Dark Paradise

by Tami Hoag

  And what about you, J.D.?

  He negotiated the truck around a curve where the shoulder of the hillside dropped eighty feet almost straight down. The needle on the truck's tachometer was swinging wildly upward toward the red zone. The engine roared. A warning light was glowing red on the dash, and a hot smell rolled out of the air-conditioning vents. The odometer showed 153,189 miles. The trail disappeared over yet another crest. He held his breath and punched the accelerator.

  The Ford jumped to meet the challenge, lunging for the hilltop. At the same instant, over the crest of the rise came Mary Lee's mule. There was no time to react. The mule was flying, long ears back, reins blowing behind him like streamers. He twisted in midair, trying to avoid the truck, but it was too late. They collided with a sickening thump. His front feet skidded up the hood. The cattle guard over the grill caught him in the ribs, and his whole body came up onto the hood, threatening to crash through the windshield. But he slid off on the driver's side as he scrambled in panic, eyes rolling white in his big ugly head.

  J.D. swore and slammed the brakes. Every molecule of his body was trembling as he jumped out of the cab and ran for the mule. Clyde had landed heavily on his side, wedged up against the trunk of a fallen tamarack. He thrashed wildly, trying to stand. J.D. caught hold of one rein just as the mule got his feet under him and surged upward.

  “Whoa, whoa. Easy, fella.” J.D. spoke softly, but he couldn't keep the urgency from his voice. The mule rolled an eye at him and danced in place. His hide was slick with sweat and flecked with lather. His muscles quivered as if an electric current were running through him. The cattle guard had opened a gash in his right side, ugly but not life-threatening. His legs were all intact.

  “He all right?” Will demanded as he tried to jog over from the truck. He had pulled a catch rope off the gun rack. His knuckles were white as his hand squeezed around it.

  “Doesn't look like he broke anything,” J.D. mumbled. His attention was less on the mule than on the mule's empty saddle.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” Will groused, slipping the loop over the animal's head and twisting it over his nose into a makeshift halter.

  “He belongs to Mary Lee.”

  “She must have gotten herself dumped,” he said, tying the rope around an aspen sapling. “Let's get the hell out of here. If we see Mary Lee on the way up, she can jump in the truck. Let's go.”

  He started back to the truck, too concerned about Sam to consider anything else. But J.D. stood there and stared at that empty saddle. With fear clenching a fist in his belly, he thought of Mary Lee, the little city girl who liked to act tougher than she was. And he thought of all her suspicions and her determination to find the truth. And he thought of the signs he had seen up on Five-Mile creek, signs of a hunt. He thought of Samantha, who had been seen bound to a bed, and Lucy, who had been found with a bullet blown clean through her.

  Above the trees, thunder tumbled through the swollen clouds. A sense of doom descended on him like a shroud.

  They scrambled up the hillside, Mari dragging and shoving Samantha along, pushing her own body far beyond its limits. The cover of forest had grown dense again, giving them a small measure of security. Any shot would have to be taken from close range.

  Her foot slipped on the trail, and she went down hard, what little breath she had leaving her on a grunt as her right knee cracked against the dome of a rock buried in the soft loam. Gravity and the weight of Samantha hanging on her left arm threatened to pull her backward, and she grabbed wildly to catch hold of a handful of a huckleberry bush.

  We're dead. We're dead. The words pulsed through her brain. The expression on Sam's face seemed to confirm them. Her eyes had gone flat and dull, as if there were nothing behind them, as if her soul had already departed. Her mouth hung slack. She was in shock, Mari supposed, her systems shutting down one by one until the only thing left to kill was a body running on autopilot. The plan held a certain appeal. As she sat in the mud, her body on fire with pain, she had to kick herself mentally to keep from succumbing. Her will was flagging, her stamina gone. Del's place was still a distant dream.

  We're dead. We're dead!

  There was no way on earth they were going to make it. She couldn't drag herself any farther, let alone drag Samantha with her. The sounds of the dogs baying rang in her ears.

  We're dead, she thought again. The air sliced in and out of her lungs like the blade of a ripsaw. A million things buzzed through her head—prayers, longings, regrets, images of her family, nebulous thoughts of the children she would never have, J.D. Damn hardheaded cowboy. Too stubborn to know a good thing when he saw it.

  Oh, damn, Marilee, this isn't the time.

  From some deep well inside her she dredged up strength she had never imagined possessing and pushed herself to her feet. She propped Samantha up against a tree and scrambled to get a view of their pursuer. She could see the basin they had skirted. The hunting dogs were racing through the high grass. Sharon rode just behind them with a rifle slung across her back. They were moving fast, closing in. Apparently, Sharon didn't find a manhunt nearly as much fun in the rain. She had probably decided to waste them and be done with it. Go home for a soak in the Jacuzzi and relive her glory moments over champagne.

  The rain was coming harder, slicing down through the trees, plastering their clothes to their bodies.

  “I don't want to die,” Samantha mumbled to the world at large. She stared straight ahead as if she were blind.

  “Then you have to do what I say,” Mari said sharply. She took hold of the girl's shoulders and pulled her around to face her. “Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Sam? You have to listen to me.”

  Her gaze swept the area for possibilities as her brain did a thumbnail sketch of a plan. It wasn't much, but it was better than being run into the ground and shot in the back. She laid it out for Samantha as quickly and concisely as she could, and prayed that the girl wasn't too deep in shock to comprehend. Then she sent Samantha ahead on the trail and hoisted herself into the branches of a pine tree.

  There was no sign of Del at the cabin. J.D. shrugged into a rain slicker and saddled a pair of stout, leggy geldings while Will went to the inner sanctum and procured a pair of rifles.

  There had been no sign of Mary Lee along the trail. J.D. couldn't keep his mind off her. Was she lying hurt somewhere? Was she dead? Was her disappearance somehow connected to her search for the truth?

  And where the hell did Del fit into this ugly picture? God, he would never forgive himself if Del had done something to Mary Lee. He had allowed his uncle to stew in his own madness up here. If it turned out that Del had gone over the edge, it would be J.D.'s responsibility. What if Del had shot Lucy? What if he had strangled Daggrepont? He didn't want to believe it could happen, but what he wanted to believe and what was true were increasingly two very different things.

  He tried unsuccessfully to clear it all from his mind as they mounted up and headed northwest.

  Sharon pulled up at the base of yet another sharp hill, in the shelter of a canopy of ancient pine trees. The rain was turning her mood sour. She had planned to continue riding until the girl turned around and begged her for mercy. But the little bitch was proving to be remarkably resilient and the rain was spoiling everything.

  She raised her gun and peered up the trail through the night vision scope. Her quarry was on the ground, lying in a heap, about a hundred and fifty yards up the hill. She could see no sign of the Jennings woman, and assumed she had run on after the girl collapsed. There were no other options for her. She wasn't armed. She couldn't hope to fend off the dogs. She had no way of protecting herself from the rifle except to keep on going after the girl had fallen and hope that Sharon would settle for her original target.

  The dogs ran circles around Sharon's horse, frantic for the command to go. She didn't give it. Not just yet. She wanted a moment to savor the anticipation. She smiled wickedly, wishing Bryce could be watching this. She wa
nted him to see what she could be compelled to do. She wanted him to know the lengths to which she would go. Just imagining his shock brought her a sense of power. He didn't realize her strength. He didn't realize she was his strength. Without her, he was nothing. Without her, he would succumb to the tepid pleasures of a girl like Samantha Rafferty or a petty criminal like Lucy MacAdam and his power would shrivel and die.

  She would never allow that to happen.

  She urged the horse forward.

  Mari looked down on her from the branches of the pine tree. A hundred unforeseen complications thundered through her head. What if she missed? What if she landed behind the horse or on one of the dogs? What if the dogs caught her scent? All Sharon had to do was tilt the muzzle of her rifle up and pull the trigger.

  She took a breath and held it, waiting. The dogs were setting up a racket that rivaled the storm, dashing up the trail, then turning back. A memory of the way the dogs had torn into the tiger in the video flashed through her mind, and she shifted uneasily on the branch. Samantha had endured enough horrors without being torn apart by a pack of dogs, but if they weren't diverted soon, they would undoubtedly make a dash for her.

  The horse came a step closer and another step closer. Mari crouched down on the limb, wishing she had a weapon of some kind. But there was nothing at hand, and wishing wouldn't save their bacon.

  Without allowing herself another thought, she stepped off the branch and hurled herself down on Sharon Russell. She caught the blonde around the shoulders with her arms, tipping her backward in the saddle. The rifle went off with a crack.

  Startled, the horse bolted sideways, ducking out from under Mari and slamming Sharon's right leg into the trunk of a tree. She howled her rage and twisted around in the saddle, swinging the gun in Mari's direction. Mari scrambled to stand and fling herself ahead at the same time, grabbing wildly for the rifle barrel. She caught hold of the fore end of the stock and shoved it aside just as Sharon pulled the trigger.

  The rifle cracked again, spitting its load into the soft loam of the hillside. Mari hung on tight to the gun as the horse leapt forward, eyes rolling, hooves scrambling for purchase. Sharon had the choice of giving up her ride or her rifle. She came out of the saddle screaming in fury.

  Her momentum drove Mari backward on the steep hillside, and she stumbled and went down, letting go of the gun to try to save herself from rolling down a hundred feet of mountainside. She skidded backward on the rain-slick slope, grabbing for anything she could and catching hold of a broken branch that was three feet long and thicker than a baseball bat. Her fingers gripped it hard as she struggled to get her feet under her, her eyes on Bryce's cousin the whole time.

  Sharon came at her with madness flaming in her eyes and terrible alien cries tearing from her throat. She brought the rifle up against her shoulder. Mari surged upward, swinging the branch, once again knocking the gun to the side. Without wasting a second, she lunged closer and swung again with all her might, catching the woman hard enough in the upper arm to make her lose her grip on the rifle.

  The gun dropped and bounced down the hillside, twisting and flipping. Both women scrambled after it, pushing and shoving at each other until they went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Samantha watched from up the trail, thinking she should do something, but she couldn't think what. Her brain felt numb. The rain pouring down gave the scene a weird, dreamlike quality and separated her from the other women like a wall, like a window she could see through but not move through. She could actually feel her consciousness retreat inside her mind. She wanted to shut down, to black out, to fall into oblivion where she couldn't be hurt and she didn't have to exist in this nightmare. But a small, strident voice inside her shouted for her to hang on, to get up, to do something.

  She struggled to her feet and started down the hill. Then the dogs turned and looked right at her with their eyes bright and their teeth showing.

  Mari fought to get free of Sharon. They had come to rest on a shelf of treeless ground that jutted out from the hillside. The rifle lay half a yard away, nearer the edge. Mari lunged for it, her fingertips just grazing the butt of the stock as Sharon fell on her. The rifle slipped beyond her grasp. She twisted onto her back and tried to throw her attacker off, but Sharon's hands closed on her throat and squeezed. Those hands were large and strong, as masculine as her face, which was now twisted with madness and rage, distorted into a grotesque mask. The features blurred and melted together as the blackness of unconsciousness crept around the edges of Mari's vision.

  She struggled beneath the weight of the larger woman, clawing at Sharon's sinewy forearms to no avail. Flinging her hands out to the side, she scrabbled for anything she could use as a weapon and closed her fingers on a jagged shank of wood. With all the strength she could muster, she swung her arm up and jabbed the shard into Sharon's biceps.

  Sharon screamed, twisting to grab the makeshift knife, throwing herself off balance. Mari heaved her hips upward and to the left, and her assailant fell off her, allowing her to scramble to her feet. She jumped up, dizzy, her legs heavy and slow beneath her. Sharon lunged sideways, making another grab for the rifle and catching hold of the sling. She pulled the gun toward her as she slid another five feet toward the edge of the ground. Desperate, Mari flung herself on Bryce's cousin, knocking the gun from her hands and sending it over the edge and down the side of the mountain.

  The two of them wrestled and kicked and clawed, sending a hail of loose rock careening down the slope. Mari felt her strength ebb as the initial burst of adrenaline faded. She had been running for miles. Sharon was fresh. Sharon was in shape. Sharon was insane. And as they came to their feet, she discovered one other very important thing about Sharon Russell—she had a knife.

  At the sound of the rifle shots, Will kicked his horse into a gallop without regard for the terrain or the animal or his own life.

  J.D. was right behind him, his thoughts on Mary Lee. He leaned back hard in the saddle as his gelding skidded down the trail, slipping on the mud and dead vegetation. They crashed through the brush and over fallen logs, dodging trees and boulders, stumbling over roots. The rain came down through the trees as loud as nails on a tin roof. It sluiced over the brims of their hats and obscured vision. They rode on, oblivious of it.

  Del held his position, watching the goings-on through a 36x Unertl scope. The scope nearly ran the length of an all-black Heckler and Koch .308 assault rifle. His meanest, ugliest, ass-kicking gun. He had it tricked out to take a sixty-shot banana clip. It was the siege gun. The gun he would use to protect his family and his land from all comers.

  The time had come to use it. He could feel it. His nerves were jumping like live wires beneath his skin. He felt as though he had a swarm of bees inside his head, that if he could uncork the knot of flesh on top of his head, bees would fly out by the hundreds. He wished he could do that to clear his mind. He wished a lot of things. He wished the little blonde—the talker—had not come to his place. She said she had seen the tigers too, but he still wasn't sure she wasn't trying to trick him. The blondes were like that. The one had lured J.D., the dead one, the same one that lured Del during the long nights. They couldn't be trusted.

  He had followed the talker a ways out from his place. Not too far, because he didn't feel good about leaving the cabin now that its sanctity had been breached. And then he had picked himself a spider hole and waited. There was something in the air, something akin to the storm that gathered angrily overhead. He lay prone in his spider hole and waited as the anticipation built into a ball of energy at the base of his skull.

  He had expected the dog-boys and the hunters. What he saw through the scope were the blondes. Two of them locked in combat. They were perhaps five hundred yards out and sharply down the mountain from him on a lip of ground that had always been called Bald Knob. The lack of trees on Bald Knob afforded him a decent view, but his vision was obscured by the rain and the light was nearly gone. The blondes moved together, like
dancers, like sexual mates, writhing and twisting, their bodies melding into a grotesque mutation of the human form.

  Del's fingers moved restlessly on the rifle, stretching, limbering. The tip of his trigger finger hummed with energy as it caressed the arc of steel. His heart was running like a generator in his chest. He couldn't seem to slow it. His lungs felt overinflated. Panic filled his throat. He could smell his nerves like smoldering wiring. His stillness had deserted him. Thunder boomed overhead, and he thought of mortar fire and listened to the remembered crackle of radio static as it skated along between the plate and his brain.

  He didn't know what to do. Had they come to take the ranch? To taunt him? To drive him mad? To kill one another? He didn't understand. He couldn't calm himself enough to think. Time seemed to be moving at hyperspeed and there was nothing he could do to still even one moment.

  Kill them!

  But he knew he shouldn't.

  Protect the ranch. Make the family proud. Be a hero.

  Hero.

  Behind his eyes he saw the little blonde looking up at him. You can be a hero, Del . . . J.D. will be so proud of you . . .

  The blondes fought on, their features melting and distorting in the rain until he couldn't tell one from the other.

  He had to do something. Do the right thing. Do the hard thing. Save the day. Save the ranch. Save himself.

  He tightened the HK-91against his shoulder and blew out half a breath.

  Samantha faced the dogs, holding herself as still as a statue, thinking that if she were still enough, she might somehow become invisible to them. But they had already seen her and they had spent the better part of a day trailing her scent. They took a step toward her and then another. She took a step back, then they all sprang into motion at once—the dogs lunging toward her, Samantha turning and trying to run up the steep slope.