by Robin Gideon
The room began to spin. Gregg hurried his stride. He had to get outside. There suddenly wasn’t any air in Pamela G’s, it seemed.
Good Christ, could it be that his one true sanctuary, the one blissful refuge in all of Whitetail Creek, was now forbidden to him?
Marcus. It was all his fault. Pamela G had said so. And Helen, now homeless, was staying with Marcus.
Gregg started back toward the bank, a plan beginning to take shape in the convoluted recesses of his fevered brain. There were people who needed punishment, among them Marcus and Helen. This time Gregg was determined to administer the punishment personally!
* * * *
“What do you think will happen now?” Marcus asked, sitting by the fireplace in the one overstuffed chair in his home.
Helen, sitting in a bentwood chair at the kitchen table, shrugged her shoulders. “Samantha and Amanda are going to say they are the ones responsible for killing those three men. Jared says there’s no jury in the world that’ll convict them of anything. After all, they were only protecting themselves and their own property.”
“You mean Jared was protecting them and their property.”
Helen nodded. “Without him, the Neilsons would have been able to run Whitetail Creek like it was their own personal kingdom.” She smiled, enjoying it whenever her thoughts turned toward Jared. He was a topic she adored discussing. “He said the sheriff has been taking bribes, so he’ll be of no use to us, but he knows someone else who might be able to help the good people here in Whitetail Creek. I forget the man’s name, but Jared was going to send him a telegram tonight.” Helen’s smile broadened. She took a sip of her wine and then turned to look at Marcus. “Jared really is a prince, isn’t he?”
“A prince. A king. I can’t say for certain, but whatever he is, he’s royalty.” Marcus sighed a bit dramatically and rolled his eyes heavenward. “I won’t ask you for a second time with him. We both agreed that it would only happen once. But now that I know what that is supposed to feel like, how am I ever going to be satisfied with anyone else?” He looked at Helen questioningly. “Is he always that good?”
Helen nodded. “Always.”
“I’m sooo jealous. You just wouldn’t believe how jealous I am.”
Before Helen could issue the blathering reply suggesting that one day soon Marcus would find his own version of Jared Parker—Helen didn’t believe there was another Jared out there to find—there was a knock at the front door. Helen’s countenance broke into a beaming smile as she leaped from the chair.
“Jared’s here! He said he’d come to me just as soon as he sent the telegram,” Helen explained as she worked open the locking bolt on the door.
The instant the bolt was thrown, the handle turned and the door burst open, striking Helen hard, knocking her backward several steps. Gregg stepped into the room and kicked the door closed. Helen, stunned at having been struck in the forehead by the door, was on wobbly legs for a couple seconds.
“You’ve no right to come in here,” Marcus said after a moment, but there wasn’t quite the vehemence to his voice that Helen had hoped for.
While rubbing her forehead with her fingertips, Helen looked at Gregg and asked, “What are you doing here, Gregg? Don’t you know that it’s over between us? You’re the one who burned my house. You had your bully boys do the dirty work while making yourself visible to all at the bank. That didn’t fool me for a second.” Her mouth quirked into an expression of utter contempt. “It didn’t fool anybody. The whole town’s talking about you.”
It was only then that Helen realized Gregg’s right hand was in the pocket of his jacket. The smile on his face was maniacal, insane in a way that Helen had never before seen. Suddenly she was very frightened. She hadn’t really been frightened when her ex-fiancé had first burst into Marcus’s home, but she was scared now, right down to the marrow her bones.
Gregg pulled his hand from his pocket. Inside his fleshy fist was a small, gold-plated, double-barreled derringer. Even though she knew almost nothing at all about guns, Helen could tell that the piece was meant to be showy, but that didn’t make it any less lethal. Her spine stiffened, and she stopped rubbing the bump on her forehead. For once in his life, Gregg Neilson was a man to be taken seriously.
In as calm a tone as she could manage, Helen asked, “What are you doing, Gregg?”
“You and I are going to do a little business transaction. Right here. Right now.” With his left hand he pulled several sheets of folded paper out of the inside breast pocket of his suit coat. With a snap of his wrist, he unfolded the pages and stepped over to the kitchen table where Helen was. “You’re going to sign right where I tell you.”
“What are these?”
“Deeds to your homestead. You’re selling your land to me.”
“Like hell I am!” Helen snapped, her eyes shooting emerald-green flames at the man she now loathed with a passion.
Gregg pointed the deadly, little pistol at her face and slowly thumbed back the hammer. He said, “Sign your name to the deed of sale, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
Helen looked down the big, black twin barrels of the pistol, closed her eyes, and replied, “No. I won’t do it, and if you kill me, you still won’t get the land.” Very slowly, she opened her eyes. Gregg was still standing in front of her, towering over her with that golden gun in his hand—but now in his eyes was doubt. “I know you hate me. I don’t care. I welcome your hatred. I won’t sign the papers, Gregg, and I won’t sell you my land.” Her expression was impassive. “And there’s not a damn thing you can do to change that.”
Helen almost smiled then. Almost, but not quite. She had thwarted Gregg with her refusal to be cowed by his threat of violence. But she hadn’t counted on Gregg’s merciless savagery or on his understanding of her emotional vulnerability.
Despite his size, Gregg moved swiftly though not light-footedly, rushing to the overstuffed chair by the fireplace and its slender occupant. Marcus let out a short scream and put his hands up to defend himself. Gregg batted his hands away and grabbed him by the hair, yanking him cruelly to his feet. He put the muzzles of the derringer to the back of his head and then turned slowly to look at Helen with eyes that held not a trace of sympathy.
“If you don’t care about your own life, that’s fine. But if you don’t sign that deed of sale, I’ll blow this freak’s brains all over this room.”
“Don’t!” Helen screamed. Gregg smiled, and Helen knew that she had shown him her weakness and that he would exploit his knowledge to the fullest. “Leave him alone,” Helen whispered, the horror of abject defeat washing over her. “This isn’t his fault.”
Gregg, never one to miss the opportunity to inflict pain, whether it was physical or emotional, shook Marcus hard by the hair for a full fifteen seconds. When he stopped, he jammed the muzzles of the derringer into his temple and, with eyes glowing red with sadism, looked at Helen once again and asked, “So, are you ready to sign the deed, or do you want to watch me administer some justice to this bigmouthed freak?”
Helen looked into Marcus’s eyes. Earlier they had held horror in them, primal fear. Now they were glassy, his gaze unfocused. He was in the early stages of shock. Helen decided that, for Marcus, going into shock was a small blessing because he wouldn’t be entirely aware the danger he was in or the pain that Gregg was joyously but needlessly inflicting.
“I’ll do it. I’ll sign the deed,” Helen said, the words tumbling out of her mouth.
She had recently discovered that Gregg was evil, it was true. But it wasn’t until that very moment, when she could look Gregg directly in the eyes as he held Marcus by the hair and the small, golden pistol to his temple, that Helen realized he was evil. Pure evil. All the fancy clothes that Gregg favored, the golden palomino mare, and the hand-tooled saddle and bridle that was finer and more ostentatious than any owned by anyone else in Whitetail Creek—it was all just a disguise. Beautiful things that people could see, things to disguise the maliciou
s, unholy person hidden by those things.
In a tone of deathly authority, Jared said, “Put the gun down, Gregg.”
Helen let out a frightened squeal as she spun to face Jared. He had come in through the bedroom, as he had earlier. Now Helen was happy with her lover’s unconventional method of entering a home.
“I’ll kill him!” Gregg said, holding Marcus tightly by the hair as he ground the muzzles of the derringer even more forcefully into his temple. “Put your gun down or he’s dead. I’ll kill this freak, and it’ll be your fault if—”
Jared added a couple more ounces of pressure to the trigger of his Colt, and the awesome weapon roared its fury. Helen heard the body crumble lifelessly to the floor. Marcus started screaming. Helen rushed to him, taking him into her arms. She tried very hard to not look at the corpse on the floor at her feet.
“Jared’s here,” Helen said, ushering Marcus away from the corpse and toward the kitchen chairs. “Jared’s here now, so everything is going to be fine. We’re safe. Jared’s here.”
* * * *
A curious thing happened at the bank following the shooting of Gregg Neilson. The First Bank & Trust burned to the ground. A rumor went around that a tall man, dressed all in black, had been seen in the bank after it had closed. The people weren’t really interested in finding out his identity, and soon there were so many rumors going around that the arsonists could fit any and all descriptions. All of the money had been placed inside the fireproof iron safe, so the patrons of the bank didn’t lose so much as a single dime. But the land deeds held by the bank, and all the records of loans given and other financial transactions, had not been put in the safe, which was extremely unusual. Every record of bank transactions simply vanished into smoke.
Jerome Neilson, unable to prove who owed him money, insisted that heads roll. And since he had just palmed five thousand dollars to the territorial governor, he was quite certain he’d soon have the First Bank & Trust back in highly profitable operation.
The territorial governor convened a special panel to investigate the mysterious bank fire, as well as the bank operations. The more the investigators checked into Jerome Neilson, the more corrupt his entire operation appeared.
Jerome Neilson, financially and emotionally shattered, rode out of town one night and was never seen again.
The investigation into the First Bank & Trust took three months, and during that time Helen discovered that she was pregnant with Jared’s child. She hesitated telling him, knowing that he was a wanderer and not a man likely to be happy with all the responsibilities that went along with fatherhood and husbandry. Helen was quite wrong. Jared insisted that they get married immediately. He was offered the job of sheriff, but he turned the offer down because Helen said she couldn’t sleep a wink if she knew her husband wore a badge in a town like Whitetail Creek. However, Michael Duerson needed a chief of security for his various enterprises, and Jared accepted the position.
The child, christened Marcella Parker, had green eyes like her mother, and a dimple in her cheek like her father.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Gideon has been the featured author on the nationally syndicated TV show CBS Sunday Morning, was named third Best All-time for sexy romances by Amazon.com’s Listmania, and is the author of numerous novels and novellas. She lives in what has been described as Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. She loves hearing from her readers and can be reached at [email protected].
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