The images made Carly angry, bringing with them as they did the unspoken implication that every woman should shroud herself from view, but she tried to be fair. "I suppose it's only natural for men denied regular contact with women to fantasize about them."
"You think so?" He turned then, knifing her with a glance. "I saw you once, when I was driving out to the prison. You were crossing Chennault Circle, walking over to one of the academic buildings. The sun set your hair aflame."
His gaze skimmed down her bare legs. When he brought it back to her face, Carly's heart bumped.
"Your hair wasn't all that was on fire that day. I started to burn, too. You were wearing black high heels. I remember wondering how the hell you could balance yourself on those thin spikes... and how those incredible legs would feel wrapped around me. I'm still burning, Carly."
Air clogged her lungs. She couldn't breathe, couldn't squash the thrill that centered in her belly, any more than she could tell Ryan McMann that he'd ignited a few late night fires in her blood, too. This wasn't the time or the place for such admissions.
Ruthlessly, she shoved aside the thought that they might not ever have another time or another place. It cost her, but she managed to keep her voice cool and impersonal.
"When did these vague fantasies, these general rumors, start to take on substance?"
Jesus! Ryan swung away again, ripped in half by stinging anger and grudging admiration, and damned if he was going to let her see either. He'd just admitted that she turned him inside out, and she sat there cool and composed and lawyerly right down to her toenails.
Not for the first time, the savage need to shatter that composure gripped him. He wanted to snatch her out of her chair, cover her mouth with his, devour her whole. The urge left him shaking. The vow he'd given not to touch her again, not to hurt her, left him aching.
"About three months ago," he ground out.
He forced his mind from Carly and what she did to him, took it back to that January day. Chill had nipped at the air. An early darkness had draped around him like a cloak when he stepped outside the education center to find Gator waiting for him. He'd walked right past Burns, ignoring the inmate's presence, ignoring, too, the salacious, audacious proposition Burns put to him as they cut across the compound through the deepening dusk.
There was this little club, Gator had sniggered, this handful of rich bitches who got their secret thrill by having sex with inmates. They'd heard about McMann. They wanted him to join their afternoon fun. They'd pay big bucks to climb onto his superstar cock. These weren't no trulls, Burns had assured him. No twenty-dollars-a-trick street whores. They was clean, clean and hot. McMann could take his pick, and Gator would expect only a small cut for setting it up.
"When did you begin to suspect that Billy Hopewell was being forced to... entertain the members of the club?"
"I don't think he was forced," Ryan said slowly, his vision locked on the gray lake surrounding their hilltop sanctuary. "I think he probably enjoyed it at first. He had the mind of a child, but he was a man, with a man's body and a man's needs. He would've been scared, would have had to be coaxed the first time or two, but that hot spill of pleasure would have seduced him, just as it would most men."
"But not you."
It wasn't a question, just a soft echo of his previous denial.
"Joy said Billy sobbed in her arms," Carly continued after a moment. "What changed him? What made him realize that having sex with those women was wrong?"
A vile taste filled Ryan's throat. He swallowed the gall and pushed around to face his inquisitor. "I did."
To her credit, Carly didn't blink.
"Isn't that rich?" he asked on a snarl of laughter. "Me, giving advice to the lovelorn. I don't even know what I said to the kid, exactly. I've tried to think back. God knows, I've tried. All I can remember is that he was reading one of his books, a second grade picture book, and something, some picture or word, triggered a thought. He asked me about girls, or that's what I thought he asked. He was stammering so badly that day I could barely understand him."
His mouth twisted with disgust.
"I think I fed him some crap about learning from my mistakes. I know I warned him to be careful who he had sex with, said he should know his partner and be gentle with her. Like a damned fool, I even suggested that his momma would want him to wait for the right woman to love."
He read neither pity nor condemnation in her face. Only that cool, detached calm. God, he hated it. Hated her at that moment. He folded his arms to hide the fact that his hands had balled into fists.
"Billy seemed to retreat inside himself after that. I couldn't get two coherent words out of him, couldn't even get him to look at me half the time. Once, I saw fingernail scratches on his neck, the kind a woman makes when she wants to mark a man. When I asked him about them, he cried."
Across the quiet of the kitchen, Carly watched him. Just watched him. He let out the air that was hurting his lungs.
"Then Elaine Dawson-Smith was shot, and I stopped trying to get Billy to talk at all."
"Why did he kill her? Why didn't he just walk away?"
"She wouldn't let him," Ryan shot back savagely. "How do you know?"
"I pounded the truth out of Gator this afternoon, before you showed up on the scene and he started singing a different tune. He told me your colonel refused to let a big, dumb inmate balk at playing the games she'd taught him. She insisted that Billy continue to meet her in the woods, seemed to delight in proving that she could make his body do what his confused mind had decided was wrong."
"God, that sounds like her."
From the quick, irritated way Carly clamped her mouth shut, Ryan gathered she hadn't intended to let that comment slip out.
"Yeah, just like her, if half of what Gator said is true. She'd taunt Billy, threaten to say he raped her. She'd even dig the barrel of the gun she carried in her purse under his chin and warn him she could make it look like self-defense if she put a bullet through his brain."
Carly tried to imagine how Billy could perform to Elaine's satisfaction with a gun under his chin. The woman must have followed her threats with an erotic stimulation that would raise the sap in a tree stump.
"She played her sadistic games with the kid once too often," McMann continued grimly. "He snapped, wrestled the gun away. I don't know if he meant to kill her. We'll never know. At the sound of the shot, Gator came running. He wiped the prints off the gun and hustled Billy away."
"Then he had to find a way to keep Billy from confessing and blowing the lid off his moneymaking schemes," Carly said slowly.
"You're quicker than I am, Counselor." Bitterness clawed at Ryan's gut. "I suspected Billy might have been involved in the colonel's death, but I didn't question the accident that killed him. Not until today, when one of the guards let drop that Gator had bribed him to put Billy on the same crew the day he went under the mower."
The silence in the kitchen deafened him. Ryan felt the weight of his own culpability in Billy's death crushing down on him. If he hadn't kept silent, would the kid be alive today? Carly's relentless questioning only added to his inner torment.
"Why didn't you tell the agents investigating Elaine Dawson-Smith's murder your suspicions?"
"I answered every question the cops asked me."
"Don't give me that bullshit, McMann. You knew about the Afternoon Club, but you kept quiet about it. You suspected that your friend was involved in it, that he might have killed Elaine Dawson-Smith, yet you let her husband take the rap for her murder."
His eyes went hard and flat. "You charged him, Carly. You, and the system you represent. Not me."
Incensed, she sprang out of the chair. "Based on evidence you provided. Unless you lied about seeing Smith's car on River Road."
"I didn't lie. He was there. For all I knew at the time, he could have killed his wife."
"He could have, but you suspected differently, didn't you, McMann? Didn't you?"
His sto
ny silence made her see red.
"How far would you have let it go?" She strode up to him, the air around her vibrating with the fury that the river had temporarily washed away. "If Billy hadn't died, would you have let the system you despise so much crucify Michael Smith? "
"Come off it, Counselor. You and I both know that it's doubtful Smith's case would ever have come to trial. If it had, he would have walked. It was his word against that of a convicted felon."
"Is that right? What if I tell you that the prosecutor would have suppressed your conviction under the rules of evidence? "
"Yeah, sure. Just like the judge in my trial suppressed the past sexual activities of the girl I took up to that hotel room. It doesn't matter what the rules say, Carly. Lawyers can find a way around them."
"I can't speak to the incompetency of the judge who presided over your trial, nor to the ethics of your defense team," she said icily. "I can tell you that if you'd completed your rehabilitation, the military justice system wouldn't allow evidence of your prior conviction."
A frown slashed across his forehead. "The jury wouldn't have needed evidence," he argued after a moment. "In most people's minds, my name brings an instant image of sordid sex and a young girl's death."
"You flatter yourself, McMann. Not everyone knows either your name or your past. I never heard of you until I started this investigation. Think about that the next time you decide to hold to your own code of silence and play God with another man's life!"
Scooping the sodden bundle of clothes out of the sink, she strode past him to the back door. The screen banged shut behind her.
Chapter Sixteen
Hammered by Carly's parting shot and his own bitter regrets, Ryan was driven by a savage urge to do something, anything. He needed occupation. He needed to keep busy while he regained a measure of control over himself and the jagged guilt that ripped through him whenever he thought of Billy's needless death.
He made his first order of business a search of the detached garage, where he collected everything that might come in useful, including a gallon of dark green paint and a brush. Leaving the paint on the back stoop, he went upstairs to appropriate a sheet from the girl's room. Stunned by the mounds of garments apparently necessary to clothe one young girl, he dragged a daisy-trimmed sheet off the bed.
It took only a few strokes to outline a giant S O S on the flat fabric, a few more to fill the letters in. The last rays of a hot, traitorous sun burned his back as Ryan climbed out onto the eaves. With the sureness he'd gained from his months of wielding a staple gun, he crawled up the steep roof to nail the distress flag in place.
That done, he sat back on his heels and took a 360-degree inspection. His stomach ratcheted tighter with each quarter turn. Jesus! They might be sitting in the middle of a lake or a vast, flooded reservoir. Patches of green showed here and there, but for the most part there was only water, endless water.
Turning his back on the low-hanging sun, Ryan squinted to the east, searching for the city's skyline, for the red-checkered water tower that marked Maxwell, for anything that might give him an idea of how far they'd come downriver. He couldn't find any familiar landmarks.
The sun was an orange-red ball afloat on a lake of gold by the time he crawled off the roof. He didn't need the visual reminder of the time. His rumbling stomach had already made itself heard.
Not knowing how long the electricity had been off, he wouldn't trust the contents of the refrigerator. Nor could he trust himself to talk to Carly without a return of the anger that had seared them both earlier. Stiff and silent, they shared a dinner of canned chickpeas, canned asparagus, and canned tuna. Dusk was falling when Carly shoved back from the kitchen table. She still wore the marks of her fight with the river on her body. Bone-deep exhaustion ringed her eyes and gave her face a grayish cast. The scrapes on her arms showed raw against her creamy skin.
"I'm going upstairs to get some rest. I'll take the boy's room."
"Fine."
"Do we need to take turns mounting a watch, in case the rescue choppers or boats come looking for us?"
"If they come looking, I'll hear them."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. Get some sleep." She left with a curt nod. Ryan let her go. He wasn't ready to admit she was right, that he shouldn't have tried to protect Billy with his silence.
The truth he'd pummeled out of Gator this afternoon was still too raw. Pushing away from the table, he decided to make another sweep through the house for items to add to their store of emergency supplies.
His earlier search of the garage had turned up a coil of rope, rubber hip boots, a small hand ax, and a box of traffic flares in addition to the paint. Now he took time to go through cupboards that he'd only skimmed through the first time around. From the kitchen cabinets he extracted more salves, liniment, and a snake-bite kit. A shelf in the living room yielded a high-powered boom box, but no batteries to operate it. Ryan took the radio to the kitchen on the off chance that the batteries from the flashlight he'd discovered earlier would fit.
They didn't. Rolling the two D-cells back and forth on his palm, he frowned at the silent radio. He'd take a look at that little auxiliary generator that powered the water pump tomorrow. Maybe he could hook it up to the boom box instead.
He didn't like being cut off like this, didn't like not knowing the forecast or the situation upriver or how long they'd have to wait until the waters subsided enough to walk out of here or help arrived. If the assistant warden had survived the wall of water that crashed down on her, she would have started the search by now. If not...
Ryan's fist closed over the batteries. Gator sure as hell wouldn't want them rescued. He'd probably climbed into the back of that ton-and-a-half praying the river would swallow McMann whole. That way he could pin the Afternoon Club on a dead man. Elaine Dawson-Smith's murder and Billy's "accident," too.
A shudder passed through Ryan when he thought of what would await him when he got back. The accusations. The denials. The inescapable fact that he'd withheld all knowledge of the happenings in the woods. That alone could bust his parole, put him back under Bolt's control.
Christ! He'd been so close, so damned close, to shaking Alabama's red clay off his boots and hitting the road to nowhere.
With a savage oath, Ryan shoved the batteries back into the flashlight. Cupboard doors slammed as he searched through them again, one by one, until he found the bottle he was looking for. Peach brandy. Not exactly his drink of choice, but at this moment he didn't care what kind of coating the kick wore.
A small, muzzy sound dragged Carly from sleep. Groggy and disoriented, she blinked at the wall-sized poster of Michael Jordan. The basketball star's ten-megawatt smile flashed down at her through the moonlight streaming in the open window.
She lay still for long moments, awash in boneless lethargy, contemplating that smile. A small corner of her mind listened for a repeat of the sound. The larger, more sensible portion pushed her back toward sleep. She'd almost drifted off again when she heard it again, a thin, distant cry.
A bird? An animal trapped by the rising water? Unbidden, the hairy muzzle and yellowed eyes of her grandfather's mule flashed into her mind. Carly couldn't bring herself to hope the animal had been swept away, but it certainly wouldn't break her heart if the river took some of the pure, cussed meanness out of her.
Which led her to wonder how far and how fast the flood had spread, and to worry about the young couple working the Judge's farm. Were they safe? Had they moved the horses to high ground? Would they
trunk to cart the family albums and the Judge's law books upstairs?
And what was happening with her family? The river had broken through its banks west of the city, bypassing the heavily populated areas. Still, Carly couldn't help worrying about her mother and the Judge, about Dave and Allie and the kids. Only now, with her body slowly regaining its strength and her mind working free of its exhaustion, did she realize how worried they must be about her, too. The
last sight anyone had of her was just before the river claimed both her and Ryan.
Thoroughly awake now, Carly tried to think of some way to let her family and officials at the base know she and McMann were safe. Unless some carrier pigeons came home to roost, she didn't see how she could communicate with anyone outside their water-shrouded world.
Rolling over, she punched the pillow. She wished she knew how far downriver they'd come. Would the searchers look this far, miles from the base? Would anyone? The area below the dam had already been evacuated, but patrols would still run checks for stranded livestock or trapped motorists. Surely someone would see their SOS.
She was still trying to reassure herself when the cry came again, small and sad, like the wind whispering through winter branches. Sighing, she pushed off the bed. She had to see what it was.
Her bedroom looked over the pecans and hack-berry trees shading the front of the house. The sound, Carly discovered after a few moments of listening at the screen, came from the back. Tugging on her borrowed shorts under the rumpled shirt she'd slept in, she made for the hall.
Following the breeze to the open window, Carly swallowed a gasp at the moonlit vista spread out below. Beyond the windbreak, the all-encompassing river eddied around their hilltop sanctuary, white gold and shimmering in the moonlight. The farmhouse and its yard seemed to float on an endless sea.
The scene held a wild sort of peace, a beauty all its own. Carly might have been seduced by the rippling water if not for the debris that dotted its surface. An uprooted tree floated by in the distance. Closer in, the main current carried several old tires on its swift moving back... and carried as well the sound of that tiny, mewling cry.
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