Dark Paradise (34 page)

quivering like a race car idling at the starting line. He pinned his

long ears back and blew loudly through flared nostrils.

"Good mule, nice mule," Marilee gasped, stroking his neck with a

trembling hand. "Chill out, will you, Clyde?"

The adrenaline rush subsided, leaving her feeling wobbly and

light-headed. The cool, meadow-scented air surged in and out of her

lungs in ragged gusts. But as Clyde made no further attempt to bolt, she

began to relax. Belatedly, she wondered what had spooked him. The deer,

probably. Or another of Bryce's hunting buddies?

"Hey, anybody out there with a gun!" she called breathlessly. The mule

shuddered beneath her. "I'm not an elk!"

Silence. The breeze stirred. Thunder grumbled over the next mountain

range to the west. A chipmunk chattered at her from its perch on a

fallen tree trunk. Her call was not returned. The mule was still quaking

beneath her.

She didn't hear the crack of the rifle until a split second before the

bullet smashed into the dead stump behind her. Then everything happened

so quickly, her brain couldn't keep the order straight. She was falling

backward. Clyde was a rear view of bulging hindquarters and hooves. She

wondered dimly if she had been shot.

She hit the ground and everything went black.

When the world began coming back into focus, she didn't know if she was

dead or . Alive, alive she suspected, wincing. Dead shouldn't hurt.

Awareness of her body came back pain by pain, and she opened her eyes

and gasped at the face staring down at her. It wasn't the face of anyone

she had been told she would see in heaven, and she fully expected to go

there even though she wasn't a regular at church. No, the face that

stared down at her was the face of a cowboy, and something in his eyes

told her he may not have come from hell, but he had very likely seen it.

Beneath the brim of his gray cowboy hat, beneath the heavy rim of his

brows, his narrow eyes were a stormy mix of gray and blue, swirling with

what looked to Marilee like madness. Anger, fear, a brittle tension that

threatened to snap. He was probably fifty. His face was lean and

weathered, brown and carved with lines like a tooled belt. Some mishap

had left him with a puckered round scar the size of a penny on his left

jaw. It pulled the corner of his mouth into a grotesque, perpetual

frown. In his big, raw hands he held a very large, very deadly looking

rifle.

"Don't kill me," Marilee whispered, wondering wildly what she might do

to prevent him, wondering if death might not be the most pleasant

alternative she had. She was suddenly all too aware of just how remote

this area was. Fragments of lines from her guidebooks flashed through

her head - nearly a million acres of wilderness, ninety percent of it

roadless. He could take her anywhere, do anything to her, and there

would be no witnesses except the wildlife. Her heart shuddered like a

dying bird.

"If I had meant to kill you, ma'am," he said in a low, hoarse voice,

"then you'd be dead."

The voice. She blinked hard, as if that might somehow clear her head.

The voice was J.D.'s voice, but lower, rustier. The face was a harder,

abused version of J.D.'s face. Slowly, she pushed herself into a sitting

position, her gaze darting from the face to the rifle and back.

"Del Rafferty?" she ventured weakly.

He narrowed his eyes to slits. "Yes, ma'am."

"And Quinn said I'd never find you."

Del walked ahead of his horse, his mood as sour as the acid churning in

his stomach. He hadn't meant to saddle himself with the blond woman. He

had meant to scare her off. The last thing he wanted was a woman at his

place, especially this woman.

His mind tried to scramble things around, as it often did, tried to make

him think she had followed him up here, had been stalking him because

she had sensed his presence, because she knew. It tried to tell him she

was the other one in disguise, come to haunt him. But he brought the

boot heel of reality down on those wild rantings and squashed them like

June bugs. She wasn't the other one. She was the new one and she was

just here, that was all. He didn't have to like it. All he had to do was

deal with it. Tolerate her, then get rid of her.

Her mule was probably halfway home by now. Damn shame she couldn't have

managed to keep her fanny on its back.

"So, you live up here?" she asked.

Del glanced at her over his shoulder and said nothing.

She sat in his saddle on his gelding, her hair a wild mop of streaky

blond, a bruise darkening on her right cheekbone. He supposed she was

pretty, but he had long ago given up thinking about women in a sexual

way. He tried never to think of them at all, same as he tried never to

think about the 'Nam or the period after he had come home, which he

referred to as his black hole period, when everything had been sucked

into the dark void of his mind. He lived his life a second at a time,

focusing totally on the moment, just to get him from one to the next.

"My friend was killed somewhere around here a couple of weeks ago. Shot

in a hunting accident. The sheriff told me you're the one who found her

body."

Del just walked on, trying not to hear her. He concentrated on his

breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other as he led the horse

up the steep trail to the summer cow camp. If he ignored her, she might

become invisible to him or he to her. That idea held great appeal. If he

were invisible, she might stop talking.

"I was hoping you could answer some questions for me. If you don't mind,

I'd like to get some details. You know, fill in the gaps in the story."

On the other hand, there was always the grim possibility that she never

stopped talking. She had been talking to the mule when he had first

brought her up in the cross hairs of the Leupold 1OX scope.

"Quinn told me you didn't come across the body until two days after the

fact, but I was wondering if you might have heard anything or seen

anything that day she was shot?"

The images flashed before his eyes - darkness, moonlight, the woman

running. Suddenly blind to his surroundings, he stumbled on the trail

and jerked himself back to the present, cursing himself mentally and

cursing the woman. He could hear her ragged breathing, roaring in his

ears as if it were coming over loudspeakers. He could hear the dogs. His

heart pumped hard in his chest.

". . . Anything might be helpful. I just need to know-"

"I don't know!" he screamed, wheeling around so fast he frightened the

horse. The gelding spooked and, wide-eyed, jerked back against the

reins. Del ignored him. His gaze was hard on the blond woman, a corpse

sitting in his saddle with a ragged, gory hole blown through her chest

so that he could see straight through her, halfway to the Spanish Peaks.

"I don't wanna know what happened to you!
 
I don't wanna know about the

tigers. Leave me alone. Leave me alone or I'll leave you for the

dog-boys, damn you!"

In a blink, the corpse was gone and the new woman was staring at him as

moon-eyed as the horse, her face chalk white.

"L-Lucy," she stammered weakly. "Her name was Lucy. I'm Marilee."

Del jerked around, ashamed and embarrassed, and kept on walking. This

was why he stayed at the summer camp. He couldn't be around people. They

broke his concentration, snapped it like a thin rubber band, and then

everything in his head came apart, the jagged fragments exploded

outward, bright and dark and bloody.

Beneath the metal plate, his brain began to throb.

The sky rumbled overhead and rain began to fall.

Marilee didn't say another word on the ride to his cabin.

Del Rafferty had told her to begin with that he would radio for someone

to come and get her. After his little break from reality, she could only

hope it wouldn't take that somebody too long to get up here. His mind

obviously wasn't firing on all cylinders. It would have been nice if

someone had seen fit to tell her that right from the start. Of course,

Quinn hadn't believed she would find the man, and J.D. had warned her

off - twice - which would have been enough in his mind. He probably couldn't

conceive of anyone going against his highhanded dictates.

The camp finally came into sight through the branches of the pine trees.

A small cabin, complete with outhouse, a three-sided shed, and a corral

with four horses in it. A trio of dogs raced out to meet them, barking,

baying, yipping with excitement as they dashed around the horse and

their master. Rafferty ignored them. He tied the horse to a hitching

rail and went into the cabin without so much as glancing at Marilee.

The rain came a little harder. Marilee slid down off the gelding and

darted for the shelter of the cabin before the man could lock her out.

As she reached for the doorknob, she turned her head casually to the

left and came face-to-face with a rattlesnake.

A scream ripped from her throat and she threw herself back, clutching at

her heart. The snake sat coiled and poised to strike inside a box

constructed of a wood frame covered with two layers of chicken wire. The

cage was nailed to the wall of the cabin a foot from the door. The snake

was coiled around itself inside its prison. It was as thick as her

wrist, tan and brown and black with elliptical eyes as bright and shiny

as jet beads. It flicked its tongue at her, its tail quivering.

What kind of lunatic kept something like that nailed to the side of his

house?

The door swung open and Del Rafferty glared at her.

"Leave my snake alone. Get in here where I can see you."

He grabbed a hold of her wrist and pulled her into the cabin, jerking

her past the snake so quickly that she had no time to worry about the

thing striking her.

The cabin consisted of just one large room. There was a kitchen area

with a one-burner wood stove, a tiny refrigerator, a crude table with

two chairs. Open shelves were stocked with necessities. Canned foods,

condiments, canisters of sugar and flour, cans of Dr. Pepper. There was

a sink with a pump-action faucet. The rest of the cabin was taken up by

an old couch, a narrow, neatly made iron bed, and a dozen or more

rifles, cleaned and polished and lined up in racks along the end wall.

Marilee stared at the arsenal, jaw slack. The guns were all huge and

deadly looking, some with scopes of exotic size and shape. Del Rafferty

slipped the one he'd shot at her with off his shoulder and went about

the business of unloading it and breaking it down, completely ignoring

her as he wiped the rain off. He didn't even so much as offer a word of

apology afterward. She thought of Lucy riding into that same clearing.

Sheffield claimed he hadn't seen her. Had Del Rafferty?

She backed away from him, her gaze locked on the scar that disfigured

his jaw. The backs of her knees hit the edge of a kitchen chair, and she

sat down abruptly, her hand landing on the tabletop, sending a hunting

knife skittering.

Her stomach rolled over like a dead dog as she turned and, for the first

time, took in the knives neatly lined up beside a sharpening stone and a

can of 3-In-One oil. Del walked straight up to her, picked up the buck

knife with its wide, vicious blade, and set it out of her reach, as if

he thought she might somehow spoil its edge just by touching it. Her

heart slid down from her tonsils to the base of her throat.

He called the Stars and Bars on a radio tucked among the condiments on

the small kitchen counter. His only words on making contact were "Get up

here. There's - a woman. I want her gone." Then he went out to tend to

his horse, leaving Marilee alone with her imagination.

It took J.D. an hour to reach the camp. An hour in the cab of his truck,

lurching up the side of the mountain on the old logging trail, a