Jackrabbit Junction Jitters (48 page)

She fought to keep the rushing water from swirling over her
face while rocks and boards ricocheted off her. She tried to kick free.

The water spun her around then, just in time to see
something big and black surfing toward her.

Her arms felt leaden as she lifted them to shield her face,
but the tire came hard and fast. It bashed into her forearms, knocking them
into her chin and cheek.

Stars floated behind her eyes for a second.

Then time stopped.

* * *

“Claire!” Mac raced along next to the ravine, his light’s
beam bouncing over the churning water.

It’d taken him a good twenty minutes to sprint down the
hillside and across the valley floor. Twenty agonizingly long minutes filled
with dread and panic. His chest ached from the run and the fear that he hadn’t
raced fast enough.

The scent of wet dirt saturated the air. He’d passed the
point where he’d found her and Porter’s footprints leading into the dry wash a quarter-mile
back. With the torrent still rushing, he had no way of knowing if either of them
had made it back out.

“Claire!” he yelled between gasps.

On the opposite bank, his flashlight skimmed over what
looked like a muddy, gnarled tree trunk snagged on several branches of a
mesquite tree.

A hand bobbed in the current next to the trunk.

Mac skidded to a stop, his heart throbbing in his throat,
his burning lungs constricting with fear.

“No, no, no,” he whispered.

He inched up to the wash’s edge and squared the beam on the
hand, then followed along the arm to where it met up with the trunk—a torso
floating face-down, feet directed downstream. The mud and debris obscured the rest
of the body.

Mac dropped to his knees.
Claire?

In spite of grinding pain in his chest, he had to know for
certain. He examined the torso again, searching for any definitive sign. A
tumbleweed caught in the current bumped against the mud-covered shoulder, then
caught on the body and blocked his view.

He moved the beam down, following where the legs should be
but were under water.

Then he saw a boot heel floating above the surface as water
rippled around it.

A boot heel.

The memory of Porter’s ostrich-skin cowboy boots wriggling
through the hole flashed through his mind.

Claire had been wearing tennis shoes.

Mac closed his eyes, running his shaking hand down his face.
He swallowed his heart back down into his chest.

She was still out there somewhere.

He sprang to his feet and jogged along the bank of the wash
again, slower this time as he studied every clump of matted roots, tumbleweeds,
and tangle of branches.

As the bank flattened, the wash spread out and grew
shallower. Over the next quarter-mile, he counted three rats, one coyote, and
the front half of a deer.

Then he found another body—this time human.

It lay face-down along the bank closest to him, the hips and
legs still submerged in the brown water.

Stumbling over a broken wooden gate, he crashed through a
thicket of brambles and landed on his knees next to the outstretched arm.
Claire’s grandmother’s ring glittered from the middle finger on the
pale-skinned hand.

“Claire?” He croaked, his voice clogged in his throat.

He flipped her over, mopping the mud from her skin with
trembling fingers. He shined his light on her face. Her lips were tinged blue,
her eyes closed. He patted her cheeks. Dirty water drooled out from the side of
her mouth. He turned her head to the side, forcing her mouth open to clear it.
More water seeped out.

“Sweetheart, come on, open your eyes.”

His fingers found a pulse in her neck, still strong.

Quakes of relief racked him from head to toe. He grabbed her
under the armpits and tried to pull her free of the water. She slid about half
a foot and then something tugged her back into the wash.

A moan escaped from her lips.

“Claire?” Mac gave up on pulling her free and returned to
trying to rouse her. “Come on, baby. Come back to me.”

She gurgled, then coughed and rolled her head to the side. When
he turned her on her side to help clear any mud or water from her lungs,
another moan crawled up from her chest.

“Claire, wake up!” He used a hard, stern voice this time.

Her mud-caked eyelashes fluttered against her ashen cheeks,
then opened, instantly closing again.

Mac moved the beam of the light to the side, and she lifted
her lids partway.

The urge to squeeze her against him and never let go coursed
through him. Instead, he cleared the wet strands of hair from her face and
smiled down at her.

“Welcome back, Slugger.”

A wave of coughs rang from her, followed by retching. After
it passed, she lay limp in his arms.

“Mac?” Her voice sounded raspy.

“Yeah, baby.”

“Something’s chewing on my ankle.”

“Come again?”

“It keeps biting me.”

“I’ll look.” His boots sank into the mud as he stepped
carefully into the shallow bank of the fast-moving, dark waters. He tested his
footing and the current before focusing on Claire’s leg. He ran his hands down
her right pant leg and found nothing.

“The other one.” Her voice barely carried over the rushing
sound of the water.

Around her left ankle, Mac found the offender—a strip of
barbed wire.

She cried out as he lifted her foot.

“Sorry.” He followed the strand down, digging it out of the
soft sand until his fingers bumped into something solid that wouldn’t budge
from the earth. He needed his wire cutters, damn it.

He stood, noticing that since he’d found Claire, the water
had climbed further up the bank and now lapped at her upper thighs. Shit, the
water was still rising. He had to get her out of there.

“You’re caught in part of a barbed-wire fence, Claire. I’m
going to have to unwrap it from around your ankle.” He found her ankle again. “This
is going to hurt.”

She gasped as he started working the barbs free, but kept
silent as he struggled with the tangles and worked to free her.

“Got it,” he said several minutes later. “I’m going to carry
you out of here, Claire.”

He hated to move her, but he needed to get her to higher
ground in case another swell came along.

“Can you tell me if anything feels broken?”

“Just my head.”

“That’s too hard to break, sweetheart.”

Her chest rumbled with a half-cough, half-laugh.

Squatting next to her, he slid his arms under her.

“Wait!” She grabbed his arm.

“What?”

“I need to tell you something.”

He frowned down at her pale face.

“I think there’s a good chance—” She sneezed, twice, into
his chest.

“You were saying?” His knees were too old to hold this
position for long, especially after his flight down the hillside.

“I think that I might possibly love you back.”

He stared into her dark eyes, and then burst out laughing.

Only Claire could take those three short words and jumble
them into such a noncommittal sentence.

“Mac!” Claire tried to sit up and failed. “Mac, stop.”

“I can’t …” He laughed, all of the fear and worry tumbling
away. “I can’t help it.”

He tried to swallow the rest of his chuckles, and sputtered
behind closed lips.

Her attempt at a glare fell short. “You should be kissing
me, not laughing.”

Looking away from her, he took a deep breath before turning
back.

“I’m sorry,” he said and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “You
taste like mud pie.”

“That’s not very romantic.”

“Mud pie?”

“No, kissing my forehead.”

“I’ll kiss you properly after I get you to the hospital and
the doc says you’re okay.”

She sighed. “Fine.”

He scooped her up in his arms.

“Wait!” Her gaze darted around.

“Now what?”

“Porter.”

Mac glanced upstream. “He didn’t make it.”

Her lids lowered. “Oh.”

Handing Claire the flashlight to guide them, he asked, “Can
we leave now or would you like to go skinny dipping first?”

“Funny. You’ve been hanging around Chester and Manny too
long. Next you’ll start talking about hooters.”

“Yours are often on my mind,” he said, heading away from the
wash.

“Good. How’s your head?”

“It’s still attached.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. “There’s no way you
can carry my fat ass clear to your pickup.”

“Watch me. And don’t insult your butt. It happens to be one
of my favorite parts of your anatomy, along with your hooters.”

She pressed a kiss into his jaw. “Mac?”

“What, Claire?”

“I love you.”

He grinned. “Yeah, I know.”

Wednesday, August 25th

The noonday sun cooked the tar-streaked pavement at Biddy’s
Gas and Carryout at a slow, smelly boil.

Kate fanned herself with a credit card pamphlet as the gas
pump chugged beside her, spewing high octane fumes as it took its sweet time
filling her tank. A blast of heat from a passing semi-truck plastered her shirt
against her damp skin.

The engine of her newly repaired Volvo ticked along with the
numbers on the pump’s LCD display.

Across the street, Creekside Supply Company’s flag fluttered
and flapped in the cross-breezes, sagging in the humidity every time the desert
paused to take another breath.

Kate tapped the edge of the pamphlet against her chin. Good
ol’ Jackrabbit Junction spread out before her in all its dusty, heat-rippling
glory. In less than twenty-four hours, she’d watch it disappear in her rearview
mirror.

After receiving a call from the repair shop yesterday that
her Volvo was ready to roll, it hadn’t taken Deborah much hot air to convince
Kate to leave a few days earlier than originally planned. Monday’s chain of
events had Kate wanting to run for the hills—the Black Hills. Back to square
one.

She was tired of being hung out on the line to dry only to
end up caught in another August gale.

Claire’s injuries had kept them from escaping before Ruby
and Gramps returned earlier today, much to Deborah’s chagrin. But with Ruby
home, Kate no longer needed to hang around to mind the store. They were free to
flee tomorrow at first light.

If it weren’t for Jess’s birthday party tonight, Kate would
have pushed to make their exit this afternoon.

An all-too-familiar, almost brand new, red pickup, its
tailgate down with a couple of two-by-fours sticking out, rolled into the
carry-out’s parking lot.

Kate avoided looking in Butch’s direction as she heard his
pickup door open and then slam shut. She breathed a sigh of relief at the sound
of the store’s electronic door buzzer. Her mother was right, some places were
meant only to be passed through—preferably at sixty miles per hour.

The gas pump clicked off. Kate hung the nozzle back in its
holder, fidgeting with her keys while she waited for her receipt to print. She
wanted to escape before Butch came out and saw her.

Finally, the machine spit out her receipt.

“Hi, Kate.”

Her shoulders pinched together.

Damn!

Planting a smile on her face, she faced Butch, who stood
just outside the glass doors with three packs of hamburger buns and two loaves
of bread in his arms.

“Hey, Butch.”

“How’s Claire? Grady said she looked like she’d gone a
couple rounds with Muhammad Ali after her dip in the wash.”

Which was nothing compared to Porter, according to what Mac had
told Kate after returning from the county morgue where he’d had to identify his
body.

The truth about Porter’s reason for courting both Claire and
Kate still took her breath away. All of those times she’d spent alone with him
in his pickup and he’d turned out to be a cold-blooded killer. She shivered in
spite of the heat searing her skin.

“Claire’s moving pretty slow and has a big bruise on her
chin, but she was up and limping around the place this morning.” In spite of
Mac’s protests.

The friction that had caused all of the sparks between
Claire and Mac last weekend seemed to have smoothed out, which was another
reason Kate couldn’t wait to leave. She’d had enough salt rubbed in her wounds
lately. Watching those two lovebirds made her want to jab pencils in her eyes.

“Good to hear. Your car looks brand new again.”

“Yep.” Kate patted the roof, fighting back a grimace as the
sizzling black metal burned her hand.

Several seconds ticked by way too slowly, Kate glancing everywhere
but into Butch’s blue eyes.

“I heard Ruby and your grandpa made it home this morning.”

She gaped. Who had told him that? This town was way too
small.

“Jess called to say her mom gave the ‘okay’ on her working for
me.”

Ah, Jess. Of course.

“She also told me you’re heading home early.” His expression
remained fixed, his grin nothing more than polite.