Lone Star Redemption

by Colleen Thompson

  Using a small folding knife she’d pulled from her pocket, Jessie pried at the latch that held the lock in place.

  “Entering,” Henry finished. “You surprise me, Jessie.”

  “Which part?” she asked, easily dragging one screw from the dry-rotted wood. “The knife or the ambition?”

  “You’re not letting me forget that, are you?”

  “Not likely.” Her pulse jumped as the latch fell away. Rusty hinges squealed in protest as the bunkhouse door swung open.

  She grabbed the porch rail, which she’d leaned against the wall, and gestured toward the black maw. “After you, sir.”

  “Ladies first,” Henry said. “Though for the record, I still think this is the worst idea you’ve had all day. And considering some of the other ones, that’s really saying something.”

  Jessie ducked beneath a cobweb that draped the upper portion of the doorway and stepped inside. But the chance that the stains on the old T-shirt might be blood had her heart pounding. Was it possible her sister had never left this glorified shack alive?

  No way, she told herself, even as the fine hairs on the back of her neck rose. Surely, whoever had come to put on the padlock would have noticed something as obvious as a dead body—or its odor.

  Shaking off her jitters, Jessie aimed her flashlight down the long and narrow space. Startled by her entrance, something scuttled across the floor, and she swallowed back revulsion.

  There wasn’t much to see: a grimy tunnel-like room with a stained mattress pushed off to one side, a threadbare, plaid sofa with a distinct sag in the middle. Feet crunching over grit, she took another two steps inside. Enough to spotlight the kitchenette, with its rusty sink and a plug-in electric burner on a plywood countertop. At the far end was a single doorway, which must lead to the bathroom.

  Jessie tried a light switch, found it dead as she’d expected, and walked the length of the bunkhouse, her eyes straining for forgotten oddments: a bent fork, a piece of junk mail—anything that might convey the slightest clue.

  But there was nothing, no trash or personal possessions in the kitchen drawers or the tiny pantry. Even the dented refrigerator had been left unplugged with its doors propped open. Since Jessie couldn’t imagine her sister or her boyfriend taking the trouble to clean before running out on the rent, she supposed that Mrs. Rayford had had whomever she’d sent to secure the door deal with the mess.

  Sighing, Jessie lowered her light. “Guess you’re right. There’s nothing left to see.”

  Henry sidled toward the door. “Let’s get out, then. Before somebody catches us here.”

  “Might as well check the bathroom first,” she said. “Then I’ll be right behind you.”

  The beam of light preceded her, sweeping dated fixtures. A strand of hair lay in the sink, reddish-gold and longer than her own. Unease crawled on spider’s legs up her neck. Haley’s hair, she thought, raising her eyes to the mottled glass of a partially de-silvered mirror.

  There, her attention zoomed in on the brownish speckles along the lower edge—speckles that made her think of dried blood.

  “Henry!” she called.

  But he was shouting her name even louder, screaming, “Jessie, don’t come out!”

  Heart contracting, Jessie reached for the bathroom door to slam it shut. But in that fractured second, she looked out through the narrowing gap to see Henry’s splayed hands rising, his feet scrambling backward as he struggled to escape.

  Reacting on pure reflex, she flung open the door rather than retreating. Unable to bear the thought of anyone hurting her reluctant partner, she launched herself forward, intent on dragging him out of harm’s way before—

  She had barely made it a step when an impossibly loud boom exploded.

  With that single blast, Henry was falling, crumpling as an arc of scarlet sprouted from his back. In the span of that same panicked heartbeat, an invisible blow caught her right hand, a shock that brought with it a wave of dizziness that dropped her to her knees. And pain, pain like she had never known, turned her vision red and dragged a cry from her lungs, sending streamers of shock cascading through her.

  Abruptly biting back her scream, she looked at Henry: her coworker, her friend. A man she’d known for every day of the four years she had worked for Metro Update, a family man with a devoted wife and three grown children, with his first grandchild on the way.

  He lay twitching in an expanding puddle, as his choking rattle gave way to a sigh, then utter stillness. Gone. He’s gone, she understood, the dark certainty slamming her like a mallet. And the bullet that had killed him must have passed through and caught her hand, too.

  Get inside that bathroom, his voice seemed to shout inside her brain, before the shooter comes to finish you, too.

  Adrenaline pounding through her, she fought to get up, to get away, but panic tangled her legs. So she moved as best she could, crawling toward the bathroom using knees and elbows while struggling to keep her throbbing right hand off the filthy floor...and to keep herself from looking back again at Henry—or checking for the gunman in the empty bunkhouse doorway.

  Instead, she swore to herself she was going to get through this. Going to survive to make the animal who had gunned down Henry pay.

  At least, she would if the shooter got in his vehicle and drove away now.

  But that hope died moments later, when she smelled the first acrid wisp of smoke.

  * * *

  It was the dust that gave away the intruders, dust rising from the dirt road leading to the East Two Hundred. Thick as it was, the cloud lay heavy along the horizon, reminding Zach of smoke as he raced toward it, hell bent on throwing the reporter and her cameraman off his land before Jessie Layton found the proof that could upend all their lives.

  If he was right in his suspicions, that same proof might end his mother’s. Even if it didn’t outright kill her, the web of lies she’d told could easily lead to lawsuits or even prison if the wrong jury got hold of the case.

  The thought of his frail, grief-stricken mother in a cell turned his guts to ice water, and his skin grew clammy beneath the jacket he was wearing. But as horrible as it was imagining himself unable to protect her, the possibility that she hadn’t actually lied but somehow believed what she’d been claiming disturbed him even more.

  Could Ian’s death have pushed her beyond the bounds of reason? Or was Zach himself the crazy one, imagining that his mother would spin such a tale? Back when he and Ian were kids, nothing would get them sent to their rooms (or whipped with their dad’s belt, if he happened to hear them) faster than telling lies, and Zach had never—not even in these past few stressful months—seen any signs that she might be delusional. Fragile and often ill, yes, but never out of touch with the sad reality of their recent losses.

  As he lowered the window, the ashen odor filtered into his truck, and his heart lurched at the realization that what he’d been seeing really was smoke, not dust, and that the flickering glow could only mean one thing. Fire. Had the Layton woman and her cameraman somehow accidentally set it? Or was she so upset about what had happened with his mother and then later in town, she’d taken out her frustrations with a lit match?

  Furious at the thought that the flames might spread to the drought-plagued pasture and threaten his livestock, he mashed the pedal to the floorboard and crested a low hill.

  From that vantage, he saw flames leaping from the collapsed front porch of the structure. Just as he’d suspected, he spotted a car there, too, the same blue hybrid he’d watched Jessica Layton and her cameraman climb into before leaving his house this afternoon.

  A new worry goosed his heartbeat. Could the two still be inside?

  He reached for his phone to call for help a split second before he started around a curve and was blinded by the high-beam headlights of a fleeing pickup. The blare of a horn fo
llowed, flooding him with adrenaline as he wrenched the wheel to the right.

  The two speeding trucks came within inches of colliding head-on, but Zach didn’t have a moment to celebrate his survival as his vehicle careened down the steep side of a gully. He fought to regain control, to steer or brake to halt the bone-jarring descent, but the truck slid sideways until the right front tire struck something unyielding and the wheel crumpled, the axle snapping audibly.

  After that, there was a single, confused moment as the pickup leaned, then started over, and before he understood what was happening, there was a tremendous crunching and the sounds of shattering glass and screaming metal, followed by a pain shooting through his jaw as it struck the steering wheel.

  It might have been five seconds or an hour later when his senses returned and his eyes opened. Though his dash lights remained on, the stars above had vanished, and blood was running the wrong way, dripping from the top of his head....

  He was hanging in his seat belt, he realized, upside-down in the darkness. But as he blinked, he spotted a glow on the horizon. A glow that looked like firelight.

  Had Jessie and her cameraman gotten out, or were they still inside the burning bunkhouse? Fumbling for the seat belt latch, he depressed the button and dropped down with a thump. For several minutes he struggled to extricate himself from the tangled belt before crawling out through the open window. His body aching with the effort, he rose to his feet, dizzy and wobbling but relieved that he could still stand.

  A few steps later, a fresh wave of dizziness had Zach staggering to a stop. He bent forward, resting his hands above his knees before reaching up to probe his bloody chin. When his finger found the spot where the steering wheel had split the skin, bursts of color exploded in his vision and sirens wailed, so loud and so close he covered his ears with his hands.

  It took him several moments to remember that he’d never called anyone for help. The sirens, maybe even the fire and smoke he had been seeing, couldn’t be real. Instead, they were from there, he realized with a shudder. Another crash, another time.

  Only that time, he had parachuted down to safety, watching his jet nosedive, watching a second explosion blossom, a lethal flower that consumed houses, cars and twenty-two lives, including that of his best friend. Lives lost while he hung helpless in the air above them, his chest split in two by a howl of pain and grief. The echo of that cry still woke him some nights, two years later, along with the sound of sirens in Kabul and the sense of utter helplessness.

  But that time wasn’t this one, he understood as the phantom sirens abruptly fell silent. Here, there might be something he could do, not only for himself but for anyone still trapped inside the bunkhouse....

  His burning bunkhouse? He drew in a breath of air, and quickly understood that it was real smoke he smelled.

  Remembering his phone, he pulled it out and was grateful to discover it hadn’t been damaged in the accident. He punched in 9-1-1 and quickly got out his location to the dispatcher who picked up.

  With a glance toward the glowing horizon, he added, “Send an ambulance along with a fire crew. Send everything you’ve got. I think there might be people trapped inside a burning building.”

  “I’ll have first responders there as soon as I can,” the dispatcher promised. “You need to wait for them outside, sir. Well beyond the fire’s radius.”

  “I understand,” he told her, cutting off the call before he could say more. Before he could lie to her, because there was no way in this world he was letting it happen again, allowing himself to waft downward on a gentle breeze while others burned to death.

  Shaking off his swirling vision, he lurched forward through the dry grasses, desperate to get there as fast as possible, to change the outcome of his nightmares, if only he could keep focused on the here and now.

  He dropped the phone into his pocket, then dragged out a wadded bandanna. Holding it to his chin, he broke into the fastest pace he could manage with his vision fraying like an old rug at its edges. Unsteady as his gait was, his long strides quickly ate up the distance, and soon he crested the hill—and saw the reporter’s Prius parked there, its headlights trained on the last few flickering flames licking lazily up the side of the bunkhouse doorway. He stared for a moment, confused to see that the blaze had died down considerably from the initial glow.

  Why? Had some accelerant burned off before it had had time to soak in? An accelerant meant to burn the evidence of a crime?

  Angry as he’d been about the reporter trespassing, he thought of the fleeing truck and felt a rush of apprehension. For the rising moon revealed there was no sign of either the Layton woman or her cameraman. No sign of life at all, save for the distant yipping of coyotes.

  Zach approached cautiously, relying on the same instincts and training that had kept him alive through three deployments. His mind was clear, his senses sharp as he pushed back both the pain of his injuries and his emotions to circle the bunkhouse at a distance, alert for any sound or movement.

  Seeing nothing, he called out, “Anybody in there? Miss Layton? Henry!” He couldn’t recall the cameraman’s last name, but it didn’t matter, he realized, as he got his first good look at the open doorway.

  Gut tightening, he sucked in a sharp breath at the lump that blocked the entrance, a clearly human, and partially burned, body. Hurrying up the steps, Zach checked for signs of life, but quickly realized that the small man who’d sneaked the camera into his home was beyond help.

  But what about the woman traveling with him?

  Looking past the body, Zach made out the dim shapes of furniture, but the rest of the room lay in shadow.

  “Miss Layton? Jessica? You in here?” He stripped off his jacket and beat down the last few flames at the base of the doorway. As he stamped out the embers, he raised his voice. “It’s Rayford—Zach. I’m here to help you. It’s safe to come out now.”

  There was a faint echo but no other answer. Pulse pounding, he stepped over the dead man and moved deeper, using the faint illumination from the headlights of the Prius as his guide.

  For a moment, he wondered if the driver of the pickup could have taken her. Then he spotted the blood trail, and what looked like drag marks leading to the closed door of the bathroom. A door that gave only an inch or so when he tried to push it open.

  “Jessica!” he shouted, giving it a hard pop with his shoulder. But the door stubbornly refused to yield, as if something heavy blocked its progress....

  Something he very much feared would prove to be the beautiful reporter’s corpse.

  Chapter 5

  Something bumped against Jessie’s back, thumping repeatedly until it woke her. Her heart stumbled as she peered into the darkness. Where was she? What was happening?

  Remembering, she gasped and tried to sit up. Making the mistake of pushing off the floor with her injured hand, she shrieked with the agony shooting up her right arm into her shoulder.

  She nearly blacked out again, pale stars streaking across her inky vision. But the knocking and the noisy rattling of the knob above her head refused to allow her to escape the pain.

  “Move back from the door,” a muffled male voice instructed. “Let me help you.”

  Help...yes. She had to have help to get out before the place burned with her in it. But what if it was the shooter out there, trying to trick her into letting him inside to kill her?

  Not right, she realized, for why would the man urge her to let him help when he could simply shoot her through the closed door? Or leave her here to die, as she surely would without help?

  Her mind conjured an image of her mother, the mother she couldn’t risk leaving to die alone. With the thought, she focused on dragging her body farther back into the bathroom, gritting her teeth as she slid through something wet and slimy. Blood, she realized, her blood, and she wondered if the pool was any
where near the size of Henry’s. Was it already too late for her, as well?

  The door pushed into her again, this time opening wide enough to smell the ash and hear the speaker.

  “That’s good.” His words were calm and reassuring, a lifeline to grasp and cling to. “A little more now. You can do this.”

  “I—I can do this,” she echoed, moving onto her side and sliding back a little farther.

  This time it was far enough.

  A moment later, a big man crouched beside her, silhouetted by a dim light behind him.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said, finding the flashlight she’d dropped earlier.

  When he switched it on, she saw red. So much red, on the floor, on her clothes. Had it all come from her? Looking up at the man who loomed above her, she recognized Zach Rayford, from the ranch.

  He was bleeding, too, she saw, blood that ran from chin to neck, painting a dark bib down the front of his shirt. But there was nothing frightened or confused in his face, only grim determination. “We’re going to get you to the hospital,” he told her. “Don’t worry. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “Fire,” she murmured. “I—I smelled fire.”

  “The fire’s out,” he assured her. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay!” she burst out, her mind leaping to another fear. “What if he comes back? Comes back and shoots us, too, like Henry?”

  “Like who shot Henry? Do you know who did this?”

  “I didn’t see, but Henry—he’s really dead, isn’t he? It wasn’t just a nightmare?”

  “You’re safe now,” Zach told her, laying a big hand on her shoulder.

  “Henry—he didn’t want to come here. He argued after you told me, the sheriff told me, too, to go home. But I—I had to see if Haley had left something, anything to help me trace her.”

  “For your mother,” he finished for her, with what might have been understanding in his voice.