Bannon Brothers Read online

  Finding a glass, he poured himself a double shot and moved toward the couch with the bottle in his hand, setting it down on the floor before he sank into the richly upholstered cushions. It didn’t take too long for the strange edginess that kept him awake to mellow a little.

  Idly, he sipped the bourbon and cast a glance into the accordion file, picking up the letters that had fallen out and stuffing them back into the slots inside. It had been organized—who had done that? A former secretary, he supposed. He’d had several. Feeling angry that he couldn’t remember, he upended the damn thing and let the contents spill out, brushing his hand over the pile to separate the papers.

  Whoever had put it all in order had been wasting her time. There was never any need to keep such stuff. He picked up a letter in a little-old-ladyish handwriting that thanked him and his lovely wife most sincerely for the annual tour of their historic home. That had been Mrs. Meriweather’s idea and Luanne’s responsibility. After the third year of strangers traipsing through the halls, he’d put his foot down. No more tours. He crumpled the letter into a ball and tossed it on the floor.

  A detailed pencil rendering of an odd mechanism caught his eye. He picked it up, admiring the draftsmanship and noting the words Patent Pending below the—what was it? He read the neatly lettered title. A Device for the Walking of Horses, Attaching to a Standard Halter. Montgomery took a large swallow of bourbon and looked for the inventor’s name. There it was. Randall Ernest.

  That rang a bell—no, it didn’t. Randall was Erin’s last name, that was all. This Randall Ernest was some forgotten genius. Or crackpot. He supposed the half-remembered secretary had dealt with the man. There was no way he could assign a face to that unremarkable name.

  Bored but still wide awake, he studied the rendering again. The device was ingenious, if useless. Carelessly, Montgomery finished the bourbon and set the glass on the paper. The drop of liquor that ran down its side brought his own faded scrawl to life. Not interested.

  He ought to burn these files, he thought. The ache in his head had started again. Or seal them and send them to that Bannon. Let the detective beat his brains out, while he was looking for clues and causing trouble.

  A star-filled but otherwise dark sky arched over Erin as she took Charlie outside for a last, short walk. They stayed near the house. Only her bedroom window, curtains drawn, was lit from within.

  The sense of peace she always got from being out in nature filled her heart. She breathed in the cool night air, keeping her hands warm in the pockets of an old, baggy jacket. Charlie sniffed the grass first, then the air, alert as usual. He returned to her side and sat down on his haunches, positioning his head directly under her hand.

  Erin laughed softly as she looked down. “All right. I can take a hint.” She patted his big head and rumpled the thick fur at the back of his neck.

  For a few minutes longer they stayed outside, enjoying the peaceful night. Erin took one last deep breath and turned to go in. Charlie stayed by her.

  She made sure the back door was locked, and then the front, before she shed the jacket and hung it up on the hook that held the leash. The lamp in her bedroom spilled warm light into the studio area, reaching as far as her easel. Erin stopped to flip through the large sketchbook she’d taken to the Montgomery stables today.

  So far she was pleased with her drawings of the magnificent stallion, although none were complete. But she’d captured something of Take All in bits and pieces. The proudly arched neck and well-groomed mane. Liquid dark eyes with a touch of mischievous spirit. The strong shape of his head. She’d used quick, swooping lines of dark pencil to outline the powerful contours of his back and hindquarters.

  She wished she could show them to Bannon. If only he had been here with her, walking under the stars. They could have come in together, chilled, and done some cuddling. Maybe more. She wasn’t sure if her restless longing for him was emotional or physical or both.

  Erin closed the sketchbook and headed to her bedroom. She undressed and slipped into bed, wondering what Bannon was doing right now. Probably the same thing. It was a little too easy to imagine him unbuttoning his shirt and tossing it aside, revealing a chest and arms that had to be pure muscle.

  Sometimes it was a wonderful thing to be so visually oriented. Erin almost giggled as she settled into her pillow. She let her imagination go a little further with her vision of Bannon . . . and then she sighed. He wasn’t here, so right now it was frustrating.

  Charlie padded into the room, ready to sack out on the rug by her bed. She rolled over and reached out to pat him one last time. The dog settled down in a sphinx position, front legs outstretched and head up, as if he was listening to something.

  “It’s okay, boy,” she said softly. “Settle down.”

  Charlie turned his head to give her a soulful look and then resumed his watchful pose. He really was a great dog, she thought. It was a pleasure having him around, especially since it looked like Bannon was available for an occasional walk during the day. She didn’t want to keep Charlie cooped up if she didn’t have to.

  “Go to sleep,” she said.

  Obediently, the dog rested his head between his paws. Erin pulled up the covers under her chin and stared dreamily at the ceiling. In another few minutes, she’d drifted off.

  The dog’s ears pricked and turned. His head came up. But he stayed where he was.

  Erin awoke with a start when she heard Charlie’s deep growl. The big dog suddenly jumped at the window still shrouded by curtains, not barking, breaking the fragile old glass with the force of his leap. A man’s voice cursed. Erin shrank back in terror when she glimpsed someone on the other side of the jagged shards entangled in the curtain. Someone tall. Broad-shouldered. Menacing. She couldn’t see his face in the half light before dawn.

  The dog’s nose was bleeding but he stayed put, barking ferociously, back fur raised, looking and sounding twice as big as he was. The intruder vanished and Charlie turned to her.

  Erin scrambled out of bed, switching on the light, trying to see the dog’s wound. “Stay!” she whispered. In less than a second she plucked a half-inch sliver of glass from his sensitive nose, drawing a sharp breath when he flinched.

  “Good dog. Good boy. I’m done.”

  The dog stood patiently as she wiped the blood from his nose with a corner of the bedsheet. She scrubbed her cheeks, suddenly aware of two hot tears that were rolling down them. She told herself fiercely not to cry as she took hold of Charlie’s head and turned it this way and that. Eyes, ears—both uninjured. Thank God. She saw no other cuts or bits of glass.

  She looked around wildly, finding jeans and a top, struggling into them. The prowler could be trying another window. Or the door.

  Charlie seemed to have no interest in the window and quickly moved away on patrol—there wasn’t any other word for his deliberate progress through the house.

  Her heart was hammering under her ribs. Where was her cell phone? Erin couldn’t remember. Damn it—the bag she’d taken with her to the stables—it had to be in there. Unless it was in the car.

  She edged into the studio area step by cautious step, hugging the wall, keeping her eyes on the windows. She saw nothing outside from her vantage point but the sky, quickly growing light. Even so. The man could still be there. Erin got down on hands and knees and headed for her toolbox. There was a claw hammer in there. Better than nothing.

  She had the hammer in hand when she saw her bag. On the floor, where she’d dropped it. Erin let out her breath as Charlie came over.

  “Sit,” she whispered. He obeyed. It occurred to her that he wasn’t growling. His back wasn’t up. Still, she wasn’t going outside. She reached over from her position on the floor and dragged the bag to her with the hammer’s claws. Then she scrabbled inside, looking for the little phone, praying that it was charged.

  She flipped it open, keeping a hand on Charlie’s powerful neck, more to reassure herself than him. The battery icon was low, but it had enou
gh juice to make a call.

  For a moment she hesitated. 911? The friend who’d rented her the house had warned her that it took forever to get help this far out in the sticks. The sheriff was a local joke and so were his deputies. She’d lost the number of a former boyfriend who lived about two miles away.

  Erin called Bannon.

  She hadn’t finished telling him what had happened before he interrupted her. “Coming. Stay on. And stay down. Let Charlie tear out the sonovabitch’s throat if he comes back.”

  “You didn’t tell me Charlie did things like that,” came her soft reply.

  “Part of his training. Keep him with you.”

  He pushed the button to put his cell phone on loudspeaker so as not to lose her, grabbing his jeans from last night, belt still in the loops. One, two, legs in, three, sweatshirt yanked over his head, four, boots he didn’t bother to lace. Less than five seconds had passed when he picked up the phone. “I’m outta here.” He took a gun from a drawer. His own, not department hardware. A Glock.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  Bannon scooped up his car keys, pretty sure the rotating light to slap on the dash was under the passenger seat. If not, the hell with it. His fellow law enforcement professionals could follow him to Erin’s house if they wanted to. His car could do ninety to a hundred easy on clear roads, and Wainsville didn’t have a rush hour. He flung open the door and found it blocked.

  The building manager, a guy who had a bad habit of starting work at dawn, was standing there with two large cardboard boxes stacked at his feet. He goggled at Bannon, just as startled as he was. “Hello there. I didn’t want to knock. These came in yesterday—hey!”

  Bannon swore under his breath and pushed past the boxes, then got a glimpse of the TV station logo on the cardboard and sent the top box flying inside with one swipe of his hand, kicked the bottom box inside after it, and slammed the door, not waiting to hear the click of the automatic lock.

  “Didn’t mean to wake you!”

  Bannon swore again and ran for his car.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bannon drove at top speed down the narrow road to Erin’s house, skidding over ruts and slick spots. Dark clouds were drifting over the Blue Ridge, spitting cold rain that hadn’t been falling in Wainsville. His car bounced over a rise and slammed down again. The axles were taking a hell of a beating. He didn’t care.

  On the way here he’d blown right past a highway patrolman who’d pulled over a couple of lowlifes in a battered van. The officer hadn’t had a chance to call him in, let alone stop him. Bannon was going that fast.

  He gouged out deep ruts of his own as he came to a swerving stop on the wet ground of her front yard, positioning the passenger side parallel to the house. With luck, the car would take the first bullets if anyone had him in their sights. Bannon barely paused to draw breath as he pulled his gun and scrambled out, head down, scanning the house and the land around it through the window.

  Empty.

  Which didn’t mean—

  Erin opened the door and peered around it, holding on to Charlie’s collar. Bannon lowered his gun but stood tall, even though he was ready to drop to his knees and give thanks she was alive. He’d imagined the worst.

  “He’s gone,” she said in a shaky voice.

  Bannon wasn’t so sure. His reply was almost a whisper. “Do what I told you. Get back inside and stay the hell down.” He gestured to Charlie. “Keep him between you and trouble.”

  Erin opened her mouth as if she was about to protest but thought better of it. Charlie kept his shoulder to her knee, guiding her. He was a damn good dog.

  She left the door ajar. He could jump up there and slam it, or go for a walk.

  Bannon walked, taking it nice and slow. Going around the first corner was no fun, but he did it. The second was easier. The third corner revealed blurry footprints in the tangled mix of grass and mud outside Erin’s bedroom window. He glanced down, not squatting in case someone was planning to catch him off balance and whack him for all eternity.

  The rain wasn’t letting up and the blurred footprints didn’t tell him much. He guessed that the prowler had long feet. That wouldn’t put anybody in jail.

  But then, whoever was behind this attempt to break in to Erin’s house most likely would never see the inside of a jail. Because someone else was behind the lone man who’d threatened Erin—every instinct Bannon possessed told him that. He had a few ideas. Could be a cop on the take—or the chief himself. Bannon had been connecting some more dots all the way out here and the way he saw it, reporting what had happened here to the police wasn’t looking like the best option.

  He looked up at the windowsills of the old house. They were close to six feet above ground level. The thug was tall, if he’d been able to look in like she’d said.

  There was the broken pane. Rain-spattered shards lay on the ground where the glass had exploded outward from the force of the big dog’s lunge at the window.

  The footprints ran out from the house, dug deep at the toe—Bannon squinted at the double line of prints until they got too small to see. The prowler had gone back the way he’d come, into the forest that clung to the looming mountains. Bannon’s gaze moved back to the ground surrounding the house. The footprints closer in were well spaced and far apart. Bannon guessed the man was lanky. Maybe a long-distance runner, maybe ex-military. There was something disciplined about the evenness of the stride.

  Skip it for now, Sherlock, he told himself. He could just about hear Doris’s crisp voice saying the words in his mind. The fourth corner of Erin’s little house was coming up.

  Bannon swallowed hard and stepped around it, gun braced in both hands. No one was there.

  He bounded up onto the porch, pushing the door open long enough to get inside himself, then slamming it shut and locking it.

  Erin had squeezed herself and Charlie into a corner. Actually, the dog was in front of her. He looked up at Bannon but didn’t move.

  Bannon made a mental note to thank Linc’s girlfriend ten times over. Karen, or whatever her real name was, had trained the big black dog unbelievably well. He holstered the Glock and gave Erin a hand up.

  “I did a perimeter check. We’re alone.”

  “Gee whiz. Sounds romantic.” She dusted off the back of her jeans, then stuck her hands in the front pockets. Bannon looked her over. He was waiting for the shock to wear off.

  Her casual tone didn’t fool him. Granted, she didn’t seem like the sob-and-scream type. But she would crack one way or another. Bannon wasn’t going anywhere until the fear she was holding back surfaced.

  His being here could trigger it. That was the reason he didn’t take her in his arms and tell her something stupid like everything was going to be all right. Maybe it would be someday, but it wasn’t now.

  It felt strange as hell to be standing here again, as if he and the prowler had something in common. Only yesterday, sneaking a copy of her birth certificate and that card hadn’t bothered him enough to stop him from doing it.

  As for what he’d found out from the hospital clerk—later for that. Much later. Even if it turned out to have something to do with what had just happened.

  Bannon had something to say that she wasn’t going to like: She couldn’t stay in this isolated little house after today. She was going home with him. Charlie too.

  He had to figure out what was going on and get a chance to straighten out the bad guys. Or take them out before they found her again. And oh yeah—found him too, for starting all this. He had to have been watched the time he’d come here to walk Charlie. He’d relaxed his guard some. Maybe the watcher had tailed him to the hospital somehow, even observed his interaction with the clerk. Then seen Bannon’s bribe and raised it to a hundred to find out what he was asking for after he was gone. The scenario was unlikely but not impossible—Bannon tripped up sometimes, everyone did. The most dangerous state of mind was thinking you’d gotten too good to fail. He had. He was leading someone to Erin. His
hand moved to his gun. Not a problem solver. But it was there.

  “It’s not good, Erin,” he replied. “Even though it looks like your prowler headed for the hills.”

  “Should I call the sheriff?”

  Bannon shot her a quizzical look. “I assume there’s a reason you didn’t.”

  He could come up with one of his own: Hoebel had begun his career in a little town that was more or less in between where she lived and where he lived. There was no doubt in Bannon’s mind that the chief could call in favors. There were always a few cops who were happy to do dirty work on the side, especially if it paid better than overtime.

  “The friend who rented me this place didn’t think too highly of him or the deputies.”

  “How long was she living here?”

  “Seven years,” Erin replied.

  “Then she would know.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you see the guy’s face?” he asked after a few seconds.

  “No.” She moved into the kitchen, reaching for a zip-locked plastic bag and opening it, pulling out a dog biscuit. She tossed it at Charlie. “Thanks for saving my life.” The big dog snapped the boneshaped snack out of the air. “You’re welcome. It’s the least I can do.”

  Her voice was cracking.

  The dog swallowed it in a couple of bites and gave Bannon a what-now look as Erin found a chair for him and one for herself. She had to do something and it didn’t have to be rational. She set the chairs in the middle of the floor, like they were about to have afternoon tea at an imaginary table. He noticed how hard she gripped the wood.

  Here it came. Meltdown. He’d seen it before. A female cop usually took over at this point, when there was one around.

  Erin didn’t sit, but went to the sink. She picked up a can of cleanser and shook half of it into the sink, running a little water over the scattered powder. Then she scrubbed. And scrubbed and scrubbed, until the sponge was in tatters. Her hands had to be raw.