by Jody Klaire
Chapter 22
IN THE COMFORT of a warm kitchen, it was all browns and yellows. The photo of three happy faces faded yet still in pride of place. Everything was as it had always been but Charlie looked down at the cell in his hands. Aeron was a hard woman to understand and there were a lot of hidden secrets. One of them Sheriff McKinley had learned this evening, from Brad Jewel of all people. Apparently Ms. Lorelei had a past, a past that involved a dead boy and a sentence in a mental institution.
Not that Charlie necessarily believed Brad. He was a narcissistic little scumbag but he knew people. Brad had his own satellite phone that he offered to the sheriff for the sum of a half-a-million dollars.
The guy was as sick as they came but he also made sense when he wanted to. The other woman, Serena or Renee Black as Aeron called her, had stirred his anger.
Charlie shook his head. Renee Black? The daughter of Colonel Black? What were the odds that she, the fiery blonde who had shot a man in cold blood, was the same woman who was a hero’s daughter?
It didn’t make sense.
But . . . why would Aeron lie? Why would she hand him a phone and tell him to change the card? How would she know about Leyton? He glanced at the old photo on the wall. How could she know if she wasn’t privy to it?
“Unless Mark told her.” He swallowed back the pain that damn photo stirred. He’d rip every one of them down if he could. He couldn’t bear it. “She could have gotten almost anything out of Mark.” It was clear the guy had a soft spot for her.
“She sees,” Joyce whispered.
He lifted his eyes to her. Joyce had been battered and beaten by her nerves to the point she believed she saw things. The whole mess with Leyton, his . . . Charlie still couldn’t even think of the words . . . The whole thing had got her thinking that she could actually see the future.
“You pick up the gun?”
Joyce looked away—the second time she’d avoided his gaze.
“Honey, if you removed a gun from the crime scene, a woman could be in jail for no reason.” He pulled her around by the shoulders till she looked at him. “I’m serious. This isn’t a game.”
“It’s for your own protection.” She stared down at the table. “It’s all to save you.”
“You took a damn weapon!” Charlie could hear his own voice bellowing off the walls. “You want to get arrested?” He stood up. The chair clattered to the floor. “You want to end up in a mental institution?”
Joyce’s eyes filled with tears. She hugged herself and fled out of the room. Her wails faded as she went to her bedroom. Charlie placed his palms on the smooth pine table surface and stared at the picture of Leyton. He hadn’t been the perfect son but then Charlie hadn’t been the perfect father. They had jarred more than gelled and eventually Leyton had wanted to get away. Joyce blamed herself for not stopping him. She thought she was guilty of his death. Simon, his best buddy, felt that he should have been the one swept out to sea. None of them even stopped to look at Charlie.
What kind of a father was so cold that he said nothing when his only child told him he was signing up? What kind of a parent let him go? What kind of a man stood back and watched a member of his family walk into peril? Now Joyce was a wreck and it was his fault.
Charlie looked down at the cell phone. Aeron had been right about Joyce and right about Leyton. He took the card from the phone and placed it in his . . . full signal.
He scrolled down and found the two names that Aeron had mentioned. He hit “call” on Lilia’s number first, hoping it was as good a start as any.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Deputy Charlie Hornecker,” he said. “I have a woman called Aeron Lorelei who has asked me to contact you.”
“Aeron?” The voice thawed, panic pulsed through it. “Is she okay? Is she hurt?”
“She’s fine, ma’am.” So they knew her. That was step one. “Her friend . . . Renee?” He thought it best to go for the name Aeron told him and hoped it didn’t make the woman worry more. “She shot a man.”
“Is he dead?”
Charlie looked down at the phone. “Excuse me?”
“Is he dead?” The woman wasted no time waiting for an answer. “Commander Black is to be released instantly. I will contact her team and General Ursula Frei—”
“Aeron mentioned her.”
“No doubt,” Lilia said. “Everything you have heard is national security level. You are not to speak a word of this conversation to anyone.”
Charlie felt his jaw ache as it tensed. “Don’t you even want to know where we are?”
“St. Jude’s.”
Charlie pulled the cell away from his ear to look at it again. Huh?
“No one in your town is to approach the man. Get Commander Black out of the cell and listen to everything she tells you.”
“I can’t,” Charlie said. Aeron had been right. He glanced down the hallway. She had seen.
“Can’t?” The woman’s voice was once again laced with panic. “Is she alright?”
“Yes and no—”
“Has she been shot?”
“No.”
“Has she been harmed in anyway?” The woman took a deep breath. “Has the man been near her?”
The quick fire inquisition made him reel and he shook his head at the empty room. He needed to speak. She couldn’t see him. “No, well he was close enough for her to take a shot at him.” Charlie sighed. “Look, she’s in shock or something . . . she won’t talk to anyone or respond.”
The woman muttered something under her breath.
“Who is this guy?”
“Yannick Boucher,” the woman said.
Charlie slumped down onto his seat in complete shock. The woman ran through protocols of what he was expected to do but he was numb. Finally, the woman cut the call. He looked at Joyce who handed him a long silver gun.
“Keep it,” Charlie said, getting to his feet. “Lock every damn door and don’t open it unless it’s me on the other side.” He grabbed his bullet vest from the closet. “I don’t need to argue with you.”
“Please.” She grabbed his arm. “You can’t go . . . if you go . . . I’ll have lost everything.”
Charlie took her hands in his. “Listen to me, I let our son die. I let you worry yourself and blame yourself until you could barely eat.” She tried to shake him off but he held on fast. “I messed up but I will never let anybody harm you. You’re everything to me, you hear?”
Joyce blinked the tears away.
“You’re everything.” He pulled her to him and she slumped into his arms. He held on. If Joyce had seen, she knew what they were up against. They’d be lucky if any of them survived. He closed his eyes. If only Renee Black had put one in the guy’s head. Why hadn’t she? Why had she risked the lives of them all?
Charlie let go while he had the courage to. He wanted to barricade himself away with Joyce. He wanted to ride it out. Let the storm rage. That couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t, not with a man like—
His heart sped up. He stormed to the gun chest and unlocked it. He loaded his pistol, his hands trembling, and pulled out his shotgun.
“Keep the pistol in your dress,” he told Joyce, shoving it into her hands. “If he gets in here . . . let him have it.”
Joyce took the weapon as if that sealed everything.
They stared at each other. A lifetime of waking up together and he didn’t know what to say. He’d known her longer than he could remember not. Where had all that time gone? Where had the years disappeared? He swallowed the catch in his throat as he realized something. He still loved her. He still loved her like he had then.
Her eyes filled with warmth as if she read his thoughts. Maybe she could? How much was there about her he’d blanked out? She was still a mystery to him. God, he loved her. His tears gushed from his eyes with the intensity of the feeling. There was nothing he could do. No more time to tell her. He’d never been good with words.
He wrapped her up. Kissed her as the
tears ran down his face. “I won’t let him hurt you, you hear?”
One last moment, he savored the feel of her, the smell of her . . . and let go.
Before he changed his mind, he fled from her side. He headed into the bitter cold. He prayed that Aeron was already convincing Sheriff McKinley of the truth. If James didn’t listen, fast, heaven only knows what would happen.
YOU PLACE THE nurse in position and put her arms over her chest. It feels so wonderful to be releasing the pent up mastery that was taken from you for so long. The Philistines, the unintelligent barbarians who saw fit to hold you against your will. Do they not know that you are better than them? That you are evolution in action? Only a fool would lock away someone as special, as superior, as you.
The nurse’s limp arm drops to the side of the bed and you tut.
“That will never do,” you tell her. “Now, what have I told you about spoiling the surprise?”
You put the arm back but again it slips down.
Rage fires through as you fix it in position. The rage shifts to hilarity, the blood has long stopped flowing but it’s funny all the same.
“Messy, aren’t you?”
“Hello?” The doctor no doubt.
You sneak into position and stifle your giggle. This will be so much fun. His horror makes you laugh too hard. You barely have time to shut the door. He is old. Boring. And no match for you. His medical bag hits the floor as his head hits the door frame. You reach inside the bag. You know exactly what you’re looking for.
Chapter 23
I SAT IN the sheriff’s office, gripping my knees so hard I was sure I’d leave a bruise. He wasn’t listening. I could hardly stop myself from vaulting over the desk and knocking sense into the idiot. Instead, I listened to the sheriff discount every damn thing that I’d just told him. How could I get him to understand that one of his deputies was in real danger? You’d think me fixing him would have made him trust me.
“So, Miss Lorelei, isn’t it?” he said.
His energy was pretty much as if he was talking to a criminal. I had spent over a decade being talked to like I was some scum on somebody’s shoe and I knew the signs. It didn’t help calm my nerves though. Oh no, they were clattering around my body like they were doing the loop-de-loop. I was sure I hadn’t told him my name, maybe Renee had.
“Look, I don’t have time for whatever complex you got about me.” I ran my hand through my hair. “You need to find Hal.”
“Hal is fine,” the sheriff said, a smug smile on his face. “Unless you had an issue with him?”
My brain and body did a mutual “uh oh,” at his tone. “What do you mean?”
He threw a printout of a news story at me. I knew that damn headline, “The Face of a Killer.”A part of me wanted to demand where he’d gotten it from and what right did he have to go digging into my past but there was no time for his games. Whatever he thought I was, it didn’t mean shoots.
Something dark was bubbling up over the town like a column of clouds before they crashed down as a tornado.
“You read the recent press?” I asked him. “The story that showed that I was wrongly convicted.”
His eyes flickered with my words. I was no longer ashamed at that headline or at being locked up. There were worse things in life than me. “I don’t care what you think of me but something bad could happen to Hal if you don’t figure it out.”
He sighed and waved it away. “You may have helped me when you fixed my leg but I’ve given you the time to help your friend. She still shot a man in the street and no evidence points to him having done a thing wrong.”
“Check the wall!” Frustration hitched up my voice. “If there’s a bullet in the wall, maybe he wasn’t innocent?”
“I would have seen if there had been another gun,” he said. What a surprise, his ego made him eagle-eyed now. Talk about a chip on his shoulder. He gave me a condescending smile. “I would have seen if a bullet had whistled past me.”
My temper bubbled over. I got to my feet so fast that I lost the room for a second. “I’m done with this crap!”
McKinley looked terrified and his hand went to his gun. I walked to the framed medal on the wall and ripped it off.
“James Michael McKinley,” I said. “You are the only son of Robert and June, you couldn’t ride your bike without training wheels until you were fifteen, you once stole sweets from the local shop as a dare and, to this day you still leave them money in an envelope to make up for it.”
He looked around the room as if wondering where I was getting the information from.
I stepped forward. “You broke your right leg skiing when you were nineteen. You never wanted to be a cop but the McKinleys are always cops.”
His hand dropped away from his gun. His mouth gaped open.
“Thing is, nobody told you that you got another tradition in your family.”
His jaw tensed until I could see the muscles twitching.
“Nobody told you that the men in your family never make it into middle-age.”
“Stop,” he said.
Like heck I was. “You left her to stop her having to watch you go through the same thing your dad did and his dad. You didn’t want her to end up like your mom.”
He raised his hands. “Enough—”
“Uh uh,” I said. This guy was getting the message. If I had to ram it home, I was gonna. “There is no cure, right?”
He nodded, his face waxy with the sweat.
“So explain to me, James Michael McKinley . . . just how you ain’t ill no more?”
He shook his head. He still wasn’t going to give in. “Could be a coincidence, a period of improvement . . . I—”
“What did the doctor say?” I folded my arms.
McKinley looked away, his aura swirling.
I stormed forward and threw the medal onto his desk. “What did he say?”
“That there were no periods of improvement!”
We stared at each other, panting like we had just gone ten rounds.
“So there is no plausible explanation as to why you are feeling better, why your stomach ain’t in two and why you stopped peeing blood?”
His eyes searched mine. “No.” His voice was so quiet, so unsure, like if he said it out loud somebody would tell him it wasn’t true.
“Then take that as a sign that I’m different. Take that as a sign that I don’t tell you things unless you need to know them.” I picked up the paper. “I was locked up for most of my adult life because I saw something happen. I thought I had killed a boy but I didn’t. I saw it.”
I tapped the medal. “This was yours, when you won a shooting competition with your father. It was raining, you think about that day every time you reach for your rifle.”
He stared down at the medal with tears in his eyes.
“Hal or Charlie could be in real trouble from the guy who was shot,” I said. “I don’t know who he is but he was trying to shoot her first.”
“Sheriff!” The door burst open as two of the ladies from the field hospital ran in. “They’re dead! Someone killed them!”
The trickle of cold dread slithered up from my stomach and into my very pores.
“Who?” McKinley was up and striding to the door.
“The doctor . . . Betty . . . they were in the room . . .”
“Same one the shooting victim was in?” I asked.
They nodded and I glared at McKinley. I was too angry to say, “I told you so.” I’d just wasted half an hour talking around the dumb clot when we could have saved two lives.
He dropped his chin.
Yeah, your ego just gave a lunatic the time to hurt people. Well done, you idiot.
“Where is he?” McKinley asked. I was thankful he couldn’t hear my thoughts.
“Gone,” they answered in unison.
“Hal!”
Hal ran into the office.
McKinley glanced at me again before he turned to Hal. “I want you to take care of Serena. Lock up t
he station and don’t let anyone in. I mean anyone.”
Hal nodded, and we headed out into the biting wind. Jacket or no jacket, it was colder now than I could bear. I looked up. It was no coincidence that an ominous rolling bank of cloud billowed out across the sky. Fear.
“Happy?” McKinley asked me as we navigated the icy street.
“Not by a long shot.” I tore my eyes away from the cloud. “But at least Hal is locked in there.” I glanced down the street, empty, silent, the hanging, suspended in time feeling getting stronger. “Let’s hope Charlie has done the same at home.”
BRAD JEWEL WRAPPED his arms around the two girls drinking with him in the bar. He only wished that Weedy, James McKinley, was here to see him with Grace Teller. He smiled to himself and poured more vodka into her glass. How fortunate that she was turning to him to take the pain of Weedy’s rejection. Ha, the guy still adored her. Dumb idiot, but then Weedy had never really known how to handle a woman. They needed a strong hand. Grace giggled with her hanger-on Marie and Brad bit off the end of his cigar. Women on his arm, spirits in his glass, and a cigar in his mouth . . . Life was good.
“Who’s the man, Simon?”
Simon looked up from nursing his drink and grunted.
“So he fell off the boat,” Brad snapped. “Get a grip.”
“You’re a bastard, Jewel,” Simon slurred, staggering off his stool. “A cold-hearted bastard.”
Grace gasped at the language, which only made Brad laugh harder at the pathetic loser. Like Simon was getting a cent off him, drunken sod. What was he gonna do? Go tell the sheriff that Simon had paid money to people for him back in the past. Like hell he would.
Sheriff Weedy, Brad laughed to himself. The guy needed to get his heart trampled on.
“Can you believe the freak?” Grace said. “Can you believe that she attacked me right there in the café?”
Brad caught the end of the conversation and an idea made him widen his smile. “Why don’t we do something about her?”
