely. In fact, the woman had disappeared so fast and so good that he suspected she might have scammed him. Maybe Mary wasn’t as dumb or naïve as she appeared. Maybe she worked for Freddie the Fence, too, and knew from the get-go that the little jade necklace was worth millions.

He hoped not. If that were true, then he was a dead man. The Colombian was losing patience, and the only way Woody could pay off his gambling debts was to find Mary and the necklace and make the delivery Freddie the Fence had hired him to make.

So he’d spent the last twenty-four hours backtracking to the Dew Drop Inn and working his way outward in concentric circles. He’d turned up nothing, except an FBI tail, which he had lost last night around three in the morning. The bus station was a three-mile walk from the bar where he’d last seen Mary. He doubted she had walked all that way in spike heels, but he couldn’t rule it out either.

“Can I help you?” the ticket agent asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Woody said as he pulled out a creased photograph of Mary Smith—the one from the Working Girls Go Wild calendar. Man oh man, that girl had a set on her. Those little teeny-weeny suspenders covered up her n**ples, but left everything else visible to the eye. “I’m looking for this woman. I think she might have bought a bus ticket to Nashville or Fort Myers sometime on Wednesday.”

The man took the paper and studied it for a moment, his eyes going wide as he took it all in. “Don’t reckon she was dressed like this, huh?”

“No, sir, she would have been wearing a little white tank top, a jean jacket, and a pair of jeans.”

“High-heel boots? Big satchel of a handbag?”

Excitement clutched at Woody’s gut. “Yep, that would be her.”

The ticket agent handed back the paper. “You her boyfriend or something?”

“Or something.”

“She run out on you?”

Woody dug deep in his pocket and pulled out his last twenty-dollar bill and slid it across the counter. “I’m her brother,” he said earnestly.

The agent took the bribe. “Yeah, I seen her. She bought a ticket to Last Chance.”

“A ticket to where?”

“Last Chance, South Carolina. I remember because she was in a hurry, and it was one of the stops on the first bus leaving. She remarked that the place sounded hopeful, and I thought she must be nuts or a little slow on the uptake. Last Chance sounds like a place I wouldn’t ever want to visit, even if it were the last place on the face of the earth.”

Tricia waited until the ticket agent finished his conversation. She stepped up to the counter until her big belly brushed against the edge. Her belly seemed to be in the way all the time these days.

That thought left a pang of despair in its wake. The baby was in the way of more than just her reach. The baby was a definite roadblock to her happiness.