Ripped Apart

by Miriam Minger

  She didn’t want to think about the blood soaking the upholstery. She didn’t want to think about the warmth of Doug McKain’s skin as if he were still alive. She turned the key in the ignition and shoved the gear shifter into reverse. The rear tires sent up clouds of dust as she jammed her foot down hard on the accelerator.

  In a moment she was back out onto the main road and driving north. Panic filled her when she spied a silver-colored vehicle in the rearview mirror. She floored the accelerator pedal, almost losing control of the car. The tires squealed and gravel spewed behind her as she steered back onto the road from the shoulder.

  A glance in the rearview mirror showed a truck behind her, not a sedan, and Clare forced herself to focus on what Detective McKain had told her.

  “Three miles…only three miles.” Clare had no idea how far she’d gone, she was driving so fast. A green road sign flew by and she almost burst into tears. Had she missed Hidden Spring? She didn’t dare turn around but kept driving, though she slowed down when she spied another green road sign to the right. All she needed to see was the word Hidden and she steered sharply onto the paved single lane road, realizing only then that she had no idea what to do next.

  “Jake Wyatt…Jake Wyatt.” Clare slowed the car again to scan the names on a row of mailboxes, but she didn’t see a Wyatt among them. Detective McKain had said he was a friend, hadn’t he?

  Her head throbbing, she drove on, and passed several closed gates. Her hands felt numb from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Fresh panic seized her.

  She was out in the middle of God-knows-where looking for someone she didn’t know while a man lay dead only a few miles to the south and two strangers wanted to kill her—

  Clare brought the car to a screeching halt outside an open gate, a high metal archway over the dirt road emblazoned with the name Isabella Ranch. She didn’t need to see any more. She gunned the engine and veered onto the private road.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake Wyatt called it The Gauntlet.

  Sweat poured down his face as he lunged up the last hill of his five-mile run, the hundred sit-ups and push-ups at each mile mark behind him.

  At mid-morning, it had to be ninety degrees already. His muscles screamed. His lungs burned as he breathed hard and fast. Forty feet to go. Thirty. He summoned every ounce of energy he had left and surged forward the last twenty feet, the one moment of the day when he felt truly alive almost upon him.

  Jake tagged the boulder and collapsed against it, but he didn’t fall. The rush of adrenaline he felt was immense. He rested his hands on his knees for a minute and caught his breath, then stood up and looked around him at the view of his ranch and the surrounding hills.

  Thank God for this place. Four years ago he’d needed a refuge to lick his wounds and regroup, and the hill country north of San Antonio was where he’d come to. Isabella Ranch.

  An image of dark hair and beautiful dark eyes came to him but Jake pushed it away. The moment of exhilaration had already faded. Time to think of the list of repairs ahead of him around the ranch, fences, riding trails, you name it.

  He’d be opening up the place again in less than a week to the disabled kids who loved to come here. He had been up since before dawn tending to the horses, but he liked staying busy. Kept his mind off things better left alone.

  Jake wiped the sweat from his face with the edge of his T-shirt and set off toward the limestone and white stucco house at the foot of the hill, but the squealing of tires made him glance toward the dirt road leading from the ranch entrance. A dark four-door sedan careened toward the house going about seventy miles an hour.

  “What the—?” Jake started running at the same moment the vehicle barely missed slamming into a row of hay bales stacked alongside a fence and came to a dead stop in a swirling dust cloud. It took him a moment to get there and as he drew closer, he recognized the vehicle as an unmarked police car but he didn’t see the occupant. He threw open the driver’s side door and a woman screamed and dove for the opposite door.

  “No, leave me alone! No!”

  The woman seemed close to hysterical, and Jake didn’t waste time trying to reason with her. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her from the car though she kicked at him and flailed her arms.

  “Look, lady—” A doubled fist caught him in the jaw and Jake grunted as the woman fought wildly to free herself. She swung at him again, but this time he clamped a hand around her wrist. “Settle down, okay? I’m trying to help you.”

  The words must have pierced her brain because the woman stopped struggling and stared up at Jake. Cold terror lit her green eyes, her body shaking.

  “Please…Jake Wyatt. I have to find him.”

  Jake eased his grasp on her wrist. “You’re looking at him. What the hell’s going on—”

  “Detective McKain…oh, God.”

  Jake’s stomach knotted as the woman’s face blanched white and her knees gave way. He saw it then, a bloody handprint on her arm. He caught her by the shoulders and lifted her back onto her feet. “What about Detective McKain?”

  “He’s dead. They shot him.”

  Jake took the rest of the scene in within an instant, the driver’s seat soaked in darkening red, the large dents on the right side of the police vehicle, a window shattered by gunfire, the tears welling in the woman’s eyes. Doug, dead? Jake didn’t want it to be true, but his gut instincts left him no doubt. The woman wasn’t lying.

  “What’s your name? Where is he?”

  “Clare Carson—Smithson Valley Road, three, maybe four miles south. He told me to find you…a place to hide. He said they wanted to kill me but they missed and shot him—”

  “Come on.” Jake grabbed her arm and pulled her with him, but the woman’s legs gave out beneath her and she stumbled. He cursed under his breath and swept her into his arms. She was shaking uncontrollably. Grateful the ranch was closed for repairs that week, no kids and their parents or any of his part-time employees around, he carried her to the house and kicked open the front door.

  “Wait here. I have to move the car.” He deposited her into the nearest chair and left her staring after him, her eyes as wide and round as a terrified child’s. Once outside, an image of Doug lying dead only a few miles away made him feel sick and enraged by turns. He jumped into the car, the key in the ignition.

  He floored the accelerator and drove straight for the garage where he steered into the freshly mown grass and then parked the car behind the building. No one would see it there from the road. The thought that the killers might still be looking for the woman made bile rise in his throat. He needed more information from her, fast.

  Jake wasn’t surprised when he threw open the front door that she was still sitting there staring straight ahead. She was probably in shock, the reality of what must have happened hitting her harder with every passing moment.

  “Come on. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

  She nodded blankly and rose. Jake took her by the hand and led her through the dining room into the kitchen, the small color television on the counter still blaring from him watching the news before his run. He punched the volume button on the console to lower the sound and pulled out a chair from the table. “Sit here. I’ll get you some water.”

  She obliged him wordlessly. Jake ducked into the adjoining living room to grab a blanket from the couch, then returned to the kitchen and draped it around her shoulders. A blood smear across her cheek momentarily stopped him in his tracks, or maybe it was the sudden memory of him and Doug playing football at MacArthur High School years ago.

  Jake’s jaw tightened. He filled a coffee mug at the sink with cold water and returned to the woman’s side where he pulled out a chair and sat down next to her.

  “Here, drink.”

  She didn’t respond, instead staring down at her hands in her lap that were stained with dried blood.

  “Clare—you said your name was Clare Carson, right?” She nodded faintly, and Jake had a sense that he�
��d heard her name somewhere before. Her face was still deathly pale. He picked up the coffee mug and held it out to her. “If the water doesn’t suit you, I’ve got something stronger. Whiskey—”

  “No, I don’t drink.”

  “Okay, then swallow some of this.” Jake sat back in the chair as she shakily took the mug and took a long sip. “Good, now I need you to tell me everything that happened.”

  She lowered the mug slowly to the table, taking a deep breath as she met his eyes.

  “Detective McKain rammed their car and they went off the road. He told me to find you right before he died. He said you were a friend, and backup was too far away to help so to come here. We were on our way to Canyon Lake—oh, God, Tyler!”

  She rose so suddenly from the chair that it tipped over and crashed to the floor, the mug sent skidding across the table. Jake reached for her but he snagged only the blanket as she lunged past him for the door to the dining room. She didn’t make it, though. Jake caught her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him.

  “No, let me go! Please, my son, my son!”

  If she’d appeared in shock before, now she was becoming hysterical again. Jake feared he might bruise her by holding her arms so tightly but he didn’t let her go. “Clare, listen to me. What about your son?”

  “My ex-husband took him from the hospital last night! Detective McKain and I were going to my friend Irene’s cabin at Canyon Lake. We thought Billy might have taken him there—oh, please, no…”

  Jake doubted he’d seen anyone’s face turn so white. As hard as she’d been struggling with him a moment before, Clare had suddenly grown still and stared beyond him to the TV. He followed her gaze to the screen, the regular programming interrupted by breaking news showing a red Ford pick-up being dragged by a cable out of a lake.

  “No…that’s Billy’s truck.”

  Jake didn’t let go of her but reached over to the counter and turned up the volume. With Clare’s face still chalk white, he realized why her name had sounded familiar to him as the camera focused on a rustic lakeside house in the background behind the on-scene reporter.

  “The body identified as Billy Carson was discovered in the kitchen by the county sheriff a short time ago thanks to a phone tip from the owner of the cabin. It appears a suicide, a single gunshot to the head, but police at this point aren’t ruling out the possibility of foul play. Authorities estimate the time of death to be at least twenty-four hours ago, clearing the deceased as the prime suspect in the kidnapping of his son, Tyler Carson. Police continue to search for the boy, a recent heart transplant patient who remains missing after being taken from his bed at Universal Hospital late last night by unknown abductors—”

  “Turn it off. Turn the damn thing off.”

  Jake quickly obliged her although he held fast to her arms. He could feel the raw tension in her body, but it was no more than the tension in his own.

  He’d watched enough news lately that things were starting to add up in his mind. With the few details Clare had given him, Doug’s death and now her ex-husband’s, it wasn’t a pretty picture. Too many years spent in Special Operations had either trained him well or cursed him, but right now his instincts were screaming.

  “If Billy’s dead, who would have done this? Who took my son? Why would those two men want to kill me?”

  Clare’s tormented eyes bored into Jake as if he might know the answers, her voice hoarse with anguish. The same questions burned in his brain and he could think of only one way to get quick answers.

  He felt tempted at the same time to call the police and hand this unfortunate woman back over to them, and wash his hands of the whole mess, but Doug had sent her to him. It had been the last thing his friend had done. Doug had known of Jake’s background and that at the very least, he’d be able to protect her.

  “Those people who they found murdered yesterday, the Garzas. Did you know them?” Jake wasn’t surprised that she looked startled by his question, but it was the first thing he needed to know. “It’s been all over the news—”

  “No, I didn’t know them.”

  “Okay, but their son died about the same time as your son’s transplant, right?”

  “Yes, some time that day, but they don’t tell you the donor’s name.“

  “And there was a mix-up at the hospital, so it wasn’t their son who became the organ donor but some other kid, a Daniel Salinas.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Dammit, woman. Think. Mr. Salinas shows up out of nowhere and then his son’s body is taken from the funeral home, only to disappear into thin air. The police are still looking for him—probably because Salinas wasn’t his real name in the first place. Now your son’s gone, the Garzas are dead, Doug’s dead, your ex-husband’s dead, and Doug said these guys wanted to kill you. Did anything else happen before today? Has anyone tried to hurt you?”

  “Last night at the hospital in the parking lot. I’m sure it was the same car, a silver Taurus. They tried to run me down—”

  “Bingo.”

  Jake knew he’d been harsh, Clare’s stunned expression telling him as much, but there was no time to waste. “Wash your face, hit the bathroom, whatever you need to do, but be out front in two minutes.”

  He let go of her arms so abruptly that she swayed as if she might fall, but Jake headed out of the kitchen to change clothes and didn’t look back.

  * * *

  Clare stared after Jake, feeling as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

  Two minutes? Her mind spun from his questions, her face burned, her eyes stung. Two minutes? She didn’t know what to do first, but not anything he’d just suggested to her.

  Billy was dead. Someone else had kidnapped Tyler. She’d seen enough terrible stories on the news about children taken by strangers from their backyards or their beds to become innocent victims of sadistic, murderous crimes. Now strangers wanted to kill her. Dear God, she needed to sit down, she needed time to think, she needed—

  “Let’s go, Clare. I’ll be waiting for you in the car.”

  Clare jumped at the sound of the front door slamming. Was he taking her to the police? Surely it wasn’t safe yet for her to go out on the road. Those men were probably still looking for her. Detective McKain had said she needed a place to hide. Did Jake have some other place in mind than his home?

  That thought spurred Clare out of the kitchen and back through the house, the sound of an engine revving making her move faster. Her stomach lurched when she opened the front door to see him behind the wheel of Detective McKain’s car. Was he mad? The killers would know it was her—

  “Get in.”

  His face was so grim, his tone allowing no argument as he threw open the door to the front passenger side. Clare was barely settled in the seat before he gunned the engine and took off down the drive, and she had to grab the car door to keep it from flying all the way open. Her heart pounded as she slammed the door shut and then reached for the shoulder belt.

  “Don’t fasten the belt. We may have to get out of here fast.” Clare stared at Jake, her hand falling away from the seatbelt. His gaze was intent upon the road, his hands tightly gripping the wheel. A tick worked in his jaw and she took a stab at guessing his thoughts.

  “I’m sorry about Doug…about Detective McKain.”

  He didn’t respond but drove in silence, so Clare tried again.

  “I didn’t mean to punch you earlier.”

  “Would have done the same thing in your shoes. Have you ever used a gun?”

  Clare gaped at him as he turned the car sharply out of the ranch onto Hidden Spring road, the tires squealing. “I—I don’t like guns.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He leaned over and punched the button on the glove compartment, the door popping open to reveal a small handgun. “Likes and dislikes don’t matter right now. I put this in here for you. If things go badly for us, just point and shoot. Ask questions later. ”

  Clare glanced from the gun to Jake, but he was alr
eady focused back on the road. “B-but I…what…where are we going?”

  “Smithson Valley, three miles south. Isn’t that where you said you left Doug’s body?”

  Clare nodded, her face growing hot, her hands starting to tremble.

  “Let’s hope they’re still looking for you. As soon as we get out onto the main road, take the wheel.”

  Clare didn’t have a chance to answer, to scream or even jump out of the car as Jake suddenly veered the vehicle onto Smithson Valley and headed south, his foot flooring the accelerator. In seconds they were going seventy-five miles an hour.

  “Okay, now!”

  Clare had no choice but to grab the steering wheel, Jake already letting go to climb into the back seat. She’d never moved so fast, but slid to the driver’s side and sped up the car again while Jake ducked down behind her.

  “They probably figure you’re still close by.”

  “I saw their car crash into some trees. Maybe they’re dead—”

  “Cold blooded killers don’t die that easy.”

  Jake’s words chilled her, but she had no time to wonder what sort of man Detective McKain had led her to or what Jake’s plan might be. A glance in the rearview mirror made her heart slam against her chest. A light-colored vehicle in the distance was fast approaching, but she couldn’t tell yet if it was a sedan or a truck.

  “I see something but I don’t know if it’s them.”

  “Slow down a little. Let them catch up and try to pass you.”

  It was so frighteningly similar to what had happened earlier that Clare wondered if she’d be able to keep her hands on the wheel, she shook so badly. She forced herself to breathe, forced herself to slow down just as Jake had instructed her even though she wanted nothing more than to speed away. She almost slumped against the wheel when the vehicle drew close enough that she realized it was a mid-sized SUV and not a Taurus.