The Marshal's Hostage

Chapter Eighteen



Everything happened so fast that Joelle didn’t have time to fight back. The hulk of a man threw her into the truck and before she could even bring up her arm to try to slug him, someone else rammed another gun into her rib cage.

And that someone was Sarah Webb.

Joelle wasn’t exactly surprised to see the woman. She wouldn’t have been shocked to see any of their suspects, but knowing her captor’s identity didn’t explain why all of this was happening.

Dallas launched himself at the truck, trying to open the door to get to her, but her captor had already locked it. And he started the engine and sped away.

Joelle’s heart was pounding now because they were clearly taking her to a secondary scene. Away from Dallas. Away from the ranch where his brothers might be able to help her get free.

She started thinking that she was about to die, but that wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the thought of Dallas being killed. And that’s exactly what she thought might happen when the driver calmly lifted his gun and fired.

Joelle heard herself scream because she thought he’d shot at Dallas, but she quickly realized he had fired overhead. The bullet slammed into the roof of the truck.

A warning shot.

Probably to get Dallas to back off.

He didn’t. Dallas latched on to the door handle, but the driver gunned the engine and sped away. She saw Dallas flung to the side. As horrible as that was, at least he hadn’t been shot. But Dallas didn’t stay down. He jumped to his feet and starting running after them.

“He won’t stop,” Joelle mumbled, and she turned toward Sarah. “He won’t stop until he has you behind bars.”

“And that’s why I have you,” Sarah said. Not calmly, either. There was a high pitch to her voice. More than nerves. Her hand was shaking, too. Probably because she’d never done anything like this.

That only made the situation more dangerous.

Joelle didn’t like her odds with a shaky kidnapper who wanted to do God knows what to her.

“I’m guessing this means you killed your husband,” Joelle said, trying to keep an eye on the driver, Dallas and Sarah. The mud was slowing them down, but Dallas was quickly losing ground.

“You already knew that,” Sarah insisted.

But Joelle hadn’t. Not until now, and now seemed a little too late.

“You and Dallas put it all together.” Sarah kept glancing back at Dallas, too. “And then you found the safe beneath the floor.”

Joelle shook her head and nearly blurted out what exactly was in that safe, but she decided to go with a question instead. “What do you think the CSIs will find that will implicate you?”

“Too much.” Sarah’s mouth was shaking now. In fact, nearly every part of her was. “I threatened to kill him, and he said he’d recorded the threat. That he’d lock it away to give to the cops if I tried to do anything.”

Joelle didn’t tell her there wasn’t a tape or anything else that would incriminate the woman. She just waited, listening, and she prayed that she could figure out a way to stop all of this before Dallas got hurt.

“I need Dallas to destroy everything in that safe,” Sarah continued. “As long as I have you, Dallas will do that. He’ll do anything to protect you. I could see it in his eyes.”

Yes, Dallas would indeed do anything to protect her, and that’s what scared Joelle most. She could no longer see him on the trail behind the truck, but at the speed they were moving, he’d soon catch up. And the hired gun behind the wheel might try to shoot him even if it meant Sarah had to rely on someone else to destroy evidence she believed existed.

“You just couldn’t leave it be, could you?” Sarah grumbled.

No. Not with the governor’s inquiry and not with Dallas’s prints on the knife. Of course, they now knew how the prints had gotten there.

“Why did you kill him?” Joelle asked. Not that she had a burning desire to know, but she wanted to keep Sarah talking while Joelle tried to come up with a way out of this.

“It was a bad day,” Sarah answered. She kept her attention nailed to Joelle. “Jonah ordered me to get Declan from the infirmary, but he wasn’t there. He’d sneaked out or something.”

“Because Webb had beaten him,” Joelle provided.

Anger flashed through Sarah’s eyes. “Because he deserved it. That brat was always causing trouble, and he’d started a firestorm that day. When I told Jonah that Declan wasn’t in the infirmary, he didn’t believe me.”

Joelle glanced behind them. Still no sign of Dallas. “Webb thought you were protecting Declan?”

“Yes!” Sarah said with a curse. “I wouldn’t do that. Not for him, not for any of you. None of you ever lifted a finger to help my boy, Billy, when Jonah was beating on him.”

“We were kids,” Joelle reminded her.

“Kids having sex. You were all disgusting as far as I was concerned, and if Declan had been where he was supposed to be, I would have taken him to my husband’s office.”

For no doubt what would have been another beating.

“Jonah said if I didn’t find Declan in five minutes he was going to give me what Declan was supposed to get.” Sarah’s mouth tightened. “I couldn’t go through that again. So I pretended to look for the brat, but I put on some gloves and used the knife that I knew had Dallas’s prints.”

“You wanted to set Dallas up?” Joelle shook her head. “Why?”

“I didn’t set him up. Well, not at first. I just wanted some insurance in case the cops pointed the finger at me. I locked the knife away, and the day they found Jonah’s body, I sent the knife to Owen and told him to make up a story about how he got it.”

So Owen had known for almost two months that Sarah had killed her husband. And yet he’d withheld that and instead implicated Dallas and had tried to force her into marriage. That shouldn’t have surprised her, but Joelle felt even more disgusted with the man.

“Unlike the rest of you, Owen was always a good boy,” Sarah concluded. Her gaze slashed to the driver. “Make sure everything’s all right at the house, that he has Kirby by now.”

Oh, mercy. “Why Kirby?” Joelle asked. “He’s a sick man.”

Sarah nodded. “And he’s my insurance policy. If Dallas won’t destroy that evidence for you, he’ll do it for Kirby. At least he’d better. I used every penny of my savings to hire these two to help me.”

So they were hired guns. Which meant they had nothing to lose. Sarah was paying them to do whatever she asked, even if meant sending Kirby to an early grave.

“You there?” the driver said into the ear communicator he was wearing, and he kept driving. Seconds later, he repeated his question.

Still no answer.

Good. Maybe that meant Harlan had stopped him.

Sarah cursed again. “He better not have failed,” she snapped. And she jammed the gun harder against Joelle’s ribs. So hard that it nearly knocked the breath out of her.

Clearly, the woman was working on a short fuse. Maybe even an unstable one. It was a risk—anything Joelle did at this point would be—but she was certain of one thing. Even if Dallas managed to destroy that evidence, Sarah wasn’t going to let them live.

Dallas and she were the ultimate loose ends.

With that realization slicing through her, Joelle gathered all her strength and breath. She dug her feet into the floor to anchor herself. Then she slammed her entire weight into the driver.

Thankfully, he hadn’t seen it coming. The steering wheel lurched to the left. So did the truck. And it flew off the trail right into the boggy ground. The jolt was instantaneous, as if they’d been in a collision. The truck jerked to a stop, tossing them forward into the dash and windshield.

The impact stunned her, and the pain shot through every part of her body. But she didn’t let it stop her.

She pulled back and started fighting as if her life depended on it.

Because it did.

* * *

DALLAS RAN AS FAST AS HE COULD, battling both the rain and the mud. He had to get to Joelle, had to stop her from being taken away from the ranch. But he also couldn’t risk another shot being fired. That’s why he stayed off the trail, behind the trees and shrubs.

He had to believe that shot had been meant for him. He couldn’t stand to think otherwise. No. He wouldn’t go there. He would get to her and he would save her.

His brothers were somewhere on the grounds. Maybe one of them would be able to stop that truck before it reached the main road. Of course, that was a risk for them, too, but he knew without a doubt that each of them would take it to save Joelle’s life.

Ahead of him, he heard the heavy thudding sound. And the scream. It was a woman’s, but it didn’t sound like Joelle. Still, that pushed him to pick up the pace, and when he threw back a low-hanging branch, Dallas spotted the truck sitting nose first in an irrigation ditch.

“Harlan has the other gunman!” Clayton shouted. He sounded close, but Dallas figured he was closer.

He hurried to the truck and threw open the first door he could reach—the one on the passenger’s side. Two people came spilling out. Both of them fighting. Both yelling.

One of them was Joelle, thank God. Alive and okay, for the moment at least.

The other woman was Sarah. And she was fighting, too, but she had the advantage because she had a gun in her hand. Joelle had a death grip on the woman’s wrist, but from what Dallas could tell Sarah’s finger was still on the trigger.

Sarah’s henchman, the driver, came scrambling across the cab of the truck and tried to latch on to Joelle. Dallas didn’t let him do that. He rammed himself into the man, knocking him away from the fray.

Unfortunately, that took Dallas away from it, too.

From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw Clayton approach them. His brother had his gun aimed and ready, but he didn’t shoot. Sarah and Joelle were practically wound around each other, and Dallas had no choice but to drag the gunman to the ground so he couldn’t try to help his boss.

“Harlan has the other gunman in custody,” Clayton called out. “And the guy’s already squealing about a plea deal to testify against his boss, Sarah Webb.”

Whether it was true or not, Dallas prayed that would make Sarah surrender.

It didn’t.

The woman kept fighting, kept trying to aim that gun right at Joelle.

Enough was enough. Even though the hired gun outweighed Dallas and was probably a lot stronger, he didn’t have the high stakes. He wasn’t fighting for Joelle’s life. Dallas rammed his elbow into the man’s jaw and followed it by bashing his gun across his face.

Cursing and spitting blood, the man reared up to charge at Dallas, but before he could do that, the shot rang out. From the corner of his eye, Dallas saw that Clayton had put a bullet in the man’s leg.

Dallas didn’t take the time to see if that would stop the guy. Clayton had his back, but Clayton still didn’t have a clean shot to stop Sarah. Praying it wasn’t a mistake, Dallas launched himself toward the woman, hauling them both to the ground.

The shot was deafening.

It blasted through Dallas’s head, and he could have sworn his heart, too. That’s because the bullet hadn’t hit him, and that meant it could have Joelle.

He heard himself shout out her name, but it sounded like an echo with the blast still ringing in his ears. Dallas latched on to an arm and gave it a fierce tug.

Joelle.

She was moving. Alive. But since she was coated in mud, he couldn’t tell if she’d been wounded.

Sarah came up off the ground. “I won’t let this happen!” she yelled. “I won’t go to jail for killing that bastard.”

And she pointed the gun right at Joelle.

Dallas still had hold of her arm, and he slung Joelle behind him. In the same motion, he aimed his own gun, praying that there wasn’t too much water or mud in the barrel.

He fired.

And his shot slammed into Sarah’s chest.

Unlike his brother, Dallas had to go for a kill shot. He couldn’t risk Sarah pulling that trigger.

The woman froze, the gun slipping from her hand and onto the ground. Her stare was frozen, too, fixed on Dallas. She said something.

Three words.

Words that Dallas didn’t catch because of the rain.

He didn’t get a chance to ask her what she’d said because Sarah dropped to the ground right next to the gun she’d just tried to fire at them.

Clayton hurried closer to cuff the injured gunman, but Dallas’s attention went straight to Joelle. He grabbed her, pulled her closer to make sure she hadn’t been shot.

“I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was as shaky as she was.

Dallas didn’t take her word for it. He swiped away the mud and looked for any signs of injury. She had some cuts and scrapes on her face, and while it turned his stomach to see them, it was far better than the alternative.

Relieved, he pulled her into his arms. “I’m sorry.” It was just one of the things he needed to say to her, but the others could wait.

“Sarah’s alive,” Clayton relayed to them, and he took out his phone and called for an ambulance.

Joelle pulled back and placed both hands on Dallas’s face. “Did you hear her?”

Her voice wasn’t just shaky now. It was pretty much frantic, and he wanted to dismiss it as part of the slam of adrenaline she was no doubt feeling.

But there was something else.

“Did you hear what Sarah said?” Joelle asked.

Dallas had to shake his head. Three words. But he hadn’t heard. “What?”

Joelle moved closer to him and put her mouth right against his ear. He heard the shuddering sound her breath made. “Sarah said I had help.”