Masculine voices laced with frustration rose and fell on the other side of a shallow ditch that ran a short distance alongside the road-a trench that Jared abruptly realized their bus now straddled. He leaned out the door. "Marvin, that you?"

"Yeah, I'm here, Mr. Hamilton."

Locating the driver in the black-on-black shadow cast by the bus, he was just in time to see Marvin stumble away from the back end, lean over and be sick. When he straightened a moment later a burly man who had been standing in even deeper shadow stepped out to give him a companionable thump on the back. Jared saw the tail end of a semi across the road and assumed he was its driver.

Taking in the rain-slicked roads, he climbed down to help Marvin back onto the bus, shivering anew at the damp ground beneath the soles of his feet. "You okay?"

"Yes:no:I'm not sure. How about everyone else?"

"Shaken but unharmed. Come on, it's wet out here." He turned to the trucker. "You, too, sir. Come in out of the rain." He offered his hand. "I'm Jared Hamilton."

"Red Conroy." The man shook hands with a firm, hard grip and followed them onto the bus.

P.J. and posse, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, crowded the galley. When he brought the two drivers within the circle of light from a lamp someone had turned on he saw that Marvin was roughly the color of his once-crisp white shirt. "You don't look so hot. Did you hit your head?"

"No, sir."

"You have any other injuries that might need attention?"

"No."

"Then you want to tell me what went down here tonight?"

"Yes, what happened?" P.J. asked, stepping forward to touch gentle fingertips to the driver's shoulders as he leaned forward, gripping his knees with white-knuckled hands, his head hanging. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yeah, I'm just rattled," he said shakily and slowly straightened. "I've been a driver for twenty-three years and until today I've never had a ticket, much less an accident."

"Was it the rain?" Jared asked.

"That might have contributed to it. A shower blew up out of nowhere and the highway's slippery." But he cut himself off, shaking his head.

"The roads are slick," the trucker named Red agreed. "But it was that crazy-ass driver in the black pickup who caused this."

Marvin nodded. "Yeah. The rain wouldn't have made a lick of difference if not for that damn reckless yahoo playing games with me."

Jared's instincts started quivering like bird dogs on point. "What yahoo is that?" he asked in a carefully neutral voice.

"You mind if I sit down?"

"Damn, Marvin, of course not. I should have gotten you settled sooner." He turned to the trucker, who had no doubt gotten his handle from his receding crop of gingery curls. "You, too, Mr. Conroy. Grab a seat."

"Call me Red," the trucker invited as he moved to accept one of the captain's chairs Jared indicated.

Marvin collapsed onto the other one and hugged himself as if he were cold. He looked shell-shocked. "About twenty minutes ago a car came roaring up on my tail," he said. "Until then, except for the occasional trucker like Red here hauling their loads back up north, I'd had the road pretty much to myself."

Hank, who had disappeared for a moment, returned with towels, which he handed to Marvin and Red. He tossed the last one to Jared. Nell handed the drivers each a steaming cup of coffee.

The bus's AC had gone off when the engine was shut down and Marvin had clearly had more things on his mind than to turn on the backup generator. It was growing muggy, but he hugged his towel around his shoulders like a shawl before cradling his mug in both hands. "The guy flashed his lights like he wanted to pass me, so I moved to the edge of the shoulder and he went roaring by. I figured he'd be nothing but a red taillight in the distance before long." He buried his nose in the cup, took a cautious sip.

"But he wasn't?"

"No, sir." Marvin looked up at him. "Right away he slows down to under thirty miles an hour. But when I started to pull into the passing lane, he punched it. I tried to pass him anyway for a coupla minutes, but anytime it looked like I had a shot at getting by he moved in front of me. Short of ramming him, there wasn't much I could do to stop him from blocking my way. So I dropped back. But the leg to Houston is a long one and I couldn't afford to have the hour and forty-five minutes it oughtta take to reach I-20 turn into almost four. So I pulled out into the passing lane again."

"And I'm guessing he punched it once more."

"Yes, sir. But I put the pedal to the metal this time and held it there, thinking maybe I could power past him, since he was driving an older model pickup that looked like it'd seen better days. I also kinda hoped he'd get tired of screwing around and just let me by. So there we were, roarin' down the highway side by side:until I saw Red's semi headed toward us."

"Oh, my god," P.J. breathed and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

"He was still a good ways away," he assured her, reaching up to give her hand a fatherly pat. "You've probably noticed for yourself how far down the road you can see in this area." Then he looked over at Jared. "I had a cushion of several miles before I had to worry about that rig turning into a problem, so I started edging toward the other driver, hoping he'd get a clue about the law of tonnage and get the hell out of my way. But he didn't budge and I've had 'safety first' drummed into my head from the day I got my first car, so I had to concede the road to him and drop back."

The driver's eyes held a vestige of the shock he must have felt at the time. "Except he dropped back, too. He wouldn't let me pass him and he wouldn't let me fall back, and that rig was starting to get a little too close for comfort. Red obviously thought so, too, because his air horn started wailing."

"I thought at first Marvin musta been drinking or something, the way that bus was all over the road. But when I slowed down I could see that asshole in the pickup truck-beg pardon, ladies-wasn't allowing him to get back in his lane."

"I was about to bail into the oil field on Red's side of the road but-" Stumbling to a halt, Marvin brought fisted hands up and ground the heels into his temples.

"But the sonovabitch swerved at him," Red said, picking up the narrative when it became clear Marvin needed a minute. "Swerved right the hell at the side of the bus."

"And I was so surprised that I swerved too hard myself to avoid him."

"Anyone woulda," Red assured him. "Dodging the crap that sumbitch was hurling gives a whole new meaning to defensive driving."

"No, I really did overcorrect. Plus I was sure I'd caught his bumper, which probably gave my wheels that final boost off the ground. But when I got off the bus half expecting to find him flipped on the side of the road there was nothing there. So now I don't know, maybe I just thought I hooked him. And I'm sorry, Miz Morgan, Mr. Hamilton." Coffee sloshed in his cup and he gripped it tighter in a blatant attempt to stop his hands from trembling. "But it happened so fast. For a few seconds there I thought I was gonna roll it for sure."

"You didn't, though, and no one was hurt," Jared assured him evenly. Someone could have been though. They all could have been smeared on the highway and he was pretty sure he knew who was responsible.

It sure as hell wasn't Marvin, who hadn't signed on for any of this shit. "Did you get a license number?"

"Yes, sir. Considering how much time I spent behind that Ford, I had what seemed like hours to memorize it." He rattled off the number, then gave Jared a level look. "It was an Iowa plate."

 

"I'M SORRY ABOUT THE ROOM."Jared leaned against the hotel room's doorjamb and watched P.J. set out toiletries on the bathroom counter.

"Yeah?" She looked up from arranging a bewildering array of makeup. "Why's that?"

He scratched his thumbnail beneath his lower lip, thinking she looked like she was about fifteen years old with her hair pulled up in that high bouncy ponytail. "Well, it's not exactly a suite at the Teatro, is it? Or even a particularly great standard room." And she deserved better.

"Yeah, pretty damn inefficient of you not to know this was a big conference week in Houston," she said sternly. Then she slugged him in the arm. "C'mon! You got Marvin through his interview with the cops, poured whiskey down his throat to cure his shakes and drove the bus to Abilene yourself while he slept it off. You got the rest of us on a flight to Houston so he can take his time driving here and got us all rooms in this perfectly fine hotel."

"Which rates maybe two stars, and then only if you squint real hard."

"Hey, that's a star and a half more than anywhere I stayed before this Priscilla Jayne thing started taking on a life of its own. But we were talking about you-about how cool under pressure you are. And about how you're my hero. In fact-" Abandoning her unpacking, she crossed over to him and reached for the fastenings on the button-down pinstriped shirt he wore with his jeans. "I think you deserve a little reward for all your hard work."

He'd been steeling himself to put a little more distance between them, not less. In the past twelve and a half hours he'd managed to put up a good front for P.J. and her crew. It sure as hell hadn't stopped him, however, from thinking almost nonstop about what could have happened during that whole bus-being-run-off-the-road debacle.

And the possibilities of what might have been scared the bejesus out of him. The sheriff in the small town where they'd reported the incident promised to run the plates, but Jared didn't need confirmation to know Luther Menks was behind the run-in. There weren't enough coincidences in the world for it to be otherwise.