The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense)

by Colleen Thompson

  We’ve never needed your prayers more, so keep ’em coming. Nikki sends her love and says she can’t wait to hold the new baby once she’s well again.

  —E-mail message from Laurie Harrison

  Dana had stopped screaming by the time Jay was halfway down the sidewalk, but a glimpse of blood across her legs kept him running, his pulse pounding in his ears.

  “Snakesnakesnake,” she blurted the moment she saw him.

  “Where?” he asked, scanning the area. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Hooks and a couple of regulars boiling out the front door of the Broken Spur. Mamie Lockett, who lived next door to the café, poked her gray head through her front window to stare, too.

  Dana climbed to her feet and put more distance between herself and the open car door. Pointing toward it, she shouted, “A humongous freaking snake. In my car, across the floorboard.”

  In spite of the heat her teeth chattered, and her eyes were wide. Yet she was already bolstering herself against the terror, gathering whatever reserves of courage she could muster.

  Though he still refused to like her, he appreciated that. Hysteria solved nothing—and inconvenienced the hell out of those working to set matters right.

  “Somebody put it in there.” Her whole body was shaking, her flesh crawling with revulsion. Her gaze locked onto his face. “What kind of nutcase puts a rattlesnake in someone’s car?”

  “You sure it was a real snake?” This place spooked some of those more used to human commerce. The quiet he needed to stay sane worked at city nerves. Though Dana Vanover had struck him as anything but flighty, she wouldn’t be the first to mistake a purse strap or a set of jumper cables for a hissing viper.

  “Are you crazy?” she demanded. “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you stick your head in there and see for yourself?”

  “Don’t need to,” he said as he looked down past her knees. “You’ve already convinced me.”

  Or the wounds had. A pair of them, some four inches above the outside point of her left ankle. A few drops of blood marked the spots one fang had scratched and another had sunk into. Already the flesh around the wound looked puffy. As if that weren’t proof enough, he heard the telltale buzz of rattling from the direction of the car.

  She followed his gaze downward, then yelped as she saw the bites.

  “Oh, God. I didn’t even feel it. Now I do, though, plenty.” After a pause she added, “Guess he didn’t like being shut up in the heat.”

  As if to confirm it, an arrow-shaped head poked out of the door, and a tan-and-brown snake as thick as her forearm lowered itself to the ground. As she had claimed, a damned big snake—a Western diamondback. The dog leaped toward it, snarling, but Jay beat him to the punch, drawing his sidearm and shooting the serpent through its head. As the body twitched he put the sole of his boot across the rattler’s neck and pulled the tail end from the vehicle. A lot more snake spilled out than he’d expected, five—no—five and a half feet of well-fed viper, which terminated in a set of rattles bordered by telltale black-and-white stripes.

  Dana stared at it, her fair face flushing and her skin gleaming with perspiration. “Holy…”

  When her knees wobbled he holstered his Colt Commander and scooped her up before she fell. She made a nice armful, all long legs and slender curves.

  But she wasn’t too far gone to protest. “Put me down. I don’t need—”

  “Keep real still. I’m getting you inside, where it’s cooler. Then I’m calling an air ambulance.” He remembered the deputy, Wallace, pointing out the number of the El Paso-based service posted on a corkboard in the office. Glancing up, he told their audience, “She’s been bitten—going to need a medevac.”

  “Bring her on in here.” Abe waved to indicate the Broken Spur, and his two customers, the Navarro brothers, rushed over to lend a hand.

  Since the café was closer—and probably cooler—than the courthouse, Jay didn’t argue.

  “Let me take her legs.” Bill, the older of the brothers, slid a grease-stained hand beneath Dana’s thigh—or tried to.

  When Jay caught the look in his eye, he stepped neatly out of range. “I’ve got her, thanks.”

  Eagerness turned to a scowl, reminding Jay of Bill’s reputation for dealing with frustration with his fists. He and his more easygoing brother, Carl, considered themselves ranchers but earned most of their income in the oil patch. Both could always be counted on to help their neighbors, but neither could be trusted to resist the temptation to feel up a good-looking woman if the chance arose.

  It didn’t very often, since the county’s female population came in only two varieties: spoken for and old. Rumor had it that the Navarro brothers, both in their early forties, had grown so desperate that Bill was e-mailing foreign ladies eager to come to the U.S. Carl scoffed at the idea, but the area’s other ranchers joked that in the last few years their livestock acted skittish when he showed up on a property alone.

  With both Navarros and the dog, Max, bringing up the rear, Jay carried Dana into the café. Abe had pushed aside one of the three wooden tables.

  “I’ll need a chair,” said Dana. “We’ll want to keep the bite below heart level.”

  Since that meshed with what Jay knew, he bent to set her down on the chair Bill Navarro pulled out. Before he could straighten, Mrs. Lockett burst inside, too. Bird thin, she flapped around them, twisting an embroidered hankie in her liver-spotted hands.

  “Oh, dear,” she kept exclaiming, her faded yellow housedress aswirl around her stick legs. “You’d better cut a big X and suck out all that poison. My boy Nestor liked to’ve died when he got snakebit, and that rattler wasn’t half the size of that Goliath you got out there.”

  After pulling off his apron, Abe wiped his hands on it and tossed it onto the chipped Formica countertop. “Get you anything, Dr. Vanover? Water? Soda?”

  Dana slid a sharp look his way. “So you’re okay with my being here?”

  Hooks flushed beneath his mop of white hair. “I told him to bring you on in, didn’t I? And I’m sorry about earlier. Shouldn’ta been hard on you for the way your sister acted.”

  “Water would be fine, thanks,” she said stiffly before bending down to grasp her leg above the bite.

  Max wagged his stub tail and attempted to lick her face as her fingers dug into the flesh of her calf muscle. Trying to squeeze back the pain, Jay figured. But as much as it must hurt, she didn’t whimper and her eyes remained dry.

  He found himself praying that the bite was dry, too, that the rattler hadn’t cut loose with its venom. In around half the cases he’d seen growing up here, it worked out that way. But just in case it didn’t this time, he’d best get his ass across the street and make that call.

  Before he reached the door, Mamie went to search the grill area behind the counter. “What we really need’s a big knife.”

  “Nobody’s cutting me.” Dana’s gaze swept the room, touching on each of them in turn. “That old nonsense about sucking out the venom does more harm than good.”

  Carl Navarro scrubbed a calloused hand over three days’ growth of beard, probably to hide his disappointment at not being allowed a chance to put his ugly mouth to that sleek leg.

  “Are you sure?” his older brother asked. “Our daddy always said to—”

  “There’ll be no cutting on Dr. Vanover,” Jay said firmly. “Could you keep an eye on her, Abe, while I go call up that chopper?”

  Abe cracked open a bottle of water from the icebox and handed it to Dana. Though he’d complained tirelessly about the cost of a search plane to look for her sister, Hooks nodded and said, “You can count on it,” before asking Dana what else he could get her.

  As Jay strode outside, both Navarros followed.

  “Got any plans for that big boy out there, Sheriff?” Bill asked him.

  Jay hesitated. “Not particularly. Why?”

  Catching on, his brother flashed a crooked grin. “Rattlesnake chili, that’s why. Come on, Bill, and let
’s go skin ’im.”

  As Jay broke into a jog, he glanced down at the dog beside him. “You know something, Toto, buddy? I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Baghdad anymore.”

  “How’re you doing?” Judge Hooks asked her for what seemed like the thousandth time as they waited for the sheriff to return. “You sure you don’t want to lie down? I can push over this here table and spread a clean cloth for you.”

  To Dana, his tone sounded as insincere as his apology.

  “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” the old woman chirped. “I’ll run next door to get a pillow.”

  “I’m fine right here in this chair.” Dana would rather have a root canal than admit her leg was throbbing and her heart was racing. Especially since she was more than half convinced that Hooks and his two snake charmers had been the ones who had left the rattler in her car, unless he’d put Clark Kent Woman up to it. Of course the bastard was being magnanimous now that he had figured a quick way to drive her out of Rimrock County. Idiot probably imagined he was getting rid of her for good.

  “I’ll be right back with that pillow,” the gray-haired woman sang as she hurried out, leaving Dana on her own with Abe Hooks and the greasy, burned stink of years’ worth of burgers.

  “I’ll be right back, too,” Dana promised, looking square into the small man’s eyes. “I promise you I’ll find my sister, Judge Hooks. This isn’t going to stop me.”

  “Of course it won’t.”

  The patronizing runt had the nerve to pat her hand. If her leg didn’t hurt so badly, she swore she’d give him a swift kick.

  “I mean it. This bite—it’s not bad at all,” she said, though already her mouth tasted of metal and her skin felt clammy-cool. Staying on top of her panic left her feeling strung out, reckless. And mad as all hell. “A vial or two of antivenin and I’ll show up again—with help. Or maybe I’ll just call in some reporters, let them get a whiff of how you people are trying to obstruct me. Let them put a camera on that dying girl, too, and interview her parents. Then you’ll have more media in Devil’s Claw than you know what to do with. And you can’t run ’em all off with the local wildlife.”

  The county judge’s face darkened, making his blue eyes appear brighter. “You have a lot of nerve, Doctor, sitting in my place and leveling an accusation like that. I don’t know and I don’t care what kind of pull you and your people have in Houston. You’re in my county now, and it’s about time you understood what that means.”

  “All I want is Angie,” Dana repeated. “Once I find her, neither one of us will ever trouble you again.”

  “As appealing as that sounds”—Hooks’s voice softened to a serpent’s whisper—“how can you be so sure your sister’s still alive?”

  Chapter Five

  But his [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

  —Genesis, 19:26

  Holy Bible (King James Version)

  Monday, June 25, 6:48 A.M.

  67 Degrees Fahrenheit Forecast

  High: 104 Degrees

  “It’s bad enough I had to waste half my evening last night listenin’ to Weevil Jenkins carry on about that missin’ ATV of his. Now you want me to follow you in that little car of hers so I can drive you all the way back from El Paso. Three and a half hours each way.” Across the table of the Broken Spur, where Abe had plunked down a breakfast of eggs and sausage links, Deputy Wallace Hooks’s face took on the sour look that Jay was coming to know well. The easy translation was that Wallace would do things a hell of a lot differently if he’d been given a shot at being sheriff.

  He probably would have had that chance had it not been for Dennis Riggins, who insisted the Hooks family already had too much power, and that twenty-nine-year-old Wallace lacked the “seasoning” to take on the position. Dennis had swayed the other county commissioners into seeing things his way, leaving Abe Hooks outvoted, and breathing new life into the Riggins-Hooks feud that had been a Rimrock County staple for generations. Wallace in particular was put out, since the sole deputy’s position may have been created with him in mind, but it demanded long hours in exchange for near-starvation wages.

  “Think about it this way,” Jay said. “If we take Dr. Vanover’s car to her, express a little professional concern, and update her on the investigation while she’s recovering, she’ll more than likely head straight back to Houston as soon as she’s healed up.”

  Abe looked up from the grill, where he was cooking his own breakfast, since no other customers had arrived. “Man’s got a point, Wallace. We don’t need her back here, stirring up more trouble. If we’re to get this project under way…”

  Wallace shut him up with a look of pure resentment. Beneath the thick, dark bangs, the son’s hazel eyes were as striking as his cleft chin and even features. Though his father had struggled to steer him toward some practical endeavor, Wallace had defied him, running off and hitching his way to New York City after high school. Everybody in the county—except the Rigginses, Jay guessed—had been rooting for the kid to make good on the promise of his handsome face. But instead of shooting straight to stardom on the TV soaps or maybe Broadway, as he’d hoped, Wallace couldn’t act his way into commercials; and the jockey’s build he’d inherited from his father hadn’t helped things. After six or seven years of knocking around the country working various dead-end jobs, he’d come back home to lick his wounds and take the deputy’s position created for him. But if Abe had been counting on gratitude to keep Wallace in line, he’d been deluded. Though Jay had been back in Devil’s Claw only a short time, he had quickly picked up on the friction between father and son.

  Wallace used his fork to spear a chunk of scrambled egg swimming in hot sauce and then spoke around the mouthful. “To hell with all this door-to-door ass kissing. She and her nut-job sister, neither one had any business out here. And now we’re supposed to hand-deliver that fancy car of hers and act like we’re all concerned that she got snakebit?”

  “I am concerned,” Jay said as a vision of Dana Vanover’s terrified face overtook him. He could feel her still, trembling as those tight curves filled his arms. That brief contact had figured prominently in his dreams since. His subconscious didn’t give a damn that she was so far out of his league, he couldn’t reach her with an Apache helicopter. “The way I see it, putting a big rattler in that car was nothing short of attempted murder. And doing a thing like that right in front of my office shows a fundamental disrespect for this county’s law enforcement, disrespect for me.”

  He glanced toward Abe, who had sworn he hadn’t seen or heard a thing in the minutes before Dana Vanover started screaming. Though Jay had questioned both Navarros, Mrs. Lockett, the always charming postmistress, Dorothy Hobarth—who had cursed him for his trouble—and the few other potential witnesses, each one had told a similar story. Suspiciously similar, to Jay’s way of thinking, but it was possible that his late-night reading—the Haz-Vestment community meeting transcripts he’d liberated from Estelle’s locked cabinet—could have left him feeling paranoid. Or maybe the memory of Baghdad, with its indecipherable mix of enemies and allies, had him looking for conspiracies at every turn.

  Abe turned, swearing, to his grill, and scraped it as burning bacon smoked the tiny café. Rising from the table, Jay walked to the door and propped it open with a brick used for that purpose. A couple of hours from now the heat would come back with a vengeance, but Jay stayed by the door, enjoying fresher air while he still could.

  “Who’s to say it wasn’t an accident?” asked Wallace. “What if she left her door ajar and the thing just crawled in looking for some shade?”

  Jay shook his head in disbelief. “Parked car in the afternoon gets up to, what? A hundred thirty, hundred forty maybe. You don’t honestly think that old snake lived long enough to get as big as he was without having enough sense not to wriggle up inside a furnace.”

  Wallace gusted out a pent-up breath, the surliness melting from his expression and leaving behind an earn
estness that caught Jay by surprise.

  “Maybe it’s the idea of something like that happening here that I can’t handle. Hell, Sheriff, we know the people around here—every one of ’em—and they aren’t killers. These are the folks who’re rebuilding your uncle’s house so you can get out of that RV, the people who put in those wheelchair ramps for old man Parker and took up a collection to hire a home health-care aide from Pecos after Mrs. Lockett broke her hip last summer. This is Devil’s Claw, not back where you worked in Dallas,” Wallace said. “People don’t kill people out here. Scare ’em, maybe, but that’s all.”

  “If that snake had unloaded all his venom, she’d have been as dead as if a bullet did it.” Or the explosion of a suicide vest at one of Baghdad’s checkpoints. The thunder of it boomed through his memory, along with the hot splatter of crimson rain and the hail of fleshy chunks.

  Heart pounding, he nearly dropped to the floor before he realized where he was. As Jay wiped sweat from his face with a folded bandanna from his pocket, Wallace rose and carried their plates to the counter.

  As the deputy turned away, Jay caught Abe looking in the younger Hooks’s direction and caught, too, something in the glance that passed between them. Was it more evidence of the father-son struggle he’d seen earlier, or were the two united in their contempt for the new sheriff the county commissioners had foisted upon them? Had he flinched or made some sound that gave his too-real memories away?

  Yet as frightening as that thought was, another possibility raised the hairs on the back of Jay’s neck. The prospect that both Abe and Wallace had fallen for Haz-Vestment’s promises of a Devil’s Claw transformed into some kind of oasis of prosperity. And that because of their belief, both father and son regretted Dana Vanover’s survival.

  “It’s okay, Mom—Hey.” Moving the phone away from her mouth, Dana tried to catch the attention of the thickly built Hispanic woman making off with her lunch tray. “I wasn’t finished with that.”