Well, almost home free. At the least she would buy enough time to get a new identity and start over. With a new name, a new Social Security number, she could disappear.

Pulling out her cell phone, she checked the level of service. One bar. Not good enough. She’d have to get closer to a town. That was another thing about the wide-open spaces; they were too wide open, too many long miles of no people, no traffic, no houses, just fields as far as the eye could see. An ear of corn had no need for a cell phone, whereas her ear definitely did.

She drove for almost an hour, keeping an eye on the service indicator on her phone. When the number of bars abruptly jumped to three, she decided to give it a try, and pulled over.

Her first try, she got Mrs. Pearson’s voice mail. “Mrs. Pearson, this is Andrea Butts. Something has come up and I don’t want the two million in cash. I hope your head cashier hasn’t put in the order yet. I really need to talk to you, but I’m afraid to come to the bank. Please call me back at-” She stopped, completely blanking on the number for her new cell phone. “I’ll call you back,” she said hurriedly, and ended the call.

Damn it, what was that number? She turned off the phone, then turned it back on, and watched the screen as it flashed the info. Grabbing a pen from her bag, she scribbled down the number and called Mrs. Pearson again.

To her surprise, Mrs. Pearson herself answered. “Hello, Ms. Butts, I just got your message. I was seeing some clients off and missed your call by seconds. I’m giving a note to Judy right now, about the cash order. I have to say, I’m relieved you’ve changed your mind, but…is something wrong?” She lowered her voice. “You’re afraid to come to the bank?”

“It’s my ex-husband,” Drea said, glad that her hard-luck spiel was making itself useful after all. “I don’t know how, but he’s followed me this far, and knows I have an account with you. I’m afraid he’s watching the bank, and if I show up there, he’ll follow me.”

“Have you called the police?” Mrs. Pearson asked, a gratifying amount of alarm in her tone.

“So many times I’ve almost worn the numbers off the phone buttons,” Drea said wearily. “It’s always the same answer: until he actually does something, they have no grounds to pick him up. He’s a salesman for a large agricultural firm, so he has a good reason for being in just about any area, and I don’t have a right to keep him from doing his job, blah blah blah. I guess this is what I get for covering for him all those times he hit me, saying I fell down the steps, or closed the car door on my hand when he’s the one who broke my finger.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Mrs. Pearson murmured. “No, you certainly shouldn’t come here if you think he’s watching. But…what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” She did know, she just hadn’t worked out the particulars yet. “He thinks he’s entitled to the money because we were still married when my parents died and I inherited my share of their estate.”

“Ah…an inheritance is the personal property of the heir, I think.”

“So the law says, but he thinks he earned it by putting up with me.” Drea put bitterness in her tone. “I just need to break the paper trail, so he can’t keep following me.”

“Your account information is confidential. How does he-”

“He has a friend who works for the IRS.”

“I see.”

The fact that nothing more needed to be said told Drea that her reasoning about the IRS was more on target than she wanted it to be.

“I’ll have to work something out, but I don’t know what.”

“I’m afraid that any transaction you do will have to be reported to the IRS,” Mrs. Pearson said regretfully. “Banks are required to make currency transaction reports on any movement of funds involving ten thousand dollars or more, so your two million will certainly leave a paper trail.”

“I don’t want to cause any trouble with the IRS, and I’m certainly not trying to avoid any taxes. I just need to get my money, and move it to another location before he can find me.”

“Your best bet of getting a lot of cash on short notice is to be in a city that has a Federal Reserve Bank. We’re in the Kansas City district, but there’s a branch in Denver, which is a bit closer to us here. The only thing is, when you get to where you’re going and deposit the money, that bank will have to make a CTR, too.”

Not if the bank wasn’t in this country, Drea thought grimly. If she could ever get her hands on this money, she was taking it offshore as fast as she could, to get out from under the ever-prying eyes of the government. When she got her new ID, she was getting a passport-a legitimate one-and then at least she could go on vacation to the Cayman Islands and take her money with her. She was tired of this crap.

“The safest way to move this money is to do it online,” Mrs. Pearson continued.

“I don’t have a computer,” Drea said. “Can I use a computer in an Internet café, or a library?”

“Umm, it would be better if you kept the same IP number. Can you do it from your cell phone?”

“This is a cheapie. It doesn’t have Internet capability.”

“Get one that does. Then you can manage your account wherever you are. Or get a laptop, which I really recommend.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Go to our website, and follow the instructions.”

“Don’t I have to sign something?”

“Yes, there’s an agreement you have to sign. I can mail it to you-”

“I don’t have a mailing address,” Drea confessed, feeling as if she was once again beating her head against the wall.

After a moment Mrs. Pearson said, “I wouldn’t normally do this, but if you’ll get a laptop and Internet service, then call me, I’ll print out the agreement and meet you somewhere. Where there’s a will there’s a way, Ms. Butts! We can get this done.”

Getting Internet service would also require putting her name in the system, Drea thought, but what the hell, she wasn’t getting anywhere by any other means, and she sure as hell wasn’t showing up at that bank in person.

“I’ll do that,” she said wearily. “Thank you. I’ll call back when I get things organized.” She disconnected the call and let her head drop back against the headrest. Who knew stealing two million dollars would be so damn much trouble?

WAS SHE CRAZY? DREA WONDERED AS SHE PLOWED through her to-do list with ruthless determination, but no matter how determined she was, the damn thing kept getting longer.

Every step she took seemed to spawn two more steps, without which the first step wouldn’t work. Because she didn’t have a credit card, she had to pay cash for the cheapest laptop she could find at Wal-Mart, and she was beginning to run low on cash. Unless she wanted to risk going to the Grissom bank in person, she had to use the cashier’s check for eighty-five thousand to open an account at a bank in the same town as the Wal-Mart, which would cause another currency transaction report to be issued.

Still, what choice did she have? She had to have Internet service in order to electronically move the two million bucks. But before she signed up for Internet service, she needed a laptop. And to get a laptop, she needed cash.

Everything seemed to loop back on itself. When she went to the cell phone store to get a wireless card for her brand-new laptop and sign up for the company’s wireless service, she either had to have an address to which the bill could be sent, or she had to arrange for the bill to be automatically deducted from her bank account every month.

“Sure, why not?” she muttered to the slim Hispanic kid who was helping her. All of her bank account info was right there in her purse, of course, considering she’d opened the account just two hours before.

And still, she was going purely on supposition. While she was certain Rafael was looking for her, she had no proof he’d hired anyone to track her. Maybe he just had Orlando on the job. That was her best-case scenario: while Orlando was good with computers, she knew he didn’t have the expertise to hack into the IRS system.