Strangers in the Night

by Linda Howard

  Even as he had the thought he heard the shot, a deep report that boomed out over the water and was easily audible over the sound of the outboard motor. Shotgun, he thought. He eased up on the throttle and reached for the Kevlar vest, slipping it on and fastening the Velcro straps. Then he shoved the throttle down again, the boat leaping forward in response.

  Fifteen seconds later the house was in sight, taking form dead ahead of him, just as Jo had said. The river seemed to end right there. The house was built of old, weathered wood that blended into the tall trees surrounding it, but in front of it was a short dock with an old flat-bottom tied to it, and that was what he saw first.

  He had to back off the power to bring the boat into the dock. He reached for his shotgun as he did, holding it in his left hand as he steered the boat. “This is Sheriff Brody!” he bellowed. “Thaniel, you stop whatever the hell it is you’re doing and get your ass out here.” Not the most professional way of speaking, he supposed, but it served the purpose of announcing him and letting Thaniel know his identity wasn’t a secret.

  But he didn’t really expect things to settle down just because he was there, and they didn’t. Another shotgun blast boomed, answered by the flatter crack of a rifle.

  The shots were coming from the back of the house. Jackson nosed the boat toward the dock and killed the engine. He leaped out while the dock was still a foot away, automatically looping the mooring rope around one of the posts as he did so, ingrained training taking hold so everything was accomplished while he was in motion.

  He ran up the short dock, the thudding of his boots on the wood in time with the hard beating of his heart. The old familiar clarity swept over him, the by-product of adrenaline and experience. He’d felt the same thing every time he jumped out of a plane during airborne training. Lightning-fast, his brain processed the details he saw.

  The front door of the old wooden house was standing open, a neatly patched screen door keeping out the insects. He could see straight through to the back door, but no one was in sight. The porch looked like a jungle, with huge potted plants and hanging baskets everywhere, but there wasn’t any junk sitting around like there was at most houses, his included. He took with one leap the three steps up to the porch, and flattened himself against the wall.

  The last thing he wanted was to get shot by the very person he was trying to help, so he repeated his identity. “This is Sheriff Brody! Miss Jones, are you all right?”

  There was a moment of silence in which even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Then a woman’s voice came from somewhere out back. “I’m fine. I’ll be even better when you get this jackass off my property.”

  She sounded remarkably cool for someone who was under attack, as if Thaniel was of no more importance than the mosquitoes.

  Jackson eased around the corner of the wide, shady porch that wrapped around three sides of the house. He was now on the right side, with thick woods both to the right and ahead of him. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, not a patch of color or a rustling of bushes. “Thaniel!” he yelled. “Put your weapon down before you get your stupid ass shot off, you hear me?”

  There was another moment of silence. Then came a sullen, “I didn’t do nothin’, Sheriff. She shot at me first.”

  He still couldn’t see Thaniel, but the voice had come from a stand of big pine trees behind the house, practically dead ahead. “I’ll decide whose fault it is.” He edged closer to the back of the house, his shotgun held ready. He was safe from Miss Jones’s shots, for the moment, but Thaniel would have a straight bead on him if he chose. “Now do what I told you and pitch out your weapon.”

  “This crazy bitch will shoot me if I do.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “I might,” came Delilah Jones’s calm voice, not helping the situation at all.

  “See, what’d I tell you!” Thaniel’s voice was high with anxiety. Whatever he had planned, it had gone sadly awry.

  Jackson swore under his breath, and tried to make his tone both calming and authoritative. “Miss Jones, where exactly are you?”

  “I’m on the back porch, behind the washing machine.”

  “Put down your weapon and go back inside, so I can have a little talk with Thaniel.”

  Again that little pause, as if she were considering whether or not to pay any attention to him. Accustomed to instant response, be it positive or negative, that telling little hesitation set Jackson’s teeth on edge. “I’ll go in the house,” she finally said. “But I’m not putting this shotgun down until that fool’s off my property.”

  He’d had enough. “Do as you’re told,” he said sharply. “Or I’ll arrest both of you.”

  There was another of those maddening moments of silence, then the back door slammed. Jackson took a deep breath. Thaniel’s whiny voice floated from the pine trees. “She didn’t put down the shotgun like you told her to, Sheriff.”

  “Neither did you,” Jackson reminded him in a grim tone. He eased to the corner of the house. “I have a shotgun, too, and I’m going to use it in three seconds if you don’t throw down that rifle and come out.” The mood he was in, it wasn’t a bluff. “One … two … th—”

  A rifle sailed out from behind a huge pine tree, landing with a thud on the pine-needle-cushioned ground. After a few seconds, Thaniel slowly followed it, easing away from the tree with his hands up and his face sullen. A thin rivulet of blood ran down his right cheek. The wound didn’t look like anything from a shotgun, so Jackson figured a splinter must have caught him. The tree trunk sported a great raw gouge level with his chin. Miss Jones hadn’t been shooting over Thaniel’s head; she had been aiming for him. And, from the look of that tree, she wasn’t shooting bird shot.

  Immediately the back screen door popped open and Delilah Jones stepped out, shotgun held ready. Thaniel hit the ground, braying in panic. He covered his head with his hands, as if that would do any good.

  God, give me strength, Jackson prayed. The prayer didn’t do any good. His temper shattered and he moved fast, so fast she didn’t have time to do more than glance at him, certainly not time to react. In two long steps he reached her, his right hand locking around the barrel of her shotgun and wrenching it out of her hands. “Get back inside,” he barked. “Now!”

  She stood as rigid as a post, staring at Thaniel, paying Jackson no more mind than if he hadn’t been there at all. “You’re dead,” she said to Thaniel, her voice flat and calm.

  Thaniel jerked as if he’d been shot. “You heard her!” he howled. “She threatened me, Sheriff! Arrest her!”

  “I’m of a mind to do just that,” Jackson said between clenched teeth.

  “I didn’t threaten him,” she said, still in that flat, monotonous tone. “I don’t have to. He’ll die without me lifting a finger to help.” She looked up at Jackson then, and he found himself caught in eyes the dark green of a woodland forest, watchful, wary, knowing eyes.

  He felt suddenly dizzy, and gave a short, sharp jerk of his head. The heat must be getting to him. Everything kind of faded, except her face at the center of his vision. She was younger than he’d expected, he thought dimly, probably in her late twenties when he had expected a middle-aged, reclusive country woman, bypassed by modern inventions. Her skin was smooth, tanned, and unblemished. Her hair was a mass of brown curls, and her shorts stopped north of mid-thigh, revealing slim, shapely legs. He inhaled deeply, fighting off the dizziness, and as his head cleared he noticed that she had gone utterly white. She was staring at him as if he had two heads.

  Abruptly she turned and went inside, the screen door slamming shut behind her.

  Jackson took a deep breath, gathering himself before turning back to the problem at hand. He propped her shotgun against the wall and cradled his on one arm as he finally turned his attention back to Thaniel.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Thaniel had taken advantage of his splintered attention. The ground where he had lain was bare, and a quick glance told Jackson the rifl
e was gone, too.

  He jumped off the porch, landing half-crouched, the shotgun now held ready in both hands. His head swiveled, but except for a slight waving of some bushes there was no sign of Thaniel. Silently Jackson slipped into the woods close to where the bushes swayed, then stood still and listened.

  Thaniel, for all his other faults, was good in the woods. It was about thirty seconds before Jackson heard the distant snap of a twig under a careless foot. He started to follow, then stopped. There was no point in chasing him through the woods; he knew where Thaniel lived, if Miss Jones wanted to file charges against him for trespass and any other charges Jackson thought were applicable.

  He turned and looked back at the house, nestled among the trees and blending in so well it looked part of the woodland. He felt oddly reluctant to go in and talk to Miss Jones, a sense of things being subtly altered, out of control. He didn’t want to know anything more about her, he only wanted to get in Jerry Watkins’s boat and go back downriver, safely away from that strange woman with her spooky eyes.

  But his job demanded he talk to her, and Jackson was a good sheriff. That was why he was here, and that was why he couldn’t leave without seeing her.

  The uneasy feeling followed him, though, all the way to the porch.

  3

  The washing machine she’d been hiding behind was an old-fashioned wringer-type model, he noticed with faint astonishment as he paused in front of the screen door. He couldn’t see inside the house; there were no lights on, and the trees provided plenty of shade to keep the interior cool and dim.

  He lifted his fist to knock, paused, then gave two firm taps. “Miss Jones?”

  “Right here.”

  She was near, standing in the room just beyond the door. There was a strained quality to her voice that hadn’t been there before.

  She hadn’t asked him to come in. He was glad, because he would just as soon never set foot in that house. And then, irrationally, it annoyed him that she hadn’t asked him in. Without waiting for an invitation, he opened the screen door and stepped inside.

  She was a pale figure in the dim room, standing very still, and staring at him. Maybe his vision needed to adjust a bit more, but he had the impression she was downright horrified by him. She even backed up a step.

  He couldn’t say why that pissed him off, but it did, big-time. Adrenaline was pumping through him again, making his muscles feel tight and primed for action, but damned if he knew what he could do. He had to take her statement, read her the riot act about shooting at people, and leave. That was all. Nothing there to make him feel so edgy and angry.

  But that was exactly how he did feel, whether or not there was rhyme or reason to it.

  Silence stretched between them, silence in which they took each other’s measure. He didn’t know what conclusions she drew from his appearance, but he was a lawman, accustomed to taking in every detail about a person and making snap judgments. He had to, and he had to be pretty accurate, because his and others’ lives depended on how he read people.

  What he saw in the dim light was a slim, toned young woman, neat in a pale yellow, sleeveless shirt that was tucked into khaki shorts, which were snugly belted around a trim waist. Her bare arms were smoothly tanned, and sleekly muscled in a feminine way that told him she was stronger than she looked, and accustomed to work. She was clean, even her bare feet—which, he noticed, sported pale pink polish on the toes; toes that were curling, digging into the floor, as if she had to force herself to stand there.

  Her hair was a brown, sun-streaked mass of curls. She didn’t hurt the eye, though she wasn’t beauty-queen material. She was pleasant-looking, healthy, with a sweet curve to her chin. Her eyes, though … those eyes were spooky. He was reluctant to meet them again, but finally he did. They were her best feature, large and clear, fringed with thick dark lashes. And she was watching him now with … resignation?

  For God’s sake, what did she think he was going to do?

  He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there staring at her. The same thing had happened on the porch, only this time he didn’t feel dizzy. He needed to take care of business and get going. The summer days were long, but he wanted to be off the river well ahead of sundown.

  “Thaniel slipped away,” he said, his voice unaccountably rough.

  She gave a brief, jerky nod.

  “Do you make a habit of shooting at visitors?”

  The green eyes narrowed. “When they stop downriver and sneak the rest of the way on foot, yes, that makes me a bit suspicious about their reason for calling on me.”

  “How do you know what he did?”

  “Sound carries a long way over water. And I don’t hear many boats coming my way except Harley Whisenant’s, delivering the mail. Since Harley was here this morning, I knew it wasn’t him.”

  “You shot first.”

  “He was trespassing. I fired in the air the first time, as a warning, and yelled at him to scat. He shot at me then. There’s a bullet hole in my washing machine, damn him. My second shot was to defend myself.”

  “Maybe he thought he was defending himself, too, since you shot first.”

  She gave him a disbelieving look. “He sneaked onto my property, up to my house, carrying a deer rifle, and when I yell at him to leave he fires from cover, and that’s defending himself?”

  He didn’t know why he was giving her a hard time, except for the edginess that had him as prickly as a cactus. “You’re right,” he said abruptly.

  “Well, thank you so much.”

  He ignored the sarcasm. “I need to take a statement.”

  “I’m not going to press charges.”

  She couldn’t have picked anything to say more likely to rile him. In his opinion, a good deal of additional harm was done because people declined to bring charges against criminal actions. Whatever their reasoning, they didn’t want to “cause trouble,” or they wanted to give the perp “another chance.” In his experience all they were doing was letting a criminal go free to commit another crime. There were circumstances that called for a little mercy, but this wasn’t one of them. Thaniel Vargas wasn’t a teenager caught on his first misdemeanor; he was a thug who had intended serious harm to another person.

  “I beg your pardon?” He said it softly, reining in his inclination to roar, giving her a chance to rethink the situation. When he’d been a sergeant in the Army, enlisted men had immediately recognized that softness for the danger sign it was.

  Either Delilah Jones wasn’t as attuned to his mood as his men had been, or she wasn’t impressed by his authority. Whatever the reason, she shrugged. “There’s no point in it.”

  “No point?”

  She started to say something, then stopped and gave a slight shake of her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, as if to herself. She bit her lip. He had the impression she was arguing with herself. She sighed. “Sit down, Sheriff Brody. You’ll feel better after you’ve had something to eat.”

  He didn’t want to sit down, he just wanted to get out of here. If she wasn’t going to press charges, fine. He didn’t agree, but the decision was hers. There was no reason for him to stay a minute longer.

  But she was moving quietly and efficiently around the old-timey kitchen, slicing what looked like homemade bread, then thick slices from a ham, and a big chunk of cheese. She dipped a glass of water from a bucket, and placed the simple meal on the table.

  Jackson watched her with narrowed eyes. Despite himself, he admired the deft, feminine way she did things, without fuss or bother. She made herself a sandwich, too, though not as thick as his, and minus the cheese. She sat down across from the place she had set for him, and lifted her eyebrows in question at his hesitancy.

  The sight of that sandwich made his mouth water. He was so hungry his stomach was churning. That was why he removed the Kevlar vest and set the shotgun aside, then sat down and put his boots under her table. Without a word they both began to eat.

  The ham was succulent
, the cheese mellow. He finished the sandwich before she had taken more than a few bites of hers. She got up and began making another one for him. “No, one was plenty—” he lied, not wanting to put her to any more trouble, not wanting to stay any longer.

  “I should have thought,” she said, her voice low. “I’m not used to feeding a big man like you. Pops was a skinny little thing; he didn’t eat much more than I do.”

  In thirty seconds another thick sandwich was set down in front of him. She sat down again and picked up her own sandwich.

  He ate more slowly this time, savoring the tastes. As he chewed, he took stock of his surroundings. Something about this house bothered him, and now he realized what it was: the silence. There was no refrigerator humming, no television squawking in the background, no water heater thumping and hissing.

  He looked around. There was no refrigerator, period. No lamps. No overhead lights. She had dipped the water from a bucket. He looked at the sink; there were no faucets. The evidence was all there, but he still asked, “You don’t have electricity?” because it was so unbelievable that she didn’t.

  “No.”

  “No phone, no way of calling for help if you need it?”

  “No. I’ve never needed help.”

  “Until today.”

  “I could have handled Thaniel. He’s been trying to bully me since grade school.”

  “Has he ever come after you with a gun before?”

  “Not that I remember, but then I don’t pay much attention to him.”

  She was maddening. He wanted to shake her, wanted to put his hands on those bare arms and shake her until her teeth rattled. “You’re lucky you weren’t raped and murdered,” he snapped.

  “It wasn’t luck,” she corrected. “It was preparation.”

  Despite himself, he was interested. “What sort of preparation?”