Reckoning and Ruin

by Tina Whittle

  “Shane works in medical,” I said. “No wonder Jasper’s been complaining about his ankle, provoking fights. He needed face time with his accomplice.”

  She’d moved to upending drawers, riffling through stacks of papers, running her fingers around inside the safe. Obviously taking advantage of her time without Shane or Jasper to look for the money herself. But Shane was right. No way Jasper would leave it in an office, especially not a safe room. If she knew Jasper, she knew this too. But she wasn’t taking any chances.

  Eventually, she gave up on the search and pulled a chair face to face with me. Her voice was pleasant, cajoling. “If you’d just tell me where it is, we could avoid all this.”

  “I don’t know where the money is.”

  “You sure? It’s here somewhere. That’s why Jasper said to meet here. Well, one of the reasons anyway.” She leaned forward. She smelled of the same floral cologne my mother wore, almost syrupy. “But we don’t have to wait for him. You tell me where it is, and I’ll get it and let you go.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “Fine.” She stood. “Suit yourself. He’ll get it outta you one way or another.”

  Ivy upended the box of blankets with her foot. I tried to think. Jefferson hadn’t known where the money was or he’d have given it back to the KKK. Plus Trey said he’d been telling the truth. That meant Jasper had to have hidden it so well his own think-alike brother hadn’t found it. And it had to be someplace Jefferson would never accidentally stumble on it. It would be simple to retrieve, but hard to find. I doubted it was in the house, but I wasn’t about to tell Ivy that. Let her trash the place. It would keep her busy.

  I pulled at my hands, the skin raw under the duct tape. Tugging wasn’t particularly useful, and yet I couldn’t help it. It was that or scream or cry or give up. Jasper knew I had no clue where the money was, which meant that despite what he’d told Ivy and Shane, he wanted me there for some other reason. I got sick at the thought of what that might be.

  What I wouldn’t have given for Trey to pull one of his stalker cards out of the hat and show up in full-on assassin mode, eyes like ice, perfect and deadly and ruthless. But no, he was headed for Statesboro, where he was expecting to meet me. That was my one ace in the hole, that when I didn’t show, he’d come looking. But how would he find me? How would anyone?

  Frying pans and fires, all of it.

  I tried to keep my voice calm. “Whose idea was it to plant the gun on me?”

  She pulled out a drawer and dumped its contents on the floor, poked through it with her toe. “Mine. Shane’s the one actually did it, though. Popped the lock in ten seconds. He said you learn a lot of things hanging out with criminals all day.”

  “When?”

  “At the storage unit place. Shane had wanted to throw the gun in the river, but I told him we could use it, that people would believe you killed that guy, y’all having history and all.”

  History. That was one word.

  “It was Shane who attacked me at Billie’s too, wasn’t it?”

  “Attacked you? You surprised him and he ran, that’s all.” She shook her head and kicked at the mess on the floor, half-hearted now. “I told Shane that was a dumb idea, breaking in there, but does he listen? No. I told him you didn’t have the money, and that even if you did, you wouldn’t stash it there. I was right, yet again.”

  “How’d you get Train’s phone?”

  “Took it. Amazing what people will hand right over at gunpoint.” She smiled. “Oh, don’t make that face. We taped him up good and locked him in that little hidey hole at the tattoo parlor, that’s all. He’s fine. You can be fine too. If you’ll tell me where the money is.”

  “Fine like John?” I said.

  Ivy’s eyes went hard. “That was different. The trailer was supposed to be empty because he was supposed to be at work. But Shane had only been in there ten minutes, and here that guy comes, barreling up in the yard with a gun.”

  “So Shane shot him. No questions, just—”

  “No, honey, I shot him. I was lookout, parked on the road. But I didn’t want to kill him. Wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had to. Remember that.”

  I tried to say something, but I couldn’t. She’d just confessed to homicide, which meant no matter what she’d just said, she knew I wasn’t long for this world.

  “Why’d you think he had the money?”

  “Not him. His wife. She’d been seen talking to the Klanswomen at the—” Ivy stopped talking, recalculated. “But you know all about that, just like you know all about the money. You could save us both a whole lot of grief if you’d just tell me where it is.”

  “I would if I could. Believe me.”

  She sighed. Her phone rang once, then twice. Then silence. She checked the number. “That would be the good news. Let’s turn on the TV and see.”

  She switched on the dinky television in the corner. It was bad reception, obviously supported by some equally decrepit rooftop antenna. Despite the static, the breaking news report was clear.

  The reporter was breathless, high spots of color on her cheeks, beautiful and perfect in front of smoke and strobing red and blue lights. Suspected gas leak at the detention center, followed by an explosion in the infirmary. Mass evacuation. Two dead, dozens injured. They didn’t have a tally yet on the inmates and staff—how many were still under the rubble, how many slumped dazed and bloody in the parking lot, how many had fled to the surrounding woods.

  The screen flashed with mug shots, including Jasper’s. Prisoners unaccounted for, presumed at large. BOLOs for the general area. Already the news was pinging across social media, and the good citizens of Savannah were locking their doors, loading their own shotguns. Already every law enforcement officer in the Coastal Empire was being called in to help close the roads and blockade the area around the center.

  Ivy watched the report, her face gleaming, positively patriotic. “Damn if it didn’t work.”

  I tried to sound calm. “Shane smuggled it all in, didn’t he? Who’s gonna check a prosthetic foot for det cord and blasting caps?”

  But she kept shaking her head, smiling at the screen, her expression glazed with pride. Then she cocked her head, listening. A car coming through the gates. The panic was instantaneous. I’d had a chance with Ivy, maybe even her and Shane together, but not Jasper. I breathed it down. He wanted me alive for some reason, that was my leverage. I heard the door open, heavy boots on the wooden floor. Breathe, I told myself. Stay calm. Work what you’ve got.

  And then he was standing in the door—hiking boots, jeans, a dark gray long-sleeved shirt. Jasper. He looked untouched by the flames, undusted by ash.

  He smiled, and a hank of blond hair tumbled over his still-bruised face. “Hey, cuz. Long time no see.”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  He clomped into the room, the boots heavy on the hardwood. Limping now, which gave his stride an awkward lurch. He moved closer until he was right in front of me, dropped into a crouch. He smelled singed up close, despite the clean clothes, which he’d topped with a ballistic-proof vest.

  He looked at me with Boone’s eyes, frostbit green. “Cat got your tongue?”

  I strained at the tape. “Fuck you.”

  He slapped me. Then he pulled my face up, mashing his thumb into the tender flesh of my jaw. Pain went singing through my head, and my eyes watered. I tasted blood.

  “That’s enough outta you,” he said.

  Ivy stood beside him. “She wouldn’t talk. I figured I’d let you make her.”

  “Aren’t you sweet?”

  She cast a nervous glance behind her to the empty doorway. “Where’s Shane?”

  “He’s in the car.”

  Ivy froze. Something had gone wrong, and she was desperately trying to figure out what it was without tipping her hand. She kept the shotgun, held it by the barrel.
She was wishing she’d had it by the stock, finger on the trigger, so that she could level it at Jasper now.

  Instead she smiled. “Let’s don’t make him wait, baby. Let’s get the money, pay him off, and be on our way.”

  She was seductive, coaxing. Ripe for the taking. And yes, Jasper was hungry for her. But not the way she thought.

  He stepped closer, gathered her face in his hands. I saw the flicker in her eyes—relief? fear? uncertainty? Things weren’t going as planned. But he ran his fingers through her baby doll curls and kissed her, slow and deep. And I watched, sick to my stomach, because I knew what was coming.

  “You think I don’t know?” he said.

  The flicker again. “Know what, baby?”

  He took her shotgun before she knew it, wrenching it from her fingers. She started to say something else, but Jasper spun her around and shoved her toward the door.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see Shane.”

  She started begging as he dragged her down the hallway. She didn’t stop talking—rapid-fire, pleading, desperate. I heard a scuffle, then a scream. Then two shots, one after the other. And then it was quiet, just kicking, scrabbling noises, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor.

  When Jasper reappeared in the doorway, he was breathing hard, eyes bright. Blood flecked his hands and stained the vest. “That was unfortunate. She would’ve been fun for a little while. Now Shane, that’s a different story. Hurt like hell to put him down. Like a brother, he seemed to be. Of like mind and heart.” He shook his head. “I counted on them to work together, and instead they go behind my back, killing people for no good reason, looking to take my money—mine—like I was too stupid to figure it out.”

  On the television, the screen filled with a different image. Shane. In his uniform. Among the missing, presumed kidnapped. And then Jasper’s mug shot. Among the escaped, presumed dangerous.

  Jasper sighed. “You’re all the family I got, cuz. And I thank you for telling me that John Wilde was missing. That’s what made me figure out that those two were up to something. After I confronted him, Shane confessed that things had gone off-plan. A snafu, he said. He was sorry they hadn’t told me, he said. But I figured out what they were really up to there, him and Ivy. And it wasn’t much from there to figure out who’d really sent him.”

  I licked my swollen lips. “You know where the money is. Go get it and hit the road.”

  “You and I got some business to attend to first.” He crouched down behind me, stroked the blade lightly against the back of my ankle. “Now, I’m gonna cut off this tape. And as long as you behave, the only thing I’m cuttin’ is tape. You hear me? Say you hear me.”

  “I hear you.”

  He sliced my ankles free. Then he slashed the tape that held me in the chair. He grabbed me by the collar and hauled me upright, the knife at my throat.

  “Let me explain my choices here, because I have thought them out. As much as I’d like to flay you alive, I don’t have the time. And as much as I’d like to do it in front of Trey Seaver, then fill him full of buckshot, he’s too much of a complication to work easily into this scenario.” He tsk-tsked. “Dangerous man you’re shacking up with, and I know one when I see one. He’s no doubt up now and frantic, calling your phone and getting no answer and imagining all kinds of awfulness happening to you, no way to find you. Which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s second best, but it will do.”

  He marched me to the hall. “Now, I do get some delight at the thought of him finding you dead. But again, ain’t no cause for that. Maybe I’ll just break you. That’ll eat him for the rest of his life, which will be good enough. That okay with you? Alive but broken?”

  He was lying. He was gonna kill me. After he used me as a hostage. Or a human shield. And he might be quick to flee afterward, or he might be mean enough to stalk Trey down too. He was dangling survival like bait, and I wanted to grab it with both hands, do whatever he said to walk out alive. It was a deadly temptation, and I resisted it.

  Jasper’s eyes narrowed. “I asked you a question. Deal?”

  I tried to keep my voice steady. “Deal.”

  “Good. Then let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  He pushed me into the living room. I averted my eyes from the heap that was Ivy, tried to stay focused even though my head pounded and my legs shook. Jasper stuck the knife in his boot and hoisted a rifle standing beside the front door. He double-checked to make sure it was loaded, then held it up where I could see.

  “Shane had nice taste in hunting rifles. Remington Model 700. Drill a hole through a buck’s skull at three hundred yards. He fitted it with laser sights and everything. Military grade.”

  He aimed it at me, and I saw the green light blossom in front of my heart. I almost dropped to my knees.

  “Head for the dock,” he said. “I’m right behind you.”

  I walked through the doors, stronger but too unsteady to run. Jasper followed behind me at a nice safe distance, the mounted light on his rifle illuminating my path and blinding me every time I looked back. In the dark, the night dense around us, I couldn’t fight the memories that rose, the last time Jasper and I had stalked each other around that dock. I’d detailed that night for the prosecution over and over, but being back in this place on another moon-washed night fired up the fear in a way that telling the story never had.

  I saw that the backyard had been hastily evacuated. The girl’s toys remained where they’d left them, the dip nets and jars, shovels and soccer balls. The BB-pocked cans they’d used for target practice were scattered at the edge of the clearing, right next to the canoes, which had been hauled up from the dock. A one-person kayak lay flipped over next to the shed, the paddle beside it.

  Jasper played the light over it. “Get that and drag it over.”

  I stumbled forward. Was he going to try for an escape? It was certainly possible. The river was mostly empty this time of night, and a kayak could slip into the night like a ghost, avoiding whatever road barricades the cops were surely setting up. I’d let him go, not stand in his way one second.

  I bent over to grab the tow rope. The kayak was old and battered, waterlogged too, heavy as hell when I hoisted one end…and saw the glint in Jasper’s light. I pretended to adjust my grip and looked closer. It was a piece of broken glass, brown, long as my hand and sharp like a dagger. A remnant of the girls’ illicit BB shooting.

  Jasper noticed my dawdling. “Hurry up. The thing can’t be that heavy.”

  “It’s full of water.”

  “So dump it out, idiot.”

  I dragged the kayak forward until my right foot rested next to the glass. Then I knelt and tilted the kayak, the water pouring out, the hull obscuring my hand as I grabbed the glass and slipped it up my sleeve, where it rested against the inside of my wrist. I righted the kayak and started to haul it toward the dock.

  Jasper interrupted me. “Not thataway.”

  “Where then?”

  “Where do you think?”

  And then I knew the kayak wasn’t for him. I knew he wasn’t trying for an escape, not yet. He still had his money to get, and I realized with fresh horror where he’d hidden it. And why I was still alive.

  Chapter Fifty

  I gaped at him. “You hid it in the gator pit?”

  Jasper shrugged. “Was a fish pond when I put it there. I gotta tell you, when Ivy told me what Jefferson had done, I was ready to string him up. That little fishing hole had been the perfect hiding spot, easy as pie to get to, nobody gonna be looking there. And then he had to go and stick gators in it. Now it ain’t that easy. Lucky for me, I got you. Now get on.”

  I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. I had a sliver of broken glass, all but useless at a distance. Running was futile—Jasper could pick me off in a hot second before I made the woods or the water.

 
He spoke louder. “I said, move.”

  I picked up the kayak and started dragging. He stayed behind me all the way back to the house and down the path to the edge of the pit, which lay silent and dark beyond the pier, surrounded by the chain link fence.

  I stared into the water. “You never were going to take Ivy anywhere. She was supposed to be the one wading up in alligators while you and Shane watched.”

  “Yeah. She was gonna be useful. And I swear, I thought me and Shane…” He shook his head mournfully. “Ah well, he ain’t the first man swayed by a piece of tail, won’t be the last. And he turned out to be useful too. For a while.”

  I heard splashes, the roar of a bull. The spring fever surged in them, and they rutted and fought and chomped in the frenzy. The males charged anything—logs, canoes—and the females hunkered down near their nests on shore and sunk their teeth into whatever stumbled close.

  Jasper marched me down to the edge of the water, right beside the pier. It was concrete around the edges, good for supporting the chain link fence, but soft sand at the banks. The kayak scraped until I got it deep enough to float.

  “Bad timing to be rummaging around in a gator pit, I know. But I didn’t pick it. Damn Klan breathing down my neck, Ivy and Shane plotting. It made the timeline for getting out a little…what’s that fancy word? Compressed. Thank goodness that dang lawyer showed up and gave everybody something else to think about.” He grinned. “Threaten to take a couple million, and people get distracted. Even people like you who don’t have a million to take.”

  I wanted to kill him. I wanted to slice some bleedy part open and shove him on top of the gators and watch the churning. Revulsion mixed with fury, burned bright. As long as I didn’t let the fear overflow, I could ride those. They’d make fine fuel. I was more worried about the dizziness and the nausea, my shaky body and unsteady feet. Whatever Shane had popped me with, it came with damnable aftereffects.