Chapter 1
The siren was shrill, cutting the eerie silence like a knife.
Jack West awoke with a start, his gaze as alert as a cat’s as he glanced fiercely around his cheap, San Antonio, motel room. He half-expected to find himself back in cell block C, a knife-tip shoved to his throat, a murderer’s legs straddling his lean waist.
He was alone.
Safe.
Even so, his heart pounded a few seconds longer, his senses having been honed by the constant danger and violence he’d lived with for the past five years.
He felt the loneliness that he had known for so much of his life close over him. It was deep and dark, but he surrendered to it, welcomed it. For he had given up on life.
The name Jack West once had meant something in south Texas. He’d been rich and famous.
No more.
Jack West. Crisp, prison-cropped black hair. Indian dark eyes with long bristly lashes, brooding eyes that could flame with hate as hot as tar-tipped torches or turn as cold as black ice and stare straight through his enemy.
Before prison he’d been tough.
He was tougher now.
His carved face and tall, muscular body were harder and leaner than ever. Scars crisscrossed his broad back from the night he’d unwisely gotten too friendly and too drunk on smuggled gin with an inmate named Brickhouse.
Jack’s once healthily dark skin was sallow, but the scars on his body were nothing compared to the ones on his soul. He couldn’t forget that even before his conviction, Theodora had thrown him off the ranch, seized his daughter and cut him off from his life forever. Once, he had hoped, he had almost believed, his life might count for something after all.
No more.
Jack West wasn’t much different than a dead man.
He was even worse off now than when he’d been a boy—a young beggar and thief in Matamoros, Mexico. His mama had been a cheap Mexican whore; his father an Anglo ranch foreman who’d paid for five drunken minutes with her. He’d known his father’s name was Shanghai Dawes only because his mother had stolen Shanghai’s wallet when he’d passed out.
Jack had spent his first ten years in a shack in a dusty Mexican barrio where he’d had to steal or starve, where he’d lived on the fringes, on the bottom even there. He’d spent the rest of his life living like a cowboy prince in Theodora’s big three-storied white stucco house on El Atascadero , one of the grandest of the great ranches in south Texas.
Jack owed his Anglo looks and great height and his talent with animals to the father he’d never known; but on the inside he was more Mexican than Anglo. He knew that because when they’d locked him up, his soul had left him. He’d watched it go.
His mother would have said he had the susto.
Whatever. His soul hadn’t come back yet—even though they’d let him out. He didn’t want it back, either.
Outside in the sweltering darkness, the ambulance raced north on San Antonio’s Loop 410 North, its scream dying as if suffocated by the Texas heat.
Jack blinked, forcing himself to relax. He saw the rosy rectangle of light behind thin drapes and heard the muted roar of traffic.
There were drapes on the windows.
Real drapes.
Instead of bars.
The soft mattress and clean sheets weren’t a cruel dream.
He was free.
Whatever that meant now.
Bastard from a barrio. Ex-con. Starting over at the bottom again.
He wished he could go back to sleep, but he hadn’t slept through a night in years. He lay back and closed his eyes, dreading the dawn.
Yesterday, he’d been in solitary, his ankles shackled, his hands cuffed to his waist. Then this morning a guard had yelled at him to grab his bedroll. That he was moving.
Jack had been stunned when they’d driven him to San Antonio and set him free.
Nobody, not even his lawyer, had bothered to inform him about the serial killer who’d made headlines all over Texas when he’d confessed to one of the murders Jack had been locked up for.
Maybe he was free.
But he was embittered and unfit company for most decent folk. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had a family who’d stood by him.
But Theodora had made her feelings crystal clear right from the first. Never once had she written or come to see him to say that she had changed her mind. After his conviction, he’d lost custody of his daughter, Carla, who probably hated him for killing her mother. All his letters to Carla and to Theodora had damn sure come back.
Return to sender. The guards had chanted that line aloud when they’d thrown his letters through the bars of his cell.
Theodora’s betrayal had hurt more than his prison sentence. More than living like an animal in a cage.
No more. To hell with Theodora. To hell with the whole damn world. He’d started alone; he might as well end alone. Never again would he let anybody get close to him. He’d take some low job and drink till he found oblivion.
If Jack hated thinking about Carla and Theodora, he hated thinking about Chantal, his wife, even more.
For she had betrayed him in every way that a wife could betray a husband. He had taken her abuse and then her absences and infidelities for years. Until one day, she had pushed him too far.
When had the deeply rooted hate between them gotten its start? Had the seeds of it been there even on the first day when Theodora had brought him home to El Atascadero.
And how could a woman just vanish like that? Without a trace? For five damn years? Without a thought that her husband was rotting in prison for her murder? Without a thought for her daughter, whom she loved in her own bizarre and highly destructive way?
Not that Chantal had ever given much of a damn about him once she’d tricked him to the altar, given birth to Carla seven months later and saddled him with a baby and a ranch to run....
Jack lay in the dark a while longer, wishing he could turn off his mind and go back to sleep.
Half an hour later his mind was still festering with uneasy memories about Chantal and the sorry state of his life when the phone rang.
He let it ring.
Six. Eight times.
Who the hell could be calling that he’d want to talk to?
Nobody. Curiosity would be the sinking of him yet. He grabbed the phone, expecting a stranger.
The familiar, raspy, bourbon-slurred tone made his chest knot with a poignant rush of rage, regret and bitter anguish.
Theodora.
When his eyes filled with burning liquid, he brushed his fingers across his lashes.
“I’ve been trying and trying to call you, boy,” she snapped, as full of venom and vigor as always, never for a second thinking he might not know her, nor caring that he might not want to hear from her. “I’ve been up half the night dialing this damned phone, trying to get you. As if I don’t have a ranch to run come dawn. Like always, you don’t mind a bit putting me to trouble.”
“What the hell do you want, Theodora?”
“I’ve been thinking about things. About what you’ve been through. About the ranch. I want you to come home, boy.”
“Home?” He hated how the word made his voice shake. “You never once wrote or came—” Why the hell had he brought that up? He didn’t give a damn about her or about anybody now.
“I had my reasons.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
Theodora made no apology for not believing him before. Theodora had never said she was sorry to a single soul in her whole damned life. So he wasn’t surprised when nothing more came from her but a deep and brooding silence.
Her silence wrapped around Jack.
He lay in the dark, his heavy, unwanted emotions suffocating him.
He wanted to feel nothing.
He should hang up.
“You think you can just dial me up, and I’ll come running back to you like I did when I was a half-starved kid and you were the grand queen of El Atascadero? Maybe I was once your top charity case,” he muttered bitterly. “Well, not anymore, old woman. You don’t have anything I want.”
“So, what will you do? El Atascadero is the only home you’ve ever known. You spent every dime you had on lawyers. I’m the closest thing you’ve got to family.”
“I thought so once. I took a lot off Chantal—because of you. So now, what the hell do you want, anyway?”
“I want you to find my daughter and bring her home.” Jack’s heart sank.
So—Theodora wanted Chantal.
“Hasn’t she caused you enough grief, old woman?”
“She’s my daughter. Then there’s...Carla—”
“I don’t want to hear about Carla—”
Silence.
“You called the wrong man, Theodora. I don’t want to find Chantal. I want to forget her. To be free of her. I lost five years and everything I ever cared about. My daughter’s better off without an ex-con for a father.”
He lowered the phone, intending to hang up.
But Theodora wasn’t about to let him off that easy.
She knew all of his buttons.
Which ones to punch. Which ones not to.
Maybe she’d get him to come back to El Atascadero. Maybe he’d even find his evil wife for her.
The question wasn’t whether he’d return...it was whether he’d survive....