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“How long will the interview take?”
“He didn’t say. Just that he needs her at the safe house this afternoon. He’ll meet you there. Knowing him, he wants to make sure security is airtight before the prosecutors arrive.”
“Okay,” Liam said slowly. “What time?”
“Around two. If you get on the road by noon that should do it. It’s not like you have to worry about traffic, even when you get to Casper. I don’t have the address or the GPS coordinates of the safe house with me—I’ll call you later, once I get back to the office.”
“Okay,” Liam said again. “Will we be coming back here tonight?”
“D’Arcy wasn’t sure, but if I were you, I’d take everything you brought with you. In case there’s another change of plan.”
“What about the generator? If I turn it off the food in the refrigerator will spoil. But if we’re not coming back here it’ll go to waste anyway.”
“Don’t worry about it. Leave the generator on. If you come back tonight there’s no problem. If you’re gone more than a day, I’ll swing by, empty the fridge and turn off the generator.”
“Sounds good.” He thought for a moment, then voiced his major concern. “You’re sure the safe house is secure?”
Callahan chuckled. “Funny you should ask that. I asked Walker the same thing a few years ago when Mandy and my children were brought there for safekeeping. He told me there are no guarantees in this world, but that he’d stayed there himself on an operation, and he knew the people who ran it. Far as I know, the same people are still running it.”
“And?”
Callahan’s voice went deadly soft. “And I trusted them to keep my wife and children safe. They did.”
And that’s the end of that conversation, Liam thought to himself with sudden amusement.
Chapter 16
Cate had already taken a quick shower and dressed for the day in jeans and a white cotton top with a blue eyelet ribbon around the neck by the time Liam returned. When he told her they were going to the safe house in Casper to meet with the prosecutors, she didn’t object until he added, “Callahan said we should take everything with us, just in case.”
“We’re not coming back here?”
“It’s one possibility. Something we should plan for, just in case. I think we’ll come back here after you meet with the prosecutors. No matter how safe that safe house is, this cabin is safer. Especially since only D’Arcy and Callahan know we’re here. But Callahan wasn’t positive, so...”
“I see.” She considered this for a moment. “What about the laundry?”
He stared at her blankly. “Laundry?”
“The sheets, pillowcases, towels, washcloths—all the things we used,” she answered patiently. “This isn’t a hotel. We can’t just leave these dirty things behind for someone else to take care of.”
It hadn’t even occurred to him. There was no washer or dryer in the cabin, of course, so they’d been hand-washing their few clothes and hanging them to dry on the back porch in order to have clean clothes to wear every day—even their jeans dried in one day in the warm late summer sun. Now he wondered what Keira and Cody did about laundry. Everything had been clean when they arrived, so the Walkers had to do something. He just wasn’t sure what.
Cate raised her eyebrows at him exactly the way his mom used to do when something should be obvious. “You think maybe there’s a Laundromat in town?”
Duh, he thought. “Maybe. Black Rock’s kind of small, but we can check. We don’t need to be in Casper until two. We have time.”
She didn’t say anything, just began stripping the bed. Liam went into the bathroom and gathered up all the towels and washcloths, then swung into the kitchen and added the dishrag and kitchen towels to his pile. “Here,” he said as he dumped his armful in the middle of the sheets she’d removed from the bed. Cate had already fetched the sheets and pillowcase Liam had used when he was sleeping on the cot, which he’d folded neatly and stacked on top of the collapsed cot he’d stored in the closet so it would be out of the way.
Cate said, “We can wash our dirty clothes at the same time.” She quickly added her pajamas and the clothes she’d been wearing yesterday to the pile, then glanced expectantly his way. “Strip.”
Liam grinned at her as he shrugged out of his shoulder holster and one-fisted his inside-out T-shirt off. “Why, darlin’, I thought you’d never ask.”
Her cheeks reddened, and Liam realized Cate was as much a novice at sexual banter as she was at sex. He was naked beneath his jeans, but he had no false modesty, so it took him only a couple of seconds to comply. He hadn’t counted on his reaction to her watching him strip, though—which she did...in little sideways glances she thought were covert. Her pretending not to look was more arousing than if she’d openly stared. Stand down, he told his body as he tugged on boxers and clean jeans, but it wasn’t very obedient, so the jeans were a tight fit.
