The Salt Maiden (24 page)

For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.

—Jeremiah 17:6
The Holy Bible (King James version)

The Hunter backed the truck a few feet so he could pull around the writhing form instead of running over it. He wasn’t certain why he did this, since Jay had never been anything but an unwelcome complication in his life, one last burden dumped on him by his useless younger brother—the brother who had somehow pushed past him and claimed every opportunity…including the one woman R.C. Eversole had wanted for his own.

“No—no. We can’t just
leave
him,” Dana cried.

The Hunter turned a fierce gaze on her, but she didn’t shrink back, despite the way he’d bloodied her face. Tougher than she looked, this one—maybe even tougher than her sister.

And she was right as well. He couldn’t leave the new sheriff. Better to disarm and take him instead of leaving him to recover and shoot after them or call for help.

Besides, despite their argument Dana clearly cared for Jay. The Hunter reasoned that he could use that to his advantage.

He pointed his handgun at her chest. “You move from that spot, I’ll kill him. And then I’ll flay the flesh off that body of yours inch by fucking inch. You hear me?”

She nodded, eyes glazing over with fresh terror, so he bailed out and walked around to where Jay was already crawling toward the pistol knocked from his hand.

The Hunter kicked it out of range and said, “On your feet. Now.”

Jay didn’t rise, but he looked up, his face a mask of horror. Head shaking, he squinted against the headlights’ glare and said, “No, this…this can’t be right. This
can’t be
. You aren’t—”

“You never should’ve come back here. Can’t imagine what the hell you were thinking.” A sign of weakness that the boy had taken the chance for escape he’d been given and had blown it. A sign that, like a sick bull or an injured buck, his nephew—
her
son—needed culling. Before, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to see it. But the desert and the long hunt for Angie had burned away all sentiment to leave behind only the stark truth.

“What’s…what’s
wrong
with you?” Pushing himself onto hands and knees, Jay asked, “What in God’s name
happened
to make you—”

“Something that should’ve damned well happened years ago. Something I should have goddamned well
demanded,
except I was always taking care of someone else’s messes—”

As Jay grabbed for his ankles, the Hunter stepped back out of range and kicked the sheriff sharply in the temple.

He felt only the dimmest echo of remorse as his nephew dropped face-first into the dust.

Dana flew at the stranger, her raised hands clutching the metal flashlight she had found behind the pickup’s front seat. Though she ran at him from behind, some sound must have given her away, for he whirled to face her, his pistol at the ready.

“The last thing you want,” he warned her, “is to get to be more trouble than you’re worth.”

She froze, as chilled by his deadly calm as his untroubled expression. He was a tall man, strongly built for all that he was past his prime. Early sixties, she guessed, judging from
the lines that creased his weathered face and the heavy, silvered stubble, but as filthy as he was she could be off as much as ten years in her guess. From his long-sleeved work shirt to his hat, boots, and trousers to his skin, the man was caked with thick dust, and he was rank with body odor, as if he’d gone a long while without bathing. As if he had been living rough, the way Angie had been when Dana found her.

But one item that he carried stood out: a pair of small black binoculars, relatively clean and unscratched, dangled from a strap around his neck. Strange-looking binoculars. But it was his thin face that drew most of her attention.

She had never seen him before in her life, though something about him was sickeningly familiar. Some resemblance…or had she caught a glimpse of him on that terrible night when he’d pursued her in the desert darkness, the night he’d shot her sister? Seen him and forgotten, after everything that happened?

“Put the flashlight down,” he ordered.

When she did not move fast enough to suit him, he turned his gun to aim at Jay’s back, which slowly rose and fell. Or did she only imagine he was breathing?

“Putting it down,” she assured her captor as she squatted to set the flashlight on the ground beside her. But instead of waiting for another order, she dropped to her knees and crawled to Jay, desperate to reassure herself that he was still alive.

“Jay,” she whispered as she shook his shoulder. “Jay, please, can you hear me?”

Though he didn’t budge, one of his eyes looked up at her before sliding shut again.

Brief as it was, that glimpse of blue eye superimposed itself over the coldly cruel face she had just gazed into.

And in a moment of sickening clarity, she understood why it had seemed familiar. The man who had hurt Jay must be R.C. Eversole, his uncle. The uncle who had supposedly
burned to death in his bed months before. The same uncle who had accepted bribes and carried on some sort of sick affair with Angie.

Dana shook with a desire to beat her fists against her sister’s killer. But she wanted out of this, too, and good sense warned her that if she went off on him—or gave him any indication that she knew who he was—this maniac would shoot her with the same deliberate calm he’d used to take down the nephew he’d helped raise.

The older man squatted across from her. “Help me get him in the cab, unless you’d rather that we left the body…”

He bared yellowed teeth and added, “Then you and I can continue the festivities all on our own.”

His words floated between them, so detached from all emotion that she shuddered, for the first time fearing other possibilities than death.

“I’ll help,” she said, and did, though the effort made her blink back tears against the pain of her injured side.

With a groan Jay roused enough to stagger to his widely separated feet. Leaning forward, he braced his hands on the fronts of his thighs and vomited.

Wincing, Dana laid her hand on his back and noticed the already purpling lump rising at his temple.

“Come on. Shake it off.” His uncle grasped Jay’s arm and started pulling. “Now, in the truck, both of you. We’re going for a ride.”

“R.C.?” Jay grunted. “But how could…how can you be alive? Am I…seeing…?”

“Just shut up and get in.” R.C. opened the pickup’s passenger door and hoisted Jay inside, where he immediately pitched sideways and went limp.

Dana reached forward to try to help him, but the older man hooked an arm around her waist and dragged her backward before using his body to pin hers against the truck’s side, behind the open door.

“No.” Despite the pain it cost her, she fought to free her
self, then jerked back an elbow to catch him hard in the midsection.

“Goddammit, I…have had…enough of your shit.”

With every burst of speech he crushed up against her harder, and she felt her arm wrenched backward before she felt something cinch up hard against her wrist. Before she could form the thought
handcuffs
, he’d pulled back the other arm as well and tightened the second plastic zip tie.

Then he spun her roughly toward him and deliberately holstered his pistol. Before she could wonder if that could be good news, he pulled a long and wicked-looking knife to take its place.

Her mouth went talc-dry at the sight.

“Now you’re gonna tell me,” he said. “Where’d your sister hide the money she took from me?”

Dana was shaking so hard she could barely keep her legs from buckling. She couldn’t think—and didn’t understand what he was asking.

“Money?”

He pressed the blade’s tip beneath the hollow under her throat. “I honed it just for you. It’s sharp enough to glide straight to your backbone with just the slightest bit of pressure.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“I’m very good at cutting. Well practiced, you could say.”

This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t be real. What did she have to do to wake up from this nightmare? “I don’t understand what you want.”

“My money,” he said as he dragged the knife lower, first one inch, then another.

She felt its cool bite, thin and bright with pain. Felt it catch the neckline of her T-shirt and start to slice it downward.

“
My
money,” he continued. “The money I’ve had coming all these damned years. The money that bitch took from me and hid someplace in this desert.”

“I…I heard they found that. Ja…no, the FBI did,” she
amended, not wanting the crazed man to kill his nephew on the spot. “They found it by the house where you lived.”

Alarm pulsed through her as she realized her mistake. In her terror she had given away that she knew who he was. He
couldn’t
let her live now. The blade slipped several inches lower, scoring not only fabric but the skin beneath it. A high-pitched keening rose from the back of Dana’s throat, seemingly disconnected from her will.

“Shut up,” he said. “Before I jam this knife so far up between your legs you taste steel.”

Her eyes rolled back, and for a moment everything went black. But all too soon he was leaning over her, hauling her roughly to her feet and slapping her.

“Where,” he demanded, “did your sister hide the rest?”

“I…I don’t know! She didn’t tell me. Didn’t have the chance to say anything before you…before she was shot.”

“Goddammit, don’t you understand? I will slice you to pieces if you don’t tell me.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thick tongue along the flat of it, closing his eyes as if her blood were some rare vintage. “And I guaran-fuckin’-tee you I’ll enjoy it more than you will.”

Her stomach lurched in revulsion. “But I
can’t.
I don’t know anything about it.”

Eversole jerked a nod toward the truck’s cab. “Or maybe you’d like watching me skin him first.”

Dana felt her world shift on its axis, felt the blackness of her terror slide away to be replaced by bloodred fury. This man had murdered Angie, and he meant to kill her even more horribly. Whether he’d been driven insane by months of chasing Angie through the desert or something had snapped in him before that, R.C. Eversole was so far gone he was willing to carve up the only living member of his family in an insane bid to recover the money he’d squeezed out of Haz-Vestment.

All this over money.

She lowered her head and glared up at him. “All right. Then I’ll tell you.”

An unholy light blazed in his blue eyes. It was the last thing she saw before she dropped her head and rammed it upward, smashing hard against his face.

The Angie shaking Jay awake was the young woman from the old family photos, with full waves cascading over her shoulders. Scented with yucca blossoms, the blond ends tickled his cheek, and he looked up to see that in contrast to her fair hair, her eyes were deep and brown—and brimming with the fiery passion that would ultimately lead to her death.

At the moment, though, they burned with fury.
“So are you just going to
lie
there like a goddamned lump? Can’t you hear him? He’s
killing
her. Get your worthless fuzz-stormtrooper ass out there and
do
something about it. You know what you have to tell him—I did everything but leave you a fucking road map; can’t you see that?”

He saw now that Angie wore a black abaya, that her finger was poised over the detonator button. Sneering at him, she asked,
“Or are you ready to see someone else you care about get blown away on your watch?”

When he jerked forward to stop her, the splitting pain of his head jarred him awake. And he
did
hear something outside the truck’s open door, a desperate struggle playing out in grunts that sounded more animal than human. Adrenaline flashed through his veins, giving him the strength to push himself upright. Without waiting for the black dots to clear from his vision, Jay slid down from the seat and staggered toward the noise.

When he could see he froze in horror, blinking at the vision of his uncle—his
dead
uncle—over Dana, a hunting knife above her stomach, which he’d bared by slitting her shirt open. A thin line of blood marked where his blade had been drawn across the surface of her skin as well. Dana lay trembling on her back, her eyes flared and her pale lips parted—too scared to budge, or even scream.

“Make another move,” R.C. glanced up to tell him, “and I will gladly gut her like a deer.”

His words sounded strange, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of marbles, and his jaw hung slightly open.

“I don’t,” Dana whispered, “have any idea where that money is.”

“Then I don’t,” R.C. told her as he raised the knife, “have the slightest use for you alive.”

Just as Angie had had no use for money.

“Wait!” Jay’s mind snapped to the last of her recovered journal entries—to the message she
had
left him.

“I
know
,” he said. “I know where the rest is. And we can take you there right now. We won’t give you any trouble.”

R.C. stared at him, considering. “I
deserve
that money. I deserve my chance before it’s too late. And I can goddamned well assure you that I’m not gonna waste it.”

Jay scarcely recognized the man. It was as if someone had hollowed out his uncle and now looked at him through the empty eyeholes. Someone thoroughly undone by bitterness and greed.

“You won’t need the knife,” Jay assured him calmly. “We’ll help you. I swear it.”

He extended his right hand in an offer to pull R.C. to his feet. Anything to get him farther from slicing into Dana—as he had surely sliced up the woman who had bribed him. And Jenkins’s heifers—had the animals served as some sick substitute to help ease his frustration while he played a murderous game of cat and mouse with Angie?

R.C. switched the knife to his left hand and pulled his sidearm from its holster. Rising slowly, he kept the SIG-Sauer’s muzzle facing Jay.