LITMIR.BIZ

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either,” he chuckled.

      The toaster popped. Rachel stood and retrieved the browned slices. When she sat back down, her expression was more serious. “Today is Christmas.”

      “I know. Merry Christmas. Bet you didn’t think it would be like this, did you?”

      She buttered her toast. “I feel like I’m in some kind of dream.” She looked out the window. “And your ranch is like a beautiful picture-postcard to me. This area of the country is truly breathtaking. If you take out yesterday, it’s a merry Christmas for me.”

      As he salted and peppered the steaming pile of scrambled eggs on his plate, Cade felt a wonderful familiarity settling over him. Rachel was bright, quick and easy to talk with. Suddenly, breakfast was something special once more. And with baby Jenny sleeping between them, Cade swore he felt giddy. He hadn’t felt this way since his family’s death. “Well,” he said, “at least you didn’t wake up this morning thinking you were in a nightmare.”

      Rachel forced a smile. Cade would never know about her nightmare. Slathering a thin layer of apricot jam across her toast, she murmured, “Oh, no, this is a dream. A wonderful one.”

      One that Rachel wanted to last forever. But could it, with Dirk Payson out to kill her?

      CHAPTER FIVE

      DIRK PAYSON SMILED a little. He sat in a motel in Des Moines, Iowa, thumbing through a roll of hundred-dollar bills. He picked up his cigarette, took a deep drag and let the smoke drift out of his thin lips. Everything was going along fine. The Mexican drug cartel had welcomed him back like a long-lost brother. Of course, Dirk knew that that was because he’d been one of their best movers of cocaine into the U.S.A and Canada.

      His contact, Pedro Morales, had the Iowa territory to ply his cocaine to the hooked addicts. He gave Dirk ten thousand in cash to reestablish his life after the prison escape. The green felt fine between his fingers. He was free and he had money. Life was good. He was letting his blond beard remain on his face. Last night, he’d bought some dark brown hair coloring. Every day he’d have to add it to his scraggly beard. And he was allowing his blond hair to grow. Luckily for him, he only had to dye it a couple of times a month. Now he knew what a woman went through. Shaking his head, he stood up and put most of the bills in a money belt beneath his red long-sleeved sweatshirt. The rest he put into a billfold.

      Looking out the venetian blinds, he saw snow flakes twirling outside. Iowa at Christmas sucked. He hated the cold and snow but he had to connect with Pedro in order to get back into the organization.

      His mind turned, as it always did, toward Susan. His sources in prison had been trying to get a lead on her since she’d entered the witness protection program. And on her mother, Daisy Donovan. So far, no luck. But he knew the Iowa farm where Susan had been born was nearby. In the phone book, he’d found the three Donovan brothers, Robert, Marvin and Donald—Susan’s three big brothers. She had been the baby and only girl in the family.

      As he moved back to the bed, Dirk turned over possibilities. Because Susan had testified against him as his wife, the FBI had given her and her mother, Daisy, witness protection. The sons had refused it because they didn’t want to leave their five-generation family homestead. Good for them. He grinned, the cigarette clamped between his lips. The smoke made his eyes water.

      Having had plenty of time to understand the federal witness protection program, Dirk knew that neither Daisy nor Susan could ever contact their family. Did Daisy and Susan talk, though? Were they allowed to do that? Dirk had not yet been able to find that out. Now that he was free, he would turn to other field assets, a group of computer-hacker friends.

      Dirk paced the small room carpeted with a brown rug that had seen much better days. He knew one thing: he wanted to kill Susan. She was the initial target. His mind ranged over trying to find Daisy, but she was of much less interest to him. The three sons lived on the farm with their families. Could he believe that Daisy and Susan never contacted them? He found that tough to swallow. Susan was so tight with her Iowa farm family that she squeaked. And her loyalty to her family had always made him angry.

      Sitting down, he snuffed out the cigarette in a yellow glass ashtray on the nightstand beside him. He was just the opposite of Susan: a kid from a broken home with a meth mother and father who were still serving prison time in Alabama. His Southern heritage, however, came in handy from time to time, he’d discovered. With his soft, Southern drawl and good manners, Dirk could fool everyone. His mother, her face pockmarked with craters the size of those on the moon’s surface, had taught him guile and manipulation. That was the way she was and Dirk had learned at an early age how to get his way.

      He was the ultimate chameleon—able to bend, shift, change and become what people wanted him to be. It was all a huge manipulation dance, of course, but he’d learned from the best: his mother, Enid. Taking out the phone book, he thumbed through it some more. He wrote down the address of the farm, the full names of the Donovan brothers, and closed it.

      First things first. He needed to get a PC laptop. Pedro had given him an email address and a couple of throwaway cell phones so that they could remain in touch. Pedro paid hackers a lot of money to get info, to break into banks and other repositories in order to steal social security numbers. He’d given Dirk a new name and the stolen number of someone who had recently died. Now, he was Steve Larson. Liking his new moniker, Dirk chuckled. Once more, he was a fish in the big sea of drug-running. A chameleon fish.

      What to do now? His stomach growled. Across the street was a chain restaurant. Having money to buy food made him feel euphoric. He went to the closet and shrugged into his black parka, pulled a knit cap over his head and tugged on the leather gloves. He’d go eat and enjoy his freedom. Dirk sighed and smiled. How damn good it felt to be out of prison! Knowing the authorities were looking for him, Dirk stayed on the move. He didn’t look anything like his prison picture so the authorities were going to be hard-pressed to find him. All he had to do was stay smart, not drive the rental car over the speed limit and get stopped by some cop.

      From the dresser drawer, he pulled a .45 pistol. Pushing it into his coat pocket where it would be unseen, Dirk felt secure now. A gun always made the difference. He took a wool muffler, wrapped it around his neck and tucked the ends of it into the front of his coat. Now, he was prepared to go out into this below-freezing snowstorm.

      Trudging through the few inches of snow that had fallen last night, Dirk made it to his Toyota Corolla. The dark blue car was nondescript and that’s how Dirk wanted to be: unseen and unnoticed. He’d have preferred to get a bright red sports car, a Corvette, but that was out of the question. No, he was smart enough to know when to blend in instead of standing out.

      Over a Christmas breakfast in a nearly deserted restaurant, Dirk felt the joy of his freedom as never before. Few patrons were around on Christmas morning. As he savored each bite of his ham, cheese and onion omelet, Dirk remembered the holiday with simmering anger. His parents, who were meth dealers, had always been so out of it they didn’t know when a day was or wasn’t a holiday. Dirk recalled the year he was nine years old when his parents had completely forgotten Christmas. When he’d gone back to school after break and all the children were excitedly sharing what they’d gotten, he’d avoided them. Worse, no tree had been put up and decorated, either. Dirk knew about these things because he’d go visit friends and see those glittering, beautiful trees in their homes. Aching to have that in his home, he’d made the mistake of asking his father, Joe, about it.

      Dirk tried to avoid that memory—but it stuck with him like a festering cancer. Joe had jerked him off his feet by his T-shirt and slammed him against a wall. The power of his throw had broken the drywall where Dirk had struck it. For that question about Christmas, he’d received several fractured ribs. His mother had been shocked by her husband’s anger. But then, Dirk realized later, his father was high on meth. And meth users were very emotionally un stable when high. Dirk always tried to walk on egg shells around his father during those times. Except for that one mistake when Christmas had seemed really important to everyone except his family and he’d opened his mouth. Dirk learned after that to ignore Christmas and make up lies to his friends at school about the presents he received.

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