“I don’t know. Maybe this guy stole it.”
“Maybe.” There it was again, that niggling feeling she’d been trying to discount for the past week, that sixth sense that things were out of kilter. A horrible suspicion—a fear greater than when she’d thought herself faced with a. man holding a gun—darted around the edges of her thoughts.
Tossing the recorder aside, she once again knelt beside the prone man. “Help me roll him over.”
“Are you nuts?” John protested, leaning back on his heels. “We’ve got to call the police. Knocking him out is one thing, but rolling him around afterward just won’t do.”
“I need to find his wallet. I’ve got to know who he is.”
“What on earth for? Katie, I’ve gone along with a couple of your schemes that sounded pretty crazy, including pretending to be your husband, but I draw the line at this. If you’re not going to call the police, I will, and I’ll leave you alone with this guy who could wake up at any minute.”
John started to stand, but Katie grabbed his arm. “Please. Just this one more favor.”
He sighed, but he grasped the man’s shoulders and heaved. Katie jumped as the man moaned when John eased him up onto his side.
“He’s still out,” John assured her. “Go on. Do whatever demented thing you think you have to do and get this over with before one of your neighbors sees us and thinks we’re all perverts.”
With two fingers, Katie reached inside the hip pocket of the man’s black jeans and tentatively withdrew his wallet. The soft leather was warm from his body, and she felt as though she were touching him intimately. Swallowing hard, she gathered her courage.
She stood and moved closer to the window to take advantage of the light, then opened the wallet. Her heart plummeted as her blackest fears were confirmed. “He’s a private detective,” she said, forcing the words from her suddenly dry throat.
“What!”
“My parents must have hired him to spy on me. I knew it! They’ve been too quiet lately. It’s not like them to stop harassing me all of a sudden. For the past week, I’ve had the feeling that somebody was following me, watching me, and I was right. Damn his sorry, rotten hide!”
She stomped back to where John still knelt beside the man—beside Travis Rider, Private Investigator. Laying the wallet on the ground, she bent over him and steeled herself to touch him again, to reach inside his black leather jacket and search his pockets.
The action stirred the masculine scents of leather and after-shave-pleasant, compelling scents in the midst of an ominous, distasteful situation. A soft
T—shirt stretched over hard, well—developed muscles that threatened to distract her from her quest.
Reaching into an inner jacket pocket, she withdrew a comb, a gold pen and an envelope with a canceled postage stamp in one corner. Even in the near darkness she could make out the bold, stern strokes of her father’s handwriting in the address that covered most of the envelope.
With numb fingers, she opened it and extracted a single sheet of paper, a form with TRAVIS RIDER, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, in block letters at the top, CONTRACT on the next line and Ralph Logan’s imperious signature at the bottom. The printing in be tween was too small to make out in the dim light, but she didn’t need to know the particulars.
This man was helping her parents get custody of her orphaned nephew. This man would doom Nathan to grow up in the repressed, restricted, nightmarish way she’d had to grow up. She considered kicking him, but wasn’t sure he’d feel it while he was unconscious. Maybe after he woke up.
John retrieved the tape recorder and stood, offering it to her. “Katie, he probably recorded our conversation. He must know what you were planning to do. Do you want to take the tape and destroy it?”
Katie sagged back down with a muttered curse. “It won’t matter. He’s bound to have heard it all.”
She shoved at the man’s shoulder, eliciting another groan, but she didn’t care. Let him groan. Let him feel a small portion of the pain his actions would cause.
“Why’d you have to do it? Maybe I haven’t had the same job or the same address for twenty years, but I love my nephew. That’s more than my parents can say. They’ll crush the life out of him the same way they did Becky and me. Damn you, Travis Rider.” She shoved again. “May your wife run off with your best friend and all your hair fall out.”
“Jeez, I can’t believe you conked the detective who’s out to get you,” John said. “That probably won’t help your case any.”
“Probably not. Though I can’t imagine it could make things any worse.” She sighed, then cursed again. “Well, we can’t give up. I owe it to my sister. I owe it to Nathan. We have to figure a way out of this.”
“Katie, you’re licked. I tried to tell you from the beginning you’d never get away with this. Even if it worked, your parents would get visitation, and they’d find out from Nathan that we weren’t really married, then you’d be in a real mess.”
“I told you, Nathan’s a cool kid. He’d never tell those people anything. Besides, with the hours you work, even if we were married, I’d never see you.”
“Well, it’s a moot point now. You might as well give it up.”
Katie slammed her fists onto her hips. “No way. I will not let Becky’s son be raised by those cold, hard people. Help me get this guy inside the house. Maybe we can talk some sense into him when he comes around. Maybe if he understands the situation, he won’t testify against me. Or maybe we can just tie him up and lock him in the closet until after the hearing. You could come over and throw him a raw egg or a mouse now and then. That’s what snakes eat, isn’t it?”
“If the hospital finds out about this, I’m dead.”
“If this doesn’t work, an innocent child is doomed.”
“Have you been reading Charles Dickens again?”
Katie leaned over, picked up the wallet and stuffed it into her own pocket rather than have to touch the detective again, then lifted his legs. “Get his arms,” she instructed, “and stop worrying. All you’re doing is helping to get this injured man inside where you can examine him in your medical capacity. The rest is en tirely on my shoulders. So quit complaining. Where’s your sense of honor?” She wasn’t sure what type of honor she was challenging him about, but it seemed a good thing to appeal to at the time.
John grabbed Rider’s shoulders and lifted.
Travis Rider was tall and heavy. He wasn’t fat; Katie suspected the weight was almost all muscle. John had said his heartbeat suggested he worked out regularly, and she’d felt his solid chest. If they couldn’t reach him through reason, they had no chance of overpowering him physically. Unless they tied him up before he regained consciousness.
Together she and John dragged him along the rough earth, across the stubbles of grass she hadn’t been able to make grow, over to the front porch, up the steps and into Katie’s living room.
As soon as the screen door slammed behind her, Katie dropped her share of the burden unceremoniously onto the hardwood floor. John flinched as he let the man’s shoulders and head down a little more easily. “I don’t think torturing this guy is a good start toward making him listen to your side of the story.”
Rider lifted a shaky hand to his head and rolled to his side.
“Are you awake?” Katie demanded, arms crossed over her chest as she glared down at the creature on the floor.
John shook his head in consternation as he knelt beside Rider and lifted one eyelid, then the other, then examined his head. When he