The Kill Radius

by Nichole Christoff

  “Actually, I wasn’t thinking official intervention.” Barrett’s voice went flat. “I was thinking Marc Sandoval.”

  To hear Barrett mention Marc made my stomach slip sideways. I hadn’t heard from the DEA agent since I’d flown from his room in the middle of the night. And I didn’t deserve to.

  Marc had risked everything for me and I’d rejected him outright. Whether he’d been suffering from a case of lust or whether it really was love, I hadn’t treated him very well. And I hadn’t been all that fair to Barrett, either.

  I said, “I…I don’t think contacting Marc’s such a good idea.”

  Barrett shrugged, turned his attention to the quiet street past the inn. “Too late.”

  The headlamps of an oncoming vehicle washed over us as a car turned in to the Bide-a-Wee’s lot. The beams touched Barrett’s face. And for just a second, as he looked at me, the light turned his features to sterling.

  “Thanks,” I said, “for letting us slip out of that warehouse.”

  “I didn’t do it for him, Jamie.”

  “I know—and I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Barrett asked.

  I was sorry for rejecting his proposal before he’d even made it. I regretted turning to Marc for help and almost accepting so much more. And I lamented leaving integrity behind to nearly cut Eddie Jepson’s tongue from his throat.

  Before I could attempt to explain any of this, however, my SUV’s back door swung open. Marc climbed into the Escalade. And I dashed away the tears that had welled up in my eyes.

  “Well, here we are again,” he said. “Let’s get this party started.”

  Pushing down my emotions, I sketched out a quick game plan. Within moments, the three of us were on the move. As we approached what I hoped was Corinne’s room, I took the center position, a risky spot if she had company who took exception to my presence.

  With Barrett and Marc flanking me, I knocked on the door to Room 5.

  A shadow shifted behind the peephole. The door opened wide. Corinne stood on the threshold.

  “Jamie! What are you doing here?”

  Barrett appeared at my side, his eyes already searching the room’s interior. He brushed past Corinne, checked every nook and cranny. He found no one lurking inside. Marc loomed beside me. He scanned the lot in case we were approached from behind.

  “What on earth is going on?” Corinne exclaimed.

  She looked good, if angry, with her hands on her hips.

  I said, “Hello, Charlotte.”

  Corinne blanched. Barrett and Marc retreated, closing the door behind them. And then Corinne and I were alone.

  “Is…is Ray with you?” she asked.

  “No.” I sat down on the bed. It was a full-sized affair. Not a queen or a king. If Corinne were sharing it with anyone else, it would be quite cozy. “Have you checked your voicemail by any chance?”

  “I powered off my phone.” She sank against the headboard, hugged a pillow in her arms. “Jamie? What’s happening?”

  “Ray’s fine,” I began. I told her about the cardiac incident. And that Ray was now resting at home.

  “Why did you run?” I demanded.

  But Corinne wasn’t ready to tell me. She crossed the room, snatched up the television’s remote control, and flipped to a twenty-four-hour news channel. “I saw a story on that man—that Eddie Jepson—who tried to break into my house. He’s been killed.”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “He was shot through the head and thrown into the Gulf.”

  “Have you talked to Bran?” I said, changing the subject on purpose.

  “No.”

  “He’s taken off, too.”

  Corinne whirled to face me. “Bran wouldn’t leave town. Not without telling me.”

  “Would he murder Eddie? Or would you two chat about that first?”

  The remote fell from Corinne’s hand. And I feared I’d pushed her too far. I crossed the room to her in two giant steps, seized her arm, and guided her into a lounge chair.

  “Corinne…Is the baby even Ray’s?”

  Her palm flew to her rounded belly. “How can you even suggest such a thing?”

  “Very easily.” I sighed, suddenly sad. “Don’t forget I caught Bran sneaking down your stairs, Corinne. And I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Hell, I’ve seen the way you look at him. If the baby’s not Ray’s—”

  “Jamie, I think you need to go. Now.”

  “No. I won’t leave you and your child here. You’re afraid.”

  Corinne began to weep.

  I knelt at her feet, tried to comfort her with a hand on her knee, but she broke into sobs.

  “Why,” I whispered, “are you afraid?”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” she gulped. “Those men who followed me meant harm, Jamie. I could see it in their faces. Bran tells me not to worry. Ray says he’ll handle it. But he’s changed. His health isn’t what it used to be.”

  I smoothed a hand over Corinne’s blue-black hair.

  “He and Bran have secrets now.” She drew a shuddery breath. “I’m not in the office these days, so I don’t know, but I get a sense they’re concealing something terrible.”

  “Ray or Bran, one of them, was investigating Monique Wells. I don’t know which, and I don’t know why.”

  Corinne glanced up at me with wet eyes. “Monique Wells?”

  “Yeah, she’s a lingerie model near Fort Donovan. Sometimes she works as a prostitute for Hunch Nevis. Her boyfriend was in Barrett’s company. He got killed in the riverboat bombing.”

  “Monique isn’t her real name.”

  Corinne’s revelation stabbed through me like a spear.

  “Who is she really?”

  “Two months ago, I saw photos of her at Bran’s. She’s older now, of course, but I’m sure she’s the missing girl you and Ray never found. The daughter of that wealthy man everyone said was headed for the statehouse?”

  “Martha Wellesley? Did you tell Bran?”

  “No. I figured he already knew.”

  I hopped to my feet, fetched some Kleenex for Corinne, and replayed the cannery row conversation between me and Monique in my mind. She’d panicked when I’d described Bran. And she’d sworn he’d hounded her for payments. Those payments, I was willing to bet, were hush money. Because Bran had been blackmailing her.

  Without waiting for Corinne’s permission, I grabbed her overnight bag from the shelf in the closet. Quickly, I packed her things. She hadn’t brought much with her and she didn’t object when I told her we were leaving.

  Arm in arm, Corinne and I emerged from the Bide-a-Wee Inn together. Barrett drove us toward Beauville in my SUV. Like a chase vehicle, Marc in his car brought up the rear.

  As we rumbled across the causeway that separated Ocean Springs from the Mississippi towns to the west, Barrett said, “I made a few phone calls, Corinne. A federal agent I know has invited you to stay with her.”

  He meant April Callahan—and I wasn’t happy that Barrett would owe her one. But it was the plan we’d agreed upon, and if Corinne stayed with Callahan, her safety would be assured. Nobody would look for her there—and that included Nevis and Bran.

  “Corinne,” I asked carefully, “where would Bran go if he wanted to lie low? Surely, you must know.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  Her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. She was docile now, drained. Her irritation at finding me on her doorstep and telling her what to do was gone—and that worried me.

  But then she said, “Have you gone to the farm?”

  Barrett and I exchanged glances. “What farm?”

  “Bran’s uncle’s farm. It’s derelict now.”

  I remembered. Bran had been on his way from Baton Rouge to his uncle’s farm when his truck broke down. He’d sought work at Ray Walther Investigations so he could pay for repairs.

  “He’d go to the farm,” Corinne murmured.

  And if that was the case, I’d go there, too.

/>   Chapter 36

  Barrett didn’t need directions to find April Callahan’s hotel room in the middle of the night. I tried not to read too much into that. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that Callahan was all smiles when she saw Barrett standing outside her door at one of those extended-stay establishments that are supposed to feel like home.

  Still, Callahan welcomed Corinne graciously and I was grateful for that. Once she’d escorted Corinne and me to the back of the unit, and got her guest squared away in the bedroom full of pale furniture and beige bedding, Callahan held a little briefing in her sparse living room. She assured me no one, including Hunch Nevis, would find Corinne here—and she filled in Barrett, Marc, and me on the conspiracy case against him.

  “It’s not going well,” she confided. “If Nevis really did pay Eddie Jepson to blow up the Lady Luck, there’s no money trail. And we can forget about a line on the bomb-maker. We’ve executed a warrant for Nevis’s phone records, his emails, his laptop, his secretaries’ desktop computers, you name it, but so far, they’ve led nowhere.”

  “Try mining his private servers for info,” I suggested. “He’s got a rack of them in the attic of that antebellum mansion he pretends is only a bar.”

  Callahan looked at me with new eyes—and reached for her phone.

  Meanwhile, Barrett, Marc, and I hit the road.

  “I’ll drive,” Barrett said, and appropriated the Escalade’s driver’s seat.

  “Shotgun,” Marc called, which I didn’t think was funny.

  I didn’t object, however, and by the time I climbed into the back of the SUV, it became glaringly obvious that Barrett and Marc had had their heads together without confiding in me.

  “Turn left,” Marc told Barrett, as he consulted a map app on his phone.

  Barrett did so.

  To me, he said, “According to the local probate court, Bran had an uncle named Eustace Brandon. The old man died about five years ago.”

  “He left behind a chicken farm,” Marc added, “and not much else.”

  “The property taxes fell delinquent before Eustace passed on. The county assumed the property after his death, but we don’t know what kind of shape it’s in.”

  “They could’ve bulldozed the place. There could be nothing left.” Marc turned and looked me in the eye. “Finding our boy Bran out here may be a long shot, babe.”

  “I’ll take those odds,” I told him.

  And as the eastern sky changed from black to purple to pink, our bet made good. We found a battered mailbox leaning at the end of a lane painted with the name E. Brandon. Barrett turned onto the trace and hit the vehicle’s high beams. Under the scruff and scrub of the mid-Mississippi woods, night hadn’t yet let go, though dawn was on the horizon. We were far from daylight, far from the Gulf Coast, far from any town, and far from help if we needed it.

  Oak trees and hickories reached for us with their branches as we bounced along the track. Sticks scraped the sides of the Escalade and stones crunched under the tires. In the middle of the lane, a fat raccoon paused to look at us, unaccustomed to human beings trespassing on her patch, before trundling into the undergrowth.

  All at once, a clearing opened up in front of us. In the pearl-gray light of early morning, I made out weeds as high as my knees, a barbed-wire fence closed by a rusting cattle gate—and a dark green Ford Explorer parked on this side of it. I didn’t like the sight of that.

  “That’s Ray’s car,” I warned.

  The second the words left my lips, our Escalade pitched left, then bounded right. The chassis dipped dangerously toward the trail. Barrett tapped the brakes. The SUV bucked. It swerved of its own accord before shuddering to a stop.

  “Everybody okay?” Marc asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Fine,” Barrett said.

  Nothing moved in the woods surrounding us, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I opened my door and slid to the ground. Barrett and Marc got out of the car, too.

  “The front tires are hash,” Barrett said.

  “Rear right’s gone,” Marc added.

  I took to my heels, walked the way we’d come with my eyes on the sandy soil of the lane.

  “We’re lucky we’ve got one tire left.” I pointed to a hazard mostly covered by the dust.

  Barrett and Marc joined me to blink down at a heavy iron chain. It lay in an S-pattern across the driveway. Scrap metal threaded its links and bristled on every side.

  “Someone,” Marc said, “doesn’t like company.”

  Barrett grabbed the chain, tried to drag it into the tall grass.

  He didn’t haul it very far.

  “It’s padlocked to this tree,” he called.

  I followed the links to the other side of the clearing and into the shade of some pines. “It’s locked to this tree, too.”

  The padlock was shiny and new. This chain was a recent addition to Eustace Brandon’s chicken farm. And there was no way in hell the county tax collector had installed such a thing.

  Marc kicked at the rim of Escalade’s rear wheel. “We’re not getting out of here on these tires.”

  I jogged to Ray’s Explorer, found the vehicle locked. But his tires were intact. Which meant he’d arrived before the chain had been strung across the lane.

  “I’m not liking this,” I admitted, and tried to shake off a foreboding that had taken hold of my spine.

  “We hike out now,” Barrett declared. “We call the county sheriff from the main road.”

  “Not gonna happen.” Marc held up his cellphone. “I haven’t had a signal for miles.”

  “Bran’s here.” I pointed through the window of Ray’s Explorer. The casebooks that I figured Bran had stolen from my hotel room were wedged between the Ford’s seats. “I’ll keep to the woods, but Ray’s got a bad heart. I’ve got to know he’s all right.”

  Barrett nodded. “Agreed.”

  The cattle gate sported another brand-new padlock.

  Barrett climbed its metal rungs first, then dropped into the weeds on the other side.

  “If you see any bears,” Marc told him, “keep ’em busy for us.”

  “Just don’t let any sneak up on us.”

  “No worries, jarhead. I’ve got your six.”

  And Marc did, too, falling into line behind me to protect us from the rear.

  Barrett set a swift pace, blazing a trail forward and sticking to the cover of the trees. Because if the condition of the weeds choking the lane was anything to go by, no vehicles had been on this side of the gate since Eustace had died. Rabbits zigzagged through the tall grass. Overhead, birds grew deathly quiet. They weren’t used to human intervention—and they weren’t the only ones.

  Barrett circumnavigated a fallen log. As I did the same, a light breeze riffled the dry grass. It made a faint rattling sound.

  But some instinct told me not to believe it was the grass at all.

  I turned. Marc planted a foot on the downed log. And like a coiled spring, an eastern diamondback, sunning itself with the dawn, struck.

  Marc cried out. He tumbled to the trail, clutched at his calf. His assailant slithered into the brush.

  “Let’s see,” I ordered, dropping to my knees in the dirt beside him.

  “We don’t have time for show and tell,” Marc warned. “Not if your pal Ray’s in trouble.”

  “We don’t have time for a burial service, either.”

  Barrett crouched on the ground beside us, the knife he usually carried at the ready. He handed it to me by its blade. I grasped the hem of Marc’s pant leg and slit the denim to his knee. In the muscle, just above the shank of his boot, two fang marks were already turning purple. The surrounding flesh was on its way to an unnatural white.

  “He got you good,” Barrett said, stripping his belt from his jeans.

  “Thanks,” Marc replied. “That makes me feel much better.”

  Barrett slipped his belt around Marc’s calf, just below the knee. A tourniquet was no longer the lates
t and greatest technique when it came to mitigating snakebite. First aid protocol called for a pressure bandage and little movement. Given our circumstances, though, that was out of the question. We had to be up and running—and soon—to get Marc to help, and Barrett’s belt could slow the spread of the poison.

  Marc had to know this as well as I did. Drops of sweat beaded on his forehead. I patted his brow with the cuff of my turtleneck. No doubt hiking across the old, overgrown property had made him perspire. But perspiration was also a sign of snakebite poisoning.

  The second Barrett finished tightening the belt, I slipped an arm under Marc’s and helped him to his feet.

  “Come on. Bus is leaving.”

  Marc made it upright, but he closed his eyes and swallowed hard. And that was a bad sign, too. Nausea meant that the poison had found its way to his organs already.

  I looped his arm across my shoulders, held him tight. His heart hammered against his ribcage and I could feel it in mine. Tachycardia had begun—and trepidation made me shake.

  “Wait,” Marc panted, “let me catch my breath.”

  But I wouldn’t allow a delay and neither would Barrett.

  “Come on, Sandoval. You die on us and I’m taking Jamie to your funeral as my date.”

  Marc’s laugh was short and choppy. And full of renewed fight. “Better bring lots of hankies. She’ll be heartbroken.”

  “Stop it,” I snapped, stoking my anger so I wouldn’t give in to fear. “You’ll see your one hundredth birthday.”

  But Marc only managed a few steps more. Sweating profusely and trembling with shock, he halted to lean heavily against me in the middle of the trail. Barrett drew Marc’s arm from mine and hoisted him across his shoulders in a combat carry.

  “A word of advice,” Barrett grunted. “Go easy on the birthday cake.”

  Marc’s chuckle turned to a choking cough.

  “Hurry,” I urged Barrett.

  The Escalade’s flat tires and raw rims would slow us down.

  And we didn’t have time to lose.

  Between the three of us, we eased Marc over the locked cattle gate. But before Barrett could heft him again, an explosion shook the ground under our feet. Alarmed, I looked up the lane, toward the chicken farm that had belonged to Bran’s uncle. Above the treeline, a column of ominous black smoke curled against the morning sky. Bran was back there, but so was Ray—and I had to get him out.