He nodded. “I trust your judgment. But if you’re going to do this, you need to get on the road as soon as possible, and I saw your car in the parking lot. It looks like Swiss cheese.”
“I promise I’ll fill out the report on that one,” Gretchen said.
“Damn right you will. But that wasn’t what I was thinking.” He tossed her his keys. “Take my car. I’ll fl—flag a taxi to take me home.”
That was a nice last minute save. She knew he’d been about to say that he would fly back.
She took the rest of his keys off the key-ring and passed them back to him. As her hand clenched tight around the car key, she felt something in her throat close up a little, like she was about to cry.
She’d been agonizing over whether or not she could trust her instincts, and Martin—the man she respected more than anyone else in the world—had just said, matter-of-factly, that he trusted them. He’d just turned the decision over to her, turned his car over to her, and he didn’t even look like he was regretting it.
Cooper trusted her. Martin trusted her.
Those were two really good reasons to get better at trusting herself.
She could feel tears shining in her eyes, but she blinked them back.
“And be careful,” Martin said.
“I won’t make you have to change your retirement plans.” She tucked the Ziploc bag into her coat pocket. “And thank Tiffani for the cookies. Tell the guys I’m all right, okay? It’s supposed to snow tonight, and if it turns into a bad storm, I might lose signal. Tell them not to worry.”
“I will,” Martin said. “They’ll still worry, and so will I, but I’ll tell them. And I’ll deal with all the cleanup on this—talk to local law enforcement, check out whether or not anyone knows anything about your chemical weapon. You two get going. If you want the element of surprise, the sooner you leave, the better.”
She didn’t know how to thank him for all this, and she said so.
“You already have,” Martin said. “You got me the answer to a question.”
He had to mean Cooper’s guilt or innocence, didn’t he? She hadn’t even mentioned it.
He smiled. “It’s written all over your face,” he said softly. “I’m glad to know I was right. We’ll figure out what to do about it later. In the meantime... you two just keep yourselves alive.”
9
Martin’s car had no reinforced plastic barrier between the front and back seats. It was his personal vehicle, not one designed specifically for prisoner transport.
Cooper froze in place, unsure what kind of decision Gretchen was going to make.
What would he have done in this situation? The sanest choice would probably be for her to put him in the backseat on the passenger side and cuff him to the door.
But where he had frozen, Gretchen didn’t even hesitate. She moved with graceful intent, like a stalking cat.
She crouched down in the slushy parking lot and began unlocking his leg shackles.
His voice came out strained, sounding like it was ready to crack. “What are you doing?”
She looked up at him, her bright honey-colored eyes resolute. From this angle, he had even more of an appreciation for the dark fringe of her eyelashes.
“I’m doing exactly what you think I’m doing, Coop. You’ll be a lot more comfortable without these.”
She finished undoing them and straightened up. She applied a separate key to his handcuffs, wrapping one hand lightly around his wrist to steady the lock.
He couldn’t get over the feel of her skin against his. He still couldn’t believe that she could touch him without flinching back like she was going to catch something. It was even more surprising than the cuffs coming off.
“There,” Gretchen said briskly. The shackles dangled from her hand, the blued steel gleaming in the low winter light. “That’s better, right?”
“How do you know I’m not going to run?”
“Are you going to run?”
Yes, because he had no other choice, not if he wanted to find out who had really killed Phil and set up his witnesses. Yes, because if he had to lose her anyway, he wasn’t going to combine that pain with the horror of sitting out the rest of his life in prison.