by Diane Kelly
Josh shifted his camera in his hands. “You think they didn’t check the envelope yet?”
We had little chance to speculate. Where Cobb’s red taillights had disappeared around a corner only thirty seconds before, headlights now came up the street. Fast.
“He’s back!” I cried.
We scattered, rushing back to our places.
Cobb’s Mercedes screeched to a stop in front of Judge Craven’s house. He leaped from the car and barreled up the walkway so fast he had no time to notice the three special agents closing in. Before he could even knock on the front door, Trudy yanked it open once again.
Cobb stopped on the porch as she held up her hand. In her fingers were a stack of pastel pink, yellow, and blue bills and the voided get-out-of-jail-free card. “What the hell is this?”
Click-click-click. I made my way up the walk, snapping photos in rapid succession. As much as I prided myself on my sharpshooting skills, I had to admit it was nice to take shots with a nonlethal weapon for a change.
Josh closed in from the left with his video camera. Eddie swooped in from the right with his badge and gun in his hands.
Judge Craven spotted us advancing, her furious expression turning first to confusion, then to shock as she realized she’d been caught red-handed. Well, pink-, yellow-, and blue-handed, anyway.
Following Trudy’s startled gaze, Cobb turned around, instinctively stepping backward as we approached. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Trudy went to slam her door, but by then Cobb had put a hand on the doorjamb to steady himself. All she managed to do was crush his knuckles before Eddie rushed forward and shoved the door open. Cobb shrieked in agony and grabbed his injured hand with the other, in the process dropping his car keys to the sidewalk. They landed with a clink.
I shoved the camera into the big front pocket on my hoodie and yanked my gun from the holster at my waist. “Put your hands up!”
“For God’s sake!” screamed Cobb, still clutching his hand. “My fingers are broken!”
“All right,” I said. “Sit down, then.” What a baby. I hadn’t made that much fuss when I’d been stabbed by a chicken at a cockfight. But that’s a whole other story.
Cobb dropped to his butt on the front stoop.
Judge Craven was surprisingly more resistant. She ran back into her house, tossing the play cash into the air, the Monopoly money fluttering to the floor behind her like it was ticker tape and she was leading a parade.
“Josh!” I called. “I’m going in! Keep an eye on Cobb.”
“Okay.” He pulled his gun, holding it with both hands and aiming it downward. The guy was a whiz with technology, but he stunk with weapons. He had the gun in relatively the right position, though if he fired now he’d accidentally shoot himself in the foot. I made a mental note to remind him later to point the gun slightly away from himself when he was in a holding position.
I followed Eddie into the house. A bewildered Mr. Craven stood in the living room, his mouth gaping.
“Where’s your wife?” Eddie demanded.
“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded right back.
“IRS!” Eddie shouted. “Now tell me where your wife is!”
The man frowned in confusion. “IRS?”
“Criminal tax enforcement,” I said. “Your wife’s in some trouble. You will be, too, if you don’t tell us where she is.”
The man gestured toward the hall. “She ran down there.”
“Don’t move,” Eddie told him as we inched toward the hall.
“Come out now, Judge Craven!” I hollered.
The woman had spent years in the legal field. She ought to have the sense to cooperate with law enforcement. By attempting to flee she was only getting herself in deeper doo-doo and adding to her potential charges and sentence.
Eddie and I looked down the hallway. There were three doors that led off the corridor. All three were closed.
Eddie and I took a stand along each side of the first doorway. I reached out a hand, grabbed the knob, and threw the door open. We peeked inside, finding a half bath with nobody inside.
We repeated the process at the next door, finding what appeared to be a guest bedroom. I fell to the floor and took a quick look under the bed, while Eddie checked the closet.
“She’s not under the bed.” I put a hand on the footboard and leveraged myself back to a stand.
“Not here, either.” He stepped away from the closet.
We hurried to the third door and threw it open. When we peeked inside, we saw Judge Craven struggling to get up onto the open windowsill.
“Stop!” I shouted, stepping into the room.
Trudy seemed to realize she’d never make it out the window. She slipped down the wall and turned to face us. When she began to raise her hands, relief surged through me. Looked like she was giving up now. Thank goodness.
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Trudy grabbed a tube of lilac-scented foot lotion from her bedside table and hurled it at me. I ducked and the tube bounced off my shoulder, tumbling to the floor. When I looked up again, a lamp was coming my way. I dodged to the side and managed to avoid it. Thwack! It slammed into the wall, bending the shade and breaking the bulb.
She aimed her next projectile, a paperback thriller, at Eddie. As far as weapons go, it was a poor choice. What did she think she was going to do, kill him with a paper cut? He turned sideways and the book hit him in the upper arm, causing no damage, before it, too, fell to the floor. Good thing she didn’t read those big hardbacks. A bookmark fell out of the book. Hoped she’d be able to find her page when she resumed her reading in jail.
Judge Craven hurled a TV remote at us next. As it hit the doorjamb, the TV turned on and the battery compartment broke off, spilling two AA batteries onto the floor. Ironically, the station was tuned to the news, the reporter talking about the PPE case.
This was getting ridiculous. At least the bedside table was clear now. She was out of things to throw.
Guns aimed at Trudy, Eddie and I eased toward her.
“Put your hands up!” I ordered.
Trudy reached over to the nightstand, grabbed the drawer handle, and yanked the drawer open. She stuck her hand inside and whipped out a pistol.
“Duck!” I screamed to Eddie when I realized what Trudy had in her hand. “She’s got a gun!”
Bang!
A bullet sailed over me and Eddie. I turned back, expecting to see a hole in Trudy’s bedroom wall. Instead, she’d put a hole in her husband. He stood in the doorway, hanging on to the edge as if for dear life, a look of shock on his face. His striped button-down bore a hole in the right shoulder, a hole that was rapidly losing blood.
“Trudy?” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Why?”
He slid down the door frame, leaving a bloody smear along the trim as he crumpled to the floor.
“Harold!” Trudy screamed, dropping her gun to the floor and rushing to the doorway.
As she knelt by her husband, I grabbed her hands and yanked them up behind her, slapping my cuffs on them.
“No!” she cried, wriggling and struggling against the shackles. “I need to help my husband!”
I grabbed her arms and pulled her back away from him. “Haven’t you helped him enough?”
I grabbed a towel from the couple’s bathroom and pressed it to Harold’s wound while Eddie called 911 to summon an ambulance. Three minutes and approximately two pints of blood later, two EMTs rushed into the bedroom. The first stepped on the tube of lotion, sending a lilac-scented squirt of white cream onto the carpet. The other inadvertently stepped on the television remote, ending its life with an audible crunch.
The paramedics hurriedly loaded Harold Craven onto a gurney and rolled him out to the waiting ambulance.
Trudy Craven and Russell Cobb were taken away by marshals. While Cobb maintained a poker face and said not a word as he was loaded into the car, Trudy sobbed and cried, “I never should have gotten involved! I never shoul
d have taken the money!”
“Gee, you think?” I snapped before slamming the door on her.
chapter thirty-nine
Things That go Boom in the Night
“Two down, one to go,” I told Eddie and Josh as we stood in the Cravens’ driveway.
With our two targets in Dallas now in custody, the only thing left to do was drive back out to Palo Pinto to arrest Larry Burkett. We had incontrovertible proof now linking his payments to Judge Craven and the dirty verdict. Time to snag his sorry ass and book it.
I turned to Eddie. “Think you and I can handle things on our own, let Josh get a late start on his date?”
“Sure,” Eddie said. “No sense all of us driving out there.”
“Great,” Josh said. “See ya.’” He jogged off in the direction of his car.
Eddie drove to Palo Pinto while I navigated. I’d plugged Burkett’s home address into my GPS app and we followed the directions out to his ranch. It was a damn good thing we had the help. Besides the fact that there was no moon and the night was pitch-black, the area was also devoid of landmarks. If not for the computerized voice telling us where to go, we would’ve gotten lost out here.
Burkett’s property was fenced and gated, but the gate was only latched, not locked. Eddie drove onto the property, strategically parking at an angle behind the Ram pickup and the Cadillac that were parked in the driveway, blocking them in. You never knew when someone might jump into a car and attempt a getaway.
Eddie and I climbed out of the car and met on the porch of the sprawling, single-story ranch house.
“I don’t see the Yukon,” I said.
A detached garage sat at the back of the driveway. I walked over to it, stepping up to a window on the side. The illumination from my cell phone’s flashlight app revealed a series of makeshift plywood tables and enough tools to supply a construction crew three times over, but no SUV. “Looks like Burkett’s converted his garage into a workshop.”
It also looked like he might not be home.
While the garage was dark, lights were on inside the house and we could see movement through the sheer curtains in the front windows. At least one person was inside. Eddie and I approached the door cautiously. He stood back a few feet while I rang the bell.
The porch lights came on and a woman’s voice came from the other side of the door, her tone suspicious and tentative. “Who is it?”
I couldn’t fault her for not opening the door. After all, the Burketts lived on an isolated stretch of country road. The situation was perfect fodder for a horror movie.
“Special Agents Tara Holloway and Eddie Bardin with the IRS,” I replied loudly, realizing a visit from the IRS was probably every bit as horrifying to many people as an ax murderer, maybe even more so.
The door opened a crack. Two eyes peered out over the safety chain. Eddie and I flashed our badges at the eyes, which merely blinked in reply.
“Are you Mrs. Burkett?” I asked.
“Yes?” It was both an answer and a question.
“We’re looking for your husband,” Eddie said. “Is he home?”
“Why are you looking for Larry?”
I was tempted to say, We’ll ask the questions here, but I knew from experience that a person could catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Of course I couldn’t exactly offer this woman honey, but I could be as polite and direct as possible under the circumstances. “We need to talk to him about the PPE trial.”
After a slight hesitation, she said, “He had to go out to one of the wells. There was some type of problem with the equipment.”
Eddie leaned to the side to better see Mrs. Burkett. “Do you know where the well is?”
“Yes,” she said. “He wrote it down for me.”
She slid the chain out of the slot and opened the door fully. Picking up a notepad from a table in the entryway, she held it out to us. The note indicated he’d gone out to a well located on a property on FM 919, not far from the tiny metropolis of Gordon.
We thanked her for the information and returned to Eddie’s car, driving out to the property, arriving in just under twenty minutes. While the owner’s house sat a full half mile back from the road, the gas well was situated closer to the highway. The gate to the acreage stood open. The Yukon was parked next to the well, the front of the vehicle angled toward the gate. Not only were the headlights on, but the cab was lit as well. A man was visible in the cab. Though it was impossible to identify him with any certainty from this distance and with the headlights causing interference, I assumed the man was Larry Burkett.
Eddie and I drove up closer, leaving fifty yards or so between our car and Burkett’s SUV, giving ourselves a buffer zone in case he was armed. We climbed out and crept carefully toward the Yukon. Both of us had drawn our guns, the earlier events at Judge Craven’s house having made us anxious.
“Mr. Burkett?” I called out loudly as we approached the truck. “We’re federal agents. We’d like to talk to you.”
The man in the car didn’t move.
“I don’t think he heard you,” Eddie said.
“Mr. Burkett?” I called even louder, now only a dozen feet from the vehicle. “We’re fed—”
I stopped in my tracks.
That wasn’t a man in the cab. It was a fifty-pound bag of dog food wrapped in a man’s jacket with a hard hat sitting on top of it.
Eddie must’ve noticed it, too. “What the hell?”
Before we could process the information, an odd hissing noise came from the well fifty feet away. A small flame shot up from the ground, followed by a louder hiss, followed by a larger flame. In the distance beyond the well, a dark shadow fled through the field.
“It’s a setup!” I screamed. “Run!”
Eddie took off running across the field with me following two steps behind. We’d made it only a hundred feet when BOOM! A fireball erupted from the well. The percussive effect of the explosion slammed into me, sending me tumbling forward. An instant later, the flames scorched my back. Eddie had been thrown to the ground. On instinct, I dove on top of him, covering him as well as I could with my body.
If either of us were to go up in flame tonight, I’d rather it be me. Eddie had a wife and kids who needed him. I had Nick and my cats but no children depending on me. At least if I died here tonight, I’d die knowing Nick loved me. That was something, right?
We lay there for a moment, both of us screaming in sheer terror as the flames licked over us. Those fortune cookies had been right. Things had definitely heated up for us. Given the line of excruciating pain across my ass, I surmised that the hem of my jacket had caught fire and spread to my pants. When the initial burst of flame subsided, I rolled off Eddie and kept going, spinning across the pasture like a kid rolling down a hill, hoping to douse the flames that seared my skin.
When I’d rolled a dozen feet or so, I stopped, lying on my stomach and looking back over my shoulder. Smoke rose from my scorched ass. Farther back, the well shot a geyser of flame hundreds of feet into the air. The Yukon was fully engulfed.
Eddie and I scrambled to our feet and ran toward the house. A middle-aged couple stood on the front porch, their mouths gaping, a scared, squirming dachshund clutched in the woman’s arms. I recognized them as plaintiffs in the PPE class-action suit.
“Have you called for help?” I hollered as we approached.
“Yes!” the woman cried. “It’s on the way!”
A minute later, sirens sounded in the distance and flashing lights lit up the night sky, competing with the fire from the well. The first responders pulled through the gate and across the field, driving up near the well.
Eddie and I stood with the couple on their porch while the local fire department worked to extinguish the fire. We questioned the couple about the well, whether they’d seen Larry Burkett on their property tonight, but they’d been inside watching television since dinnertime.
The wife shook her head and clutched her dog even tighter. “We didn’t notice a
thing.”
When the shock of the explosion waned, the blistering pain across my behind became unbearable. I looked back to see parts of my bare, blistered butt showing through the seat of my pants. The woman was kind enough to give me a bathrobe to wrap around myself.
When the fire was extinguished, Eddie and I were able to return to his car. The vehicle bore scorch marks but at least it still started. The Yukon, on the other hand, was a mere metal skeleton.
The firemen wore masks, but Eddie and I had to settle for lifting our shirt hems to our noses and breathing through the fabric, hoping it would filter out any toxic chemicals. The effort was likely futile, and we both knew it, so we breathed as shallowly as possible and moved quickly.
I glanced around and shook my head. “What a waste.”
“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “And that bastard wanted to waste us, too.”
“I can’t sit,” I said. “My butt hurts too much.”
Eddie opened the back door of his car for me. “Lie down back here. I’ll get your ass to the ER.”
chapter forty
Rump Roast
Eddie drove me to the nearest hospital in Mineral Wells. While he waited in the lobby and phoned Nick, Josh, and Lu to give them the news, the doctors took a look at my backside in the ER. The shit had definitely hit the fan. As promised, I phoned Trish from the hospital bed and told her about Judge Craven’s arrest and the explosion. She was thrilled to be the first reporter with the inside scoop.
“You’re lucky,” the physician told me as he cleaned my wounds.
I cringed, clenching my eyes closed and fisting my hands against the pain. “Funny, I don’t feel lucky.” I might’ve been embarrassed if I wasn’t in such agony.
“These are second-degree burns,” he said, “but they cover only a small area. It could’ve been a whole lot worse.”
The doctor prescribed a burn ointment and three days’ worth of painkillers. He was kind enough to give me the first dose before sending me on my way.
When I stepped into the waiting room, I found Nick and Lu sitting with Eddie. All three stood as I waddled in, trying my hardest not to use my glutes.