by Diana Palmer
Darby was upset when she had him saddle the horse for her.
“You can’t do this,” he protested as she loaded a small pouch, along with a bag of biscuits and a thermos of coffee that Mavie, protesting, too, had made for her to take along. “You can’t let her do it!” he raged at the two brothers standing grimly nearby.
“Yes, they can, Darby,” Morie told him gently. “I won’t let Joe kill Mallory. No matter what I have to do to save him.”
“It’s not right.”
She smiled. “Yes, it is. You just send up a prayer or two for me, okay?”
“Dozens,” he promised grimly. “I wish I’d known who you were at the start. I’d never have let you go riding fence in the first place.”
“If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten to know Joe Bascomb and I wouldn’t have a prayer of convincing him to release Mallory. Things work the way they’re supposed to. There’s a plan, and a purpose, to everything,” she said, shocking herself because she remembered saying that to Joe.
She mounted up gracefully and turned the gelding. Rain was peppering down over her slicker and wide-brimmed hat. It was getting dark, too, but she wouldn’t let that deter her. She had a flashlight in her pack. “Try not to worry. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.” She had a cell phone in the pocket of her slicker. She patted it.
“If we don’t hear from you in an hour, we’re coming in,” Tank said quietly.
She nodded. “Fair enough.”
She turned the horse again and galloped off toward the line cabin. All she had was hope. But hope was the very last thing anyone ever lost.
MORIE PULLED UP AT THE line cabin and dismounted. She took the biscuits and thermos and money out of her saddlebag, along with her flashlight.
She noticed movement at the curtain. She’d guessed right. Joe was in that cabin. She wondered if he had Mallory there, and prayed that he did. If he’d already killed Mallory, her life would be worth nothing.
She went up the steps and opened the door. She looked down the barrel of a loaded shotgun.
“What are you doing here?” Joe Bascomb demanded hotly.
She felt sick at her stomach, and she was scared to death. But she didn’t dare show it. She only smiled. “Brought you something.”
He blinked. The gun wavered. “Brought me something?”
She nodded.
He hesitated. She glanced around the single room. Mallory wasn’t there. Her heart sank. What if he was already dead?
The shotgun barrel lowered. “What did you bring?” he asked.
“Is Mallory Kirk alive?” she asked.
He drew in a long, worried breath. He stared at her.
“Is he alive?” she asked again, more unsteadily.
He put on the safety and laid the shotgun across the long, rough wooden table. “Yes,” he said after an eternity of seconds.
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Where is he?”
“Tied up against a tree, some distance from here,” he said curtly. “Where he won’t be found. He’s roughed up—he fought me when I tried to take him from here. But he ain’t dead. Yet,” he added menacingly. “Why are you here? How did you know where to find me?”
“I didn’t,” she replied. “I was hoping you might come back here. It’s where we met, remember?”
He blinked. “Yeah.”
She put the leather pouch and the bags on the table. She opened the bag and produced two freshly buttered biscuits with strawberry preserves on them, along with a thermos of hot coffee. She presented them to him.
“Mavie’s biscuits.” His voice almost broke. He took one and bit into it and groaned with pleasure. He sipped coffee with the same expression. “Living in the wild, you miss some things so bad!” he exclaimed. He looked at her and winced. “Dangerous, you coming out here! Why did they let you?”
“They couldn’t stop me,” she said simply. She looked him in the eye. “I love Mallory Kirk.”
That made him uncomfortable. He averted his eyes. “He ain’t nothing to look at.”
“It’s what’s inside him that makes him the man he is,” she replied. “He’s honest and hardworking and he never lies.”
He laughed coldly. “That Bruner woman said she loved me,” he said coldly. “I met her after my wife died. She wanted me to make her some keys. She said that man I killed owed her a ton of money and it was in his house in a box. She told him lies about his girlfriend to make him hit her. She knew the woman would call me for help, because I was close by.”
“Good heavens,” Morie exclaimed.
“So I got her out of the room and tried to make him tell me about the money in the box, but he fought me and I had to kill him. Gelly said it was all right…she had a way to make even more money,” he said in a faraway tone. “She told me about the jeweled egg, but I already knew because Tank had showed it to me once. I didn’t realize how much it was worth. So she took Mallory’s keys and asked me to make her duplicates, to get into the Kirks’ house and that curio cabinet. She put them back and Mallory thought he’d misplaced them. I had to sneak into the smith’s shop at night and risk capture to do it for her. She said she’d get that egg and sell it and then we’d have money to run away. She got a cowboy to help her. Then she goes and sells the stuff to a fence and gets arrested, and I don’t get a dime, because Mallory Kirk called in a private detective and he blew the lid off the case!”
“My father called the detective,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was blamed for the theft of the egg in the first place.”
“You were?” he exclaimed.
She nodded. “By Gelly. And Bates, the cowboy who planted it in my bag.”
“I hate that,” he said slowly. “I never meant to hurt you. You been kind to me. Most people don’t care.”
“I’m sorry for you, I really am,” she told him. “But killing Mallory won’t solve any problems. It will just guarantee you the death penalty.”
He laughed again, a cold, chilling sound, and his eyes were opaque. “I won’t go back. I killed that man deliberately,” he said, his eyes suddenly as cold as his voice. “He wouldn’t tell me where the money was. I was going to have money to take Gelly places and buy her nice things. She said she loved me more than anybody in the world. Nobody loved me since my wife died….”
Her heart stilled in her chest. She’d never known that Joe was involved with the woman. She would have bet that the Kirks didn’t know, either.
“Did you know that she had a record?” she asked. “She was arrested twice and charged with theft, but she managed to get out of going to trial. She won’t be that lucky this time.”
“She said she had another way to get money, since this one fell through,” he muttered. “She was going to claim that Mallory got her pregnant.” He shook his head, while Morie stood frozen in place. “But after I kidnapped him, he told me he taped the conversation she had with him when she said it would be a lie but she could make people believe her. Can you believe she’d be that stupid?!”
Morie relaxed. She’d worried for a second that it could be true. It was such a relief! But she still had to save Mallory….
“I brought you something else,” she said, and indicated the leather pouch.
He frowned. He put down the thermos cup and opened the pouch. He caught his breath. “This is a fortune!”
“Not really. It’s just five thousand. It’s part of my inheritance. My father owns a big cattle ranch in Texas. His mother left me the money.” She moved closer. “It will help you get away, won’t it? So will you let Mallory go?”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “The bills are marked, huh?”
She threw up her hands. “How do you mark bills?” she exclaimed, exasperated. “I came straight from the bank to the airport, and I told no body what I was going to do with the money. I didn’t even tell my folks that I took it out of my account!”
He relaxed then. He took the money in his hands and looked at it with pure fascination. He’d d
one so many things, tried so hard, to get enough to get out of this county alive. Now he had the means. All he had to do was leave, now….
“Were you followed?” he asked her at once.
She shook her head. “I made them promise.”
He was thinking, planning, plotting. The money would buy him a cheap car, and clothes and food. He could run to Montana, where he had other friends who would hide him. He could get away.
He turned back to her and picked up the shotgun. For an instant, her heart shivered as she wondered if he’d kill her now that she’d given him the cash.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said in an awkward way. “I just want to get away. I can’t go back to jail. I can’t be locked up.” He stared at the money. “I hit my mother with a tire iron,” he recalled in a faraway, shocked tone. “I never meant to hurt her. I never meant to hurt anybody. I get these rages. I go blind mad and I can’t control it. I can’t help myself.” He closed his eyes. “Maybe I’d be better off dead, you know? I wouldn’t hurt anybody else. Poor old Mallory…he was kind to me once, gave me a helping hand because Tank asked him to, after we got out of military service. Tank was my friend. I lied to him. I told him I was framed.” He sighed. “I wasn’t framed. I meant to kill the man. I’ve done terrible things. Things I never wanted to do.” He looked at her. “But I can’t let them take me alive, you understand? I can’t be locked up.”
She grimaced. “If you gave yourself up, maybe they could get a psychologist who could help you….”
“I killed a man,” he reminded her. “And kidnapped another one. That means feds will come in. They’ll track me all the way to hell. I can get away for a while. But in the end, the feds will hunt me down. I knew one, once. He was like a bulldog. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, just hunted until he found the man he was looking for. A lot of them are like that.” He took the other biscuit and the thermos of coffee. “Thanks,” he said. “For the food and coffee. For the money.” He hesitated. “For listening. Nobody ever really listened to me except my wife. I beat her….” He groaned. “God knows why she didn’t leave me. I never deserved her. She got cancer. They said she knew she had it and she wouldn’t get treatment. I knew why. She loved me but she couldn’t go on living with me, and she couldn’t leave me. Damn me! I don’t deserve to live!”
“That’s not for you to say,” she told him. “Life is a gift.”
He swallowed, hard. He looked at her with eyes that were already dead. “My mama knew there was something wrong with me when I was little. She said so. But she had too much pride to tell anybody. Thought it was like saying there was something wrong with her. I could never learn nothing, you know? I quit school because they made fun of me. I saw words backward.”
She went closer, totally unafraid. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He ground his teeth together. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this. Wasn’t your problem. Mallory’s a half mile down the trail,” he said after a minute, “off to the right, in some bushes. He’ll be hard to find, because I didn’t want him found.”
“I’ll find him,” she said with certainty.
He started to the door, hesitated, looked back at her. “Damn, he’s a lucky man!” he said through his teeth. He closed the door and melted into the night.
MORIE DIDN’T WASTE a minute. She rushed out, mounted the horse and turned him down the narrow trail that she knew from weeks of riding fence. Mallory was out there somewhere, getting soaked in this cold rain. God knew how long he’d been tied up. He would certainly need some sort of medical attention. It was almost freezing, unseasonably cold. She felt her heartbeat shaking her as she worried about not being able to find him. She could call for help, but if Joe was still around and watching, he might think she’d sold him out and he might try to kill Mallory and her in revenge. She didn’t dare take the risk.
She rode down the path for what she judged was a half mile, and she dismounted, tied her horse to a tree and started beating through the underbrush. But she found nothing. What if Joe had lied? What if he’d really killed Mallory, and she was going to stumble over his body instead of the living, breathing man? She felt terror rise in her throat like bile.
Maybe she’d misjudged the distance. Maybe it was farther away!
She mounted again and rode a little ways. Somewhere there was a sound, an odd sound, like a crack of thunder. But it was just drizzle. There was no storm. She shrugged it off. She was upset and hearing things. She dismounted and started searching off the path again. It was slow going. She could hardly see her hand in front of her face, and the flashlight was acting funny. She searched again and again, but she found nothing. There were trees, all around, but none with a man tied to it.
“Damn,” she muttered, frantic to find Mallory. What if Bascomb had lied? What if he’d killed Mallory and dumped his body someplace else? If a man could kill, couldn’t he lie, too?
She swallowed, hard, and fought tears. She had to think positively. Joe wasn’t lying. Mallory was alive. He was somewhere around here. And she was going to find him! She had to find him. She had no life left without him.
She rode a few more yards, dismounted and searched off the path again. But, again, she found nothing. She repeated the exercise, over and over again, fearful that she might get careless and miss him. She could get help when it turned light, but that might be too late…!
She went down the path to a turn in the road, dismounted and walked through the underbrush. The glow of the flashlight began to give off a dull yellow light. She’d forgotten to change the batteries! She shook it and hit it, hoping the impact might prop it up for a few more precious minutes, but it didn’t. Even as she watched, the light began to fade.
“Oh, damn!” she wailed to herself. “And I haven’t got any spare batteries. Of all the stupid things to do!”
There was a sound. She stopped. She listened. Rain was getting louder on the leaves, but there was some muffled sound. Her heart soared.
“MALLORY!” SHE CALLED. Damn Joe, she wasn’t going to let Mal die because she was afraid to raise her voice.
The muffled sound came again, louder, to her right.
She broke through the bushes wildly, blindly, not caring if they tore her skin, if they ruined her clothing, if they broke bones. She trampled over dead limbs, through patchy weeds, toward a thicket where tall pine trees were growing.
“Mallory!” she called again.
“Here.” His voice was muffled and bone-tired and heavy.
She pushed away some brush that had been piled up around a tree. And there was Mallory. Bareheaded, pale, tied to the tree with his arms behind him, sitting. He was soaking wet. His face was bruised. He looked worn to the bone. But when he saw Morie, his eyes were so brilliant with feeling that she caught her breath.
She managed to untie the bandanna that Joe had used to gag him with.
He coughed. “Got anything to drink?” he asked huskily. “Haven’t had water for a day and a half….”
“No,” she groaned. “I’m so sorry!” She thought with anguish of the thermos of coffee she’d given Joe Bascomb.
“I’ll get you loose,” she choked out. She got around the tree and tried to untie the bonds, but the nylon rope was wet and it wouldn’t budge.
“Pocketknife. Left pocket.”
She dug in his pocket for it, her face close to his as she worked.
His dry mouth brushed across her cheek. “Beautiful, brave girl,” he whispered. “So…proud of you.”
Tears ran down her cheeks with the rain. She bent and put her mouth against his, hard. “I love you,” she whispered. “I don’t care about the past.”
He managed a smile. “I love you, too, baby.”
Her heart soared. “You do?” she exclaimed. “Oh, Mal!” She bent and kissed him again with helpless longing.
“I’m not complaining. But think you might cut me loose anytime soon?” he murmured. “My hands have gone to sleep.”
“Oh, dear!”
; She ran around the tree, opened the knife and went to work on the bonds. His hands were white. The circulation ran back into them when he was free and he groaned at the pain.
“Can you stand up?” she asked, concerned.
He tried and slumped back down. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Legs gone to sleep, too.”
He was obviously suffering from exposure and God knows what other sort of injuries that Joe had inflicted on him.
“I’ll get help,” she said at once, and pulled out her cell phone.
Lights flashed around her as men came forward. “Miss Brannt?” someone called.
She gasped. “Yes!”
A tall, dark-haired man came into view. He was wearing jeans and a buckskin jacket. He had long black hair in a ponytail and a grim expression. “I’m Ty Harding. I work for Dane Lassiter.”
“Hiya, Harding,” Mallory managed. “Good to see you on the job.”
“I can outtrack any of these feds,” he teased the other two men, “so I volunteered to help search for you. Hey, Jameson, can you bring a Jeep up here?”
“Sure. Be right back.”
There were running footsteps.
Harding knelt beside him. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to ride a horse back,” he guessed.
“Probably not,” Mallory agreed hoarsely. “Have you got any water?”
“I have,” one of the feds said, and tossed a bottle to Harding, who handed it, opened, to Mallory. It was painful to Morie to watch how thirstily he drank it, choked and drank again.
“God, that’s so sweet!” Mallory exclaimed when he’d drained the bottle. “I’ve been tied here for almost two days. Thought I’d die, sure. Then an angel came walking up and saved me,” he added, smiling at Morie. “My own personal guardian angel.”
“I gave Joe Bascomb a pouch with cash,” she told Harding. “I spoke to the sheriff about it before I came up here, so he knows. I can’t tell you which direction Joe took. It was raining….”