More and more people were gathering.
Clay continued. “Your families, your friends, all conveniently clustered in one vulnerable location.”
The crowd was growing hostile. There were awful names being shouted at me. This was their day to vent frustration, and now, thanks to Clay, this was their day to route it toward me.
I tried to step away from the growing circle.
“Not goin’ anywhere, miss,” said a man in a cowboy hat, rifle in hand. Folks in this part of the universe carried guns. Proudly.
“Please,” I implored them. “I need to call an ambulance. My husband needs an ambulance.”
“Stop lying!” said Clay.
“Yeah,” said a worker, joining in the mob mentality. “Stop lying.”
“She’s a radical!” said Clay. “Hired by Drake to sabotage the strike!”
I started to struggle against the grip of the crowd but more and more people were shoving me back to the center. The two fires roared behind me.
After all I’d been through—was this really how I was going to go out?
The chorus of discontented voices grew and grew until someone said, “Kill her.”
And someone else shouted, “No, you kill me first!”
Chapter 29
And that changed everything.
It was a thunderous voice, slightly ragged, but resounding with confidence and conviction that I’ve only heard emanate from one person. My husband.
“Me first!” roared Aaron. “Kill me first!”
The crowd all stopped. Hushed itself. They slowly opened their ranks to let him take center stage. He had Sierra in his arms. Knees buckling as he walked, he’d expended his last breath to walk up the hillside.
“Me…not her,” he said one last time.
He knew what he was doing—the locals reacted instantly.
“Aaron Cooper,” said the woman with the forearm tattoos, as if his name were holy.
“It is him,” said someone else with equal awe. “It is Aaron.”
They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. I couldn’t either. Whatever it was. Him. Their savior. He stood in the middle, commanding all their attention, all their respect.
“This is my wife,” he said. “Her name is Miranda. Today she faced a monster. And that monster…that monster is standing right next to her.”
“Quiet!” shouted Clay. Then he addressed the crowd. “You can’t trust him!”
“Clay and his cronies rammed us off the road,” continued Aaron, pointing at Clay. “Then he tried to kill her. Then, when he knew he couldn’t cover any of it up, he had Jed try to kill all of us.”
“This man is a liar!” said Clay, pointing his finger back at my husband.
“This man is Aaron Cooper!” said a woman from the back.
She had a small child with her. She nodded toward Aaron like he was her favorite brother. “He’s defending my home and my family.” Then she turned to Clay. “I’d trust him over you.” Then she nodded to Jed to add, “Over both of you!”
“So would I,” said another local.
“So would I,” said another.
“Aaron Cooper’s been helping us for almost a year,” said the guy in the cowboy hat. “I’d trust him with the life of my newborn.”
The workers and residents had taken his side, our side, which felt amazing, truly.
I finally spoke up. “I can tell you what this man did. I can tell you every detail.”
Clay had reached his threshold. With the flames of hell whipping around behind him, he aimed his rifle directly at my chest and shouted his war cry, “Liar!”
I saw each split-second elapse individually. I heard each millimeter of his index finger begin to pull that sliver of metal. A flurry of gunshots went off. And I swear I felt each bullet go inside me.
Chapter 30
But that was an illusion. The others fired, Aaron’s defenders and now mine. A total of fifteen rounds from four different guns. I don’t think anyone missed. Every single shot pierced Clay Hobson in the chest before he ever squeezed his own trigger.
The bullet-riddled man teetered backward, took two clumsy steps, paused, coughed up blood, then fell into the trench behind him, into the roaring inferno of the rig, where instantly the dynamite sticks in his vest combusted.
Boom.
Luckily, our crowd was on the opposite edge of the blast radius. Clay Hobson wasn’t spared. His body was obliterated, while the rest of us remained dazed but still on our feet. Aaron had instinctively clutched downward, curling himself over Sierra. She was shell-shocked, but she would see her fifth birthday.
The one person now trembling in our midst was Jedediah.
The crowd had fully aligned itself with Aaron, defending him, and thereby me. Jed’s goons were nowhere to be seen, successfully evaded by my determined husband.
“Set your gun down, Jed,” said the tattooed woman.
Jed didn’t seem popular here. Maybe everyone saw through him.
The man in the cowboy hat cocked his revolver. “Jedediah Branch, I don’t care how high you are on the food chain. If you move one molecule of that index finger, I will shoot you in the throat.”
Jed was pale. He lowered his weapon slowly.
I gingerly made my way over to Aaron. I wanted so badly to hug him but he looked frail enough to crush. I didn’t even want to exhale in his direction. Instead, I took my place at his side.
Jed was covered in oil, head to toe, doused by the spray of snuffing out the first derrick. One of the men looked directly at Jed, pulled out a pocket lighter and flicked it without ever breaking eye contact, holding the flame aloft like a torch.
Jed trembled in horror. The implication was terrifying. These people might actually burn him alive. He dropped to his knees, to face, of all people, Aaron.
“No. Please,” Jed began to grovel. “Please don’t.”
He must’ve been convinced Aaron would condemn him. I had to be honest: seeing my husband hold our child, thrashed, bruised, teetering on the edge of death, mere yards away from the man responsible for the agony of it all, I almost wondered if he might actually give the word.
Almost.
But I knew better. I knew what Jed didn’t know.
“You asked me to speak at the rally on behalf of Drake, but you found out I was going to blow the whistle on the whole operation. So you ordered me killed. You ordered my family killed. All so you could keep getting kickbacks from Drake Oil while these laborers got sicker and sicker, poisoned by the drinking water in their own homes.”
Aaron stared at Jed.
“You want me to call them off?” said Aaron to the judge.
Aaron isn’t a murderer.
“I’ll make you glad you did,” said Jed. He kept his movements slow and cautious, well aware of the muzzles pointing at his vital organs. His desperate gaze turned to me. “Please, Miranda. Anything you want.”
“There’s nothing you can say,” I told him.
His ghostly face then peered around the group, frantically calculating.
“I’ll say it,” said Jed. He took a deep breath. “I did what you saw other judges do. I obstructed justice. I was paid to rule in favor of Drake Oil.” He clasped his hands as if in prayer. Imploring. “But I can make it right. Help me make it right.”
It had no value, this sad speech. Under duress, stating something he’d later dispute, it had no legal weight. This was just another stunt. But the moral victory definitely tasted sweet.
What was bizarre was that everyone was staring at me just as much as they were staring at the judge, wondering what kind of verdict I would render.
“Help me, Miranda,” pleaded Jed.
I said, “My family will be giving you back your $145,000.”
I let that sit for a second, watching his confusion.
“The bonus your people paid us?” I continued. “You’ll be getting all that back. Starting with…” I began to fish in the pockets of my jeans. Here came all the cash I had
on me, some bills and two coins, a grand total of six dollars and eleven cents. I tossed the wad toward Jedediah, then added, “The rest is coming soon.”
In the distance were sirens.
I looked over at Aaron. He emitted a frail half chuckle, his best version of a laugh. Which meant, given the state he was in, that he found me hysterical.
“There’s an ambulance for you, Mr. Cooper,” said the tattooed lady, kindly. She was pointing to the front gate at the far end of the ranch, ready to assist him down the road.
I still didn’t want to hug my husband for fear of toppling him over, but before I could tell him no, he put Sierra on the ground and embraced me. Sierra glommed on to us to make it a three-way group effort. We held. We held tight.
We held our family as if we’d just learned what the word meant.
Epilogue
That day felt like a year. And that’s how long it would ultimately take to ram this monstrosity of a case through the Arizona court system, where Aaron had been summoned to testify, where I was now waiting out in the hallway for him.
Sierra was orbiting around the corridor like an urban tumbleweed. She’d abandoned her career in kangaroo development and moved on to portrait photography, snapping pictures of random faces wherever we went.
“There,” she said, pointing into the courtroom. The door had opened briefly, giving her a glimpse of the distant witness stand and her daddy taking a seat. “Daddy! He’s handsome.”
She could hardly comprehend how important this was. He was about to provide landmark testimony that would essentially bury the oil titan for good. I could hardly comprehend it myself. All nine active members of the board would sink. The CEO, the previous CEO, the army of vice presidents, Jedediah and all the other judges who were bought off, the late Clay Hobson, everyone whose hands were dirty.
It got too much for me to watch, to be honest. The trial recognized case after case of ravaged families, and last week, while sitting in on testimony from a balding mother of three, two of whom were in caskets, I wound up getting escorted out of the room. For yelling at the defense.
I’m the reason gavels were invented.
As for Aaron’s culpability, our infamous Tuesday in the canyon helped sway any public doubt as to whether we’d duly suffered. I mean, let’s not forget, Aaron was the one person who tried to drown this demon the moment he learned it existed.
“Mommy, that lady is staring,” said Sierra, having just snapped a photo down the hall. She leaned over to show me a woman on her screen, a woman who was now approaching in a high-heeled cadence that echoed across the marble. She was indeed staring. At me.
Soon her stilettos came to a crisp halt right in front of my chair. She was tall, tall like a statue-of-democracy tall, her business suit failing to hide a well-chiseled figure.
“Miranda Cooper,” she said to me. A question with no question mark.
“Uh,” I replied.
“My apologies for being abrupt. My name is Kelly Miles. I have a job offer.”
“Oh.”
“My team fights the kind of battles I think you’d appreciate. And we happen to need a geologist. Someone to cover the Caspian Sea. Someone like you. Someone hard to stop.”
Hard to stop. Is that my new slogan?
“Ah.” The only reply I could think of besides uh and oh.
She looked like she could dent a concrete wall just by glaring at it. I got the feeling she wasn’t offering me a job so much as telling me she already hired me. The Caspian? Isn’t that Russia? And missiles?
“I…” I didn’t know what to say. “I like your…confidence…but…”
“But you’re declining,” she said. Another question with no question mark.
I looked over at Sierra as if she might teleprompt me. Sierra was riffling through her latest photos. Some seventy-five pictures in seventy-five seconds. No help.
“What I am is…” I said, “honored. And, yes, declining. But thank you.”
She smiled. “My card.” She handed me her business card. “You can throw it away as soon as I’m gone. Nice to meet you, Miranda Cooper. You did well.”
She started walking away. And within ten more photos from Sierra, our strange visitor had disappeared around the corner.
I looked down. I contemplated the card. A new frontier. Wild terrain. The thrill of the hunt.
And I crumpled it up.
About the Authors
James Patterson has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He lives in Florida with his family.
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Shan Serafin is a Los Angeles–based writer who began his career with his first novel, Seventeen, before adding screen work to his repertoire and eventually collaborating with Mr. Patterson.
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Copyright © 2016 by James Patterson
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