by Sandra Brown
“Yes.”
“You weren’t hurt?”
“No.” Then, shaking her head, “No.” She looked him over. “You?”
“No, but I was losing. Good thinking with the horn. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Her teeth began to chatter.
Crystal came running up to them, panting. “Are you two okay?”
“We’re fine,” he said. “Shaken, but fine.”
“Good Lord, Ledge.” Crystal splayed her hand across her chest. “You could have been killed.”
“I think that was the idea.”
She looked at him with dismay.
Marty joined them just then. She’d had the presence of mind to tell neighbors who’d come out to see what the commotion was about that everything was under control. She’d also collected Arden’s purse, which she’d dropped when the dogs attacked. It had been trampled.
“Everything was spilled and scattered,” Marty told her. “I gathered up what I could see. Your billfold is intact.”
“Thank you.” Arden took her purse but seemed indifferent to its battered condition and at a loss as to what to do with it.
Ledge took it from her and set it on the floorboard.
Marty said, “Should we call the cops?”
“It won’t do any good,” he said.
“But with a pack of wild dogs—”
“You heard the whistle?” he said. “They weren’t feral, and they weren’t on the prowl.” He turned to Crystal. “Do you mind if Arden stays with you tonight? She shouldn’t go home alone.”
“Where are you going?”
“To run an errand.”
This trio of women wasn’t stupid. They shared a look among themselves.
Crystal said, “Of course; Arden can stay for as long—”
“Thank you, Crystal, but I won’t be pawned off on you.” Looking straight at him, she stated, “I’m going with Ledge.”
“The hell you are. You’re shaking like a leaf.”
“I was. But the shock has worn off. I’m okay now. See?” She held out her hands, palms down to prove they were steady. They weren’t.
“You’re staying.”
“No. I’m not.”
Marty nudged Crystal. “I think we should leave them to hash this out.”
Crystal looked indecisively at him, and then at Arden, then murmured, “Be careful,” and went along with Marty.
Ledge waited until they were inside the house, then said, “Arden, I don’t want to waste time arguing with you.”
“Then you had better stop arguing.”
“You could get hurt.”
“You keep telling me that, but so far I haven’t been.”
“You can’t go where I’m going.”
“Which is where?”
“I don’t even know yet. I don’t know what I’ll be up against when I get there. It will most certainly be dangerous. You can’t go with me. That’s final.”
She stared him down, or tried. But he won. She capitulated.
“All right.” She retrieved her purse and climbed down from the truck. But she didn’t start in the direction of the house. She headed for her car.
“What are you doing?”
“I either ride with you or follow in my own car.”
He erupted with a stream of obscenities, none of which fazed her. She walked back to him. “You believe Rusty was behind this, don’t you?”
“It has his trademark.”
“If what you told me tonight is true, and he killed Brian Foster, and he has let everyone think for two decades that my father did it, I’ve damn well earned the right to fight back.”
His head dropped forward. He blew out a gust of breath. He counted to ten as he stared at the ground between his boots.
When he looked up at her, he said, “I gave you fair warning.”
Chapter 31
As they drove away from Crystal’s house, Ledge got on his phone and called Don. “The other night when Rusty ambushed me in the bar, there was a guy playing pool with some buddies. I didn’t even turn around to look when Rusty hassled him about dogfighting. Rusty called him by name. Dawkins?”
Arden, in the passenger seat, heard Don say, “Hawkins. Dwayne Hawkins.”
“Do you know where he lives? Or where he holds the fights? Rusty mentioned an old barn.”
“You’re not taking to that sport, I hope.”
“Come on.”
“Then why are you asking about it?”
“A friend of mine had a run-in with a vicious stray. He thought it might belong to this Hawkimans character.”
Don said, “I’ll ask around and get back to you.”
“My friend needs to know now.”
“What’s the rush?”
“The dog may still be loose in his neighborhood. There’re kids around.”
“Then he should call animal control.”
“I need that info, Don. Please?” He clicked off and propped the phone in the cup holder.
“You told a fib,” she said.
“I edited the truth.”
“A skill you’ve perfected.”
He didn’t respond to that.
She noticed that they’d driven past the same water tower twice. “We’re driving in circles, aren’t we?”
“For the time being, yeah.”
“Why?”
“To see if somebody is tailing us.”
“Is someone?”
“Not that I can tell now, but somebody had to have told Hawkins where we could be found. Rusty’s got every deputy in the department in his back pocket. He had them on the lookout. Your car was spotted at Crystal’s. Eventually, you would have come back for it.”
“I could have been inside the house.”
“To get to your car, you’d have had to go outside.”
“I was the target?”
“Good. You’re finally beginning to catch on.” He turned into the parking lot of a closed business and brought the truck to a stop. “We’ll wait here for Don to call back. I’m burning up gas, and I don’t know how far we’ll have to drive.”
He turned off the engine and sat back in his seat, facing forward, staring at the brick wall in front of the truck. She did the same. Neither said anything.
Now that she’d had time to recover her breath and wits from the dog attack, her thoughts reverted to the fight they’d had just before it. The topic lay between them like a grenade whose pin had been pulled. No sooner had she wondered which of them would pick it up than he spoke in a grumble.
“That Jacob was the daddy?”
She glanced at him, then looked forward again. “Jacob Greene with an e at the end.”
“Where’d you two meet?”
“I worked at Neiman’s as a personal shopper. Jacob became a client. A good one. He spent a lot of money with me. I later became his patient.”
“Patient? He’s a doctor?”
“Yes, but by the time I started seeing him professionally, we’d gone beyond the traditional doctor-patient relationship.”
“Obviously way beyond. How come you’re not together now?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s married.”
“Ah. That’s the crimp. Big one. The wife found out about his pregnant mistress and—”
“Will you shut up?” She turned to him then. “Jacob is a specialist in AI. Artificial insemination. He impregnated me, yes. Using sperm from an anonymous donor.”
He held her gaze for several seconds, then bowed his head and rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow. “I feel like an ass.”
“I can’t imagine why.” She didn’t try to disguise her sarcasm.
He looked at her querulously. “Well, when I asked about the father, why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I didn’t even tell my sister. It wasn’t any of her business, and it certainly wasn’t any of yours.”
“Right. So you’ve said.”
Before they could take it further, his phone vibrated, rattling th
e loose change in the cup holder. He kept his eyes on her as he reached for it and answered. She heard Don say, “Okay. I’ve got the directions to his place.”
“Gimme.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Then I’m sorry to have bothered you. I’ll get the info from somebody else.”
“This guy’s no choirboy, Ledge.”
“Figured that.”
“You’re looking for trouble.”
“No, he was, and now he’s got it.”
Don hesitated, then muttered, “Hell.”
The place looked almost too derelict to be real, more like a stage or movie set crowded with props to make it appear as squalid as possible. Floodlights mounted on metal poles formed a perimeter and shone down on the property, contributing to the movie set feel.
The house was as ramshackle as the various outbuildings, one of which was missing half its roof. The disemboweled, rusted-out vehicles scattered about were a cliché. Two mismatched upholstered chairs squatted on the porch under the overhang. Arden didn’t even want to think about the vermin that nested in them.
Off to one side of the dirt yard was a row of cages, crudely constructed of weathered scrap lumber and cyclone fencing. They were filthy and overpopulated with dogs trained to fight to the death if necessary.
As Ledge drove the pickup into the clearing, the pack set up a ruckus so savage, it was bloodcurdling. Arden vacillated between pity for the animals over the egregious mistreatment and terror of them.
Ledge pulled to a stop and took several moments to assess the scene. Then he reached beneath his seat and came up with a leather holster. The pistol in it looked like something Wyatt Earp would have owned. He checked the cylinder to see that it was fully loaded, then set it on the console.
He reached behind him to the floorboard of the back seat and produced a rifle. With stern concentration, he went through a preparedness routine that involved several moving parts, a clicking of this mechanism, a clacking of that one. All of it he did with precision and caution and know-how, which was both assuring and disconcerting.
“Lock the doors behind me,” he said, his features chiseled with resolve. “I’m going to keep the motor running in case you have to get out of here in a hurry. Do not hesitate. I mean it, Arden. If this goes tits up, get the hell out of here. No matter what happens, you are not to set foot out of this truck. If you’re forced to use that,” he said, nodding down at the revolver, “point it and pull the trigger. It’s a hand cannon. If you don’t hit something, you’ll stop it in its tracks.”
He gave her one last, hard look. “This son of a bitch tried to kill us, and he still might. If he makes a move, don’t wait to see what’ll happen next. Throw the truck into reverse and floorboard it.”
He opened the driver’s door and got out. He waited to hear the doors lock, then started walking toward the house, the rifle held at his side, barrel down. She marveled at his seeming calm. Her heart was pounding. She could barely draw breath.
The screen door of the house was pushed open, and a young man with stringy, shoulder-length hair stepped out onto the porch, barefoot. He was wearing a dingy white t-shirt and dirty blue jeans that hung onto his jutting hip bones by a thread. He carried a double-barrel shotgun.
When he snapped it up and aimed it directly at Ledge, Arden made a small, fearful sound, which even she couldn’t hear above the deafening barking coming from the dog pens.
Dwayne Hawkins walked as far as the uneven edge of his porch. “You’re Burnet, ain’t cha?”
Ledge didn’t say anything, just continued toward the house in an unhurried, measured tread.
“You deaf or something?”
Ledge kept walking.
Hawkins stepped off the porch and walked toward Ledge, then stopped and assumed a belligerent stance. “You come here to shoot my dogs?”
“No, I came here to shoot you.”
It happened in a blur of motion. Ledge swung the rifle up to waist level. The barrage lasted for only a few seconds, but it seemed to Arden to go on forever. The reverberation did. The dogs went crazy.
Dwayne Hawkins lay sprawled on his back in the dirt. The shotgun had landed yards away from his outstretched arm.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” Arden didn’t stop to think about Ledge’s dire warnings and emphatic instructions. The door unlocked when she opened it and all but fell out. As she ran across the yard, she held her hands over her ears to mute the din coming from the cages.
Ledge seemed impervious to the dogs, to her, to everything. He walked over to Hawkins’s prone form and pressed the muzzle of the rifle against the center of his forehead. In horror, she stumbled toward him, calling his name. He didn’t react.
It wasn’t until she got to within feet of him that she realized Hawkins wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even bleeding. He hadn’t been touched. He lay between the arms of a V, neatly stitched into the dirt by bullets. His eyes were open and blinking rapidly. His rib cage was sawing up and down. Otherwise he was frozen with fright.
Ledge said, “You sicced your dogs on us?”
“I got nothing against you. Honest. Swear. Don’t kill me,” he pled, then began to blubber.
“Who put you up to it?”
“That asshole DA. Dyle.”
“What did he pay you?”
“Nuthin’. We made a deal.”
“What did you get in return, Dwayne?”
“He let me off for…I got this hobby.”
“Dogfighting. Some hobby, Dwayne.”
“You got no call to—”
“Did the DA tell you why he wanted to harm Ms. Maxwell?”
Dwayne didn’t move, but his eyes cut to her. “That her?”
“Did he tell you why he wanted—”
“No, no,” he sputtered. “He said turn the dogs on y’all. That’s all I know.”
“Y’all? Both of us?”
“He said you two’d be together.”
“How did he know that?”
“No clue. He said that sooner or later y’all’d show up at the house behind the beauty parlor and for me to be waitin’. I didn’t mean to—”
“Sure you did, Dwayne. You meant for us to be chewed to pieces.”
“I got nuthin’ against you,” he repeated. “Her, either.”
“Well, I’ve got something against you now.” Ledge’s voice had the quality of an icicle. “Do you know what I did in the army?”
“Heard you was in the war, but—”
“Sniper.”
Dwayne whimpered. His Adam’s apple slid up and down.
“That’s right, Dwayne. I could target your eye socket from a mile away. Any. Time. I. Want. And I swear to God I will if you don’t disappear.”
“Disappear? Run off, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I cain’t. Dyle said if I double-crossed him, he’d kill me.”
“Then you’re up shit creek, Dwayne.”
“Dyle’s got Mex’cans with cartel experience.”
“And I’ve got a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight. If it’s any comfort to you, you’ll be dead before you hear the report. When you look at it that way, you’re probably better off sticking around and sucking up to Dyle until—well, until I take a notion.”
Hawkins hiccupped a sob, and snot trickled from his nostril.
Ledge hitched his head back toward the cages. “I ought to shoot you right now for animal abuse. But if you stay in the neighborhood, in the state, you’re on borrowed time.”
Ledge lifted the muzzle off Hawkins’s forehead, walked over to the shotgun, and removed the shells. He put them in the breast pocket of his shirt. Giving Arden a fearsome look, he nodded her toward the truck.
She walked to it quickly. Ledge walked backward, keeping a bead on Hawkins as he picked up the empty shell casings. When he reached the truck, he got in, replaced the rifle on the floorboard, and put the pickup in reverse.
He said, “Rusty put him up to it. You heard th
at, right?”
“I heard.”
“Do you believe me now? He killed Brian Foster.” He thumped the steering wheel with his fist. “I goddamn know it.”
Chapter 32
That night in 2000—Rusty
It never would have occurred to Rusty that the pipsqueak bookkeeper would turn brave in the amount of time between when the band of burglars had split up in the parking lot of Burnet’s bar and now, when Foster arrived at their designated meeting place to hide the booty.
Even when Rusty had talked to Foster on the phone half an hour ago to tell him about Ledge’s arrest and the jeopardy it placed them in, Foster had seemed his ordinary self. That was, uncertain and indecisive, anxiety and fear bringing him close to his breaking point.
Which was exactly where Rusty wanted him to be.
But as he watched from his hiding place on the other side of a narrow channel, he saw Foster plowing through the dark woods with less trepidation than one would expect. The beam of his flashlight danced among the trees and bounced over the marshy ground as he walked with a purposeful stride that was out of character with his scared-rabbit personality.
He didn’t slow down or stop until he reached a barricade of cypress knees in the shallows, where he stopped and shone the flashlight around. He aimed it at the grouping of picnic tables a short distance away, apparently believing that he would find Rusty there waiting for him, as he’d been doing the first day Foster had followed Rusty’s instructions and had arrived with a six-pack of cold brew.
“Rusty?”
The dark, sultry stillness of their surroundings absorbed Foster’s voice like a velvet muffler. He cleared his throat. “Rusty?”
On that second try, Rusty detected a trace of misgiving in his tone. He smiled, thinking, That’s more like it. He stepped out from behind his cover of low tree branches, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called in a stage whisper, “Here.”
Foster swept the flashlight beam across the channel, swinging it from side to side until it lit on Rusty, who raised a hand and made a staying motion intended to communicate that Foster was to sit tight.
“Where’s the money?”
“Shh!” Didn’t the idiot realize that sound carried over water?