Chapter Twelve
Lawson snatched up the phone as soon as he saw it was Sarah calling and lifted it to his ear.
“You okay?” he asked, concerned.
“Not really,” she blurted out.
His heart dropped as soon as he heard the tone of her voice. He knew she would never fool around about something like this. If she sounded that scared, it was because she had a real reason to be, and he hated the thought of her struggling like that.
“What’s going on?” he asked, wishing he had somewhere to pace. Right now, in the confines of this restroom, he was stuck in one spot.
“We…we’re just coming home from the bar,” she told him.
“Some guys there had the waiter deliver us drinks. We didn’t talk to them and they didn’t look familiar, but they left right after us and there’s a car behind us on the road right now.
We can’t help but wonder if it might be them following us. ”
She paused and took a deep breath, and his gut clenched. Damn. Someone was possibly tailing them. Could they be related to the guys they were after tonight? They tended to focus on women driving alone, but he wasn’t going to take that chance.
“Listen to me,” he told her firmly. “You go straight back to the lodge, okay? Don’t slow down and don’t pull over. If it is someone following you, they won’t try and cross the property lines. Especially if they don’t know who else might be around.”
At least, he hoped not. Truth be told, he didn’t have any confirmation that they wouldn’t. This wasn’t something they’d anticipated. He hoped that the surveillance there might be enough to scare them off, but if they had come this far, there was a chance they were going to take it even further.
“Okay, we’ve still got a ways to go,” Sarah replied, her voice still trembling. “I… Are you at the lodge?”
“Not right now,” he admitted. She let out a small whimper. He hated being so far from her when she was clearly struggling so much, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“Where are you?”
Before he could reply, he heard a noise outside. He cracked the door open and saw a black SUV pulling to a halt next to his truck. Talk about bad timing…
“I’ll explain later,” he muttered to her, dropping his voice so it wouldn’t carry outside the restroom.
“Lawson, I—”
The men stepped out of the SUV—two of them. One of them whistled, calling out to anyone who might have been nearby, and they paced around the truck he’d left there as a lure.
“Listen to me, Sarah,” he told her urgently. “Tell Hannah to call Xavier and fill him in on everything that’s happening. Do it now. I’ll stay on the line with you until you get through.”
“Why?”
“Please, just trust me on this,” he begged her. “I know how it sounds. Just get her to call him, okay?”
“Sure, okay.”
She did as she was told, and, a few moments later, she told him that Hannah had Xavier on the line.
“Okay, good,” he replied as he nervously ran a hand through his hair. He glanced outside once more. One of the men was motioning toward the restroom, clearly sensing there was someone inside. “Now, get her to tell Xavier to call all the men back to the lodge. They’ll meet you there.”
“All of them? Who else is out there?”
“Everyone,” he replied. “And tell Xavier that I have our target. I’ll handle business while they make sure all of you are safe.”
“Target?” she whispered. “Lawson, are you in danger right now?”
“No,” he said quickly. “But I’m looking at two guys who are about to be. You have nothing to worry about, Sarah. You just make sure you’re safe, okay?”
He hung up before she could answer. He knew she was going to be pissed at him after she found out the details of what he and the others had done, so would the other women, but that was a problem for another time.
What mattered was making sure that he pulled this off.
They finally had these guys right where they wanted them, and he would be damned if he’d let them slip through his fingers.
He turned on one of the restroom taps, and then dived into a stall, stepping up on to the toilet so they wouldn’t be able to see his feet.
He wasn’t going to give them the slightest heads-up as to what was going on here.
There were two of them, after all, and he would need every advantage he could get.
His heart was pounding in his chest, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen action like this.
The adrenaline was rushing through his system, lighting up every part of him, and he clenched his fists at his sides.
He was going to make them pay for what they had done, for everything they had pulled on his stretch of road.
If he’d known about this before, he would never in a million years have allowed them to get away with it.
But this was his chance to bring it to a close.
Or at least, start the process.
“Hello, miss?”
One of the men called out to the supposed damsel in distress as they approached the restroom. They sounded innocent in their inquiry. Helpful. Almost kind. It was a damn good ruse, he had to give them that, even if he hated that they were clearly so well-practiced at it.
The door to the restroom opened. Lawson could see the two men entering through the crack in the stall. He braced himself. He didn’t know if they were armed, or what they were packing if they were. But he had the element of surprise, and that had to count for something.
“We saw your vehicle outside. Do you need a hand with a tire change?” one of the guys asked. The sound of the tap running was his only response.
Lawson bided his time. He needed to wait until they were right outside the stall before he made his move. He couldn’t risk missing his chance. He couldn’t risk screwing this up.
“Check the stalls,” one of the men muttered to the other, and they began to make their way along the grimy stalls. First, the one farthest from Lawson, and then, the one next to him.
And finally, both guys were standing right in front of his stall. He planted his hands on each side of it for leverage, as one of them tried the door.
“It’s locked,” one remarked. “She must be in—”
Before he could finish what he was saying, Lawson swung his legs toward the door with all of his might and slammed his feet into the flimsy wood panel. It crashed off its hinges, and smashed into the two men standing on the other side.
He sprang down on to the floor and quickly surveyed the situation: one of the men had been tossed against the far wall and slammed his head into the dirty tiles, while the other was half-pinned by the door on top of him.
He shoved it off his chest and scrambled to his feet, reaching for a weapon at his side.
“What the hell—” he blurted out, but Lawson took advantage of the obvious shock written all over his face.
Lawson lunged for the assailant’s gun and grabbed it out of his hand, then took his arm, twisted it up roughly behind his back and slammed the man into the wall.
The man let out a cry of pain, then Lawson tossed the gun aside and pulled out a pair of cuffs he’d brought with him.
He snapped one of them around his wrist and attached the other to a metal pipe hanging on the wall above him.
The other man had gotten to his feet, and Lawson rounded on him.
Using the man’s dazed state against him, Lawson grabbed his arm, then slapped a second cuff on his wrist before he knew what was happening.
There was a wound on the man’s head, dripping blood down his face, and Lawson doubted he would have been able to put up much of a fight, anyway, even if he had wanted to.
Lawson pushed the guy back against the wall and lifted the man’s cuffed arm above his head, attaching the other end of the cuff to the metal pipe running along the ceiling. He checked the man for weapons and didn’t find any, so Lawson pulled out his phone.
While he was dialing the sheriff, he leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath, waiting for the other man to answer. After a few rings, the sheriff picked up, his voice a little groggy.
“Sorry to wake you, sheriff,” Lawson greeted. “But I have a couple of guys with me here I thought you might want to meet.”
“You got them?” Sheriff Willis asked, his voice sounding surprised.
“I got them,” Lawson replied, unable to keep the grin off his face. Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t have been celebrating so soon, but any win was one he would welcome right now.
“Tell me what happened, exactly,” Willis demanded. “I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”
They had talked a few times about what they intended to do, but the guys had ended up making a few alterations at the last minute.
Lawson stepped out of earshot and swiftly filled in the sheriff on the plan the guys had put together, with the broken-down vehicle on the side of the road as a lure.
The guys who had turned up expecting a helpless woman were now cuffed to a metal pipe in a public restroom in the middle of nowhere.
Sheriff Willis let out a sigh.
“You bring them down to the station,” he told him. “But like I said before, if you don’t have anything we can pin on them right now, we’re going to have to let them go. You hear me? I’m not intentionally bringing this kind of trouble into my town.”
Lawson nodded, even though the sheriff couldn’t see him. He got it. They couldn’t just lock up these guys and throw away the key, no matter how much he would have liked to do just that. No, they had to go through the proper judicial process.
And if that meant Lawson needed to get a confession out of them before they could lock them up, so be it. He couldn’t risk having to cut them loose, and allowing them to run back to Granger and tell him about their trap and that someone else was on their trail.
“I’ll meet you at the station in an hour,” he told the sheriff, and Sheriff Willis muttered his agreement, still clearly in the process of waking up.
Lawson turned his attention to the two men opposite him.
Both of them were scowling, muttering curses at him with hatred in their eyes.
If he was going to do this, he was going to have to get the information he needed from them quickly.
He had about the length of the drive back to Blue Ridge to squeeze some of the truth out of them, and he hoped he’d scared them enough to get them to spill, one way or another.
He smirked, looking between them. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, boys,” he told them, then went about undoing the cuffs from the pipe and dragging them to the truck waiting outside.