Blood on Copperhead Trail (16 page)

“But why would he believe that? It’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? I’m new in town. An outsider. A flatlander. I came from a sheriff’s department that had its own issues with corruption. I showed up just days before the girls were shot. I have a vested interest in keeping the Bitterwood P.D. alive and kicking. And now I’ve gone AWOL, along with you. The woman the county sent to spy on me.”

“I wasn’t sent to spy on you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You think Bolen or Ray plan to use your weapon to kill Joy and me,” she said with a sinking heart.

“They have it. They took it off me when they Tasered me.”

“I guess maybe they didn’t think I’d be packing,” she murmured.

“Lucky for us.” He’d taken over her pistol and holster, with her blessing, after a quick grilling established that he was the more experienced shooter.

“It would tie up a lot of loose ends. Plus put Bolen in prime position to step into the chief’s job,” Laney admitted.

“He’d be next in line. The only reason he didn’t get it this time was that the county commission wanted to look outside the area for their next chief.”

“But if you turned out to be even worse than Rayburn, they might not feel that compunction a second time.”

“Exactly.”

Laney rubbed her gritty eyes. “This is so crazy.”

“What I don’t get,” Doyle added a few moments later, “is how this connects to Wayne Cortland. If Bolen was working for Cortland, and Cortland is dead, what’s his plan now?”

“Maybe that’s where Ray comes in.”

“Maybe. He could be Cortland’s successor, although the feds didn’t think there was such a person. They thought the whole cartel died with him.”

“Well, clearly the pieces of that whole are still around. What if they’ve found a new leader?”

“A new leader who can pull all those mismatched pieces together?” Doyle sounded skeptical.

He was probably right, she knew. The prevailing theory about Cortland’s criminal enterprise was that Cortland’s ruthless control had held the disparate groups involved together. Militia groups, meth dealers and anarchist hackers hardly made ideal partners, but Cortland had somehow brought those groups together, massaging egos and convincing each group that their goals would be met if they went along with his plans.

But could someone else maintain that delicate, improbable balance?

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “Probably not.”

“Doesn’t mean someone isn’t trying,” Doyle countered.

Laney pushed the stem of her watch, lighting up the dial. Just after three o’clock. Based on what Joy had told them, their captors would bring them something to eat around five, as daylight was beginning to wane.

“What if all they do is throw the food in here?” she asked Doyle. “What good does it do to have a weapon if we can’t get close enough to use it?”

“Joy and I had a plan before you arrived.” His voice was a rumble in her ear, sending a shudder of feminine awareness dancing down her spine despite the less-than-ideal situation. “She was going to scream bloody murder near the back of the cave to lure someone inside. I’d be hiding near the door, ready to jump.”

“Dangerous.”

“Desperate times,” he said, a shrug in his voice.

“What if they both come in?” she asked.

“Then it gets a little more difficult.”

* * *

W
HEN
L
ANEY
FELL
SILENT
,
her head drooping against Doyle’s shoulder, he was loath to move, even though his legs were starting to cramp from sitting in one position so long. Time was ticking toward their next chance to make an escape, and if she needed a nap to restore her strength, he didn’t want to disturb her.

So he was surprised when she sat up abruptly and said, “Oh.”

“Oh what?” he asked when she didn’t say anything else.

“I think I know what this place is.”

“Yeah?”

She looked over at the heavy wood door closing them in. “When we were kids, my mother used to tell us every Halloween before we went out trick-or-treating, ‘Y’all be careful, or Bridey Butcher’ll get you!’”

“Bridey Butcher?” he asked, pricked by déjà vu.

“Yeah. Bridey Butcher was a big, strappin’ mountain girl who lived up this way back during Prohibition. She and her daddy ran a moonshine still and scared off a lot of the other moonshiners with a little well-applied violence and threats of more. Anyway, one day a city slicker from over Knoxville way came up here looking to employ some men on a public works project, and for Bridey, it was love at first sight.”

Listening to Laney’s accent broaden as she warmed to the tale, Doyle’s sense of familiarity bloomed into memory. “But he did her wrong.”

Laney paused in her story. “That’s right. He led her on, made her think he was going to marry her and take her out of these mountains, but when the time came to go, he told her he had a girl back in Knoxville.”

“And Bridey lured him up here for a goodbye, or so he thought,” Doyle continued, the story coming to life in his mind, as if his mother were whispering in his ear. “She and her daddy had built a door in the mouth of a cave where they hid their still from the revenuers. But she’d moved the still somewhere else, and when she lured her lover inside the cave, she’d knocked him out and locked him inside. She left and never came back, leaving her lover to die slowly, the same way he’d killed her love.”

“How do you know that story?” Laney asked, her eyes wide with surprise.

“My mother used to tell it,” he said. “I’d forgotten. When I was old enough to be thinking about girls, she told me about the girl done wrong and how she got her revenge. But she never said what mountain.”

“I bet you were afraid to date after that,” Laney said.

He smiled back at her. “For a while. I’m pretty sure that was my mother’s intention.”

“How did your mother know about Bridey Butcher?”

He shrugged, not sure. “I know she was from somewhere in eastern Tennessee. Maybe she heard the story there.”

“It’s pretty specific to Bitterwood, since it actually happened here—” Laney stopped short, her face turning toward the doorway. “Footsteps,” she whispered.

Doyle clicked on his phone and saw that it was only three-thirty. Their captors were way too early to be bringing their evening meal.

He had a sick feeling that time had just run out.

Chapter Sixteen

Doyle nearly dumped Laney onto the floor of the cave in his haste to get to his feet, though he held her arm to make sure she didn’t fall as she scrambled up. She felt his tremble of hesitation, then suddenly he was handing her the pistol she’d given him earlier.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

His response was to flatten himself against the wall closest to the door.

What had been the plan? Joy was going to scream, right?

But Joy wasn’t awake.

Laney scrambled back deeper into the cave, trying to get out of the line of sight. She wasn’t much for screaming, but if that was what it took—

The door opened and she saw a silhouette enter the cave, shorter than Craig Bolen. Leaner, with a headful of hair that Craig Bolen would have envied even ten years earlier. The wig, she thought. Ray’s disguise—and Craig’s disguise, too, that one time in the hospital.

That was why Janelle hadn’t been quite sure the man in the hospital was the same man she’d seen on Copperhead Trail, she realized. Because they’d been different men in the same disguise.

In one hand Ray held a pistol, in the other a flashlight. He flicked on the light, piercing the gloom of the cave with its bright beam.

Shoving her own pistol behind her back, she squinted, turning her head away from the blinding light.

Suddenly, from the back of the cave came a soul-piercing howl. It filled the cavern, rang along the walls and sent tremors racing up Laney’s spine, as if the earth had opened up and the agony of a thousand souls filled the still air of the cavern.

She heard a scuffle of footsteps moving toward her from the front of the cave, punctuated abruptly by a bone-rattling thud of body meeting body.

The flashlight crashed to the floor of the cave, the beam extinguished. It rolled toward Laney, but she ignored it, her gaze fixed on the struggling silhouettes backlit by the open doorway.

Doyle and Ray were struggling for Ray’s pistol, a tangle of grappling arms and kicking legs. The hard lines of the deadly weapon were easy to distinguish, so she kept her eyes on that particular silhouette, aware that whoever had the gun had the upper hand.

She left her own weapon where it was, tucked behind her back, knowing it was useless to her while Doyle and his opponent were locked by battle into a single, writhing organism.

Ray pulled free for a moment, and he swung the gun toward Doyle.

Laney brought her own weapon in front of her, ready to shoot.

Then Doyle launched himself at Ray, slamming him into the wall by the open door. The gun went off, the bullet ricocheting against the hard stone wall. Laney pressed herself flat against the door, praying Joy wasn’t standing in the open, then dared another look.

The men were no longer inside the cave.

And the door was slowly swinging shut.

Laney raced forward, catching the heavy door before it closed. It pinched her left hand hard enough to make her cry out in pain, but she gritted her teeth and pulled the door open with her uninjured hand.

Outside, the sunlight was blinding, the pain of her contracting pupils almost eclipsing the agony of her smashed hand. She heard the sound of fighting long before she could open her squinted eyes enough to see what was happening only a few yards away.

At first she could make out only dark figures, locked in a fierce battle of crashing fists and tangling legs. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw details. Doyle’s bloody mouth. The gash across Ray’s cheek. His wig was hanging half off his head; Doyle’s next blow knocked it to the ground, revealing short blond hair that had hidden beneath the brown wig. The glasses he’d worn were gone, as well.

Neither man seemed to be holding the pistol. But the danger was greater than ever, Laney realized with a jolt of alarm, for their fight had taken them dangerously close to what looked like a steep drop-off. The tree line ended feet away, with nothing but sky and the velvet blue outlines of distant mountains stretching out beyond.

Ray threw himself at Doyle with a vicious head-butt. Doyle’s head snapped back, and suddenly they were teetering at the edge of the bluff.

“No!” Laney cried, pushing her sluggish feet into action.

But it was too late.

Both men tumbled over the side and disappeared.

* * *

I
N
HIS
THIRTY
-
THREE
YEARS
,
Doyle had felt the cold finger of death on the back of his neck twice before. Once, at the age of nine, when he had gone swimming in the Gulf of Mexico and ignored an undertow warning. He’d made it back alive, though there had been several minutes of choking on salt water and praying for deliverance before that had happened.

The second time, he’d been in the swampy woods of Terrebonne, the sleepy little town in south Alabama where he’d spent most of his life. He’d been on a manhunt for a drug dealer the coast guard had chased ashore. He’d ended up pinned down between well-armed and ruthless Colombians and an equally well-armed and ruthless group of DEA agents. Bullets had rained from the sky in all directions, ripping to shreds the fallen log behind which he’d taken cover. When the battle ended, he’d been bloody from splinters but, by some miracle, untouched by gunfire.

Today, death came in the form of a fifty-foot drop down the side of a mountain.

He clawed at the rocky side of the bluff, trying not to hear the bone-cracking thuds of Ray’s body bouncing down the incline below him. Doyle’s own fingers had caught on an exposed tree root, keeping him from following, but his feet dangled below him, gravity and his own weight conspiring to wrench him free of his desperate hold on life. He tried to go completely still, to stop his body’s swaying movements, and that was when his ankle cracked against something hard embedded in the side of the bluff.

Ignoring the sharp sting of pain, he glanced down and saw the flat, narrow outcropping of shale just above his dangling feet.

He bent one knee, putting his foot on the outcropping, and pushed down, expecting the rock to crumble under the pressure. But it held.

Lifting the other foot, he put more weight on the ledge. No give. The rock was solid, and it seemed to be firmly embedded in the side of the bluff.

“Doyle!” Laney’s voice rang above him. He looked up and found her pale face and wide blue eyes staring back at him.

“Are you okay?” Her gaze slid past him to focus on something below.

He dared a quick look downward and saw that Ray had finally stopped tumbling, his crumpled body lying motionless against the outcropping that had stopped his descent.

Footsteps scurried above, and he looked up to see Joy Adderly crouching next to Laney. Her breath caught at the sight of Doyle hanging precariously on the steep side of the bluff.

“How’s your foothold?” Laney asked. Doyle could tell she was struggling to stay calm and focused, but she couldn’t hide the fear in her eyes or the tremble of her voice.

“My feet are on a narrow ledge,” he told her. “It seems to be holding pretty well, but I can’t get any leverage to climb. You don’t happen to have a rope, do you?”

“In my backpack. Which those bastards took.” Her lips pressing to a grim line, she stripped off her jacket. Her body immediately trembled—whether from cold or fear, Doyle didn’t know. Holding one sleeve of the sturdy jacket, she flung the coat toward him.

Sucking in a deep breath, he let go of the rock beneath his right hand, ignoring the resulting sensation of falling backward, and caught the other jacket sleeve, understanding what she had in mind.

“You sure this will hold?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted. “You sure you can hold on long enough for me to go down the mountain for help?”

The thought was enough to make his insides shrivel. “No.”

She put her left hand on the sleeve she held, but the second she closed her fingers around the fabric, the muscles in her jaw tightened to knots.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” Doyle asked, seeing a long purple streak of incipient bruising across the back of her hand.

She took her hand off the jacket, shaking it with a wince. “My hand got caught in the door.”

Joy reached for the jacket, gripping it above the sleeve seam with both hands. “Let’s give it a try now.”

You can do this,
Doyle told himself as he prepared to take his hand away from the tree root he’d been holding on to for dear life.
Just grab the jacket. You won’t fall.

His gaze slid downward toward the steep drop below, but he quickly forced his eyes back upward, where they locked with Laney’s baby blues.

“You can do this,” she said with soft urgency. In her eyes, he saw a blaze of emotion that stole his breath.

His heart pounding with a surge of adrenaline, he released his grip on the side of the mountain and closed both hands on the jacket sleeve. Pushing off with his legs, he used the leverage of the jacket to claw his way upward until his torso hung partially over the edge of the bluff.

Laney grabbed the waistband of his jeans with her uninjured hand and pulled, falling backward as she hauled him the rest of the way up. He sprawled forward, his body landing over hers. She was soft and warm and perfect beneath him, and even as relief washed over him like a tidal wave, he wanted to stay there cradled in her fervent grasp forever.

He held her face between his hands, wanting to kiss her so much it was a physical ache. But a blast of icy wind rolled down the mountain, sending a shudder of cold through her slender body, and he pushed his own desires back under control, rolling off of her and reaching for her coat.

It had somehow survived its brief role of makeshift rope. He wrapped it around her shivering body as she sat up. “Thank you,” he said.

That fierce emotion still blazed back at him from her eyes. “You’re welcome.”

He reached for her bruised hand and gently manipulated the fingers, feeling for any sign of a break. “How badly do you think you’re hurt?”

Her jaw tightened with pain, but she shook her head. “I think it’s just a bad bruise.”

He didn’t feel any obvious fractures, but the angry purple color was spreading. “It’s swelling a little,” he warned.

She pulled her hand away, her chin lifting. “It’ll be okay until we get down the mountain.”

He bent and kissed her forehead. “Okay.” He turned to look at Joy. “Thank you, too.”

She was watching them with eyes narrowed almost to slits. The light was hurting her eyes, Doyle realized. She’d been in that cave for days; daylight probably felt like needles in her brain.

“I wish I had a pair of sunglasses for you,” he told her. He’d had a pair in his backpack, but the bag had disappeared at some point after the Taser attack.

“I’ll be okay.” Joy pushed to her feet, looking weary but determined. “I just want to go home.”

Doyle rose, holding out his hand to help Laney to her feet. His body creaked a little, the aftereffects of his fight with Ray making themselves known in twinges and aches. He took a quick assessment of his injuries—a bloody scrape on one cheekbone, puffy skin around his right eye that felt sore to the touch, a split lip and all sorts of muscle twinges—but he would survive.

He wandered back to the edge of the bluff and looked down. Ray hadn’t moved.

“Is he dead?” Joy asked.

“He fell a long way,” Doyle answered.

“We can send for help when we get down the mountain,” Laney said firmly, grabbing Doyle’s arm and pulling him away from the drop-off.

“I left something in the cave,” Joy said. “I’ll go get it.”

Doyle caught her arm as she started toward the entrance. “Don’t go back in there.”

Joy’s expression hardened to a dogged scowl. “I pulled a leather patch off Craig’s coat when he put me in the cave. Apparently he realized it was missing, because Ray kept asking me to give it to him. I lied and told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He even searched the cave, but he didn’t find where I hid it. It’s proof that Craig was part of my kidnapping.”

“Tell me where you hid it and I’ll get it,” Doyle said.

“No,” Laney said firmly, handing him her pistol. “I’ll go with Joy to find it. You keep guard.”

Doyle started to argue, but she had a point. Ray might be out of commission, but Craig Bolen was still around here somewhere. Gripping the pistol with resolve, he nodded, walking with them to the mouth of the cave.

He handed Laney his phone. “The battery’s close to giving out, but it should give you enough light to find the patch and get back here.”

Laney took the phone and disappeared into the cave with Joy.

Doyle watched until they reached the outer edge of the ambient glow coming through the open doorway. Laney turned on the phone flashlight and followed Joy deeper into the cave, both of them disappearing from sight.

Doyle turned away from the doorway and studied the woods around him, alert for any sign of movement. He heard the rustle of wind in the leaves, the distant twitter of birdsong and the thudding drumbeat of his own pulse.

No sign of Craig Bolen.

But he was still out there somewhere, dangerous as hell.

* * *

L
ANEY
FOLLOWED
J
OY
through the narrow passageway to the deeper room of the cave, flashing the light toward the wall of the cave where Joy directed her. It looked no different from the other stony walls surrounding them, but Joy went directly to a particular spot and started tugging at a piece of stone embedded there, waist high.

As Laney shifted to direct the light from Doyle’s phone toward Joy’s hands, she saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She started to turn, expecting to find that Doyle had followed them inside.

A hand snaked out of the gloom behind her, tangling in her hair and jerking her backward. She hit a thick body and felt hot breath on her neck. The fist in her hair twisted, sending pain ripping through her scalp.

“Don’t say a word,” Craig Bolen growled, pressing something hard and cold against her temple.