The microwave stopped. Thank God.
I turned toward the closed door—Styles was gone.
The air hung heavy with gas now; the thick taste of it clung to my nose and mouth. Any sort of spark and the place could still blow. I quickly closed the propane valves, threw open the door, then darted back to where Meg lay crumpled on the floor. I knelt down beside her. She was pale and very still, but her chest rose and fell with short shallow respirations. She was alive.
My heart soared, then hardened. I ripped the gun from Eamon’s hand and checked the magazine. Empty. I racked the slide. One round in the barrel. There’d be no room for error.
I tightened my hand around the grip. Styles killed my mother. He killed Sheila Costello. And he almost killed Meg.
He was not going to simply walk away.
My legs were still wobbly, but adrenaline propelled me forward. I ran outside. Then stopped cold. Styles stood, facing me, about five hundred feet from the door, his hands raised, briefcase on the ground at his feet, and the muzzle of an AR-15 pressed against his chest. He was pleading for his life. Urine ran down his leg. A drug runner, his back to me and his full focus on Styles, yelled something in Spanish and tightened his grip on the gun.
I lifted the pistol and aimed for center mass.
Styles reacted, his eyes darting my way. The drug runner spun his head. His gun followed. I pulled the trigger. His body jerked from the bullet’s impact, and he went down.
I kept the gun raised and pointed it at Styles. “Stay where you are.”
He tensed, looked at the gun, squinted, and then loosened, his fear quickly morphing into arrogance. I’d spent the only round of ammo on the Mexican. And he knew it.
He dove for the AR-15 still in the dead Mexican’s hand.
Oh shit!
Tossing the empty gun, I broke into a run and hit him in a full-out frontal attack, wrapping my arms around the crazy SOB and using my momentum to push him to the ground. We hit hard, my full weight on top of him. The rifle landed a few feet away.
Air expelled from my gut and lungs. Spots clouded my vision. I sucked at the air, recovered a little, but out of nowhere came Styles’s palm. It connected with my chin. My neck jerked back, and muscles and nerves ripped and tore. Blood filled my mouth. Hot pain scorched along my spine and radiated through my neck. I rolled to the side, gripped my head, and brought my knees to my chest.
I drew deeper into myself. I’m going to die. I want to die.
Styles’s voice came low and somber. “Poor Brynn. You’re like her in some ways, you know. Stubborn, idealistic . . . stupid.”
I stayed curled up but forced my eyes open. The black steel of the rifle’s muzzle was inches from my nose. Styles’s dirt-streaked face was on the other end of the gun, his eyes harried and wild.
He continued. “Only she was beautiful. Red hair, haunting eyes. And her body . . .” He ran his tongue along his bottom lip. “The things she did with her body.” The rifle bounced awkwardly in his hands. His voice tightened, turned high and thin. “I couldn’t believe she was back. Waiting for me at the hotel. I thought . . . but no. She didn’t want me. You know what she wanted? She wanted me to repent. She’d found religion.” He laughed. Shivers crawled up my back. “She was nuts. I told her to go to hell. But she insisted. Said she couldn’t live with what we’d done. She was going to go to the cops. Clear her conscience.” His voice hardened again, the tone deep and determined. “So, you see, she had to die.” He thrust the gun closer. “Just like you have to die.”
Acid rose in my throat. I swallowed and kept my hand low; my fingers trembled along the upper edges of my boot. My nails scraped the handle of the knife.
His grip tightened on the gun. “On your knees, Brynn.”
I pulled my knees in closer. My body was a tight little ball curled in the dirt. “No.”
“Get up!”
My fingers clutched the knife.
“Get up now!”
I sprang from the ground, ripped the knife from my boot, and thrust upward, sinking the blade into the meaty portion of his thigh. Blood erupted from the wound, spewing over the front of my body, droplets splattering on my face. At the same time, I wrapped my free hand around the barrel of the rifle and pushed upward. Styles squeezed the trigger. Shots exploded. Rapid bursts of air hit my face. The report whipped my eardrums, sending pounding pain through my jaw and throbbing temples. A couple dozen searing-hot brass casings pelted my face and slid under the edges of my sweater.
He grappled to free the gun, but I gripped the barrel harder, extracted the knife, and thrust it again.
Voices of the past echoed in my mind:
Marines!
Aye, Drill Sergeant.
What’s the spirit of the bayonet?
Kill, kill. Kill without mercy.
I can’t hear you.
Kill, kill. Kill without mercy!
I sank the knife deep into his abdomen. He screamed in agony. His hold on the gun loosened. I yanked it from his slackened fingers, flung it into the air, and twisted the knife deeper into his gut.
Styles’s shoulders fell forward, his jaw loosened, saliva trickled from the corners of his mouth. He grasped weakly at my blood-slicked hands. I pushed harder, until my knuckles entered his gaping, wounded flesh. “You. Killed. My. Mother. And. Father.”
He crumpled to his knees. I kept my grip on the knife and sank to the ground with him, my fist now hot with his bloody flesh. The color drained from his face; red spider-like lines erupted over the whites of his eyes. We knelt there, our faces just inches apart as I watched the life drain from his body.
“No, not your father,” he rasped. “You’re doing that.” His blood-drenched lips curled back. “Right now.”
My mind erupted in fury. “You lie!” I gripped the knife with both hands, ripped upward through his rib cage, and yanked it back. Blood gurgled from his lips just before he fell face-first to the ground.
* * *
Shock permeated my muscles. I swayed, struggling to stay upright. The knife fell from my hands. I swiped at my tears with blood-covered fingers before my focus snapped toward the shack.
Meg! I’ve got to get to Meg.
I tottered forward and collapsed, pushed back up on my knees, and glanced back at Styles’s lifeless body. The bloody knife. My bloodied hands. So much blood. My father’s blood?
Do you hear me, Marine?
Aye, ma’am.
Say it again.
Kill, kill without mercy.
Marines! What makes the green grass grow?
Blood, blood makes the green grass grow.
Louder.
Blood, blood makes the green grass grow!
War. War was nothing but brown sand and red blood. A putrid mixture that crept and oozed into every crevice of our bodies, our minds . . . our souls.
I gasped for air, swallowed against the bile rising in my throat, clutched my stomach, and lurched forward and heaved and heaved until I was emptied. I swiped at my face, only to shudder in pain. My nose was swollen. It oozed snot and blood.
Blood, blood, makes the green grass grow.
I stared at the ground under me. Tried to make sense of it all. My father? It couldn’t be. Billy Drake was my father. Wasn’t he? Not Styles . . . It all came rushing back: She had a lot of boyfriends . . . I knew your mother well . . . what she did with that body . . . gypsy whore, gypsy whore!
Blood dripped from my nose and pooled on the ground around my hands.
Blood, blood makes the green grass grow.
Marines! Let me hear your battle cry.
I tipped my head skyward. A cry escaped from somewhere deep inside me and rose into the air, low and menacing, like a frightful monster. Ahhh . . . ! It echoed upward through the bare tree branches, spurring a massive release of birds, their dark wings frantically batting at the gray-white sky.
Then came another cry—woeful and distant, high-pitched and laced with hope. Wilco!
“Wilco,” I whispered
.
My eyes strained against the impending darkness. A familiar outline bounded my way. Wilco!
Pusser trudged behind him. “Meg,” I called out. “She’s hurt. Call for medical assistance.” Pusser got on his radio.
I raised up and held out my blood-stained hands. Wilco ran full speed, body stretched out like an arrow. About ten yards out, he went airborne, flying into my chest and knocking me backward. We landed in a muddled mess of human and dog; his wet nose, cold and comforting, wormed its way over my wounded face.
Laughter rang through the air. Mine.
I pulled my dog closer and held on tight.
It was over.
CHAPTER 18
Pusser handed me a foam cup full of coffee and sat in the waiting room chair across from me. A television, mounted to the wall, was tuned into the early-morning news. The press had already broken the story about Styles’s death.
Broken was the operative word. The same reporter who had sprinted after me the day after my mother’s remains were found used his baritone voice and dramatically scowled into the camera. He informed viewers that a beloved local veterinarian had been brutally killed when he uncovered a drug operation in the same woods where the bodies of two Traveller women had been recently discovered. “It appears an officer may have also been involved and injured trying to valiantly save Doctor Styles.”
Deputy Parks had driven me in her patrol car to the hospital while the ambulance crews tended to Meg and Eamon. From behind the cold pack the paramedics had given me for my face, I’d spied the news insignia on a car scurrying to the scene. They must have just assumed the deputy had rushed one of their own back for care.
Pusser groaned. “No one said—”
“Don’t worry,” I offered. “Once they figure out it was only me, another Traveller, that Parks carted off, they’ll drop that part like it was never said.” Pusser didn’t respond. He knew I was right. By noon, they’d probably have enough information to broadcast a full, maybe even close to factual, report. I wondered if once McCreary folks heard one of their own, a beloved veterinarian no less, was a killer, plus a drug dealer, they’d back off the eviction process for the Travellers. Only time would tell.
“You worry me, Callahan.”
“I worry you? Why’s that?”
“What you did to Styles. That’s why.”
“He pointed a gun at my face. A big gun.”
“Don’t give me that crap. This went way beyond self-defense. You practically gutted the guy. The coroner needed a separate bag for his innards.”
“You going to make a big deal out of it? Bring charges against me or something?”
“No.”
“Then why bring it up?” I watched him take a gulp of coffee, amazed at how he could drink with a toothpick in his mouth.
He met my gaze and narrowed his eyes. “You got them, don’t you?”
I groaned. My head was throbbing, my eyes halfway swollen shut, and my busted nose looked like someone had shoved a golf ball up my right nostril. My jaw was an ugly color of purple and my tongue a puffy mess of raw flesh where I’d bitten. Just sipping coffee hurt like hell. I was in no mood to play twenty questions. “Got what? What are you talking about, Pusser?”
“Yips. Flashbacks. Whatever you want to call ’em. The war’s still with you, isn’t it?”
Not this. I don’t need this from Pusser.
He continued. “You getting help?”
I chuckled. “Sure. I got help. They ran me through a bunch of VA docs, shrinks, group therapy, you name it. Only the best from Uncle Sam.” And there was a reason it was Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha. The VA did their best, but despite the insurgence of female soldiers, it’d been a male-oriented system for decades. Vaginas threw them for a loop. That, and the piles of disability paperwork . . . well, I guess somewhere down the line I’d found that the best cure, the easiest anyway, came from Dr. Jack Daniels. I really must set up an appointment soon. I chuckled to myself, took a sip of coffee, and missed the brim. It dribbled down my chin.
He handed me a napkin. “Is it bad?”
I dabbed at my mouth and looked away. Bad? I almost laughed out loud. Guess it depended on what he meant by bad. I was here, wasn’t I? A lot of my buddies weren’t. They couldn’t handle civie life. One by one, they succumbed, checked out, jumped, ate their guns . . . whatever. Just another sister who chose to end it rather than deal with the constant mental shit. I shifted in my seat. Pusser didn’t get it. How could he?
It ticked me off that he’d even brought it up. I ignored him and changed the subject. “Thanks for seeing to my dog.”
Pusser opened his mouth as if to say something, but let it drop. “Sure. Your grandmother was happy to see him.” Parks had taken me straight to the hospital. They wouldn’t let my dog in, so Pusser took him to Gran’s.
“Yeah. They’ve bonded.”
He smiled. “Glad your cousin’s okay.”
She was still unconscious, but the doctor had her on an IV drip to slowly get the drug out of her system. He said by tomorrow she’d come around. Everything that had happened would hit her then. I was almost glad she could avoid it for a few more hours. “Depends on how you define okay.”
Pusser raised his brows.
“She was naked in the shower when that SOB ripped open the curtain and stabbed her with a needle.”
He drained the last of his coffee. “She’s traumatized. I get it, believe me. But she’ll get over it.” He spit his chewed toothpick into his empty cup. “Least she’s alive.”
Spoken like someone who’s never experienced real trauma.
Pusser cleared his throat. What now? I wondered.
“You were right.”
“Great.” I didn’t know what I was right about and didn’t much care. He didn’t say anything else, waited me out. Okay, maybe I did care. “About what?”
“That I needed to look just as hard at, ah . . .”
“Settled people?”
He smirked. “Yeah. Settled.”
“So Al was involved too?”
“No, not him. But when you called from Doc Styles’s place, told me about the drugs, it got me to thinking. Sure, we had Eamon pegged in some way for drugs. But no way would a small solo businessman like Styles have anyone else order his controlled substances for him. And even if he did have someone else ordering, the cost would be really obvious for that much ketamine.”
“So that’s why you came to the clinic?”
“Yup. You’ve got good instincts, Callahan.”
But not good enough, fast enough, or I wouldn’t have ended up doped and nearly blown to bits.
He continued. “Case you’re wondering, Al talked.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We recovered insulated gloves and a baseball bat in the vicinity of the substation transformer, all with his prints.”
“He was going to take down our power supply.”
“That’s right. Once we confronted him with the evidence, he talked. Said he was planning to take out the transformer fuse on the main power supply. It was just the first step in several attacks he and his cronies planned to carry out against you folks.”
“In an effort to get us to leave the area. So it had nothing to do with Meg personally.”
“Seems that way. Those lines belong to Tennessee Valley Authority Electric. It’s a federal offense to mess with power grids. He’ll be tried in a federal court. He’s facing substantial prison time.”
Good. I didn’t care if I ever saw his sorry ass again. I didn’t have to worry about mentioning the prostitution ring he’d run. No need to get more people in trouble for Al’s mischief when Al was already being put away.
I gave up on drinking the coffee and set my cup aside. “I got to thinking about how Styles took the ring off Meg’s finger when she was unconscious.”
“Yeah?”
“He was at the diner yesterday when Meg showed it to me. He must have known it was Sheila Costello’s.”
�
��A dead girl’s ring. Sick.”
“You’re thinking Eamon killed Sheila?”
“How else would he have gotten the ring?”
I shook my head and instantly regretted the movement in my throbbing skull. “It doesn’t make sense that he’d kill Sheila, then give her ring to Meg. Talk about implicating himself.”
“No one said the guy was smart.” Pusser lifted his chin. “Anyway, Meg and Eamon were a liability. Styles figured they knew too much.”
“Yeah, but I can’t believe Meg knew anything about the drugs.”
Pusser didn’t respond. He was a hard one to read, but I was sure he’d grill Meg later. That was his job. But I knew her—no way was she involved except by association with Eamon.
He continued, “Styles was cleaning house. Meg. Eamon. Sheila. They were all liabilities for one reason or another. Maybe Dublin Costello too. Suppose we should run your dog through the woods for his body.”
“You think Styles killed Dub Costello?”
“Probably.”
“And what? Burned the trailer to hide evidence?”
Pusser shrugged again.
“So Kevin Doogan’s no longer under suspicion?”
“I didn’t say that. Maybe the whole damn clan’s involved. With Styles as the ring leader. Won’t know how deep this thing runs until we talk to Eamon. If we can get anything out of him.”
There was a flash of movement over Pusser’s shoulder. A nurse came our way.
“Sheriff Pusser.” Her voice was flat.
Pusser turned around. “Yes.”
“You wanted to know when the patient was available.”
Pusser rose from his chair. “Thank you.” He looked at me. “Coming?”
“You want me in there?” The clock on the wall said it was after ten already. It was Wednesday. I needed to get to work. “Not sure I have time. I gotta be to work in a couple hours.” I was on Drake’s bad side already. If I was late today, I could pretty much kiss my job good-bye.
“It won’t take that long.”
“Why would you want me in there?”
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