Run & Gun

BOOT SCOOT-1

BOOT SCOOTAn FBI Special Agent, even one on leave and celebrating Christmas in her old hometown, is not going to let some lowlife mess with her family. A strange man follows Dawna Shepherd’s little brother two hundred and twelve miles across west Texas, of course she’ll stop the jerk cold at the Shepherd front door.

But when Dawna yanked open the door to the chill December evening, the light from the electric icicles glinted off a golden seven-pointed star. She realized her visitor was holding up a badge case.

“Team Leader Tommy O’Brien,” the man said. “Official business.”

A man with New York City in his voice has official business in Amity, Texas?

Curious, Dawna kept her mouth shut, studied her visitor. O’Brien was her height, six three. Thick through the torso but not fat. In his forties, more than ten years older than she was, time etching a trio of lines across his forehead. His Irish blue eyes were so deep set they looked as if they’d been smudged in with a sooty finger. Dawna was a sucker for eyes like that. But O’Brien’s appeal was negated by the ready-to-jump alertness in his posture. Ten seconds, he’d be threatening to put cuffs on her. Another rush of adrenaline hit her bloodstream, instinctive reaction to the menace coming off O’Brien as strongly as a bad scent. She squinted to read the print on his badge. FUGITIVE RECOVERY TEAM.

“A bounty hunter,” Dawna said. She kept on her game face, stern and impassive, her body blocking the doorway. Fugitive recovery agents had the legal right to pursue bail jumpers across state lines, but they worked for bail bondsmen, not law enforcement. So O’Brien wasn’t all that official. And he wasn’t all that bright, either. What fugitive did he think he’d find in the home of Police Chief Donald Raymond Shepherd, Dawna’s father? “Who you huntin’?” she asked.

“Astrid Anderson.” O’Brien brushed a thick lock of dark hair off his forehead and held up a mockup of a wanted poster in his left hand. His right fell casually to rest on the extension baton tucked into his belt. He wore leather gloves, the fingerless version preferred by serious shooters.

Dawna plucked the poster from his hand, hiding her shock. She knew the pallid girl pictured there. Baby-fine ash-blonde hair skinned back in a pony tail that emphasized the high hairline, the pale streaks of her eyebrows blending into the shiny whiteness of the broad forehead. The young woman was Bailey Winters; the same Bailey Winters who’d hurried into the house only minutes before with Dawna’s brother Zane. Both students at Texas Tech, the two now huddled in the kitchen, waiting for Dawna to handle the man who’d followed them from Lubbock to Amity.

But the pictured woman couldn’t be Bailey, Dawna realized. Astrid Anderson was wanted for a murder in connection with the robbery of a Bronx savings bank in 1971, years before Bailey was born. “You got the wrong house,” Dawna said to O’Brien. “There’s no Astrid Anderson here.”

“Jane Winters, then. That’s the name Anderson may be using now.”

Bailey’s mother? Dawna shook her head, vibrating her tumble of blonde curls. “Not possible.”

O’Brien folded his arms, the ends of his fingers bluntly pink against the dark leather of his jacket. “Jane Winters was born March 14, 1950 in Eugene, Oregon. Got a driver’s license in Odessa, Texas in 1979. During that twenty-nine year gap, she had no driver’s license, never held a job, never filed an income tax return, never owned a credit card, and never borrowed money. Makes me want to ask Jane Winters what she was doing between 1950 and 1979. And since Bailey Winters came straight to this house, I thought I might find her mother here.”

“You didn’t.” Dawna’s basketball instincts kicked in. The other team comes at you suddenly with a strategy you’ve never seen before, you don’t try to guess how to respond. You get control of the ball, call a time-out, analyze the play. Dawna pushed the door shut and slammed the dead bolt home.

O’Brien spoke loudly from the other side. “Ma’am, there’s a very serious charge against Astrid Anderson. Really, you don’t want to find yourself aiding and abetting a murderer. You think about it. I’ll be in town till I get some answers. You want to talk to me, you got my cellphone number right there.”

Dawna waited, her back against the door, until she heard O’Brien step off the front porch.

Then she was brushing past the darkened Christmas tree, pushing through the swing door into the kitchen, jerking the cellphone out of Bailey’s hand, shutting it down.

Bailey backed herself up against the Formica-topped counter. Her lanky frame seemed to shrink inside her baggy warmups, the ketchup-red pants riding low on her narrow hips. She held her hand out to Dawna, begging for the phone back. “I got to talk to my mom.”

“That’s what he wants you to do,” Dawna said. “He’s outside right now scanning cellphone conversations, waiting to listen in.”

Zane snorted and moved closer to Bailey. “You don’t know that.” The shortest of the Shepherd family, only five feet nine, and the darkest, he flanked Bailey like a stunted shadow.

“He’s a bounty hunter, that’s how they work.” How we all work when we’re hunting, Dawna amended to herself. Right after denying knowledge of a fugitive’s whereabouts, a liar invariably tries to warn the fugitive of what’s going down. Listen in on that call, you can often locate the person you’re looking for.

Shoot, what was Dawna doing, interfering with the lawful apprehension of a fugitive from justice? An FBI agent, she couldn’t obstruct O’Brien just because her unreasonable gut told her he was a dangerous threat.

She moved an egg-stained plate from the table to the sink and sank into a chair. She’d been finishing her supper when Zane and Bailey arrived and the kitchen smelled of bacon.

Bailey dropped into the chair across from Dawna. The younger girl’s skin had grown translucent and a blue vein sliced across her forehead like a scar. “He’s made a mistake, right?”

“He must have,” Zane said, joining them at the table. Even in December, his complexion stayed dark and his teeth gleamed in the center of his tan face. “Jane never killed anyone.”

Dawna’s eyes flicked to the poster. Astrid Anderson hadn’t killed anyone, either. She wasn’t even inside the Bronx bank when one of her partners shot a guard. But she drove the getaway car. And as soon as she was released on bail, she disappeared. Dawna’s glance went from the poster to Bailey and back again. Virtual twins. No wonder O’Brien was already counting the bounty money offered by the bondsman.

“Start at the beginning,” Dawna said to Bailey. “Tell me how this O’Brien got on your tail. When did he contact you?”

“Two weeks ago. In New York.”

Bailey played basketball for Texas Tech. A shooting guard, she was hitting forty-eight percent from beyond the arc, on her way to setting a new school record for three-pointers. Dawna knew that during the first week of December, the Lady Raiders had preseason contests at Manhattan College and Fordham University.

“He caught up with me after we beat the Jaspers,” Bailey continued. “He said he was a sports reporter. And he asked all the right questions about my game. And then he wanted Texas color. You know, I’m a Texan, what about my folks and their folks and all that. So I told him, like there’s no story there. My mom’s folks are dead, I never knew my father. There’s just her and me and neither of us was born in Texas.”

Single mother, drifted into town, ended up buying the Amity Café; that was all Dawna knew about Jane Winters too. Which was odd when she thought about it. The summer Dawna was thirteen, Jane had just opened the cafe and was building up her lunch trade. She hired Dawna to babysit four-year-old Bailey, which meant taking her to the city playground in the morning and the city pool in the afternoon. Dawna was already crazy about hoops, and she gave Bailey her first taste of the game in baby-sized morning workouts. Afternoons, Dawna brought three-year-old Zane along to the pool and he and Bailey had been best friends ever since.

And in seventeen years of casual conversation, Dawna had picked up virtually nothing about Jane’s past. Just a vague sense that some disaster—a house fire?—had wiped out Jane’s parents and all souvenirs of her youth. It was the kind of vagueness that would interest a bounty hunter.

“O’Brien came back,” Dawna said to Bailey.

The younger woman ducked her head in agreement. “Two nights later, after we lost to Fordham. Said he wanted to check his facts. But this time, he knew a bunch of stuff I hadn’t told him. And he was wanting more. Like my mailing address is just a rural route number so where do I actually live? I kind of brushed him off. And then he starts in on my mom. What’s she do for a living, how old is she, do I take after her? I stopped it right there, it was just too weird. I told him we don’t look a bit alike and I headed for the locker room.”

“There’s no resemblance.” Zane glared at Dawna, daring her to disagree.

But Dawna was already touching up her mental picture of Jane, cutting the bangs, lightening the hair, looking for Astrid Anderson in the familiar face. Because all the other facts fit too damn well. The fugitive recovery team leader must have reached the same conclusion. “O’Brien came to Lubbock,” she said.

“I didn’t know what he wanted exactly. Just that it had to do with my mother. I refused to meet with him. But he hung around outside my dorm. He followed me to class. Not making any threats or anything. But he was just there. All I wanted to do was take my last exam and get out of Lubbock.”

Purposely spooking the girl so she’d run. So close to Christmas, he would have expected her to go to Jane. For a man who talked like a native New Yorker, following Bailey was a safer strategy than coming direct to Amity and searching for Jane Winters on his own. Bounty hunters who go charging into insular communities have been known to end up dead. Dawna had been home for three days, gossiping with her mother, catching up on everybody’s business. If O’Brien had been in Amity, Dawna would’ve heard about it.

“I didn’t know any of that when I picked Bailey up,” Zane was saying. “We were halfway here before she told me she recognized the car. He’d been behind me ever since Andrews, but I didn’t think anything of it.” Zane looked at Dawna from beneath lowered lids, checking to see if she’d chastise him for letting himself be followed, the way their father would have.

Dawna absolved him. “These back roads, hard to tell if somebody’s tailing you or just going to the same place.” Her gaze moved to Bailey’s face. “And if she hadn’t told you about O’Brien . . .”

“You should have,” Zane said to Bailey. “When I still could’ve helped you.”

Dawna heard the unspoken ending to the sentence: without telling my dad or my sister.

Red circles burned in each of Bailey’s cheeks. “But I wanted to tell my mom first.”

In Bailey’s place, Dawna would’ve phoned her mother from New York City. Surprised, she asked, “Your mom doesn’t know about O’Brien?”

“You think I’d call her up, tell her some man is stalking me?” Bailey shook her head. “She’d go crazy, worrying. Two hundred miles away, how’s she supposed to help me?”

“Right,” Dawna murmured agreeably. She realized that Bailey had feared from her first encounter with O’Brien that he knew something harmful to Jane Winters. And for reasons Dawna could only guess at, Bailey had decided she had to confront her mother face to face. In Lubbock, she’d hugged her secret close, unwilling to reveal to anyone even remotely connected to law enforcement that O’Brien was tracking her movements. But by following her home, he’d forced her hand and she’d had to tell Zane about him.

“By the time I understood what the guy wanted,” Zane said, “it was too late to lead him away from Amity. I figured I’d come here and let Dad handle him.”