Licensed to Thrill: Volume 2

by Diane Capri

  He noticed the crackling, snapping sounds of the raging fire, louder than any fire he’d set before. How would he get out in time? Where was Helen? And who had shot him?

  A new surge of adrenaline granted his mind temporary clarity. This only enhanced his nausea, which he recognized as an acute symptom of shock. He took a few deep breaths and pressed his hand tighter into the wound on his leg.

  Would they all die together here, then? As always, Helen had shown courage in this, the final challenge. Still, Ben had bested her; he could be proud of that much.

  He struggled to sit up in the darkness and almost passed out from the pain in his leg. He clamped his teeth into his lower lip to keep his moans from escaping. He realized he was seated on the floor near the door. He had only to crawl the short distance down the corridor to the exit.

  With his right hand still holding the gun, he shoved hard and flung the door open. The hinges howled like the gates of perdition.

  Four gunshots rang out, each one hitting his body.

  Scalding hot pain torched his stomach, his groin, his arm, his chest.

  He dropped the gun and howled while the blood emptied from his body with each pulse of his frigid heart.

  “Jess!” Helen’s scream was the last sound he ever heard.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Thornberry, Florida

  Monday 2:30 a.m.

  STILL HOLDING OLIVER’S 9mm PISTOL aimed in Ben’s direction after hitting her target four times, Helen smelled the fire, the metallic tang of blood. Ben didn’t shoot again, nor did he make another sound. She yelled for Jess, but if the younger woman responded, Helen could not hear her. Quickly, Helen thought it through.

  Jess had shot Ben first, saving Helen’s life. He’d returned fire and must have hit Jess. While Ben was distracted, Helen had grabbed Oliver’s gun from the bedside table.

  Helen believed Ben Fleming was dead, but either way, she had to find Jess and couldn’t see her in the dark. Helen felt around the floor until she found the bedside table and raised herself to retrieve the large flashlight Oliver kept there.

  She turned the flashlight on and swept its beam over the area near the door. She saw Ben’s body on the floor, his life’s blood leaking from half a dozen wounds.

  She had never killed a man before. She had never wondered how her body would react in such a situation, how she would feel about taking a human life; she never expected to do so. An emotional detachment settled over her like a protective barrier between skin and pain that dulled her senses and slowed her reactions. She felt little, if anything.

  In the darkness, she smelled smoke, endured the heat surrounding the room.

  “Oliver,” she said to him. “Don’t worry. We’ll get out of here in a minute.”

  Carefully, she shined the flashlight’s beam over his bed, illuminating enough that she could check him without shining too brightly in his eyes. No need. His eyelids were closed. Dead? Her own heart stopped. If Oliver was dead, she’d die here, too. This mess would finally be over. Surely, something better had to be in store for them all after death.

  She reached over to check the pulse in his neck. Still beating. He was alive. A flood of relief almost capsized her. She heard herself begin to cry as she committed Oliver’s peaceful face to memory. As she watched, his eyes opened, and closed, and opened again.

  Her breath caught. “Oliver? Can you hear me?”

  His eyes closed. She held her breath, waiting. His eyes opened, closed, and opened again.

  Helen heard something near joy in her own sobs and noticed her tears falling on Oliver’s cheeks. She bent down to his brow, his chin, his nose, and covered his face with light, quick kisses. “You’re really in there, honey. You’re really alive,” she said between laughing tears, then turned with renewed purpose to her problem.

  She flashed the beam of the flashlight over the rest of the room and found Jess. She was lying on the floor near the closet where she’d hid when they’d heard the two gunshots outside a lifetime ago.

  Jess’s chest was moving. She was unconscious, but alive. The only obvious injury Helen could see was a bullet wound across the outside of her left arm. The wound was bleeding, but Helen didn’t have time to do anything about it. Had Jess passed out from pain? Or did she have other wounds?

  Helen ran the flashlight’s beam over Jess’s body and noticed bleeding from a groove in her scalp. Another bullet had glanced across her head. A lucky shot. A few inches one way or the other and Jess would have been dead.

  Helen dragged Jess to Oliver’s bed. She used the hydraulic pedal to lower the bed closer to the floor and struggled to get Jess onto the bed with him. Jess was surprisingly heavy for such a small woman, Helen thought nonsensically. After struggling for what seemed too long a time, aware of the encroaching fire, Helen was able to settle Jess partially on the bed well enough that she wouldn’t fall off.

  Helen reached down to the wheels of the hospital bed and flipped the levers to release the brakes. Then she yanked Oliver’s two IVs out of their bottles to untether him.

  Helen pushed and pulled to move Ben’s much heavier body out of the way of the door and then shoved the door open. The fire raged so loudly she didn’t hear the hinges protest.

  She yanked on the foot of the hospital bed until she was able to get it rolling out into the corridor.

  “Which way? Which way? Which way?” she asked aloud, twisting her head from one door to the other at each end of the corridor.

  The door Ben used to enter was closer, but had only a small landing outside and then several steps descended to the patio. How would she get the bed down the steps? The exit door from the living room was farther away. But it led to an outside porch with a ramp for Oliver’s wheelchair which she could use to get the bed safely to the ground.

  Helen ran to the closed doorway between the corridor and the living room. She put her hand on the wood, yelped, and pulled her scorched palm back quickly. The door was so hot the fire must have filled the living room. The area where she was standing might burst into flames any moment.

  She turned and ran back to the bed, grateful for the old house’s high ceilings that had probably saved them from toxic gases already.

  She pushed the bed toward the rear exit door, pulled the door open, and shoved the head of the bed onto the landing and down the stairs. She held onto the foot of the bed, leaning all of her weight backward, praying not to bounce Jess and Oliver onto the ground as the bed took each step.

  The bed’s wheels struggled over the door sill and onto the small landing and then plopped heavily down onto the first of the steps. The frame bounced hard and stuck on something at the second step.

  Helen pushed with all of her strength, but the bed would not roll over the block.

  The bed was stuck in the doorway, half inside, half outside, sloping downward and would not budge. She couldn’t see what was blocking the wheels. She imagined the flames coming down the corridor or over the roof and knew she had to do something more. But what?

  Helen climbed up on the mattress and managed to scoot her head outside. She took several deep gulps of fresh air and held her face up to the stiff breeze. It felt so good to have the wind in her face. Both Oliver and Jess had their heads outside and could breathe untainted air, too. Helen knelt on the bed for a moment, relieved.

  The night was pitch black. The fire’s noise was slightly quieter outside, but its voracious appetite consumed the house’s fuel unabated. Helen could see almost as clearly as daylight, even though none of the electrically powered lights burned.

  The thought had done nothing more than surface when another struck her with the force of a hurricane: The total loss of power meant that the propane generators were out.

  Propane tank. Fire. Explosion.

  Helen scurried off the left side of the bed. She managed to stop on the solid concrete surface of the small landing with half her right foot before she lost her balance. She could see what was blocking the bed’s passage down th
e steps: Frank Temple’s body.

  Helen’s heart slammed harder against her chest and her stomach seized into a hard knot. She stooped to check, but found no pulse. Indecision captured her for a moment before she realized Frank couldn’t be helped.

  “Help!” she screamed, but no one answered. Had Ben killed everyone except the three of them, then? She didn’t know. But she knew she had to get Oliver and Jess away from the house before the gas blew them all into a million bloody pieces.

  Helen couldn’t possibly lift Oliver by herself. And she didn’t have time to lift both Jess and Oliver, even if she could manage to do so. She needed help.

  “Jess! Jess!” she shouted, shaking the younger woman with both hands. “Wake up!”

  Could she even hear Helen?

  “Jess! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Maybe Jess heard; she lifted her head and glanced briefly toward Helen. Helen saw her wince when she felt the pain in her arm. Her right hand flew to her wound and she stared at her own blood with disbelief. The blood on the side of her face was more terrifying to Helen, but Jess couldn’t see it.

  “Jess! Come on!” Helen told her, tugging at Jess’s good arm from her position on the ground while Jess remained partially on top of the mattress.

  After an eternity, Jess looked around and seemed to comprehend the situation. She sat up and then slid carefully off the mattress into Helen’s waiting arms.

  Jess wobbled on unsteady legs until her body’s adrenaline kicked in. “Okay,” she said, her voice a croak of tightly controlled fear and pain. “Now what?”

  They tried to roll the bed over Frank’s body. “Come on! Pull!” Helen encouraged them both, to no avail.

  Next, they looked around for something to make a ramp, but found nothing in the immediate vicinity.

  Helen glanced back and saw the fire had eaten the wall surrounding the closed doorway to the living room and advanced inexorably down the corridor in their direction.

  “Jess! Stand here. Hold the plastic sheet in your good hand. When I get Oliver moving, pull the sheet.” Helen didn’t expect Jess would be able to do any such thing, but she didn’t see any other option.

  Helen ran around to the other side of the bed and climbed up onto the mattress. Oliver’s eyes were open and she thought he was watching her. “Hang on!” she yelled over the noise. She hoped he could hear her, but she had no time to waste confirming.

  She wedged her body under the plastic bed sheet and cotton bottom sheet under Oliver’s body and pushed with all of her strength. She felt his dead weight begin to move, but she made little headway. She kept trying. She couldn’t see anything at all. After several attempts, miraculously, Oliver’s body began to slide. Jess had begun to pull.

  All at once, Oliver and the sheet he lay on slid off the mattress. Before he thumped to the landscaping, Helen grabbed the sheet. Jess managed to pull the sheet down to the ground and Helen slipped off on top of him.

  The three of them lay tumbled together on the shrubbery, battered and bruised, but were alive.

  Helen and Jess scrambled to grab the sheet and pull it along the back yard, bouncing Oliver over stones and debris until they reached the clearing where Jake’s barn once stood.

  From the ashes of Jake’s barn, the three of them watched as the ranch house burned.

  A few moments later, the remainder of the only home Oliver had ever loved exploded into the night sky sending fire and sparks so high into the air they illuminated the clouds.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Thornberry, Florida

  Tuesday Noon

  NEW YEAR’S DAY, HELEN RESTED her boots on the railing of the porch that surrounded what had been the ranch manager’s house and pushed the big cane-bottomed rocker back and forth. She wore comfortable jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt and a lightweight denim jacket, clothes she’d owned for so many years they felt like second skin. The day was cool but sunny and dry, the kind of weather Floridians loved but seldom experienced.

  Her emotions had returned, ebbing and flowing unpredictably, but she no longer allowed herself to become distanced from her feelings.

  A week ago she’d saved Oliver and Jess while losing Frank and members of his team. Her home and everything in it had been destroyed.

  And she’d killed a man. He was a man who deserved to die. He would have killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. He would have killed Oliver and Jess, too.

  Her feelings were ambivalent and came in waves. Sometimes she thought she was rationalizing her horror away. Other times she thought she’d experienced some sort of post-traumatic growth. Regardless she couldn’t change anything that had happened. She wondered how long it would take her to make peace with that reality. She was willing to ride it out this time. No more burying herself in distractions.

  Right at the moment, she felt free and unencumbered. The sensation was settling as comfortably on her shoulders as the jacket. Today was the first day she’d been free of the burden of government in too many years. Whether she thrived and flourished or withered and disappeared remained an open question. Answers would come soon enough.

  She held a warm mug of black coffee between her hands and stared out toward the big live-oak tree that had so enthralled her son as a child. She imagined she saw the ten-year-old Eric sitting there, laughing. She could think about him sometimes with only a searing stab of sorrow instead of unrelenting anguish. She supposed that was a type of progress.

  Curiously, she didn’t regret shooting Ben Fleming at all. She felt neither satisfaction nor remorse. DNA results confirmed absolutely that Ben Fleming had killed Mattie Crawford, Todd Dale, and nearly destroyed Oliver. She had little doubt that Ben Fleming had cleverly, quietly pushed poor Milton Jones to his mad, drunken act of desperate violence. And although she would never have definitive proof that Ben had killed her son and Vivian Wade, she would believe it until the day she stopped breathing. Yes, if anyone ever deserved to die, it was Ben Fleming. Sometimes, a small nudge of satisfaction surfaced that she’d been the one to do it.

  Helen heard a car pull up in the driveway. Jess Kimball walked around the side of the house, up onto the porch, and settled on the edge of another rocker’s seat.

  “About ready to head out?” Helen asked her.

  “My flight leaves in three hours, but I’ve got to return the rental, too,” Jess said, subdued, but a bit rushed, too. A long-sleeved shirt covered the bandage on her arm, but she’d only been able to partially conceal the crease along the side of her head with her curly hair. “I finished the article last night and sent it off to my editor. I’ll send you the magazine when it appears, if you want.”

  Helen smiled, wagged her head back and forth. “I’m sure you did a fine job on it.”

  She would never read Jess’s article. They both knew as much.

  They sat for a moment, rocking together, bound together by experiences etched in granite memory. Helen felt Jess’s anticipation across the short divide.

  “Where are you going?”

  Jess stood and jiggled her keys. “Colorado. A guy there is helping me with Peter. He’s got some new leads.”

  “How long are you going to keep looking?” Helen’s tone was gentle. “Peter’s been gone for more than ten years. Even if you find him now, he won’t be your baby anymore.”

  “I know. But I can’t give up. I’ll keep looking until I find him.” She hesitated again, still reluctant to say the words that Helen had lived with every day since Eric died. “One way or the other.”

  Helen let it go. If Jess was able to avoid the words, maybe she’d be able to avoid the nightmares, too. “It’s not so bad, after a while. You never forget, but you keep going. Bad memories hurt less. You remember more good times.”

  Jess nodded. “I’ve been told that before. I’m glad it’s true for you.”

  “It will be true for you, too,” Helen said.

  Jess nodded again, glanced away, and then looked back with her mouth turned up in a weak smile.
“Talked to Mike. He said he was bummed that he wasn’t here during . . . the fire.”

  Helen laughed. “I’ll bet he was.”

  Neither of them mentioned that if he’d been in his bed on the ranch, Mike would have died on Christmas Eve along with Prescott and Berger.

  And Frank. Helen had asked him to serve in a job that had gotten him killed when he could have rotated off her detail, knowing he wouldn’t refuse her request. One more thing she had to live with that was far from easy.

  “What about Manson? Have you heard from him?” Helen didn’t expect Manson would allow Taylor’s wrongful execution to fade into obscurity when it was a clear victory for his cause, as well as an unmatchable opportunity for personal publicity. Indeed, as far as Helen could see, Manson was the only one who came out on the positive side of the entire disaster.

  “To tell you the truth,” Jess said, her chin jutting forward. “I hate that he was right. He’ll never let me forget it, either. He acts so damn sincere, but he’s a dishonest fraud. I put that in my article, too. I haven’t figured out what else I’m going to do about him, but I won’t let his actions go. Not by a long shot.”

  Helen liked the spark of indignation she recognized from the first time she’d met Jess. The younger woman was resilient, too, even if she didn’t realize just how much yet.

  “I’m not okay with everything,” Jess admitted, subdued. “I said that, too. In the article. Just so you know.”

  “I was sure you would,” Helen replied.

  “After Peter was taken, I’ve tried to help other parents like me get justice. The system favors the criminals over the victims most of the time, or so it seems to me. I guess in the end the Wards did get some justice, and maybe the Crawfords, too.”

  “You can’t blame or applaud the legal system for any of that.”

  Jess was always prepared to argue. “But Tommy Taylor shouldn’t have been executed when he was. He didn’t kill Mattie Crawford. That’s the real bottom line.”

  “True.”

  “I helped to make that happen,” Jess said. She looked at the ground, “And I’m having trouble dealing with it.”