by J. A. Jance
“I had to wait long enough for the meat loaf to cool,” she explained, handing him a plate with a sandwich already on it. “I made five—one for now, one for dinner, one for a midnight snack, one for breakfast, and one for me. They’re too good to pass up, if I do say so myself.”
Garth took a first bite of his and groaned with pleasure. “Nobody makes better meat loaf,” he told her.
“Maybe so,” she told him, “but the next time we have meat loaf, you’ll be the one making it. I won’t last forever. You’ll need to know how to manage on your own. Besides,” she added, “do you know where I got this recipe?”
“No idea,” Garth answered, mumbling because his mouth was full.
“Handed down from Great-Grandma Raymond, who taught my Jebbie how to make it when he was just a kid. He brought it to a youth-group potluck at church. As soon as I took that first bite, I was hooked, and the rest is history.”
“So you’re saying I need to know how to make a decent meat loaf in order to find a girl?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Grandma Juanita said. “You need to find someone to marry before you get too old and set in your ways.”
“Grandma,” he objected, “give me a break. I’m only twenty-three.”
“That’s two years older than Jebbie and I were when we tied the knot.”
More than three years had passed now since they’d lost Grandpa Jeb. Garth knew that his grandmother still grieved for her lost husband, but when she spoke of him now, with humor and affection, it was clear her loss was no longer the aching black hole it had been to begin with. Garth was quite sure that the fact she still felt responsible for him was part of what made her keep on keeping on. Without her grandson’s need for her, she might simply have given up.
When he finished the midnight sandwich, which had somehow turned into an early-morning sandwich, he opened the last of the three thermoses of coffee that Grandma had sent along. He wasn’t sure why Grandma Juanita always sent three, but he wasn’t going to argue with her about it. He poured the steamy liquid into the plastic lid that served as a cup and took a tentative sip.
Chief Deputy Hadlock had told him the previous afternoon that one more day of searching the site would probably be the end of it. That was disappointing. He’d been hoping for several more overtime shifts that would enable him to make a couple of extra payments on his student loans.
Garth moved the seat back to an upright position. His feet were warm again, and it was time to take another turn around the crime scene, just to be sure no one was on the prowl. The previous afternoon when he’d shown up for duty, there’d been a crowd of reporters gathered on the perimeter. Hadlock was worried that once he was gone for the day, some of them might return. That hadn’t happened, at least not as far as Garth could tell. Other than a couple of Border Patrol guys stopping off to say hello, he’d been completely alone all night long.
Tonight, this far from civilization and beyond the reach of any streetlights, the glowing stars overhead had been spectacular. Garth had enjoyed the solitude and the wonder of it. With or without Great-Grandma Raymond’s meat loaf, he couldn’t imagine ever finding someone who would love the Arizona desert as much as he did. It just didn’t seem as though meeting the right girl was in the cards. Garth suspected that he’d end up being a lot like Tom Hadlock someday—a confirmed old bachelor with no real way to explain why things had turned out that way.
After first making sure the hand warmers were still in the pockets of his jacket, he turned off the engine and let himself out of the cab. He was well away from the vehicle when he became aware of the intermittent flashes of light that told him a vehicle was approaching, speeding toward him on Skeleton Canyon Road. What he realized about that vehicle, long before he heard it, was that it was coming far too fast. There was a sharp turn just ahead where the road veered south and ran alongside a steep ravine. If whoever was driving didn’t slow the hell down, they weren’t going to make it.
And they didn’t slow down. Garth stood transfixed, watching the scene unfold before his eyes—knowing how it would probably end and utterly helpless to do anything to prevent it. He could see the individual pinpricks of headlights now and hear the laboring engine—as though whoever was behind the wheel had shifted down into low and was driving faster than the transmission could handle.
The headlights started into the turn. Garth waited for them to emerge again on the far side of the curve, but they didn’t. Instead he heard the sound of a distant crash and saw a headlight-illuminated cloud of dust billow skyward.
Garth was a hundred yards away from the Tahoe when the crash occurred. He sprinted back, climbed into his vehicle, hit the light bar, and raced off into the night. Trying to radio for help was useless. He was out of range. That afternoon when he’d come on duty, Chief Deputy Hadlock had told him the satphone wasn’t working and he was taking it back to the Justice Center to see if someone could fix it.
No, Garth realized, if people in that crashed vehicle were injured and in need of assistance, he was their only hope.
Chapter 31
A DAZED LATISHA CAME TO HER SENSES DANGLING UPSIDE DOWN in the overturned pickup. She didn’t remember fastening her seat belt. She had done it out of sheer force of habit, because that had been one of Lyle’s inviolable rules—the car didn’t move until everyone inside was belted in. Trayvon had always made fun of her for wearing a seat belt in his Cadillac, but given the reckless way he drove—routinely speeding and often driving under the influence—buckling up had been a matter of life and death. It was this time, too. That unthinking action on Latisha’s part had most likely saved her life.
She remembered seeing a sign warning of an upcoming curve. She had slowed, but not enough. Partway into it she’d felt the tires veering off the road and skidding toward the left. She had pulled the wheel to the right, overcorrecting, and the next thing she knew, the truck flew off the road and tumbled down a steep bank into a ravine.
She was lucky not to have been thrown from the truck, but now she was desperate to escape it. Everything she knew about car wrecks came from movies and TV. There the cars always exploded into fireballs once they landed, so she needed to put as much distance between herself and the truck as she could and as quickly as possible.
The weight of her body against the restraining seat belt made it hard to breathe. After fumbling blindly with the release, she finally managed to unfasten the belt, sending her tumbling down onto the ceiling. The engine was still running. Fighting her way through a layer of deployed airbags, she located the ignition button on the dashboard and shut down the engine. In the process her searching hand landed on one of the stolen boots. If she was going to walk away from the wreckage, she’d need both of those boots. It took time to find the other one—time she didn’t have. She discovered that both plastic containers had been crushed. While searching blindly for the missing boot, her hand encountered puddles of water dotted with mounds of wet kibble. But finally, just when she was about to give up, she found the boot.
Clutching both of them in one hand, she attempted to open the driver’s door with the other, but it didn’t work. The door wouldn’t budge. Next she tried the window button, but nothing happened. The window wouldn’t open, either. Crawling over a layer of shattered safety glass, she found that the passenger-side window had been blown out. Without even trying the door handle, she threw the boots out through the missing glass and then slithered after them on her belly. Just when she thought she’d made it—when she was safely away from the pickup—she came face-to-face with the toes of a pair of men’s shoes.
“Well, looky here,” the Boss muttered, grabbing Latisha by the hair and yanking her to her feet. “If it isn’t my runaway bride! What the hell have you done to my truck?”
“How did you find me?”
“You think I’m stupid or something? How do you think I found you? I followed your tire tracks.”
She tried to wriggle out of his grasp. He had seemed weak and dizzy before, but
he wasn’t now. He lifted her off the ground one-handed and shook her like she was a rag doll. That’s when she spotted the gun in his other hand.
“Just shoot me, then,” she whispered. “Shoot me and get it over with.”
“I don’t think so,” he answered, pulling her so close that she could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “That would be too easy. You and me, kid, we’re gonna go back home and have ourselves a little playtime. Afterward I’ve reserved a space in that freezer down in the basement. I’m pretty sure there’s a spot with your name on it.”
The freezer! Remembering Amelia’s desperate plight, Latisha realized she had nothing to lose—nothing at all. Being shot would be better than being locked in that freezer. Anything was better than the freezer.
“Climb,” he ordered.
“I’m barefoot,” she objected. “Let me put on the boots.”
“Bullshit,” he told her. “You left me barefoot, and I’m returning the favor. I said climb! Do it!”
Left with no alternative, Latisha started to comply. Just then flashing lights appeared on the bank above them and a car door slammed shut.
“Police,” a voice from overhead announced as a flashlight beam probed the wreckage of the truck. “Is anybody hurt down there? Do you need help?”
Realizing that the Boss was momentarily distracted, Latisha used the only weapon she had at her disposal. She was far enough up the bank by then that she was able to turn and nail him full in the balls with her knee. As he crumpled to the ground, she took off running.
Running for her life, she found herself in a dry stream bed with steep perpendicular banks on either side. The ground under her bare feet was mostly dry sand punctuated by occasional rocks.
It was still dark, but she had little difficulty seeing her way. The pale moonlight overhead provided plenty of illumination for eyes long since adjusted to the inky darkness of the basement dungeon.
Someone—the cop, probably—was stumbling down the bank toward them, creating a mini avalanche of rocks and dirt that landed on Latisha as she raced past. Instead of breaking her stride, she kept right on running. She darted around a slight curve and then ducked into a small indentation in the bank where a second dry stream bed emptied into the larger one.
She had just made it to cover when bullets began to fly. She counted off the shots in her head—one, two, three, four, five, six. It wasn’t like the spray of automatic-weapons fire that you hear on TV. It was far more deliberate than that, with each shot followed by a distinct pause.
At first Latisha thought the Boss was firing the gun at her, but then she realized that wasn’t the case. He was shooting at the cop, and so she resumed running, picking her way around boulders, sticking close to the shelter of the bank.
At one point she stubbed her right big toe on a rock that turned out to be the same color as the sand. A jolt of pain shot through her body, spreading from the ingrown toenail and traveling up her leg, but Latisha kept on going. Her lungs burned. Long-disused muscles ached, but she kept running until her legs literally collapsed beneath her. She lay prone in the sand, gasping for breath, unable to move, and waiting for the kill shot she knew was coming. And since she was about to die, and since she’d been saying the prayer for months now, she did so again, whispering the words. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
But then a car door slammed somewhere behind her and an engine started. Latisha sat up and looked back the way she’d come. The bank was somewhat lower here. She couldn’t see over it, but she could tell that the blue and red lights on top of the cop car were still flashing. They hadn’t moved. Meanwhile another set of headlights lit the nighttime sky as a moving vehicle executed a U-turn and sped off into the night—going back the same way Latisha had come, back toward the dungeon.
So had the Boss left her to live, then? Had he decided she wasn’t worth killing? If so, why? And where was the cop? He had come to help her—would have helped her. What had happened to him? If the Boss had been shooting at him, what if he’d hit him? What if he was dying? What if he was dead?
Never in her whole life had Latisha Marcum thought of herself as brave, but the months in the dungeon had changed her. Running away from the Boss tonight, driving off in his pickup, had been brave things to do. Hitting him in the balls had been brave as well. Chained to the wall, she’d been able to do nothing to help Amelia or Sandy or Sadie, but if the cop was wounded and in need of help, maybe it was time for her to be brave again.
Slowly, still breathing heavily and hoping against hope that the Boss really was gone, she got to her feet and started back downstream.
Chapter 32
NOBODY GOES THROUGH POLICE-ACADEMY TRAINING WITHOUT having the deadly risks inherent in traffic stops drilled into his or her head, but this wasn’t a traffic stop. This was a motor-vehicle accident, and Garth was coming to offer assistance. As a consequence he was totally unprepared for the barrage of bullets that slammed into his bulletproof vest. They hit like hammer blows, knocking the breath out of him.
Looking for cover, he tried to retreat back up the bank. Instead he lost his balance and fell. As he plunged to the ground, the last shot came, and a searing pain shot through his body as a bullet penetrated his upper left thigh. He hit the ground hard and then lay there, dazed and unmoving.
Garth tried to make sense of what had just happened. He knew that his assailant hadn’t used an automatic or a semiautomatic weapon. Fearing that the shooter might be reloading, Garth managed to extract his weapon from its holster, but by the time he had it in hand, his attacker had disappeared. He had gotten away clean. As for Garth? He was pretty sure he was dying.
Once when he and Grandpa Jeb had been out in the desert gathering up dead mesquite—sawing it and splitting it to sell—the head of Garth’s hatchet had come loose, burying the blade deep in his upper thigh, only inches from where this bullet had hit him.
At the time of the accident, Garth and Grandpa had been miles from the nearest hospital or ER. Garth still remembered how Grandpa Jeb had whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Garth’s leg, using it as a tourniquet.
“Cry if you want to, but don’t you faint or pass out on me,” Grandpa Jeb had ordered. “You’ve got to hold this tight long enough for us to make it to the hospital in Wilcox.”
Gritting his teeth, Garth hadn’t cried. Later, after sewing up the wound and giving Garth a tetanus shot, the doctor told them that if it hadn’t been for Grandpa Jeb’s tourniquet, Garth would have died that day.
Lying wounded in the cold and dark, Garth decided this was the same thing.
At Sheriff Brady’s insistence, these days all departmental vehicles were equipped with state-of-the-art law-enforcement first-aid kits—plastic pouches packed with all sorts of first-aid necessities, including tourniquets, pressure bandages, and packets filled with a powdered blood-clotting agent. All of that was right there in the back of the Tahoe, but from where Garth was at the bottom of the ravine with the Tahoe parked up top, it might as well have been on another planet. The only way to get to the kit was to climb up after it, and the tricky part was living long enough to make the climb.
Not willing to give up and die, Garth knew that he needed to stop or at least slow the bleeding. Recalling his grandfather’s lifesaving actions, Garth attempted to remove his belt. Because he was lying on it, that wasn’t easy. Once he did, when it came time to fasten the tourniquet around his leg, he was so shocked by the amount of blood he found on his pant leg that he had to fight to keep from blacking out.
“This is bad,” he told himself aloud. “If I die, too, Grandma Juanita will kill me.” The utter absurdity of that statement made him burst out laughing, making him believe that he was going into shock.
Just then a monster silently materialized out of the darkness and hovered over him. Standing silhouetted there backlit by the pulsing blue-and-red glow from his light bar, he could make out no facial features on the terrifying apparit
ion. The creature boasted an enormous head and a bulky body, perched on top of what appeared to be pencil-thin legs.
Garth remembered one of Pastor Mike’s long-ago sermons where he’d talked about the angel of death. That’s probably what this was, Garth concluded now, the angel of death, sporting a huge explosion of hair instead of wings and come to collect Garth and take him home—not home to Elfrida and Grandma Juanita but home to heaven, where he’d spend eternity with Jesus and with Grandpa Jeb.
But then, to Garth’s amazement, the disturbing figure dropped to the ground beside him and spoke.
“You’re hurt,” a woman said in a surprisingly gentle voice with a distinctly southern accent. “Please don’t die on me. What can I do to help?”
He could see that she was a black woman, or maybe a girl instead of a woman. That’s why he hadn’t been able to make out her face. Now, though, the pain in his leg was so all-encompassing that it was difficult for him to speak.
“There’s a first-aid kit in my patrol car,” he managed at last. “It’s in the back on the right-hand side, just inside the hatch. I dropped my flashlight. If you could find that . . .”
He’d been searching for it in the dark and unable to locate it. Without a word and with no hesitation at all, the woman walked a few steps away, picked up the missing flashlight, and handed it to him.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, “but give me your phone so I can call for help.”
“The phone won’t work,” Garth told her. “We’re too far out of town. No cell service. Hurry, please.”
She left then. He switched on the flashlight to look at his blood-soaked thigh and immediately wished he hadn’t. Just the sight of it sickened him.
Watching her climb the bank and feeling as if his very life were leaking out if him, the time it took seemed like forever. It wasn’t that steep, and it shouldn’t have been that much of a struggle, but it was, and although it might have been only a matter of seconds before she finally reappeared, for Garth it felt like a lifetime.
