Her heart ached for him, for this good man in the most impossible of situations. And the certainty sliced through her, keen and cold as the knife’s edge of the winter wind, that though they might part bitter enemies, she would always love him. Love the man for showing her what honor and duty were really all about.
As they sliced through the town’s center, honking the horn and flashing headlights at anyone foolhardy enough to get in their way, the bruised glow of the horizon darkened, and the first few stars punched their way through small gaps in the cloud cover.
It served as a cruel reminder of just how early night came in the teeth of the Panhandle winter. And how much colder the bitter darkness would grow before the dawn.
Chapter 17
They were halfway to the ranch, hurtling along thirty miles per hour above the posted limit, when Zach’s phone rang. His pulse jumping, he reached for it, so desperate for a report that Eden had been found that he didn’t even check the caller ID but assumed it was Canter.
“Tell me you’ve got Eden,” he said. “Tell me she’s safe and sound and with my mother—”
“Need to—need to get on over here,” a muffled male voice panted.
“Get on over— Wait, who is this?” Zach demanded. “Hellfire?”
“Come quick. Not much time.”
With a glance toward Jessie, Zach slowed, hearing something ominous. “Come where? Is something wrong, man? Are you hurt?”
As he pulled over, he heard the breathy scrape of some more panting, a groan that finally morphed into intelligible words.
“After the last time I was arrested, I swore on my mama’s grave I’d go straight...even if it killed me. That I’d find a way to get the...”
“The Prairie Rose, you mean?” Zach asked, knowing the man’s obsession with what he saw as the pathway to respectability. “Is that where you are now? Did Frankie stop by, Danny? Is he there with Eden?”
“What is it?” Jessie asked beside him.
Hellfire said, “Tried my best. Tried to show my brother what Mama would’ve wanted for us. Warned him to lay off the booze. Warned him to lay offa Haley. But those two couldn’t quit their— It was sick, man. The fighting and drinking, the make-up sex and—and that poor, sad little kid of theirs, stuck in the middle of it. She deserved a better life. Deserved to be something better than another McFarland for this town to look down their noses at her whole life.”
“Where is she, man? Where’s Eden?” Zach demanded, looking over his shoulder before jerking the truck through a three-point turn. “Tell me, and I’ll send an ambulance there to you...Danny?”
“I tried to stop her, man. Tried to make his life count for some—”
In the background, he heard a desperate outcry, a voice shouting, “Put down that phone! Put it down now!”
There was a loud clatter, but the connection remained live. Live and open long enough to capture the sound of two blasts, the first nearly on top of the second. Zach flinched with the insult to his ears.
“Danny? Danny, are you still there?” he called, his head still ringing.
The only answer, in those last moments before the line went dead, was the terrified weeping of a child in the background, a child crying, “Wanna go back home!”
Gut twisting, Zach roared, “Eden!” But it was too late, too late to do anything but get there, as fast as he could.
“What’s happening? Is Eden—is she all right?” Jessie demanded, her eyes rimmed in white as she pulled out her own cell phone.
“She’s— I don’t know. There were shots. Then she was crying. I think she witnessed—”
“I’m calling 9-1-1. What do I tell them?”
“Tell them to send an ambulance, sheriff’s cars—everybody they have to the Prairie Rose on Old Cemetery Ridge.”
“So Frankie’s back? He shot his brother?” she guessed as she punched out the numbers.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” Zach said, making it a desperate prayer to heaven. “And Jessie, it’s not Frankie. We’ve had this thing wrong all along.”
* * *
Jessie shook her head at Zach, trying to make sense of what he’d told her. Before she could ask him to explain, her call to 9-1-1 connected, leaving her to tell the operator that a man had been shot at the Prairie Rose Saloon. “We think that Eden Rayford’s there, too,” she added, “along with the shooter. Please, send everyone you have and hurry! We can’t let him get away!”
As they roared down the road, she answered those few questions she could. Eventually, however, she lost patience with the dispatcher’s request for her to stay on the line and disconnected.
She had questions of her own, questions she couldn’t put off another second. Before she could get the first out, Zach said, “It’s a small department, spread over a damn big county. Depending on how many deputies are out at the ranch looking for Eden, we’re likely to beat them to the Prairie Rose.”
She shook her head, not caring who made it there first. Not caring about anything except getting there before the shooter disappeared with her niece.
“What did you mean before,” she asked, “when you said it wasn’t Frankie? How could it not be him, going back to see his brother? Maybe Hellfire got it wrong, thinking he was there to steal from him again.”
“It wasn’t Frankie’s voice. I’m sure of it,” Zach insisted. “I’ve known that guy, both brothers, since we were all in grade school.”
“Voices change. Kids grow up.”
“I’m telling you,” Zach insisted, “it wasn’t him. Not unless he had a sex change I didn’t hear about.”
She blinked hard. “You’re saying it was a woman? The person who shot Hellfire?”
Zach accelerated into a curve, forcing Jessie to brace herself to avoid being thrown into the passenger-side window.
“Slow down, Zach, please,” she cried, feeling her insides flung to the road’s shoulder. “This isn’t your old fighter jet! Eden needs us in one piece, not splattered on the pavement.”
“She needs us now,” he said, “before your sister takes off with her.”
“My—my sister?” Jessie asked, her head spinning as she shook it. “No, that can’t be. Haley’s dead. You saw the burned bones near the bunkhouse.”
“I saw bones,” he said, “charred and human. But not necessarily female. And definitely not Haley’s. I’m telling you, it was a woman yelling at Hellfire before I heard the gunshots. A woman with a voice a lot like yours.”
Jessie shuddered, her stomach threatening upheaval. “But that would mean...” she said, her mind struggling for purchase. “It’s impossible, what you’re saying. My sister wouldn’t shoot somebody. She’s a victim of abuse. Of murder, not a—”
A killer. It wasn’t possible. Yet Margie’s words rang through her memory, something about Haley telling her she could give as good as she got.
“When we get there,” Zach said, “I need you to let me handle this. You just stay out in the truck and wait for the deputies.”
“The heck I will,” Jessie argued. “Frankie has my niece in there.”
“Listen to me. Someone’s got to tell the deputies not to just go charging in there, where people might get hurt. People like Eden or your sister.”
Shuddering, Jessie rubbed her arms, still unable to accept what he was saying. “Do you really think they’re still inside? I mean, surely Frankie won’t just hang around, waiting to be caught.”
He shook his head. “It’s hard to say what someone that unbalanced might be thinking. But whatever the case, I’m not taking any chances with your safety. Yours or Eden’s, either.”
In shock, Jessie didn’t argue. The idea of her sister, not as victim but as perpetrator, kept buzzing wasplike through her brain, its sting somehow more painful than the thought of her bur
ied in a landfill. Could Zach really be right? Could Haley have killed her longtime lover before fleeing? But why come back, then, to take Eden and shoot Hellfire? It made no sense at all.
“Where on earth is this place?” she finally asked, as they turned down a road with a hand-lettered sign reading Cemetery Ridge.
“Right up the hill, on the horizon.” He pointed out the silhouette of a long, low building, squatting a hundred yards ahead. “Only place in town the neighbors wouldn’t complain about the noise.”
“You were right before,” she said as he pulled into the unlit lot, slowing for the deep ruts. “We did beat the emergency responders. But someone’s here. See?”
She pointed out a dark bulk in the lot ahead just as the truck’s headlights raked across a rusted old sedan. A wrecked sedan, with its sprung hood crushed against the driver’s-side door of a large white SUV—
“Wait,” she cried, shocked to see her mother’s Escalade. “How on earth would my car get here?”
“Your sister must’ve taken it when she snatched Eden. The keys were down in the den. But it looks like she cut off this other driver. Or maybe it was the other way around.”
“Hellfire, maybe?” she guessed. “Maybe that’s how he ended up shot. But isn’t that his motorcycle?” She pointed out the dark shape of a parked chopper.
“I think so. I’m heading inside.” Zach put the truck in Park. “Get behind the wheel when I bail out. And be ready to get out of here if anything goes wrong.”
“Wait,” she warned, grabbing his arm to stop him. “Whoever’s in there—this person’s armed and dangerous. Maybe you should leave this to the sheriff’s department.”
Their gazes met in the charged space between them, fear reminding her how quickly everything could change. As tough and capable as he was, he was no match for a bullet. Fear froze the breath in her lungs at the thought.
“I’ve come back from the war zone,” he said. “Come back from hell in Kabul. I’ll come back from this, too, with Eden in my arms. I’ll come back for you.”
Shaking her head rapidly, Jessie felt fresh apprehension knotting inside her, crowding out her breath with a dark warning. “Please, don’t, Zach. Everything could go wrong.”
“Things can go just as wrong when we do nothing,” he said, his head shaking. “And I won’t take that chance again.”
When he leaned to press his lips to hers, her heart stuttered and her breath hitched. Then he left her, a dark figure leaving the cab an instant before disappearing into the shadows. A dark figure risking his life to reclaim the child who owned his heart.
* * *
It was Ian’s voice that Nancy Rayford heard in her head. Ian, urging her to save his daughter. Guiding her to slip out of the mansion, as the caller had instructed, telling her to do whatever needed to be done.
She imagined her son’s strong hands over hers, gripping the wheel of a vehicle no one had imagined she would dare take. But Ian had guided her there, too, in her darkest hour, warning her that she’d be caught if she tried to drive her familiar Mercedes out of the car shed, where too many eyes were watching.
But then Ian, she remembered, had always been so clever about escaping the ranch for his adventures. So it didn’t surprise her how she wasn’t seen, leaving with the money and the gun he had helped her take from the den.
Because one way or another, she was coming back with his little girl, raising his precious child in the home he’d missed so much. Just as he had missed her. Or at least that’s what he’d told her in the dark days after his death.
The wheels bumped, jostling the SUV over rocks and grassy tufts, jerking her fully awake. With a gasp, she hauled on the wheel, getting herself back on the narrow road—and warning herself that she couldn’t risk drifting off again.
“Wake up, wake up!” She pinched the tender flesh inside her arm, wishing that she hadn’t taken both her anxiety and migraine pills along with those new medications the specialist in Amarillo had put her on for her arthritis. She was going to have to find a way to stop, she knew, stop and become a better grandparent than she had been a mother: a more present and more active influence than the timid little shadow she’d been.
She would see to it, she told herself, as soon as things settled down a little. As soon as the pain became more bearable, and she had Eden on the ranch where she belonged.
Chapter 18
Though he was keeping it switched off to avoid being spotted, Zach gripped the metal flashlight like a police baton, prepared to use it as a weapon. To knock Haley out, if he could, before a stray bullet forever silenced her innocent four-year-old daughter.
But first he had to find Haley, to somehow catch her inside the darkened saloon unawares. As he slipped around to the back, where he thought he remembered a loading entrance, he prayed she wouldn’t fill him full of lead the moment he poked his head through the door.
Finding the outer door unlocked, he slipped into the pitch-black and carefully eased the door closed just behind him. Hard as it was, he resisted the impulse to blunder forward, instead taking several deep breaths and allowing his eyes to adjust.
He heard the noises first, a metallic clinking punctuated by the sound of breaking glass. Soft crying, too—Eden’s—in the distance, and farther along this hallway, a hallway leading to... Was that light?
Yes, a dim light, he was certain, ahead and to his right. A light from—he struggled to remember the bar’s layout from his brief meeting with Hellfire before he’d banished Zach from the bar. Wasn’t there a little kitchen back here, and an office, here in the back?
Still uncertain, he crept along the hallway, following the muffled sounds of conversation: male and female. An argument, he realized, hurrying as the voices swelled into bitter accusations.
“You can’t just take her,” cried the woman, weeping out the words. “You can’t. I have the right to see my child.”
“You got no more right to that kid than you did to my money.”
Coldness crept up Zach’s spine. Let these two argue all they wanted, but where was Eden right now? And how could he get past this door without drawing fire?
“I just—just needed a little more travelin’ cash, Danny,” Haley said. “Just a little loan. You didn’t have to—”
“When you tripped that alarm, I thought you were some damned lowlife, breaking in to rob the place. Guess I—I was right. You are and you were. I warned you what would happen if you came back!”
“You’re just covering yourself, like always,” she accused, “considering how you freaking sold my daughter to get this place.”
Sold her daughter to get this place. The knowledge hit the pit of Zach’s stomach, making sense of Hellfire’s purchase of the bar, of the undocumented expenditures from the ranch’s accounts: gaps he’d blamed on the mess his mother had made of the record keeping.
“It was—” Harsh panting. “It was never about sellin’ anybody.” Danny McFarland’s voice had grown weaker, but a vein of pure stubbornness ran through it. “It was about a real life for my niece. A life better than what she’d have, as a foster kid with a mama in prison for shootin’ down her daddy. Or worse yet, growin’ up the way that me and Frankie both did, so damned poor and dirty, kids made our lives a livin’ hell till we got tough enough to—”
“Rich isn’t always better,” the woman insisted, her voice a warped, weak version of her sister’s. “It doesn’t buy wh-what matters. Doesn’t buy a mother’s love.”
Was she hurt, too? Hearing the pain in her voice, Zach edged farther down the hallway.
Danny coughed. “If you really loved that kid, you’d let her go. Let her grow up a high-and-mighty Rayford, with ribbons in her hair and gold-plated ponies.”
“I only meant to leave her for a little while, until I could get back on my feet. If I hadn’t been so freaked out,
I never would’ve—”
“I told you, told you to stay well clear. Warned you what would happen if you showed your face in this town again.”
“How’d you swing it, Danny? How’d you make it pay off? You get your old jailhouse buddy Elam to forge the paperwork? Or’d you have some shyster lawyer connection who would do it for a price?”
Zach flinched, his heart pounding. Was his mother really callous enough to buy herself a granddaughter? Or had it not been about callousness, but desperation? A need to give her meaningless life purpose, a desire to save a child who was obviously in need?
“It was for Bree’s own good. I didn’t want her growin’ up like me an’ Frankie. Growin’ up the town’s trash—”
“Or did you blackmail the old lady to get your money? Told her you’d let Bree go into the system if she didn’t pay up?”
“What the hell’s it matter? Everybody made out.”
“I never got a dime,” she said, her voice so hard, Zach started at its callousness, unable to believe this grasping, desperate woman could be related to his Jessie.
“You freaking got away with murder,” said Hellfire, “thanks to me ’n’ Clem.”
“Not murder, self-defense. We both know your brother would’ve killed me. And now I want my daughter, Danny. I want...to take...her home.”
“Home? That dump’s been bulldozed.”
“That bunkhouse was never home. Home’s where I can say my sorries, where I can leave my kid to get raised right. And disappear again, if that’s what they want. Disappear where I won’t hurt anybody else.”
“You ain’t taking her. No one is. When I make a deal, it stays made.”
Finally close enough, Zach crouched down to peer into a room lit by the dim glow of a desk lamp that had been knocked onto its side. As he searched desperately for Eden, he saw Hellfire sprawled beside an old desk, a dark puddle beneath him and a revolver in his hand.
Across the room, a woman sat slumped beside a wall, a wet streak smearing the paneling behind her. They’ve gone and shot each other, Zach understood, mentally replaying the two blasts he had heard on the phone. Yet even now, the two of them weren’t finished, prepared to argue to the bitter end.
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