by Lisa Jackson
Your nerves. Noah’s right. You’re overly tired. Still she searched the parking lot and saw only the pale image of her reflection staring into the night.
“Come on, let’s get you into bed,” Noah said, once he’d finished paying.
“I’m okay,” she said, wondering about the night ahead. There were two beds in the room, and they’d each placed a bag at the end of the one they had claimed. But . . .
She was distracted, considering the next few hours alone with Noah.
As they reached their door, Noah began to slide his key from his pocket, and Remmi felt a movement behind her, a disturbance in the night. The hairs on the back of her neck raised and she started to turn.
Too late!
Steely fingers surrounded the back of her arm as the cold barrel of a gun jammed against the base of her skull.
“What?” she cried.
Noah reacted, reaching for the gun in his pocket.
“Don’t,” a strong male voice whispered just over her ear. “Or I’ll blow her brains all over you . . . and you,” he added tightly, his fingers clamping harder, “shut up.” To Noah, he snarled, “Put your hands in the air or I’ll blow off her head. Don’t think I won’t.”
Remmi was frozen, her breath caught in her throat.
Noah’s hands rose slowly to the sides of his head. The gunman reached over and grabbed Noah’s pistol from his pocket, transferring it to his own. Then he retrieved Noah’s phone and did the same.
Terrified, not daring to move with the cold metal jammed against the back of her head, Remmi stared at Noah. She couldn’t see her attacker, but she felt him pressed hard against her, could smell some cologne. For a split second, she thought about trying to pull away, but she heard the click of the gun’s hammer and froze. Noah’s head gave the barest of shakes.
“Hedges,” Noah said, “what the hell are you doing?”
Hedges? Brett Hedges? Why would he be here? What would he want with them?
“Shut up,” Hedges ordered. “Just shut up, or I’ll kill her. I will.”
Noah’s mouth clamped shut.
“Put these cuffs on,” Hedges ordered and tossed a pair of handcuffs to Noah, who caught them on the fly.
Please use them to hit him! Don’t do as he says.
But Noah complied. The handcuffs clicked. No one showed up.
The few people in the restaurant couldn’t see them.
The occasional car on the road passed by.
No one pulled in.
No one came out of the damned motel.
“Test ’em,” Hedges ordered in a low voice, the gun’s muzzle never moving. “Snap your wrists apart, Scott. Do it!”
Noah did. The handcuffs held, the chain taut.
“Get into the car,” Hedges said. “Now. Back seat.”
“What car?”
“Her car, damn it,” he said, and Remmi realized they were only a few feet from her Outback.
Oh God. No. This couldn’t be happening.
“Don’t do it,” Remmi said.
Noah kept his gaze on Hedges as he opened the back door of the Subaru.
“Get in! Now,” the gunman ordered fiercely.
Please, someone come.
No one did.
Heart pounding, panic setting in, Remmi watched Noah slip into the interior. Before he sat down, Hedges moved swiftly, slamming the butt of his gun into the back of Noah’s skull. Noah crumpled with a low groan.
In that split second, Remmi tried to run. She screamed.
“Shut the fuck up! You want me to shoot him?” Hedges said, turning the gun on Noah’s inert form. “You do as I say, or I’ll gut-shoot him and you can watch him bleed out. Is that what you want?”
“Why are you—”
“Shut up, and get in the car and drive.”
“I can’t. He’s . . . he’s got the keys.”
“This is your car.”
“But he was driving,” she said in a panic. “They’re in his pocket.” She started to reach for Noah, but she tripped over the curb, stumbled against Hedges, and fell to her knees.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” He yanked her to her feet, then to her horror, slid her phone from her back pocket. “Now. Get behind the wheel.” He reached into Noah’s pocket and extracted the keys, then handed them to her. “No funny business. Believe me, I’ll shoot him. Now. Drive.”
Telling herself she was being a fool, she did as she was told. In the time that it took him to open the door, she tried to start the car and knock him down, maybe run over him and lay on the horn, but he was onto her and kept his pistol aimed at Noah, so she merely waited as he climbed in.
“Take the road south,” he ordered.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
In the flash of the interior light, she’d caught a glimpse of him, a beard starting to gray, hair thinning a bit, but a normal-looking man, not a psycho. “It doesn’t matter. Just head south.”
She pulled out of the parking lot. Her brain was engaging again, and she was thinking faster, trying to come up with a way to escape. He’d surprised her and scared her out of her mind, but now, she had to think, had to find a way to stop whatever madness he had planned.
She turned onto the access road.
“No! Shit. Not north. I said south. The other way, damn it!”
“Sorry,” she said. She wheeled a quick one-eighty and watched the city grow smaller in the rearview. “I–I’m not used to driving with a gun pointed at me.”
“I’m not moving the barrel.”
“If you killed Noah—”
“He’s not dead. Yet.”
“But you intend to kill him? To kill me?” she asked. “Is that what this is all about?” If so, she should drive like a maniac and wreck the car, take him with them. But even as the thought came into her head, it fled. As long as they were alive, there was hope, a chance that they would find a way to escape.
For now, she’d do as he wanted.
CHAPTER 35
“Man, that was some weird shit,” Martinez said as they climbed into the rental car at the Las Vegas airport. Stinson had flown them in his Cessna once more, and now Settler owed him not one, but two dinners. He was also hinting that she throw in a Vegas show.
As if.
“You mean the song?” Settler said. They’d interviewed Milo Gibbs after his surgery, and either he’d lost part of his mind or the anesthesia hadn’t worn off because he kept singing some little song she’d heard long before.
“Yeah, the light shining song. Over and over again.”
“Yeah. I heard it. And if anyone hasn’t given him the word yet, he’s not gonna make it on The Voice.”
“Unkind, Settler.”
They’d gotten more from Gibbs than the song. With his attorney present in his hospital room, Gibbs had confessed to the murders of the Crenshaws, Bob Rice, the handyman for Kris Kringle, and even to giving Karen Upgarde the drugs that literally pushed her over the edge. He also admitted to killing the still-unidentified man in the car in the desert twenty years earlier and attempting to kill Remmi Storm and Noah Scott the night before. But he’d sworn he hadn’t killed Didi, which meant, if he was telling the truth—a big leap, given the man’s perfidy—that a killer was still at large. Settler wasn’t sure what to believe. Gibbs was a consummate liar, but it was entirely possible that Didi’s murderer was someone else, as she had collected enemies like dogs collected fleas.
So, it wasn’t out of the question that the same killer who had helped OH2 to an early grave had taken Didi’s life.
“She’s on the move,” Martinez said, staring at the cell phone that Milo Gibbs had given them. The man had admitted planting a tracker on Remmi Storm’s car, and though it was evidence, they’d chosen to use it to keep tabs on Didi’s daughter.
“Remmi is?”
“Yep. Heading south.”
“Damn it! I told her to stay put.”
“Apparently she doesn’t take orders all that well.�
�
“Apparently,” Settler repeated grimly, as the entrance to the freeway heading south came up. “Let’s see where she’s going.”
* * *
The city was far behind them, barely visible in the mirror as Remmi drove onward, angling into the mountains. They’d left the freeway for a county road and from there to a smaller, private byway that cut upward through the cacti, Joshua trees, and rocks. No streetlights. No cars. No people. Total isolation.
This is not good.
Heart pounding, her nerves strung to the breaking point, she tried to come up with some way to beat Hedges at his own game, but the farther they got from the city, the more unlikely that was becoming.
She glimpsed reflective eyes caught in the beams of her headlights. “What the—” She slammed on the brakes as a coyote streaked in front of her headlights, a flash of silver gray and brown fur.
“What the hell!” Hedges yelled, then he, too, saw the furtive animal scurrying into the shadows. “Just drive!”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re almost there.”
She had to find a way out. There had to be some way to save them. He had the phones and the guns, and if she hit the car’s panic button out here, no one would hear them and he’d shoot her or, worse yet, Noah.
The nose of her Subaru crested the ridge, and then the gravel road sloped sharply downward, ruts causing the car to bounce, tires spinning, gravel spraying as they slid downward. The steering wheel slipped through her fingers until finally the headlights found the valley floor. Here, the ground was more stable, though it still sloped and was surrounded on two sides by mountains of sand.
“What is this place?” she asked and felt a chill as cold as the desert night.
“Where OH Industries gets its sand. And where you’re going to find out what it felt like for your mother in that Cadillac, all those years ago . . .”
At that moment, her headlights washed upon several oversized pieces of machinery. A dump truck, and a backhoe with a huge bucket. Parked next to the dusty construction equipment was a black pickup, its paint job so shiny as to nearly appear liquid.
Hedges’s vehicle.
“Park it.”
“Here?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“I don’t understand.” The car was still angled about fifty yards from the truck and equipment, situated in the middle of the pit.
“This is payback,” he said calmly. “For your mother. That bitch tried to ruin me. She sold me my own kid. For a quarter of a million dollars. Told me I had a son, and I paid her, only to find out that night that she’d had twins, and she switched out the daughter for my son. She planned on trying to sell me each of them, one at a time.”
“But you cheated her.” Remmi had yet to slip the car into park. She kept her foot on the brake, to keep the Outback from rolling down the slight incline.
“She was selling me my babies. Of course I cheated her. What mother would do that?” He stared at Remmi as if she were crazy. “And it was complicated on my end, because I wasn’t the only one who wanted my kids. My older brother? Oliver, or OH2, as he liked to think of himself? He wanted them, too. Considered them his heirs when they were mine. He couldn’t have kids of his own, so he thought, he really thought he could swindle mine. I was the one who dealt with Didi, and he thought he was going to take them from me. And how was he going to do that? Kill me, of course.” His agitation grew, and with it, he began waving the gun.
Remmi kept her eyes on the gun’s muzzle. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but she wanted to keep him talking, not for his story as much as to buy time. If there was some way to get him out of the car, she could drive away . . . or if she could get the gun or the phones or something. She heard another groan from the back seat, and her heart soared. At least Noah was alive.
For now.
“But he didn’t . . . your brother didn’t get Adam and Ariel. He died,” she said.
“Kyle and Kayla.” Hedges barked out a laugh. The gun was pointed at her again. “Good old OH2. All his brains. All his education. All his plotting. For what? He ended up dead.” Another harsh chuckle. “It seems we’re all a murderous lot.”
“What do you mean?”
Keep him talking. She was looking at Hedges, but in her peripheral vision she was trying to see any means of escape. That’s when she saw the movement in the back seat. Noah was rousing.
Keep him talking. He can’t know that Noah is coming around.
“My brother was poisoned,” Hedges said.
“You killed him?”
“No. Oh, no.” He gave his head a shake. “My father took care of that. He blamed my brother for his skiing accident, something about the bindings being tampered with, and it crippled him, didn’t quite kill him, but almost did. Dad was sure his namesake planned not only to win his woman back, that bitch Marilee, but also to take over the company and my kids. Before he could, though, Dad got his revenge.”
“I thought your father was in a retirement home. In a wheelchair . . .” If she could just get the gun!
Behind her, through the seat, she felt movement.
“Well, he had a little help,” Hedges admitted, caught up in his story, seemingly unaware that Noah was rousing. Oh, dear God, if there was a way out of this . . .
“From you?” she asked, her eyes never moving from Hedges and the gun.
He snorted. “And I thought you were supposed to be smart.”
She waited, ears straining for any signs that Noah was awake, while her mind was trying to piece together what Hedges was talking about. “Your father had help from . . .” She felt some pressure on the back of her seat. Was Noah signaling her? She couldn’t tell.
Hedges was waiting for her to finish her sentence, baiting her, she realized.
And then it dawned on her.
“Seneca,” she whispered, her heart freezing.
“There ya go!” He waved the gun. “Give the lady a prize!”
“She stole Adam from me and brought him to . . . you?” Remmi said, disbelieving and silently praying for a miracle.
For a second, she thought she heard the whine of a car’s engine . . . She pressed her foot on the brake a little harder, the Subaru still idling.
“Not to me,” Hedges said. “She took Kyle to my brother, actually, but only temporarily, until she killed him.”
“She what?” No! Remmi must have heard wrong. “Seneca killed OH2?”
He snorted his disgust. “Shawna,” he said. “Shawna killed him. Can you not get the names straight?”
“I don’t believe she would—”
“She’s a woman of many talents, as it turns out. Excellent nursemaid. She helped raise the kids and gave my father a chance at life again. He’s still in a wheelchair, but he gets around okay. You know what they say about the love of a good woman. And a damned good murderess, if she needs to be.”
“I can’t believe that—”
“Oh, believe.” He was so much calmer now that he was in control, that he had Noah and Remmi unable to thwart him. He almost seemed to revel in telling his story.
She sensed that he liked drawing this part out, of having the power, of terrorizing and informing, almost bragging, while she was literally a captive audience.
“But Shawna won’t like the fact that I had to get rid of you. She was really fond of you, so this will have to be my little secret.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked and, from the corner of her eye, saw something shift in the back seat.
Hedges was into his story. “If it all hadn’t fallen apart, if that damned book hadn’t been published, if you hadn’t started nosing around . . . But you wouldn’t give up. You just had to keep poking and prodding, trying to find my kids . . . and that just can’t happen.”
“The police know,” she said. “You can kill me, but the police will find them and tell them. The reporters? They’ll be coming, too.”
“But none of them know all the
secrets, do they? Only you.”
She saw now, through the slight crack between the two front seats, that Noah had positioned himself behind Hedges. There was just enough light from the dash to catch a glimpse of Noah angling his head back and raising his cuffed hands.
“You killed Didi,” she said flatly.
“Of course I did.” He sounded pleased with himself. “And I’d do it again, the way that bitch fucked me over, I would gladly—”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Noah gather himself. “Now!” he yelled “Now!”
She took her foot off the brake and hit the gas as she flung open her door. The car bucked forward. She rolled out, bouncing and scraping in the gravel, avoiding the rear tires. Scrambling to her feet, she watched in the incandescence of the dash lights.
Noah was pressed against the back of the passenger seat. He’d risen over the headrest and had thrown his arms forward and over the head of the unsuspecting Hedges.
But the car kept rolling, picking up speed on the incline . . . toward the pit . . .
“No,” she whispered and took off after it.
It sped, rocking and turning as if someone were grappling for the steering wheel. Gravel, sand, and dust sprayed from the wheels.
“God, no!”
Choking, the clouds of dust thick, she raced.
No! No! No!
Vaguely, she was aware of another light, something bright piercing the canyon floor. Another vehicle, hurtling over the rise.
Was Hedges meeting someone here? Another killer?
She stumbled, just as the speeding Subaru bounced off course and smashed into the side of the truck. Metal screeched and groaned as it twisted and crumpled. She felt a split second of relief that the vehicle hadn’t nose-dived into the pit when she heard a horrid, blood-chilling scream.
Noah! Oh, God, Noah!
Blam!
A gun blasted!
The windshield shattered, glass spraying. That son of a bitch had shot Noah!
“Stop! Just stop!” she cried, coughing, racing, stumbling forward as the vehicle that had followed them into the canyon shuddered to a stop.
