Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(8)

She felt the instant flex of muscle in his forearm, an automatic response from too many years of working in law enforcement. “What’s the matter?” His voice was hoarse with sleep but already worried.

“Do you hear the car coming down the road?”

He propped himself up on an elbow, and they both lay completely still, listening through the open bedroom windows to the faraway engine.

“I hear it,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“People don’t come down this road at two in the morning. It’s just Dell and me. This is the third night in a row I’ve heard it.”

Nick rolled out of bed, stepped into his jeans, and grabbed his pistol off the nightstand in one smooth motion. Josie slipped a T-shirt and shorts on, grabbed her Beretta, and shoved her bare feet into a pair of work boots beside the door. She quietly shut the bedroom door so that Chester wouldn’t follow them, and walked behind Nick down the hallway. In the living room she placed her hand on his back.

“Let’s go out the back door,” she whispered.

Nick put on his boots while she disengaged the alarm system and they stepped outside.

The night spread before her in black and gray shapes, making depth perception difficult. From where she was standing ten feet from Nick, his form was clear, but the features of his face were not. Without a word she took off walking around one side of the house and Nick took the other. She held her Beretta at the ready position, her right hand gripping the gun, her trigger finger extended along the side, and her left hand held underneath to support.

She hugged the side of her house, controlling her breathing as she saw the headlights appear around the curve of Schenck Road. The headlights went off.

Josie and Nick both reached the front of the house at the same time and crouched behind his black SUV, an armored vehicle necessary for his job. She wanted to run to the side of the road to catch the make and model of the car, but the driver was driving slow enough to signify he was looking for something or someone and might have night vision gear.

“We need to stay behind the SUV. There’s nothing for cover out in the front yard,” she whispered. “The best we can hope for is to see where they slow down. Maybe we’ll narrow down what they’re searching for.”

“If shots are fired, you get back inside and arm the security system. I have my car.”

She didn’t argue. Like it or not, since serving as her negotiator in a kidnapping case the year before, Nick automatically assumed the lead role when it came to any safety issue. Eventually she would confront him about this, but now wasn’t the time or place to take it on.

About five hundred feet from Josie’s house the car slowed to a crawl. As it rolled by she heard the gravel crunch under the wheels. She could only make out the shape of the car as a mid-sized vehicle. The front passenger window was open. She could see moonlight reflected off the back passenger windows, and the front windows appeared completely black, which meant someone had turned off the dashboard lights. She was too far away to see shapes in the car.

Then the car passed by her house, and as it reached the pasture containing Dell’s cattle, it stopped. For almost a full minute they watched the car sit idling. It finally pulled away, heading in the same direction, and rolled along for a quarter mile, then the lights were turned back on and the car picked up speed.

“You heard the car last night too?” Nick asked, his voice remaining low.

“This is the third night. Last night I got up and watched it roll by about the same time, and do the exact same thing—slowing down and killing the lights.”

“Why didn’t you call me last night?” he asked.

“There wasn’t anything to call about.”

He didn’t respond and Josie switched topics.

“It’s odd the car didn’t stop in front of the house. It continued on toward the pasture. It didn’t last night either. It makes me think they aren’t after me. Maybe the kayaks you saw down by the river really are coyotes crossing. They’re just too stupid to realize a cop lives here. Maybe they lost someone crossing through the pasture.”

“A coyote’s not going to spend three nights in a row looking for a lost traveler. They already got their money. They couldn’t care less if someone gets lost.”

“I forgot to mention, I found a baggie with crumbs in it under my tire this morning. Looked like someone’s sandwich bag.”

She could see him shrug, like it didn’t make sense to him.

“Maybe a load got lost,” Josie said.

“They wouldn’t be cruising by a pasture if they thought dope was lying out there. They’d have boots on the ground.” He pointed at the place along the road where the car stopped and they both started walking toward it.

Josie heard a sound coming from behind her on the front porch and put out her hand to stop Nick. “You hear that?” she whispered.

He shook his head. They were standing near the end of the driveway. She switched on her flashlight and shone it back at the house and around her jeep and Nick’s SUV.

They crept between the vehicles and up to the front of the house. The front porch was the length of the house, about ten feet deep and thirty-five feet long, with just one low step that ran the length of it. Josie shone her light along the porch, from left to right, to the far right corner where there was a chair, and froze.