Cowboy Undercover. Alice Sharpe
rotary type. Chance’s grip on the receiver tightened. He didn’t know much about Charlie’s father, Jeremy Block, except that he’d done something severe enough in Lily’s eyes that she’d run from him with their child in tow and hid out here until Block sent someone to abduct and kill her a few months before so he could reclaim his son. The man had been adamant he was working for Jeremy Block.
The night that went down, Lily left Hastings Ridge Ranch, Charlie in tow. Chance didn’t know where Block lived and he didn’t know what had happened in the weeks following Lily’s departure.
He hadn’t wanted to know. He’d avoided the topic like the plague. “Where is your dad right now?”
“Asleep.”
“Has he hurt you?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s good. Can you tell me anything about where he lives?”
“In a house.”
“What city?”
“Bossy.”
“Could it be Boise?”
“I guess.”
Another thought jumped to the foreground of Chance’s mind. Lily would never willingly let her son go unless she had no choice and that meant almost anything from abduction to murder.
“When did you go with your dad, Charlie?”
“Mommy wasn’t at the bus stop,” Charlie said, talking fast now, his voice wavering as he apparently turned his head and compromised the signal on a cell phone. “A man said he knew where she was. He drove the wrong way and I was scared. I told him to stop but he frowned at me. I fell asleep and it got dark and then we were at Daddy’s house but I want Mommy and he says I can’t see her and—”
“Charlie!” A masculine voice boomed from Charlie’s end of the line. “What are you doing, boy? Is that my phone? Who did you call?”
“I want Mommy,” Charlie squeaked.
The man spoke into the phone. “Lily? Do you really think you’re ever going to see him again?”
“This isn’t Lily,” Chance said.
“Then who—”
“I’m a friend of Charlie’s. Are you Jeremy Block?”
“What’s it to you?”
“The boy sounds upset. What’s going on?”
“Nothing that concerns you,” Block said, and severed the connection.
The ranch phone didn’t have a caller identification screen so Chance dialed the code to find out the number of the last call, jotted it down and dialed it. The call was answered by Block’s terse message to leave a number but now Chance knew that Charlie was in Boise or a nearby community with the same area code.
Chance called a Hastings family friend on the police force next, Detective Robert Hendricks, who had a knack for sounding alert and on the job no matter when you yanked him from slumber. Chance told him about the call. “Give me the number,” Hendricks said.
“You’ve got to rescue the boy,” Chance said.
Hendricks was quiet for a beat or two. “Gerard told me you didn’t want to know anything about Lily Kirk after she left the ranch. Was your brother mistaken?”
“No. I didn’t want to know anything. I still don’t. But it’s different now that Charlie is in jeopardy.”
“Charlie isn’t in jeopardy,” Hendricks said slowly.
Chance straightened his shoulders. “What? How can you say that? Are you forgetting Jodie Brown and what he did to Kinsey thinking she was Lily?”
“Stop for a minute, Chance. Jeremy Block is a respected district attorney in Ada County down in Boise. Lily ran out on him and took their child with her. She has a documented history of being unstable. He filed for and won temporary custody in her absence. It sounds as if he finally got his kid back. As a father, I can understand how good that must feel. The fact is Lily is the loose cannon, not him.”
“But Jodie—”
“Jodie Brown was a career criminal with a record as long as your arm. Block sent him to prison for drug trafficking twelve years ago. He says that’s the last time he saw him. He figures Jodie was out to take revenge on him by abducting his wife and demanding a ransom. Block denies having anything to do with Jodie since years before when he won the conviction. There is no indication he isn’t telling the truth.”
“What does Jodie Brown say about this?”
“He’s dead. His truck ran into a tree a couple of days after he left your ranch. His blood alcohol was .20. Case closed. Except that there’s a warrant out on Lily but I understand she’s disappeared.”
“If Jeremy Block knew where to find his son, he knows where to find his ex-wife,” Chance said, and despite Hendricks’s insistence that Jeremy Block was Man of the Year material, felt a chill.
“Not ex,” Hendricks said. “There’s been no divorce.”
Chance blinked away that momentary shock. “Charlie said a man took him from the bus stop and drove him to his father’s house. Doesn’t that remind you of what Jodie Brown tried to do? Do you really believe Jeremy Block is telling the truth?”
“I really do,” Hendricks cautioned. “But more importantly, it’s all happening two hundred miles from here. The police in Boise are satisfied with his story so that’s the end of it although I will contact them about the child’s call so they can look into it.”
Chance slammed down the receiver. His father had taken Lily in nine months earlier and not said a word to anyone about her past but there was a good chance he knew something that might help. Chance had to know she was safe and not fighting for her life somewhere. He dialed his father’s cell and when no one answered, his stepmother’s. Both phones went straight to voice mail and he left the same message, an insistent request they call home as soon as possible.
Now what? Where was Lily? How did he find her?
He heard a vehicle outside. Undoubtedly Gerard or Pike had arrived early to help get ready for the Bywater trip. He dashed into the mudroom, glad for the company. He was betting Gerard knew all about Lily’s past from Hendricks. He switched on the floodlights before opening the door and exited the house as a woman stepped out of a red coupe.
The car looked familiar but the small woman standing in the glaring light did not. The three resident dogs had roused themselves from their beds in the horse barn to welcome the newcomer who didn’t seem alarmed by the excited attention of the two shepherds and the part-Labrador retriever milling around her legs. She wore her light brown hair parted in the middle and pulled back. Heavy black glasses dominated a pale face while a long shapeless gray cardigan dominated an equally drab dress that fell all the way to the top of brown cowboy boots.
“Chance?” the woman cried, taking a halting step forward and then stopping.
Chance’s mouth almost dropped open as he recognized Lily’s voice. For the tick of a heartbeat he tried to reconcile the woman before him with the sassy, blonde firecracker who had left here months before, and then he came out of his stupor and stepped toward her. “I just had a call from Charlie,” he said.
“You heard from my baby? When?” Her hands flew up to cover her face and her knees buckled. He reached her before she hit the ground. The dogs yipped with uncertainty.
“I’m okay,” she insisted. “Where is Charlie? Who has him?”
“His father,” Chance said.
“I thought so. Damn.”
He still couldn’t believe she was here and right on the heels of the past thirty minutes of revelations. He was touching her, almost holding