Triple Exposure (22 page)

And he’d been happy with his life, or at least resigned until the woman sitting next to him, piloting this plane so ably, had walked into his life seeking the same escape that he had.

“Look at that,” she said.

The sun had finally given up its fight and was sinking in a blaze of glory that painted a cloud on the horizon in vibrant plums and scarlet.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” she asked. “Kind of makes you forget all the people, all the tough times—everything that’s
come before this. Up here, we can leave it all behind us, leave all the reasons two people like us could never…”

The engine noise drowned out the rest of her words, but Zeke didn’t want to hear them. Didn’t want to dwell on impossibilities.

“So what do you think?” she asked him.

Because he couldn’t find words, he found her hand and squeezed it. She flashed a smile his way, comprehension lighting her eyes.

Before them, the first, bright stars put in an appearance, heralding a vast darkness that would overtake them all too soon. But he couldn’t let that happen without trying to find answers. Couldn’t let her distract him from her pain with simple beauty.

“So what else did that lawyer tell you?” he asked, over the rumble of the engine. Swiftly, before he lost his nerve. He pressed on, acting more on hunch than reason. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me about those pictures?”

There was no answer save the droning buzz of the engine and the spreading darkness. Rachel kept her attention fastened to the dials and controls, the dimming land below them—everywhere but on him.

“How ’bout we circle town, then head back?” she asked before turning southward.

“You’re not going to scare me off,” he said. “Whatever it is, I’m not bailing on you.”

“Good plan, considering our altitude.” The smile she shot his way looked haunted.

“Don’t you understand?” he blurted out. “It doesn’t matter to me that you killed some son of a bitch who had it coming. It doesn’t matter if you’re sued for all the money in the world. It doesn’t even matter to me, Rachel, that I’ve got no business falling for a woman. Just that I have.”

She wheeled the plane back toward the airport so abruptly that his stomach lurched.

“I
have
,” he repeated, feeling reckless with emotion, for
finally, he understood that being with Rachel had shattered his contentment with living a half-life in safety. He wanted more, much more, and he wanted at least a shot at it with Rachel.

Even if he knew that hope would burn to cinders within seconds, once he told her who—or
what
—he was. As he must, no matter how much it cost him.

“You can’t possibly mean that.” Rachel’s voice was muffled by the buzzing. “
I
can’t—not with…This is crazy. We hardly know each—”

“I know enough.”

“You don’t know.”

“So
tell
me, Rachel.”

As he waited for her answer, he saw more stars, by the hundreds. He felt strange hurtling through space just beneath them, disconnected from the reality below. Or from his better judgment. As the seconds ticked away, doubt crept in, then regret.

“See that lighted runway? We’ll be landing in a moment.”

“Rachel…” Maybe he should let it go, allow her to pretend that what he’d said didn’t matter, that words spoken in the air were weightless, unimportant. That
he
was.

“So what did you think about your first flight?”

“Thought I was going to like it.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“Zeke, I’m—I’m sorry. What the—” By the light of the instruments’ glow, he saw her pointing at the airport, where something outside the glider hangar was ablaze.

“It’s your van,” he shouted, “It’s burning.”

“Just
wonderful
,” growled Rachel. “The cherry on the icing on a real crap-cake of a day.”

Distracted during her initial approach, Rachel brought the plane around and made a second attempt at landing. Zeke was relieved when she brought them to a safe stop on the runway.

He warned, “I know you’re upset—
I’m
upset. But let me check this out first, make sure it’s safe—”

“That’s my van somebody’s lit up—”

“Somebody who would probably rather burn
you
,” Zeke reminded her.

Without waiting for an answer, he unstrapped himself and jumped out of the plane, then lit out in the direction of the vehicle. It was totally engulfed, its dark bulk disappearing inside the twisting, roaring monster of a conflagration. He hoped like hell that the arsonist was still close—and that it wouldn’t be Rachel’s female caller. Because he couldn’t strike a woman—any woman, for any reason—and he badly wanted to cram some asshole’s teeth down his throat.

Zeke stopped short, pressed back by blistering heat.
It
could have been an accident
, he realized,
some electrical malfunction.
But quickly, he dismissed the thought. There had been too many “accidents” in Rachel’s life—including the one that had killed her grandmother.

The flames were shooting twenty feet or more above his
head and lighting the night sky by the time Rachel ran up beside him, a fire extinguisher in her hands.

“Oh, hell.” Gazing upward at the flames, she panted out her despair. “This won’t be any use.”

There was a popping noise from Rachel’s van, followed by a hissing sizzle. Jumping back, she tugged at his arm. “Move back, Zeke. We’ll get burned here. And the smoke—”

He retreated until they coughed their lungs clear in the cooler, cleaner air. Then he looked hopelessly around the airport. Though he’d already concluded that whoever had torched the van was long gone, he spotted no help, either. As it often was this time of day, the tiny airport was abandoned.

While he cursed in frustration, Rachel was pulling her cell phone from a pocket in her jeans. “I’ll call for—oh.”

Following her gaze, he spotted the flashing red lights coming their way. Someone passing by must have spotted the flames and called the fire department.

A Presidio County deputy, the jowly, middle-aged Leo Varajas, was first to arrive. The moment he spotted the two of them, he peered unhappily through his wire-rimmed glasses. “You again. I should’ve known. You both all right?”

When they assured him they were unhurt, he listened to their brief explanation of how they had spotted the fire from the air. With a nod of understanding, he said, “Sheriff Castillo’ll have my hide if I don’t call him out to investigate this personally.”

The deputy folded his thick frame back into his SUV to make the call.

A half hour later, Zeke was with Rachel in her father’s office, where Harlan Castillo plied them with questions as he sat behind Walter’s desk. The door stood partly open, allowing Zeke to see the volunteer firefighters hanging around the puddle that surrounded the smoldering wreckage. One hawked and spat to clear his head and another nodded approval at the job they’d done, while a third had the fervent look of a man praying for one final flare-up to extinguish.

Castillo reached up with one short arm to scratch at a five o’clock shadow flecked with silver. His hat sat on the desk between them, where he’d laid it when they came inside. “So you’re sure you saw no one? What about before you took off?”

Rachel shook her head. “No. Like I told you, I was the only one around before Zeke pulled up. And we didn’t see another soul. Not before. Not after.”

The sheriff’s mouth thinned, and he darted a speculative look in Zeke’s direction. “So what brought you here to see her? I know you eat at The Roost most days, but you’re always home by this time, aren’t you?”

Zeke’s heart stumbled as he heard something in the question, some discordant note warning him that for the first time in all these years, he’d captured the interest of local law enforcement. “Rachel’s dad asked me to keep an eye on her. Since I live so close by.”

Castillo glanced in the direction of Zeke’s place. “You’ve got power back there, don’t you? I know I’ve seen a line of poles leading down your road.”

“I have electricity.” Zeke shrugged an answer. “Man’s gotta keep a cold fridge for his longnecks. But what the hell does that have to do with whoever set this fire?”

Castillo shook his head. “Just satisfying my curiosity, that’s all. You don’t get the Internet, do you?”

Rachel gave the sheriff a puzzled look. “What’s the point of this, Harlan? You think Zeke’s been ordering remote-control incendiary devices off the Web? He didn’t start that fire. He was with me, in the air.”

Not daring to move a muscle, Zeke kept his eyes on the lawman’s steady, blue gaze. “I care about Rachel. And I’d like to consider myself a family friend.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Rachel nodding, a simple, affirming gesture that filled him with gratitude.

But Castillo didn’t back down. “Kinda interesting,” he said in a phony-casual manner that set off all sorts of alarms,
“you being so—I guess you could call it standoffish—before Ms. Copeland came back to town. Not at all neighborly,’ til now….”

Zeke shrugged, though his pulse was pounding like a snared jackrabbit’s. “So it’s a crime in Presidio County to meet a pretty woman, take a little interest?” As much trouble as Castillo supposedly had keeping his zipper up, he ought to understand that.

Harlan smiled. “ ’Course not, Mr. Pike. But it just seems odd, that’s all. Especially in light of Ms. Copeland’s recent troubles. And certain pictures that were—”

Rachel rocketed off her chair. “If you’re too inept to find whoever set that fire, say so. But don’t you dare bring up that garbage and sit here insinuating the one man in this town who’s been there for me—”

“Pike
has
been there, hasn’t he? When your glider crashed. When your grandma got killed. When you saw the fire—”

“I don’t own either a phone or a computer,” Zeke said flatly as he rose to loom above the sheriff. “Don’t have the Internet to look at anything, including naked women. And I might not be the friendliest man in this town, but I’m sure as hell not twisted enough to set up disasters so I can ‘rescue’ my fair lady. You got that, Castillo? Because if you don’t, you’re gonna damned well find out how un-neighborly I can be.”

The sheriff’s hand had drifted to his sidearm, but his voice was cool, collected. “That a threat, Pike?”

“Zeke,” warned Rachel.

Zeke’s teeth hurt, he was clenching his jaws so hard. Finally, he backed off, saying, “Hell, no. It’s not a threat.”
A
promise, maybe
.

Castillo relaxed his posture, but his eyes were full of caution. Turning from him—and from Rachel—Zeke stalked out into the cool night air.

Because after all these years, he felt the fabric of his second life give way, heard its fine threads popping like the
seams of an old parachute. At any moment, his safety would collapse completely, plunging him straight down into blackness.

His instinct was to flee, to go back for his truck and vanish on some dark, lonesome highway before it was too late.

“Do you mind telling me what that was about?” Rachel demanded of the sheriff. “Did Patsy put you up to it?”

“Patsy? Why would she—” Castillo straightened, his expression sharpening. “Guess she knows the man about as well as anybody. So she doesn’t approve of the two of you together?”

“She hasn’t talked to you, then?”

“Not any more than she can help,” he said, reminding Rachel of what the man had let slip earlier, something that clearly referenced his own guilt and Patsy’s unrelenting anger. “My ex-wife and I—we stay out of each other’s way as much as we can. Easier for both of us not to open up that old can of worms.”

Rachel wanted to ask but didn’t, since she had no doubt he’d shut down her questions as he had before. Instead, she peered through the door, but she couldn’t spot Zeke out there. Had he been upset enough to try to walk home in the pitch black without a light?

She returned her attention to the sheriff. “Patsy’s fine with Zeke now. You can ask her yourself as soon as she gets over here. When I called Dad, he told me she stayed home this evening with a migraine, but he’s picking her up on his way back from Alpine.”

Rachel had hated calling to tell her father about the fire. Over the past year—nearly a year and a half now—she’d done nothing but heap disaster onto his and Patsy’s lives. Worry and expense, in equal measure. Grief and guilt punched through Rachel’s center, along with the bone-deep knowledge that Benita Copeland would still be living if her granddaughter had remained in Philadelphia.

Rachel was on the verge of inquiring whether he was
certain that the chocolate hadn’t been poisoned, whether it wasn’t possible that the glider she’d gone down in hadn’t been tampered with as well. But before she could, Castillo blindsided her with the last thing she expected.

“His name isn’t Zeke Pike.”

“What?”

“Or Ezekiel Pike or Zachariah, Zachary, or anything else I can figure.”

Rachel frowned, confused. “Have you asked him about it? Maybe it’s his middle name.”

“He doesn’t have a valid driver’s license.”

“Really?” Rachel asked, her mind scrambling for purchase. Had Zeke lied to her, to everyone? Had she been wrong about him as she’d been wrong about Kyle?
He’s no
damned Kyle
, her instincts whispered. “Maybe he just couldn’t deal with going to the court house, being around a lot of people. He’s a good man, one-on-one or around a few people if he knows them. But any more than that and…”

She thought of his reaction to the business her photo had sent him and added, a little desperately, “He’s just a loner, that’s all. Shy or something. But there’s no harm in him.”

“He ever mention where he lived before here? Who his people are or where he’s from?”

Rachel blew out a frustrated sigh. “You’re wasting your time. My time. Zeke Pike wasn’t driving the SUV that tried to hit us in the desert, and he’s certainly not the
woman
who’s been calling me, harassing and threatening me for months and months before I ever met him. That woman—Kyle Underwood’s mother—has sicced her lawyers on me with an enormous wrongful death suit. She’s not letting this go, Sheriff. She won’t drop it until she completely breaks me. Or, who knows? Maybe it’s killing me she’s after.”

“I agree.” He nodded. “The woman’s unhinged. But as disagreeable and unfair as the lawsuit is, she’s working through legal channels. And legal channels only.”

“I don’t—what do you mean?”

“I mean—” Castillo’s gaze bored into her “—her daughter swears that Sylvia Underwood hasn’t set foot outside of Pennsylvania since the night her son was killed.”