Her phone pinged. Grateful for the excuse to break contact with Greer, she dug it out of her pocket. “Oh, God. It’s them. They booted up my computer.”
Greer nodded. “Copy that.” She wasn’t certain he was talking to her. “My teammate saw the message. He’ll deal with it,” Greer said as he reached over to take her phone and shut it off. “Don’t open that message. Now what’s it gonna be? You comin’ with me, or you hangin’ here with my friends for your baddies to come back when the clown doesn’t make them laugh?”
Her breathing was shallow. There was no choice to make. No choice at all. “I’ll go with you.”
He nodded and lifted her suitcase and laptop bag, then stepped over the threshold. They walked down to a big black SUV parked at the curb in front of her house. He tossed her suitcase in the back hatch, then handed her computer bag to her.
“So, where are we going?” she asked
“Wolf Creek Bend.”
That was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, at the base of the Medicine Bow Mountains. “What’s up there?”
He looked out of his side mirror as he pulled onto the street. “Your last hope in the hell that’s become your life.”
Chapter Ten
Remi watched the barren land roll past as they drove west out of Laramie. The moon had finally risen, spreading its sepia light over summer-brown hills. They were heading away from civilization at a breakneck speed.
She looked over at her traveling companion. The muscular lines of his neck and face were lit by the pale green dashboard light. His brown hair was brushed back from his forehead in waves that rippled toward the back of his head.
He appeared rational, calm.
She was bewildered that she’d gone with him so meekly and unnerved that it didn’t feel wrong. It made no sense. The only person who knew she was headed away from her home was waiting to make her termination official. She hadn’t told her assistant where she was going, a fact that she wondered about now. Clancy was brilliant, and could one day be a phenomenal scholar, but there was something off about him, something that had made her keep him at a distance over the two years she’d been teaching at the university.
“Who are you? For real,” she asked Greer.
He looked over at her. The green dash light illuminated his serious face. “Shall I lie to make you comfortable now that your world is standing on its head?”
“No. I need you to be honest with me.”
He faced the road. “I’m a consultant in the security industry.”
Somehow, she doubted that was good news. “What is your job, exactly?”
“I hunt, find, and kill bad guys.” His smile broke into the silence that followed his words.
“Hahaha. You’re not really great at calming nerves. You should probably never read stories to children. I think even Humpty Dumpty would sound sinister if you read it.”
“True. And that, Remi, is me in a nutshell.” The smile ended, falling from a mouth that looked as if it never knew true joy.
Remi’s stomach knotted. She faced forward, staring into the dark that swallowed the light from their headlights as the road twisted and rose up into the national forest.
“I thought you were a computer programmer.”
“I am.”
“So you moonlight as an assassin?”
“‘Assassin’ is such a harsh word.”
“Finding Sally’s not your real focus, is it?”
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. “No. She is real, though. And I promised her I would keep her safe.” He looked at Remi. “But I didn’t.”
“So you and your band of merry mercenaries got together to find her?”
He tilted his head as he considered his answer. “Only one of us is really merry.”
“Greer,” she said, in her best unamused professor’s voice. “I need answers.”
“You’ll get them. When we get to Wolf Creek Bend.”
Ignoring the bone he tossed her way, she continued digging. “Are you with the WKB?”
“No.”
A more chilling idea hit her. “The Friends?”
“No. Relax, professor. You’ll know what you need to know shortly.”
She gaped at him. “‘Relax’? Really? Your life isn’t the one on the line right now.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
She scrubbed her hands over her face, then pressed them against her mouth. “I think I’m going to vomit.”
He looked over at her. “For real?”
She focused on breathing, but her skin was growing cold and clammy. She nodded. “It’s a panic reaction.”
“Shit.” He pulled over and stopped the car. “Don’t go running through the wayside. There are rattlers everywhere. Just lean out the door.”
She pushed the door open. Cool evening air spilled into the cab. She released her seatbelt and turned to sit facing the open prairie. This was it. This was her only chance to run. She sucked in a few long, slow breaths. Go or stay? Her indecision roiled in her stomach.
Greer had helped her twice already. Surely she could trust him?
Or had he saved her only to preserve her for something much, much worse?
She leaned over and folded her arms about her waist, reminding herself she knew how to survive—just look how far she’d come. A girl with minimal education until high school, no hope in hell of being free. She’d managed not only a diploma, but also an undergraduate degree and two advanced degrees. And now she was a professor at a public university.
For a few more days, anyway, unless she complied. She had no choice. She was going to have to put her research on hold. She could still draft the articles she’d had in mind, just not submit them for publication yet. She’d have to come up with something else to submit to the sociological journals if she wanted to stay on her tenure track, which she could do. She had plenty of primary data from the other groups she’d studied.