One Hot Forty-Five

She grabbed the front of his shirt and the strings from his bolo tie. He heard fabric rip as he tried to pull away, the bolo tie tightening around his neck. The door to the sheriff’s office clanged open, and the still-wet-behind-the-ears deputy came running toward them.

It all happened so fast. Lantry made the mistake of trying to calm her, afraid he would hurt her if he pulled away too hard. Dede had wound her fingers into the fabric of his shirt and was hanging on to his bolo tie as if it were a lifeline.

The deputy jumped into the middle of the ruckus.

Lantry didn’t see her get the deputy’s gun. It just suddenly appeared in Dede’s hand, pointed at the two of them at the same time the screaming stopped.

In the deafening silence that followed, all Lantry could hear was the blood pounding in his ears as he stared at the woman with the gun.

Dede was so calm now he shuddered to see that she knew her way around weapons and probably the steering mechanisms on Lamborghinis as well. He couldn’t believe how he’d been taken in by her. Probably the same way poor Frank Chamberlain had.

The deputy had turned a sickening shade of green.

“Take it easy,” Lantry said, not sure if the words were meant for Dede or the deputy or himself. “Don’t do anything rash.” How could she do anything more rash than what she’d just done short of shooting them both now at point-blank range?

She barked out instructions to the green deputy, who did as he was told. “Now put the plastic cuffs on the lawyer. Loop them through that fancy belt of his.”

“Like hell,” Lantry said.

“I’m sure you don’t want to see anyone get hurt here, do you, Mr. Corbett?”

He glared at her.

She pointed the deputy’s pistol at the young man’s heart. “Make sure they are good and tight.”

Lantry had no option. He couldn’t take the chance she would shoot the deputy.

“Now open the cell,” she said, still holding the gun on the deputy. “Hurry up. We don’t want to see any innocent people get hurt because you didn’t move fast enough.”

As instructed, the deputy opened the cell and traded places with her. Dede closed the cell door, keeping the pistol on Lantry, and took the keys.

“Come on, Mr. Corbett. We’ll be leaving now. Cross your fingers that no one tries to stop us. As crazy as I am, who knows what I might do?”

Lantry bit down on a reply and, with the gun barrel pressed into his back, let her lead him out of the sheriff’s department and into the snowy, still-dark early morning.

Chapter Two

There were no cars in the parking lot other than Lantry’s pickup and the deputy’s beat-up old Mazda, both covered with snow. The blizzard Lantry had been warned about on the news had finally blown in.

“Just a minute.” Dede reached into his coat pocket and dug out his cell phone and keys. She hit the automatic lock release, the lights of the pickup flashing on.

As Dede walked him to his pickup, wind whirled the large, thick flakes around them as if they were in a snow globe.

He could imagine how ridiculous the two of them looked. Him in handcuffs tethered to his belt and a petite woman in a Santa costume holding a gun on him.

But unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone around at this hour—and in the middle of a blizzard—to see them.

“You don’t want to do this,” Lantry said as they reached his pickup. “This is only making your situation worse.”

“A hotshot lawyer like you? I’m sure you can get me off without even any jail time,” Dede said, keeping the pistol pressed into his back.

“You can’t possibly think that I can make all of this go away. You pulled a gun on a sheriff’s deputy and escaped from two mental hospitals and a jail cell.”

“I did what I had to do,” she said, pressing the gun barrel into his back. “When the time comes, I know you can make a judge understand that. Anyway, what would you have done under the same circumstances?”

He didn’t know. He thought of his brother Dalton’s criminally insane first wife. The law didn’t always protect people. Oftentimes it was used against the person who needed and deserved protection the most.

Dede took him around to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Get in and slide across the seat. If you think about doing anything stupid, just think about your part in helping Frank take everything—including my freedom from me—in the divorce.”

He climbed in and slid across the seat, keeping what she had said in mind. He had helped put this woman away—just not well enough, apparently.

She followed, never taking the gun off him and leaving him little doubt that she really might shoot him if he tried to escape.

Shifting the weapon to her left hand, she inserted the key and started the pickup, then hit the child locks and reached over to buckle him in. “Just in case you’re thinking about jumping out.”

As if he could reach the door handle the way she had him hog-tied.

The wipers swept away the accumulated snow on the windshield. The glow of Christmas lights on the houses blurred through the falling snow, a surreal reminder that Christmas was just days away.

Dede turned on the heater, then shifted the truck into gear and, resting the pistol on the seat next to her thigh, drove away from the sheriff’s department.

Her composure unraveled him more than even the gun against her thigh. This woman must have nerves of steel. For just a moment, though, he thought he saw her hands trembling on the wheel, but he must have imagined it given the composed, unwavering way she had acted back in the jail.

They passed only one vehicle on the way out of town. A van with a state emblem on the side, but the driver was too busy trying to see through the falling and blowing snow to pay them any mind.

Lantry consoled himself that the deputy would soon be found in the cell and a manhunt would begin for the escaped prisoner and her hostage.

“You’ll never get away with this,” he said, his throat dry as she took one of the narrow back roads as if she knew where she was going.

He recalled that she’d spent the past twenty-four hours before her arrest with Violet Evans, a woman from the area. It was more than possible that Dede had gotten directions from the local woman.

“I suppose all this seems a little desperate to a man like you,” she said quietly.

“A little desperate?” He looked over at her, then out at the storm. He could feel the temperature dropping.

The weatherman had forecasted below-zero temperatures and blizzard conditions. Residents had been warned to stay off the roads because of blowing and drifting snow and diminishing visibility.

Lantry had little doubt that the roads would be closed soon, as they had been earlier in the month during the last winter-storm warnings.

“You know, it’s funny,” Dede said as she drove. “Thanks to Frank, I’ve been forced to do things I wouldn’t have even imagined just months ago. I suppose that is nuts, huh?”

Lantry studied her, not wanting to know what had pushed her over the edge. “Would you have really shot that deputy?”

“Of course not. What do you think I am? That deputy never did anything to me. Unlike you,” she added. “You helped Frank get me locked up in a mental ward.”

Lantry didn’t want to go down that road. The wind rocked the pickup. Snow whipped across the road, forcing Dede to slow almost to a crawl before the visibility cleared enough that she could see the road ahead again.

The barrow pits had filled in with snow. Only the tops of a few wooden fence posts were still visible above the snowline.