She recoiled. Her lips parted. He didn’t believe she could have faked how astounded she appeared. “A laser?”

“Not the kind you buy to bamboozle your neighbor or drive your cat crazy. High grade. Industrial strength. Powerful enough to penetrate that fog and damn near my skull.”

“I’ve heard of that happening to pilots. A lot, lately.”

“Well, it happened to me last night. I would have made that landing if I hadn’t been blinded seconds before touching down.”

“You could have been killed.”

“That’s crossed my mind a few dozen times.”

“Did you tell Rawlins this?”

“No, and I have my reasons.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

“Because I didn’t know you, either.” He let that reverberate for a few seconds before continuing. “For all I knew, you were the culprit. The way you crept up on the plane made me suspicious. But once I saw how protective you were of that box, it didn’t make sense. Why would you want to sabotage the airplane carrying the treasure chest?”

“I see. You don’t think I’m an attempted murderer, but only because it doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, did that hurt your feelings?” He scoffed. “Don’t cop that self-righteous attitude with me, Brynn. I’m not the one keeping secrets.” He gave her a hard look. “I don’t really think you’re a terrorist bent on killing a lot of people, but I do think you’re in possession of something that belongs to somebody else. Or at least to somebody who claims rights to it.

“Diamonds, the key to a safe deposit box, a human finger bone excavated on Mars. The booty doesn’t matter to me. It’s yours to keep. Split it with your daddy. I don’t care, except for the role I unknowingly played in transporting it. If it’s illegal, I could do jail time and lose my pilot’s license.”

“If you’re so worried about it, then take me back to town, to the Ford dealer, and let me leave.”

“No. That’s not the only reason I’m staying. I want payback for the damage done to Dash’s plane, and the attack on an innocent man.”

“That’s the obligation you feel.”

“Yeah, that’s the obligation I feel.”

“Your worst nightmare.”

His focus sharpened on her.

Softly, she said, “Involvement.”

He didn’t realize she’d heard him say that or that she would have tucked it away in her memory bank to take out and air now. All the emotions that invoked coalesced into anger.

“I’m tired of this dance.” He went over to the dresser. The first four dials on the padlock were as he’d left them minutes earlier. Only the last one remained. It was on the four. That didn’t unlock it. He rolled it to the numeral one. That was no good, either. “I’ve got a maximum of eight more tries.”

He went through them, taunting her as he counted them down, but her expression remained impassive. After the nine failed, she said, “You’ve only got one more chance, and it’s futile to try it.”

“We’ll see.”

He dialed the zero. The lock stayed locked. Cursing, he turned to her.

“Told you.”

He fumed in silence, then said, “Fine. Play your game, but you’ll do it without your toy.”

He picked up the box and clamped it against him with his arm. “Until I know what’s in it, and have my reckoning with the people who tried to crash me, it stays with me.”

“Put it down.”

“Nope.” With his free hand, he grabbed his flight bag and headed for the bathroom.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to shower and then get some sleep.”

“Sleep?” Brynn placed herself in his path. “We don’t have time for that. If you don’t believe anything else, believe me when I say that it’s imperative I get that box to its destination.”

“Which is?”

He gave her a ten count, and when she didn’t reply, he bumped her aside with his hip, continued on into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him.

9:01 a.m.

“We lost her.”

Goliad’s update wasn’t what Delores and Richard Hunt had expected to hear, and the news certainly didn’t go over well with either.

Following their bodyguard’s last call, Richard had demanded to know everything Delores had been withholding from him about the situation in Howardville. She had laid out the facts the way a blackjack dealer dealt cards, methodically, one at a time. After each, Richard had calculated his odds of winning the hand or losing huge.

He’d been dismayed over how badly the job had been botched, and angry at Delores for glossing over the worst of it. “All I got was a weather report!” he’d shouted.

Her only defense had been that she’d wanted to prevent him from worrying.

“I appreciate that consideration,” he’d told her in an effort to suppress the full ferocity of his anger. “By the same token, I resent being kept in the dark. Don’t do it again. Ever.”

He had accepted her tearful apology along with her promise not to hold back anything from now on, no matter how dire circumstances became. She’d sealed her promise with a kiss and reminded him that the situation wasn’t all that bleak.