CHAPTER 10 JORDAN
JORDAN
I get off my shift and my eyes burn. I’m ready to slip right back into my routine with Lana. It’s amazing how she’s become such a fixture in my world. Every missed connection and failed relationship makes sense. All of it was a roadmap straight to her.
I pick up two coffees in a tray on my passenger seat. Hers is some kind of latte with low sugar, just like she likes. Mine, of course, is black.
When I pull up to Lana's place, the sun is sliding down behind the ridge and the porch light's already glowing against the dusk.
We'll take our coffee out front, and then, if she's up for it, I'll cook her a full dinner and we'll watch the dark come down over the valley.
It'll be the kind of long, quiet evening I've been looking forward to since before she came down off that mountain with her hand in mine.
I take the porch in two strides and let myself in with the key she gave me. I slip into the bedroom, surprised to find Lana’s bed empty. “Sweetheart, you up?”
I listen for a reply, but the house is eerily quiet. There isn’t even a podcast playing in the background. I move from room to room and my heart races as I note the items missing from each space.
Then I step into the kitchen and find a grocery receipt on the counter. There’s a note in Lana’s handwriting scrawled on the back.
I read it once.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time, slowly, because my brain has gone somewhere else and my body is still in this room. I need rational thought to come back to this room before I do anything.
My eyes run over the note again and again until they settle on one sentence. Please don’t come after me.
There’s no way in hell I’m doing that. This time I’m fighting.
I don’t know what or who spooked her, but Lana isn’t slipping through my fingers that easily. A new thought settles and it makes my blood run cold… It sure as hell better not be her ex.
I go from frozen to taking action in a matter of seconds. I head to the police station. On my way over, I call every guy on the squad and cash in every favor I’ve got. Then we do what we do best, we organize.
Fifteen minutes later we’re fanning the area and I’ve got calls into every station within six hundred miles. I’m bringing my girl home where I can keep her safe and these guys are going to help me do it.
What I don't say out loud is that the net I'm throwing for Lana is the same one the arson team has been sitting on for two weeks.
They pulled a description and a partial plate off the school's lot cameras and never could put a name to either one.
If the man who's been hunting Lana is the same man who lit that building, then every deputy I just dragged out of bed to find her is hunting him too. They just don't know his name yet.
The hours that pass with no word from her are the longest of my life. I've run on coffee, adrenaline, and the kind of fear I don't have a name for. I work the radio so hard my voice has gone to gravel but she’s worth it.
Every minute that passes is a minute she gets farther away. I know that Lana is meant to be mine, even if she can’t see that yet. She’s worth fighting for and in hour three of the search, my world cracks open.
The radio crackles. Tessa's voice comes from dispatch.
"Jordan."
My heart rate ticks up. It’s just my name, but I've known Tessa since the academy. I hear the urgency in the single word. She’s bracing me for something.
“Jordan, copy.”
Tessa’s voice is clipped. "We've got someone."
My heart slams once, hard, against my ribs. Found her. The word found is already halfway out of my mouth, already turning into relief, into the breakfast I never made her, and I told you I was never leaving.
“That’s great. Copy. Where do I meet her?” Relief swells in my chest and pumps through my veins.
"It's not Lana."
The muscles in my throat clench and the truck cab goes very quiet. The two coffees are still in the tray on the passenger seat, gone cold hours ago, and I stare at the lid of hers like it might tell me something.
"Say again," I manage.
What I hear next makes me slam my foot into the accelerator.
I pull into the station and the lot's half full of squad trucks that shouldn't be here on a Tuesday. But word travels in Whispering Pines and besides, I don't care who came. I’m here for one thing.
Reyes meets me at the door with his hand flat on my chest. "Jordan. You're not going back there."
"Watch me." My heart thuds in my chest. The thought of Lana’s ex showing up here in my hometown, endangering our kids and threatening my girl, has me livid.
I shove Reyes away from me and stomp toward the door of the holding cell. But Reyes is on me again.
"Don’t lose your shit right now. We’ve got him on arson.
He's processed. The Sheriff's got it. A deputy made him at a motel out on the county line an hour ago and matched his car to that partial plate the arson team pulled off the school cameras.
He didn't even bother to run. You go in hot, you hand a defense attorney a gift.
" He doesn't move his hand. "Don't give him that.”
“Oh I’m going to give him a hell of a lot more than that.” My chest heaves with anger.
Reyes grabs me with both hands and shoves me backward. “Okay, then don't give her that."
Her. Lana.
I deflate.
She’s the only thought on earth that could’ve stopped me. Her. I let out a breath and all the fight drains out of me. Reyes reads it on me and lets me past him, but only to the glass.
The holding cell sits at the end of a short hall. It’s bleak with white block walls and a bench bolted to the floor. I look in and there he is, a small pathetic shell of a man.
I don't know what I expected. A monster, maybe.
Someone that matches the size of what he did.
But he's just an average man. Mid-thirties. Soft in the middle. He’s got the kind of face you'd forget at a gas station.
He's sitting with his ankles crossed like he's waiting on a flight.
When he sees me through the glass, he has the nerve to fucking smile.
I return his stare with a scowl and he mouths the word firefighter.
He’s been watching me too. It’s too bad he didn’t try something. I could’ve taken care of this problem once and for all.
He mouths something else with a too-big smile plastered on his face and I get it.
He wants me to flinch. He needs it. He's a man with nothing left but the size of the reaction he can pull out of other people, and I am not going to be the thing that fills him up. I look away. He doesn’t deserve an answer from me.
I've put out enough fires to know you don't feed one with air.
Reyes appears beside me. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, okay.” But before I leave I turn back to the glass and pound with everything I’ve got. “Get comfortable, asshole. You’re going to be in there for a long time.”
Then I turn around and walk out, because I've got a woman to bring home.
There's exactly one way out of these mountains that ever touches the interstate.
Every back road for sixty miles funnels down to the same interchange, and Lana doesn't know that.
I've driven these roads my whole life. So when a county unit radios a plate matching her car running south toward the on-ramp, I don't panic.
I point my truck at the one place she has to pass through, and I get on the phone to make damn sure it's the last place she passes through tonight.