The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense)

by Colleen Thompson

  Dana flew at the stranger, her raised hands clutching the metal flashlight she had found behind the pickup’s front seat. Though she ran at him from behind, some sound must have given her away, for he whirled to face her, his pistol at the ready.

  “The last thing you want,” he warned her, “is to get to be more trouble than you’re worth.”

  She froze, as chilled by his deadly calm as his untroubled expression. He was a tall man, strongly built for all that he was past his prime. Early sixties, she guessed, judging from the lines that creased his weathered face and the heavy, silvered stubble, but as filthy as he was she could be off as much as ten years in her guess. From his long-sleeved work shirt to his hat, boots, and trousers to his skin, the man was caked with thick dust, and he was rank with body odor, as if he’d gone a long while without bathing. As if he had been living rough, the way Angie had been when Dana found her.

  But one item that he carried stood out: a pair of small black binoculars, relatively clean and unscratched, dangled from a strap around his neck. Strange-looking binoculars. But it was his thin face that drew most of her attention.

  She had never seen him before in her life, though something about him was sickeningly familiar. Some resemblance…or had she caught a glimpse of him on that terrible night when he’d pursued her in the desert darkness, the night he’d shot her sister? Seen him and forgotten, after everything that happened?

  “Put the flashlight down,” he ordered.

  When she did not move fast enough to suit him, he turned his gun to aim at Jay’s back, which slowly rose and fell. Or did she only imagine he was breathing?

  “Putting it down,” she assured her captor as she squatted to set the flashlight on the ground beside her. But instead of waiting for another order, she dropped to her knees and crawled to Jay, desperate to reassure herself that he was still alive.

  “Jay,” she whispered as she shook his shoulder. “Jay, please, can you hear me?”

  Though he didn’t budge, one of his eyes looked up at her before sliding shut again.

  Brief as it was, that glimpse of blue eye superimposed itself over the coldly cruel face she had just gazed into.

  And in a moment of sickening clarity, she understood why it had seemed familiar. The man who had hurt Jay must be R.C. Eversole, his uncle. The uncle who had supposedly burned to death in his bed months before. The same uncle who had accepted bribes and carried on some sort of sick affair with Angie.

  Dana shook with a desire to beat her fists against her sister’s killer. But she wanted out of this, too, and good sense warned her that if she went off on him—or gave him any indication that she knew who he was—this maniac would shoot her with the same deliberate calm he’d used to take down the nephew he’d helped raise.

  The older man squatted across from her. “Help me get him in the cab, unless you’d rather that we left the body…”

  He bared yellowed teeth and added, “Then you and I can continue the festivities all on our own.”

  His words floated between them, so detached from all emotion that she shuddered, for the first time fearing other possibilities than death.

  “I’ll help,” she said, and did, though the effort made her blink back tears against the pain of her injured side.

  With a groan Jay roused enough to stagger to his widely separated feet. Leaning forward, he braced his hands on the fronts of his thighs and vomited.

  Wincing, Dana laid her hand on his back and noticed the already purpling lump rising at his temple.

  “Come on. Shake it off.” His uncle grasped Jay’s arm and started pulling. “Now, in the truck, both of you. We’re going for a ride.”

  “R.C.?” Jay grunted. “But how could…how can you be alive? Am I…seeing…?”

  “Just shut up and get in.” R.C. opened the pickup’s passenger door and hoisted Jay inside, where he immediately pitched sideways and went limp.

  Dana reached forward to try to help him, but the older man hooked an arm around her waist and dragged her backward before using his body to pin hers against the truck’s side, behind the open door.

  “No.” Despite the pain it cost her, she fought to free herself, then jerked back an elbow to catch him hard in the midsection.

  “Goddammit, I…have had…enough of your shit.”

  With every burst of speech he crushed up against her harder, and she felt her arm wrenched backward before she felt something cinch up hard against her wrist. Before she could form the thought handcuffs, he’d pulled back the other arm as well and tightened the second plastic zip tie.

  Then he spun her roughly toward him and deliberately holstered his pistol. Before she could wonder if that could be good news, he pulled a long and wicked-looking knife to take its place.

  Her mouth went talc-dry at the sight.

  “Now you’re gonna tell me,” he said. “Where’d your sister hide the money she took from me?”

  Dana was shaking so hard she could barely keep her legs from buckling. She couldn’t think—and didn’t understand what he was asking.

  “Money?”

  He pressed the blade’s tip beneath the hollow under her throat. “I honed it just for you. It’s sharp enough to glide straight to your backbone with just the slightest bit of pressure.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m very good at cutting. Well practiced, you could say.”

  This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be real. What did she have to do to wake up from this nightmare? “I don’t understand what you want.”

  “My money,” he said as he dragged the knife lower, first one inch, then another.

  She felt its cool bite, thin and bright with pain. Felt it catch the neckline of her T-shirt and start to slice it downward.

  “My money,” he continued. “The money I’ve had coming all these damned years. The money that bitch took from me and hid someplace in this desert.”

  “I…I heard they found that. Ja…no, the FBI did,” she amended, not wanting the crazed man to kill his nephew on the spot. “They found it by the house where you lived.”

  Alarm pulsed through her as she realized her mistake. In her terror she had given away that she knew who he was. He couldn’t let her live now. The blade slipped several inches lower, scoring not only fabric but the skin beneath it. A high-pitched keening rose from the back of Dana’s throat, seemingly disconnected from her will.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Before I jam this knife so far up between your legs you taste steel.”

  Her eyes rolled back, and for a moment everything went black. But all too soon he was leaning over her, hauling her roughly to her feet and slapping her.

  “Where,” he demanded, “did your sister hide the rest?”

  “I…I don’t know! She didn’t tell me. Didn’t have the chance to say anything before you…before she was shot.”

  “Goddammit, don’t you understand? I will slice you to pieces if you don’t tell me.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thick tongue along the flat of it, closing his eyes as if her blood were some rare vintage. “And I guaran-fuckin’-tee you I’ll enjoy it more than you will.”

  Her stomach lurched in revulsion. “But I can’t. I don’t know anything about it.”

  Eversole jerked a nod toward the truck’s cab. “Or maybe you’d like watching me skin him first.”

  Dana felt her world shift on its axis, felt the blackness of her terror slide away to be replaced by bloodred fury. This man had murdered Angie, and he meant to kill her even more horribly. Whether he’d been driven insane by months of chasing Angie through the desert or something had snapped in him before that, R.C. Eversole was so far gone he was willing to carve up the only living member of his family in an insane bid to recover the money he’d squeezed out of Haz-Vestment.

  All this over money.

  She lowered her head and glared up at him. “All right. Then I’ll tell you.”

  An unholy light blazed in his blue eyes. It was the last
thing she saw before she dropped her head and rammed it upward, smashing hard against his face.

  The Angie shaking Jay awake was the young woman from the old family photos, with full waves cascading over her shoulders. Scented with yucca blossoms, the blond ends tickled his cheek, and he looked up to see that in contrast to her fair hair, her eyes were deep and brown—and brimming with the fiery passion that would ultimately lead to her death.

  At the moment, though, they burned with fury. “So are you just going to lie there like a goddamned lump? Can’t you hear him? He’s killing her. Get your worthless fuzz-stormtrooper ass out there and do something about it. You know what you have to tell him—I did everything but leave you a fucking road map; can’t you see that?”

  He saw now that Angie wore a black abaya, that her finger was poised over the detonator button. Sneering at him, she asked, “Or are you ready to see someone else you care about get blown away on your watch?”

  When he jerked forward to stop her, the splitting pain of his head jarred him awake. And he did hear something outside the truck’s open door, a desperate struggle playing out in grunts that sounded more animal than human. Adrenaline flashed through his veins, giving him the strength to push himself upright. Without waiting for the black dots to clear from his vision, Jay slid down from the seat and staggered toward the noise.

  When he could see he froze in horror, blinking at the vision of his uncle—his dead uncle—over Dana, a hunting knife above her stomach, which he’d bared by slitting her shirt open. A thin line of blood marked where his blade had been drawn across the surface of her skin as well. Dana lay trembling on her back, her eyes flared and her pale lips parted—too scared to budge, or even scream.

  “Make another move,” R.C. glanced up to tell him, “and I will gladly gut her like a deer.”

  His words sounded strange, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of marbles, and his jaw hung slightly open.

  “I don’t,” Dana whispered, “have any idea where that money is.”

  “Then I don’t,” R.C. told her as he raised the knife, “have the slightest use for you alive.”

  Just as Angie had had no use for money.

  “Wait!” Jay’s mind snapped to the last of her recovered journal entries—to the message she had left him.

  “I know,” he said. “I know where the rest is. And we can take you there right now. We won’t give you any trouble.”

  R.C. stared at him, considering. “I deserve that money. I deserve my chance before it’s too late. And I can goddamned well assure you that I’m not gonna waste it.”

  Jay scarcely recognized the man. It was as if someone had hollowed out his uncle and now looked at him through the empty eyeholes. Someone thoroughly undone by bitterness and greed.

  “You won’t need the knife,” Jay assured him calmly. “We’ll help you. I swear it.”

  He extended his right hand in an offer to pull R.C. to his feet. Anything to get him farther from slicing into Dana—as he had surely sliced up the woman who had bribed him. And Jenkins’s heifers—had the animals served as some sick substitute to help ease his frustration while he played a murderous game of cat and mouse with Angie?

  R.C. switched the knife to his left hand and pulled his sidearm from its holster. Rising slowly, he kept the SIG-Sauer’s muzzle facing Jay.

  “Get back inside the truck,” R.C. ordered.

  Jay reached past him to help Dana.

  “Leave her,” R.C. told him. “We can’t take her. Woman fights like a goddamned hellcat. But we can keep the money between us, in the family.”

  Jay heard her death sentence in his uncle’s voice, so he quickly moved between them. She reached up to take his hand, her gaze latching onto his as comprehension passed between them.

  And something more as well, a possibility Jay would die to preserve.

  “I’m not going anywhere without her,” Jay said. “And before you threaten me, too, you might want to think about the implications of killing the only person with a clue where Angie hid that money. Unless you want to spend the rest of your days stuck right here in Rimrock County, driving that old hunting truck and stewing in your own filth while that money rots where Angie hid it.”

  As he leveled the threat he heard a sound off in the darkness, a dead woman’s disembodied laughter.

  Or maybe it was his dog, Max, whimpering in pain.

  Chapter Thirty

  Two nights ago the work was not enough, and neither was the desert—not with everything that’s happened racing through my mind.

  After a while the quiet got to me, along with endless grime and lousy food—and that freaking scorpion I stepped on didn’t help things. So I piled into my heap and went looking for a place I’d spotted a while back—found it, too, a bunkhouse where the land’s rapists sometimes put up workers. Pried off the lock and broke in, and damned if I didn’t find what I most wanted but least needed—a full bottle of mescal stashed under one bunk’s mattress.

  I never really meant to drink it. I thought I’d take it back to my squat and keep it hidden, a little rainy-day insurance in case I ever really bottomed out. A trophy of sorts, the proof (eighty proof!) that I was strong enough to keep my ass on the straight and narrow.

  But halfway home there was this huge clunk from the engine, and that was all she wrote…For what seemed like seventeen years I sat atop the cooling hood with hooch in hand, the seal unbroken.

  Then all of a fucking sudden I was introducing myself to the drowned worm on the bottom. I don’t remember much about what happened after that.

  —Undated entry (loose page)

  Angie’s sobriety journal

  (recovered July 10, interior wall, Webb adobe)

  Saturday, July 14, 12:37 A.M.

  84 Degrees Fahrenheit

  Forecast High: 99 Degrees

  As R.C. came around the front end after putting them both inside the truck’s cab, Dana whispered, “Have you really figured out where Angie hid the money?” It had occurred to her that Jay might be lying, trying to buy time, as he’d been when he had fallen to his knees, requiring his uncle’s assistance to get back inside the pickup. And Dana also had the queasy feeling that their captor would cut them both to pieces once he figured out he’d been deceived.

  Jay looked directly into her eyes. “Maybe I’ve got no business asking at this point, but will you trust me, Dana? Will you trust me with your life?”

  There was an intensity in his gaze that sliced straight through her doubt and terror, a brand of confidence that resurrected her own courage. This was a man who had survived both domestic criminals and terrorists abroad, a man who, she had learned in a follow-up news report, had been decorated for valor on the field of combat. She had to think of that and not the brutality his earlier flashback had unleashed.

  “Yes,” she told him after only the slightest hesitation.

  As the driver’s-side door opened, Jay reached across her to the passenger-door handle.

  “Then run like hell,” he ordered, and gave her a firm push outside.

  Unprepared and off balance with her hands bound behind her, Dana nearly tumbled down face-first. But the panic blasting through her somehow kept her on her feet—that and the terrifying cacophony behind her. Male shouts erupted, followed by the crack of gunfire, shot after shot shattering the still night.

  She ran despite the pain in her side, ran knowing that death could catch her from behind as it had caught her sister. Dana darted around dark clumps that snatched at the fluttering remnants of her shirt, then staggered when she banged against an old fencepost, but there was no going back now that she’d committed to this course.

  Or had been committed by Jay’s quick thinking and his courage. Perhaps his sacrifice as well, for she no longer heard the two men struggling, heard nothing but the echo of the blasts.

  He can’t be dead, can’t be dead, can’t be… The thought repeated endlessly, a prayer cast to the heavens.

  A prayer that reverberated wi
th the memory of what Jay had told her when she’d left in tears. “I’d do anything to make this up to you.”

  Even get himself killed in an attempt to save her.

  A second round of shots began, and though she’d zigzagged her way through darkness, she heard a rock crack all too near her, followed by what sounded like a bullet rattling through the scrub brush.

  Shooter’s closing in—he sees me, instinct warned her. Without slowing she turned to look behind her, half expecting to spot a flashlight following her flight.

  Instead she glimpsed a second set of headlights on the road. Still about a half mile distant, the other vehicle was fast approaching.

  Was help coming, or would it be some accomplice of R.C.’s? Before she could decide whether to head back toward the road or keep running farther from it, she tripped again when her foot hooked beneath a stick of some sort.

  Without her hands to break her fall, Dana came down fast, her head and upper body slamming against soil as hard as concrete. With the impact, the desert’s blackness rose up to hood her like an executioner.

  Jay first felt the vibration of the engine and the bumping of the pickup as it jounced along the rough road. Pain followed, an agony that threatened to split his head wide-open. When he lifted his fingers to wipe blood from his eyes, the effort left him groaning, and each bump made him want to vomit.

  The urge subsided as the pickup slowed, then stopped.

  “I think we lost ’em—whoever the hell that was.”

  Jay looked up toward the sound. Only then did he realize his lower body was crumpled awkwardly on the passenger-side floorboards, while his arms, head, and shoulders leaned atop the truck’s seat.

  His uncle sneered down in his direction. “You’re goddamned lucky you’re alive after that stunt you pulled. Didn’t mean to hit you so hard—sure as hell didn’t want to kill you before we get my money—but there’s no way in the world I was lettin’ you get hold of my gun.”