by Jenna Ryan
“She turns them on everyone, male and female.”
Rachel’s insides simultaneously froze and boiled at the sound of a second voice. She raised a protective hand to her cheek. “You keep away from me. Owen won’t—”
“Give a damn what I or anyone does to you, Georgia. Not one good goddamn.”
Pouting wouldn’t help. Neither would tears or a tantrum. And defiance would only get her slapped again.
“Do you want food or not?” the person, once trusted and now despised, asked again.
Rachel’s lower lip wanted to wobble. She stopped it. “What kind of food? I don’t want anything healthy, or Southern.”
“I’ll see what the chef can rustle up. Don’t hold your breath you’ll enjoy it.”
The door closed, and Rachel lay back down. She let the wobble grow, closed her eyes. “Bitch,” she whispered with venom. And giving in, she allowed the tears to come.
Chapter Nine
“No talk. You stay put, stay quiet, and eat. You’re too skinny.” Krista, a short, stout woman with the remnants of a strong German accent, waved her wooden spoon at Amber. “You.” She stabbed the spoon in Gage’s direction. “Explain why you came here and scared my little Robin half to death. She’s not used to people who drive so close to the gate without warning.” Her voice gentled. “You got trouble, Gage?”
“Always.” He dug into the heaped plate in front of him on Krista’s round kitchen table.
The house was made of mud and stone; the floors were hand-painted tile. Paper-covered lights hung on braided chains and sported colorful tasseled ends. The kitchen smelled like stew and bread and rosemary.
Maybe incense, too. Amber couldn’t separate all the scents, and she was too distracted to try with Krista’s spoon flapping wildly back and forth mere inches from her head.
“Eat more,” Krista warned her again. “What’s your trouble, Gage?”
“You’re a foot away from hitting that trouble with your mixing spoon.”
“You’re not his lady friend?” Krista seemed genuinely surprised.
“I’m…no.” Keep it simple. She glanced sideways at Gage, who gave a little smile. Maybe she’d let him handle the details here.
He regarded the motherly woman whose striped socks didn’t match. Not each other or the oversize patterned sweater she wore. “Is little Robin acting as lookout for uninvited guests?”
“Until midnight, yes. The cards I read this morning said ‘beware of approaching danger.’ I take my cards seriously.”
“I know. And in this case, they’re not far off.”
Krista pushed a glass of something green and milky toward Amber. “She doesn’t feel dangerous to me.”
“Krista reads auras,” Gage said. “It’s a gift.”
One Amber wouldn’t mind possessing at that moment. “I’m not dangerous,” she told the older woman. “Not really. Not deliberately.”
“She means the trouble that’s chasing her isn’t of her own creation.”
It was, in a way, but Amber had no desire to get into a philosophical discussion with an aura-reading stranger.
Gage mouthed the word “eat” to Amber. Out loud, he asked, “Where’s Knute?”
Krista’s lips turned down in disapproval. “He’s at the kiln, making new plates to replace the ones he broke this morning. We had a large group breakfast out at the long tent. It was his turn to clean up. His eyes and brain went all sideways when Jenny sauntered in in the altogether. Jenny forgets to put her clothes on sometimes,” she said to Amber. “It happens. Knute tripping over his tongue shouldn’t. Jenny’s half his age, and her mind’s mostly elsewhere. How big is the trouble?”
So much for keeping it simple. Amber sampled the stew. The texture was odd, but it was tasty enough. “It’s a long story that starts in Las Vegas and ends in Tennessee. My former boss, who’s not a nice man, wants to kill me because I collected damning evidence against him and gave it to the FBI.”
“Who in turn made the collected evidence disappear.” Gage shrugged. “The story’s not just long; it’s old as hell.”
“Bad people exist in all levels of government. I’ll read the cards for you later, Amber. Maybe we’ll see something that could help you and my danger magnet, Gage… Oh, this thing.”
Her comm link was beeping. Gage stopped eating and held out his hand for the device. “Hey, Robin. Gage. Yeah, real long time. Is there a truck hanging around out there?” He walked away.
Krista planted the tip of her spoon on the table and stared Amber down. “Nourishment stimulates the brain. How long have you and Gage been running?”
“Only two days. It feels like weeks. We’ve stopped once or twice to sleep and clean up.”
“My tea helps digestion.” Krista tapped a steaming cup in front of Amber’s plate. “Won’t help break down pork, which is why we don’t keep or eat pigs. Except for Peter, Paul, and Mary.”
“As in the sixties folk trio?”
“Knute named them. Gage wanted to call them Elvis, Jessie, and Priscilla.”
“So you only eat pigs you’ve named?” Somehow, that didn’t strike her as fair.
“No, we keep pigs we’ve named. We never consume any of our pets.”
The conversation had taken a very strange turn, Amber decided.
“Gage used to name all the animals that lived on or passed through the commune in the hopes that none of them would end up in a pot. He was an interesting young man, my Gage. Very different from Knute. Sadly, the two of them never got along. I believe there was a strong rivalry between them, mostly of Knute’s doing. Pah! And they say jealously is a woman’s curse.”
Laughing, Amber relaxed. “Krista, I’m really sorry we had to come here. The people who are after me are a lot more than dangerous. They kidnapped my sister, and I know for a fact they’re deadly. They’ll kill anyone who gets between them and me.”
“You must know a great deal about your former boss’s crimes.”
“If I do, I’m not aware of it. My boss doesn’t believe that, but it’s true.”
“Maybe you know more than you think. Do you understand hypnosis?”
“It doesn’t…”
Krista’s spoon hit the table with a thwack. “Don’t say it doesn’t work on you. Has anyone ever tried to hypnotize you?”
“Yes.” Amber met her piercing stare. “It was suggested that some of the information I’d gathered against Owen might be accessible. But the attempt to retrieve it didn’t work.”
“You didn’t let it.”
“Yes, I did. Or I tried to. I was open to anything that meant my sister Rachel and I wouldn’t have to run and hide. It’s one thing to separate yourself from the world. It’s a whole different thing to have that separation forced on you.”
“Drugs?”
“They used a few. I didn’t like them, and all I felt afterward was sick.”
“Chemicals.” Krista’s voice held a strong measure of distain. “The devil’s candy. Unnatural and unholy. My way is better.”
“What way is that?”
“I have other, more humble brews, natural concoctions. Do you like my chicken stew?”
“What? Yes. It’s delicious”
“It’s squirrel.”
Amber regarded her plate. “That’s…interesting.”
“The biscuits have crushed grasshoppers mixed into the grain.”
Although her stomach seized, Amber summoned a serene smile. “Even more interesting. I hardly tasted them. What’s in the tea?”
“Chamomile and well water. Unstrained, of course.”
Setting her fork down, Amber arched a brow at her hostess. “I grew up in Wyoming. My grandfather had a cattle farm. There was branding time, calving season, cougar attacks. I mucked out stalls and even slopped the pigs on occasion. Very little affects my appetite. Or did until now.”
A slow smile crossed Krista’s lips. “Was it the squirrel?”
“Grasshoppers.”
“And now you think yo
u’ll vomit.”
“I might have as a kid, but not anymore. I’ll employ one of my defense mechanisms instead.”
Krista’s spoon hit the table again. “There, you see? I tell you things that make you feel sick, and you find a way to deal with it. You have a strong mind. A little exploration might make the reasons for this deadly pursuit you are involved in come clear.”
Were the reasons not to try important? She considered, then sighed. “I suppose any knowledge is good knowledge at this point. If nothing else, maybe I can figure out where Rachel’s being held.”
“In that case”—Krista set her wide hands on either side of Amber’s head so she could look into her eyes—“we should begin at once.”
…
After his conversation with the Hidden Valley lookout, Gage left Amber in Krista’s capable company and struck out for the potting kiln.
Full darkness had descended, and the commune lights were few and far between. But Gage knew exactly where the shed was located. He also knew, or suspected, that Knute wouldn’t be anywhere near it.
“Bastard,” he swore as he jogged across the grounds. “You’ve got way too much of your old man in you.”
Then again, Gage thought, so did he. His ornery shit of a father had come one step short of naming his only kid Sue before he’d stuffed his Johnny Cash tapes in a pack and taken off to pursue whatever it was alcoholic, pool-playing assholes pursued on their winding path to nowhere. At least his mother had had the balls to dump him in a place where he’d be raised safely without someone’s fists itching to pound him to a pulp.
Screw old memories. He needed to keep the bigger picture in mind, and this particular picture was all about Amber. At the moment, the smaller one depended on him successfully restraining his temper if Knute tried to lay into him.
As expected, the shed was empty and the potting wheel unused. Much as he hated to do it, he forced himself to crawl inside Knute’s head while he scanned the crop of buildings scattered around the commune.
His gaze came to rest on a ramshackle barn used primarily for storage those days. The roof needed work, the walls were unstable, and only things that didn’t matter ever made their way inside. Or so the story’d gone back when he’d lived there.
Shadows and the smell of old hay and manure hung heavy in the air when he stepped through the door. A few animals, undoubtedly rodents, scuttled across the dirt floor ahead of him. Gage stood still and listened to the waves of silence, until finally his patience paid off and he caught a murmur of voices. Three of them, all pitched low and all tight with strain.
A smile tugged on his lips. They knew he was there. Not there in the barn necessarily, but on the grounds, in the vicinity.
He moved toward the rear of the structure. Three voices became two. A door creaked closed. He smelled smoke, forbidden in Krista’s world. Then he heard another creak and the voices ceased.
No way to avoid the screech of hinges when he opened the feed hatch and ducked through the opening into a long, sectioned-off room with similar hatches at either end.
Knute jumped, spun, and thinned his lips. “You don’t waste time, do you, bro?”
“Not generally.” Gage let the hatch fall shut. “Were you and your friends having fun?” He glanced at a pair of jacks on a rough slab of barn board. “Five card stud, Texas hold ’em, or strip?”
“Piss off.” Kicking the board with a booted foot, Knute sent the cards flying. “If you really need to know, and you really don’t, we were playing fish.”
“Not your usual high stakes game.”
A thick, stocky man, Knute might have been shorter than Gage by a couple of inches, but he probably outweighed him by twenty-plus pounds. Right then, his fists were clenched and, even by lantern light, his neck was turning visibly red.
His blue eyes glittered. “Word has it you brought trouble to our valley. I don’t appreciate that. Neither will my mother after the dust settles and she sees what’s what.”
Even knowing Knute as he did, Gage was surprised. “Word travels faster than it used to,” he remarked easily. “Have you got your mother’s house bugged these days?”
“Yeah right.” Knute snarled. “I talked to Robin, is all. She’s spooked on account of the vehicle that keeps creeping past her and the gate.”
Gage studied him. “What makes you think I brought that particular problem here? Don’t forget, I was a cop once upon a time.”
“And I built furniture.”
“Yeah?” He could almost smile at that. “For how long?”
“Seven, eight years. Left, made money, got bored, came back. Still build and sell when the mood strikes. Who’s the woman?”
“No one you need to know—not if you want to stay healthy.”
“So, either she’s got Ebola, or she’s living on the wrong side of the law. I’m thinking you value your life too much to risk the Ebola thing, so she must be a fugitive.” His ruddy face broke into a smile that fell just short of cruel. “An image comes to mind. What was her name? Lydia? Man, you always could pick ’em.”
Shoving his hands in his jacket pockets, Gage strolled away. He wasn’t going to get sucked into that. No fucking way. “You’re lucky I’m years past the nut-kicking stage of adolescence. This isn’t the past, this is the now, and what’s outside that gate didn’t wind up there because of us.”
“To hell with that, and you.” A scowl appeared. “You think only a cop or a US Marshal can figure things out? Well, I’m neither, but I’ve got a lot of things figured you haven’t got a clue about.”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of clues.” Gage watched Knute’s knuckles closely. “What I don’t have yet is a sense of where you and your card playing friends factor into the overall scheme of it. As I recall, there are a lot of hidey holes scattered throughout the commune. Caves, tunnels, even a store room or two.”
Knute’s features and tone turned suspicious. “You been poking around already, or is this you guessing?”
Gage merely offered him an unrevealing smile. “Talk to me, Knute. I can’t afford to have trouble come crashing through the gate. And I sure as hell don’t have time for games or old resentments.”
“Right then.” Smacking his right fist into his left palm, Knute stepped forward, bared his teeth. “Let’s get straight to it then, shall we…bro?”
…
Amber allowed her mind to drift. Krista had taken her to a room full of mats and floor cushions. Soft blue lights glowed from no particular source and turned her hostess’s features into a weird, elongated mask.
Two people, a man and a woman, hummed in the background. Amber couldn’t see them, but she heard their clothes rustling and smelled two different kinds of incense.
“Relax and empty your mind,” Krista instructed. She lit something in a pot and swung it like a pendulum in front of Amber’s nose. “This is to center yourself, body and soul. The teas you drank in my kitchen were to illuminate your mind and open all the closed doors inside it… You like Gage, yes?”
“What? Yes. I guess. He’s very…” Sexy. Hot. Reminding herself that anything she might have felt for Gage had no part in this, she settled on, “Uh…efficient.”
“Pah.” Krista batted the lie aside. “You want him. He has a great body and a beautiful face.”
Amber thought she heard one of the hummers sigh. She did the same inside. Heat rose in her cheeks. “Okay, fine, he’s more than efficient. But I don’t see how that relates to me accessing some obscure tidbit of information in my head that might help me locate my sister.”
“It doesn’t.” Krista continued to swing the simmering pot. “I was simply curious. He’s been my child from boyhood, after all.”
“He’s not a boy now.” Amber set her palms on the floor for balance. “I feel strange. Like my mind’s spinning in crazy circles.”
“Place your former boss’s face in one of those circles and hold it there. See it. Use it. Remember all you did to discover what was bad about him.”
&nb
sp; “Everything was bad.”
“What was worst?”
The humming stopped, but the circles in Amber’s mind continued to swirl and overlap. “He sold drugs and weapons for another man. The drugs were smuggled in from South America. Overseas sometimes, but he preferred to deal with the people in Colombia and Panama. One of his late wives came from Bogota. Her brother wanted her dead. He gave my boss a bonus shipment for making that happen. My boss didn’t mind. Plenty more where she’d come from.”
“And now what is buried in your mind begins to come out.”
“Maybe.” The circle of Amber’s thoughts spun faster. “I glanced at some of the files before I copied them, to be sure they were relevant. Certain words registered, but maybe I was too worried about being caught to put them together on a conscious level.” A dark haze slithered through her head. “What am I saying? Why don’t I know what I’m saying?”
“You know exactly what you are saying. And you know more than you realize. What about the business itself?”
“He owns property in Nevada and New Mexico. A man named Carlin did something for him, or with him. I can see the name Carlin, and I know there was a deal either done or pending. I’m just not… I had to get out, take what I could with me. I probably switched off the memory app in my head—that’s what my WPP contact suggested after the fact. I might have done it too late, but it wouldn’t matter anyway at this point. My boss and his think I know stuff, therefore, I need to be eliminated. Simple equation, even simpler solution.”
The air in the room altered, freshened briefly. Amber heard Gage’s voice, muffled and distant.
“What the hell are you doing, Krista?”
“Getting her to remember. I didn’t force this on her. Your lady friend has a strong will and an even stronger won’t. Information is buried inside.”
“That’s great. Or it would be if there was anyone she could trust enough to relay it to.”
“She can trust you.”
“Again, great, but who can I trust on her behalf?”
“You work for a man you believe in.”