Within seconds, a large brown shadow with long ears ambled out of the underbrush.
Mariah smiled. “A mule deer.” A smaller shadow frolicked along the same path. “And her fawn.”
Eric sank back on his heels. “Mule deer?”
“They’re all over the mountain. I’m surprised we haven’t seen them before.”
They watched in silence as mama and baby lapped up water from what appeared to be a tiny stream. Once, mama lifted her head and scented the air, but she and Eric must have been downwind, because she lowered her head and drank again.
By the time the deer moved on, the sky had turned decidedly pink.
“Sun’s coming up. Time to get moving,” Eric said.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He backed another step, pulling her with him. “That stream. It’s not natural.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s an irrigation hose of some sort.”
“That’s very good, Randall,” a snickering voice called. Enc looked up sharply as two men—one holding a rifle—stepped out of the woods.
“Yeah,” the other man added. “For a city boy.”
Eric locked gazes with first one man, then the other. “What’s the matter, deputies?” he asked. “Forget your black masks this time?”
Chapter 14
“Drop the gun,” Deputy Rodney Cain ordered.
Mariah felt Eric’s left arm on her hip, urging her to his back. She didn’t move quickly enough. The barrel of the rifle swung in her direction.
“Drop it, or I drop her.”
His gun clattered on the rocks at his feet. Too late, she understood why Eric hadn’t wanted her on the mountain. She was a tool to be used against him.
“Now move away. Over there.” Deputy Hayes nodded to their left. Once they’d crossed ten feet, he climbed down the slope and picked up Eric’s gun, then stood in front of them, leering. “Well. Isn’t this sweet? Two lovebirds watching the sunrise together. We’ve been waiting for you.” He sounded very full of himself. “The boss didn’t figure a little paint would scare you off. You don’t look like the kind of man that’s got an ounce of quit in him. And you—” He turned to Mariah. “The boss says you have always been too stubborn for your own good.” Both deputies laughed, and Hayes pointed uphill. “Now get moving. That way.”
“Where are we going?” Mariah asked.
“Up there.” Cain spat on the ground. “To show you what you’ve been looking for.”
Mariah threw a panicked look at Eric. The deputies wouldn’t show them anything incriminating and let them live to tell about it. She saw the same realization in the depths of Eric’s eyes, and guilt hit her like a fist in the stomach. Eric had been right about her. She was a fool. A dreamer. She’d thought that with his help she could find the answers she’d sought for so long. She’d believed that at last she could have a life. That she could have him. She’d concocted her own happily ever after tale, believing nothing bad could happen, and he was going to pay the price.
A half an hour later, Eric, Mariah and the deputies were breathing hard from the climb. Cain was well in front of Eric and Mariah, leading the way. Hayes was behind them with the rifle trained on their backs. Not so subtly, Eric kept his back between her and the rifle.
She stopped at the bottom of a steep slope and turned to Eric, needing to say the words that had been playing in a continuous loop in her head during their forced march now, in case she never got another chance. “Eric, I want you to know how sorry I am that I got you involved—”
“Forget it.” He stopped her words with a fierce glare. “I mean it. Don’t you give up! We are going to get out of this.”
Surprisingly, given the circumstances, she felt a corner of her mouth curl upward. “They’re right. You don’t have an ounce of quit in you, do you?”
“Not when it comes to you.”
This Eric was new to her. This determination. This utter confidence in himself—and in her. He wore a warrior’s expression, as if he believed they were invincible. That belief gave her strength.
“Shut up and keep moving,” Hayes called out.
With more hope than she’d had before, Mariah picked her way up the cliff. Cain disappeared in the gap between two boulders at the top. Hayes motioned for them to follow.
Eric turned to the deputy behind him. “What now? Why bring us all the way up here to kill us?”
“All part of the boss’s plan.”
“The boss, huh?” Eric’s voice was tight with fury. “You can tell Hightower—”
Hayes laughed and motioned at the narrow passage where Cain had disappeared. “You can tell him yourself.”
When they entered, Mariah didn’t understand everything she saw, but she knew enough about gardening to get the gist of the operation the deputies had been hiding on the mountain.
The cave extended at least twenty feet into the rock formation. The light filtering in through the entrance lit a folding card table and four metal chairs, a half-empty case of beer and a circular fan. From the darkness in back, some kind of machinery hummed. Generators, Mariah guessed. Something had to provide all this power.
“All this for a little weed?” Disgust echoed in Eric’s voice.
“That weed—marijuana—has provided us a nice living for the last fifteen years,” Hayes said.
Cain sat down in one of the folding chairs. “Yeah. More than we could ever have made as deputies.”
Hayes laughed. “Working as deputies on the side did provide some...security, though. At least while Jay Robb was sheriff. He was more interested in counting the days until he could collect his pension than watching what we were doing.”
“Where’s Hightower?” Eric peered into the darkness.
Shoving Mariah the rest of the way into the cave, Hayes explained mockingly to Cain, “They want to talk to the boss.”
Cain snickered as he flicked a switch and a bank of halogen lights came on in the middle of the cave, revealing a man sitting on the floor with his back against a sturdy wooden support post.
“Hightower,” Eric hissed, starting forward.
A tall man stepped from behind a stack of crates and slammed the butt of a rifle in Eric’s abdomen as he passed.
“What the—” Eric grunted, doubled over.
Will Granger grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back to Mariah.
Across the cave, Shane raised his head. Mariah gasped. The sheriff’s right eye was swollen nearly shut. The other eye was bruised as well. His lip was split, and a dried trickle of blood clung to the corner of his mouth. He pulled on the ropes where his hands were tied behind him.
“You want to talk to the boss,” Granger said. “You talk to me.”
“The deputies work for you?” Eric slowly straightened.
Granger lowered the barrel of his rifle. “Ever since they were sixteen and I found them on my mountain, a couple of no-account teenagers sticking plants in the dirt all wrong and killing more than they grew. I showed ‘em how to do it right.” He sounded proud of himself. “I showed ’em how to plant and when to fertilize and how to start crops under lights for a longer growing season and how to irrigate so you get more yield.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “Taught these boys everything they know, right boys?”
Eric’s eyes blazed with anger. “Including how to hide behind masks and kill innocent people who stumble on your operation, hke my brother?”
This time it was Cain’s fist planted in Eric’s gut. “We ain’t killed no one...yet.”
Eric’s face twisted with pain, but he didn’t cry out. Mariah wondered how much that show of pride cost him.
“What did you do?” Eric ground out. “Chase him the way you chased me? Is that why he jumped the gorge, to get away? Then you cleaned up all the evidence and threw his bike into the river?”
Hayes snorted. “We chased him all right. But he didn’t have to jump any gorge to get away. He left us in the dust in about two seconds.”
/> “Lucky for us. Though, you showed up just then,” Cain chipped in, looking at Mariah.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Hayes explained. “You were standing on those rocks with your camera pointed right at one of our growing sheds. He must’ve seen us sneak up on you and knock you out, ’cuz he came flying across that gorge like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“Man, oh man.” Rodney turned his attention to Eric. “That brother of yours sure could ride. I thought he’d gone and sprouted wings, making a jump like that.”
“Yeah, until he hit the soft dirt where we were digging in a new irrigation line and did a header into the trees,” Hayes finished. “It was a helluva wreck. Better than any of those extreme videos they sell on TV.”
Mariah forced the sickness down in her stomach. How could anyone take pleasure from something like that? Mike had died trying to help her. She’d have to live with that guilt for a lifetime.
Shane lifted his eyes to Eric’s. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Eric ground out. “You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Shane’s voice was as raw as his face. He tipped his head toward the shadows at his side. Mariah squinted, but couldn’t make out anything in the darkness. Granger scowled at the deputies and toggled a switch and another bank of lights came on, these near the back of the cave.
A man lay face down in the dirt.
“Oh my God!” Mariah and Eric were at his side in an instant. Eric turned him over gently, careful not to dislodge the makeshift splints that secured his left leg and forearm.
“Mike?” Eric pushed the hair off his brother’s forehead gently, but Mike didn’t respond. Still, the steady, if shallow rise and fall of Mike Randall’s chest reassured Mariah somewhat.
“I’m sorry,” Shane said again. “I found him tied up in a growing shed like this one farther up the mountain.”
“You were looking for him?” Eric’s voice sounded like he didn’t know whether to be grateful or mad as hell.
“No,” Shane said. “I was looking for this operation and just stumbled on him. I did what I could for him, tried to get him out of here, but my deputies showed up before I got very far.”
Granger scowled and grabbed Cain by the collar. “You were supposed to kill him.”
“We were gonna,” Cain whimpered, “just—just—”
“Just what?” Granger looked to Hayes.
“We wanted to make sure Mariah didn’t give us any trouble first.” Hayes’s glance darted around the cave at the assortment of captors and prisoners. “We thought we could get rid of her if she started remembering anything, and make it look like he was to blame.”
“You thought?” Granger pushed Cain away. “You aren’t supposed to think. I’m the boss of this operation. I told you not to worry about Mariah. I took care of everything.”
“Just exactly how did you do that?” Eric asked sharply.
Granger laughed. “Marijuana isn’t the only illegal drug we deal in. We provide a full selection for our customers, including a kind that will block out memories, which is especially popular these days.”
“Like a date rape drug?” Mariah asked, the implications sinking in.
Eric reached out and touched her hair. “Damn. I should have realized. You didn’t lose your memory, baby—you were drugged.”
“Her losing her memory worked for me once before. I figured it could work again. Only this time I gave it a little help.”
Manah jerked her head up, breaking away from Eric’s touch and immediately regretting the loss. “What do you mean my amnesia worked for you before?”
A silence as eene as the greenish glow from the plant lights hung in the cave. Mariah finally broke the stillness, the disbelief in her heart making its way into her words. “My God, you killed them. You killed my parents.” All these years she’d wondered, doubted herself, her sanity, and it had been Will Granger at fault.
“They were poking around up here and found one of my sheds,” he grumbled defensively. “I tried to reason with them—I even offered to cut them in, but they ran—ran halfway down the mountain to that blasted shack they called a cabin before I caught up with them. Then when I broke inside, you came charging out from nowhere holding that old rifle so tight I thought you might break it in two.”
Mariah’s vision wavered, then scenes flicked through her mind one at a time, like a series of still shots. Instead of early morning it was midnight. She heard a sound outside, like a motorcycle. Her mother and father ran into the cabin. Her father bolted the door and pushed a chair in front of it while her mother shooed her into a closet and told her to be quiet, but she opened the closet door just a crack, so she could see. Something banged on the cabin door. Harder. Harder.
She reached for the gun in the closet, and stood on her tiptoes to get the bullets from the top shelf. Her fingers fumbled as she tried to figure out how to put the bullets in the gun. She’d seen it on TV, but it was dark in the closet.
The bolt on the door shattered and the table scraped across the floor. A tall man came in, but she couldn’t see his face. She finally got one bullet in, then another. There was more shouting, then a scuffle, like fighting, and her mother screamed. She opened the door, and raised the rifle.
“You couldn’t do it, though,” Granger said. “You couldn’t pull the trigger.”
The tall man was right in front of her, but she still couldn’t see his face. She should shoot, but her finger wouldn’t move. He reached out with a gloved hand and took the gun from her. “Didn’t your ma and pa teach you not to play with guns, missy?”
Then the gunshots.
“Why?” she asked, feeling lightheaded as the blood drained to her extremities. “Why didn’t you kill me, too?”
“I didn’t mean to kill nobody.” Granger shook his head as if, just for a second, he actually regretted what he’d done. “But your ma tried to jump me when I took the gun from you, and the rifle went off. It was an accident. But then I had to kill your pa, too, because he’d never keep quiet after what happened to your ma. By the time it was over, you had run off into the woods. I tried to go after you, but you got away. You were a quick little thing.”
She had blood on her hands and she was running. Someone was behind her. She looked back, and for the first time, she saw the face of the man chasing her—Will Granger.
“You should’ve never come back here. You should’ve let me buy you out when I offered,” Granger seethed, wrenching Mariah’s thoughts back to the present. She realized she was shaking. His eyes were red rimmed. “But it’s too late for that now.” He looked at Rodney and Seth. “Let’s get on with it.”
Five minutes later, Rodney had untied Shane while Seth escorted Enc and Mariah from the cave. They all stood together on a rocky plateau.
Eric watched for a chance, the slightest opening, to take action, but Seth kept his rifle too close to Mariah to allow him any chance at escape. Time was running out.
“What’s your plan, Will?” Rodney yelled.
Will swaggered across the clearing. The deputies’ motorcycles and a four-wheel ATV were parked under a tarp slung across the rocks. The ATV must have been the engine he couldn’t identify that first day on the mountain, when he’d been running. Granger must have been there, too.
Will scratched his chin. “There’s going to be a terrible shoot-out. Seems the sheriff—and his deputies, of course—discovered the Randall brothers were growing illegal drugs on our mountain. Hightower tried to talk them out of it peacefully, but the Randalls gunned him down in cold blood. Course then you boys had to return fire, and the Randalls were both killed. Unfortunately, a local girl, Mariah Morgan, was killed in the crossfire. She must have been in with them, poor misguided soul.”
“So Mike and Mariah and I are going to take the fall for all of it.” Eric’s heart thudded slowly as the simplicity—and viability—of Granger’s plan sunk in. He and Mike were out-of-towners, and the sheriff was ne
w. People would believe whatever they heard about them, whatever the deputies told them.
“Course we’ll have to retire now, what with the ruckus this will cause. But we’ve already made enough money to last, and raising a cash crop is hard work. I’m getting too old for this.” Will whirled toward Rodney, who watched wide-eyed. “Give me his gun.” Taking the weapon Rodney handed him, he checked the ammunition then fired, seemingly at random, into the rocks beyond the cave. After he’d wiped the gun clean of his own fingerprints, he handed the pistol to Eric.
“There’s one bullet left,” Granger said. “We need you to fire it, so there’ll be gunpowder residue on your hands and the ballistics report will be in order. The sheriff has to die by your gun, your hand.”
Seth dragged Shane several yards away from the group, steadied him on his feet, and stepped away.
“Go ahead,” Granger said. “Shoot the sheriff.”
The gun in Eric’s hands seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. A thousand. He couldn’t possibly lift it. He looked at Mariah. The horrified sheen in her eyes made his heart pull tight. He’d thought he could make things right for her, find the answers to her questions and give her back the dreams she’d lost.
He’d tried so damn hard. And he’d failed.
Seth grabbed Mariah and pushed the barrel of the rifle into her side. “Go ahead. Do it or I shoot her.”
He swung around slowly toward Hightower. The sheriff swayed a moment, then straightened his spine and met Eric’s gaze head-on.
How could he do it? How could he kill a man—a man who had risked his life to save Mike? How could he not, if it would buy time—even just a few minutes—for Mariah?
“Do it, cowboy,” Rodney urged, a sick grin on his face. Seth wrapped a fist in Mariah’s hair and yanked her head back.
Unable to find enough spit to swallow, much less speak, Eric faced Hightower a final time. Hightower was watching Mariah, too, and Eric saw his eyes spark at her pain.
Then the sheriff bore his eyes down on Eric. “Huh! Cowboy! The closest this city boy’s ever gotten to a cowboy is the front row at a Saturday afternoon western. Am I right? Did you watch a lot of B-movies, city boy? They make it look easy to kill a man, don’t they?” The sheriff looked like he’d just woken up from a long, sad dream. “Go ahead, city boy. It’s easy. Just like in the movies.”
Virgin without a Memory Page 20
