The Lonesome Lawmen Trilogy

by Pauline Baird Jones

  While she wondered, Dark Lord came in. No wings beat the fetid air to herald the arrival of Death’s messenger. There was just the muted rasp of breath and a slight groan as the wooden floor gave under his weight. She knew it was him, even before she separated his dark silhouette from the framed opening of the door.

  Hayes paused just inside the door, listening to her faint, panicked breaths coming from deep in the room. Taking in a scent that might have been coconut drifting on the stale air. It mingled with the intoxicating scent of her fear. His blood sang with eagerness. Soon, very soon her blood would spill across his hands, then evaporate in healing fire. Every fiber of his being strained towards her, his muscles bunched to spring at the first hint of a scream.

  The silence drew out. He smiled his pleasure. She was strong, but he already knew that. That’s what made her blood so sweet, so necessary, to his survival. It was why his pain wanted her. He took another careful step forward, and heard her inhale.

  “I have a gun.”

  Her voice came to him on a slender thread of terror. He inhaled it greedily. “I don’t believe you.”

  He fingered the shaft of his knife, felt the warm, wet slick of recent blood-letting harden his need for more, for hers. He had entered three rooms before hers, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Only her blood would take away his pain. Only her blood would give him Willow. Another step toward her and he heard the double snap of a bullet being loaded into the chamber.

  “Okay. I believe you.” He chuckled as delight speared deep in his groin, loosing a shaft of heated pleasure. Foreplay for the climax of fire. “Do you dread death, sweet lady? Do you fear that last, insensible sleep?” His body had no weight, no substance. Let her send her bullets his way. How could they hurt him anymore than he already hurt? They might enter, but they couldn’t stop him. “You shouldn’t. Dying is your destiny. Run to your new lover’s bed. He’s waiting…”

  “No!” The first cry was sharp and high. A short silence filled only with the intermingling of their panting breaths. “I’ll shoot. I will.”

  He felt her hesitation, felt it feed his lust. She moaned and the heat in him quivered in pleasure. Now. He must have her right now. He shifted, his body light like a dancer’s, homing in on the sound and feel of her terror like a guided missile. “Go ahead. Pull the trigger. You can’t touch me, can’t escape Death when it wants you.”

  In the darkness, he heard a small, guttural sound, the next to last sound she would make in this world. He smiled as pain prepared to retreat.

  “You for the fire,” he gasped, his sweat-slicked body tensing to spring. He added as his personal vow, “and Willow for me.”

  “How did you know I’m Willow?”

  Her words cut through his intent, reverberating like the thunder on his mountain. He cried out, staggering from the new pain exploding inside his head as an alarm shattered the night with a raucous scream.

  How did you know I’m Willow?

  No, it wasn’t possible…

  His cry fell on Dani like the howl of a wild beast in pain. It drowned out the harsh one forced out Dani’s throat as she cowered at his feet. Outside the first pale strand of morning sun put a halo around the steel in his bloody hand. He cried out again, a savage sound that told her this was the end. She had lost the toss. Richard and his dark killer had won. Death had arrived. She looked into its heart for her baby…

  She stared in shock when he pivoted, turning his spring toward her into a leap away. His shadow grew large against a wall touched by the burgeoning dawn, then vanished like an image in her nightmare. Only this wasn’t a dream, was it? How could it be when the shriek of her alarm was all around her?

  I’m right down the hall.

  Cloris. Must get to Cloris…

  Driven by the pounding alarm, Dani staggered into the black hall, still tainted with the passage of evil and found her door. She lifted her hand to pound it, but at the first touch it swung open. Pale rays from the window lit the bed, lit the still figure on it. Light fell without mercy on the place where a neck had been. Gleamed dully in the pool of red soaking into white sheets.

  Dani didn’t decide to run, had no sense of movement or passage from one place to another. One moment she stared at Cloris, the next she was in the alley with the chill morning air hitting her in the face.

  In either direction was rank road, the stink of garbage joining the scent of blood in her nostrils. In the distance the wail of police sirens joined with the alarm in her room. They would help her. She leaned against a garbage bin, trying to catch her breath.

  How did he know about Willow?

  The question wouldn’t go away. It demanded an answer. Something brushed against her bare neck. She reached up to brush it away, touched something cool and smooth that felt like…

  No, she didn’t want to know. Too late. Her head had already turned. Her eyes saw the hand hanging down from the garbage bin. The tattoo was clearly visible, despite dried blood caking on flaccid skin.

  A harsh scream tried to force its way out her fear dried throat. Blocked, it turned to flight. Out of her chaos one thought emerged with macabre clarity: how awful that meatloaf had been his last supper.

  * * * *

  “What a screw up.” Matt stood in the center of the dreary room Dani had almost died in, holding onto rage with a weary grip. He wanted, needed to say worse, to swear until the frustration gnawing away at his gut was gone. They had come so close. He could still feel her panic and the chill of Hayes’ evil quivering in the air. All around him was the smell of death that hadn’t entirely missed its mark.

  “She didn’t stop to pack this time,” Alice said, holding up a thumb drive on a key ring she had found in Dani’s abandoned backpack still hanging from a crooked chair. Her hand shook and she dropped it, then shoved her fisted hands into the pockets of her suit jacket. “Left her book this time.”

  “Only smart thing she’s done,” Matt growled, turning as Riggs displaced the cop in the doorway. “What you got?”

  “One dead outside, found him in the trash bin—probably a snitch—and three dead inside. All done the same way,” he said, pulling his hand across his throat in a graphic demonstration. “Looks like Hayes worked his way down the hall until he got here.”

  “Where he tripped over Dani’s new toy.” Alice held up the motion detector. “Must a been a shock.”

  And Dani? Matt wondered. She had been seen leaving the scene alone and alive, but no one knew if it was before or after Hayes arrival. Where was she? Surely she knew now that she couldn’t hide from Hayes? That the only way to end his threat to her was to help them catch him.

  He tried to see the scene through the detached eyes of an investigator, uncolored by the painful mix of feelings in his gut. It wasn’t easy. Maybe because he had looked in her eyes, breathed her woman’s scent. No matter how much he told himself this was just another op, he knew it wasn’t. He wasn’t the same. Never would be again. Why had she chosen to come here and risk other lives besides her own? There was no peace in the knowing she had brought this on herself. Only a bitter regret that she appeared willing to trust everyone but him.

  Riggs turned from conferencing with the cop. “Look, Matt.” He held up a pistol in an evidence bag. “This looks like service issue. They never found Oliver’s weapon at the last SOC, did they?”

  “No—” If she had had a gun, why hadn’t she used it?

  Riggs answered his unspoken question. “She never even took the safety off.”

  Henry edged around Riggs.

  “Any sign of them?”

  He shook his head. “I got people combing the area, but so far we’ve found a big, fat nothing.”

  “Keep looking,” Matt ordered. “She can’t have gotten far.”

  * * * *

  Like a gothic heroine, Dani ran through mean streets and meaner alleys until adrenaline and stamina deserted her. She stumbled, then sagged against a graffiti marked wall, her eyes closed, waiting for her breathin
g to even out, her thoughts spinning around the million dollar question.

  How did Dark Lord know about Willow?

  Even as her mind asked the question, she wanted to avoid the answer.

  Betrayal.

  What other explanation was there? How else could Dark Lord know she was Willow? The alarm had startled him, driven him away this time, but it wasn’t over. Wouldn’t be until she died or testified Friday morning against Richard Hastings.

  Richard. Did he know what he had unleashed in his drive to save his worthless hide? Did he care? The Richard she’d loved as a brother would have cared. Did that Richard exist? Nothing she thought she knew about Richard added up since the moment six months ago when she saw him kill.

  She had felt a lot of things since then. Shock. Dismay. Fear. Exhaustion. Sorrow. Pain. Determination.

  With a distant surprise, she realized she wasn’t feeling any of those things right now. She had been there and done all that. What she felt was…

  Pissed. Royally, completely, totally pissed off.

  It swelled up from her bend-not-break core in a wave that curled her hands into fists and filled her heart with iron. She wished she had blown the bastard away. Dark Lord wasn’t mankind. He was an aberrant animal. So was Richard. And whoever else had chosen money over the lives of the innocent. The bad guys weren’t going to win this one. She refused to die until she had walked into that courtroom and told her story. Until the whole world knew what kind of person Richard was. Knew the kind of scum he had aligned himself with.

  And Matt Kirby? She didn’t want to think about him. The feelings he had stirred up just clouded the issue. If only he wasn’t so hard to push away. She had seen a lot of things in Matt Kirby’s face yesterday. Strength. Determination. Even ruthlessness. She hadn’t seen evil. Had felt no compromise mixed into the power his strong body gave off, seen no quarter in the stubbornly carved out jaw. Her heart told her he hadn’t betrayed her.

  What did her heart know? It had trusted Richard and Steven. Both had let her down. When had she decided she was so wise? When had she decided she could discern someone else’s heart and mind? What did she know about hearts or minds? Nothing. Less than nothing about her federal hunter. Just because her hormones wanted him to be a good guy didn’t make him one. There was too much at stake to trust her life to a hormonal response and a fine tush.

  She looked at her watch. According to the papers, the jury selection was done. The first round of witnesses would begin giving testimony in the morning. Her turn would come after police and forensics. If everything went like it was supposed to, that gave her—it was surprisingly easy to do the math when her brain was churning with pissed—something like seventy-two hours until she was due in court. If events didn’t go like they were supposed to? Well, she would deal with that when it happened. She would deal with all of it without dying trying. She would not give Richard the satisfaction.

  The first step was to figure out where she was. She looked around, suddenly uneasy. The alley was shadowy, the sun not yet high enough to top the buildings on either side of her. The still air was weighted with the stink of garbage, car exhaust and hopelessness. A car out in the street back-fired and she jumped. She’d better get her tush in gear before someone unfriendly from either side of the equation found her. A man thrust open a door and dumped some trash into a bin. His curious glance was an added spur. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her shorts, one hand closing around the pepper spray can she had forgotten was there. She lifted her chin and started away from him towards the light, the street, and the people she could see passing by.

  Pepper spray wasn’t a gun, but it was something.

  There was no warning. One moment she was walking forward. The next an arm had hooked around her waist, a knife was pressed against her throat and no time to resist being dragged into a darkened doorway.

  “Don’t make a sound or I’ll kill you right now.” Dark Lord’s voice rasped in her ear, edged with a rage more terrifying than the knife nicking the skin over the frantic pulse at the base of her neck.

  For a moment terror crawled back up out of her gut. Then rage did a comeback. Who was he to be angry? She had had it with this crap. His rage fueled hers, sharpened her thinking to a knife-edged precision. She didn’t flinch from the bite of steel against her skin, didn’t shiver when a warm trail started down her neck. Instead she eased the pepper spray out of her pocket and felt for the trigger.

  “Tell me about Willow.”

  Willow. Why didn’t he just wave a red cape at an enraged bull? This was not some all powerful killer. This was a creep. A scummy, slimy life-taker. She tensed and the knife pressed close again.

  “Tell me about Willow!”

  “Not until you tell me how you knew I was Willow.”

  His body jerked like she had shot him and the knife bit through another layer of skin. Her anger rose to challenge his. She lifted the spray and depressed the trigger. His howl of pain mingled with her own cry as pepper stung into the slice on her neck. Got her eyes in the process. His hold loosened. She used her elbow in his gut to break it. Heard his knife clatter against the pavement. She whirled. Her fist shot out. Caught him imperfectly on the jaw. It hurt. His head snapped back. He crashed into a row of garbage cans.

  Through a blur of tears she glared down into his shocked, streaming face. “Tell Richard I’ll see his ass in court.”

  She turned and walked away.

  * * * *

  “You think you saw this woman?” Alice crouched beside the drunk, holding the photo of Dani close to his bloodshot eyes.

  Matt closed his senses to the rotting garbage the man sat in, to the filth that coated his body. All that mattered was what he knew.

  “Yeah, she was running. Woke me up.”

  Matt didn’t blame him for sounding aggrieved. Waking up couldn’t be pleasant when your home was an alley behind a trash bin. “How long ago?”

  “Mebbe an hour. Mebbe longer.”

  Alice looked at Matt. “It was probably less than that. Hasn’t been an hour since we got here and we were practically on her heels.”

  “How long she stay in the alley?” Matt asked.

  “She start walking, then someone grab her.”

  “What?”

  “I hear him yell, she clips him a good one, then books out of here, rubbing her eyes like crazy. He gets up, heads other way, rubbing his eyes, too, and laughing like a crazy man.”

  Matt looked at Alice, felt an insane urge to laugh himself. “Pepper spray?”

  She shrugged. “She got some at the same place she got the motion detector.”

  “Where’d she go? Which direction?” Matt asked.

  “To the mission.” He pointed toward the street and Matt could see the sign. “She stop and see the sign, then she walk that way, probably because of the blood.”

  “Blood?” That took away all desire to grin.

  “She was bleeding and they got someone what does first aid there.”

  Bleeding. She was bleeding. He felt almost light-headed for a minute. Hayes had almost finished her off. His head cleared. She was alive. That’s what mattered. She had punched Hayes. Knocked him down. The romance writer had gone three rounds with one of the mob’s most notorious hit men and walked away. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to find her and…

  The drunk grabbed Matt’s leg as he turned to leave. “Something for my trouble?”

  Matt hesitated, he would probably just drink it up, but he had earned his bender, almost wished he could share it with him. He tossed the man a crumpled bill, then turned to follow Alice.

  “You have to admire her ingenuity,” Alice said.

  “Yeah.” He felt like he was climbing at fourteen thousand feet. His breath was ragged and shallow with shock and hope. Inside the mission the slope got steeper, the air thinner as hope gave way for reality. “She’s gone?”

  The thin, serious mission director pushed back a coarse mop of hair. “I’m afraid so. She was wired when
she came in. We thought she’d got some bad crack or something. Bleeding from a cut on her neck. Claimed a trick tried to cut her and she sprayed him with pepper gas. Some of it got her. We rinsed her neck off, and her eyes, then put some stuff on her cut. Must have hurt. She calmed down after a bit, then Carol gave her—”

  “Let me guess. A Diet Dr. Pepper,” Matt said.

  “Didn’t have any. She settled for water.” He grinned, tiredly. “And some aspirin. She wouldn’t take anything stronger. We tried to get her to let us call the police, a doctor, but…” he shrugged, “if she was turning tricks, cops would arrest her, too, so we didn’t push it. She sure looked like she’d been hooking.”

  She was still wearing leather. He wasn’t ready for the surge of lust at the memory of how she looked wearing leather. The smooth soft skin, the curve of body and mouth—his went dry thinking about her. He rubbed his face, cursing silently. He wasn’t some kid. He was a man, a pro. And she was getting further away. He fought his way to a kind of calm, held onto it with a thin rope as he asked through gritted teeth, “Where’d she go?”

  “She found out one of our workers was heading home and she asked if she could hitch a ride downtown. Said she had friends who would help her.”

  “How long ago did she leave?” Alice asked.

  “Maybe fifteen minutes? Not much longer than that.”

  Matt felt an unaccountable urge to howl, but he was afraid she might hear him.

  * * * *

  Dani didn’t care when the clerk looked at her like something that had crawled out from under a rock. She almost had. Let her hold her nose while she looked down it, as long as she took Dani’s money when the time came. The dress Dani chose was an in-your-face scarlet red that hugged the pared down lines of her body with a sleek and sexy elegance. It seemed appropriate to wear red, since she was seeing red. As an added bonus, she didn’t have to change her nail color to match it. The hat she put on her head was so smart it had its own degree. Her high heels weren’t made to run in.