by Dahlia West
His luck, though, it seemed, was finally close to running out.
Chapter Twelve
‡
Erin walked out of the barn and toward Hank’s truck. Her blood was pounding in her ears and her breath was out of control. Images flashed in her mind. They all involved Bee and King. And none of them were pretty.
She took a deep breath as she crossed the driveway. She could pull this off, she told herself. She had to. She had no choice.
Hank lumbered out of the cab and Erin was hit with a fresh wave of anger toward him, despite the present circumstances. She needed help, desperately, but part of her was galled at the idea that it was this man she’d have to ask.
She didn’t think she could, anyway. Someone else maybe. Buck, who always kept a gun or two in his truck would be better than this asshole. In the end it wasn’t worth the risk, Erin decided. She could not lose Bee or King.
“What are you doing here?” she called out before he could get any closer to the house.
Hank turned and eyed her.
From this distance she couldn’t tell for sure if he was drunk, but his red nose gave her a pretty good guess.
“Came for the rest of my pay,” he replied. “And my things.”
Erin scowled at him. She might agree to give him some money, if only to get him to leave. But she didn’t have any on her. Her checkbook was up at the house and going there was out of the question. If she tried to take Hank there, the man in the barn would almost certainly make good on his threat. He’d either shoot the horses, or he’d burst out of the door and kill Hank and Erin, as surely as they were both standing here now.
Erin shook her head. “I’m busy,” she told him. “I’ve got chores to do. I’ll bring your stuff into town this evening, after I’m done.” She’d left out any mention of money, because even now in the midst of all this, the fact that he had the nerve to ask her for any pissed her off.
Hank latched on to the omission, though, and Erin immediately regretted making it.
“I want my money!” he growled, breaking into her thoughts.
Familiar anger surged up and Erin momentarily forgot about the present danger. “I don’t owe you shit, Hank!” she snapped. “And frankly you’re damn lucky I didn’t call the sheriff!” Maybe the threat now would get him back in his truck.
Hank laughed, instead, and it infuriated her. He knew she couldn’t call the sheriff, knew she never would. “Yeah, you do that,” he teased. “Matter of fact, why don’t you call Powell right now? I’ll wait.”
Erin tightened her jaw. “Get off my property, Hank,” she ordered. “Just get the hell out of here. Or I will.”
Not knowing what else to do, Erin took a step toward the barn. Unbelievably, it seemed like the safest option, heading back to the man with the gun.
“No,” Hank said.
Erin spun back toward him. Something in his voice had changed. Something she definitely did not like.
He took a menacing step toward her. “You won’t call the sheriff, will you? No,” he said almost to himself. “You won’t call the sheriff at all. You can’t.” He reached out and caught her arm.
Erin jerked out of his hold and tried to push him away.
Hank’s arm cocked back and the crack of the back of his hand connecting with the side of Erin’s face echoed off the trees.
She fell, to her side, right into the mud.
Before she could scoot away, he kicked her in the ribs and Erin grunted, rolling onto her side.
Hank was on her then. Grubby hands clawed at her and turned her over the rest of the way.
Erin’s face ground into the dirt at the edge of the driveway. Her bottom lip was split from the force of his blow and a thick copper taste coated her tongue along with dust. She put her working hand on the ground, gravel digging into her palm, and tried to push herself up.
He punched her then. Or he must have. Erin didn’t see it, but pain exploded in her head, at the back. She tried to scream as her vision swam. It came out as a ragged, raspy yelp.
Hands were on her again, rolling her, then tugging at the waistband of her jeans.
Erin could barely remain conscious, let alone try to fight him off.
She felt the skin of her thighs being exposed as her body jerked, it seemed, in multiple directions at once.
“Won’t do nothing,” Hank muttered. “Can’t do nothing.”
Chapter Thirteen
‡
Jack looked at the pills. Massive painkillers. He could use a few or ten of those. He shoved a handful of them into his jeans pocket, leaving two in his palm. He was about to swallow them when he heard a cry from outside. He dropped the pills and sprinted to the door. When he opened it, he could see nothing. Neither Erin nor the man were anywhere around.
Another yelp sent him around the corner, gun in hand. He saw her on the ground and the man hovering over her. His pants were down to his thighs. His fat, white, mooney ass was on full display.
Jack sprang forward as adrenaline surged through him. “Hey!” he bellowed, surprising the asshole.
The man half-turned his head just as Jack brought the butt of the gun down against his skull. He flopped back onto the ground and tried to scramble away, but his pants, twisted around his legs, prevented him from getting very far.
Jack eschewed using the gun a second time and instead balled up his hand into a tight fist and brought it down. It felt equally satisfying. Actually, more so. He began raining down blows, fury rising within him that blocked out everything else.
Somewhere in the back of Jack’s mind, he understood that it was not this man he was angry with. Not really. Not totally. Jack went beyond, in his opinion, a just punishment for attempted rape and began punishing this man for other people’s sins. Diamond. And Hook. And Haze. And the rest.
Every time his fist connected, Jack saw a different face, one he wanted to smash in.
Finally, he relented. He righted himself, staggering back. Below him, sprawled in the dirt, the man groaned. Blood trickled from between his fat lips.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack spotted movement. He came back to himself, body tensing, poised to spring, but he was too late. “No!” he shouted, as Erin, rock in hand, delivered her own crushing blow, directly to the man’s face.
Jack tried to grab her and haul her back, but the gun handicapped him. He grabbed her arm instead, the only one he could reach. It was the wrong one, though, and she raised her arm and brought down a second blow.
This time bone crunched loudly and blood sprayed in all directions.
Erin let out a cry that sounded half-feral, half-surprised. The rock tumbled into the dirt as she fell back, moving away.
Jack, shocked himself, let go of her arm.
In front of them, the man on the ground took one final, ragged breath and then his entire body sagged.
There was no sound, then. None at all. Even the birds had stopped singing.
Despite the grisly nature of it, Jack could only admire the strength with which she’d dispatched him. Jack wouldn’t have killed him, but, he supposed, it was her debt and she should get to choose how the fucker paid.
She blinked down at the man, as though she couldn’t quite understand how he’d gotten there.
“Hey,” said Jack.
She didn’t respond.
“Hey.” Jack slid her keys and her cell phone out of his pocket. He gripped the ring tightly in one hand while passing her the phone. When she didn’t immediately take it, he reached out to take her hand.
That shocked her out of her stupor. She yelped and jumped back.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jack told her, but as she raised her hands, warding him off, he could see that she already was.
Her left wrist was swollen to almost the size of her hand. Purplish bruising mottled the skin. Jack knew it would only get worse as the minutes passed. He silently cursed himself for not having paid closer attention to what had been going on out here.
“Take
the phone,” he demanded, pressing it into her good hand. “Call the cops. Okay? Erin? Call the police. I’ll be gone by the time they get here. I’ll…leave your truck somewhere, somewhere it’ll be found. Okay?”
She didn’t answer but Jack didn’t need her to. He turned, fisting the keys, and headed across the driveway.
What could he do? Eat bullet? So she would have to have two dead bodies to look at while she waited? He shook his head to himself, almost imperceptibly. He wouldn’t do that to her. And besides, beating the man senseless told Jack there was still some fire left inside him. The Buzzards hadn’t gotten it all.
He swung up into the cab of her truck, cranked the engine, and headed down the driveway. When he got to the highway, he braked and glanced back at the house. She was still there. She hadn’t gone inside to get away from the body that would soon start baking in the summer heat. In fact, she was trying, struggling mightily, to drag the corpse by one arm across the gravel.
Jack cursed under his breath, threw the truck into reverse, and stomped on the gas. Gravel sprayed in every direction as he rocketed back down the way he’d just come.
He barked the tires when he hit the brakes and jumped out of the still-bouncing cab.
“What the hell are you doing?!” he demanded as he stalked toward her.
She looked up at him, eyes glittering with fury. “What do you care? Just go! Leave!” She didn’t spare him a second glance. She simply returned to her impossible task.
Jack watched her make little progress. It was obvious from her trajectory that she was trying to drag the body to the truck the man had arrived in. He shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t move the body, Erin,” he snapped. “Just call the police.”
“No,” she bit out, and tugged again. This time the dead man’s sleeve ripped.
Jack sighed and took a step forward. She clearly wasn’t thinking straight. “You’re not—”
She dropped the dead weight and spun toward him. “This place is all I have!” she screamed at him, pressing her injured arm against her belly. “And if word gets out about this, about everything, no one will want to bring their horses here for treatment.”
Erin gestured wildly at the barn with her good arm. “King’s owners will come for him. They’ll want a refund on their advance. There won’t be any money, asshole!”
Jack rocked back on his heels, a little surprised that such a small, obviously defeated woman still had so much in reserve. He watched, fascinated, as she closed her eyes and steeled her resolve. Her hair was wild where the man had pulled it. Blood still trickled from her cut lip. It ran down her chin in rivulets. Dirt covered every inch of her.
She opened her eyes slowly, bent, and took hold of the dead man’s wrist again. “I won’t tell anyone about you,” she said in a flat, even voice this time. “No one will ever know. I’ll get rid of him. You’ll be gone. No one will ever know.”
She tugged again—hard. The soles of her boots scraped on the loose gravel at first but soon gained traction. She managed to move the body six inches. If that.
She could barely stay upright. Her purple arm sagged uselessly at her side. She couldn’t even refasten her jeans. They hung low around her waist, still unzipped. Dust covered blue panties peeked out.
In a million years, Jack Prior would not have guessed that the civilian world was as brutal and ugly as his own. He wasn’t stupid. He’d known that it could be. But he’d assumed it was rarer than this.
“You’re a mess,” he told her.
“Fuck you,” she snapped, eyes trained down toward her grim task.
Jack registered the waver in her voice, though. This was a woman on the verge of a breakdown. She might be riding high now, fueled by adrenaline and fury, but when those wore off, her busted arm was going to cripple her with pain. And the enormity of the fact that she’d killed a man with a rock was going to do even more damage than that, Jack suspected.
And later, when the sun went down, and she was alone, she’d come face-to-face with the very real possibility that she might have died out here today, face down in the dirt. And what would that do to her?
Well, Jack already knew, didn’t he?
“Let go.”
“No,” she snapped.
“Erin—”
“No!”
Jack surged forward, crowding her with his large frame, forcing her to drop the dead man’s wrist.
She took a step back, quickly putting herself out of Jack’s reach.
“I’ll do this,” he told her and bent down to the corpse.
He turned out the man’s pockets until he came up with a cell phone and a set of keys. He shoved them in his own pockets and pulled the body into a sitting position.
Much as he didn’t really want to, Jack hauled the man up into a fireman’s carry and made his way to the now-ownerless truck. Jack tossed the corpse into the bed. Sprigs of hay and dust were flung up into the air as he pulled a dirty canvas tarp over it.
Satisfied that the hidden cargo couldn’t be seen from any angle, even if you were looking straight down into the bed, Jack closed the gate with a bang and headed toward the driver’s side door.
“What…what are you going to do?” Erin asked.
Jack saw that she was cradling her arm, looking terrified and unsure.
He was obviously much more qualified to handle body disposal, even on Erin’s best day.
“You don’t want to call the cops? Fine,” Jack told her. “I get it. You want to protect your business. I definitely get that. I’ll take care of it. Even if you change your mind—”
“I won’t,” she vowed.
Jack was actually surprised at the fierce look of determination in her eyes. Well, hell. Maybe she would keep this secret. He shrugged, though, just the same. “Doesn’t matter. If you do change your mind, I’ll be long gone.”
He looked at the keys in his palm and saw a silver rope, twisted into the shape of a “W.” He frowned as the fog of memory clouded his brain. Something about it caught his attention, but Jack couldn’t say what it was.
He pinched the largest key and slid it into the ignition. The dead man’s truck roared to life. Jack placed the dead man’s heavy boot onto the accelerator. The tires spun a little, kicking up dirt and debris.
Jack slammed the driver’s side door shut, reached in through the open window, and popped the truck’s gear shift into Drive. He jumped back as the vehicle rocketed forward, tires finally finding purchase in the soft mud.
It roared straight for the pond, spraying water on all sides as it crashed into the calm, smooth surface. The engine sputtered and whirred and finally went the way of its owner as the water finally seeped into it.
Jack stood at the water’s edge, watching the truck submerge slowly. Not for the first time, he was happy that no one was around for miles. Not a single car or truck drove past as this one sank to the pond’s murky depths.
Jack let out a small sigh of relief when, over thirty minutes later, the truck had disappeared fully underneath the surface of the water. He finally turned, satisfied, and headed back up the bank to the paved road. He stopped, though, shielding his eyes from the rising sun, and frowned.
Even after all that had happened, he now found himself in the same position, looking down the same road, going over the same non-options.
He was tired and his chest burned. He hadn’t slept in days, not real sleep anyway. You slept well at home. Except Jack didn’t have a home. He didn’t have a family anymore, either. And he was about as fucked up as the woman back at the ranch.
Without thinking about it, without even acknowledging it to himself, Jack put one foot in front of the other and headed away from Rapid City…and back to Thunder Ridge.
Chapter Fourteen
‡
Erin sat on the floor of her kitchen, leaning up against the cabinets, wondering how she’d gotten there, exactly. Why had she passed up the kitchen chairs? Or the couch? Or, for that matter, the bed? Despite the throbbing pain in her ar
m, she was exhausted and thought perhaps she could close her eyes and sleep for days.
Maybe when she woke up, Hank would be alive, as asshole-ish as ever. That other man never would’ve come to Thunder Ridge. Her arm wouldn’t be broken. She wouldn’t have bloody scratches on her thighs.
But none of that was useful thinking, and only useful thinking would get her through the day.
And that was all she had to do, wasn’t it? Just get through the day. Then tomorrow, she’d get through another day. Then another.
She looked down at her hand and the ping pong ball that nested inside her palm. She only vaguely remembered picking it up when she’d stumbled into the house. Anger surged in her again and she wasn’t sorry that Hank was dead. If only King had killed him, though. It would have been more poetic, at least.
At the thought of the horse, she realized she needed to check on them. Terror, fury, and exhaustion took a back seat as she came back to herself. She had work to do. One day to get through. She had a farm to run and a dream to chase and her legs, at least, weren’t fucking broken.
As she was about to struggle to her feet, a shadow loomed through the screen of the side door.
Ridiculously, hysterically, she had the fleeting thought it was Hank, or Hank’s ghost, coming to get her.
She gasped as the bottom of the door scraped on the wooden back steps.
The boots, though, she recognized. Not cowboy boots or even work boots. Motorcycle boots. And there he was again, standing in her kitchen, frowning down at her.
It wasn’t over. Maybe it would never be over. Or maybe he was about to put her wherever he’d put Hank.
In front of her, he hunkered down and reached for her, but Erin pulled away instinctively, pressing herself against the cabinets behind her. She instantly regretted it, expecting him to be angry and possibly lash out at her.
Instead, he frowned and pulled back his hand. A moment of silence hung between them before he said, “You don’t know me, so you have no reason to believe me, but…before…in your room, in the barn, the things I said to you… I never would have done it. I never would have…hurt you…like that. I just needed to keep you in line.”
