Death Rides Again (A Jocelyn Shore Mystery) (28 page)

She smiled and nodded, and he made his escape out the door with a jingle of the bell and a sheepish look over his shoulder.

“I don’t know why you need to be rude to him. It’s not his fault that Kel’s been arrested.”

I shrugged. Of course she was right, but everything about the man irritated me. I watched him drive away in his big-ass truck, and decided he was probably overcompensating for something.

“You know, Sherman is a pretty great guy. Why are you”—I glanced at the woman behind us—“messing around with T.J.?”

“Mind your own business.”

After getting our order, I drove to the hospital without consulting Kyla. She rolled her eyes when she figured out where we were going but didn’t protest.

“Don’t take all day,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Why don’t you come inside then?”

Grumbling, she did, and after a brief stop in the ladies’ room, we dropped in on Colin.

He was sitting up in bed, a mostly uneaten breakfast of eggs and fruit sitting in unappetizing blobs on his rolling bedside tray. The bandage that had covered his eye had been removed, and although he had a truly impressive shiner, I was more concerned by the strip of tape at the corner of his eyebrow. I suspected it hid a line of stitches.

I also didn’t like the gray color in his face or the light sheen of sweat on his forehead. However, he smiled when he saw us walk in.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Brought you some doughnuts,” said Kyla at the same time. “Sort of like crack for cops, right?”

“That’s a stereotype,” he answered her. “And a derogatory one at that.”

“Oh, so you don’t want them?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I handed him the little sack. “There’s a sausage roll, too. Still hot.”

He took it with thanks, and sniffed with appreciation, but I noticed he made no attempt to take it out.

“Seriously, Colin, how are you feeling? You don’t look so well this morning.”

“How come you can say that, but you get mad when I tell him he looks like shit?” protested Kyla.

Colin grinned. “I’m fine. I’ll be getting out of here this afternoon.”

Ignoring Kyla, I skewered Colin with my best teacher eye. I always knew when a kid was lying, and Colin, in his current state at least, was doing less well than the average fifteen-year-old. He squirmed a little and focused on Kyla instead.

“What are you two doing today?” he asked her. “You’re up awfully early.”

She opened her mouth to tell him, but I cut her off for two reasons. One, I didn’t think Colin needed to know about our breaking-and-entering activities, at least not yet. And two, I wasn’t going to be sidetracked that easily.

“Never mind that. What is going on with you? Really. And don’t try to give me some half-ass version either.”

“Is she always like this?” he asked Kyla.

She nodded. “Always. And don’t ever play poker with her.”

He gave a little shrug. “They want to run a couple of more tests. They won’t take long, then I’ll be out of here.”

“Tests for what?” I asked.

He actually looked embarrassed, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. Men and their egos were always going to be a mystery to me.

“Internal bleeding,” he mumbled.

“Oh, is that all? Well gee, now I understand why you don’t want to talk about it. That’s hardly worth mentioning.” I felt both anger and fear in about equal measures. I wanted to shake him, but I wanted to find a doctor to shake even more. “What kind of internal bleeding?”

“I don’t know. It’s nothing.” He reached for my hand.

I thought it felt hot, and I felt another stab of fear. I’d read the horror stories about people getting infections in hospitals that were worse than the injury or illness that had brought them to the hospital in the first place.

A nurse arrived with a wheelchair at that moment. Colin almost seemed relieved. “Here we go. Look, we’ll know more when this is done. How about you come back in a couple of hours?”

He handed me back the sack of doughnuts, and I stood helpless. “Take that back to your family. Someone will eat them. Hell, you’ll probably eat them. You can put them on a stick.”

I tried to suppress the smile, but he saw. With a smile of his own, he said, “Will you go? I’m not getting up in front of you while I’m wearing this hospital gown.”

I came to a decision. “Give me your hotel key,” I said, holding out my hand. “Kyla and I will go get our things from the ranch, and then pick up your things from the hotel and check you out. We’ll be back here as soon as we can, and then we’ll drive you to Austin.”

The nurse spoke for the first time. “Sir, the doctor isn’t going to release you today.”

“We’re taking him to Seton hospital in Austin. If he has any records they’ll need, we can take those with us or you can fax them over.”

She looked alarmed and opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off. “I bet you send people from here to Austin all the time, so you can make whatever arrangements you need. But one way or another, he’s leaving when I get back. And you,” I said turning back to Colin, “gimme.”

With a grimace of pain, he reached into the drawer of the bedside table, pulled out a key, and dropped it into my hand. It was a real key, not a card, attached to a battered plastic disk that said “Sand Creek Motel and Bar.”

I put it in my jeans pocket and leaned down to give him a kiss. His lips were hot and dry beneath my own.

“Back as soon as I can.”

The fact that he didn’t argue scared me as much as anything else. Kyla had to trot to catch up with me on the way to the elevator and I punched the button with more force than necessary.

“So we’re going back today,” she said in a conversational tone. “What about Kel?”

I hadn’t exactly forgotten all about Kel and our recent criminal actions at Carl’s place, but I admit both had slipped pretty far down on my list of priorities. I stared at her blankly for a moment, then I said, “We’ll give what we found to Will. Elaine wouldn’t know what to do with it, and Will is used to looking at contracts. He can at least get it all to someone other than Sheriff Bob.”

The elevator arrived, and I pressed the ground floor three or four times to make sure it got the message.

“You don’t have to go back with me today,” I said, remembering her date with T.J. “In fact, someone needs to drive Colin’s Jeep home, assuming we can find it. It’s probably at the police station, although who knows.”

“I can hunt it down, and I’ll be glad to drive Monkey Boy’s car. We can have Elaine call around and find out where it is while we’re packing.”

“Great. So you can stay and go out with T.J., then come back whenever it’s convenient.”

She shot me a sideways glance. “So T.J.’s okay with you now?”

“No, but you’re going to do what you want no matter what I say, and I have better things to worry about. Just don’t let him … annoy you.”

I had almost said “hurt you,” but I didn’t know how that was even possible given the length of time they had spent together.

“No worries there,” she answered. “If anyone’s going to be doing any annoying, it’ll be me.”

On the ride back to the ranch, she took out Carl’s envelope again and began flicking through the smaller pieces of paper.

She stopped at one and said, “This is weird. It’s a receipt from a zoo.”

“A zoo?” I thought about it. “Well, Carl was always transporting livestock. Maybe it was an exotic for T.J.”

She shrugged and put it back. “Doesn’t say what it was. Oh, look!”

I had already seen it. T.J.’s big truck was askew on the side of the road, and T.J. was out and looking at a tire on the far side. Ha. Served him right. I did not slow down.

Kyla said, “We have to stop.”

“We don’t actually have to. We could slow and tell him we’ll call a tow truck.”

“Oh for God’s sakes, pull over. Colin’s not going to be able to leave for hours anyway. You know how those hospital tests work.”

“What are you going to do—change his tire for him?” I reluctantly removed my foot from the accelerator and began slowing.

“No, but we can see if he wants a ride.”

I hated when she made sense. I pulled the Civic to the side of the road in front of the truck. As she jumped out, I said, “Hurry it up.”

She shot me the finger and went back to T.J. I took the envelope from her seat, closed it with the metal prongs, and carefully hid it in the glove compartment. No point in having T.J. see it and start asking questions.

As I was straightening up, a sharp tap on my window made me jump. I turned and found myself staring into the barrel of a pistol.

Chapter 9

KIDNAPPERS AND KINGPINS

I’ve read that victims of armed robberies make extraordinarily bad witnesses because they are unable to focus on anything except the gun pointed at their heads. I’m here to tell you that’s completely true. I was a rabbit caught in the black-death gaze of a metallic rattlesnake. From far away, I could feel my own heart begin to pound in my chest, feel my mouth turn dry, feel every hair on my head stand to attention, but it felt as though it was happening to someone with whom I was only slightly acquainted. Somewhere in the distance, I was vaguely aware of a small clear voice telling me to snap out of it, but I was unable to take my eyes from the gun.

I don’t know how long I sat frozen. My heart beat about a hundred times, but that could have happened in a space of about ten seconds. Then the gun rapped sharply on the window again, and the spell broke.

I raised my eyes and found myself looking at something even more frightening than the pistol. T. J. Knoller had Kyla in a choke hold, and he moved the pistol to her temple and gestured to me with his head.

“Get out,” he said, his words muffled by the glass.

I opened the door of my little Civic and the chill November air swept over me like a splash of cold water. My brain began to wake up, and I started to breathe again. A quick glance showed me Kyla had a large bruise forming on her temple and a dazed fearful expression that made my heart beat harder for a different reason. A slow burn of rage spread from somewhere deep in my chest, and I seized it eagerly. After all, anything was better than the paralyzing fear.

I stepped from the car keeping my hands up out of instinct.

In a conversational tone, T.J. said, “Before you have a chance to get any bright ideas, you need to know I will shoot your sister here.”

“Cousin,” whispered Kyla.

He yanked her hair hard and jammed the gun into the soft flesh of her throat. “Shut up,” he hissed at her.

I saw her eyes roll in terror, and a single tear slipped down her cheek.

“What do you want?” I asked him, trying to get him to return his attention to me.

He eased up on the hair, although the gun remained in her throat. “I want you to do what I say, when I say it. If you do, you might just get out of this. If not … well. Do you believe I’ll kill her?”

Well, yes I did. I also believed that he was as crazy as a shithouse rat, but keeping the rat calm had to be my primary goal at this point.

“I know that you could, T.J., but you won’t need to. What is it that you want us to do?” My voice squeaked only a little before I regained control and managed a calm, low tone.

His eyes narrowed, and he stared at me appraisingly. “Well, well. Who would have thought it? Little Miss Invisible is the one to watch after all.” He swung the gun from Kyla’s throat and pointed it at my head.

Goddamn it. The bastard was going to kill me, and he still did not know my name. I could learn the names of two hundred kids in less than a week, and he wasn’t able to remember even one?

T.J. released Kyla, who staggered back and then froze. “Get the papers,” he told her, not taking his eyes from me.

“What papers?” I asked. There was no way he could know about our activities at Carl’s. Or could he? I glanced at Kyla, and saw a look of dawning horror mixed with guilt cross her face. “You told him? In the doughnut shop?”

“No!” she said. “Well, yes. But all I said was we’d found some interesting stuff about Sheriff Bob.”

“Just get them,” T.J. said sharply.

Kyla hurried around to the passenger side and opened the door.

“They aren’t here,” she said blankly.

He waved the gun at me in a threatening manner, and I flinched in spite of myself.

“Glove compartment,” I told her. After all, there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to hide them. And there was a tiny, tiny chance that if he got what he wanted, he’d let us go.

Kyla found the squashed envelope without difficulty and stood.

T.J. said, “All right. You come around here and get into my truck. You’re going to drive us where I say.”

So much for my tiny, tiny chance. “Drive where?” I asked.

“You shut up. You’re going to follow us. If you don’t, I’ll kill her.”

I was close to panicking. Everything I’d ever read about violence against women had said not to let your attacker take you anywhere. Whatever he was going to do to you would be much, much worse if he could do it in privacy. But those self-defense tips had never said anything about what to do if the attacker had a gun on someone you cared about. I glanced at the big black truck, thinking hard.

I said, “You better let me drive with you then. Kyla can’t drive a stick shift.”

“She can learn,” he said tersely.

In spite of my terror, I almost snorted aloud at that. I’d tried teaching her to drive the ranch truck once and thought she was going to grind the transmission into a fine powder. I certainly hoped our lives didn’t depend on her learning to shift, but the longer we could delay him, the better the chance that someone else might come along this deserted road, and I figured in the approximately two or three weeks it would take to teach Kyla basic shifting, either someone would come to the rescue or T.J. would lose the will to live.

It was almost as though he read my mind. “I’ll drive, then. And you will follow. If you don’t, the minute you veer away, I’ll drag her from the truck and shoot her like a dog. And you,” he spoke to Kyla without looking at her. “If you try anything, I shoot you first, and then I’ll go after this one.”