Jay’s heart stuttered. He couldn’t answer, couldn’t even speak.
“It wasn’t a half-bad plan,” R.C. conceded. “Probably would’ve worked except for these.”
He touched the binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck. “After last time I got myself a pair with night vision.”
Jay wondered how, since R.C. was presumed dead. Had he risked driving somewhere, or was someone helping him? But what did it matter if R.C. had shot Dana? What did anything matter now that she was dead?
“Why?” It was the only question he could manage without completely breaking down. And even that one syllable reverberated with his anguish.
“Why what? Why’d I go for the brass ring after all these years of living on the straight and narrow?” The older man’s laugh turned to a dry cough. “After I found out what those assholes were up to I was out to help myself, that’s all, to squeeze out every drop I could. Everything I’ve been missing out on all these years. Good times with a gorgeous woman—maybe a little hula girl of my own, once that money set me up to retire in paradise.”
Hell’s the closest you’ll get, old man. Because Jay was going to kill him, one way or another, for what he’d done to Dana.
As if he’d read Jay’s mind, R.C.’s voice softened as he said, “You did her a favor, son. It ended a lot quicker this way. I just walked straight up behind her after she had fallen and bam, it was all over. She never even saw it coming.”
Jay’s eyes squeezed shut, and he burst out, “Jesus,” without knowing if he meant it as a prayer for her soul or a curse. If he hadn’t shoved her out the door, if he hadn’t taken the decision from her, maybe he could have bought a better chance for her somewhere down the line. Maybe…
“Even if I’d held her for ransom, like I thought I might,” R.C. said, “well…there’s no way I could’ve ever let her go.”
Some measure of Jay’s soul crumbled into ash, one last, resilient stronghold still untouched by either crime or war. That bastard—did R.C. think he was consoling him?
“So where’s that money?” His uncle’s voice went hard and flat.
Jay hesitated before saying, “It’s at the old Webb place out by Lost Lake.”
The place where he would make R.C. pay for Dana, for all the pain he’d caused.
“The Webb place?” his uncle asked. “Angelina’s squat? But I’ve searched high and low through that adobe.”
“You had to know exactly where to look.”
“Where?”
“You think I’m going to tell you so you can cut my throat and dump my body?” Jay figured that was what R.C. planned for later anyway. But things weren’t going to happen the way his uncle intended.
As R.C. continued driving, Jay envisioned himself overpowering the older man, caving in his head with a rock, then jumping back inside the truck and returning to his ranch to find Dana. She would be alive, unhurt—would tell him she’d simply dropped down and played possum, that his uncle had only grazed her slightly or, better yet, had missed her altogether.
She would look into his eyes and say that she loved him, that she had since they’d first met. And he’d wrap both arms around her and beg her to let him stay with her forever.
And when she told him yes, yes, her answer would drive the darkness from him and leave him worthy of the gift.
Chapter Thirty-one
“How far would you go?”I used to ask my little sister.
She was annoying sometimes but basically a good kid. A kid who saw the limits and understood the consequences if she pushed too far past them.
However far she dared to go, I always had to take it two steps past that. Because the things I cared about mattered so much to me, I was willing to do anything. Even to die for them, if that was what it took.
—Entry seven, March 12
Angie’s sobriety journal
From her hiding place in the brush, Dana watched the driver climb down from his pickup. Though R.C. Eversole appeared to have been scared off by this truck’s approaching headlights, she leaned her face against Max’s fur and trembled, waiting like some feral, wounded creature who would bolt if she could only find the strength.
An image of Angie flickered like a hologram through her mind. Angie, who had somehow been driven to this same desperate position—or had chosen it in an attempt to make a difference. Perhaps all the time she’d spent as a troubled teen in wilderness programs had convinced her she could survive the desert long-term. Or maybe she’d started with the thought of hiding only a short time before getting out and finding help, but exposure, injury, or illness had left her too weak or confused to do much more than run from place to place.
Dana knew she would never last as long. She had to risk asking for help, not only for herself but for Jay—if he remained alive to save. Which was why she crept in closer, anxious to identify the man opening the ranch gate, praying she would recognize someone she could trust.
His height marked him as a Hooks, and the dark hair narrowed it down to Wallace. Heart pounding, she decided she had no other choice except to put her faith in him. She crept forward with Max limping close beside her, hobbling on three good legs. “Deputy? Deputy, please help me—”
Her voice rose to a shrill cry as Wallace drew his gun on her and shouted, “Hands up. Keep ’em high.”
“I can’t,” she called. “They’re tied behind me.”
“Don’t you take one step closer. Just turn around so I can see those hands.”
She did as he asked and said, “It’s me—Dana Vanover. Please don’t shoot.”
“Dr. Vanover?” Gravel crunched as he approached her. “Who did this to you? You’re hurt—God.”
“Forget that—I’ll be all right.” She turned to face him, unwilling to waste time. “Jay needs your help, now.”
If his uncle hadn’t already murdered him for daring to help her…Panic shafted through her at the thought.
“The sheriff? Where is he? What happened?”
“It was his uncle. He attacked us. Or attacked me, and Jay tried to interve—”
“His uncle? How could…Where? Where is this person?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “He took off with Jay in an old pickup when he saw your lights coming. We have to catch up to them.”
“But R.C.’s dead. I…I was there when we pulled the body out of his bed. And the medical examiner said…Look, there’s no way it could’ve been him. Jay called me earlier, left a message that he needed to talk. He sounded worried, and I overheard something at ho—Well, I overheard some stuff I wasn’t meant to, and I thought there might be trouble, so I headed straight on over. Maybe I’m too late—”
“That body wasn’t the sheriff’s. Jay recognized his uncle. I’m sure of it.” She couldn’t bear to spend another moment arguing. “We have to go. Before it’s too late.”
“All right, but let me cut your hands free so you can get up in the truck.” He pulled some kind of utility tool from a pouch attached to his uniform belt.
She felt a hard tug and heard plastic snap before her shoulders loosened. “Thanks.”
She opened the truck door and coaxed Max into jumping onto the passenger-side floor area before she climbed inside. By the time she fastened her seat belt, Wallace was behind the wheel.
He put the truck in gear, but hesitated. “If it wasn’t R.C. in that bed, then who—”
She wanted to rage at him, Who the hell cares? But apparently the deputy needed answers to convince him she wasn’t leading him astray. “Isn’t the FBI looking for the husband of the woman we found in the salt cavern? What’s his name? Goldsmith, wasn’t it?”
The old sheriff must have killed him, then used the body to stage his own death. Probably it had happened the same day R.C. had murdered the man’s wife. Had Eversole gotten greedy and tried to squeeze too much out of the couple? Considering how obsessed the man was with the money Angie had supposedly stolen from him, it made sense.
“Christ on a crutch…” Wallace muttered. “T
hen…well, if that’s right, where would R.C. be taking Jay?”
She nodded, tears burning her eyes and pointed out the direction in which she’d seen the taillights disappear. “All I know is they went that way. I don’t know where they were headed. The old sheriff was half-crazy, ranting about finding the rest of his money.”
Wallace’s head jerked back and his eyes widened.
“He thought I knew where it was,” Dana went on, “thought Angie must’ve told me before he killed her. He…he’d do anything to get it back—probably so he can get clear of the area. He’d kill anybody—right down to his own nephew. Jay told him he knew where the money was, but Angie never said a word to me about it.”
Wallace nodded and put his truck in gear. “Then we’d better catch up with them.”
“Do you have some idea where they went?”
“Better than that,” he said grimly. “I know exactly where they’re going.”
The shovel Jay had been given bit into the gravel, then rattled an addition to the growing pile at his right. The repeated scriiitch-rattle of the work formed a rhythm as surreal as the headlight-lit excavation of the double grave.
While his uncle kept his gun on him from a safe distance, Jay was seized with the notion that this was something from a horror movie…or a Middle Eastern desert.
The pistol trained on him became a machine gun; the darkness cloaking the man who held it morphed into the black robe and headdress of a mujahideen guerrilla. They were forcing him to dig his own grave before they tried to make him renounce his government and beheaded him on a videotape they planned to send to the Al Jazeera network.
They…no…he…There was only one, not many. And the night smelled of West Texas and…
It was the pain that brought Jay to himself: the soreness of his muscles, the sweat-spawned blisters on his palms, and the sick throb of his head. They combined to ground him in a present even more distressing than his past.
His uncle had shot Dana and had him digging beneath the petals, bones, and pebbles Angie had used to mark the old Webb graves. The same sort of decoration that had marked the site where the body he suspected would prove to be Roman Goldsmith’s had been found, where Angie had interred the first fifty thousand.
In the final recovered pages of her journal, she had written of her desire to honor the ones who came before, who got us where we are now. Not the cheap flash and empty promises of modern charlatans. That’s the shit that should be buried and forgotten.
Those words, along with the prompting of his subconscious—since he refused to believe he had actually been visited by Angie’s spirit—had convinced him that the money had been split up and moved to at least two other sites, including this one and the salt cavern where Miriam Piper-Gold’s body had been hidden.
If he had guessed wrong, the man standing some six feet away pointing his pistol would surely use the weapon. But come to think of it, he would probably do the same if Jay were right—unless Jay found some way to distract and overpower R.C. first.
Jay had to, not for his own sake, but for Dana’s. If there was any chance—any chance at all—that she had survived a gunshot wound to her head, he had to get back to her quickly.
He dug deep into his reserves of strength to summon up an attempt at conversation. “So who’s been helping you?”
The stony soil rattled as it slid down from his shovel. When his uncle didn’t answer, he added, “Somebody had to’ve. That old truck’s not yours, is it? And someone’s picked up supplies and stuff for you.”
“Is this the part where you try to draw me into conversation to lull me off my guard?” R.C. asked him. With a nod, he added, “Guess you have learned something since you left here. I would’ve tried the same thing.”
“I learned a lot from watching you,” Jay said, trying not to let his uncle’s comment get to him. “It’s what made me switch my major to criminal justice while I was putting myself through school. I wanted to be like the first man I respected.”
At the moment Jay wanted nothing more than to split the bastard’s skull with the shovel he’d been handed. But with his uncle out of range, he used his foot to drive the blade in deeper.
“Flattery now, huh? They teach you that in Dallas? Or did they have you ass-kiss ayatollahs while you were over there in I-raq?”
“Maybe you could give me a few pointers on sucking up,” Jay countered. “The way you’ve let Abe Hooks run your office all these years. I know about the way y’all ‘persuaded’ folks you didn’t want around to leave Rimrock.”
Maybe if he pissed off the man sufficiently, his uncle would grow careless enough to drop his guard. Since Jay was standing in the hole he’d dug, the chances of gaining control were worse than slim, so he’d have to act fast to seize on the slightest opening.
But R.C. simply shrugged. “Hell, boy. That’s not Hooks runnin’ me. That’s just the way things are done out here. The way they’ve always been done since back before your granddad and great-granddad did their stints as sheriff.”
“Things were done that way in a lot of departments for a lot of years. But that doesn’t make it right—especially not when people end up dead.”
Jay’s uncle spit. “I’ve heard about that pussification training they make cops take now. All that diversity awareness and such shit. And that might be well and good in those fancy college classes they got the ACLU teachin’. But out here we hold with what works—and that’s still a strong sheriff givin’ bad men till sundown to get the hell out of Dodge.”
Something he’d said rang a bell. His reference to the American Civil Liberties Union, maybe. But Jay was far too distracted to focus on it at the moment. “That hippie squatter you and your buddies burned to death back when I was a kid? I still remember him and his woman wearing those tie-dyed T-shirts from the sixties and making candles and wind chimes to sell at craft fairs. Do you really expect me to believe people like that were threatening the peace? Or maybe they were just a little too different for the people here in Devil’s Claw?”
“Everybody knew those two were illegally harvesting peyote buttons. You let that sort of business get a toehold, and before you know it all sorts of—”
Interrupting himself, R.C. frowned and pointed to Jay’s right. “Should have found something by now. Little thing like her couldn’t have dug too deep. Maybe you ought to try a bit farther over that way.”
But Jay’s shovel had already struck something that felt different. Unlike the noisy, pebbled sand he had been digging, the sound was deadened and the steel blade’s bite felt soft.
Far too soft to be explained by the banded packs of cash that he’d expected. As the pungent odor filled his nostrils, dread breached Jay’s levees.
Dread mingled with the bittersweet anticipation of his own impending death.
Chapter Thirty-two
Behold, from the land of the farther suns
I returned.
And I was in a reptile-swarming place,
Peopled, otherwise, with grimaces,
Shrouded above in black impenetrableness.
I shrank, loathing,
Sick with it.
And I said to him,
“What is this?”
He made answer slowly,
“Spirit, this is a world;
This was your home.”
—Stephen Crane,
“The Black Riders and Other Lines”
As Wallace raced along dark roads, Dana checked Max’s leg wound, in part because she couldn’t stand the thought of the dog suffering and in part because she had to do something—anything—to keep from going utterly to pieces in her worry over Jay.
“It’s not so bad, boy. Not so bad,” she reassured the quivering dog as she stroked his short hair. To her relief she found no injuries other than a single slash across Max’s upper foreleg, which had nearly finished bleeding. Grazed by the shot, the shepherd had gone into hiding. Dana quickly guessed the reason as she touched the knotty, healed wounds along his si
de, which she remembered feeling earlier. Someone had hurt the animal before he’d come into Jay’s keeping. Some cruel jackass with a gun.
“Never again,” she promised Max. Even if Jay didn’t make it, she wouldn’t let—
Shredded by the thought, she forced herself to ask Wallace a question. “How…how did you know her? How did you know Angie?”
“What?” he asked her from the driver’s seat, where he had clearly been lost in his own thoughts.
Once she repeated the question, his ring finger tapped a fitful beat against the wheel.
“I didn’t know your sister.” He noisily cleared his throat. “Not really. Just bumped into her a few times around town.”
“Jay said you picked her up when she was drunk. Not long before she vanished.”
His gaze flashed sideways. “What the hell are you accusing me of? Because I’m trying to do my job. I’m trying—”
“She told you where she hid the money.” Dana’s heart pounded with the suspicion that so much hinged on this conversation, even more than Jay’s life. “Drunk or not, she told you because she knew you once. Because you’d been together.”
Dana wanted to add, When you were both in rehab, but intuition warned her not to push him any harder.
“What the…” He shook his head emphatically, tapping his ring finger even harder. “You think I’d take up with a woman like that? No offense, but your sister spent so much of her life hammered, she was wrecked. Whatever the bizarro cause, she jumped all over it. Whoever the man, she jumped him, too, as long as he could help her get her next good buzz on—”
“She wasn’t always that way.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said as the truck rolled to a standstill in front of the access gate that led to the salt dome. “Now stay put. I need to check this.”
He ran out and fiddled with the gate’s chain before returning to the pickup and climbing back inside. “I guessed wrong. They didn’t come here, so they must’ve gone over to the Webb place.”
The Salt Maiden Page 28