Ready to Die

by Lisa Jackson

  Cade landed on his butt, his fists curling, but instead of throwing himself to his feet to tear into Bart, he sat for a second on the drying grass, and again he looked at his new sister-in-law. “See what I mean about luck,” he said, standing and dusting his hands as Zed and Dan restrained a furious Bart. “You, darlin’, are going to need it. A lot of it.”

  Now, as she lay on her bed, Hattie scowled up at the ceiling. Cade had been right, unfortunately. Bart’s mood swings had been wide, his anger ignited by a trigger switch, his deep soul-searching depression sometimes taking him near despair, his happiness, when he found it, euphoric. There was just no leveling him out, and therein lay the problem, one she hadn’t seen before she was married. Had she suspected? Of course. But she’d turned a blind eye to her suspicions and had satisfied herself with being married.

  “Fool,” she whispered to the dark room.

  She thought again of her husband’s death; how with his depression, suicide was definitely possible, but still she refused to believe Bart would take his own life. In anger, he’d flash to fury, but he’d rarely been violent, except to his brothers, never to her. And when he was feeling down, he became morose, but not, she believed, to the point of actually carrying out a suicide plan, not taking his life, and without saying good-bye or leaving an explanation for his girls. No way could she believe that!

  Even though Bart had died nearly six years earlier, wasn’t it possible that someone, the same someone who tried to kill Dan, had murdered her husband? Somehow forced him up the ladder before kicking it from his legs? She knew others were sure she was grasping at straws, but she wouldn’t give up, especially now that Dan had been attacked. He’d been decent to her after the divorce, and while Zed and Cade seemed to think that she’d spent the last six years trying to squeeze the last blood from a corpse by insisting Bart’s death wasn’t suicide, Dan had looked into his brother’s death. Not only had he comforted Hattie and made some inquiries, he’d also pulled the medical examiner aside for a private chat. In the end, however, he couldn’t come up with any proof that Bart hadn’t hung himself, and there just hadn’t been enough evidence in the ensuing years to reopen the case. Bart had been buried in the family plot, labeled forever as a victim of his own hand.

  Despite what others might think, her battle wasn’t just for the insurance benefit that had never been paid because of the medical examiner’s ruling, nor was it to preserve his name. Certainly she didn’t want her children believing their father had taken his own life, but the real reason behind her determination was justice. She hated to think that someone had tricked or coerced Bart onto that ladder and then taken his life, just as her blood boiled to think that some sicko had attempted to kill Dan.

  No. It just wasn’t right, and damn it, she wasn’t going to back down, not until she was satisfied that the truth had come out and Dan’s attacker brought to justice.

  Or dead. That would be okay too. In fact, the bastard’s death would be a whole lot better.

  He couldn’t believe he’d missed. Grayson was alive!

  He drove through the streets of Grizzly Falls undetected, furious enough to consider going to the hospital in Missoula and finishing the son of a bitch off once and for all.

  All day he’d waited to hear that Grayson had gone to meet his maker, but through the miracle of modern medicine and the damned luck of that stupid detective, the bastard had survived.

  Be patient. What’re the chances that he’ll pull through? You know you hit him in the chest and the head. It will just take a little more time.

  His gloved fingers tightened over the wheel as he slowed for a stoplight on the road that cut through the lower part of the town. Running parallel to the river, this street was as old as the town itself. Shops and restaurants, even the old brick courthouse with its imposing forty-foot Christmas tree, flanked the street.

  Waiting at the light, he tapped his fingers on the wheel, fighting the urge to try to attack Grayson again, knowing it was too big a risk. The chances were too small that he could pull it off. Still, his eyes narrowed through the windshield as he watched a large group of pedestrians, all bundled in ski jackets and fleece, strolling across the street in front of him. He wondered vaguely why they were out, decided it wasn’t his business, concentrated instead on how he could get past the security guarding Grayson.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Time was running out!

  Grayson needed to die so that he could continue with the next step.

  Honk!!!

  A horn blared and he glanced at the light, now glowing a bright green. He stepped on the gas quickly. His concentration was shot. That was the problem, he needed rest. Then, once he’d refueled, he would tackle the Grayson problem. The sheriff wasn’t getting out of this alive.

  Chapter 10

  “You’re a dead woman, Pescoli,” the voice threatened, echoing as if it were carried down a long, snaking tunnel.

  Her heart slammed in her chest. Where was she? In the forest? There were trees everywhere, branches shivering and chattering in the wind, and the voice . . . it seemed disembodied.

  Where are you, you bastard?

  Freezing cold, Pescoli turned slowly, her eyes wide as she searched the wooded terrain where trees rose to impossible heights, their skeletal branches covered in ice, their rough-barked trunks thick enough to hide a man. Or an army.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, crouching, keeping low as she reached for her sidearm. Her fingers came up empty.

  Damn!

  Nothing in her shoulder harness!

  “Count the seconds,” the voice ordered.

  She whipped around. Where the hell was the bastard? Her gaze scraped every square inch of the white landscape, blinding to the point that she had to squint. Still, she saw nothing. Her heart was trip-hammering, every muscle tense. Think, Pescoli, think. You’ve been in tighter spots than this. Keep him talking. Zero in on him. You don’t have your weapon, but you can get the upper hand. You’re a trained officer, for God’s sake.

  Adrenaline pumping through her bloodstream, she yelled. “What do you want?”

  “Five!” he called, his voice firm and harsh, seeming to come from all directions at once. Was he in front of her, hiding behind the heavy bole of the hemlock? Or was he coming up from behind?

  Whirling quickly, she hoped to surprise him, but saw only more dense forest.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. Come on, you coward, show yourself!

  She was breathing rapidly, her breath fogging the air as she ducked low, moving quickly under the low-hanging branch of a pine tree.

  “Four!”

  “Just leave me alone!” She had to get the drop on him. Somehow. Without her weapon. Using only her wits and bare hands.

  “Three!”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw movement. Spinning quickly toward the noise, she felt a pine needle scrape across her eye, temporarily blinding her. Where the hell was he?

  “Two.” The voice was almost familiar. The sheriff’s . . . ?

  “Grayson?” she called before remembering that he was hurt, lying in the hospital . . .

  She blinked, her vision blurry, her ears straining. Over the hollow rush of the wind, there was another sound, the familiar tinkle of laughter.

  Out here? In the middle of no-damned-where?

  And children’s voices. Giggles. Shouts.

  No! There couldn’t be kids out here in the middle of nowhere with a maniac on the loose!

  As her vision cleared, she saw him, a tall figure backlit by a street lamp in the middle of the forest. His face was obscured from the enormous tree under which he stood, but she could tell he was athletic. And dressed in white—almost like a space suit.

  Worse yet, just creeping into her line of vision, not ten yards from the freak, was a small child, a girl with dark curls and a pink jacket. Holding a stuffed rabbit upside down with one hand, she allowed the bunny’s fuzzy ears to drag on the ground and leave a trail in the snow.

/>   “No!” Pescoli screamed. The girl couldn’t be more than three!

  Where was the kid’s mother?

  Pescoli’s voice seemed to alert him and he turned, revealing the rifle strapped to his back. As she watched in horror, he deftly clicked the weapon from its case and lifted it to his shoulder, sighting on the child.

  “Noooo!” Pescoli screamed.

  From the surrounding trees, a dog began to growl and bark.

  The child’s stuffed rabbit suddenly came alive, squealing and baring its teeth, a red stain appearing in the trench in the snow, blood flowing like a river from its ears. Twisting, it bit the girl on her wrist.

  Heart thundering in her ears, Pescoli yelled at the kid. “Run!”

  He swung the barrel around, sighting directly at Pescoli. Who was he and why was he doing this?

  “One!” He pulled the trigger.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Her eyes flew open.

  She sat bolt upright in the darkness. Took in long, deep breaths.

  “What the hell?” she whispered, shaking, her teeth chattering, starting to realize that it had all been a dream. Another horrid nightmare.

  The door to her room opened.

  A man’s silhouette filled her doorway.

  Tall. Backlit. Like the monster in her dream.

  Scooting back on the bedclothes, she automatically swung her arm toward the nightstand for her service weapon just as she woke up fully.

  “Mom?”

  “For the love of God, Jeremy, you scared the living crap out of me!”

  “You were screaming.”

  Holding up a hand, she waved him off. Her mind was starting to clear. It always took a second or so. Even reaching for her gun was a mistake; she’d kept her weapons locked away ever since Jeremy had arrived home from the hospital twenty years earlier. Letting out a long, slow breath, she tried to clear her mind. “Bad dream.”

  “Mom, this is, like, the fifth one in a month.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Nodding, feeling foolish, she wondered what the hell was wrong with her. Lately, she’d been having nightmares—bizarre, horrid dreams where she awoke with her heart thundering. In some cases, segments of the dreams were from old cases she’d worked. Other times, she was a young woman, with little kids. In some cases, Joe was dying in her arms, blood pouring from a wound she couldn’t locate, blood she couldn’t staunch.

  She wondered if she should see a shrink but quickly decided against it. With Santana’s ultimatum looming, and after witnessing the attack on Grayson, she was just stressed.

  Lord knew she’d seen enough horror in her job to create the sick images that crawled through her brain at night. Coupled with what she’d seen, she’d physically and mentally experienced her own terror at the hands of a madman.

  If she had bad dreams, she’d earned every last one of them. Drawing her legs up around her, she wrapped her arms around her knees. She was still cold, shivering inside; she realized she’d kicked her covers off sometime during the restless night.

  “You’re okay?” Jeremy asked from the doorway.

  “Yeah.” Pushing her hair from her eyes, she glanced at the clock: 3:37. Inwardly, she groaned when she thought of how soon she’d have to get up. Clicking on the bedside light, as her eyes grew accustomed to the illumination, she saw that her son’s hair was mussed, his clothes disheveled. “I, um, I don’t suppose I want to know where you’ve been.”

  “Don’t think so. No.”

  She wanted to argue, but it was too late, and it would only be one more heated, angry discussion that went nowhere.

  No doubt he’d been with Heidi until all hours of the morning. He knew where she stood about sex, condoms, his future, Heidi’s . . . bringing it up now would only exacerbate an already prickly situation.

  “Nothing good happens after midnight,” she reminded him.

  “You’re wrong, Mom, and you know it.”

  “Okay, okay.” Who was she to argue the point when she and Santana had made love into the wee hours of the morning so recently? “Not a discussion for the middle of the night.”

  “You’re right.” Hand on the doorknob, he started to turn away.

  “Jer?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, Mom. Good night.” He closed the door softly and she knew he was lying. As she slapped off the light and the darkness crept in, she knew it wasn’t a good night, not a good night at all.

  As Christmas celebrations went, this had been the worst ever, Pescoli thought, hanging up her coat on the hook near the door of her office. It didn’t even seem like the holiday. The last twenty-four hours since the attack on Grayson had been a disaster that wouldn’t end. Last night, she’d hung out with her kids for a while, talked to Santana on the phone for nearly an hour, then flopped onto her bed long after midnight, though she hadn’t slept much, the nightmare destroying whatever chance of getting the shut-eye she needed. She’d barely caught two hours of sleep, and this morning her eyes felt gritty and red, as if she were hungover. So far, there didn’t seem to be enough Visine on the planet to help.

  She made her way into the near-empty lunch area where she poured herself a cup of coffee, emptying the glass carafe in the process as she watched the dregs slide into her mug. Sometimes, when she grabbed the last cup in the pot, she’d take the time to brew more. Not today. Not when Dan Grayson was lying near death in a Missoula hospital.

  Sipping from her mug, hoping the coffee had enough caffeine in it to give her system the jump start it needed, she walked down the short hallway, nodding at a couple of deputies sauntering in the opposite direction, their conversation hushed.

  The entire building seemed to have turned down the volume a bit—no loud jokes, cackling laughter, or rattle of chains as a suspect, handcuffed and shackled, was herded through the department. Cell phones still rang, but they seemed quieter, and the conversation, if there was any, was muted.

  Had it been just a little over a day since she’d driven around the bend in Grayson’s lane and seen him hit? God, it seemed like a lifetime as she passed Grayson’s darkened office and noticed Sturgis’s empty dog bed in the corner. Her heart twisted and her jaw tightened as she remembered the old dog taking off like a black bullet, streaking after the assassin. “Shit,” she said and wished to hell she had a cigarette.

  “Hey!” Alvarez called from inside her office and Pescoli paused at the doorway. “Brewster’s on the warpath.”

  “When isn’t he?” Whether he was the acting sheriff or not, Cort Brewster was a prick, at least in Pescoli’s biased opinion. “And by the way, that’s not PC.”

  “Nothing is anymore.”

  “You got that right. So what’s up?”

  “Have you heard that Kathryn Samuels-Piquard is missing?”

  “The judge?” She stepped inside the office where she noticed for the first time that the image on Alvarez’s monitor was of Judge Piquard.

  “I heard it last night at the hospital. Manny Douglas was more than pleased to drop that particular bomb, and I double-checked this morning, with Taj in Missing Persons. Turns out it’s true. Piquard’s son called it in and claimed the judge was last seen a few days ago, before she took her usual holiday up at her cabin. She goes there every year, the week before Christmas, stays through Christmas Eve, and then always returns Christmas afternoon.”

  “But this time she didn’t show up?”

  “That’s right. And the family can’t get her to answer her cell, which they swear is always on. Brewster’s already sent deputies to the cabin, which is just this side of the county line, way up in the hills.”

  “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours.”

  “Doesn’t matter, after the attack on Grayson, the family got worried and called Brewster, as he’s a family friend.”

  “They think the two incidents are related?” Pescoli asked, surprised.

  “I don’t know what they think, but they’re nervous as hell
and Brewster is concerned.”

  “Let’s just hope she just forgot and let her cell phone battery run down.”

  “Yeah,” Alvarez said, though she sounded as unconvinced as Pescoli felt. “Just a sec”—she glanced down at her phone, which was trying to vibrate across her desk. “O’Keefe’s texting again.” A bit of a smile brushed her lips. “What a way to spend the holidays—electronically.”

  “When are you going to see him?”

  “Tomorrow night. Gabe too.” She smiled at the mention of her son. “Better late than never, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Detective?” Cort Brewster stuck his head into Alvarez’s office, but his gaze was fastened on Pescoli. “I’d like to talk to you. In my office.”

  Pescoli couldn’t help but bristle. She’d never liked Brewster and the feeling was mutual. While she considered him an egocentric, hypocritical prick, he thought she was a loose cannon who was a failure as a mother. She thought he hid behind all his churchgoing, long-lasting marriage bullshit, and he thought she was a woman who couldn’t hold on to a man or keep a marriage together.

  Now, as she walked down the hallway to his office, she decided maybe they were both a little right about each other. Of course, they were at odds because their children had gotten into serious trouble together in the past, and he was scared to death Jeremy would get his precious little daughter Heidi pregnant. Pescoli could have issued him a news bulletin: She was even more frightened of Cort’s princess getting knocked up than Brewster was.

  She snorted. They each blamed the other one’s child. Brewster made no bones about the fact that he considered Jeremy a do-nothing, dope-smoking loser, and Pescoli considered Heidi as conniving and wily as a con woman twice her age. The one thing she and Brewster agreed upon was that the kids weren’t good for each other and should break up, which they did, on a regular basis, only to come back to each other over and over again.

  “Have a seat,” Brewster suggested, pointing to one of the visitor’s chairs, then rounding his desk and settling into the executive chair on the other side. He was flanked by bookcases where he displayed awards for service and pictures of his family, including his wife, Bess, to whom he had been married for over a quarter of a century, and their four blond, stepping-stone daughters, the youngest of which was Heidi, who, Pescoli had to admit grudgingly, was drop-dead gorgeous with her wide smile, dynamite figure, and air of innocence. Only her eyes, even in Brewster’s photograph, gave away the essence of her true personality. There was a smoldering naughtiness in them, as if she held some great feminine secret she would just love to share.