Chapter 23

 

I SAT IN the sheriff’s office, gripping my knees so hard I was sure I’d leave a bruise. He wasn’t listening. I could hardly stop myself from vaulting over the desk and knocking sense into the idiot. Instead, I listened to the sheriff discount every damn thing that I’d just told him. How could I get him to understand that one of his deputies was in real danger? You’d think me fixing him would have made him trust me.

“So, Miss Lorelei, isn’t it?” he said.

His energy was pretty much as if he was talking to a criminal. I had spent over a decade being talked to like I was some scum on somebody’s shoe and I knew the signs. It didn’t help calm my nerves though. Oh no, they were clattering around my body like they were doing the loop-de-loop. I was sure I hadn’t told him my name, maybe Renee had.

“Look, I don’t have time for whatever complex you got about me.” I ran my hand through my hair. “You need to find Hal.”

“Hal is fine,” the sheriff said, a smug smile on his face. “Unless you had an issue with him?”

My brain and body did a mutual “uh oh,” at his tone. “What do you mean?”

He threw a printout of a news story at me. I knew that damn headline, “The Face of a Killer.”A part of me wanted to demand where he’d gotten it from and what right did he have to go digging into my past but there was no time for his games. Whatever he thought I was, it didn’t mean shoots.

Something dark was bubbling up over the town like a column of clouds before they crashed down as a tornado.

“You read the recent press?” I asked him. “The story that showed that I was wrongly convicted.”

His eyes flickered with my words. I was no longer ashamed at that headline or at being locked up. There were worse things in life than me. “I don’t care what you think of me but something bad could happen to Hal if you don’t figure it out.”

He sighed and waved it away. “You may have helped me when you fixed my leg but I’ve given you the time to help your friend. She still shot a man in the street and no evidence points to him having done a thing wrong.”

“Check the wall!” Frustration hitched up my voice. “If there’s a bullet in the wall, maybe he wasn’t innocent?”

“I would have seen if there had been another gun,” he said. What a surprise, his ego made him eagle-eyed now. Talk about a chip on his shoulder. He gave me a condescending smile. “I would have seen if a bullet had whistled past me.”

My temper bubbled over. I got to my feet so fast that I lost the room for a second. “I’m done with this crap!”

McKinley looked terrified and his hand went to his gun. I walked to the framed medal on the wall and ripped it off.

“James Michael McKinley,” I said. “You are the only son of Robert and June, you couldn’t ride your bike without training wheels until you were fifteen, you once stole sweets from the local shop as a dare and, to this day you still leave them money in an envelope to make up for it.”

He looked around the room as if wondering where I was getting the information from.

I stepped forward. “You broke your right leg skiing when you were nineteen. You never wanted to be a cop but the McKinleys are always cops.”

His hand dropped away from his gun. His mouth gaped open.

“Thing is, nobody told you that you got another tradition in your family.”

His jaw tensed until I could see the muscles twitching.

“Nobody told you that the men in your family never make it into middle-age.”

“Stop,” he said.

Like heck I was. “You left her to stop her having to watch you go through the same thing your dad did and his dad. You didn’t want her to end up like your mom.”

He raised his hands. “Enough—”

“Uh uh,” I said. This guy was getting the message. If I had to ram it home, I was gonna. “There is no cure, right?”

He nodded, his face waxy with the sweat.

“So explain to me, James Michael McKinley . . . just how you ain’t ill no more?”

He shook his head. He still wasn’t going to give in. “Could be a coincidence, a period of improvement . . . I—”

“What did the doctor say?” I folded my arms.

McKinley looked away, his aura swirling.

I stormed forward and threw the medal onto his desk. “What did he say?”

“That there were no periods of improvement!”

We stared at each other, panting like we had just gone ten rounds.

“So there is no plausible explanation as to why you are feeling better, why your stomach ain’t in two and why you stopped peeing blood?”

His eyes searched mine. “No.” His voice was so quiet, so unsure, like if he said it out loud somebody would tell him it wasn’t true.

“Then take that as a sign that I’m different. Take that as a sign that I don’t tell you things unless you need to know them.” I picked up the paper. “I was locked up for most of my adult life because I saw something happen. I thought I had killed a boy but I didn’t. I saw it.”

I tapped the medal. “This was yours, when you won a shooting competition with your father. It was raining, you think about that day every time you reach for your rifle.”

He stared down at the medal with tears in his eyes.

“Hal or Charlie could be in real trouble from the guy who was shot,” I said. “I don’t know who he is but he was trying to shoot her first.”

“Sheriff!” The door burst open as two of the ladies from the field hospital ran in. “They’re dead! Someone killed them!”

The trickle of cold dread slithered up from my stomach and into my very pores.

“Who?” McKinley was up and striding to the door.

“The doctor . . . Betty . . . they were in the room . . .”

“Same one the shooting victim was in?” I asked.

They nodded and I glared at McKinley. I was too angry to say, “I told you so.” I’d just wasted half an hour talking around the dumb clot when we could have saved two lives.

He dropped his chin.

Yeah, your ego just gave a lunatic the time to hurt people. Well done, you idiot.

“Where is he?” McKinley asked. I was thankful he couldn’t hear my thoughts.

“Gone,” they answered in unison.

“Hal!”

Hal ran into the office.

McKinley glanced at me again before he turned to Hal. “I want you to take care of Serena. Lock up the station and don’t let anyone in. I mean anyone.”

Hal nodded, and we headed out into the biting wind. Jacket or no jacket, it was colder now than I could bear. I looked up. It was no coincidence that an ominous rolling bank of cloud billowed out across the sky. Fear.

“Happy?” McKinley asked me as we navigated the icy street.

“Not by a long shot.” I tore my eyes away from the cloud. “But at least Hal is locked in there.” I glanced down the street, empty, silent, the hanging, suspended in time feeling getting stronger. “Let’s hope Charlie has done the same at home.”

  

BRAD JEWEL WRAPPED his arms around the two girls drinking with him in the bar. He only wished that Weedy, James McKinley, was here to see him with Grace Teller. He smiled to himself and poured more vodka into her glass. How fortunate that she was turning to him to take the pain of Weedy’s rejection. Ha, the guy still adored her. Dumb idiot, but then Weedy had never really known how to handle a woman. They needed a strong hand. Grace giggled with her hanger-on Marie and Brad bit off the end of his cigar. Women on his arm, spirits in his glass, and a cigar in his mouth . . . Life was good.

“Who’s the man, Simon?”

Simon looked up from nursing his drink and grunted.

“So he fell off the boat,” Brad snapped. “Get a grip.”

“You’re a bastard, Jewel,” Simon slurred, staggering off his stool. “A cold-hearted bastard.”

Grace gasped at the language, which only made Brad laugh harder at the pathetic loser. Like Simon was getting a cent off him, drunken sod. What was he gonna do? Go tell the sheriff that Simon had paid money to people for him back in the past. Like hell he would.

Sheriff Weedy, Brad laughed to himself. The guy needed to get his heart trampled on.

“Can you believe the freak?” Grace said. “Can you believe that she attacked me right there in the café?”

Brad caught the end of the conversation and an idea made him widen his smile. “Why don’t we do something about her?”

The women looked at him adoringly, a real man.

He loved it. “I think we should go and demand the sheriff do his duty.”

“You should,” Marie said. “Hal would have if he was sheriff.”

Grace didn’t look as convinced as Brad wanted. She needed to understand who was in charge now. “You girls will come too. You will, won’t you . . . Gracie.”

He knew his tone made her shiver. He loved the fact that she was so easily dominated.

“Let’s go, girls,” he said, getting off his stool and gripping her tight enough that she wouldn’t run. “Let’s go see that idiot McKinley and put him in his place.”

Grace squirmed a bit and Brad gripped her harder, making her squeal. The feeling of power made him laugh out loud, this was going to be good.