Dangerous Christmas Memories

TWO

Priscilla had to tamp down her fear if she was to get out of this situation alive. She paced a few steps away from the couple and Mr. Long to talk quietly with Mac on her phone, her nerves jangling. She concentrated on slowing down her inhalation and exhalation.

“Was anyone hurt?” Mac snapped out the question. He had moved into crisis mode and she wasn’t about to let his briskness hurt her feelings.

“Yes, a bullet hit the upper left arm of Mr. Long. I don’t think it’s bleeding too bad. I don’t know if anyone was hit in the salon because I got out of there as fast as I could.” She sneaked a glance at Mr. Long, who had his right hand clamped on the wound.

“We need to get you out of there pronto. Your safety is top priority.” Mac’s reminder of the danger that still permeated the very air around her didn’t settle her nerves.

“Unfortunately,” Mac continued, “it could take me about thirty minutes to get to Fairfax. You can’t wait where you are. Still too close to the salon for my peace of mind.”

“My car’s in the parking lot near the salon.” Priscilla breathed in and out to the count of ten. Her brain kicked back into gear. “I only have my wallet.” She voiced her thoughts as she took in her surroundings. “And I have my phone. There’s a bus stop farther along this path. Hold on a minute.” She consulted the Next Bus app on her phone, then clicked back to Mac. “The Gold 1 Cue bus is due to arrive in less than ten minutes. Why don’t you text me where to get off once I board at the Daniels Run/Lee Highway stop?”

“Yes, got it.”

“See you soon.” She disconnected the call and eased a look over her shoulder. The woman handed her leash to her companion and drew out a bandanna from her back pocket to wrap around Mr. Long’s arm. It was time for Priscilla to move.

Priscilla stepped away without the group noticing. She didn’t want to abandon the man who had been shot on her account, but she also didn’t want to endanger him further, which she would if she stayed with him. The man who was after her would have no bones about shooting her and whoever she was with—of that she had no doubt. Priscilla took a bigger step and crunched a dry twig with her shoe.

“Hey, don’t leave!” Mr. Long extracted himself amid the woman’s protest that they had called for an ambulance.

“You should stay here, get help for your arm,” Priscilla said, then broke into a run down the path. Too much time had been wasted already. The shooter could be around the back of the building searching for her. He’d find the path easily enough. She had to be on the bus heading to Mac and safety.

A branch snapped behind her. She risked a glance to see Mr. Long, his face pale, jogging along the trail. He should be waiting for medical attention, not following her.

Ignoring him, she slowed slightly to check the Next Bus app. The Gold 1 Cue bus would arrive in seven minutes at the closest stop. The next bus heading in the right direction wouldn’t be coming for another thirty minutes—she definitely couldn’t wait around for that one.

Priscilla increased her pace, pushing through the stitch in her side. If only she liked running, she’d be in better shape. Her lungs burned as she sucked in more air before checking the time on the app again. Four minutes to the bus’s arrival. Right up ahead, Priscilla saw the trail spur to the street on the left and took it, pulling on her reserves to make it up the steeper incline without slowing her speed.

Mr. Long grunted as he tried to keep up. Her conscience chided her for caring only for her own skin and not about whether he would pass out on the trail. But he didn’t have to follow her.

“You should have waited for medical help,” she said over her shoulder.

The man merely shook his head, and she turned her attention back to the path. Somehow, as she cut his hair, she hadn’t been afraid of him. After living for years fearful of her fellow human beings, she had learned to trust her instincts when it came to who she could trust and who she couldn’t. The way he’d thanked God for her safety and stepped between her and the dog walkers had reaffirmed what her gut had told her—that she could trust him. Too bad, she would have to find a way to lose him before his association with her got him killed.

Priscilla reached the edge of the woods and halted to check the bus arrival time once more. Craning her neck to view the street, she saw that everything appeared normal. A woman with a baby in a stroller and a preschooler holding on to the handle waited at the bus stop. That meant Priscilla could hang back at the tree line until the bus approached the stop.

“Why were you running? Shouldn’t we have waited to talk with the police?” Mr. Long braced himself against a tree, his complexion gray.

“You need to see a doctor.” Priscilla feared Mr. Long would collapse right there. If he did, she would miss her bus, because she couldn’t just leave a hurt man to fend for himself, not when he was injured on her account.

“I need to speak with you.”

The simplicity of his request startled her, and an alarm bell rang inside her head. She narrowed her eyes. “You are following me.”

Mr. Long stayed bent over, his forehead resting against his right arm propped on the tree. “You noticed?”

Priscilla ticked off the incidents on her fingers. “The grocery store, jogging by my apartment building, today outside Snippy’s. Here beside me now. You weren’t exactly subtle.”

The man shifted upright with a wince. Then his eyes closed and his body slumped toward the tree.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Priscilla hastened to his side and grabbed his right arm. “Don’t you faint on me.” She slung the arm over her shoulders, nestling underneath to support him. “You need to stay upright.”

“I’ll be okay,” he mumbled against her hair. “Just give me…a minute.”

Priscilla didn’t have a minute. The bus rumbled up to the curb. Taking him with her presented its own set of problems, but she had no time to dither over a decision. Better take him with her—at the very least, she could find out why he had been following her.

“I don’t have a minute. The bus is here, and I need to get on it.” Without another word, she started off toward the bus. To her relief, he stayed upright and leaned on her only a little bit.

“Bus? But my car’s in the parking lot.” His words came out a bit slurred as if pain was dulling his senses.

“No time. Now keep quiet.” Priscilla dug a ten-dollar bill out of her work apron and fed it into the meter. “For both of us,” she told the driver, an older woman wearing a Santa hat with cropped hair and a name tag that read Charlene Grant.

Charlene eyed Mr. Long with an apprehensive expression. “What happened to him?” the driver asked as Priscilla gathered her change from the machine.

“You know how men are.” She gave Charlene a rueful smile. “A teensy cut and he goes all woozy on me.” She jerked her head toward the bandanna. “He’ll be all right.”

Charlene chuckled. “If you say so.”

Priscilla hustled Mr. Long to the back of the bus, plopping him down in the corner, then sitting down beside him as the bus pulled away from the curb.

With deft movements, she untied her work apron with the word Snippy’s and a logo of an animated pair of smiling scissors. At least she had some cash, thanks to the generous tips of her customers. Stuffing the bills into her wallet, she checked to make sure the driver’s attention wasn’t on her and Mr. Long, then shoved the apron underneath her seat. No sense advertising where she worked, especially once the news broke about the shooting.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

Priscilla whipped her head to stare into Mr. Long’s deep blue eyes tinged with pain. “Why are you following me?”

A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “You always answer a question with a question?”

“When I haven’t gotten an answer the first time I asked it, yes.” Something about him triggered a feeling that she should know him. Their encounter hadn’t been recent—of that she was sure. Which meant it predated the shooting that thrust her into witness protection and running for her life. But she’d had so few friends back then and none of them had been a hunky, tall blond man.

“Why am I following you?” The man drew in a steadying breath and let it out slowly. A little color returned to his cheeks. “Because I couldn’t believe I’d finally found you after years of searching.”

A frisson of fear sliced into her. “You’ve been looking for me for years?” She stiffened her spine. It was too late to double guess her decision now. She was stuck with the man.

“Yes, for a very long time.” He held her gaze, his eyes both demanding and pleading with her for what, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she couldn’t look away.

Her phone pinged, indicating an incoming text. She tore her gaze away to check, glad for an excuse to break eye contact. Mac’s text was brief: Traffic better than expected. Get off at the stop by Chick-fil-A. Waiting there.

The bus eased into Fairfax Circle from Old Lee Highway, then swung onto Fairfax Boulevard. The stop Mac indicated would be the next one. She pulled the signal string. “This is our stop.” She would let Mac finish questioning why Mr. Long had been searching for her.

Luc gritted his teeth against the discomfort in his arm. The bullet had gone straight through the upper flesh of his arm, which still seeped some blood through the bandanna. So much for behaving like a man in front of Priscilla. She’d had to practically carry him onto the bus. At least she hadn’t left him in the woods, where he had almost passed out. Why she took him with her he didn’t know, especially as it had become obvious to him that she had no clue who he was. No one could fake that look of unrecognition. The pain of her not recognizing him cut deeper than the bullet.

The bus ground to a halt, and Priscilla rose. “Do you need any help?”

He shook his head as he struggled to stand while a wave of dizziness crashed over him. By sheer willpower, he managed to exit the bus without falling flat on his face. Thank You, Lord.

Once off the bus, Priscilla paused as the driver reentered traffic after picking up passengers. She pointed to a black SUV idling by the curb. “That’s our ride.”

Luc nodded and followed behind her at a slower pace. He placed his hand on the side of the car to steady himself, pleased he hadn’t stumbled and fallen to the ground during the short walk. Priscilla reached the vehicle first and spoke to the driver through the open window.

Priscilla opened the back door. “Get in.”

Probably not a good idea to climb into a car driven by a stranger, but the truth was, he didn’t think he could stand on his own two feet much longer. Besides, he didn’t want to lose sight of Priscilla again. In he climbed, with Priscilla right behind him. The dark interior warmed his body, the back windows heavily tinted. A man in the front had short-cropped hair and wore dark shades and a Bluetooth headset in his ear.

“Did anyone else follow you?” the man asked Priscilla in clipped tones, smoothly merging the SUV into the late-afternoon traffic on Fairfax Boulevard.

“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure.”

“Right.” The man threw a glance at Luc in the mirror. “How’s your arm?”

Luc glanced down at the bandanna covering the wound. The gray bandanna with pink Yorkshire dogs had only a bit of red smudged along one edge. “Okay. I think it’s stopped bleeding.”

“We’ll get it checked out when we arrive.” The man turned his attention back to the road, his eyes moving from the rearview mirror, to the side mirrors, to the windshield.

“Where are we going?” Luc should have asked that question before getting into the SUV, but where Priscilla was going, he was along for the ride.

“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” the man stated calmly. “Priscilla, you’ll find a first-aid kit under the front passenger seat.”

Luc closed his eyes as the SUV continued north on Fairfax Boulevard. He wanted to ask who the driver was, question why he couldn’t be told their destination, why Priscilla had called this man after the shooting, and a million more questions. But a wet blanket of tiredness and pain settled over him, dulling his senses.

“Mr. Long?” Priscilla’s voice brought him back to reality.

He opened his eyes, focusing on her warm brown ones. Wait a minute. Priscilla had had blue eyes—not a bright vivid blue like his own, but a softer shade like the sky after a gentle summer rain. No, he was sure this was the woman he had married. He wanted to ask her why she acted like she didn’t know him, but with his brain fuzzy from the pain, he should wait until his head was clear to tackle such questions.

“Here’s some ibuprofen for your pain. I’m sorry we don’t have something to wash them down with.” Priscilla ripped open a single-dose pill packet.

When he extended his right hand, she shook the pills into it.

Luc tossed the ibuprofen in his mouth and dry swallowed. “Thanks.” He closed his eyes again, but couldn’t help asking one of his many questions. “You were going to leave me in the woods. Why didn’t you?”

She sighed. “Because I’m responsible for your getting shot.”

THREE

Luc’s eyes popped open. “How could you have known someone would start shooting into the hair salon?”

Priscilla didn’t answer, but exchanged a look with the driver. Something wasn’t right here. Even his pain-dulled brain picked up on the undercurrent of concern—no, fear—that hummed around Priscilla. Why would she still be afraid when they’d escaped the shooter?

He hadn’t realized he’d voiced that last question aloud until the driver responded. “I’m asking the questions. Who are you? Why were you following Priscilla?”

Luc frowned. Priscilla had asked the same thing, but he hadn’t had time to answer her fully. He wasn’t sure he wanted to blurt out the entire story in front of a man with whom Priscilla was acquainted but of whom he knew nothing. “I could ask you the same question—who are you?”

The man executed a sharp right turn onto a business street that ran parallel with the main road. “I’m US Marshal James MacIntire.”

A US marshal? Luc blinked. He might have guessed law enforcement from the way MacIntire carried himself, but he wouldn’t have pegged him as a marshal. “I thought marshals hunted fugitives.”

“They do.” MacIntire cut his eyes to the rearview mirror, then the two side mirrors. He punched something on the middle console that Luc couldn’t see from his vantage point behind the passenger’s seat. “We’ve got company. A silver Ford Explorer with North Carolina plates Charlie, zebra, delta, one, three, five.” He repeated the plate number, listened for a moment, then disconnected the call.

“I was followed?” Priscilla sounded scared and angry at the same time. “I’m sorry, Mac.”

Mac. The person she’d been talking to on the trail. Then he remembered the other job marshals had—witness protection.

As Mac whipped the car into the parking lot of an apartment complex and exited on the back end into a residential neighborhood, Luc turned to Priscilla, who gripped the grab bar with one hand while the other remained fisted on her lap. Her fear, the certainty with which she knew the shooting at the salon had been because of her, Priscilla’s reluctance to share anything with him, and her observation of his presence on the fringes of her life instantly made perfect sense to him. She was in the US Federal Witness Protection Program.

That knowledge didn’t alleviate his concern that she didn’t recognize him. Luc would puzzle that out later, but he could clarify what was happening right now. That knowledge brought a fierce need to protect her from whatever danger she was in, despite the fact that she had deserted him directly after marrying him. As Mac executed an illegal rolling stop at a deserted intersection, Luc quietly said to Priscilla, “You’re in witness protection, aren’t you?”

Priscilla gaped at Luc. “What did you say?”

Luc patiently repeated the question, relieved that the ibuprofen had indeed dulled the pain and given him back some of his mind.

Her expression shuttered, giving him no clue as to her thoughts. “Who are you, Mr. Long?”

Luc gave her a pass on not answering his question. Maybe hearing his name would jingle a bell in her memory. “For starters, my name isn’t Mr. Long. It’s Lucas Benedict Langsdale the third.” Saying his full name always sounded pompous to his ears. Blast his father for naming him after his paternal grandfather, who had been named for an ancestor who had died in the mid-1800s.

She raised her eyebrows, a slight smile playing across her lips. “The third, hmm? The second must be your father, then?”

“The second is my grandfather, still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of eighty-five. I go by Luc, while my grandfather’s Lucas.” He neatly steered the conversation back to Priscilla. “But my name is not important. Why are you hiding out in witness protection?”

Mac turned right onto Annandale Road as a newscaster on the radio read the top-of-the-hour news at 3:00 p.m. “Priscilla isn’t at liberty to discuss the matter.”

“Let me guess—that information is on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t need to know.” Luc would have to be content with having his suspicions nearly one hundred percent confirmed.

Mac frowned, his head swiveling to look over his left shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” Priscilla craned her neck to look in the same direction.

Luc started to look as well, but the movement jostled his arm, so he stayed put.

“I thought a truck was getting too close, but it eased back.” Mac shifted in his seat and directed his attention to the traffic in front of him.

Priscilla resettled in her seat, but kept her hand braced against the door. “Is it the Explorer again?”

“No, a beat-up Toyota pickup without a front license plate.” Mac made a right turn onto Arlington Boulevard, then accelerated into the left lane of the divided four-lane highway.

Priscilla gulped beside him as the vehicle wove in and out of traffic. “What’s happening?”

As they approached the Wilson Boulevard intersection, Mac whipped the SUV into the right-hand lane as the traffic light at the intersection flicked from green to yellow. Luc leaned slightly to see the view in the driver’s-side mirror. A dirt-caked truck mimicked their SUV’s every move, staying right on their bumper.

Luc shifted to see out the windshield as the traffic light turned red, sending up a prayer for safety as Mac hit the gas. Then the truck slammed into the rear of the car, sending it spinning into oncoming traffic.

Priscilla screamed as Mac wrenched the wheel to miss a collision with a minivan hurtling toward them from the right. Their SUV skidded as Mac fought to bring the vehicle under control.

“Watch out! He’s coming again!” Mac maneuvered the car onto Wilson Boulevard, a one-way thoroughfare, just as the SUV shook with another hit from behind. Metal screeched as the other vehicle seemed to push the SUV along. Mac struggled to keep the SUV moving forward in the left lane. A shopping center parking lot entrance loomed on the left, and Mac swerved into it.

Hands shaking, Priscilla looked behind her in time to take a mental snapshot of the battered pickup zooming away, its license plate smeared with mud. Mac eased the SUV into the parking lot of an Asian supermarket, picking a spot away from other cars.

“Everyone okay?” Mac put the SUV into Park.

“I’m all right.” Priscilla looked at Luc, who offered a tiny shrug. “Mr. Langsdale’s hanging in as well.”

“Good. We’d better get moving again.” Mac put his hand on the ignition as sirens wailed closer. “Looks like someone called the cops.”

Priscilla twisted around to see two police cruisers pull into the parking lot and head toward their SUV. Her stomach flip-flopped. Mac had told her that local law enforcement wasn’t always cooperative with marshals and their witnesses. She didn’t want to wait for the officers to question them and fill out paperwork—she wanted to get as far away from Fairfax, Virginia, as she could to a safer location.

The cruisers parked behind them. Mac disconnected his phone from the console and dialed a number, telling whoever answered, “We’re in a spot of trouble.” He detailed the incident, describing the truck and their location with precision.

Luc nudged her shoulder.

Priscilla jerked her head toward him, her hands wrapped tightly together.

“Are you okay?” He nodded toward her jiggling knee. “You seem very agitated. Surely that truck driver is long gone, and we have two police cruisers parked right behind us.”

How could she explain that none of that mattered, not if the person who was after her decided today was the day he would finally end her life? She stilled her leg. “You don’t understand. We need to get out of here, not stay like sitting ducks.”

Mac put down his phone. “The officer is coming up to the car. Let me do the talking.” Without waiting for confirmation from Luc or Priscilla, he powered down the driver’s-side window, then kept his hands visible on the steering wheel as a tall black policeman paused a foot from the car. Mac pasted a smile on his lips. “Officer, I’m a US marshal and I’m carrying a weapon. May I reach into my left breast pocket to show you my ID?”

“Please keep your hands where I can see them.” The officer peered over Mac’s shoulder into the interior, his eyes spotting Priscilla and Luc. With his hand on his gun at his right hip, the cop spoke something into his shoulder mic. Then the officer addressed Mac. “Who else is in this vehicle?”

Mac pushed his sunglasses up on the top of his head with his left hand, then placed it on the top of the door in full view of the cop. “Officer, there are two passengers in the back seat.”

The policeman moved a step back from the SUV. “Sir, I’m going to need you and your passengers to exit the vehicle.”

Another police officer had left his cruiser to stand a few feet from the passenger’s side of the SUV hood. As the air filled with tension, Priscilla’s heart began to pound. The taut stance of the cops radiated suspicion, but she couldn’t get out of the SUV without exposing herself to a potential assassin who might be lurking nearby. She didn’t want to find out if the shooter had improved his or her aim.

She focused her attention on Mac, who appeared unruffled, relaxed even, by the officer’s request.