Breathtakingly handsome in a simple polo shirt and worn jeans, Buck took it all in at once, the table wedged in the sliding glass door, the chair in her hand. “Wow, honey, are you preparing for a siege?” Grabbing her waist in a quick embrace, he dropped a casual kiss on her forehead.
Cara blushed. How stupid such primitive precautions seemed when she had Buck there to protect her. “If necessary.” She strove for a light tone. “I was a little jumpy...”
“Of course you were. Well, you don’t have to worry, because I’m here now.”
Strange. Cara knew her heart should be singing, but instead it just lay there, pumping mechanically away. He hadn’t even mentioned how nice she looked even though she had worked extra hard to dress up for him. It was definitely a romantic dress, packed so long ago with the idea of wearing it in some antebellum New Orleans patio restaurant. After due consideration, she had rejected wearing the white gauze dress she had bought the first day, back when things were normal. Perhaps there was still a chance of it being used for its original purpose.
If she really wanted to. Oddly enough, the idea left her cold.
Right now she didn’t know how she really felt about anything, let alone spending the rest of her life with Buck. Maybe she was just too tired after all the alarums of the past few days.
“Hey, honey, why so glum?”
Cara laid her head against his shoulder. “I guess I’m just tired. Maybe we need a vacation to recuperate from our vacation!”
“Uh-unh!” Buck shook his head strongly in the negative. “Once I get us safe home again, we’re going to stay right there! I don’t want to relive the past few days.”
He was squeezing her too tightly. Cara could barely breathe. “Hey! I’m not one of your football buddies!” she managed to gasp and a repentant Buck released her at once, so suddenly that she rocked on her feet.
“Sorry...I keep forgetting what a delicate little thing you are.”
He was lying, of course; at five-foot-eight and a buxom build, Cara was far beyond anything called either delicate or little, save by comparison to a linebacker or wide receiver. That scrupulous bit of honesty aside however, she enjoyed it immensely.
“Flatterer.”
“Just a little bit. Hungry?”
Cara nodded and allowed him to lead her to the couch, where they settled, as happily intertwined as puppies. “Starving.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, because dinner should be here almost any minute. I went ahead and ordered... I hope it’s all right.”
“What are we having?”
“Don’t you want it to be a surprise?”
“Don’t you think we’ve had enough surprises?”
Buck grinned at her. “Life’s always full of surprises, sugar.”
“Well, diffuse this one and tell me what you ordered.”
“Nosy little thing, aren’t you?”
“I’m hungry!”
“All right, sugar, all right. Lord, a man could go broke feeding you, you know...” Playfully he tickled her flat stomach. “For starters, I ordered shrimp cocktails, then some of those cheese enchiladas, and some kind of chicken...”
Cara’s mouth was beginning to water. “What kind of chicken?”
“Heck, honey, I don’t know!” Buck answered with an explosive burst of laughter. “The guy practically had to lay an egg to get across that it was chicken! Anyway, we’re going to have some of that flan custard stuff and some fresh fruit for dessert. That should hold you until morning, at least.”
“At least. When did they say it would be here?”
“Any minute. You are hungry, aren’t you?”
“Hungry enough to start gnawing on anything that’s handy,” Cara growled, giving his encircling arm a mock bite. It might have been done in play, but beneath her teasing mouth, his muscles felt hard enough to break a tooth.
“Lordy, I’m glad I ordered early! I’m going to have to fight you off with a chair.”
“Please don’t.”
Buck’s arms tightened, pulling her close into a suffocating embrace. “I don’t have any intention of doing anything like that, sweetheart. No intention at all,” he repeated, his lips grazing gently against her forehead.
Cara could feel herself melting against him as her mouth, her very being, yearned upward toward him. She arched back, letting his questing mouth move toward hers...
The shrilling of the telephone shattered the mood as thoroughly as a splash of cold water. Rudely ripped from a moment of growing passion, Cara felt as if she had been slapped.
“I hope,” Buck said tersely, “that’s not about dinner!”
Reaching across her, he answered in a tone that was little more than a growl. Cara watched with alarm as his expression changed.
“All right,” he said at last.
“That’s not about dinner,” she said when he hung up.
“No, it wasn’t.”
His grim, set face alarmed Cara. “Buck, what’s the matter? Who was that?”
“That’s the police, sugar. They want to talk to me.”
“Are they coming up?”
“No. The inspector was in the lobby. He’s got something he wants to show me.”
“Well, let’s go down.”
Buck cradled her head in her hands and regarded her as he would a beautiful objet d’art. “Sweetheart, he asked me to come down alone. He said you were to stay up here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I want you to stay here. He wouldn’t ask without a reason. Besides,” he added with a leaden attempt at humor, “you need to be here to sign for dinner. It should be here just any minute.”
“Buck...”
“You’re hungry, remember? So am I.” Pulling free of her clinging arms, Buck stood up and looked away from the naked need on her face.
“But Buck...”
“Honey, don’t be a baby. I’ll be back in just a few minutes and we’ll have a good, relaxing dinner together. Go ahead and open the wine and I’ll be right back. Now come lock the door after me.”
Cara did, but she didn’t feel any safer once the bolt shot home. Foolish to put the chair back, she thought, as dinner would be there any minute. She leaned against the door and mentally followed Buck’s progress. In her mind ’s eye, she could see his handsome, masculine figure walking down the hall, making the turn at the balcony and pushing the elevator button. Then he would ride down to the softly lit lobby, step out of the elevator and... what? Where would the inspector wait for him? By the desk? Sitting in the conversation pit?
And why would he ask to see Buck but want her to stay upstairs? She was the one who had been kidnapped; she was involved...
“Room service,” came a deep voice simultaneously with a thunderous knock on the door.
Automatically Cara unlocked the door and opened it wide. A vague feeling of recognition was the last thing she remembered.
* * * * *
Something was very wrong. Cara realized that from the beginning. There was no sense of dislocation, no mental ‘where am I?’ From the moment her mind clicked back on again, she knew things had changed and definitely not for the better.
For one thing, she was in a place that was not only insufferably hot, it smelled. Somehow, the odor was vaguely familiar, but at the moment there was so much more she had to concentrate on. Her eyes were closed, so she left them that way for the moment. She was lying on her side, face turned to the ground and crumpled roughly in the fetal position, but her hands were tied behind her. At least, she hoped they were tied; she couldn’t feel them at all and her tiny attempts at moving her arms produced nothing, no movement, no sensation, nothing.
She was lying on something that was hard and prickly and had hard lumps. It smelled, too.
There was dust in her nose and it took a conscious effort to keep from sneezing. When that not inconsiderable battle was won, Cara turned her senses to exploring. Either it was dark or her face was in deep shadow. Even when she cautiously
cracked one eye, she couldn’t see a thing.
Or hear. The silence was profound. Years’ worth of slasher films and TV movies rose in her memory, bringing scenes of all kinds of possible horrors that inevitably befell the heroine.
Oh, dear Heaven! she thought in a bleak flash of despair. Where am I?
From somewhere much too close to her extended and defenseless feet came a low, urgent moan, rising and falling in an eerie ululation, filling the darkness that surrounded her with an echoing intensity.
Deep in her soul, Cara began to giggle.
It was a cow, and this was a barn. She wasn’t at the bottom of a well, or locked in a sealed chamber, or any other of the melodramatic fates she had imagined; she was in a barn that really didn’t smell too differently from any of the other few barns she had been inside.
But whose barn?
And where?
And why?
Was Buck here with her? Had they (who?) been waiting for him when he went down to meet the policeman? While she had been fancifully imagining his trip downstairs, had he really been fighting for his life? Were the police involved in this (what?) too?
Or had there ever been a policeman? Had the call been just a ruse to get Buck out of the room?
Cara’s mind ran around and around. Who? Why? What was going on and why was she and Buck trapped in the middle of it?
Lying there wouldn’t answer any of those questions. Whatever the risk, she had to find out what was going on. Cautiously she opened both eyes. It wasn’t entirely dark; there was a faint light behind her, its feeble rays obscuring almost as much as they showed. What she could see was a perfectly ordinary, very poor kind of barn.
She was lying in a rough stall; the occupant of the next stall looked over the stick divider with enormous brown eyes almost devoid of curiosity. Cara had forgotten just how big cows were; even so, she wasn’t level with the animal’s feet. She was lying on a pile of sacks, which though they felt as if they were stuffed with doorknobs and old tools, smelled as if they contained some kind of animal feed.
Whoever had done this had a poor opinion of her, Cara decided. Her feet weren’t tied. She struggled into a sitting position.
“Hello,” said a horridly familiar voice.
Cara whirled around and stared as her mind raced in sudden terror. “Why did you bring me here? What have you done with Buck?”
“Sorry,” said Dave Burkhart. “It’s not me this time.”
Of course. Cara could see that. He sat on the floor, his legs straight out in front of him, his arms stretched out at shoulder length and tied to two stout uprights. He looked extremely uncomfortable. Not far from him, an old-fashioned oil lantern cast a feeble light.
“Why aren’t you in jail?”
“Surely you can’t be that naive,” he retorted. “There’s no way any of them would ever get near the police, even if they do own them. We don’t have much time. Can you get free?”
“But if the police aren’t involved,” Cara cried in sudden terror, “who called Buck? He’s in trouble...”
Dave made a sound of disgust. “Not as much as we are! Now can you get your hands free?”
The authority in his voice shattered Cara’s inaction and she began to wiggle where she thought her arms should be. “I can’t feel anything. My arms are numb.”
“I know the feeling,” he said grimly. “Turn around and let me see.”
Standing carefully on uncertain legs, Cara turned her back to him.
“Finally some luck,” Dave breathed. “The rope is looped around your bracelet. That should make it loose enough for you to wiggle out. Can you move your arms yet?”
“Yes,” Cara replied with true feeling. Her arms felt as if she had fallen into a bed of cactus, and moving them only made it worse. Barely awake, both arms and hands felt as if they had been clumsily carved from rough, sticky wood. In spite of that, she struggled heroically, pulling and wiggling until at last, more from luck than design, her bonds fell away.
“Are you all right?” Dave Burkhart asked anxiously.
“No! My arms are asleep,” Cara answered crossly, trying to decide which would feel worse, leaving her arms to get better on their own,or trying to rub some life back into them.
“Well, wake them up and untie me.”
Cara looked up at his harsh tone. Really, that was just too much! “Why should I?”
“Because I don’t know how much time we’ve got before somebody comes back, and believe me, I don’t want to be here when they do!”
“Who? As far as I’m concerned, you’re the bad guy!”
“And you think I knocked you out, dumped you over there, and then tied myself up like this? Get real, Miss Waters!”
It was logical, but still Cara hesitated. He was a known factor, and he, for whatever reason, was her enemy, but it didn’t necessarily stand to reason that his enemies were also hers. On the other hand, she had been knocked out, kidnapped (again!) and tied up in this old barn.
“Come on, move! We’ve got to get out of here.”
Later Cara couldn’t say why she moved to untie him, she just did, fumbling with the ropes and breaking more than one nail. He had been struggling; the knots were drawn tight and there were ugly raw places on his wrists.
“Don’t wiggle so!”
“Hurry!”
“I’m trying. Have they hurt you?”
He made a sour face. “Not much. They didn’t want any unexplained marks on the body.”
Cara decided not to explore the obvious implications of that. Instead, her gaze was drawn to a bloody cut, now crusted and scabbed, on his forehead. “But your face. Oh. Did I do that?”
“Yes, with that dratted bracelet. Do you wear that bloody great thing all the time?”
“Yes. I have to, since Buck locked it on me.”
“Tarrant...what?”
“It’s a lover’s bracelet...hold on, this is coming loose...stop pulling! There...anyway, it locks on. Something about symbolizing eternal fidelity.”
In spite of its crusting of dirt and blood and sweat, Dave’s thin face looked beatific. “Of course. That sneaky son of a...”
“If you say another word I’ll go away and leave you right here, I swear I will.” Cara grunted as another nail popped off, leaving a jagged stump behind. So much for the fancy manicure she had gotten the day they left!
“Look...” Dave nodded his head toward the far wall. “There’s a hatchet over there...”
“Not,” said an almost-familiar voice, “that it will do you any good.”
“Murchison!” Cara breathed gratefully. Unfriendly he might be, but he was at least familiar, and that alone could make him an ally.
“Either one of you,” he said coldly.
Cara froze. Only her eyes moved as she looked up at the scrawny, rat-like form and scowling face of Murchison, the strange little man from Accounts Payable who always looked as if he disliked her. Now, though, one of his old glares would have been practically pleasant compared to the look of burning hatred that glowed in his ugly, heavy-featured face. More disturbing than that, however, was the big pistol in his hand.
“So you do know who I am, don’t you?” he asked in a soft, undeniably frightening voice, then when Cara nodded almost reluctantly, he went on. “You should have listened to him earlier. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but running you to earth would have been a lot of fun!”
“You’re going to kill us,” Cara stated simply.
“Yes,” he replied. “And I’m going to enjoy it a lot.”
“But why...” At the moment, Cara didn’t really care why. Given half a chance, she felt like breaking into wild, hysterical sobs, but a detached and coldly logical part of her that she had never known existed had taken over, and it was telling her that the longer he talked, the longer they stayed alive. Slowly, warily, as one would move in front of a wild animal, she rose from her uncomfortable crouch to a standing position.
It was a mistake. Even in her sandals, she w
as taller than Murchison and his hateful sneer showed her that he was well aware of it.
“This isn’t a movie, Miss Waters, so don’t try to keep me talking. Besides, there’s no cavalry to ride in and save either one of you.” His expression went from ugly to pure evil. “Which one of you should I kill first? Would you like to see me shoot him? How would you like to watch him die?”
The dark hole in the end of the gun swung back and forth between Cara and Dave in an obscene version of ‘eenie, meenie, miney, mo...’
Dave was ‘mo.’ Murchison straightened his arm and sighted down the barrel at Dave Burkhart’s head.
“No!” Cara cried. Her all-too-real squeal of terror made Murchison smile, and Cara knew that small lapse in his guard was all she was going to get.
It was all she needed. With a short, sharp gesture, she flung the handful of mud and rocks and Heaven only knew what else that she had been holding behind her. Only a part of the mess hit Murchison in the face, but it was enough to startle him. Cara followed instantly with a kick that, instead of knocking the gun out of his hand, connected directly with his groin.
His hands waving wildly, Murchison stumbled backwards. The gun fired, but the bullet passed up harmlessly through the roof. Cara knew she was lucky there, and this queer, detached logical corner of her mind said she couldn’t count on being lucky again. The rest of her was an insensate, quivering jelly, but her body responded when she knew she had to kick Murchison at least one more time in hopes of disabling him. But where?
Vaguely Cara was aware that the cow was panicking, pulling at her headstall, and lowing wildly. She could only hope the beast didn’t get loose. Somehow, she didn’t think a hysterical cow barging about the place could help the situation.
“You...”Murchison wheezed as he struggled for balance, one hand protectively grasping his injured area, the other waving the gun about wildly.
The next kick connected with his gun hand as neatly as if it had been choreographed. Cara gasped in sudden pain, sure that she had broken her toe; of course, when she had chosen these fancy, lightweight sandals for her romantic dinner with Buck, she hadn’t anticipated having to fight for her life.
The gun flipped from his hand and Murchison staggered. One foot slipped on the slick muck on the floor and he overbalanced. With a helpless feeling of horror, Cara watched him fall backwards, his arms wind milling, towards the enormous, rusty scythe propped against a stall wall. She wanted to scream, to reach out, and grab him, to do something, but no matter how slowly things seemed to be happening, it was still too quickly for her to react.
The Other Half of Your Heart Page 10