by Tami Hoag
All the fight drained out of her, washed away by a tide of despair and inadequacy. She stood there like a zombie, numb, staring at Rich's power tie as he lowered his head and kissed the side of her neck. Jolynn shuddered. The response was shame, not desire, but Rich didn't seem to care.
“You always want it, Jolynn,” he murmured, bringing up his free hand to open the top three buttons of her blouse. He pushed aside the cup of her bra and filled his hand with her breast, kneading it, squeezing it, rubbing his thumb across her nipple. “You're always hot for me. You always will be.”
Tears rose in her eyes and spilled over to roll down her cheeks. He was right. She had always been hot for him. Always willing. She'd never given him reason to think things would ever change. She had told Elizabeth she enjoyed sex with him. She had told herself it was habit. Maybe it was more a matter of addiction. Or desperation. Either way, it was pathetic. She was pathetic.
“Come on, Jolynn,” he whispered, his voice as darkly seductive and as smoky as the music that created the undercurrent for it. “You want it.”
He didn't seem to notice she wasn't enjoying the proceedings. But then, he had never cared about anything but himself—his pleasure, his satisfaction, his comfort. She was just a convenient means of achieving those ends. His own private toy to use and discard when he was finished.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go to your room. I don't like doing it on your floor, you never vacuum.”
“No,” she said softly. Whether he didn't hear her or simply chose to ignore her, he took her by the wrist again and started toward the hall. Jo jerked back her hand and dug down inside for a scrap of courage. “I said no.”
Rich's eyes narrowed and gleamed with feral light. His upper lip curled into a snarl. “Don't be such a bitch, Jolynn,” he growled. “I've got a hard-on.”
“If you're limber enough, I have a suggestion as to what you can do with it,” she said. “Go fuck yourself, Rich. That would have to be the ultimate treat for you.”
Color slashed across his cheeks like war paint, and his nostrils flared as he took an aggressive step toward her. His hand snaked out and he caught her wrist in a bone-crunching grip. Jolynn bit her lip to keep from crying out. That she wasn't sure whether he would force her or not frightened her. She'd known him for years and she suddenly wasn't certain what he might be capable of if she made him angry enough.
“You want to have the title ‘Rapist' precede your name as you step out onto the campaign trail?” she asked, warding off the pain in her wrist with sarcasm.
The look he gave her was utterly contemptuous. “Who'd believe you?” he sneered, looming over her, slowly twisting her arm.
She bit back a moan, glaring up at him through her tears. “What difference would it make if anyone believed me or not? This is Minnesota. The slightest breath of scandal and you're political road kill.”
He swore viciously as he thrust her away from him. She stumbled back against the coffee table, toppling another mountain of magazines. Pulling her injured wrist against her, she rubbed it absently as she watched Rich pace off his frustration.
“You wouldn't do that to me.” He stated it as a fact. His eyes were cold and hard as he glared at her.
Jolynn laughed, incredulous. “Why not?”
“There's too much between us.”
“Don't make me gag. The only thing that's been between us in the last five years is your penis.”
“Jesus, Jolynn.” Rich decided to play incredulous too. The wounded lover. The friend betrayed. “This is my career we're talking about! This is my life we're talking about!”
She arched a brow in amazement. “And what am I—an inanimate object? I have a life too, Rich.”
He shook his head and laughed to himself. “You're nobody, Jolynn,” he said cruelly, both his gaze and his words cutting her to the quick. “You and your bitch queen boss and your stupid little piss-ant newspaper. You're nothing.” He tapped a fist to his chest. “I'm going to be somebody, Jolynn. Don't even think of getting in my way.”
She watched him storm out the back, wincing as the glass rattled in the door. Tears came for her aching wrist and for the ache inside her. A jumble of emotions left over from the confrontation knotted in her chest, and she cried a little, at a loss as to what to do with them. She felt alone and unsettled, as if the earth were shifting beneath her and reality was altering around her.
She wasn't Rich Cannon's wife anymore. She wasn't Rich Cannon's mistress anymore. She didn't want to think that she had ever defined herself that way, but she had. Now she stood in her living room, looking at what was left of her now that she'd scraped away the layer of dirt. She looked at her reflection in the glass of the cactus print and saw herself. Wide-eyed and uncertain. Overweight and in need of a new hairdo. She felt raw and weak . . . and clean. Clean, she marveled. Fresh. Ready to start over. She smiled a little and shed a tear for herself, for happiness, for a new beginning.
The doorbell jolted her from her trance. She went to answer it, trying to straighten her clothes and wipe her tears away with her good hand. She had to look like hell, but she didn't really give a damn. It wasn't likely to be anyone but the paper boy coming to collect.
Yeager was standing on the doorstep in rumpled chinos and worn-out purple knit shirt, a strand of sandy hair sticking up in front like an antenna. Yeager and his dog, side by side. The dog cocked his head and gave her a quizzical look that confirmed Jolynn's worst fears about her appearance. Yeager's lazy smile faltered.
“Am I here at a bad time?” he asked softly, concern lighting his dark eyes.
Jolynn shook her head. “No,” she said, a secretive smile blossoming on her rosebud mouth and in her heart. “The bad time is over.”
“I brought that book over.” He lifted a thick, hardbound tome as evidence. “Arnaut's Science of Blood Spattering.”
Jolynn accepted the offering with a misty smile. She stroked her hand over the cover. “How sweet.”
“And I brought cookies,” he said, his grin making a comeback as he pulled a giant-size Ziploc bag from behind his back. “Double chocolate chunk with pecans. They're my personal favorite.”
“Come on in,” she said, stepping back from the door, hugging the book against her. “I think I even have a quart of milk that hasn't gone bad.” She turned and headed for the kitchen, waving her good arm at the living room. “Sorry about the mess. I haven't felt like cleaning up for the last two or three years.”
“Looks okay to me,” he said innocently as he and his four-legged pal followed her into the house, tromping over magazines and past the display of dying plants.
Jolynn cast him a smile over her shoulder. “You're a man after my own heart, Agent Yeager.”
Yeager's grin widened. “Yes, ma'am.”
FIVE BLOCKS AWAY TROUBLE WAS BREWING IN THE PARKING lot of the Red Rooster. The building that housed the bar and pool hall, appropriately enough, looked like a chicken coop with a thyroid problem. It had, at one time, been used as a storage shed for the volunteer fire department, then a school bus shed, then a dance hall. Over the years the building had been modified and updated, never in any way that could have been considered anything but half-assed. Workmanship and quality materials had been spared, and tackiness given free rein. The place looked as though it would have gone over at the first strong wind, but it had managed to remain standing for nearly forty years.
The town council had finally shamed Arnie Myers into painting it—barn red—and Mrs. Myers had contributed a touch of Still Creek hominess by planting geraniums in whiskey barrels by the doors. The result was politely called “quaint” by tourists. Arnie didn't much care. He had a deficiency of iron and civic pride that melded into a general kind of apathy. As far as he saw it, it didn't matter what the tourists thought; he catered to a more local clientele.
One of the worst of that crowd loitered in the dark parking lot near the side door. Smoke and noise wafted out through the screen: the clack of cue balls hitting thei
r mark, cheers, groans, raucous laughter, glass hitting glass. The jukebox blasted over it all—Garth Brooks bragging about having friends in low places. Carney Fox lit a cigarette and leaned back against his Impala, his dark eyes gleaming bright as he looked up at Trace Stuart.
“Turned you down, huh?”
Trace laughed, but it was a sound of teenage affront, not humor. “Shit. Turned me down? He damn near threw me out with his bare hands.”
Thinking of it still made him furious. Old Shafer had lit into him with his teeth bared, yelling and screaming that he wouldn't hire Trace for anything, that the Stuarts weren't anything but trash and troublemakers and no one wanted them in Still Creek. Well, Trace had news for him. He didn't want to be in Still Creek either. He would rather have spent his whole frigging life in Siberia than in this stinking squarehead Norwegian town. Humiliation burned inside him as Carney laughed. The rage that he never seemed to know what to do with reared up and chomped at the bit to be set free.
He hated this place. Hated it, hated it, hated it.
“So, what are you gonna do about it?” Carney asked slyly. He took a drag on his cigarette. The red glow from the tip illuminated his sharp, bony face with eerie light.
Trace scowled at him. “Hell, what can I do? I can't hardly make him give me a job.”
And dammit, he'd wanted that job. Wanted the money, the independence. Just the idea of having that job made him feel more like the man he wanted to be. That and the idea of the car he would have saved for. Now he was stuck with his stupid bike like some stupid little kid.
Carney sucked at the last of his smoke, pinching the filter tip with grubby fingers. He tossed the butt into Carol Myers's geraniums and spread his skinny arms expansively. “No, but you can make him sorry he didn't give it to you.” He flashed his crooked teeth in the dim light and trouble hummed in the air around him. “Don't get mad, Trace, my man. Get even.”
FIFTEEN
ELIZABETH WOKE WITH A START, AS IF HER BODY were aware of something her mind had yet to pick up on. She had fallen asleep on her lumpy beige sofa, curled up in her oldest pair of jeans and a sky-blue Gianni Versace silk shirt—another item she'd stolen from Brock. The lamp on the end table was turned on low, creating a puddle of amber light in the otherwise darkened house. Her three-by-five cards were scattered across the worn brown shag carpet like confetti, notes about the murder—motives, suspects, hunches.
She had sat there all evening, staring at the notes until her eyes refused to focus and her brain had long since given up trying to untangle the threads. She was no detective. Hell, she wasn't even really a reporter. How did she think she was going to solve this mess? How was she supposed to sort fact from fiction, gossip from grounds for murder?
Dismissing the questions, she sat perfectly still, listening until her ears rang from the silence. The Bonnie Raitt tape she had fallen asleep listening to had played itself out, the cassette player had turned itself off. There was nothing in the air, no sound from inside the house, no sound drifting in through the open windows, only a fresh, cool breeze.
She had waited in dread all evening for the phone to ring, but it hung, silent and mocking, on the kitchen wall. According to the clock on the VCR it was twelve, twelve, twelve. According to the wind-up alarm clock sitting on the TV it was eleven twenty-five. She thought she might have heard Trace coming in, but there was no sound from the kitchen.
“Paranoid,” she mumbled, rubbing her hands over her face.
She pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen, trying to rouse her mind from the fog of hard sleep. A bright wedge of moon beamed silvery light down on the countryside and into the kitchen. Pretty night. Quiet night. She poured herself a glass of milk to combat the burn of anxiety and scotch in her stomach, sniffed at it to make sure it hadn't gone bad, and moved to the counter to look out the window.
Everything was still outside. She saw no sign of Trace coming home. There was no light on in the shed. There was no silhouette of him on the road. The idea that he was far away in more ways than just distance made her heart ache. She wanted to be up when he came in, wanted to just sit with him and talk, not fight, which was about all they had been doing recently. Fighting wasn't doing her any good. At this moment he was probably off somewhere with Carney Fox, telling him what a bitch his mother was.
It didn't do her any good to worry about it though. The worry would eat her alive and leave the problem to grow on unhindered. What she wanted to do was get into her car and go after him, track him down and bring him home, but she could well envision the kind of fight that would spark. The need to have him here and safe and free of the influence of people like Carney Fox warred mightily with the logic of letting him go.
He was sixteen. She had been barely a year older when she'd gotten pregnant with him. No one could have told her then that she didn't know everything she needed to know about the world. It might have made a difference if she had had a mother, but it hadn't made a difference to have J.C. The only time he'd taken any interest in her was when she was winning money on the rodeo circuit, barrel racing, or when he was drunk and mistook her for the ghost of the long-dead, long-lamented Victoria. She tried to take some comfort in the knowledge that she was a better parent than J.C. had been, but then, slugs probably made better parents than J. C. Sheldon.
It was hard, she thought, sipping at her milk, so hard for a woman to raise a boy on her own. What Trace needed at this point in his life was a role model, a male to bond with and look up to. She thought of Dane and laughed bitterly at her mind's ability to ferret out ways of justifying a relationship with him.
What she needed was something to occupy her mind until Trace showed up. Something to keep her calm and distracted. Then, when Trace came in, they would have that heart-to-heart and she would try her best to steer him in the right direction without pushing him into an even worse rebellion.
She needed to go over the inventory of damages to the paper office for the insurance company, but she had inadvertently left it in the Caddy out in the shed, and the idea of walking out there in the dead of night didn't appeal. In fact, she shivered at the thought of it.
Coward. The word poked at her, taunted her. Once Aaron got the locks on the doors, she would become a virtual prisoner in her own home, she thought, her mouth curling downward in disgust at her lack of nerve. She would just sit in here every night, petrified, afraid of every sound, afraid to hear the phone ring. What kind of life was that? What self-respecting girl from West Texas lived that way?
Stepping around the sawhorses and over the nomadic pile of shoes that had migrated to a spot near the refrigerator, Elizabeth made her way to the back door. The night was just as quiet from this vantage point. No suspicious sounds, no dark shapes lurking in the shadows of the old buildings. Dane had told her he was sending a car by every hour or so during the night just to keep a lookout. That reminder gave her enough courage to go out onto the back step.
All she had to do was walk across the yard to the lean-to shed at the end of the barn, dig the papers out of the mess she'd left in the car, walk back to the house. Not a tall order. Nothing complicated. Nothing she would hesitate to do in the light of day. Night always seemed more frightening, but the fact of the matter was Jarvis had been killed in broad daylight. He had probably felt perfecly safe—until the blade had sliced across his throat.
Turning that image off before it could rattle her, Elizabeth descended the steps and headed for the shed, picking her way barefoot across the weedy, thistle-strewn yard, glass of milk still clutched in her hand.
The shed was narrow and decrepit, not much wider than the Caddy, with a dirt floor, no windows, and mountains of junk around the sides of it, stuff left by previous Drewes usurpers—old crates of motor oil, rusty tin cans full of rustier nails, amputated car parts, bald tires. The only light was a feeble seventy-five-watt bulb up in the rafters that cast about as much illumination on the mess as a candle, but it was better than nothing. Elizabeth made her w
ay along the wall, feeling for the switch, heart thumping in the base of her throat as something skittered along the floor among the retreads. She flipped the switch and turned toward the Cadillac.
Paper was strewn everywhere. She had dumped much of the mess from the Clarion office into the car, planning to sort through it Sunday and get some of the files back in order. Someone had already been sorting—or searching for something. The driver's side door stood ajar, papers spewing out of it in a trail of white onto the hard-packed dirt floor of the shed.
Elizabeth's breath froze in her lungs. The short hairs bristled on the back of her neck. The house suddenly seemed a long, long way away, and tears blurred her vision as she stared through the open door toward it. What good would it do her once she was inside? There were no locks. There were no neighbors near enough to hear screams.
But there was a big pistol in her purse on the kitchen table.
She started to move toward the door, feeling as if she were going in slow motion, when all hell broke loose behind her. Her brain absorbed the action in snatches, as if through the blinding flashes of a strobe light. A figure clad in black. Only the eyes and mouth visible. Eyes wild. Mouth open. It lunged from the dark corner near the hood of the Cadillac, looming up over her shoulder like a specter, one arm raised high.
A scream tore from Elizabeth's throat as the figure lunged at her, arm swinging down. She pitched forward, crying out again as something hard hit her a glancing blow to the shoulder and pain rained all the way down her left arm to her fingertips. The glass of milk dropped from her hand and shattered across the floor of the shed. Stars shooting across her vision, she stumbled, staggered dizzily, and went down to her knees on the hard, lumpy, glass-strewn floor. Glass bit into her right knee, but the pain was there and gone in a white-hot burst as adrenaline swept it away. Her legs felt like rubber and the world seemed to pitch and roll beneath her as unconsciousness beckoned. But from some corner of her mind came a loud, insistent shout—Move or die! Move! Move! Move!