Roped (Gail McCarthy Mysteries)

by Laura Crum

  Joyce looked like a cornered coyote. She'd taken a couple of steps backward until she was up against the door to the room, and the look in her eyes was desperate. Desperate and something else. Savagely angry. She appeared torn between fight and flight.

  I had already decided that the frilly white blouse and tight black jeans she was wearing could not possibly conceal a gun. She carried no purse; she stood near no drawers. I pressed her.

  "Running won't help, Joyce. The cops will catch up in the end. Why'd you do it?" I asked softly.

  The flat blue eyes looked right at me. Anger struggled with fear and anger won. "Because I hate the son of a bitch." Her face seemed to contort, the rage that had been penned up so long rushing out in a tide of ugly, corrosive venom. "Yeah, I hated him," she spit out. "The great Glen Bennett." Her eyes flashed at the quiet figure on the bed. "With his ranch and his family and his horses. I wasn't important to him at all. I was just a convenience, a token wife. He didn't give a damn about me." She stared at Glen as if she could make him disappear with the pure force of her hatred.

  Lisa was watching Joyce with an expression of horror on her face. I felt pretty horrified myself. It was hard to reconcile the calm, cold exterior I was used to with the raging Joyce in front of me. This woman had been terribly angry for a long time and couldn't or wouldn't express it. Unbidden, a vignette from my youth flashed into my mind-Joyce, in one of her rare good moods, playing a cute, kittenish little girl to Glen's strong, silent man routine. Joyce, I thought, had never been able to deal with the frustration she felt at being forced into that role.

  She was expressing a lot more than frustration now. "I did things just to make his life miserable. I left the gates open; I even tried to poison his stupid horses. I left the tractor in gear. I dug a hole in the arena; I thought maybe it would kill him."

  I shot a glance at Glen. His eyes were closed and he leaned back on the pillows. He hadn't said a word since I'd walked into the room.

  I cut in on Joyce. "We're talking about attempted murder, Joyce. You'll go to jail."

  "I didn't murder him." Her voice rose. "Look at him; he's still alive."

  "What did you give Smoke?" I asked her.

  "Give Smoke?" For a second she looked confused; I watched her eyes drop and rise again and saw fear creep back in.

  "Who gave you the dummy fuse and told you how to use it?"

  I asked.

  "No one. It was my idea."

  "And was it your idea to shoot at me this afternoon?"

  "I never shot at you." Joyce's eyes jumped to my face.

  "Well, someone did. I can prove it," I said firmly, not sure if I could or not. "And I will press charges."

  "I didn't do it."

  "So, who did?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do. You told someone that I found the dummy fuse; you told them where I was. And that someone shot at me with a deer rifle this afternoon. Who was it?"

  Joyce shook her head. "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do, Joyce. The same person who cut the colt's throat and gave Smoke a shot. And if you don't want to go to jail, you'll tell me who that person is."

  She stared at me and licked her lips. I didn't take my eyes off her. I didn't know anymore what Lisa was doing, how Glen or Tim was reacting. I just watched Joyce.

  "Tell me who it is," I prompted.

  "I can't," she said softly.

  "You have to. I'll turn you in to the police right now if you don't tell me." I glanced meaningfully at the phone by the bed. "Now, Joyce."

  There was a second of silence while Joyce's eyes darted around the room frantically. I could imagine her brain doubling back on itself, trying to see a way out. I took a step toward the phone.

  "All right. I'll tell you. I'll tell you who it is." She'd made up her mind. Her eyes whipped sharply across the room, and she pointed right at Tim. "He did."

  Even as the words left her mouth there was a crashing boom. Red flowered on the white lacy front of Joyce's blouse, like a corsage.

  Then she was falling and shards of glass were falling from the windows and Lisa ran to Joyce where she lay on the carpet. The blood was pumping out of the hole in her chest, and she made one choked moan. Lisa was trying to stanch the flow of blood with the hem of the bedspread.

  "Call nine-one-one," I said to Glen. "Get help."

  I saw him reach for the phone, and then I was out through the French doors, running across the dark lawn and seeing Tim running in front of me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The moon was up and Tim was a sharply defined black shape moving fast across the silver gray of the grass. I chased after him, my heart pounding with fear and adrenaline. I lost sight of him in the trees, but I could hear him, crashing and stumbling and swearing.

  I charged in his wake, following the sounds of breaking branches. The darkness under the trees seemed absolute. I stumbled and nearly fell and bounced off an oak tree and kept running.

  Then we were out on the road and I could see Tim, running flat-out down the hill, and ahead of him was another shape-a man, running, and Tim was gaining on him.

  My heart was crashing in my chest. I saw the running man stop and take up a shooting stance. He had a rifle in his hands, and he was pointing it at Tim.

  "Down, Tim!" I screamed. "Down!"

  The shot cracked; Tim dove; the man whirled and ran again. I didn't think, just ran after him as hard as I could run. I had to catch him.

  The dark figure ahead of me was down the hill, headed toward the roping area and the road, but I was gaining on him. He stopped and I heard another crack as I flung myself sideways. My gut lurched with fear, but there was no impact, no pain, and I plowed on, chasing him, drawing closer.

  This was the shadowy figure who had pushed Joyce to murder Glen, tried to kill me, and shot Joyce just now. I wanted him, wanted to see his face, wanted his destruction.

  He was at the arena fence, and he paused. He moved forward again, climbing over the fence, and I could see the shape of his head and his body clearly in the moonlight and knew for certain who I was chasing.

  I slowed down. I could hear Tim behind me with a rush of running footfalls, and before I could say a word, he was past me and vaulting the fence. I looked ahead and saw that the dark figure we were chasing had stopped and was pointing the gun right at Tim.

  I yelled frantically, "Stop!"

  Everything seemed to freeze. The man with the rifle stood perfectly still, pointing the gun at Tim, who had lurched to a stop in midstride, as though he were playing Red Light -Green Light.

  There was a long, strange moment of silence. I was aware of the three-quarter moon, high and hard and white in the sky behind me, shining down into his face. I could see some movement in the pens behind the chute, off to our right. Cattle, I thought. Everything around me was normal and familiar, except the gun that gleamed dully in the moonlight. I leaned on the rails of the fence, looking right along the barrel.

  My heart was pounding hard from fear and exertion, but I tried to keep all that out of my voice when I spoke. I looked right at him, our unknown killer, and knew him all right. "Well, Charles," I said slowly.

  He stared back at me. The moonlight seemed almost as bright on his face as daylight, but his eyes were just dark sockets-unreadable. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. His voice came as a shock. The arrogant confidence seemed undiminished, though he sounded out of breath. "Too bad for you, you nosy little bitch." He took a breath. "You made a mistake, coming after me."

  He looked down the barrel of the rifle as he spoke, sighting carefully, pointing it not at me, but at Tim. "Climb over the fence, bitch," he said heavily. "Real slow. And come stand here by this asshole."

  "It won't work, Charles," I said sharply. "Too many people know."

  "Too bad." He still stared down the gun at Tim. "You two are gonna die. You first, you bastard Bennett. But you, you lousy little vet, are gonna get it, too. I should have made sure you were dead this afternoon. Now, clim
b over that fence, or I'll shoot little Bennett right in front of you."

  I started climbing. I could hear Tim's voice, sounding bizarrely normal, his usual relaxed drawl. "Just couldn't handle it, could you, Charles? You're so damn jealous of Dad you had to kill him to get even."

  Charles kept the gun trained on Tim. "Kill him because he's a bastard. He deserves it."

  I was over the fence now. Tim's quiet voice went on. "Kill him because he's a better man and your wife knows it." I saw the infinitesimal jerk of the gun as it went off. The shot shattered the night, and I dove straight at Charles.

  I hit him right at the knees, even as another dark shape came out of the night from my right and hit both of us. I felt a crashing punch in my right shoulder; then Charles went down and the gun went off again. Someone was on top of Charles and was smashing his fist into Charles's belly. Whump. Charles groaned.

  Twisting myself away, I spotted the metallic gleam of the gun and grabbed it out of a slack hand. Charles writhed, and I heard another whump. There was a loud moan, and then a voice I recognized. "Don't move," it said heavily to Charles.

  I got to my feet, holding the rifle gingerly. "Thanks, Al," I said.

  Al Borba crouched over Charles in the moonlight, gripping Charles's shirt with one hand, his heavy frame gorillalike in its stance, his arm cocked back to deal another blow. There was no need. Charles was gasping in painful wheezes, like a punctured balloon.

  I looked for Tim. He sat on the ground, holding his right shoulder with his left hand; I could see the dark stain in the moonlight.

  "He hit you; you're bleeding." I squatted next to Tim.

  He flexed his right arm slowly. "Not serious. Just winged me." I could hear a trace of a drawl. "It all works."

  Tim got up slowly and we both looked at Charles and Al, still frozen in their tableau. "I've got his gun, Al. You can let go of him."

  When Al took a step toward Tim and me, I trained the rifle on Charles's prone form.

  "Where were you?" I asked Al.

  "In the pen with the cattle," he said. "I saw that horse running around the barn about half an hour ago, so I went over and unsaddled him and put him away and turned off the lights. Then I went out here to check on these weaned calves; a couple of them didn't look so good this morning. That's when I heard the shots and saw you running down the hill. I turned off my flashlight and waited. After a while I figured out what was going on."

  "Well, thanks," I said.

  Al was silent.

  We all stared down at Charles. He was still gasping where he lay on the ground, and both arms were wrapped around his stomach.

  "So it was this asshole all the time," Tim said.

  "I don't know about all the time. Joyce set up most of the little accidents that Lisa noticed. But he's the one who pushed Joyce toward murder. And he just shot her."

  "Yeah." Tim looked at me. "I don't know why she pointed at me, Gail. I mean, we've never liked each other, and ever since Dad got electrocuted I've been watching her like a hawk, 'cause I wondered, but I sure never had anything to do with this bullshit. "

  "I know," I told him. "Joyce was desperate to put the blame on somebody, anybody that wasn't Charles. Charles was her lover."

  We both looked down at the figure on the ground. "I knew Joyce had some kind of an ally; I didn't believe she was capable of some of the accidents. And I think she was protecting him because of their 'relationship.' And I guess he was waiting out there in the dark to kill Glen. He came after me this afternoon and shot at me and thought he killed me. I think he was starting to believe he could get away with anything."

  Charles was still gasping and moaning a little. I kept the gun pointed at him; he seemed to be getting his air back. As we watched, he pushed himself up into a sitting position.

  "Don't move," I said.

  He glanced up at me and the gun and the two men beside me and didn't seem inclined to try. Just sat there, with his head down, breathing hard. He was a bully, I thought, used to victims who couldn't or wouldn't fight back. A little physical damage to his own person was more than he could stand.

  "Listen." Tim pointed with his good hand toward the road.

  We could all hear the sirens. Glen had gotten help.

  "Go get some of them to come here," I asked Al. "Tim needs someone to look at that shoulder, and we need people to take him away." I pointed with the rifle at Charles.

  Al stumped off, going toward the road. Charles sat with his head bowed, the picture of defeat. I felt no sorrow or sympathy for him; it was hard for me to see him as human. I had tracked him down with a tenacity I hadn't known I possessed, and now that I had defeated him, I felt not satisfaction, but a deep grief for all that he had destroyed. Life would never be the same.

  "You killed Joyce," I said out loud.

  "I didn't give a damn about Joyce." The old arrogance was a faint echo in his voice. "Joyce was my mistress, but she didn't mean one thing to me. I used her to get at Glen."

  "Why'd you shoot her?" I asked him.

  "She gave me away. I stood right outside those windows. I heard her. She said I did it."

  "She didn't give you away, Charles," I told him. "She covered for you right until the very end. Until you killed her."

  He didn't say anything for a minute. When he spoke it was as if to himself. "I didn't give a damn about her. But I hated that bastard. He took Pat away from me. Everyone knew. I did it for Pat." The force with which he said that brought on a fit of coughing. When he finished, he looked straight at me. "I should have made sure you were dead."

  I nodded slowly. "Yeah. I guess you should have."

  TWENTY-SIX

  Three days later I sat in the bar at Casa del Mar, sipping a margarita and staring out the window at a stream of black shorebirds-shearlings-flying endlessly (or so it seemed) to the south.

  Lonny sat beside me, looking over the bay, his shoulder just touching mine. All around us groups of suntanned golfers and tennis players chattered and drank, munching tortilla chips with abandon. Casa del Mar, the dining room of the old Rio del Mar Hotel, with its ancient adobe walls and dramatic site on a cliff overlooking Monterey Bay, was very popular with the local country club set.

  Lonny and I stood out a bit, I thought with amusement. In our jeans and work shirts and boots, neither of us entirely free from dirt and both slightly speckled with flecks of the alfalfa hay we'd been moving, we looked a good deal more rumpled and untidy than the rest of the crowd.

  "Lisa called me today," I said, still staring at the flying stream of shearlings.

  "What did she say?" Lonny asked. "How's Glen?"

  "Glen's okay. She says he won't talk about Joyce or Charles or any of that, and he's still weak, so she isn't pressing him. The one person he'll talk to is Al Borba, she says. They talk about the ranch just like nothing ever happened, and even though he's on crutches, Glen goes out every morning to talk to Al about the day's chores. Lisa thinks he'll be okay."

  "That's good."

  "She says Al and Janey are both being really helpful. She's surprised. Maybe they just want to hang onto a deal where they don't have to pay rent. Janey brings cookies or a cake up almost every day, and Lisa thinks that Al is really making a point of letting Glen lean on him."

  "How's Tim?"

  "He's fine. It wasn't a serious wound. His shoulder's taped up, but Lisa says he'll be one hundred percent in a couple of weeks. She's been talking to him a lot, she told me. He wants to talk, I guess. He told her he'd gotten so resentful of Glen that he felt he almost hated him. It took Glen getting electrocuted and nearly dying to wake Tim up. Suddenly he knew he loved his dad. At that point, everything Lisa had been saying got through to him and he was really afraid for Glen. That's why he wouldn't leave his side.

  "I guess he suspected right away it was Joyce; he'd been living in the same house with the two of them for years, after all. He was afraid if he left Glen even for a minute, Joyce would finish the job. He might have been right."

 
; "Joyce's funeral is tomorrow," Lonny said quietly.

  "That's right. Will you go with me?"

  "If you want." Lonny sighed. "How's Lisa doing?"

  "Good. Or so she says. She told me her ex, Sonny, showed up the other night, acting apologetic and offering sympathy. Told her he wanted to get back together. Lisa said she just listened and then let him know she wasn't interested; he left with his tail between his legs, in her words. She told me she finally feels in charge of her life again. She's not afraid of Sonny anymore."

  "That's great." Lonny was quiet a moment. "How are you feeling about all this?" he asked me.

  "I don't know. In a sense, I feel I failed. Lisa asked me to help her, and even though I tried, Joyce is still dead."

  "But Glen's alive."

  "Yes. Glen's alive."

  "And Charles is in jail."

  "Uh huh." We were both silent. After a minute, I said, "I saw Pat down at the sheriff's office when I gave them my statement."

  "How did she seem?"

  "Worn down, but still Pat. She was friendly. I asked her how she was doing, and she said she was surviving. Then she told me that even though this terrible thing had happened, in a way it had helped her. She realized what a farce her life with Charles had been. She said she went to see him in jail and he seemed like a stranger. She couldn't believe she hadn't left him years ago."

  More quiet. I thought that becoming strangers looked like one of the occupational hazards of being married. In Pat's case, the results had been pretty extreme. And in Glen's.