Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  “They’re both red, and I think they’re close in shape,” she said dubiously. That was as much as she recalled about the drive she’d sewn into the lining of her backpack. In her desperate rush to get it out of sight before she was caught with it, she’d paid no attention to the brand or any markings.

  Sam nodded an acknowledgment. “It won’t be perfect, won’t be identical to the one the thief took—especially in terms of the contents—but we have to both believe it’s going to fool him long enough.”

  Outside the window, lightning flashed and a boom followed, causing her to jump. Trembling even harder, she shook her head. “This is never going to work. He said they’ll know if the files have been copied or examined. If they can tell all that, they’ll figure out a fake in no time.”

  “He can’t know about the contents at a glance. That’s bullshit. So what we have to do is figure out a way to overpower him while he’s distracted. Or plant a GPS tracker on him somehow—I’ve got one we can use to follow him back to wherever he’s stashed your family, if he has them.”

  “How can we possibly—”

  “Shh.” Sam stepped closer to her, near enough that she felt the heat of him, felt the tidal pull of man to woman. And she wanted so badly to believe him, to buy into his skill and competence, that she didn’t step away from him, didn’t move a single muscle, even when she realized he was bending to seal her mouth with a kiss.

  Her heart bumped at first contact, and her head tilted backward to allow it. There was no hurry in his kiss, no expectation or even possibility. No fireworks went off—not even another stroke of lightning. Yet the warmth and comfort and simple human connection sent fatigue cascading off her, smashed through the glass shell of her grief and isolation.

  She could have stood there for a long time, drinking in the sweetness. Instead, when it felt like enough to sustain her soul awhile longer, she spread her hand against the wall of his chest, applied the gentlest of pressure, and felt disappointment mingling with relief when he stepped back to look her in the eye.

  “You want me to lie to you, to tell you I’m sorry?” he asked her, the gentlest of smiles warming his eyes. “I’m not much of a liar, Ruby. Couldn’t beat a six-year-old at poker.”

  She shook her head to answer, unable to speak for fear of what she might say. She knew she was a wreck now, knew she was in danger of mistaking gratitude for more.

  The safest thing, she decided, might be a change of subject. “There isn’t much time.”

  Nodding, he said, “Of course,” before putting his back to her and beginning to unpack the electronics she had purchased.

  But he didn’t turn quite fast enough to keep her from seeing the regret in his expression. Regret and sharp desire crumbling beneath the force of will.

  C HAPTER S EVENTEEN

  “When you have a child, the world has a hostage.”

  —Ernest Hemingway

  With Ruby in the next room slipping on a clean, dry shirt he had offered, Sam set up the computer at the table and cursed himself for a fool. After realizing he was no better at relationships than any other McCoy, he’d learned to content himself with good-time girls, all of them too short-term to give a damn about his background. All of them too shallow or too selfish to break his heart when they left.

  Though it was hard to think about her now, he knew Elysse had been his first real slipup. She was neither self-centered nor superficial, a woman whose biggest flaw had been a tendency toward self-delusion. She’d longed for a life partner and a family, but she’d been too quick to settle for a man who wanted nothing of the kind.

  As bad a mistake as it had been to get involved with her, it didn’t hold a candle to the sin of playing with the emotions of his foster brother’s widow. Turning his head, he listened for Ruby but heard nothing except the diminished rattle of the rain.

  “You finding everything okay?” he called, the thought running through his mind that he should tell her what Paulie had said regarding the rumor about Misty’s pregnancy. That he had no right to keep such information, no matter how dubious, from Ruby.

  When she didn’t answer, he went to the open doorway and peered into the living room. He smiled, surprised to see her curled up on a red slip-covered sofa, her head tilted against her outstretched arm, her features slack with sleep. Exhausted, he thought, to conk out like that so quickly, but it was probably the best thing for her.

  Before she’d succumbed, Ruby had pulled off her jeans and T-shirt and dressed in a long-sleeved guide shirt that was miles too large for her. Sam rummaged in a dented metal chest and shook out an old but reasonably clean throw he discovered. He hesitated for a moment, admiring her bare legs before guilt cracked its tiny whip.

  As stupid as this attraction was, it wasn’t about Aaron, Sam realized as he covered her and grabbed a fresh shirt for himself. It didn’t have a damned thing to do with jealousy or with paying him back for what had happened with the Monroes when they were both just kids.

  But it wasn’t about Ruby either, couldn’t be, in such a short time. So it had to be the situation, the vortex of the shit storm forcing the two of them to work together. After changing shirts, he went to the kitchen and rebooted the computer—yet another forbidden desire—to activate the newly installed air card.

  He had to keep his mind on his task and off the woman. Anything less would be unfair to Ruby, even cruel, considering her situation. Only a first-class asshole would move in to take advantage, would go back into the other room, slip his hands beneath the blanket, and caress that creamy skin.

  Scowling at the computer’s progress, he forced his mind back on track. A few minutes later, he used cell phone technology and Ruby’s log-in information to connect to what he’d come to think of as Nirvana: the untamed Internet.

  “That’s right,” he said aloud, his blood pumping and fingers tingling as thoughts of Ruby’s body—along with Pacheco’s warnings—faded.

  Sam’s first stop was a free Web-based e-mail account Sybil had promised to set up for short-term contact. Finding no messages, he opened a second window and busied himself seeking out and reading all he could find regarding DeserTek.

  There wasn’t as much as he might have expected. Though the company was mentioned in a few news feeds listing overseas contractors, critics appeared focused on the largest and most infamous of the “wartime profiteers,” several of which were being forced to publicly account for themselves in congressional hearings beginning next week. DeserTek’s public face, its Web site, was decidedly low profile, and it took Sam quite a bit of digging—and a couple of exercises that proved he hadn’t lost his knack for circumventing firewalls—to find the names of the company’s CEO and board of directors.

  From there, he followed strands as faint and fragile as the most delicate spiderwebs, but it was a simple Google search leading to the archived “Celebrations” section of the Houston Chronicle that caught the first fat fly. A wedding announcement showed DeserTek director Alexander Jason Merrill with his new bride, Hollis Marie Leighton. Hollis Leighton, who’d been given into holy matrimony by her father, U.S. Senator Richard Leighton. The lucky groom, Sam decided, looked too damned baby-faced to sit on the board of such a company, a suspicion he confirmed by finding Merrill’s name listed in an alumni association’s rah-rah announcement congratulating a prestigious private college’s recent honors graduates. Very recent, as in last spring….

  Which led Sam to dig deeper on the other members of DeserTek’s board, to see if he could find out into whose bulging pockets each of the puppet’s strings led.

  When Ruby opened her eyes, the air above her shimmered, laced with moving filaments of light, threads of sun that filtered down past floating plants, through algae, past the strands that undulated all around her. Golden strands of hair, her hair, though her hair was neither so long nor so light in color…Was it? And how was it she was looking up through water, through a silvery school of minnows sparkling just beneath the surface, looking toward the silhouette of
lily pads above them?

  Panic slashed through her like a razor, and she sucked in a breath to scream. Except she couldn’t do it—wasn’t breathing, because she’d awakened too late. Because she had already been dead, dead and anchored to the bottom far too long.

  Anchored not far from the body of the tiny blonde, beloved child who had been her charge.

  C HAPTER E IGHTEEN

  Yes, the Dead speak to us. This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.

  —Carl Sandburg,

  from “Yes, the Dead Speak to Us,”

  Smoke and Steel

  With the first scream, Sam lurched to his feet. By the second, he was kneeling beside the old sofa in the living room, shaking Ruby as he called out her name.

  “Nightmare.” His heart thudded as he tried to explain it. “You were having a nightmare. It’s all right now.”

  Ruby stared upward, reached upward, her fathomless blue eyes focused on something he could not see.

  “Can’t—can’t get to the surface. Can’t breathe,” she whispered. “Something’s holding me down.”

  “Wake up, Ruby. It’s a bad dream.” He took his hand off her shoulder. “I’m not holding you down. You can breathe now.”

  She blinked, and her white-rimmed eyes turned to take in the sight of him. With a noisy gasp, she pushed herself into a sitting position, her body shuddering. “Misty. Misty’s down there. At the bottom of the lake. And Zoe…”

  “You can’t know that,” he said quietly and a hell of a lot more calmly than he felt. “It’s a nightmare, that’s all, fears working themselves through your head while you sleep.”

  Ruby jerked, remembering. “They’re dredging the south end of the lake for bodies. I heard the sheriff say so. She thinks Zoe might be…”

  Sam hugged her trembling body, as much to calm himself as to offer comfort. After making a shushing sound against her temple, he whispered, “You can’t give up now.”

  “I—I was Misty, in the dream. And there was something heavy weighing me down.” Rocking herself, she added, “And I—I think she was upset about Zoe….What if Zoe’s down there with her? What if they’re both really—”

  “We can’t afford to think that,” Sam said. “We just have to keep working on the assumption that we’ll get them out alive. I’ve already found something. Something that could help us.”

  “You have?” Ruby shifted, and Sam helped her to her feet.

  As they moved back toward the kitchen, he explained about the senator’s son-in-law, along with a second connection he’d uncovered linking another DeserTek board member, a woman whose leadership experience appeared to be limited to an elementary PTA, with a high-ranking State Department official who happened to be her brother. “If I can come up with anything that financially connects them, we’ll be in business.”

  Ruby rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “I don’t get it. What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I might not be able to load that flash drive you bought with the same files that were stolen, but I’ll come up with enough incriminating information that we could crush the company’s chances to secure that fat new contract if it were made public. Maybe I’ll even get enough to take them down completely. All we need here is a bargaining chip.”

  He didn’t bother to explain what he’d been building as he went along, the components he’d uploaded to a safe location. Time enough to fill her in on that later.

  “Something to trade for Misty and Zoe’s freedom,” Ruby added, nodding, as she stared down at the computer. “I should have been here helping you. Why did you let me sleep?”

  “You were only out for a few—”

  “It’s been hours.” She pointed out the time on the corner of the laptop’s screen. “It’s already past four.”

  Embarrassed at having lost track of the time, he glanced at the now-sunlit window and said, “You really needed the sleep. No one can run on fumes forever. Besides that, I work faster on my own.”

  A chiming sound from the computer alerted him to the presence of an e-mail in his in-box, one bearing the hall-of-fame spam header DEFILE HER EXPECTATIONS WITH UR NU LONG SCHLONG!

  He grinned, recognizing Sybil’s sense of humor in both the header and the sender’s name, Blessing R. Cummings. But the smile died on his lips when he read the contents of her e-mail.

  “What is it?” Ruby asked him.

  “Nothing I wasn’t expecting. Not really. My—uh—my associate couldn’t get a bead on the signal for your sister’s cell phone. Which means the battery’s out of juice—”

  “Or underwater.” Ruby’s eyes looked haunted.

  “Or damaged somehow or maybe even turned off,” he added, “so we’ll start working on plan B now.”

  Sybil, using the information he’d e-mailed her, would start working to track the DeserTek players’ financials. If no more profitable opportunities turned up in the meantime.

  “It’s a bad sign, isn’t it?” Ruby asked him. “That and the fact that Misty hasn’t used her credit cards.”

  “She could be spending cash.” Tactfully, he didn’t mention Ruby’s looted accounts. “Would make sense if she doesn’t want to leave a trail.”

  The silence made even more sense if Misty was a captive. Or a corpse. But Sam saw no need to state the obvious. Ruby understood the reality as well as he did.

  “How about a sandwich?” Rising, he reached for a loaf of bread and took stock of the other items he’d brought. It was a pretty limited assortment, but at least he’d thrown in the jalapeño potato chips that he found so addictive. Given those and a supply of iced-down Dr Pepper, he could function until his arteries begged for mercy.

  “I suppose,” she said as he pulled open the bag. “But let me feed you this time. You keep working.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded her head. “I need—I have to do something. Think I’ll start by putting my pants back on.”

  He wanted to tell her they would still be damp but figured she’d know self-interest when she heard it. So instead he went on explaining, speaking loudly so she’d hear him, his suspicions regarding DeserTek’s real leaders.

  “I knew they were well connected,” she called back, “but I had no idea that the board was nothing but a front. And heck, what did I care, as long as they paid me a great salary to drive their buses?”

  He heard the irony in her voice, the bitterness and self-recrimination.

  “We can keep a copy,” he said. “Send it to somebody with that congressional committee. Or put the press on their scent with an e-mail.”

  Reemerging, she shook her head. “If I can pull Zoe and my sister out of this alive, I’m willing to let the rest go. As long as they’ll leave us in peace, I have to, no matter what this has cost me.”

  “How about what it cost that woman who was killed after she warned you about complaining, and all those other workers? How about what it cost Elysse Steele?”

  Ruby winced, flushing deeply. “I’ll never forgive myself for my part in this—don’t you understand, my heart is broken. Elysse—I’ve known Elysse for half my life, Sam. But if I’m allowed a miracle, if I ever see Misty and Zoe again, how can I risk their lives? Especially if it turns out it was really my involvement in this whole scheme that put them in danger in the first place. These people, these powerful big shots pulling down hundreds of millions—they aren’t about to let some little cog in their machine destroy them.”

  “That’s what they want all us ‘little cogs’ to think. And if you can’t stand against systematic murder, then what can you stand against?”

  “I stand for my child, Sam, and the sister I practically raised. If I’d remembered them and only them, they wouldn’t be in danger, so you can stow the lecture. I feel plenty bad enough already.”

  “All right, Ruby,” he said carefully. Of course, she’d put her family before the need for vengeance. Maybe justice was a luxury, a nebulous concern only applicable to those who could afford it. Or those, like
him, with no family to put first, and only a hollow shell of a real life to return to.

  A chiming interrupted. “Better check out this new message.”

  “Sure. Go for it.” Ruby’s voice was crisp, her agitation obvious as she turned toward their food supplies.

  Not knowing what to say, Sam turned back to the message. This time, the sender’s name was a random string of digits, and the header contained only the words I’M OUT.

  “What the hell?” he said. Clicking to open it, he quickly read the contents.

  DT’s contracted Hobson Best to troubleshoot a *personnel issue.* I’ve seen Best’s work, seen the way he *solves* (!!!) people’s problems, and I won’t cross him, won’t chance hitting this bastard’s radar screen. You got good sense, you’ll get clear of this mess in any way you can. Make a run for it if you have to. Ditch the woman and go off-grid. Now, before it’s too late.

  Just disappear and I’ll contact you later—could use a sharp mind & skill set like yours. Could make it worth your while.

  “DT,” Sam growled through clenched teeth, hating DeserTek more with each passing minute. How arrogant, how dangerously amok this corporation had run, to hire a pro killer to obliterate the evidence against them.

  “Hobson Best,” said Ruby, who’d come to lean over his shoulder. “My God, it sounds so…I don’t know, like a small-town preacher, or the local bakery on Main Street. And here it turns out it’s one of the devil’s other names.”

  Sam looked up to see the stark horror in her eyes, even more troubling than the chill in her voice. “Best won’t be his real name, and he isn’t supernatural. He’s just a hired gun.”

  “Your friend or whatever he is doesn’t think so. Seems pretty spooked to me.”

  Sam didn’t correct Ruby’s assumption as to Sybil’s gender. It was a moot point anyhow, since the hacker had made it clear that she had no intention involving herself in anything to do with Hobson Best. Shrugging, he said, “Good help’s hard to find. Guess this is gonna have to be a do-it-yourself project.”