by Jenna Ryan
The runner darted through gullies and hopped over fallen logs, but Aidan suspected he was tiring. Even jackrabbits had their limits.
Unfortunately, so did cops who’d been dead for two years. A mile in, he opted to go with the odds. He waited for the man to pull up as they approached a wide stand of bushes, then, stopping, fired three shots into the mist.
The runner stiffened and spun in place. Several drunken steps later, he vanished into the darkness.
Aidan headed toward the greenery with caution. Tendrils of white twined about his ankles, but all he could hear were his own footsteps and half the insect population of Maine waking up for the night.
He expected the shots when he glimpsed the man down on one knee, his shoulder butted up against a rock smeared dark with blood.
Ducking behind a bush, Aidan called to him, “You can toss the gun or bleed out. Your choice.”
“Go ahead and shoot, McInnis—if you’ve got the balls. I see your face or any other part of you, you’re a dead man.”
“You think?” Clearing the outer leaves, Aidan took aim, cursed the night mist and squeezed the trigger.
The man’s body jerked. He’d worked himself to his feet, but Aidan’s bullet threw him against the trunk of a poplar and sent his gun flying into the night.
“You know you have to kill me, right? I’ll keep fighting you until you do.”
“Why?”
“Because you murdered my kid, why the hell do you think?”
“You know what happened that night. Jason’s dying wasn’t part of any plan.”
“He’s dead all the same, isn’t he?”
The sudden surge of motion came as no surprise. It irritated the hell out of him, but Aidan had already figured the guy was playing possum to some degree. He’d wanted a clear shot of his own. Hadn’t gotten one, but like any shooter worth his salt, he’d taken a chance.
“Where are you?” Gaitor shouted the question through increasing static.
“No idea.”
Back on the move, the man leaped left, somersaulted over a felled tree and barreled on.
“Take the next road that goes west, partner.”
“I sent a sheriff’s deputy after you,” Gaitor returned. “Hope he’s fit enough to keep up.”
Aidan hoped he was fit enough to keep his quarry in sight, because there was no chance the guy would be exiting the woods anytime soon.
Another mile on, the runner veered right, halted abruptly and slipped out of sight behind a fat spruce. “Stop there, McInnis.”
At least he was panting, Aidan thought as he bent at the waist to suck in badly needed air.
“Come one step closer—” the man emerged from the trunk as a silhouette “—and I’ll drill the bitch.”
Aidan’s insides turned to liquid. Until his eyes cleared and he realized the woman who’d been yanked—bound, gagged and whimpering—into view had the wrong shape to be Raven. This woman’s hair was short and her figure less curvy.
“Yes, you can see she’s not your precious wife, but you wouldn’t want this one’s death on your conscience, either, would you?”
“Is this what you want?” Aidan called back. “To kill an innocent woman? A stranger?”
“Who I do or don’t kill at this particular moment is entirely up to you, Lieutenant. You let me walk, I let her live. It’s a fair exchange. Don’t,” he barked when Aidan’s hand twitched. “You can’t be stupid enough to think I don’t have a gun stuck in her back.”
“No, I’m not stupid enough to think that. Then again...”
When a twig snapped behind him, the man reacted instinctively, swinging his head around to find Gaitor standing several yards away.
Aidan knew he had him then, and fired off three rapid shots—one in the shoulder, one in the side, one in the leg.
A shocked snarl emerged as the man reared backward, released his hostage and dropped to the ground, jerking in pain.
His legs wobbling from exertion, Gaitor went to his knees to help the woman, hysterical now, while Aidan grabbed the fallen man by his jacket and flipped him onto his back.
“Hey, Guy.” Crouching, he jammed his Glock under the beard of the braided hippie. “You’re an agile bastard, I’ll give you that.”
“Hey yourself, Lieutenant.” The man bit the words out on wheezing bursts of breath. “You move pretty well yourself.”
When Gaitor pulled the gag from the woman’s mouth, Aidan realized that Guy’s hostage was Sylvie, the blonde woman who’d helped him find Raven in the crypt.
Still on her butt, she caterpillar crawled away from her captor. “You should shoot him,” she said with a quaver. “He’s crazy, and I mean stark raving.” She started to shiver. “I helped him bottle that fruit stuff he likes so much, and suddenly, out of nowhere, he shoves a knife under my chin and says his name’s not really Biggs, it’s Demars. Like it makes a difference what he calls himself when I figure he’s gonna stick me.”
Pounding footsteps approached and slowed. In the process of untying the ropes from Sylvie’s ankles, Gaitor raised a hand. “It’s okay, Deputy, we’re good. McInnis and me got him.”
The winded deputy bent for a look. “You might not have him for long if you don’t get him to a hospital, sirs. Bangor should do since it seems like all three bullets passed right through.”
The neon flashed a new and larger warning in Aidan’s head. Something about this felt wrong. The reason slammed into him when he stood to stash his gun.
“Biggs,” he repeated, and narrowed his eyes on Sylvie’s face. “Is that what you said?”
“I said what he said. ‘Call me Biggs,’ he told me my first night here.”
But that wasn’t what he’d told Raven. “I’m Guy,” he’d said outside Phil Herron’s empty tent.
A tent that contained three rifles. The tent of a man who’d had his eyes shot out and his body dumped in the ocean.
“Biggs.” Aidan spoke to Gaitor now. “Guy Biggs. He’s George’s ‘big guy.’ Jesus, Gaitor, he’s not Johnny Demars. He’s Demars’s second hit man.” Which meant, Aidan realized through a nightmarish haze of fear, that Demars was back on the ridge.
With Raven.
* * *
MOST OF THE PLAYERS wandered off the stage and into the audience at will. Only Hezekiah and the good and evil spirits had voices and were therefore required to stay put.
“The ‘evil’ actor sounds exactly like I figure a snake would sound.” Fergus squirmed. “Low and hissy, like a trail of slime.”
Raven rubbed her chilled arms. “My grandfather—my dad’s father—sounded like that, and he wasn’t even a Blume. Wonder what that says about his personality?”
Fergus followed her gaze. “You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“Very. Aidan would say I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it. Johnny Demars is a shadow, Fergus. How do you capture a shadow?”
“You dip it in lead and make it so the shadow can’t disappear.” He shrugged a massive shoulder. “Gaitor told me that, once when I was a kid and I asked the same question. I thought it was kind of a cool idea. Er, do you think we can take our masks off now?”
“Probably.” Not that she wanted to, but the last communication she’d heard on her crackling two-way had been a shout from one of the Reenactment ravens about a jackrabbit.
Fergus removed his feathered head. “That’s better.” He whooshed out a breath, inhaled deeply and coughed when his lungs filled with drifting grill smoke. “Aw, that’s gross. I don’t like fish, do you? I mean I know it’s good for you, but it always tastes so—fishy.”
Raven laughed at his expression. “You look like a baby who’s just swallowed a spoonful of mashed carrots and beets.”
He brightened. “I could eat that before smoked salmon. My uncle loves smoked West Coast salmon.”
“I know. I made sure it was served at Aidan’s wake.” She twirled her mask in agitation. “Where are they? And why did our stupid radios have to cut out?”
&nbs
p; “Because they’re old?”
His uncertain tone struck a humorous note. “Rooney’s old, and he’s still going strong. Why are you fidgeting?”
He squirmed again. “Ravenberry juice. It goes right through you.”
“You mean you want to be excused.”
“Only for a minute. I’ll use the porta-john.” He shuddered. “Just this once.”
“You’re a trouper, Fergus.” Raven’s grin was faint as her eyes rescanned the misty points of rock. “I’ll wait for you here.” Because—dumb, dumb, dumb—she’d promised Aidan she wouldn’t move.
She hadn’t, however, promised not to pace. Or to go over everything in her head for the umpteenth time.
George and Demars’s two favorite hit men were dead. No, strike that. One hit man was dead. Phil Herron remained a question mark in Aidan’s mind. No idea why.
Aidan believed that Demars had shot and killed Weasel. Weasel had had a mini cassette recorder and a tape in his backpack. A man’s voice had said, “Jason...” at the end of a previously one way conversation.
Neither Raven nor Aidan recognized the voice. At least they couldn’t connect it to anyone they’d met in Raven’s Cove. That didn’t mean Demars wasn’t here, merely that they hadn’t heard him speak. Or if they had, they didn’t have enough of the taped voice to identify him.
Pressing her fingers to her temples, she walked back and forth on the rocky ground and tried to unkink the thoughts jumbled together in her brain.
Outside view, inside view, abstract view, none of her usual clarification techniques worked. All she felt right now was terrified for Aidan’s life and—weird, she realized suddenly. Now when had that sensation snuck back in?
Grill smoke blew by her in dense clouds. She couldn’t imagine why that should intensify the feeling, but it did, so she went with it and concentrated.
In was like déjà vu, but not quite. Connected to the food stalls, but not really.
“Fish,” she said softly. “Is it something to do with fish?”
A foggy, distant image floated just out of reach. Raven stood absolutely still, afraid if she moved, the partly formed memory would fade to black.
Was it a face, an object or both?
The grill smoke obscured her vision, yet in some strange way, it seemed to be aiding her memory.
Fergus’s voice repeated, “Gaitor loves smoked salmon...”
Smoked salmon, smoke in the air. Smoke and trees blurring her mind, taking her to another place and time.
“You need to eat, dear...”
“You should dance, Raven...”
“Would you like a canapé, ma’am? The topping’s smoked salmon...”
Like a light blinking on, the image solidified. It had a face, with features she recognized from two different places—Aidan’s wake, and here.
She hitched in a shocked breath.
Wait though. Was this a valid memory or merely her overworked mind drawing false pictures?
Raven sensed a presence behind her a split second before a small, hard object dug into her spine.
“Hello, Raven,” said a cold but familiar voice.
Valid, she realized as her lungs constricted and the blood in her veins turned to ice. Extremely valid.
The object—a gun not a knife—pushed in deeper. “Did you figure it out?” the voice asked. “Because you’re not moving, not saying hello back and you don’t seem the least bit surprised. I wondered if you might recognize me, but I told myself, no, she won’t even remember the big parts of that day, let alone a single insignificant person inside one of the smaller ones. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You do remember some of those smaller pieces, and you’ve put the pertinent ones together with the here and now.”
Raven wasn’t sure how she found her voice, but she did. “You’re not...” Then she lost the thought in panic and had to substitute an inadequate “Who are you?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, or worse yet, boring. You’re too smart to ask stupid questions. You know who I am, just as surely as you know what I’m going to do to you.”
One silent word repeated in Raven’s head, and it wasn’t polite. But it helped clear out some of the terror. “You’re not Johnny Demars, but you’re connected to him, and you’re going to do what I assume you’ve been promising to do since you discovered that Aidan was alive. You’re going to kill me and, like the soldier from the legend, have your revenge. An eye for an eye.”
Chapter Sixteen
“I must have jiggled something loose when I fell.” Gaitor played with his two-way as he and Aidan ran for the road. “Yours?”
“Stopped working after the last time I spoke to you.”
“Do you have your cell?”
“It’s in the Jeep—with Raven’s. Come on, Gaitor, where did you park?”
“Point your flashlight east. You’ll see the back end.”
Panic threatened to spike, but Aidan found he could block it. The wicked thrust of love was another matter.
Picturing the gruesome possibilities had already slowed his thinking processes. Unable to shut them out completely, he used them to leap from thought to disconnected thought.
He’d left Raven with Fergus—but Demars was resourceful enough not to see that as an obstacle. There was a crowd of people on the ridge—but Weasel had plucked her out of a crowd, no problem.
Switch to something helpful, he ordered himself.
He could strike anyone he’d met or seen who was under forty-five from the list of potential crime lords. Ditto the people Gaitor referred to as the faithful. Take away Raven’s distant relatives and Rooney’s friends. Nix anyone else currently living in Raven’s Cove.
That still left too many to count, and for all he knew, Demars hadn’t made himself visible during his tenure here. His instincts argued that point, but as Gaitor had said more than once, instincts could be easily skewed by food, drink and intense emotions.
“Praise the Lord,” his partner gasped when they finally reached the Jeep. He climbed in, panting. “Any brainstorms, yet?”
“No.”
But he continued to bounce the possibilities as he shoved the vehicle in gear and swung out onto the road.
Gaitor wasn’t quick enough to prevent the cassette recorder on the dash from hitting the floor. He picked it up. “Is this the machine you found in Weasel’s pack, the one with the man’s voice on it?”
“Yeah, but there’s not enough on the tape to tell us anything.”
Gaitor searched for the cassette that had fallen out. “I’ll take a stab at it while you drive.”
Although he nodded, Aidan’s mind was no longer on the tape.
He’d felt the wrongness of tonight’s pursuit from the start. Demars hadn’t achieved his current level of success by doing the obvious. Guy Biggs, George’s “big guy,” had been a decoy. So had Phil Herron, though he’d likely had nothing to do with either Biggs or Demars. He’d been a dupe, and he’d died. Which told him that Johnny Demars possessed virtually no ethics at this juncture, and would murder without compunction or remorse.
Why in hell, a far distant part of his brain wondered, should that surprise him?
Voices from Weasel’s recorder broke into the churn of his thoughts.
“You’re turning him into your clone,” a woman accused. “An adolescent Mini-Me.”
“I’m giving him insight into a world which, until this moment, suited you very well.”
Aidan frowned. “What is that?”
Gaitor nodded at the cassette recorder. “Tape fell out. I put it back in.”
Although he was tempted to bang his head on the steering wheel for missing something as obvious as playing the flip side of Weasel’s tape, Aidan settled for grinding his teeth and listening to the rest of the conversation.
“We’re talking about a child, Johnny,” the woman continued. “My child.”
“Yours and mine,” the man countered coldly. “This argument’s old, and it’s over. Jason is my future and the future
of my business ventures. It ends here. He’s not a toddler who needs his mother to coddle him. He’s sixteen and more than capable of making his own choices. Now get out of my office. I have work to do.”
“No.”
One of them walked across the hard-surfaced floor.
“Get out,” he repeated. “Now. Before my temper snaps.”
“He’s my child,” the woman maintained.
“And mine.”
Aidan heard it a second later, the unmistakable thwack of two silenced bullets. Two bullets that didn’t ricochet or blast anything apart.
Something soft but solid hit the floor. Several seconds later, the feet moved again. This time, the steps were evenly spaced, the pace more deliberate. A deep breath heaved out.
And then the woman laughed.
* * *
JOANNE, RAVEN THOUGHT as panic clawed through her. The woman had said her name was Joanne. No surname given, none requested. Why bother when they’d been searching for a man.
“Walk,” she barked now. “While you’re at it, put your head mask back on. Better for me if no one sees you leaving the festivities.”
Raven steadied her breathing. “Where are we going?”
“Far away from here. Make any sudden moves and know for a fact, Raven Blume, I’ll kill you where you stand. Are we clear?”
“Perfectly.” Keep her talking, Raven’s terrified mind whispered. “Is your name really Joanne?”
“You want to chat, do you?” The woman shrugged. “Well, why not? Yes, my name’s Joanne—Demars née Farber.” She poked the gun hard into Raven’s side. “You deduced the Demars part, I trust.”
“It made sense. A mother avenging her child’s death.”
“Jason was murdered, Raven. Call a spade a spade.”
She breathed in, then carefully out. “Where’s your husband?”
Joanne laughed. “Ah, yes, my sweet, devoted, faceless Johnny. Sweet to no one, devoted to himself, faceless at the outset by choice and now because nature has the most amazing way of dealing with dead flesh. Oh, but I don’t need to tell you that, do I, as you’re a doctor and would know all about the process of decomposition.” She gave a pleasurable sigh. “I planted him in the garden, under my petunias. Lovely flowers, a veritable riot of color every year. And you know, I’ve never added so much as a speck of fertilizer to the soil.”
