Shotgun Daddy

by Harper Allen

  Momentarily his gaze darkened. “Sure hope she’s fit to come home from the hospital tomorrow,” he muttered. “Can you believe I used to think of myself as a loner? I didn’t realize that woman was my soul until I almost lost her a couple of months ago.”

  He took a breath. “But that’s another story, and you were asking about Mary. She was Navajo, of course, and like I told you before, she wouldn’t let me quit my rehab, not even when I was at my lowest. Greta once said that if Mary were alive she’d look her up and thank her for giving me back my life.”

  “So you knew she’d died?”

  Del nodded. “I knew she’d died. I never knew she’d given birth to a child.” His jaw tightened. “Mary and I only had a single night together, but it wasn’t a one-night stand for either of us. We were two shattered people reaching out for something that would give meaning to the hell we were going through. She’d found out she was a widow, and I was living with the fear that I could never be a man again. Mary proved me wrong. She likely broke every rule in the book by coming to my bed, but she gave me back my faith in myself as a man. I never knew until tonight that I’d given her what she most wanted—a child.”

  He brought his hand up to cover his eyes for a moment. When he brought it down, his gaze was suspiciously bright. “She left the V.A. hospital soon after. Her occasional letters stopped coming after a while, and the ones I sent to her were returned ‘address unknown.’ A few years later I hired a private investigator to track her down, and he found out she’d died. He asked me if I wanted him to get more information, but I told him it wasn’t necessary.”

  “You blame yourself for that, don’t you,” Caro said.

  “Yeah, I blame myself,” Del said softly. “I blame myself for not being there for my son while he was growing up.” He looked at her. “You think it’s too late for us to have some kind of relationship?”

  Her throat tightened. “Gabe’s right—you do need some sense knocked into you, Lieutenant. Can’t you see that the two of you already have one?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Maybe we do, at that. He’s given me a beautiful granddaughter, that’s for sure. And he’s going to bring Emily back to us, sweetheart, don’t you worry—”

  The shrill ringing of the wall-mounted telephone beside him drowned out the rest of his sentence. Dropping her hand, Del turned swiftly and reached for the instrument.

  “Double B, Hawkins speaking.” His parade-ground bark was tinged with the same electric fear that Caro could feel, but almost immediately his tense posture sagged. “Tye. No, I thought you were someone else. I don’t have time to explain, but Susannah can fill you in on the situation. She’s with Tess and the kids at—”

  Abruptly he fell silent. As long as she and Del had been talking together, Caro thought numbly, she’d been able to keep her terror under control. Now all that was stopping her from racing from the house and frantically screaming out her daughter’s name was the knowledge that giving in to hysteria wouldn’t help Emily.

  He’d gained a son and lost a granddaughter in the space of an hour, she thought through her pain. What enemy from his past could hate him so much as to want to inflict such a carefully orchestrated revenge on him?

  Somewhere under the blanket of fear that fogged her mind, a small part of her brain was still struggling to do its job—as if, she decided later when she reflected upon it, there was a single pinpoint of rationality inside her that knew Emily’s life depended on her mother’s ability to make some kind of sense of a senseless situation. It was that small part of her brain that made itself heard now.

  There are only two men in the world whose love and loyalty to Del could have turned to such corroded hatred. The man who once thought of Del as a brother, and the man who believed himself to be Del’s son. Both those men are supposed to be dead…but what if one of them—

  “That was Tyler.” Del hung up the phone and turned to her. “He’s just come back from the morgue. It’s the damnedest thing—he says that although the body the federales discovered was dressed in the clothes Jess was wearing when you saw him killed, it’s definitely not—”

  “But what if one of them isn’t?” Caro whispered through tense lips. She got to her feet and pushed past a startled Del. “I’m calling Joseph Tahe at the gate. We need to find Gabe right away.”

  Even as her shaking hand reached for the receiver, the phone rang out. Before Del could react, she snatched it up, barely giving the metallic voice on the other end of the line a chance to speak before she interrupted.

  “The deception’s over, so turn off whatever device it is you’re using to disguise your voice,” she said harshly. She fought back the nausea that was threatening to overwhelm her and gripped the phone so tightly that her knuckles whitened.

  “What have you done with Emily, Jess?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Crawford picked the one area of the Double B spread that the searchers might miss, for his rendezvous with us,” Del muttered as the Jeep he and Caro were in—a vehicle modified for his use with hand controls replacing the foot pedals—nearly bottomed out on a slab of rock. “This whole area looks deceptively flat. You can sweep a high-powered light over it and still not see that the land dips down into this wash and then up again.”

  He maneuvered around another rocky slab. “But that’s just as well. We can’t risk anyone stumbling upon us, not after Jess’s threat about what he’ll do to Emily if he thinks we’ve double-crossed him. You’ll pass on my message to Gabe for me?”

  Caro didn’t trust herself to speak. Mutely she nodded, fresh tears slipping down her cheeks and the nightmarish telephone conversation she’d had with Jess twenty minutes ago replaying itself in her mind.

  “I haven’t done anything to Emily—not yet.” Even though she’d already guessed Leo’s identity, at the sound of the metallically distorted tones changing in midsentence to Jess’s familiar voice, she’d felt as if she’d just received a blow. “And I don’t want to, Caro. You know how I feel about her.”

  “I know how you said you felt about her. When you asked me to marry you, you said you would love her as much as I did,” she’d replied. Her control had broken. “Please, Jess, just let her go! If it’s a hostage you want, I’ll take her place!”

  “I’ll trade Emily’s life in return for her grandfather’s.” Suddenly his voice was no longer familiar, but coldly distant. “You were smart enough to know that it was me making this call, but maybe you haven’t figured out everything. Do you need me to tell you who I’m talking about?”

  “You’re talking about Del.” As if Jess could see her, she’d shaken her head. “You don’t want to do this. You’re not a—” She’d paused. When she’d spoken again there’d been dull horror in her voice. “But of course you’re a killer. I saw a man die on that truck, and the federales found a body dressed in your clothes. Who was he, Jess—some hitchhiker unlucky enough to bear a passing resemblance to you after your paid thugs hid half his face with a gag and a blindfold?”

  He’d ignored her question. “The terms are that you and Del come alone to meet me, and although I meant what I said about not wanting to hurt Emily, if I think you’ve crossed me I’ll kill her without a qualm, understand?”

  “I—I understand,” she’d replied. “Where do we meet you?”

  Instead of giving the directions to her, he’d asked to speak with Del. The ex-marine’s carved features as he’d taken the phone had told Caro he’d gotten the gist of the conversation from her end of it, including the identity of the caller, and he’d listened without interruption to Jess’s instructions.

  The Jeep jolted over another rock, and Caro glanced at Hawkins. He was going to his death, she thought. He’d accepted that fact like the marine he’d once been.

  “It’s me he wants, and it’s me he’ll get,” he’d said quietly as they’d left the house. “Something obviously snapped in him when I told him that final time that I wasn’t his father. He must have seen it as a rejection he coul
d only deal with by destroying me, and he concocted this whole elaborate scheme toward that one, single-minded end. That’s why I believe him when he says he’ll let you and Emily go.”

  His jaw tightened. “Tell Greta her old mustang loved her more than she’ll ever know. And tell Gabe—” He’d hesitated and then gone on, his tone low. “Tell my son he grew into the man I always thought he could be.”

  And into the man I might have spent the rest of my life with, Caro thought achingly as Del brought the Jeep to a stop, if only I hadn’t destroyed any chance of that by trying to keep his daughter from him.

  He had said she’d done the right thing. That didn’t cancel out the fact that she’d broken trust with him. Something had happened to Gabe on the Dinetah tonight—something that had nothing to do with his meeting with Alice Tahe, something that she’d seen in his eyes as soon as she’d walked into the kitchen of the Double B and met his gaze. Whatever it had been, it had changed him from a strong man who’d always fought his battles alone, to an unbeatable warrior, ready to take his place as a leader of other warriors.

  He found his roots. Even as the startled thought crossed her mind, Caro knew it was true. Gabe had come home to his roots—not only those he’d discovered on the Dinetah, but the ones nurtured so long ago on the Double B by an ex-marine who’d seen himself in the rebellious teen. And she had no one to blame but herself for the fact that the life he would grow from those roots wouldn’t include her.

  But it would include Emily. Gabe’s father was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that it would.

  “This is where he told us he’d be.” As they exited the Jeep, Del frowned. “Like I said, this wash is hidden. But even if Crawford only uses his running lights to illuminate the scene, they’ll be instantly visible to anyone on the—”

  Without warning, the barren landscape of the wash was suddenly bathed in an eerie red glow. Del looked toward the now-visible shape of a parked truck and the figure advancing toward them.

  “I should have guessed he’d take that into account. He’s fitted his headlights with red gels to cut the glare.”

  Caro didn’t reply. She was too busy straining her gaze for any indication of her daughter, but as Jess drew nearer she didn’t see Emily in his arms.

  “I was watching to make sure you weren’t being followed,” Jess began, but she didn’t let him finish.

  “Where’s my child?” Only Del’s restraining hand on her arm prevented her from covering the twenty or so feet separating her from the man she’d once considered marrying. “Where’s Emily, Jess? Why isn’t she with you?”

  “Because I learned a thing or two about handovers from those ruffians I hired in Mexico,” he retorted. “She’s in the truck, and when I’m finished here, I’ll let you go to her, Caro. If I’d been carrying her, I couldn’t be sure that while I was handing her over to you, Del wouldn’t try something.”

  “And put a child and a woman in jeopardy to save my own skin?” Del’s smile was wintry. “Let’s get on with this, Crawford. I’m here and unarmed like you stipulated. You told me on the phone this was to be an execution, so where do you want me to stand?”

  “Crawford? You only used to use our last names when you hauled us up on the carpet over something, Del.”

  Jess flashed the little-boy grin that Caro had seen him give so often in the past when he’d realized he’d overstepped a line. Under these circumstances, she thought sickly, it was grotesque. His grin faltered as Del remained silent.

  “It didn’t have to end like this. You knew how much I looked up to you when I was a kid—how much I still looked up to you. Why was it so damn important to set me straight on my belief you were my father? Why did you have to take that away from me?”

  “Because what you believed wasn’t the truth,” Del said tersely. “And although I made my share of mistakes with the teens in my charge, lying to them was never one of them.”

  Caro couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “For God’s sake, Jess—if this is all about how much you admired and loved Del, how does killing him fit in?” she burst out. “How did you let this get so out of control?”

  She shook her head in confusion, still finding it hard to reconcile the reason they were here with her memories of the man she had thought she’d known.

  “I know when you take up something you sometimes let it become an obsession,” she said helplessly. “Maybe that’s what happened here. But at some point you must have woken up to reality and been horrified at what you were planning, even if Steve Dixon was okay with being a party to it for a price.”

  “Steve?” Slowly the grin spread over Jess’s features again. “Man, that’s sweet! I wasn’t sure you’d suspect him enough to look at the books, but just on the off chance, I overrode the security systems and linked him to the Dos Abejas payouts. Hell, I created that software. The security kept out every other hacker in the world, but not me. And the bastard was stealing from me, you know. Crawford Solutions made Stevie a rich man, and he still couldn’t resist putting his hand in the cookie jar.”

  “Hold on a second.” For the first time since they’d arrived, Del’s composure cracked slightly. “Dammit, Crawford, he admitted to everything. He used my wife as a hostage to get away. Are you trying to tell me he was innocent?”

  “Like I say, the Milagro thefts were his, so no, not totally innocent.” Jess shook his head. “Beats me why he would admit to the Dos Abejas ones, though. The Swiss account they went into was mine, not his. Money never was that important to me, but I’m a little too old to want to start from nothing all over again. Of course—” he gave Caro a small smile “—by the time the authorities get the necessary permissions from the Swiss banking authorities, that particular account will have been closed out.”

  She didn’t smile back at him. “As soon as we showed Dixon those payouts—payouts he knew he hadn’t made—he must have realized that the only person who could have framed him like that was you, and that somehow you’d faked your own death,” she said slowly. “He didn’t run because he was guilty, he ran because he was scared of the noose he could see tightening around his neck.”

  In the red glow dimly illuminating the scene it was hard to see Jess’s expression. “Steve brought it on himself,” he retorted, “just like Andrew Scott did. Dixon’s lucky he didn’t end up an unidentified body in a Mexican morgue, too.”

  He shrugged. “Scott came to me after he’d gone to the feds, and told me he’d figured out that I’d reacted the way I had when he brought the Dos Abejas payouts to my attention because I’d made them myself. He was almost as good a hacker as I am,” Jess added with a frown. “He said if I gave him a piece of the action, he’d disappear and the feds would never hear from their whistle-blower again. I agreed, and told him I’d give him the money at the villa in Mexico.”

  Caro closed her eyes, seeing again the bound figure in the back of the truck, seeing again the shot that she’d believed had ended Jess’s life, but that had really killed the man who’d tried to blackmail him.

  Beside her, Del drew in a harsh breath. “Scott deserved what he got. Dixon deserved what he got. How far does your twisted logic go, Crawford? Did Caro deserve to be run off the road by you and left for dead on the Dinetah? What did she ever do to you?”

  “She gave you a granddaughter,” Jess said with a crooked smile. “With the snoop software I’ve recently developed for certain unnamed buyers, there isn’t a secret in the world I can’t unearth. I knew about Mary Morgan months ago. I realized she’d borne your son, Del, and I knew that son was Gabe. I’d already pried the truth of Emily’s paternity from Larry Kanin. The man’s no genius, but when his ex-fiancée gave birth nine months after leaving his chalet with Gabe Riggs, even he could guess at what had happened between them. Anyway, whether you knew it or not, Caro had given you a granddaughter and that put her in your camp as far as I was concerned. You still don’t understand just how much I hate you now, do you, Hawkins.”

  “I’m begin
ning to,” Del said slowly. “But I don’t believe it’s because you finally learned I wasn’t your father.”

  “Bravo, Lieutenant Hawkins, bravo,” Jess said, an odd note in his voice. “You’re right, it wasn’t because I learned you weren’t my father. It was—”

  “…all of us Double B’s were given leave together. That shy little girl from your hometown came all the way out to the coast to see you, and you took her and us out to dinner one night…”

  An icy hand seemed to wrap itself around Caro’s heart as Daniel Bird’s words came back to her, and she completed Jess’s sentence for him before he could finish.

  “It was because you knew Del had killed your father,” she said. “You’re Zeke Harmon’s son, aren’t you, Jess. And although he was a murderer and a rapist, he was still your father and you intend to avenge his death.”

  “His death and his betrayal at the hands of a man he thought of as a brother,” Jess replied hoarsely, the gun in his hand wavering. “He was just as much a part of Beta Beta Force as MacLeish and Daniel and yourself, Hawkins, but they turned their backs on him and you hunted him down like an animal—hunted him down and murdered him.”

  His voice shook. “I think I always knew you really weren’t my father, but I looked up to you so much that I allowed myself to hang on to the illusion as long as possible. When you finally forced me to let go of the lie I’d been telling myself all my life, I knew it was time to find out the truth. You’ll never know how I felt when I realized that the man I’d idolized for so long had been responsible for my real father’s death.”

  “Harmon was a killer,” Del said incredulously. “For God’s sake, Jess, he raped your mother! If I hunted him down like an animal, it was because he’d turned into one.”

  “He was a Double B!” Jess said thickly. “I’m the son of a Double B, dammit, just as much as Gabe is! But you took that away from me, Hawkins, and now you’re going to have to answer to me for what you did in the jungle all those years ago!”