Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  It shocked Miranda, the gush and volume of Kate’s blood. She rocked back on her heels, studying the hole torn in Kate’s stomach.

  Kate’s awareness of time had breached the narrow focus of day-to-day existence, and events that rippled through her consciousness were like memories, whether they had happened yet or not. She saw the mountaintop receding. She saw Leo at the moment of his birth; just a glimpse, because the vision was overlaid by a late summer afternoon in Kentucky, and the sight of Leo—a grownup, slender Leo—leading a colt who was skittish and mysteriously traumatized, and pathologically unable to control his fear. And somehow the colt grows quiet, sensing safety in the hands of Kate’s son, who kept the lead rope slack and walked ahead; still confident, and still without words.

  Kate was confused, wondering if she saw the life that was, the life that will be, or the life that could have been. She was drifting, and did not hear Leo scream.

  Miranda did hear the scream and it brought her to her feet.

  Leo had run from the house wearing only one shoe, and his left foot had turned blue from the cold. The sensation connected him, a bridge from the here and now to his internal world that was a whirlpool kaleidoscope of sound and sensation. Leo paused at the top of the hill and Miranda aimed the gun, waiting for the boy to come closer, her finger just starting to squeeze. Something made her turn her head—a noise, a flash of movement observed out of the corner of one eye. She saw George just as he launched himself from the rise of the driveway. Miranda aimed and fired and the bullet took George on his right side, singeing the fur and traveling through one rib. Because the shot caught the dog at an angle, it penetrated no further and exited three inches from the point of impact.

  George felt no pain; a creature of instinct, obeying the genetics of wolf, he was aware of nothing but the feral intent to kill.

  Miranda whirled and ran, confirming George’s decision that she was prey, and he brought her down, sinking his jaws in the back of her neck and left shoulder. Miranda’s screams were piercing and guttural, which excited George further. She dropped the gun, and her hands scrabbled over the dirt, only to find not the gun but two small, booted feet. A burst of electric shock knocked Miranda and George backward into unconscious oblivion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Janis checks the dog first—the shock was worse for him than the bullet wound, but he is breathing and semiconscious, eyes open to little slits. She checks Miranda. The girl’s eyes have rolled back in her head. Janis leaves her and goes to the woman, to Kate. She can hear the little boy making his way down the hill, but he does not say a word and neither does she.

  Wreckage and too much blood is what Janis thinks when she gets to Kate. But Kate is still breathing, and Janis sees the blood ooze in a lazy spurt, which means an abdominal artery that is nicked or severed. Janis slides two fingers, then three, into the opening of the wound. She closes her eyes, picturing the layout of internal organs, but she cannot find that rogue end of the artery—she needs a larger opening.

  The utility knife is on the ground by Kate’s right hand, and Janis takes it. She senses the presence of the little boy. He stands a few feet away, one shoe on, the other foot bare. He wears a sweatshirt and a pair of pajama bottoms and a hat with ear flaps bent down.

  “Go check on the dog,” Janis says. Intent on enlarging the wound, Janis does not look back up, but she is aware that he moves, finally, and heads for the dog.

  The incision brings more blood but not much, and Janis has enough leeway to get her whole hand inside the body cavity. Kate does not move, but she breathes. Janis is methodical and unhurried. It is her lack of fear and steady plodding that has always impressed the vet. Shut everything out except exactly what you are doing, he always told her; always surprised when she did.

  Janis has it, finally, the artery taut and rubbery between her fingers. If she lets it slip out of her grasp it will curl up and away and she won’t get a second chance.

  There are no clamps, so she ties it off, easy, slow, both hands inside Kate’s abdominal cavity. Janis does not rate Kate’s chances of survival, which depends on how long she can sustain the massive blood loss, how much internal damage there is, how soon she gets to an ER, and whether or not Kate will survive the onslaught of bacteria Janis has left behind in the abdominal cavity.

  Janis’s hands and wrists are slick with Kate’s blood. She wipes them on her sweatshirt. This whole thing is turning messy. She checks her cell phone. No service. She will take care of Miranda, quickly, then call 911 when she gets to her truck.

  Miranda hasn’t moved. Janis grabs the neck of the girl’s sweater and drags her down the path. She glances back once at the little boy.

  “Your dog will be fine,” she tells him. She’s not so sure about the mom. Too bad, Janis thinks. She likes a woman who keeps a neat barn.

  Even going downhill, dragging Miranda is hard work, and Janis is in a sweat by the time they make it to the side of the pond. The sun has dropped and it is dusk, and full dark will come instantly, as it does in the mountains.

  Janis drops Miranda in a thick patch of saw grass. Miranda whimpers and cries. Janis grabs her by the hair and dunks her head in the water. Miranda sputters and her eyes open.

  “Stay,” Janis says. She goes down on one knee and holds her nine millimeter to Miranda’s throat. “I know you shot that woman. I know your boyfriend’s a cop, and you know who I am. Just for curiosity’s sake, what are the two of you up to?”

  Miranda tosses her head in spite of the gun. “I won’t tell you a damn thing.” Her speech is slurred and she shivers. She is coming out of the shock of current slowly.

  “I expect you haven’t seen him today.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do to him?” Miranda’s eyes fill with tears. “Where is he?”

  “First you tell me what I want to know. Then I tell you what you want to know.”

  Miranda swallows against the pressure of the gun at her throat. Closes her eyes as if she can make Janis go away by not looking at her. “We were going to blame it on you.”

  “Blame what on me?”

  “His wife. We were going to kill his wife, and bring you down here and make it look like you did it.”

  Janis smiles. “That explains the straitjacket and the cuffs?”

  Miranda’s eyes go wide. “So you did meet him. Did you hurt him? Where is he?”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “Of course I do.” Miranda tries a smile. Ever hopeful.

  “Done.” Janis shoots Miranda through the heart.

  Janis pauses, takes a breath, then steps back and puts the gun in her jacket pocket. She is bending over to roll the girl into the water when she hears a car coming up the drive. She checks quickly to make sure Miranda is dead—the vacant eyes confirm the kill. Janis slips into the woods.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It never failed to amaze Wilson, the way people on the East Coast could move from state to state with a speed and ease unheard of out west, where one had to either cover a significantly higher number of miles, or wrestle with continuously clogged traffic, or both. The southeastern states were relatively small to a California boy, the interstates wide open and free of traffic. Rodeo had been able to move in and around the Southeast like a ghost.

  Wilson had changed into black-and-green Cammies, a black sweatshirt, and lace-up hiking boots. He wore a blue Kentucky Wildcats ball cap he got in the hotel gift shop—he bought one for Sel, too. He’d wrapped an ace bandage thickly around his leg.

  He opened the bottle of Advil resting on the front seat, unscrewed the cap of bottled water, and swallowed four extra-strength gel caplets. Bad for the stomach, good for the pain.

  Wilson turned the rental into what he hoped was Kate Edgers’s driveway. The sheriff’s department was supposedly on its way out, but he didn’t see any sign of them.

  A Glock, holstered, lay on the seat near Wilson’s leg.

  The driveway began to wind and get steeper, and Wil
son looked ahead, mouth open. A good thing he had four-wheel drive. He could see that the gravel drive led up the mountain to a hideous, brown-brick house. Someone had nailed a basketball goal to a tree on the other side of the drive. A battered Miata was parked on the grass at the edge of the drive. Wilson parked his rental behind the Miata. He slipped his arms through the holster straps, double-checked that the Glock was fully loaded, and slammed the door of the Ranger.

  He cupped his hand. “Hello?”

  A woman, crouched near the side of the pond, stood up when she heard him call. Wilson headed in her direction. He recognized her—she was the woman who’d been at that kid, Rob’s house, asking about Cheryl Dunkirk. Her name was Padget, Lena Padget. He walked toward her, noting every detail of the scene, the edge of the woods, the grassy slope and pond, a small wood dock, an overturned canoe.

  “It’s Wilson McCoy, isn’t it?”

  The woman had the kind of southern-inflected contralto that could launch a man’s fantasies into high gear. Her hair was dark and curly, and hung two inches above her shoulders. Her eyes were very blue, her face very white. And she had blood all over her shirt.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but she’s not.”

  She, Wilson thought. Rodeo?

  Then he saw the small round hands that snaked from behind a tree stump. Wilson crouched down awkwardly, trying to bend the bad leg, but it wouldn’t cooperate, and he had to sit instead of balance on his heels. He studied the girl with detached care, and in the back of his mind, he said a small prayer, just for her.

  A sudden intake of breath made him look up. The detective had no color in her face, and he got awkwardly to his feet, thinking she was going to faint on him.

  “Best sit down,” he said.

  Lena looked at him, then back down at the body, and sank to her knees. Her heart was beating so hard and fast he could see the motion through her sweater.

  The woman had been shot one time, through the heart.

  “Do you know who she is?” Wilson’s voice was gentle.

  “Miranda Brady,” Lena said. “My client.” She turned her back to him, as if she could not bear to watch him examining the body. “I don’t understand this. I thought she came out here to—”

  “Go after Edgers’s wife, right?”

  “For a dumb California blonde, you sure do know a lot.”

  “You were right, though. She was after Kate Edgers. But while she was going after Kate, and you were going after her, she was being hunted by—”

  “By?”

  “Another party,” Wilson says.

  Lena nodded. “And this other party. You were hunting him?”

  “That’s right. Except it’s a her.”

  The corner of a piece of paper peeked out over the top of Miranda’s skirt pocket. Wilson snapped latex gloves on, and pulled the paper out.

  “What the hell.”

  Padget looked at him. “What is it?”

  “Marriage license. Cory Edgers and Miranda Brady? That puts a whole new spin on things, doesn’t it.”

  “I should have figured it out earlier. Another illegal marriage for Edgers.”

  “So you now about that, too?” Wilson got slowly to his feet, almost falling back again when he lost his balance. The leg was worse than ever.

  Wilson looked down at Lena. “I just don’t get why the hell she hired you.”

  “She and Edgers made the most of it, believe me.”

  Wilson checked Miranda Brady’s feet. Hiking boots. Size eight, from the looks of them, distinctive soles. He checked her hands for defense wounds. Found a bite where the blood had barely dried. He pushed her hair off her shoulders, and rolled her to one side. “Jesus.” Something had clamped its jaws around the girl’s neck, tearing the flesh, sinking teeth so deeply into the shoulder that Wilson could see the glint of bone. All of the wounds were thickly encrusted with blood. “The Edgerses have a guard dog?”

  “They’ve got a family pet.”

  The ground was soft and muddy, and Wilson looked for prints—the kind made by Justin cowboy boots, ladies size six and a half. No luck. He got his cell phone out of his pocket. Found no service. “Dammit.”

  “Who is this person?” Lena asked him. “Who are you after?” When Wilson didn’t answer, Lena waved a hand up the hill, where she could just barely see a glimpse of the top of a barn over the tree line. “There’s a woman up there, with a small child, and they’re pretty isolated out here. Is this guy—this woman—going to go after Kate Edgers? Can you at least tell me that?”

  “She’s not interested in Kate, I promise you. And the deputy sheriff drove out here early this afternoon—made sure she was okay. She promised to stay locked up in the house.”

  Wilson, bent double over the soft muddy ground, found what he was looking for—the heel print of a cowboy boot.

  “Which way did you come in?” Wilson asked.

  “Down forty-five. Past that church and the weird man who stands in the road and sings.”

  “I came from the other end. Did you see any pickup trucks parked along the road, anything parked pretty close by?”

  Lena frowned. “There’s a tan pickup, I think it’s a Ford, but it has Tennessee tags and a flat tire. There’s also a green Chevy, extended cab, but it had Louisiana plates.”

  “That’s her,” Wilson said, thinking that sometime in the near future he was going to have to call the Louisiana state cop who’d spotted Rodeo’s pickup on his way to the ER.

  Wilson took Lena by the shoulders. “Look, Miranda’s body is still warm. The blood hasn’t even dried. Rodeo can’t be more than fifteen minutes ahead of us, if that much. We need to get her now, or she’ll slip away. I’m going up in the woods, after her. I want you to go to the Dodge and wait there. Hide, so she won’t see you if she comes walking out of the woods. Don’t do anything if you see her. She’s killed seven federal agents we know of, and she killed Miranda Brady. Likely she’s the one who killed Cory Edgers. Take my cell—call if you get service. That number there, the first one on the phone list.

  “You got all that?” Wilson asked.

  “Yeah. I got it.”

  “Lena, hear me on this. On no account are you to—”

  “I said I got it.” Lena turned away, then stopped. “Cory Edgers is dead?” She looked back over her shoulder to see Wilson disappearing through the trees.

  It was full dark by the time she made it down the driveway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The last of the daylight disappeared less than fifteen minutes after Janis killed Miranda. The dark hit suddenly, as if someone had thrown a blanket over a dim and flickering light. Janis does not stumble; she has eyes like a cat. She moves with care and caution, walking alone in the woods, circling behind the big ugly house and following the ridge down to the road where she left the truck. Janis is cold, but she does not regret tucking her coat around the woman and the little boy and his dog.

  She is not afraid, but she is tired. Weary to the bone. Tired in her soul. She thinks of long summer nights, playing kick the can with her brothers. Where are they? Why doesn’t she see them anymore? Something has happened, she can’t remember what. Just that it is bad.

  She is worried about something. What is it?

  She cannot find him, her Dandy, that’s what it is. How could she have forgotten that? She’d Walked into his stall, holding the apple cut into sixths just as he likes, and he was not there. Someone had put another horse in Dandy’s stall. Did they think she wouldn’t notice? Did they think she was stupid? The other horse, the imposter horse, had butted his head against her arm, and she stopped herself just before she smacked him. He was a horse; he didn’t know he was in the wrong stall. She gave him half the apple.

  Why can’t she remember? Why can’t she remember where Emma is and what happened to her? She has the disoriented and disconnected sensation of one who has been plucked from one life and set down in another. There is no continuity. She knows she has
lost things, people, places, Dandy, but she does not know when and how. She knows that she can’t go home, even though it is what she’s been imagining since she left the rodeo. And already that life has receded and she feels like a stranger to the person she was as the rodeo clown.

  Janis does not know how to get away from these feelings, and she does not know how to resolve them. She can’t quite work things out, and she is beginning to question what is and isn’t real. The people she loves have been replaced with imposters. Have they done that with Dandy, too?

  Preoccupied as she is, she notices the small red eyes ahead of her on the ridge. The possum scuttles off into the brush. Janis needed just that glimpse to focus. The only reason a shy possum might make the choice to come toward her up the ridge would be if there was something worse waiting at the bottom.

  Hidden in the darkness, shielded by the trees, Janis pauses no more that forty feet from the road. She sees the dark shape of her truck. She watches and waits, and sometimes she thinks there is movement or the murmur of a voice, but she cannot be sure. But she knows—somehow, she knows—that someone is down there waiting for her to go for the truck.

  Janis points her gun in the air, fires, then emits a wailing, drawn out scream. And then she runs, uphill, drawing whoever it is who waits for her, away from the truck. With any luck she can circle back and drive off while the follower is still bumping into saplings. She will need to be fast. There may be others coming.

  Over the sound of her own ragged breathing, Janis can hear she is being followed by one of them, if not two. She veers farther right, then crouches and waits. The noise of the follower draws her, and she gets a first glimpse of her enemy, who is small and lithe, stopping now to listen.