A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  He shoved the Glock against my temple, his hands shaking so badly I was afraid he might fire the gun by accident. I closed my eyes, my heart machine-gunning in my chest.

  Gerardo swung the shotgun toward Eli. “Put it down,” he said.

  Eli blinked, slowly drawing the gun away. “Hey. Hey, you don’t believe this guy?”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position, ground my teeth against a wave of pain, and propped my back against a stall. Gerardo watched from the corner of his eye. I said to him, “He’s right when he says he . . . talked to everybody. He talked to . . . Mace, and Mace knew Junior . . . all his life. Bet he knew about your . . . history.”

  “No, no.” Eli licked his lips, looking around as if for some escape. “I swear to God he’s crazy.”

  “Mace told you about . . . Gerardo,” I said to Eli. “And that gave . . . you an idea. You planted that bandana to make it look . . . like Junior sent Mace after Zane.”

  “He did. It was Junior. He—”

  “You wanted it to look like Junior. So Gerardo would go after him and his father. Once you learned about . . . Gerardo’s past, he was your . . . secret weapon. You knew he’d do anything to . . . protect Zane and Carlin. Just wind him up and—”

  “No, no, no.”

  “You vandalized the booth . . . wanted it to seem like Junior’s work. Only Maggie saw you. You couldn’t explain it away. So you killed her.” Slowly I pulled my knees up, and another burst of pain pulsed through my side. I moved my right hand closer to my boot.

  Eli gave Gerardo a pleading look. “Maggie was a sweet lady. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  Gerardo growled, low in his throat. “The shotgun?”

  Eli moaned, the truth in his eyes. “It was Junior! It was all Junior!”

  Softly and without emotion, Gerardo said, “I do not believe you.”

  “He’s wrong!” Eli screamed. Sweat beaded his hairline. “He’s got everything wrong!”

  He jerked the gun up, but a moment’s hesitation, as it wavered between Gerardo and me, gave me time to tug up the leg of my jeans and slide the Tomcat out.

  “I’m not wrong,” I said, and shot him.

  Gerardo’s shotgun boomed. My ears rang, and a thought ran through my head—that I was dead and that the blast was the last sound I would ever hear.

  Then Eli crumpled, and I saw the red bloom spreading on his chest and the smaller blossom that my Tomcat had made. Gerardo lowered the gun and turned away.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, and the Tomcat fell from my hand. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a siren. Then my mind swam into darkness.

  47.

  On a golden day in November, I drove out to the Underwoods’ farm. Carlin came out of the house and gave me a one-armed hug. She nodded toward the pasture, where Rogue was grazing. The silver stallion, Galahad, was nowhere to be seen. Inside the barn, I assumed, or in another pasture.

  She nodded toward Rogue. “He looks beautiful, doesn’t he?”

  “He does. And so do you. How’s the shoulder?”

  “Not bad.” She rolled it gingerly. “Still going to physical therapy, but it’s coming back, a little at a time. How about you?”

  “Better than I deserve.” My ribs and the lung punctured when the blow from Gerardo’s shotgun had snapped the bone were mostly healed, and I had been pronounced “almost as good as new.”

  “Thank you for the check,” she said. I’d given them Sam Trehorne’s check, which had rested so uncomfortably in my wallet. They had better uses for it than I did. “And for your report to the insurance company.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  “A little more than that, I think. Come in. Zane wants to see you. And we have beer.”

  “Well, if there’s beer . . .”

  Inside, Zane’s new attendant, a muscular young man in scrubs, brought us three beers in sweating bottles, then retired to his room.

  Zane typed, “HOW IS DOC?”

  I’d been out a few times to see Doc at the men’s prison. He looked good for a man pushing sixty in a prison jumpsuit, but then he was a survivor. He’d pled guilty and gotten five years for obstruction of justice and manslaughter, but he’d be out in three. Nobody does the full ride.

  I passed on Doc’s regards, and Zane said, “I KNOW WHAT HE DID WAS WRONG, BUT HE SAVED CARLIN’S LIFE. HE WAS MY FRIEND.”

  A good man living in the shadow of one evil act. I knew he’d carry that weight forever.

  We talked about the TBI’s investigation into corruption in Braydon County, the subsequent purge of Trehornes from government offices, and the pending trials—Jim Lister’s and Samuel Trehorne’s among them. Hap had been spared prosecution. Stress and grief had stopped his heart not long after the investigations began.

  “I don’t know how to feel about that,” Carlin said. “He was no friend to us, but he was in a hard place. I feel sorry for him.”

  I felt sorry for him too, caught between the Trehorne code of honor and what he knew was right. In retrospect, I even felt bad for Junior, who, from childhood, had been forged into his family’s enforcer, and for Eli, who had exposed his grandfather’s killers and gotten, instead of the noble death he’d imagined, fifteen minutes of infamy and a neglected grave.

  “How’s Eleanor?” I asked.

  “Cranky,” Carlin said. “Bitter and lonely and impossible.”

  “BUT THINGS ARE LOOKING UP.”

  Carlin rolled her eyes. “If you can call it that. I took her a casserole yesterday morning, and she actually thanked me for it.”

  “BABY STEPS,” Zane said.

  We chatted for a few more minutes. Then Carlin walked me to my truck. “You know who else I feel sorry for?” she asked.

  “No, who?”

  “Rebecca Trehorne. I mean, my God, her husband’s going to end up in prison, her son is dead, and her daughter’s gone. She lost everything.”

  “I think Gerardo will come around,” I said. “Give her some kind of hope.”

  “He already has.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. The postmark was a city in Mexico. “Look at this.”

  Inside the envelope was a postcard. No message, no signature, just two wild dolphins arcing out of a blue-green sea. And a picture of two horses, one black, one white, drawn in a child’s hand and labeled: TO MOMMY I LOVE YOU.

  She took them back and put them into the envelope. “Clearly I’m supposed to deliver the picture. But the card is just for me.” She slid the envelope into her pocket and said, “I know he did some bad things, but I miss him.”

  “How does Zane feel about it?”

  Her smile was sad. “Let’s just say his feelings are more complicated.”

  That afternoon, I met Rhonda Lister at a Hillsboro-West End park affectionately dubbed Dragon Park by locals.

  She pulled up in the Porsche and got out wearing tight black jeans and a pale blue cashmere sweater with pearls. Her hair, pulled back on the sides with a pair of enameled combs, shone in the sunlight.

  The sapphire ring flashed in the light. She saw me looking and held up her hand. “For better or worse,” she said. “Jim’s aged a hundred years since the investigations started, and I’d be a fool to leave him now that he’s likely to die in prison.”

  “Which part is that?” I said. “The better or the worse?”

  She flashed me a mischievous smile. “You figure it out.”

  We shared an awkward hug and a peck on the lips. Then I held her out at arm’s length and said, “You look gorgeous.”

  “So do you.” She reached into the passenger seat of her car and retrieved two cups of coffee from a Starbuck’s carrier. “I brought you the magical elixir.”

  “Bless you, my child.”

  We scuffed our feet through crisp, curled leaves, then settled side by side onto the mosaic dragon that gave the park its nickname.

  “Cheers,” she said, raising her coffee cup. “To sticking it out.”

  I lifted mine
. “To making it work.”

  “I was surprised to hear from you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  She smiled again. It was a good smile. “Well, there was that little matter of a punctured lung. How are your boys? Tex and Crockett, I mean.”

  “Fat and feisty.” I reached inside my jacket for a manila folder and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something I checked on when I got out of the hospital. I don’t know if you want it. Maybe you’d prefer to let things lie. But I really think you should look.”

  She opened it warily, crossed her legs, and balanced the folder on her lap. “My father’s autopsy report. How did you get this?”

  “It’s what I do. I find things.”

  She snapped it shut. “I don’t know if I can look. Are there photos?”

  “I left the photos in the car. These are just words.”

  “Maybe you could just tell me what it says.”

  I didn’t need to look at the file. I’d studied it enough to know what it said. “His injuries were extensive. The sudden deceleration of the car caused severe fractures to his spine and to the base of his skull. Either one would have killed him instantly.”

  “Instantly.” She ran her palm over the outside of the folder. “But . . . I saw . . .”

  “Rhonda, you couldn’t have seen what you thought you saw. It’s not possible.”

  She shook her head, trying to imagine it, then opened the folder and started to read. I waited quietly, watching the dry leaves do a slow dance across the grass.

  After a long time, she closed the folder and hugged it to her chest. “I don’t understand. I just imagined what I saw?”

  I put an arm around her, and she laid her head on my shoulder. “You planted a false memory. Maybe you wanted so badly to see him get out that you saw what you wanted to see; you saw him moving, which gave you hope that he was alive and would climb out at any minute. Maybe the smoke and the flames just played tricks on your eyes. Maybe your brain saw a shape it thought it recognized and filled in the blanks. Our brains fill in the gaps all the time. It’s one reason eyewitness testimony is so unreliable.”

  “What I did to myself all these years.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know how to process this.”

  We finished our coffee in silence, and I walked her back to her car. She held out the folder, and I pushed it back at her. “You keep it. You might need to read it again sometime.”

  She took it with a rueful smile. “My therapist will have a field day.”

  I opened the car door for her, and as she got into the Porsche, she turned back to me and kissed me gently on the mouth. “Thank you.”

  I watched her drive away, then walked back to the park, where three Asian women, one young and beautiful, one old and frail, one scarred and missing most of an arm, took turns pushing a blond boy with Down syndrome on the merry-go-round. They looked up and smiled as I came nearer. My son patted the empty space beside him, and I hopped onboard. I lay beside him, head to head, and together we watched the sky spin.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Mike Hicks for his unfailing support, my mother, Ruthanne Terrell, and my brother, David Terrell, as well as the best in-laws a person could hope for: Thelma Hicks, Nikki-Nelson Hicks, Brian Hicks, Mike and Rene Osborne, and nieces and nephews Todd, Michelle, Brenna, and Daniel.

  Thanks to super-agent Jill Marr for her hard work and loyalty on my behalf, to Lon Kirschner for a stunning cover, to Marty and Judy Shepard for their extraordinary faith and patience, to Chris Knopf for his gentle guidance, and to Barbara Anderson for her keen eye.

  Thanks to Clay and Jacqueline Stafford for their friendship and support, and to the rest of the Killer Nashville family.

  Thanks to my friends and instructors at World Champion Productions, the Hiking Buds, all my friends from Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, my fellow Permanent Press writers, my friends from Measurement Incorporated, and the Quill & Dagger Writers’ Group: Chester Campbell, Kay Elam, Richard Emerson, Nina Fortmeyer, Nikki Nelson-Hicks, and Nancy Sartor. I love you all and will always be grateful for your support and for all I’ve learned from you.

  Thanks to Dan Royse for brainstorming some sticky plot points; Timothy Hallinan for his syntactic expertise; Keith Dane for his insights into the Walking Horse industry; David Carpenter for answering my questions about insurance companies; Tim Farrell for his insights into hunting and hunting safety; Lisa Wysocky, Dana Chapman, and the owners and boarders at Butterbean Hill Stables for their expert advice on horses and showing; and to Kay Tyler, Lonnie Graves, Phyllis Gobbell, and Michelle Almandinger for being terrific “first readers.”

  Their counsel was sound, and any mistakes are mine alone.