by Sandra Brown
“We could. But I’d rather dodge a thunderstorm than have an MD80 that doesn’t know I’m there fly up my ass.” He turned around so she could see his face instead of the back of his head. “But that’s just me.”
She gave him a drop-dead look, yanked the cords from the outlets on the wall near her chair, and removed her headset. He focused his attention on the job at hand, but when the turbulence became even rougher, he looked back to check on her. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving. She was either praying or chanting. Or maybe cursing him.
Gall, whom he’d notified of his approach, had turned on the runway lights. He set the airplane down with the ease of long practice and skill and taxied toward the hangar, where he could see Gall silhouetted in the open maw of the building.
He brought the airplane to a stop and cut the engines. Gall came out to put chocks on the wheels. Dent squeezed himself out of the cockpit and into the cabin, opened the door, then climbed out first and turned to help Bellamy navigate the steps. She ignored the hand he extended.
Which piqued him. He reached for her hand and slapped a sales receipt into it. “You owe me for the gas I got in Houston.”
“Mr. Hathaway has my credit card. Excuse me. I need the restroom.”
She hurried into the building.
Gall rounded the wing and glanced into the empty cabin. “Where are her folks?”
“They stayed in Houston.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. The old man looked like he was on his last leg. Otherwise, how’d it go?”
“Don’t make nice with me, Gall. I’m mad as hell at you.”
“You’re richer tonight than—”
“I want a straight answer. Did you know about her book?”
“Book?”
“A book. You know, like people read.”
“Does it have pictures?”
“No.”
“Then I didn’t know about it.”
Dent searched Gall’s eyes, which were rheumy but free of deceit. “I’ll kill you later. Right now, I’m ready to put up my airplane and call it a day.”
While he was going about it, Bellamy and Gall conducted their business in the hangar office. But he kept an eye on them, and, as she came out of the hangar, he placed himself directly in her path.
Stiffly, she said, “Thank you.”
He wasn’t about to let her getaway be that easy. “I may not use words like ‘expunge,’ but I know how to fly. I’m a good pilot. You had no reason to be scared.”
Not quite meeting his gaze, she said, “I wasn’t afraid of the flying.”
Chapter 3
Together Dent and Gall got the airplane into the hangar. Dent climbed back in to retrieve his sunglasses and iPad, and spotted the copy of Low Pressure lying in the seat Bellamy had occupied. “Son of a bitch.” He grabbed the book and, as soon as he cleared the door of his airplane, made a beeline for his Vette.
Gall turned away from the noisily humming refrigerator, a six-pack of Bud in his hand. “I thought we’d crack a couple of—Where are you going?”
“After her.”
“What do you mean, after her?”
Dent got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but when he would have pulled the door closed, Gall was there, the six-pack in one hand, his other braced against the open car door. “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Ace.”
“Oh that’s funny. You’re the one who set me up with them.”
“I was wrong.”
“You think?” He gave the door a tug. “Let go.”
“Why’re you going after her?”
“She left her book behind. I’m going to return it.”
He yanked hard on the door and Gall released it. “You should leave it alone.”
Dent didn’t acknowledge the warning. He shoved the Vette into first gear and peeled out of the hangar. He knew the road well, which was fortunate, because while he drove with one hand, he used his other to wrestle his wallet from his back pocket, fish the check from it, and, after reading the address, accessed a GPS app on his iPad. In a matter of minutes he had a map to her place.
Georgetown, not quite thirty miles north of Austin, was known for its Victorian-era architecture. Its town square and tree-lined residential streets boasted structures with gingerbread trim.
Bellamy lived in one such house. It sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a deep veranda that ran the width of the house. Dent parked at the curb and, taking the book with him, followed a flower-bordered path to the steps leading up to the porch. He took them two at a time and reached past a potted Boston fern to ring the doorbell.
Then he saw that the front door stood ajar. He knocked. “Hello?” He heard a noise, but it wasn’t an acknowledgment. “Hello? Bellamy?” As fast as he’d been driving, she couldn’t have been that far ahead of him. “Hello?”
She appeared in the wedge between the door frame and the door, and it looked to him like she was depending on it for support. Her eyes were wide and watery, and her face was pale, bringing into stark contrast a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks that he hadn’t noticed before.
She licked her lips. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you okay?”
She gave an affirmative nod, but he didn’t believe her.
“You look all…” He gestured toward her face. “Was it the flight? Did it mess you up that bad?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He hesitated, wondering why he didn’t just hand her the book and tell her to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as he’d come here to do, then turn and walk away. For good. Forever and ever, amen.
He had a strong premonition that if he stayed for one second longer, he would live to regret it. But despite the impulse to get the hell out of there and away from her and all things Lyston, he gave the door a gentle push, which she resisted. He pushed harder until she let go and the door swung wide.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
The central hallway behind her looked like it had been the site of a ticker-tape parade. The glossy hardwood floor was littered with scraps of paper. Brushing past her, he went in, bent down, and picked up one of the larger pieces. It was the corner of a page; T. J. David was printed on it, along with a page number.
“You found it like this when you got home?”
“I was just a few minutes ahead of you,” she replied. “This is as far as I got.”
Dent’s first thought was that the intruder might still be inside the house. “Alarm system?”
“The house doesn’t have one. I only moved in a couple of weeks ago.” She gestured toward sealed boxes stacked against the wall. “I haven’t even finished unpacking.”
“Your husband isn’t here?”
The question seemed to confuse her at first, then she stammered, “No. I mean… I don’t… I’m divorced.”
Huh. He tucked that away for future consideration. “Call nine-one-one. I’ll take a look around.”
“Dent—”
“I’ll be okay.”
He set the copy of her novel on the console table, then continued down the central hallway past a dining room and a living room, which opened off of it on opposite sides. The hall led him to the back of the house, where he found the kitchen and utility room. The door to the yard was standing open. The locking mechanism dangled from a neat round hole in the door.
A striped cat curiously peered around the jamb. Upon seeing Dent, it skedaddled. Being careful not to touch anything, he stepped out onto a concrete stoop, where a bag of potting soil and a stack of terra-cotta flowerpots stood against the exterior wall of the house. One of the pots had been broken. Pieces of it lay on the steps leading down to the ground. The fenced yard was empty.
He figured the house-breaker was no longer a threat, but he wanted to check the upstairs anyway. He retraced his steps through the kitchen and back into the wide hallway. Bellamy was standing where he’d left h
er, cell phone in hand.
“I think he came and went through the utility room door. I’m gonna check upstairs.”
He climbed them quickly. The first door on his left opened into a spare bedroom, which she obviously planned on using as an office. The computer setup on the trestle table appeared to have been left undisturbed, but, as in the entryway below, pages of her book had been made into confetti and strewn everywhere. He checked the closet, but there was nothing in it except boxes packed with basic office supplies.
Midway down the hall, a quaint pair of doors with glass panes stood open. He walked through them into Bellamy’s bedroom. Here, he drew up short. The room had been vandalized, but not with confetti.
Hastily he checked the closet, where he found clothes and shoes, several unpacked boxes, and a lingering floral scent. The bathroom was likewise empty except for the cream-colored fixtures, fluffy towels, and feminine accoutrements on the dressing table.
He returned to the bedroom’s double doors and called down to her. “Coast is clear, but you’d better come up.”
Moments later she joined him, doing exactly as he’d done when he walked in. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared.
“I take it that’s not part of the decor.”
“No,” she said huskily.
Scrawled in red paint on the wall was: You’ll be sorry.
The paint had run, leaving rivulets at the bottom of each letter that looked like dripping blood. In lieu of a paintbrush, a pair of her underwear had been used to write the letters.
The significance of that escaped neither of them.
Dent motioned toward the paint-soaked wad of silk lying on the carpet. “Yours?” When she nodded, he said, “Sick bastard. Police on their way?”
She roused herself, pulled her gaze away from the message on the wall, and looked up at him. “I didn’t call them.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I don’t want a big deal made of this.”
He thought surely he had heard her wrong, and his expression must have conveyed that.
“It was a prank,” she said. “When I moved in, a neighbor warned of things like this happening in the area. There’s been a rash of it. Teenagers with not enough to do. Maybe an initiation of some kind. They scatter trash across lawns. Knock over mailboxes. I’m told they hit a whole block one night last month.”
He looked at the vandalized wall, the garment on the floor, then came back to her. “Your panties were used to paint a threatening message on your bedroom wall, and you put that on par with scattered trash and banged-up mailboxes?”
“I’m not calling the police. Nothing was taken. Not that I can tell, anyway. It was just… just mischief.”
She turned quickly and left the room. Dent went after her, clumping down the stairs on her heels. “When I got here you were shaking like a leaf. Now you’re passing this off as a prank?”
“I’m certain that’s all it was.”
She rounded the newel post and headed for the kitchen, Dent only half a step behind her. “Uh-uh. I ain’t buying it. What are you going to be sorry for?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think you do.”
“It’s none of your business. What are you doing here, anyway?” She dragged a chair from the kitchen dining table into the utility room and pushed it against the door to keep it closed. “The neighbor’s cat comes to visit uninvited.”
When she turned back, Dent was there, blocking her. “I’ve a good mind to call the police myself.”
“Don’t you dare. The media would get wind of it, and then I’d have that to deal with, too.”
“Too? In addition to what?”
“Nothing. Just… just please let it go. I’m waiting for the call that my father has died. I can’t take on any more right now. Can’t you understand that?”
He understood that the woman was on the verge of a meltdown. Her eyes were stark with something. Fear? Her voice was unsteady, like it was about to crack. She was holding on to the ledge by her fingernails, but she was holding on, and he had to give her credit for that.
He softened his approach. “Look, thanks to your family, I’m no fan of cops, either. But I still think you should report this.”
“They’ll show up with lights flashing.”
“Probably.”
“No thank you. I could do without the circus. I’m not calling them.”
“Okay, then a neighbor.”
“What for?”
“Ask if you can crash on their sofa.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“A friend? Someone who could come—”
“No.”
“Then call the police.”
“You want to call them, you call. You can deal with them. I won’t be here.” She pushed him aside and made her way back into the hall. “I’ll be at my parents’ house.”
“That idea gets my vote. You’d be crazy to stay here alone. But wait an hour. Let the police come—”
“No. I want to make the drive before the storm gets here.”
“It’s not coming here.”
She glanced toward the window. “It may.” She leaned down to retrieve her shoulder bag from the floor, where she’d apparently dropped it when she came in. She hauled the strap onto her shoulder. “You still haven’t told me why you followed me home.”
“To return your lousy book.” He pointed toward the console table where he’d left it. Then he moved his boot through a heap of torn pages. “Seems somebody else likes it even less than I do.”
She was about to speak, but faltered and looked away from him, then turned abruptly and opened the front door.
Dent reached beyond her shoulder and pushed the door shut. She came around angrily, but he was the first to speak. “This is about the book. Right?”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Her expression said it all.
“You’re good and truly spooked, aren’t you?”
“I—”
“Because you know as well as I do that this wasn’t a teenager’s prank.”
“I know nothing of the kind.”
“What else would you have to be sorry for? You wrote that book, and it made somebody real unhappy.”
“I never said—”
“Unhappy enough to threaten you, and you’re taking that threat seriously. I know that because you’re scared. Don’t deny it. I can tell. So what’s going on? What gives?”
“What do you care?”
“Call me a nice guy.”
“But you’re not!”
There was no arguing that. For seconds they glared at each other, then her head dropped forward and she kept it bowed for several moments. When she raised it, she brushed back a strand of hair that had shaken loose from her ponytail.
“Dent, I’ve had a perfectly rotten day. First I had to encounter you, when you were so obviously hostile and rejecting of any olive branch. I had to stand by, uselessly, in that cancer ward and watch my dad, whom I love more than anyone in the world, suffer untold pain and indignity.
“I didn’t want to leave him, but he invented a business matter that needs to be dealt with tomorrow morning as soon as the offices open. But the real reason he sent me back was to spare me having to see him like that.
“Then, during the flight home, I had to talk myself out of having a full-blown panic attack, which was not only terrifying, but humiliating because you were there to see it. I got home to find my house wrecked, and then you showed up and started giving me grief. I’ve had it. I’m leaving. You can stay, or leave, or go to hell. It makes no difference to me.”
On her way out she flicked a master switch that turned off every light in the house, leaving Dent in the dark.
Ray Strickland was a man better avoided, and he worked at making himself appear so.
He had come by his mean countenance naturally, but he had developed mannerisms to match his appearance. A thick, low brow formed a perpetual scowl that kept his dee
ply set eyes in shadow. His wide shoulders and muscled arms would have made him look top-heavy if his legs weren’t equally stout.
He didn’t shave his head, but buzzed it closely with an electric razor every few days. An iron cross, like the German war medal, was tattooed on his nape. Other tats decorated his arms and chest. He was especially proud of the snake, bared fangs dripping venom, that coiled around his left arm from shoulder to wrist.
The serpent hid the scars.
Attached to his belt was a leather scabbard that held a knife he kept honed and ready in case somebody didn’t heed the advertising and decided to mess with him.
He gave off an aura of Leave Me the Hell Alone. Most anyone who crossed paths with him was happy to oblige. Tonight he was in a particularly fractious mood.
The bar where he had stopped for refreshment was crowded and hot, the band lousy and loud. Every new arrival that came through the opaque-glass entrance increased Ray’s irritation. They encroached on his space and sucked up his air. He’d left his leather vest open for ventilation, but he still felt constricted.
He signaled the waitress for another shot of straight tequila. She was wearing a black cowboy hat with a feather band, a black leather bra, and low-rise jeans. Her navel was pierced with a silver ring, and attached to it was a chain that dangled right down to there.
Ray let her see that he noticed. “I like that chain.”
“Thanks,” she said, with a silent Drop dead added. After pouring his drink, she turned her back to him and sashayed to the other end of the bar, giving him an eyeful of a heart-shaped ass.
The rejection made him mad as hell. Not that he wasn’t used to it. Women just didn’t seem to take to him, not unless he plied them with enough cheap liquor to urge on a little friendliness and cooperation. He never inspired their lust.
He just didn’t have the gift. Not like his big brother, Allen. Now there was a ladies’ man for you. All Allen had to do was crook his finger at a female and she’d come running. In no time flat, Allen could sweet-talk his way past her bra and into her panties. He’d loved women and they’d loved him back.
Only one had ever turned Allen down.
Susan Lyston.