One Hot Forty-Five. B.J. Daniels

should I do if you don’t come back?” Roberta asked.

      “I will be back.” Violet pulled the key from the ignition and climbed out. She was going home.

      LANTRY WATCHED THE ROAD ahead—what little he could see of it—and listened to Dede talk about her marriage, trying to distract himself from thinking about what this woman might have planned for him.

      “Frank changed,” Dede was saying. “One day I just woke up, and I was lying next to a stranger.”

      “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that,” he said.

      “I’m sure you got more than a dollar every time you heard it.” The pickup broke through another large drift that had blown across the road. Fortunately, the roads out here were fairly straight since it was getting harder and harder to see where the roadbed lay between the fences.

      “It made me wonder why Frank married me,” she said.

      That sexy body, Lantry thought but was smart enough not to say anything as she drove deeper into the storm and farther from civilization.

      The snow was piling up. At least a foot had fallen and was still falling. The weather conditions were worsening to the point that he was becoming even more anxious. Where the hell was she taking him?

      “You’re going to love this,” she said, “but I think Frank married me because I was so normal.”

      “Funny,” he said. “You know you really don’t seem like a woman who is running from killers.”

      “Because I made one little joke?”

      “Little is right.”

      “Oh, I would have bet you had no sense of humor in your line of work.”

      “I’m a lawyer, not an undertaker.”

      “Right, you bury people alive.”

      “Could we discuss the reason you’ve kidnapped me instead of my chosen profession, please.” He was having a hard time concentrating on the conversation. Snowflakes thick as cotton were blowing horizontally across the road, obliterating everything.

      Dede had slowed the pickup to a crawl and now leaned over the steering wheel, straining to see.

      “This is insane,” he muttered under his breath. “You don’t even know where you are.”

      He’d been watching the compass and temperature gauge in the pickup. The temperature outside had been steadily dropping as she drove south toward the Missouri Breaks—into no-man’s-land—and the road was nearly drifted in.

      If she planned to hook back up with Highway 191 south, she’d missed the turn.

      “Dede—” He’d barely gotten the word out when a gust of wind hit the side of the pickup as the front of the truck broke through a large drift. The drift pulled the tires hard to the right.

      Lantry felt the front tire sink into the soft snow at the edge of the road. Dede was fighting to keep the snow from pulling the pickup into the deeper snow of the barrow pit, but it was a losing battle.

      Snow flew up over the hood and windshield as the truck plowed into the snow-filled ditch.

      Lantry had seen it coming and braced himself. The pickup crashed through the deep snow, coming to an abrupt stop buried between the road and a line of fence posts and barbed wire.

      He heard Dede smack her head on the side window since the pickup didn’t have side air bags.

      The only other sound was that of the gun clattering to the floorboard at his feet.