Jack Stone - Wild Justice (13 page)

Stone turned Lilley around and planted one of his hands in the middle of her back, forcing her to bend over the table. She folded at the waist
obedient and willing, shuffling her legs wider apart and turning her head to press her cheek against the cold timber surface of the table. Stone held her down with enough pressure for her to feel the sense of being restrained. He fumbled with the button of his jeans with his free hand, and guided the swelling length of himself between her thighs.

“Don’t move,” Stone hissed.

He eased himself inside her. She was already wet, and accustomed to his size now. He slid within her until their bodies were pressed together and then froze for long moments to enjoy the vibrations of Lilley’s body gripping and clutching and pulsing around his length.

Stone
clamped his hands on Lilley’s shoulders, leaning over her to apply pressure – pinning her helplessly to the table. She sighed, reveling in the overpowering thrill of fullness and submission. And then Stone began to plunge himself in and out of Lilley’s wet and willing body, driving hard with his hips. The aching knot in the pit of her stomach became a bloom of searing heat, and a new wonderful sensation overwhelmed her.

For Lilley, there was no high and no low. No modulation to her heightened
sense of enduring thrill. It was like the crescendo of a piece of classical music – an endless climax that was driven by the steady rhythmic thrust of Stone’s body against hers. She writhed and twisted against him. Her hands turned to tensed claws that scrabbled at the edge of the table. Her heart began to race and she lost all control – all sense of awareness beyond the feelings that engulfed her.

They came together – a single blinding moment of release that
seized their bodies in tensed rigid relief so that time seemed frozen and everything around them stopped. A heartbeat, maybe two, and then Stone was breathing again, and Lilley was sobbing and trembling beneath him.

For a long time afterwards neither of them spoke. It was as if the air had been sucked from the room, vaporized by the intensity of their passion.

Lilley stood, weak as a kitten, and fell into Stone’s waiting arms. He kissed her, this time with slow, lingering passion as he slid his lips across hers and cupped her face within the palms of his hands.

“I have to go,” Stone said softly.

Lilley opened her eyes with reluctance.

“It’s past ni
ne,” he explained. “I need to get to Hank Dodd’s property and try to find those two girls.”

Twenty.

Lilley had a flashlight stored under her kitchen sink. Stone threw it onto the passenger seat and put the car in gear.

He turned left onto Main Street and drove slowly, his eyes scanning the parked up cars along the curb. He saw the glowing red and green neon sign in the window of ‘Stan’s Bar’. Then he saw the blue SUV. It was parked on Main Street, out front of the laundromat. He grinned mirthlessly, and nosed the Chevy into a space nearby.

Main Street was dark. The stores were closed. There was only ambient light from a slice of moon and the dull yellow glow of a couple of
street lights.

Stone got out of the Chevy and went to the SUV. The doors were locked, the windows all wound up tight. He put his palm on the
hood. The engine was stone cold, meaning the two out-of-towners were probably still in the bar, and had been there all afternoon.

Stone went down on one knee, let the air out of the two front
tires. Did the same to the rear tires. Smiled to himself, not from the act, but from what it meant. It meant the two guys weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. It meant they would still be around when Stone got back from Hank Dodd’s property.

That was good.

He slid back behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and blew past the outer limits of Windswept before he realized he didn’t know what to do with the Chevy.

Dodd had a property with a long dirt driveway that branched off the two-lane. Where did Stone park? He remembered seeing distant buildings well back from the road as he had driven to Rapture,
so each property was at the end of a mile-long dirt trail. If he drove down the track to Dodd’s property and there was someone waiting, he would be spotted immediately. But if he parked up on the roadside and Dodd came home from the bar early, he might get suspicious.

In the end, he saw the mailbox Lilley had described and drove on for another mile. Eased the car off the road so two wheels were still on tarmac,
and two on the roadside gravel out front of the next mailbox north. It was an old iron drum, painted green set on top of a treated timber post. Across the barrel hand-painted in careful lettering was the name ‘Cartwright’. Stone frowned, puzzled. Searched his memory for a moment. Then he locked the car and walked grimly back to the turnoff. If Dodd came home early, he was unlikely to drive a mile past his own turnoff. He was unlikely to see the Chevy.

It was dark.
Overhead, clouds were building up from the west, blocking out stars, scudding across the moon. There was enough light to see a few feet ahead of him, no more. He carried the flashlight in his left hand and started down the dirt track that led to Hank Dodd’s house, boots crunching loudly on the loose gravel.

Shapes began to loom out of the night. Not really shapes, but
areas of black that were somehow denser and darker than the black of the night. Big shapes on his right, and he slowed as he got closer, instinct telling him it was time for stealth.

Stone crouched down and let his eyes adjust. He had good night vision, and he concentrated on the building. Gradually
the blackness took on indistinct detail. The structure was high, shaped like a wedge. A sprawling shape with other lower structures around it. He crept closer, stepping off the track onto soft sand and scrub.

Closer. He could smell hay and manure. A barn.
An old barn that had seen better days. He heard a sound like shuffling feet on hard dirt, and then a horse snickered softly.

He crept closer.

The walls were splintered, sun-warped clapboard, and rusted pieces of corrugated iron. Beside the barn was a low timber shed, and off it at right angles was an iron gate. Behind the gate was a horse.

Stone clamped his hand over the flashlight and switched it on. There was a dull red glow of light – enough to get his bearings. The barn door was on the other side of the gate. He climbed over. The horse seemed to sense his proximity. It stomped a hoof on beaten dirt and skittered sideways. Stone ignored it, eyes fixed on the dark cavern that was the open barn door.

He stepped into total, absolute darkness. The barn was huge. The smell of hay was stronger now. Stone stood still and listened for long moments.

The scurry of rats, the sound of a small breeze through the gaping rotted timber walls, but no sound of
life
. No sound or sense that people were nearby. No sobs, no movement. Not that he could tell.

He backtracked to the gate, used the
flashlight again. There was a narrow path worn into the ground. Stone followed it past another shed, this one made of steel, painted drab green. The double doors were chained and padlocked. Stone pulled the doors an inch apart until the chain came up tight, then aimed the flashlight through the gap. He saw a tractor on a solid concrete pad. The machinery seemed to fill the whole space. He turned the flashlight off, kept moving.

At the end of the path he re-joined the gravel driveway out front of Hank Dodd’s house.

It was a brick ranch-style building, low and sprawling with an iron awning that ran all the way along the front. The house was enveloped in darkness and eerie brooding silence.

Stone crept across the building’s frontage until he reached a set of steps that led up onto the
porch. He put his foot on the bottom step, tested it – and heard a distinctive
‘click’

Stone was blinded by sudden light. He threw his hand up to shield his eyes, frozen for a second and cursing bitterly under his
breath. Above the front door a bright spotlight glowed like a warning beacon, lighting the porch and the front door – triggered by a motion sensor.

Fight or flight?
Stone had a split second to decide.

Fight.

Instinctive, reactive. Innate.

He lunged up the stairs, reached up for the light
, and unscrewed the bulb until the porch was plunged back into darkness. Then he flattened his back against the wall beside the door and counted slowly to ten, expecting to hear the sound of heavy footsteps and see interior lights being switched on.

Nothing. Silence.

Darkness.

Stone allowed himself a long steadying breath.

Okay. The place is deserted. No one is home. So how do you do this, Jack?
Do you check all the windows? Do you try to work the lock somehow, or do you break down the door?

He didn’t have the time he needed to go around the house checking windows, or the tools he needed to work the lock. And words like ‘subtle’ and ‘discreet’ were not the kind of terms many people had ever used to describe Jack Stone.

Decision made.

He peeled himself off the wall, stood in front of the door and kicked out hard – a sidekick using the heel of his boot.

The door was timber, standard in every way with a simple pattern routed into the surface. The lock was br
ass. Stone’s kick landed just below the lock and splintered the timber. The door sagged but the lock held. He kicked a second time and the door exploded back hard against its hinges.

Stone stepped inside. Pushed the door partly closed and switched on the
flashlight.

The interior was open-planned – a lounge dining area where he stood, and as he swept the
flashlight around he saw a well-appointed kitchen off to the left with glass doors that must have led out onto another porch on the side of the building. He swept the flashlight back, saw a door on the other side of the room. It was open. Stone saw polished timber boards on the floor. A hallway.

There were four doors, two left, two on the right. He checked them all.
Three bedrooms and a fourth room that had been made into an office. Stone spent two minutes in the office. There were papers spread haphazardly across an antique desk. Stone saw purchase receipts under a horseshoe paperweight and an open ledger, but no sign of the missing girls. There was a bookcase behind the desk. One shelf was lined with paperbacks and a few larger hardcover books that looked like accountancy texts. He ran his finger along the paperbacks. Stone didn’t recognize any of the titles or the authors. The books all had cracked, worn spines. They seemed to be a collection of sex stories. There was about twenty books in the series. The rest of the bookcase was filled with framed photographs of people Stone didn’t recognize and didn’t care about. He stomped back into the living room.

He called out, “Margie! Margie Bevan!” and then dropped flat on his stomach and put his ear against the cold timber
floorboards. It was the best way to pick up sound. Stone heard the refrigerator motor running, felt it’s vibrations through the floor, and he could hear the sigh of the wind as it swept over the house, but nothing else.

No
reply, no muffled sounds. No response at all. He called out again, listened in the silence for long seconds.

Absolutely n
othing.

He went into the kitchen. It smelled of cooking oil and vegetables. It was a
large space with a long bench, lined with electrical appliances. Stone checked the sink. Saw a single coffee mug, upturned to drain dry on a wire rack. He pulled open the door of the dishwasher. Two plates, a couple of forks. No sign that extra food had been prepared.

Stone glanced at his watch. It was 10.30pm.

He went back out onto the front porch, left the door wide open. He was figuring the math as he walked back along the trail towards the road. It was ninety minutes until the bar closed. Maybe another thirty minutes after that before Dodd got home and realized what had happened – and realized Stone was responsible.

Two hours in total. Two hours to
find some kind of proof before Hank Dodd discovered that war had been declared and planned his revenge.

Stone looked up. The cloud was heavier. Lower.

A storm was brewing over Windswept, Arizona.

Twenty-One.

Stone parked the Chevy out front of the police station and crossed the road. There was a narrow service lane between the general store and the
laundromat; a dark passageway piled with discarded empty cartons and trash cans waiting for pickup. Stone stood in the entrance to the alley, his back against the bricks and waited.

He couldn’t see the blue SUV. It was parked closer to the bar, but that didn’t bother him.

Stone stood in the darkness for fifteen minutes. One guy walked past the laneway without looking sideways. He had come from the bar. He was a little unsteady on his feet.

Stone waited.

Five more minutes. He could hear noise. Not specific sounds, but rather the collective sounds of voices and footsteps coming closer.