by D. D. Ayres
Shay stiffened. She felt her gut cramp as it all went watery. “I—I can’t.”
“Useless cunt.” He shrugged and lifted the barrel to her forehead.
She gritted her teeth and shut her eyes. Now. Not later. Her choice.
The pain blinded her but the blow from the barrel sent her sprawling on her back. She let herself fall in the direction of the hearth. Her choice.
He was on her so quickly the force of his body knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air she knew a panicky moment when her grasping hand met only hard slate. She had lost. She couldn’t fight him and win. If he hit her again she would pass out and all the choices after that, even to the end of her life, would be his.
She went limp beneath him.
Chuckling with satisfaction that he had bested her resistance, he grabbed the front of her bra and yanked it up over her breasts. With a grunt of animal lust he grabbed one breast and squeezed it so hard she moaned in pain.
This seemed to excite him even more. He reared back to reach for her jeans zipper.
Shay turned her face away, as if she could not bear to look at the foul man straddling her, and opened her eyes. She saw it. The log lighter. Too far away.
He was pulling at her jeans but he couldn’t get them down. “Raise up!”
“I can’t. You’re too heavy. Get off.”
He pointed his gun at her. “Nothing funny.”
She nodded and, coming up on her elbows, scooted backward out from under him when he rose up on his knees.
He watched with greedy eyes as she slipped her jeans down to the top of her hips. But then she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t let him think she’d wanted this, no matter if he killed her. She had been a victim too often in her life, at the whim of circumstances beyond her control. Not this time.
She screamed, levering her torso off the floor with hands curled into talons.
He didn’t hit her with the barrel this time, simply struck her in the solar plexus, the blow knocking her back to the floor.
He was on her, this time not taking any time to enjoy the unique features of the woman beneath him. He even laid his gun down behind his right knee, impossible for her to reach.
Shay grunted in pain as he tore at her clothing, and turned her head. Not everything was out of reach.
He didn’t notice her arm snake out, or the soft click. He had her jeans to her knees but her boots prevented him from tugging them further. He tried to flip her over, and she knew what he was planning to do. This time, she fought back, keeping his attention just long enough.
A lovely blue flame had leaped up by the hearth slate. It ran quickly along the top of the tequila spill line that ran under the chair and into the braided floor rug. The rug caught first. He didn’t notice. He only knew she was losing the fight.
In the end Shay found herself crying out, “Fire!”
“What the fuck?”
“Fire! Get off me!” Shay pushed at him with all her might. The flames were only inches from her face.
His eyes went wide as he scrambled off her. He reached for his gun even as the undercarriage of the chair began to smoke. He backed off and got to his feet. Seemingly confused by the fire, he aimed his pistol at the carpet first and then at the chair, as if the flames would surrender to his firepower.
Shay didn’t wait to see who would win. She rolled away from him and onto her feet. Even as she grabbed her jeans to pull them up over her hips, she headed for the door.
“You bitch!”
She ran. She didn’t look back. She didn’t even cower from the shot she knew was coming. Her choice.
The report was louder than she expected. She stumbled at the threshold as every muscle in her body contracted for impact. The fiery burn of the bullet still surprised her.
From the room behind her, her phone began playing Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake.” It was like music wafting in from another world, a world where there were boyfriends, and dinners to be cooked, and a fire to cozy up next to.
And then she was through the door.
Her world was filled with November darkness, the chill thrill of a damp north wind whipping in from the lake, and the insistent throb of a burning wound.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Go right!
She didn’t spare a second to wonder why her brain was directing her there. Right would take her into the woods. Harder to find. Harder to track. Yet Bogart would know to look for her.
She heard it, perhaps because she had been praying so hard for it, the sounds of a truck. Was it James’s truck turning off the main road? She stopped running at the edge of the woods. Maybe if she could just double back to the road, meet him— She looked back toward the cabin that stood in the way.
The metallic gun barrel shone under the radiance of the NightWatcher light as her assailant paused in the doorway of the cabin. He was coughing and cursing and then he was off the porch at a dead run. She waited to be certain he wasn’t coming her way. She decided he was headed for the campground parking lot on the other side of this strip of woods where she supposed he had parked his vehicle. But maybe not. Maybe he was still looking for her. And if she risked going back into the open too soon …
Survival impulse took over the decision. She turned away and took off at a run, the moist ground sucking at her boot heels as she fled into the underbrush. But within seconds she came nearly to a halt. She ached in every part of her body. It was impossible to catalogue all the pain. She put a hand to her head and it came away with a wet smear. Must be blood. Her legs were rubbery and her stomach burned with a hollow fire. Her arm—no. Couldn’t think about the arm.
The autumn-stripped trees kept the woods from the pitch-black darkness of a summer-night canopy. Overhead the sky glowed faintly with the Milky Way. If she didn’t find shelter her stalker might find her before James. She had to move!
She was familiar with this section of wilderness, and during the day she would not have been afraid to cross it alone. But in the dark, with the wind whipping her hair into her face, she might as well have been in another country. Nothing was familiar, or comforting, or tinged with the presence of another human being.
She thought she heard the moment a vehicle turned off the road into the hundred yards of gravel path that led to her door. The man behind her would have heard it, too. She moved on.
Tired, running on adrenaline and fear, she was acting purely on instinct. And instinct told every hunted animal to go to ground, to hide.
She fretted because her boots made swishing sounds as she passed through the leaves that were knee-high in places. If there was anyone to listen. Bogart!
She almost closed her eyes to pray that Bogart would hear those shussh shussh sounds and know she was in trouble. She’d never needed a Prince Charming more.
After several minutes of running and stumbling, she reached a clearing where a new road was being laid over a narrow stream. Winded and shaking from nerves, she paused again. And squinted.
The starlight was brighter now that she had reached the other side of the tree belt. Ten feet away, gleaming darkly as if they were oiled with tar, long PVC pipes lay stacked like firewood against an embankment. They had been brought in to form a culvert for the stream that ran under new road construction.
Shay closed her streaming eyes. Shelter, if only she had the guts to use it.
She had a fear of tight places. Of tunneling into the ground, a cave getting the farther along she went until she was unable to back up. It was a nightmare she’d had many times.
Behind her she heard sirens and shouts. And then, from somewhere much closer, the sound of pounding footsteps. James? Or him? She couldn’t risk being wrong.
She ran the short distance and dove for the opening of the middle pipe in the stack.
As she scrambled into the opening, she tried to stuff the fear aside. What would she tell a child who needed to take shelter from a—a thunderstorm, or a bear? Yes, a bear. Big bear. It was November. All the creepy-crawlies shoul
d be hibernating by now. Snakes would have gone to ground under stumps where it would be warmer than the inside of the cold PVC piping she was being forced to crawl into. It was safe in here.
She paused a couple of feet in, the throbbing from her injured arm making her dizzy with pain. No. Mustn’t think of that. Think only of survival.
Though the faintest light glowed at the far end, it was much too dim to see her surroundings. She felt the walls. The space was maybe thirty inches in diameter. High enough for her to be on hands and knees and still not quite touch the top. It wasn’t so bad.
Shay crawled a little farther into the pipe. It was corrugated and rainwater must have gathered over time, making the bottom feel slimy.
I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I’m not dead. The litany pulsed through her mind, growing louder and faster with every heartbeat. Shay closed her eyes and made herself breathe. She was safe.
But this time the feeling wouldn’t gel. She’d started a fire. Probably burned down her uncle and aunt’s cabin. Her assailant had gotten away. No one else had seen him. Her words against a phantom. No one would believe her. Why should they? And what about the cat? No way she could prove he did that. No way to prove that she was innocent of Jaylynn Turner’s accusations. She should have gotten proof that her attacker was still out there.
She moaned like a wounded animal as other images pressed in to drown out the first.
Headfirst into a hole. No light at the end of this tunnel. Why wasn’t there night and starlight at the other end?
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t be sure her assailant wasn’t still looking for her. Suddenly she realized it didn’t matter, she couldn’t stay here. Had to get out.
She began back crawling backward, whimpering as her hands touched unspeakably wet and smelly debris lining the bottom of the pipe.
Her panicked jerky movements were uncoordinated. The curved surface beneath her hands began to tremble. Her palm slipped in something slick and wet and she lost her balance and fell hard against the concave wall.
She felt something shift beneath her, a slight roll, and then a thud struck above her head, jarring the pipe in which she was encased.
She held her breath in fright as the movement reverberated beneath her palms. Strange squeaky squealing sounds came from deep below her. More slippage. Then the bottom fell out.
She was rolling over and over, bouncing and bumping, unable to control her body or brace herself. There was nothing to hold on to. There were only the sounds of her cries and the low rumbling like a herd of buffalo crossing a plain.
The stop was more abrupt than the free fall. The pipe she was in slammed into something hard.
Shay’s head whiplashed, hitting both sides of the curved wall. Then she was spiraling down a black hole.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The pickup truck that roared past James on the county road that led to Lake Gaston sported a flashing dash-mounted emergency light. He noticed the sticker in the rear window said: WARREN COUNTY VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT. It made his heart rate tick up a beat with impatience. Not even the traffic was cooperating. Nothing he could see was on fire. Most likely they were just out joyriding on a Friday night.
“Bastards,” he muttered under his breath, allowing a trace of anger to keep him focused and alert. Every minute delayed was eating at his control. He knew when he found the man who had been stalking Shay he was going to need it, every damned ounce.
He’d called the Warren County sheriff’s office from Raleigh. The dispatcher said the sheriff and his deputies were out, part of an investigation over a hunting accident. She’d have someone check on the cabin as soon as they could shake loose. So far, he’d heard nothing back. Shay still wasn’t answering, either.
Eyes locked on the road ahead, he blocked the feeling eating him up inside whenever Shay drifted into his mind. He had wasted more than two hours going all the way to Raleigh. He should have known better.
Raleigh police had been by Shay’s place of work only to be told she no longer worked at Halifax Bank. Nor was she at Logital Solutions when they checked. Finally, as James was entering the city limits, a final call came in that turned him north, toward the cabin.
Shay wasn’t at home. But one of her neighbors had come over when she saw a police officer at Shay’s door. She told the Raleigh officer he was the second law enforcement officer at Shay’s door in two days. She also told him that she had seen Shay packing her car earlier in the afternoon. And then she related the incident about the run-over cat the night before, and that Shay had been drunk when she did it.
Driving drunk. That didn’t sound like Shay. Going to ground for the weekend at the lake cabin did. Shay probably thought she was running from the threat of a civil suit. If only he could warn her that she was running from something much more dangerous. An ex-con with an open-ended authorization to take care of her.
He hit the steering wheel with the flat of his palm. Why the hell didn’t she call back? Was what he had done, or not done, so unforgivable?
He had a suspicion that it was.
He pressed the gas pedal harder.
From the rearview mirror he saw a second vehicle coming up fast behind him in the darkness with flashing lights and an earsplitting siren. This was a fire department vehicle, a pumper.
Cursing under his breath, he pulled over, his cruiser’s tires kicking up gravel and red dirt as he hit the unpaved shoulder. He yanked the wheel to bring him back on to the tarmac and floored it, gaining speed until he was almost on the bumper of the truck.
Okay, so there was a fire somewhere. It wasn’t much farther to the lake itself. The vehicles would have to turn soon.
A few moments later he saw through a thinned-out line of trees a small orange glow off to the right ahead. The hair lifted on his nape. That was the direction of Shay’s cabin.
Something raw and wrathful swept through him. If the bastard had hurt Shay—
Bogart pushed his muzzle into the opening, and began to vocalize softly. James took a breath. His partner was feeding off his heightened emotions.
“It’s okay, boy.”
Sucking air until it whistled between his teeth, James struggled to rein in his most savage emotions. This was not the time to lose control. This was the time to think and act like a lawman. He and Bogart would get the asshole. But they’d do it the right way.
He had to brake hard when the fire truck swung off the tarmac onto the gravel lane that led to the cabin. When it pulled over near a red fire hydrant, he shot past it.
There were already people in the yard, neighbors who had left their homes to come and help. What filled his vision was the cabin. Smoke poured through the open doorway while flames danced behind the glass of the windows.
Dear God, don’t let Shay be in there.
He slammed on his brakes, halfway out of the cruiser before he skidded to a stop.
His heart was pounding so loudly he couldn’t make out any individual voices, but he swept the face of everyone he passed looking for Shay. Not here. Somehow he knew that. She wasn’t in the yard. The only place she could be was inside.
He didn’t hesitate. He broke into a trot, heading straight for the door.
Someone checked him, throwing him off balance, and then a gloved hand pressed hard into his chest, forcing him to a stop.
He turned to shove the intruder off and saw a man maybe twenty years his senior in seventy-five pounds of firefighting gear. Their gazes met, an older unyielding purpose matching younger single-minded determination.
The fireman dropped his hand and pointed at his comrades from the pickup, geared up and ready to go in. “This is our job. Let us do it.”
“There may be a woman in there.”
The man looked at James only a second longer, then shouted to his companions, “Possible woman inside!” He turned back to James. “We were told it was empty.”
James noticed the firemen didn’t head for the front door where smoke billowed. They heade
d for the back of the house where there were no flames or smoke visible. James followed. The man who’d stopped him stayed by his side.
He’d heard other firemen say, “We fight from the unburned to the burned.” That meant getting behind a fire to keep it from spreading through the structure, saving, if possible, what remained.
The kitchen was relatively free of smoke. Two firemen went in with hoses while James spent the longest five minutes of his life waiting in the yard for one of them to return.
When he did, the man made a motion with his hands that said they had not found anyone inside.
James moved forward, about to ask if they’d looked everywhere, but the fireman beside him intervened again and met him eye to eye. “They looked. Everywhere.”
James nodded, shivering against the adrenaline rush of relief. Shay wasn’t in the fire. But where the hell was she?
He waited a few long minutes, just to be certain, as the hoses did their job.
Finally one of the first to go in came out and walked up to James.
“No one in there. But there is evidence that someone was here recently. There’re groceries still in bags. Maybe she ran when the fire started.”
That should have made James feel better but it didn’t. If she’d run from the fire, she would have called it in or gone to the nearest house for help.
He turned and looked, and sure enough her car was still in the yard. Had Shay been surprised by the ex-con? Had he kidnapped her and set the fire to leave no trace? No scenario running through his thoughts was a good one.
Something began to ache deep in his chest. It grew so quickly that a groan escaped him.
A hand fell on his shoulder. “You okay?”
He glanced at the older fireman who was still watching him.
“Yeah.” And just like that James shut down. Time for emotion later. He was a lawman and needed to do his job. He walked around to the rear of the cabin.
