Swallowing her pride, she made the phone call. When her father answered, she said, “I need your help, Dad, and I need it right away.”
“I’ve still got that spare room, sugar. And you know Noah’s always welcome.”
“I do know, and I appreciate that,” she said, thinking that his acceptance of her autistic son might be the only reason she and her dad still spoke. Unfortunately, he’d never been nearly as accepting of the other facets of her life, from her choice of jobs to what he saw as her piss-poor taste in husbands. “But right now I need you to come here instead. Please, it’s only forty minutes if you hurry.”
Though she’d often wished he’d stayed in Morton County, tonight she thanked God he had chosen to retire to a rural ranch so close by.
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re in the emergency room, waiting for some stitches. Noah’s cut himself.”
“How’d he manage that?” Her father was familiar with the lengths to which Justine went to keep the boy from hurting himself.
“Best I can figure, he banged his head straight through the window, then used a jagged piece of glass to cut his arms.”
“How bad is it?”
“His head is just fine, and most of the cuts look pretty superficial. But there are a couple of deep spots—I figure no more than eight or ten stitches this time. Thing is, Noah’s caretaker’s walked out on me, and I’m smack in the middle of this huge case—”
“The AMBER Alert? I saw that on the TV. Saw you, too, at the press briefing.” Her father waited a beat before adding the rim shot. “You looked a little overwhelmed.”
“Just tired.” Of your assuming that you—or any male sheriff—could handle it all better. “This case is tough enough without having both the media and outside agencies all over my ass. Besides, I’ve lost a good man.”
Oscar Balderach had tried hard to talk her out of running for her husband’s seat, had had the nerve to tell her Lou would never have approved. Still, he had been her husband’s good friend, and more importantly, his safety—the well-being of all those who served in her department—fell firmly on her shoulders.
“It happens, Justine. Happens to the best of us.” Her dad’s tone left no doubt that he didn’t count her a member of that club. “So you’re in over your head—that’s what you’re finally admitting.”
Justine felt the corner of her mouth tic downward. “Okay, so you were right, I’m fucking drowning out here. The question is, Dad, are you gonna toss me a life jacket or a boulder?”
“I’ll be there. When haven’t I, when you’ve been inclined to ask?”
As she was ending the conversation, another call came through. Switching over, she said, “Wofford here.”
“Sheriff, this is Ichabod.”
Justine felt her brows rise in surprise that Larry Crane would use the hated nickname. “What can I do for you, Deputy?”
“Those body parts brought in from the lake—thought you might want to know we’ve got an ID.”
“You’re sure about that?” The last Justine had heard, they’d only found small pieces.
“Brought up a head later, in halfway decent shape, too. Stashed down in some cypress roots. Gators like to do that, like to age their meals before—”
“Whose head?” Justine interrupted. “Could anyone tell whose head the divers brought up?”
Someone in the waiting room coughed, prompted her to look up, to notice a half dozen or more patients and their family members staring. A couple looked on in slack-jawed horror, while the rest bore the same expression of morbid fascination she’d seen in rubberneckers driving past a fatal wreck. Though she preferred it to the you-have-to-be-the-worst-mother-on-the-planet looks she’d scored after her son’s tantrum, she frowned and turned away from them, cupping a hand around the receiver as Noah shifted, sighed, and laid his head against her thigh.
When Crane named the victim, Justine screwed shut her eyes. “You’re sure?”
When he replied in the affirmative, she breathed a curse. She’d thought herself ready, braced for any eventuality. But this? This was going to be more difficult than anything she had imagined.
“Roger’s all set to notify the next of kin,” he said, referring to Deputy Savoy, “but considerin’ their history—”
“You tell Roger, I’ll break the news myself as soon as possible, so keep it zipped until then. Any media out there yet?”
“No. We had a lucky break in the department. Most of ’em lit out to cover that church bus wreck on I-10.”
Though Justine, too, was glad that the reporters had left the county, she couldn’t help wondering how many lives their “lucky break” had cost. “Well, let’s make sure they don’t hear about it for the next few hours, and if you find anything—anything at all—I want you to call me first.”
“But Savoy’s handling the—”
“I’m interested in his version, too. Mostly interested in how far it differs from the facts. So are you willing to help me on this, Larry, or do you really want to be the guy they call Ichabod, the guy the others stick with every shit detail, until the day you die?”
She left the question hanging, left the deputy to think his slow way through the implications…and choose his loyalty.
C HAPTER T WENTY-EIGHT
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it…
—Sylvia Plath,
from “Kindness”
Sam gasped with pain, biting back a curse as sweat poured off his body. His left ankle was swelling quickly, a souvenir of the thick branch that had snapped beneath his weight and sent him crashing into the underbrush. For a few moments, he’d kept still, praying that the agents hadn’t spotted him. But his hopes crumbled as what he assumed to be the DEA’s dark SUV barreled his way, jouncing over tufts of grass and flattening the mounds of fire ants.
Seeing their approach, he’d turned and limped deeper into the brush. Back in the day, a bayou had flowed behind the Hook-It. Decades before, its waters had mysteriously changed course, drying up the motel’s fortune and leaving the nearly impenetrable low area now filled with trees and undergrowth—and plenty of bugs and snakes as well. But Sam was willing to risk them if he could just lose his pursuers.
Running, however, was proving a hell of a lot more difficult than he’d imagined. With every step, fresh agony shafted up his leg—making him want to scream curses at the top of his lungs.
Still, he staggered forward, moving deeper into a damp tangle populated by thick swarms of mosquitoes as scores of sticks did their utmost to scrape, trip, and impale him. When one snagged his shirt, he paused to disentangle it and sucked in huge draughts of humid air. Peering back over his shoulder, he spotted no lights coming his way, but alarm jolted through him at the crunch and crash of something moving toward him through the underbrush. Moving fast enough to make him wonder if the agents had night-vision goggles or thermal imaging to pick up the heat of his body. Would they have special scopes, too, for their weapons, giving them the means to drop him the instant one of them got a clear shot?
For Christ’s sake, don’t give them a stationary target.
Adrenaline spiking through his system, he forgot the ankle, forgot the possibility that he might put out an eye on a low-hanging branch or break his neck stepping in a hole. Forgot everything but the imperative to keep moving, to put distance between himself and the men who, for all their tools, were unfamiliar with the area. Who, for all their training, lacked the sense of direction he’d honed from years of motoring around the area’s tangled network of waterways.
Using the motel behind him to orient himself, he moved deeper into the grove and prayed the snarl might slow his pursuers. The trouble was, it would also make it harder for him to get out—and give them time to call for enough backup to draw a noose tight around the area, around all of Dogwood if that was what it took.
So he had to get clear of it while he could.
Because he was in deep shit now, serious shit, w
ith his SUV abandoned near what he now knew to be a murder scene and a body in the trunk of the car he had just driven. If he ended up arrested, how could he be of any use to Ruby? He’d never promised her—nor had she expected him—to do hard time on her account.
Sam’s injured foot caught on a fallen tree trunk, bringing him down hard as his knee gave way. He landed in a tangle, his breath pumping through his shredded lungs, a stitch in his side adding to his pain. But the physical agony was nothing compared to the thought of letting Ruby down. Of leaving her to face Best and maybe Wofford on her own. Or would she be caught in the hotel room, now that the Corolla had been spotted? Would she be taken into custody, along with both the laptop and the flash drive? If Best learned that she couldn’t make the rendezvous, would he kill Zoe and Misty in retaliation?
Lying prone and frozen, Sam saw a beam of light, its movement splintered by the myriad branches. Instead of rising to run, he lay still and listened, praying that the fallen tree and silence would be enough to hide him.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when something close by chittered, a night bird or some huge insect. In the distance, he heard the sound of traffic—traffic, but no sirens—from the road. A minute more and he heard tramping, the sound of heavy footsteps and then a radio.
“You got a bead on him?” a canned voice asked, an accented voice that had Sam flashing on the face of Special Agent Acosta.
Sam felt a pinching at the back of his neck—and resisted the urge to slap at the offending insect. Or insects, from the feel of it. Nasty little bastards.
“Negative.” Only a few feet distant, the speaker stopped, standing with his back to Sam. “I lost him.”
Sam cringed, startled by the agent’s proximity, and tried to recall the name of Acosta’s partner of the peach-fuzz hair and expensive wraparound shades. The one who’d been moving through the brush with the stealth factor of an elephant on stilts.
“I don’t see him, either,” said Acosta on the radio. “Let’s pull back to the motel, call for K-9 backup. Let the dogs flush him out of this shit.”
“Or let the fucking alligators eat him,” Peach Fuzz grumbled.
“Works for me.”
As the agent signed off, Sam’s hand curled around a stout stick, and he pictured himself rising up and using it to take out this pursuer, then using the man’s weapon to get Ruby and himself, not to mention his personal canine, out of this mess.
Sam felt the capacity for violence stir inside him, sharp and vicious as anything J.B. had ever dealt out. All his life, Sam had understood it lay there, dormant. Had known it waited, coiled like a viper.
And all his life, he’d feared it, shunned it, for unlike his brother, or even the slimeball of a father who had spawned them, Sam understood the consequences of raising his fists or picking up a weapon, understood how quickly things could spiral out of control.
Understood how, even if he managed to avoid getting his untrained ass killed, he couldn’t swing a stick at a man’s skull, couldn’t pick up a gun and charge toward another armed man without the very real possibility of committing murder.
I’m not my brother. Not him. Not for any price.
All this blazed through his brain like lightning before the chance evaporated as the agent walked away.
Leaving Sam to wonder how the hell he was going to get out of this mess. Leaving him to listen for the howling of the sirens and the barking of the dogs.
Moving quietly, Ruby made her way behind the motel, the chair leg clutched like a baseball bat in her hands. Java sniffed around industriously, looking more concerned with finding the perfect place to squat than with her master’s absence.
Ruby spotted the Corolla, parked where she had left it in the shadows. So Sam hadn’t used the keys to take off, but then where had he gone?
She peered into the star-softened darkness. Though she saw nothing, heard nothing anywhere near the car, her gaze was drawn to the taillights of an idling vehicle—an SUV, she thought—near the trees some forty or fifty yards back.
Its presence unnerved her, though it could easily belong to a pair of trysting lovers or some teenagers out drinking. But she could stand here spinning out possibilities all evening. None of them would explain Sam’s absence, or why he’d taken off without a word.
“Sam?” she called softly, moving closer to the Corolla’s trunk. Could whatever was inside have frightened off a man brave enough to risk a fiery death? A man who’d done things for her that might send him back to prison?
Ruby swallowed hard, clutching her makeshift weapon more tightly. “God, please help me,” she whispered. “Don’t let him be dead, too.”
Her stomach went cold as terror prickled at the base of her neck. Had her prayer come too late for Sam?
Unable to accept that possibility, she shook her head, a movement she instantly regretted as firecracker bursts of pain popped in her ears. Groaning, she felt Java’s tongue, warm and wet on the back of her hand.
“He wouldn’t have left you,” Ruby said, her gaze latching on to the SUV at the wood’s edge, her body trembling at the thought of risking not only her life but her daughter’s on the astronomically small chance that she might be able to rescue her “partner” with a chair leg. If Sam was even out there, still alive.
The fine hairs behind her neck rose, warning her to stay put—or better yet to run back inside the room and lock the door. Warning her that Zoe had to be her focus, Zoe’s welfare her real responsibility.
Java raised her head and growled, and from the direction of the woods, Ruby heard a staccato burst of gunfire.
Her choice made, she spun on her heel and bolted, intent on getting back to safety…
And totally surprised when she ran headlong into its polar opposite.
C HAPTER T WENTY-NINE
I never hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude.
—Emily Dickinson,
from “I Never Hear the Word Escape”
Bleeding and exhausted, Sam waded, swam, and fought his way along the slimy loop of bayou. Disgusting as it was, he’d been damned lucky to fall, then slide his way down into it while running for his life.
The shooting had stopped as quickly as it started. Thinking the agents had already left the wooded area, Sam had nearly gotten himself killed by moving too quickly. Now he just hoped the shooter had mistaken Sam’s sudden disappearance for a kill—a natural mistake since the drop-off couldn’t be seen from his angle.
Sam figured he didn’t have long before the agents figured out where he’d gone. But they wouldn’t know he hadn’t been shot, just scraped and cut up from his tumble. And they wouldn’t know, as he did, that this stinking mud hole connected at one end with the navigable waterway—if he could make it without becoming mired in the muck or succumbing to fatigue…or running into something huge and hungry.
At some point, Sam had read about the rarity of alligator attacks in Texas, about the total lack of verified fatalities. Still, he was powerless to keep the primordial terror at bay, the marrow-deep fear of being eaten, of being snapped and broken and torn to bite-sized bits. An image of the doomed deer jolted through his awareness, compelling him to fight even harder to make progress.
Cheer up, he thought as he struggled to pull a leg from the deep muck. You’ll probably drown a hell of a long time before you’re eaten.
Pathetic as it was, the thought struck him as funny, and a muffled snort of laughter gave him the burst of energy needed to reach deeper water. As he began to swim, he forced himself to slow his breathing, to focus on his strokes rather than the panic roaring through his brain. Worrying about alligators, DEA bullets, and what was happening to Ruby wouldn’t save him—no more than it would help her. Even so, it took a long time for the cool water to slow his racing thoughts.
And even longer to quiet the suicidal temptation to turn back.
Though Best had precisely measured t
he amount of veterinary tranquilizer in the hypo and jabbed the full measure in her upper arm, Ruby was still struggling, reminding him that even the snared rabbit is capable of drawing blood.
He should have fucking known, should have realized after watching her tear into Coffin. It had been Best’s pleasure, killing the foul bastard who had long since served his purpose. But as Ruby fought on, Best feared he’d have to kill her to keep her from ripping out his eyes or biting through the hand he used to muffle her screams. Desperate to subdue her, he pinned her with his greater weight, pinned her until her kicks wound down to mere twitches. Until she finally went limp beneath him.
By that time, he heard sirens. Kicking a large dog to send it yelping out of his way, he tossed the woman in the trunk of the Mustang, then ran around the corner to find a room with its door ajar. Within moments, he emerged with a laptop computer and sped off, intent on finding out exactly what he’d captured.
C HAPTER T HIRTY
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
—Ernest Becker,
from The Denial of Death
April 7
This time, she lay submerged just inches beneath the water’s surface, only her eyes and nostrils protruding as she watched the paddle dig and twist, a trail of bubbles rising with each blade-stroke.
Tucking her short legs against her body, she used her tail to propel herself in the intruder’s wake, not because she recognized the metal beast as prey but because its size and shape nudged another instinct, one that compelled her to defend her territory against others of her kind.
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