Part of her problem was exhaustion, worsened by the discomfort of a long night spent wedged in a dampish space barely tall enough for her to crawl into. But terror was the biggest issue, along with the knowledge that she might actually have to shoot a living, breathing person as she’d feared.
Sure, she knew how to use a pistol. At her retired cop stepfather’s insistence, she’d bought and learned to use one after filing for divorce last year, though she’d felt so uncomfortable with the idea that it had remained locked up untouched in her Austin condo ever since.
Yet here she was, blinking back tears with her body half outside her makeshift shelter, aiming at a man, not just a paper target. Because she couldn’t let him hurt River—or use the dog to lure her out.
“Drop that leash, or I swear I’ll blow your head off,” Emma called, fatigue throbbing through a body scraped raw from last night’s frantic escape of the truck that had sped toward her when she’d tried to flag down the driver. Engine roaring, it had left the road, racing after her as she’d swerved, desperate as a fleeing rabbit, into a ravine too narrow for the vehicle to follow.
Scrambling downhill, she’d fallen hard, her feet tangling in River’s leash. The rocky ground had torn the skin off her hands and ripped out the knee of her pants. She’d apparently kicked the dog on her way down, too, for River had yelped and raced off, her tail tucked between her legs. Not daring to call after her, Emma had run farther between the steep walls, praying she wasn’t trapping herself in a spot with no escape.
“What are you doing, Emma? It’s me, Beau.” He’d withdrawn behind a bank of loose rock, completely out of sight now, but from the way his voice echoed off the stone, he hadn’t gone far. “I’m here to help you. Are you all right?”
She caught her breath, her gun hand shaking harder. Her mind lurched between the horror of knowing that she could’ve accidentally killed Beau Kingston and the worry that maybe, just maybe, that’s what she should have done.
“I found your Jeep this morning,” he continued when she didn’t answer, “And then I found River, with blood on her.”
“She’s hurt? If you’ve hurt her—”
“Of course I didn’t hurt her. I’m not hurting anyone. You know that. You know me.” He sounded worried, though, uncertain she wouldn’t pull the trigger once again.
“I—I thought I did. But you—You tried to—” Emma was weeping freely, vacillating in her certainty that it had been him last night. But it surely could have, coming from his house so late. The truck had looked like his, too, roughly the same size and age. “I couldn’t see the truck’s plates—or make out the color, dark as it was.”
“What truck? What are you talking about? Come on, Emma. All I know is I was sleeping when I got a call saying your Jeep was spotted out this way. I was mad at first, I’ll admit it, but mostly worried when I couldn’t find you. And scared half out of my wits when I saw your engine’s belt had been cut.”
“Cut? You mean on purpose?” Her heart kicked in her chest.
It made sense, though, that the person who’d tried to run her over would have set her up to be walking along that roadway last night. The question was, was the same man trying to lure her out of hiding now? Her mind flew back to the look Sheriff Fleming had given his cousin when she’d mentioned that the wind farm might be shut down if there had been a cover-up.
Cost you a pretty penny, too, now wouldn’t it, Wallace’s words rang through her memory, what with all that money you’re about to rake in with that new turbine construction?
Beau had acted as if nearly doubling the size of the wind farm meant little to him personally, seeming more upset about the loss of clean energy and much-needed local jobs. But hadn’t he changed toward her abruptly following that conversation, banning her from the property soon afterward?
“You know me,” Beau repeated, his voice steady, calming. The same reassuring voice of the man who’d helped her after Russell’s death. The man who’d waited at the hospital with her the night before last, when he could have easily left her for someone else to deal with. Had it all been a show meant to find out how much of a risk she was to his new deal with Green Horizons—or how much she really knew about what her grad student had been up to?
“I’ve shown you who I am,” he added. “And here I am, proving it again. Go on, River. Go to your mom.”
“River!” Emma cried, her heart leaping as the big dog hurried in her direction, the leash trailing.
At the sight of her, River picked up speed, her thick tail wagging and her mouth curved in an expression of pure canine joy. Reaching her destination, River tried to cover her mistress’s face and hands with kisses—and would have succeeded had Emma not pushed her away and ordered her to settle down.
“It’s all right. We’re all right,” Emma told the friend she’d been so worried for, stroking the thick golden fur. And then, abruptly, her instincts kicked in, pushing past her fear and prompting her to call out. “I—I’m coming out now, Beau, if I can still move my legs. I’m kind of wedged in under the—”
She gasped and stiffened, a reaction prompted not by pain or stiffness, but by an unmistakable noise she heard coming from beneath the rocky ledge. A sound that had River, too, reacting, crouching down on her front legs and barking as she tried to thrust her head past Emma’s hips.
“No!” Emma struggled to grab the dog’s collar before she made a bad situation even worse. “No, girl! Stop it!”
“Emma, what’s wrong?”
Still fighting to control River, Emma didn’t answer.
Beau grabbed the dog’s collar, dragging her back and ordering her to hush. When the dog finally fell quiet, Emma heard the buzzing again, now angrier and louder.
Only this time she felt the rattlesnake slithering along the length of her leg.
Chapter 8
Growing up on this ranch, Beau had heard the sound more than once. The shaking of a rattler’s tail. Very big and very close, in this case, the nerves coiling in his gut told him. And judging from Emma’s milk-pale face and widened eyes, she was as aware as he was of the danger it represented.
He raised the barrel of the rifle, taking aim at a threat that he knew from experience liked to hide out among these rocks. But the dog whose leash he held startled at his movement, making the barrel of the weapon wobble.
When Emma looked up to see the gun’s muzzle drift past her face, she shrieked and tried to scramble out from beneath the ledge.
Beau warned, “Be still—don’t move.”
But as she pushed herself out, her sharp cry told him it was too late—as did the sight of the tan-and-brown rattlesnake—a fat diamondback over a yard long—dangling from her lower right leg.
Kicking at the thing, he convinced it to let go and try to strike at him. As Emma crawled free of the threat, Beau took aim and shot the serpent’s head off with an echoing blast loud enough to make his ears ring.
Emma was sobbing, grabbing at her calf. “It got me. Latched right on. It’s already throbbing.”
“You need to try to calm down, slow your breathing.” Beau tightened his grip on River’s leash to keep the dog from the severed snake’s head, which could still inflict a deadly bite on reflex. “We’ll need to get you to a hospital, but for right now, keep as still as you can.”
Emma dragged in an audible breath, her body racked with shaking. But the crying stopped, her voice steadying as she said, “Let me hold on to River. She’ll be calmer with me.”
“You’ll be all right. Don’t worry,” he said, passing her the leash and trying not to think about an incident when he’d been fourteen, when one of the vaqueros had lost a leg—and nearly his life—to a bite from a far smaller diamondback than this one.
Emma draped her arms around the dog and leaned her head against River’s shoulder. While she shushed the whining animal, Beau kicked the reptile out of the way.
Once he’d finished, he said, “Do you mind if I look at the bite? And are there any other injuries I need to know about? That blood I found on River—”
“Mine, I suppose. I tore up my knee when I was running from a man in a dark pickup.” She shivered. “I thought—I thought it was you.”
“That was why you shot at me?”
She shook her head. “The—the truck looked like yours—at least I thought it did. And it was coming from the right direction.”
“From ranch headquarters?” He grimaced, thinking how his father had purchased five dark gray, four-wheel-drive pickups last December on a year-end fleet deal for ranch work, along with the fully loaded blue model Beau had inherited from the old man. Could one of the ranch vehicles have been taken from the equipment shed, one she’d mistaken for his own truck? “I’ll check,” he promised. “If the truck was one of ours, there should be video.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sit, River.”
When the dog settled, Emma began rolling up her pant leg.
“Here, let me,” Beau said, laying down the rifle and pulling out a pocketknife.
When she flinched, he shook his head. “You’re going to have to trust me. I need to cut through this material and get off that sock and hiking boot, too, before the leg swells too much.”
Her body rigid, she held the dog close to her body.
“Listen,” he told her, “I’m not the one who tried to run you down. And right now, you need to trust me if you want to get out of this situation in one piece.”
Shoulders sagging, she nodded. “You’re right. Just don’t cut the wound to try to suck the poison out. That’s an old wives’ tale that does more harm than good.”
“Way ahead of you there,” he said, splitting the seam up to knee level. When she removed her boot and pulled down the sock, he gestured toward an already-purpling area on the meaty part of her calf, where blood dripped from a small puncture wound. “That’s it, right? Only the one fang got you?”
“Looks that way to me,” she agreed. “I’ll bet the other one caught on the pant seam here.”
“That’s good news. Only half the venom.”
“Still bad enough if I don’t get to the hospital pretty quickly. I’ve seen rattlesnake bites up close before.”
Seeing her light green eyes losing focus, he reached out and squeezed her forearm and felt that her skin was cool and clammy. “Look at me, Emma. I need you to stay with me.” He couldn’t have her going into shock.
Sucking in a breath, she straightened and nodded at him. “I—I’m sorry. I’m just—It’s been a very long night, and that—I felt it crawling along my leg, where I couldn’t even see it.” She shuddered visibly.
“That snake’s history, and we’re getting you out of here,” he reassured her, not liking her pallor. “Fastest way to get you help’ll be for me to carry you out to my truck and call on the way to the hospital in Pinto Creek to make sure they’re set up to treat you. If not, we’ll ask them to have a chopper meet us and get you to the nearest trauma center that’s properly equipped.”
“You can’t carry me and handle River on your own. And what if he comes back—the man who tried to kill me?”
“I’ll keep my rifle handy. And as for carrying you and dealing with River, I can manage.”
“Maybe you won’t have to, not all on your own.” Wiping away tears, she turned to glance in the direction of a lone emergency siren in the distance. A siren that was drawing nearer. Relief washing over her face, she confirmed, “I’m pretty sure that’s the sound of the cavalry arriving.”
* * *
“You are either the damned unluckiest or the luckiest woman in all of Texas,” Sheriff Fleming told Emma as he strode into her room at the local hospital, where she’d spent the last two days undergoing treatment with the antivenin they kept on hand against occasional bites from the area’s most common poisonous snake. With his gray-blond mustache neatly groomed, he wore a freshly pressed uniform, and his badge gleamed as it caught a ray of morning sunlight from the blinds. “I hear that rattler didn’t get you with both barrels, or you might’ve been shoppin’ for a peg leg this week—if you’d lived to shop at all.”
She didn’t feel so fortunate, with her lower leg still swollen and her head fuzzy from the painkillers she’d been given. She felt vulnerable here, too, uncertain who had tried to kill her and isolated from her family, her students and her colleagues, with the exception of a call from her department head, who’d gruffly offered to have someone fetch her back to Austin as soon as she was discharged.
The proposal had come on the heels of Dr. Lee’s stern lecture about her “irresponsible” and “dangerous” behavior, returning to the turbines before the energy company had completed its safety review. Emma was still fuming over his attitude—and bewildered by the unmistakable impression that she was no longer the bright young star of the department, on track for an early tenure. Instead, when she’d asked about her new assignment, he’d abruptly cut her off and told her bluntly that if she wasn’t back on campus for the start of the semester, she needn’t bother coming back at all.
After waiting for a food service worker to remove her nearly untouched breakfast tray from the room, Emma told the sheriff nonetheless, “I do feel lucky to have made it through this past week. In spite of all the hospitality your county’s offered.”
“You are going to be okay, aren’t you? No long-term issues with the...?” He gestured vaguely in the direction of her leg, which remained elevated on pillows beneath the bedsheet.
“I’ll be on crutches for two or three weeks, but I may be released tomorrow.” She blinked at the bright wash of color he was holding. “Are those—you brought me flowers?”
Wallace held them up, his grin expanding, making him look like a different person than the angry and defensive lawman she’d dealt with up until now. “My wife picked them out. You like ’em?”
She blinked, her vision coming into focus. “You have a wife?”
He held up his left hand, flashing the gold band on his ring finger. “Don’t sound so danged surprised. Rumor has it I can be quite charming.”
As she struggled not to choke on that claim, he cleared his throat and added, “I figured you could use some cheerin’ up, with everything that’s happened...though I see I’m not the first to have that thought.”
Ignoring his glance at the dozen yellow roses in the green vase sitting on the windowsill, she took the flowers he offered, a sunny mix of carnations, daisies and purple asters, neatly wrapped in plastic. “That’s very kind. Please thank your wife for me,” she said before adding, “and thank you for coming. You have news on the investigation?”
“No arrests yet, if that’s what you’re hopin’, but we do have things to talk about.” He wandered a few steps closer to the roses before plucking the attached card and frowning down at the get-well message from Beau Kingston. “I only hope I haven’t come too late to sound the warning.”
A note of fear pinged through her, a reminder of her panic when she’d seen that pickup hurtling toward her. But she’d been wrong about its driver, she was certain. Sure enough that she’d accepted Beau’s generous offer to care for her dog at his home until she was released from the hospital.
Since the ambulance had taken her, however, she hadn’t seen him again. Nor had she heard from him, other than the delivery of the flowers with their thoughtful but no-more-than-polite note.
“Warning about what?” she asked Wallace.
“Your vehicle really was intentionally disabled, according to the mechanic at the garage where I had it towed,” the sheriff told her. “But the thing was, the only prints we found on the hood belonged to Kingston. So maybe it’s not so surprising that he knew right off, even though it was dark when he called it in, that somebody sawed through your drive belt.”
“So you’re saying that—?”
> “He could’ve done it himself. Could’ve considered you a danger to that big deal he’s got pending, with all your talk of murder.” A glint of malice lit the sheriff’s blue eyes. “I know you figure him for the white knight, always comin’ To your rescue, and I know the ladies around here have him pegged for the catch of the century, but if you knew the things about him I do... He’s not even a real Kingston.”
“What you’re saying makes no sense at all.” She shook her head as an image flooded her mind. “You should have seen him shoot that snake in two. That was a knee-jerk reaction, I can tell you—and it saved me from another bite. If he’d wanted me gone, he could’ve walked away, not killed the thing or flagged down help.”
“Maybe he’d just as soon scare you off, if he didn’t have to kill you.”
She straightened in the bed. “And maybe this turf war, or whatever it is, that the two of you have going has clouded your presumptions, Sheriff. Doesn’t it make more sense that whoever messed with my Jeep would wear gloves to disguise his identity? Or that he drove one of the hundreds of dark-colored pickups on the road around this county?”
Wallace’s grimace dissolved into a shrug. “You could be right. If I was sure, I’d’ve damned well locked him up by now—”
“Right next to that registered sex offender you arrested—that’s where you’d put your own cousin?”
Fleming huffed out a breath. “About that. Turns out ol’ Jorge’s not looking so good for your assault on the night of the memorial service. Looks like there was some big brouhaha with his common-law wife right around the time you got jumped—enough hollerin’ and screechin’ that the neighbors called in a noise complaint.”
“Did this woman maybe scratch him?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Not that she’s admitting, but they’ve mixed it up before on more than one occasion. And she’s the one with the record for domestic battery.”
Deadly Texas Summer Page 10