Which meant... He let out a litany of curses and headed for the garage. Snapping on the light, he looked around for a flashlight. There was one sitting on the workbench. The batteries were half-dead, but there was just enough light that he knew he could find what he was looking for.
Collin located the tracking device and swore before ripping it from the vehicle’s frame and crawling back out from under the SUV. The bastard had put a tracking device on his car? When? He had to have done it the night before they’d left. Which meant he’d been planning to come after Kate all along.
That didn’t make Collin as angry as the fact that once he knew the man had been a cop and maybe worse, he should have checked. He swore again. What kind of criminal was so stupid?
He crushed the device under his boot, not that it did any good now. What an amateur mistake that had been. If he wanted to play in the big league, he had to at least pretend to be shrewder than he was. He hated to think about what Gerald was going to say about all of this.
How was he going to explain it to Gerald? He’d have no choice but to tell the truth and hope it didn’t get him killed.
* * *
“ARE YOU DANIEL JACKSON?” Kate asked, her voice breaking with emotion.
He stretched out his legs. The left one ached. He tried not to flinch, tried not to let her see that he wasn’t the strong, capable man she thought he was—let alone the one she wanted him to be. “I don’t know who I am.” He saw her disbelieving expression.
“Collin said you worked at the refinery in Houston,” she challenged.
He nodded. “I did. Apparently I was caught in the explosion. I woke up in a hospital room with a bandage around my head and no memory of what had happened—or who I was. So many people were killed or injured. There was a lot of confusion. I didn’t know anything about myself, but I wasn’t badly injured like a lot of others, so I was moved to another hospital. It was there that I was told that I was Justin Brown. I had no reason to believe it wasn’t true. Justin Brown had no family, so it all added up when no one came looking for me.”
“I went to one hospital after another,” Kate said, her voice breaking. Hadn’t she sensed this was what might have happened to him? But she’d been asking for Daniel Jackson—not Justin Brown. “So you just believed that was who you were?”
“Apparently Justin Brown had only been working at the refinery for a short period of time and staying at some fleabag hotel. When I went there after I was released from the hospital, they let me into Justin Brown’s room. I had no photographs, nothing but some clothing and a little money. There was no wedding ring and no wife waiting for me, so I assumed I wasn’t married.”
“You left your wedding ring by the soap dish in the bathroom that morning,” she said. “They found your wallet in the debris. That’s why they were so convinced that you were dead.” She’d often wondered in her darkest hours if he’d planned to walk away that day and had left the ring behind.
“If you don’t know who you are, then how can you believe that you’re not Daniel Jackson?”
His sympathetic look seized her heart in a death grip. “Because I can’t fathom the thought that I wouldn’t have remembered you and my children. I would have known there was someone out there who would be looking for me, missing me, wouldn’t I?”
She didn’t know what to say even if she could have spoken around the lump in her throat.
* * *
“WHAT THE HELL happened to you?” Gerald demanded the moment he walked in the door and spotted Collin’s neck. He grabbed his collar and jerked it to one side. “Someone choked you?”
Collin yanked his shirt closed as he stepped away. “It’s nothing.”
The man scoffed. “Nothing?” He glanced around. “Where is she?”
“Look, it’s no big deal—”
Gerald got into his face. “Tell me what happened.” He bit off each word.
“It’s the damned woman.” Collin sighed and dropped his gaze. “She met this man in Buckhorn—”
“I thought you were engaged?”
“Yeah, well, we were—until she saw this man in Buckhorn who she thought was her husband who died twenty years ago. It’s really messed up.”
“You could say that. Who is this man?”
“Nobody,” he said quickly. “A carpenter who makes kids’ toys out of wood for a living.” He wasn’t about to tell him that Jon Harper was an ex-cop who had a bounty on his head because he’d sent some mobsters to the slammer. Only a fool would trust a man like that.
“You’re saying this carpenter, who she thinks is her dead husband, followed you up here to take her back?” That about covered it. “You didn’t notice him behind you?”
“There wasn’t anyone behind me. I wasn’t tailed.”
Gerald raised a brow. “Then how did he find you, since you didn’t even know exactly where you were going until my guy pulled you over and gave you the address?”
Collin rubbed the back of his neck, but only for a moment before he felt where the cord had cut into his flesh. His throat ached. If he ever found that bastard... He realized Gerald was waiting for an explanation. “He put a tracking device on my rental car.”
The man’s eyes widened in disbelief. “A carpenter put a tracking device on your car? What in the hell aren’t you telling me?”
“It turns out that he’s also an ex-cop. But none of that matters. I found the device and destroyed it once I realized...” He shook his head. “It’s all fine now.”
“How can you say that?” Gerald demanded. “At any moment cops could swarm this place—if they aren’t already out there.”
“Did you bring the—”
“Of course not!”
“Then, why would the cops arrest us?” Collin reasoned. “I told you, it’s cool. She isn’t going to do anything. I have someone on her kid. She’s not stupid.” It was a lie, but Gerald didn’t have to know that.
The man merely shook his head and stepped away. Collin felt his breath catch, his stomach roiling suddenly as he realized this deal might not go down now. After everything he’d put into this transaction, it had to happen. He had to convince Gerald. He was flat broke, hounded by creditors, with no chance of paying his debts unless this drug deal went down.
He stepped to the man. “I can handle this.”
Gerald turned so quickly, he flinched and took a step back. “Handle this? You can’t be serious. Something smells rotten. How long have you known this woman?”