Jack Stone - Wild Justice (10 page)

The two men came closer. The other two guys from the bar stood their ground, holding back.

Now they were close enough for Stone to see the extent of their injuries. One of the men’s noses was strapped with white surgical plaster and beneath both his eyes was bruised and blackened. The other man seemed to be favoring one side, and Stone remembered the sound of the man’s shoulder bones grating against each other. He could hardly believe either of them had come back for more.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Stone said to the men.

They exchanged brief glances. “We’ve been looking for you too,” the man with the plaster across the bridge of his nose said. “We’ve got a score to settle. You should have left town.”

Stone shrugged. “I’ve got questions I want answered.
And you should have brought more reinforcements.”

The man turned, glanced over his shoulder,
and then turned back. “You think four of us isn’t enough to take you down?”

Stone nodded. “I know it.”

Then the second man reached behind his back and under his jacket. When Stone saw the man’s hand again, it was wrapped around a pistol. Not the one Stone had taken from them at the diner. A different one. “I brought Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. What do you say now?”

Stone said nothing for a long moment. A gun made things dangerous, but he
kept his voice calm and detached when he answered. “I’d say that just made me mad,” he said. “I’d say that just got you a whole lot more broken bones than I was going to give you.”

The man made a face. It might have been a laugh, might have been a grimace.

“We want you out of town.” Stone turned. It was Hank Dodd who had spoken. “We don’t want you round here.”

“And I’ll go,” Stone said agreeably,
“When I get answers. When I find out what these two men are doing in Windswept, and when I find out what you know about the girls who went missing. And when I find out if the two matters are connected.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m not going anywhere until those two girls are found safe and sound,” Stone said, and then on an impulse he added, “and until I find out everything you know about a man named Harper.”

At the mention of the name, H
ank Dodd’s face seemed to flicker with an instant of recognition. It was just a fleeting change of expression, there and gone again within a heartbeat.

“Never hea
rd of anyone called Harper,” Dodd said. “And I don’t know nothing more than I told the police about those two little girls.”

Stone’s face went icy. “You’re
lying.”

He sensed movement and his eyes went back to the two men f
rom the blue SUV. He saw the man with the gun in his hand raise the weapon until Stone was staring down the barrel. “Be that as it may,” the gunman said, “the fact is you aren’t welcome and you aren’t going to get any answers. What we’re giving you is an ultimatum. Get out of town. Be gone before morning. If you aren’t, we’ll come looking for you, and there won’t be a second warning.”

Stone took a pace towards the man, fists down by his side, bunched and ready. Then he checked himself. Even if he could take these guys, and avoid the gun, there was no way he was going to get the answers he wanted – not
from these two men and not from Hank Dodd. Not like this. Not in a crowd. His only hope was to single them out – cull them from the herd and beat the answers from them.

Stone took another step – and then another. The guy kept the gun on him all the way. Stone walked out
the front door of the bar and didn’t once look back, which was just as well for the two men and for Hank Dodd.

Because Stone’s face was set and grim and merciless.

It wasn’t over. Not by a long way.

Eighteen.

Stone was parked outside the diner at five minutes to six. He saw Lilley through the glass windows. She was cleaning tables. The diner was empty. She waved at him, then
tugged at the ties of her apron and reached behind the counter for her handbag. She came out the doors, smiling brightly. Stone climbed from behind the wheel of the Chevy and went around to the passenger side so Lilley could drive.

“How was your day?” Stone asked.

“Good. Busy.” She had a couple of plastic storage containers under one arm. She reached behind her and set them on the back seat. “I brought left-over pie for dinner.” She settled herself behind the wheel, tugged at the hem of her skirt. “More importantly, how was your day?”

“Interesting.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Yes I do,” he said.
“I have a theory…”

Lilley said nothing. Just made an all-purpose gesture of delay and craned her neck to look over her shoulder at the stream of traffic coming behind her. She waited for a small truck and a semi trailer to roar past and pulled out onto the road behind them.

Stone sat patiently. He stayed silent until Lilley had turned off the highway and was on the road to Windswept before he started talking. She drove with one hand and pulled the pins from her hair with the other. Released from its bun, her hair broke like a black wave over her shoulders, then rippled and swayed with the small movements of her head. She used the back of one hand to brush it from her forehead, then looked up at him, her expression attentive and focused.

“I’m listening,” she said.

Stone sat back in the passenger seat and rubbed his temples. He had been thinking hard since leaving the bar, and now he just began to talk, watching Lilley’s face from the corner of his eye for signs of her reaction.

“I think H
ank Dodd kidnapped the two local girls,” he said.

Lilley shot him a wide-eyed glance of horror. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “
How do you figure that?”

Stone sighed.
Started from the start.

“I took your advice and went to the library this morning. The lady there was very helpful,” he said. “She told me the police weren’t investigating the disappearance as a kidnapping
at all – they were treating the whole incident as a runaway. They think the girls went to Phoenix.”

“Why do they think that?” Lilley sounded genuinely surprised. “That wasn’t mentioned in the newspaper.
The report said it was a suspected kidnapping.”

“No, it wasn’t
mentioned,” Stone agreed. “Because they didn’t report one key fact. Hank Dodd told the police when he drove past the girls, they were walking along this road, and Margie Bevan was carrying a suitcase,” Stone explained. “By reporting that to the police, he has deflected their investigation. Everyone in town assumes this is a kidnapping, apart from the police, because of what Hank Dodd told them. That makes me suspicious. It means the police are less likely to pursue every lead, and less likely to give this case the attention it deserves.”

“But maybe Margie was carrying a suitcase. Maybe they did run away to Phoenix.”

“No. They didn’t,” Stone said. “And Margie wasn’t carrying a suitcase.”

Lilley glared at him. “How do you know that, Stone?” she asked. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I visited Margie’s parents today. She didn’t own a suitcase, Lilley.”

There was a long silence, like Lilley was processing all this information. Stone stared out the window, giving her time to think. They were approaching Windswept. Lilley eased off the gas a
s they hit the town limits. She drove in silence, her brow furrowed like she had to concentrate on driving, but Stone knew she was thinking about what he had told her.

He didn’t speak again until Lilley had parked in front of her cottage and killed the engine. They sat in the silence for a minute, listening to the motor and exhaust tick and ping as they began to cool.

“I can’t believe it…” Lilley said finally. “So far all you have are some suspicions, and a theory. It all sounds pretty thin, Jack. I just can’t imagine these girls being kidnapped by a local. I don’t understand why.”

Ston
e nodded his head. “I think I know,” he said. “And I’ll tell you the rest when we get inside.”

The house was warm and stuffy with still air. Stone left the front door wide open and Lilley went through to the kitchen, cracked the window and set the plastic containers on the counter.

She turned round to Stone, her face still ashen and perplexed. “I need to take a quick shower,” she said.

Stone nodded. He found a can of Coke in Lilley’s refrigerator and went out onto the porch. Sat on th
e worn timber steps and stared at the houses across the street.

He thought about the men in the blue SUV. He couldn’t figure where they were. When Hank Dodd had gone into his office, Stone was sure it had been to phone the men – and they had arrived at the bar within a matter of minutes. That meant they couldn’t be staying in Rapture – they had to be waiting somewhere in Windswept.

But where? For Stone it was the one missing link.

Stone got to his feet and walked to the
mailbox. He stood there for a long moment, drinking his Coke and looking along the street. None of the properties had rental signs, and he didn’t imagine the rental market was a big one for real estate agents in these parts. It didn’t make sense. Stone was sure that if the blue SUV had been parked up nearby, he would have seen the vehicle. He frowned, shook his head.

It
just didn’t make sense.

He went back into the house. He heard the shower shutting off. He went to the kitchen, pulled another Coke from the refrigerator.

A moment later Lilley came into the kitchen smelling of talcum powder and lavender. She had washed her hair. It hung down her back, wet and shiny. She had changed into a t-shirt and shorts. Stone ran his eyes over her body. Her legs were long and well shaped, and the shorts were cut off denims, frayed and faded and tight. They were short enough that Stone could see the white fabric of the pockets peeking from below the fringe of denim. The t-shirt was not one of those big, loose nightshirt things. It was Lilley’s size, which meant the fabric was stretched across her chest, making it very obvious to Stone that she was not wearing a bra. She had finely shaped breasts, larger than he suspected, and her nipples stood out in little dark lumps under the thin cloth.

“That feels better,” Lilley sighed. Her cheeks were flushed, maybe from the water being too hot, maybe from something else.

Stone’s gaze was openly admiring. “Looks better, too.”

Lilley blushed, looked down and plucked at the frayed edge of her cut-offs. “They’re a bit short.”

“Not from where I’m standing. They look perfect.”

She edged past him to the counter, picked up the plastic containers of pie and
pulled the refrigerator door open. “I’ll put these away until we’re ready to eat.”

She bent over to find an empty shelf and Stone leaned back to appreciate the perfect shape of her body. As she bent, he could see the soft white cheeks of her bottom, above the tan line of her thighs.

Stone had no doubt about what Lilley was doing, but for all that he appreciated her coyness. In a world where women went around overtly displaying their bodies in the skimpiest of outfits, he appreciated the subtlety Lilley was using. Somehow he found it sexier than if she had appeared in the kitchen wearing nothing.

When the show was over, Lilley switched lights on and they settled themselves at the table, Lilley with coffee, Stone still finishing off his second
Coke. Daylight was fading fast in a riot of sunset oranges and mauves.

Stone quickly picked up the thread of the theory that had been forming in his mind all day, and that he had begun to explain to Lilley on the drive home from the diner.

“After I went to the library and visited the Bevan family, I walked to your diner because I wanted to walk the road and see if there was any sign of a struggle, or tire tracks in the dirt – anything at all along the roadside that might have been a clue about where the girls had been taken from. I found nothing. That didn’t surprise me too much. So after I picked up your Chevy, I decided to drive north to Rapture,” Stone said, “I was looking for the blue SUV. Those men from the diner aren’t locals, and they certainly aren’t tourists. They’re here for a reason, Lilley, and they’ve been waiting long enough to be frustrated. They want to get away from Windswept. They want to go back to wherever it is they came from – after they pick up what they have been waiting for. I went to Rapture and drove around the town, thinking they might be staying at a motel – because there has been no sight of their vehicle around town since yesterday.”

Lilley looked surprised. “You’ve been busy,” she said. “And did you find the men
?”

“No, not
in Rapture,” Stone said. “That’s what has me confused. I don’t know where they are staying,” Stone shrugged. Then he sat back in his chair, stretched and yawned.

Lilley went to the counter and refilled her coffee cup. She took the pie from the refrigerator and set the pieces in the oven to warm.

“So I went to Hank Dodd’s bar to ask him why he lied about the suitcase.”

Lilley made a face, an expression almost of horror. “He wouldn’t have liked that,” Lilley said. “Hank Dodd isn’t the most social man in town. Did you find anything out?”