Wolf at the Door: A Novel of Suspense

by JD Salyers

The pain in his leg shot through the rest of his body and he hissed, sliding back down the trunk to the ground. It took a good ten minutes before he was able to unclench his jaw and open his teary eyes again.

  When he did, he saw several pairs of eyes staring back at him. They were maybe a hundred yards away.

  Dupree Captin took a long hard look at them, counted off five coyotes altogether, and started to pray.

  He prayed for his soul, and then he prayed for Mary. He prayed for salvation, forgiveness and retribution, not necessarily in that order. Finally he prayed for Quinn and her husband, and for his God to strengthen her as she battled the degenerate that had taken her house.

  He prayed for a long time, but he never closed his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Quinn felt Cap's eyes on her as she made her way toward the house, but she didn't turn around and go back.

  Even though she wanted to. Even though a large part of her mind thought that she was on a suicide mission. But her mind wasn't in charge right now. It felt to her like her thoughts had taken a firm backseat to her feelings.

  And her feelings wanted revenge. Her feelings wanted to do something, to take back what was hers. It was an ancient thing, this raw anger that welled inside of her. She knew that her emotions echoed the emotions of millions of others, down through the ages, who felt the same and sometimes succeeded. She carried the gun pointed toward the ground, beside her leg. It was surprisingly light, considering the heaviness of the work ahead.

  For that matter, she somehow felt light as well. Her belly curled in nervous anticipation, but not fear. She was beyond afraid, she thought, as if the decision to do something had erased her overriding need for self-preservation.

  Would she die tonight? Probably.

  Did she care? Yes, she did, although the caring seemed small and far away. If she didn't, would it matter?

  If she did, would that matter?

  She kept her eyes on the house lights and moved between the trees, watching for any sign of where Abel Welch was waiting. She saw the vehicles off to her left, and then the porch. At the bottom of the porch lay her husband and ...

  She pulled her eyes away.

  She could only see part of the back yard from here - the chicken house and a corner of the dog pen. The barn was farther back, closer to the trees.

  An eerie yellow light flickered to life against the snow. She stared at it, curious, but then she saw the smoke.

  Rage blinded her for a moment, and then her vision cleared and she started to run, pulling the pistol up as she went and clicking off the safety.

  She'd been wrong - he still had the power to rip something from her. Her home. And now he was doing it.

  This night should have been like any other. She and Ethan should have been snuggled together inside, making a home-made pizza or eating his world famous potato soup. They should have been comfy and warm, happy and secure in the knowledge that the stars were above, the snow was fine and pretty, and the world was turning as it should. Their island of wonderful solitude had become an isolation cell in the cruelest prison, and the jailer was a sadistic mother-fucker.

  This monster had come out of nowhere, striking at her most vulnerable moment, and then ground his heel into her life. For what? Why was he doing this? What did he stand to gain, and when would this night of horrors end?

  She broke through to the open field and headed for the driveway, skirting around the front of the cabin to avoid falling apart when she saw Ethan's still and silent body. And Retro, her sweet boy, who had given his life to save hers.

  She let the rage rip through her, white hot and beating brute wings inside her chest. Her heartbeats blended with her footfalls as she got to the other end of the house and crouched just beyond the light.

  She wanted to see. Abel couldn't be inside the burning house, unless he had decided to end this on his own terms. She was surprised to find that the thought made her even angrier. She wanted to kill him. She wanted to watch him die and dance around his lifeless body.

  The shadows were wrong.

  That was the first thing she noticed. The angle of the shadows was all wrong for the situation. They should have been flickering directly to the west, toward the ravine and the river, but they weren't it was almost like the old barn was on fire instead.

  But that wasn't exactly right, either...

  She stood slowly and started walking again, away from the house a little way, aiming to come in behind the dog pen for cover. It would take some care and some stealth, but she thought that if she curbed her rushing anger and took care to watch her surroundings, she could get there in one piece.

  She was going to have to stop and rest soon, but feeling safe enough to do that might take years of work, and there was no chance in hell of it happening while Abel Welch still walked free.

  She thought about the blood on the cabinet at the neighbor's house. Was it human? Did it belong to someone in that house? She doubted that it was Abel's, so it had to belong to someone. Rick? Patty? One of the kids? The thought turned her stomach.

  It didn't matter. None of it mattered but the next few moments, when either her or Abel would bleed out in the snow.

  She gauged her distance from the soft edge of the yellow lights and kept away from it until she was fully behind the dog pen. Crouched there, with a hand over her mouth to help dissipate the white plume of her breath, she saw the reason for her confusion.

  The house wasn't on fire. Her shoulders dropped, and she almost laughed out loud. No wonder the fire hadn't grown out of control while she moved. No wonder Abel wasn't scuttling out of the house like a cockroach. He wasn't in the house - he was behind it, feeding a small but smoky fire.

  He was trying to flush her out.

  The woods where Cap waited was behind him now, beyond the reach of the firelight. She could see his face clearly for the first time, and she wasn't surprised that his thin frame, wracked with the ravages that years of drinking brought, matched the hollowed, scruffy cheeks of his visage. He reminded her of old pictures she'd seen - mine workers from the turn of the century, who carried shovels as tall as them and wore baggy clothes with mostly dirt holding them together.

  Her hand clutched the pistol's metal grip and itched to move, to come up, aim, and blow the small man's brains out.

  A coyote howled, close enough to raise goose bumps on her scalp. She paused. That sounded like it was coming from where Cap was hidden.

  She looked that way, then glanced at Abel again. A sinking feeling soured her gut.

  Cap was unarmed. He might need her.

  If it wasn't already too late.

  She wanted to fire on Abel and then run to Cap, but what if she missed? What if her bullet went wide, leaving him to fire back and take her down, leaving Cap alone to fight off a group of coyotes.

  She knew she was assuming a lot of things - that the coyotes were on Cap, that he was unarmed, that she would miss, that Abel actually wanted to kill her instead of...worse. It was a long list, but one thing she didn't assume on this night was that her luck hadn't run out. It obviously had, and now she had a few important choices to make. Life or death choices.

  Satisfy her revenge, or go to Cap and ensure his safety, maybe at the expense of her own.

  She watched Abel go to the hen house, step inside the enclosure, and bend down. He was gathering more straw, hoping to build up the smoke and bring her running to save her house.

  As she watched she realized something. She had wanted to save her house, it had seemed like the last, most important thing in her life until right now.

  Right now, Cap was more important.

  She backed away from the dog pen as quietly as she could, while Abel was busy with the fire. When she reached the dark again, she turned and started to make her way back toward the woods.

  She was almost there, just a few more feet across the last open part, when she heard something that spun her around.

  A bark.

  Retro.

&n
bsp; Joy shot through her, but then died again when Abel appeared at the corner of the house. She saw his head swivel her way. Saw it stop. He shifted the raised rifle and aimed it at her chest. “Hey, bitch,” he called.

  Quinn stepped backward, toward the woods.

  Froze.

  Swallowed hard. Her breath hitched. Her chest ached.

  She wanted to look away, toward the woods where Cap was possibly in trouble, but the barrel of the rifle, even from a good five hundred yards away, mesmerized her. It was such a simple thing, steel and long, no adornment or complexity at all. And yet it could end her as surely as this night would end.

  Retro was struggling to get up, but he couldn't. He barked again. She winced and willed him to be quiet, before Abel turned and put a bullet into his head. Miraculously, he stilled.

  She couldn't judge the distance, couldn't tell if she had time to run. Her mind was calculating where to step, when to run, whether to duck...but her body refused to do anything at all. She might have been rooted to the spot forever if not for one thing.

  Very faintly, through the soft weight of falling snow, she heard Cap's voice. No words, either she wasn't close enough to make them out or the snow muffled them. But his voice, small and far, startled her.

  Abel still stood at the edge of the house, in front of the fire. It made him seem like a demon that had finally shed any attempt at humanity. The flames licked up from behind him, painting him black, and yet Quinn could make out his features just enough to see that he was grinning.

  The man was crazy. He didn't want anything at all, except to tear through her life and cause all the heartache he could manage, regardless of who she was or what his eventual punishment might be.

  The flames painted the snow red, and yet closer to her, the flat width of the yard sparkled a cool blue in the partial moonlight. She wasn't cold, or hot, or afraid anymore. She simply was, still and small under the frozen sky, her heart beating too fast, her breath rising in front of her eyes.

  And as she looked at Abel standing between her and her home, something snapped into place. He was the Catch. He was the other shoe, the doom she'd been waiting for all these years. The terrible surprise that Ethan had been trying so hard to protect her from, that she'd been hiding from since she could remember. He was it, and it was here.

  In spite of the fear and the dread, a sweeping sense of pure relief swept through her.

  All these years, she had imagined an overwhelming monster, but now she saw that the worst thing was always in her imagination. Her own mind had built up the crushing catastrophe that she always feared, and now that she was faced with it she knew that most of the nightmare was inside her.

  She stared at him for a moment longer, more curious than anything, and then she raised the pistol and fired off a shot in his general direction. She felt calm, almost dreamlike. She watched him duck away, behind the house. Then she turned her back on him and walked into the woods.

  The house could wait. Abel could wait. Cap needed her.

  Once she got past the tree line, she broke into a run, calling for him. Tree branches scratched at her arms, and the uneven ground tried to trip her up a few times. When she saw him, he was backed hard against a tree trunk, holding his leg. “Cap?”

  Movement all around made her turn to see, and she caught sight of gray fur, moving through the trees. Away.

  “Coyotes,” he said. His voice was ragged. “Don't you ever take my gun again.”

  “I'm sorry.” She glanced at his leg. “What happened?”

  “I think I broke it. Pretty sure I broke it.”

  She sank to her knees and moved his hand. His ankle was swelling fast. It was purple and dark under the glow of the flashlight. “You can't stand on it, can you?”

  He shook his head, lips tight against the pain. She wanted to hug him, but they were in trouble. She needed to think. “How do I get you back to the Gator without hurting you?” she asked.

  He shook his head and barked a laugh. “Slowly.”

  She glanced back the way she had come, toward the house, trying to guess how much time she had before Abel decided to try something new.

  “Don't worry about me,” he said. “You scared off the coyotes, that's good enough.”

  She wanted to believe him. The driving urge to end this mess was pulling at her. But she knew he wouldn't last long out in this cold and wet. Oh, she might be able to get him home, but she knew that, left out in the elements for so long, he would end up sick. At his age, sick was dangerous.

  She couldn't stand the thought of any more death tonight.

  “Cap,” she said, making up her mind. “Shut up. I'm going to help you up and get you back to the Gator now. All right?”

  He laughed again, but there was pain in it. “All right.”

  It took some shoving and tugging and pulling, but she got him to his feet. Then he reached to prop himself on the nearest tree trunk. “I think I can ride the trees all the way back to the road, with your help,” he said, testing his weight on his hurt leg, wincing, and shaking his head. “Definitely need your help.”

  “No problem, Cap. I'm right here with you.”

  She wanted to thank him and tell him how grateful she was that he had come out here to check on her. She wanted to tell him that it meant something, that his actions - which he most likely thought were a small thing - meant more to her than he would ever know. But there would be time for all that later. Right now, she wanted to concentrate on getting him to safety.

  She got under his arm, staggering a bit before she got her footing, but then righting herself. “Ready?” she asked.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, searching. Maybe for the coyotes, she thought. Maybe not. “I suppose,” he said. “We don't have to do this right now.”

  She cut him off. “Hush, please. I need to listen.”

  He nodded and started off. She kept up, hoisting maybe twenty five percent of his weight with every step. Every time he stopped to breathe, she listened and waited for the sound of Abel sneaking up behind them, or the soft padding of feet that would warn her the coyotes were back.

  “Who is it?” Cap asked at one point, after they had gone a little way.

  Quinn shook her head. “Not sure. His name is Abel Welch. I think he's been staying with the neighbors down by the river.”

  Cap grunted but didn't respond to that. Instead he said, “You need to come with me. Leave now. We'll call the police.”

  She looked away, out toward the darkness of the woods. He was right - she should leave now while she had the chance.

  But something told her that it was the wrong thing to do. No - that wasn't right. It was the correct thing to do, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.

  If Abel was her Catch, then she needed to face him. Otherwise...well, otherwise, she would spend the rest of her life, no matter where she ended up, looking for the next something bad to slink out of the shadows. And when it did, finally, it would devour her, because walking away now would highlight how weak she felt. In fact, every time a Catch showed up, she would remember her running on this night and run again.

  She had been running and hiding since she was a child. That wasn't how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. It wasn't how Ethan would want her to spend the rest of her life. He had made her strong, and running away would insult his memory. Instead of trying to explain it all to Cap, she just shook her head.

  He let it go with a quiet, knowing nod.

  “Ethan was developing Alzheimer's,” she said. “He killed himself.”

  Cap was quiet, working his way to the next tree. Listening.

  “He didn't want me to live with that. You know, taking care of him, dealing with all the heartache.”

  “The Gator is right up here,” he said.

  She didn't answer, but helped him along. She could see the red tailgate of the machine, just off the main road.

  “He made the right choice,” Cap said.

  That hurt. “I don't think so.”


  “I know. But he did. You wouldn't understand how a man sees weakness.”

  “No, Cap. Ethan wasn't like that. He wasn't some macho guy who had to prove how tough he was.”

  Cap grunted. “We all are, deep down, Quinn.”

  She didn't think so, but she wasn't about to argue.

  The sharp crack of a broken branch made her gasp and half turn.

  “Quinn Galloway.”

  She stared at Abel Welch, wide-eyed. She had hoped she could hear him coming, hoped he would take his time. Long enough for her to get Cap out of harm's way.

  Cap squeezed her shoulder with his arm and then let go of her. She turned to face Abel.

  He was holding the rifle, but he was aiming it at Cap's head.

  Quinn didn't wait, didn't think. She threw herself at him, knocking him backward. She landed on top of him in the knee-deep snow and started hitting. And hitting, and hitting. She didn't know where her fists were landing, and she didn't care. She was so tired of him, of this night, of a lifetime of fear, that all she wanted to do was make it stop. If she had to pummel him to death with her bare hands, she had to make it stop.

  Everything was a blur. Her knuckles hurt every time she connected with his head or arm or chest. She didn't give him even a moment to retaliate, because she knew that if she did it was all over. He would overpower her easily, kill Cap, and do whatever the hell he was trying to do. Maybe she would die. Maybe worse. She couldn't fathom his intentions, and she didn't care to. She just knew that she needed to end this thing, and end it now, before he ended her. She burned with the fury of all her pain.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Abel didn't expect the woman to attack him, so he wasn't prepared to throw up his hands and stop her. If he were on his feet it would be easy, but his heel had bashed against something and taken him down when she launched herself at his chest. Now all he could do was roll around, trying to get out from under her, and maybe get his hands between them to push her off.

  When he fell, the rifle had slipped out of his hands. It was somewhere on the ground now, and he couldn't stop fighting her to find it. The old man was out of commission, at least.