The Payback Man (26 page)

“Why did you kill her?” Steve asked. “She was your sister.”

“My sister. My beautiful sister, Daddy’s girl who inherited the money when little Posey wasn’t smart enough to keep it out of the hands of fortune hunters. The sister my husband still loved even after he
settled
for me. The sister who was going to back her dear husband in a brand-new venture so he could walk out on me and Neil and leave us holding the bag. The sister who spent her life trying to advise me on my diet, my clothes, my hair, my makeup, my house, my husband and my life. That sister. Right.”

“And you framed me. Why?”

Posey tossed her head. “Who else was there? I certainly didn’t owe you any loyalty. Besides, if you were in jail, I got all Chelsea’s money. Finally. I should have had it all along. Neil, get out of the way. It’s time to end this.”

Without taking his eyes off her, he said, “I won’t let you. Steve, get out while you can. Run. I promise I won’t call the police. Just go.”

“You covered up for her?” Steve asked incredulously.

“Of course I covered up for her! Whose fault do you think it was that she hated Chelsea so much? Steve, I’m begging you.”

“And the evidence?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Just go, for God’s sake.”

“Not necessary, Mr. Waters.” The new voice spoke from the darkness of the hall behind Posey.

She screamed.

Steve saw the spit of fire from the barrel of her pistol as the man knocked her arm upward.

Neil grabbed his left shoulder and fell back against Steve. “Damn,” he whispered.

“Neil!” Posey screamed, and tried to run from the strong hands that held her. “Oh, God, I shot him!”

A moment later she was on the floor with her hands cuffed behind her. She kept screaming for Neil.

Steve dropped to his knees and supported Neil’s head.

“It’s just a flesh wound, Neil. You’ll be okay.”

Neil’s eyelids fluttered. “Poor Posey. Poor old Posey….” Then he passed out.

The room was suddenly full of big men. Steve handed over his pistol, pulled his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans and, with a grimace, ripped off the small microphone taped to his belly. “Did you get it all?”

“Every word,” Schockley said. “Should be enough to get you off and put them both away for a long time.”

“Then it’s over?”

“Not quite, but I’d say you’re on the downhill swing. Hang in there, Chadwick, just a little longer.” He glanced at his watch. “You’ve been gone over an hour. Time we got you back to the farm. I’ll have one of my guys drive you. We’ll alert the warden on the way.”

Steve dropped his head back the moment he sank into the front seat of the unmarked cruiser. He was exhausted, but for once it was a good kind of tired. He could finally tell Eleanor everything tomorrow. He could come to her clean, not a killer. A man who would soon be free.

And tomorrow he’d take care of Sweet Daddy once and for all. Somehow he’d get him sent back to Big Mountain.

The driver spoke to the prison, then looked at Steve strangely.

“You got a situation at the farm, Chadwick. The cow barn’s on fire. They think there may be people inside.”

Steve came instantly alert. “People? Now?”

“Yeah.”

Eleanor. She’d found out somehow he was gone and had gone looking for him. She could have run into Sweet
Daddy or one of the COs. Like Mike Newman. God, he should have warned her!

“Drive, please! I’ve got to get there.”

The car tore away from the curb.

S
WEET
D
ADDY CARRIED
an open gasoline can marked “motor pool” in each hand. He dropped them in the aisle in front of the barn office. Some of the liquid splashed onto the concrete. The smell of gasoline rose from the puddle.

“I said he’s gone! Bastard run off and left me!”

Eleanor said, “He hasn’t run anywhere.” She tried to sound certain, but her heart was pounding. Was this why he hadn’t spoken to her in days? So that he wouldn’t lose his damned
focus?

“Ain’t in the compound, ain’t in the mess hall, ain’t down here. Damn! I told the man what I’d do he didn’t take me with him.”

Sweet Daddy stamped his skinny foot in impotent fury.

Eleanor edged backward toward her truck. She’d lost. Sweet Daddy was right. This time she felt in her bones that Steve was not down in the pasture with a cow. She clenched her stomach muscles to keep the fluttering in her insides down.

Why couldn’t Steve have hung on? Had her first assessment been right? Had she always been simply a means to an end, to giving him the leeway to escape, to kill Neil and disappear?

She ought to alert the COs immediately so they could go after him, put out an APB or whatever they called it.

She also ought to alert Neil Waters to the danger he was in.

But Steve could be killed if she did. She had to find him and stop him before he committed the final act that would separate him forever from the rest of mankind.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, woman,” Sweet Daddy
snarled. “I told Steve. I warned him. I’m not going back. He’s out. Now I’m leaving on my own.”

“Go on back to the compound before the COs find you’re gone.”

He moved toward her. She’d never realized how like a snake he was. She kept backing up, waiting for the moment to break and run.

“You think you can outrun Sweet Daddy? Ain’t no
female
stop Sweet Daddy.” He kept moving forward. His body language became cockier with each step. She hated his smile and the glint of that gold tooth.

Suddenly she bumped into one of the concrete pillars.

In an instant he was on her, twisting her wrist behind her so that she gasped with pain. His cheek was close to hers, his breath in her ear. She smelled the acrid scent of his body.

She ignored the pain and tore at his face with her free hand.

“Ow!” His grip loosened. He put his hand to his cheek. “Bitch! I’m bleeding.”

She grabbed the corner of the column and used it as a lever to pull herself around.

Run! She was four inches taller than he was. She ought to be able to outrun him.

She felt his hand twist in her hair.

He yanked her head back, and when she screamed and tried to pull his hands away, he wrapped his free arm across her throat.

She couldn’t breathe. She struggled, tried to pull his arm away from her throat, tried to stomp his feet, kick back against his knee, twist around to kick his groin—all the things that were supposed to work against attackers.

But Sweet Daddy was used to battling women. He knew the tricks.

He twisted her away from the front of the barn and threw her facedown against the stacked bales of hay just past the office.

“You through giving orders, bitch. You ain’t ever dissin’ Sweet Daddy again.”

She rolled over on her back. “Touch me and they’ll hunt you down and kill you. And if they don’t, Steve will.”

“Steve’s gone, and he couldn’t kill squat. Time they dig this place out and find what’s left of you, I’ll be so far under with my ladies, ain’t nobody gonna find me.”

Eleanor froze in horror. His gold tooth flashed in the sudden flicker from the lighted wooden match in his hand. He unbuckled his belt. When he saw her face, he began to laugh.

“Sweet Daddy could teach you some tricks all right, if I had the time, but I gotta get my ass out of here in your truck while they all trying to keep this damn place from burning to the ground. This’ll do to tie you up till the fire gets going good.”

“Please, you can’t. The animals won’t be able to get out.”

“Neither will you, bitch. Get up.”

“Go to hell.”

“You first.”

She realized the thing he pulled from behind his back had once been a long steel blade used to scrape the sweat off horses. Nobody’d noticed it was missing. Now light glinted off the sharpened side, the pointed end. He must have spent hours carefully honing it into a knife.

Sweet Daddy knew how to use a knife.

Eleanor felt her gorge rise. She remembered those pictures of the woman he’d assaulted—the woman who’d testified against him. Sweet Daddy knew how to use a knife, all right.

“You think I won’t cut you? You do what I say. Get up.”

She struggled to her feet. Screaming would do no good, for no one would hear. She couldn’t reach her truck or her
cell phone, or even the panic button on her pager that sat so handily in the front seat of the truck.

He grabbed her hair again and tossed her away from the hay. She stumbled once, recovered, then faked another stumble. If she could somehow get into Marcus’s pen, she’d be safe. Sweet Daddy wouldn’t dare follow her in there.

She could tell Marcus knew something was wrong. He stamped and snorted nervously as close to the electric wire as he could get without touching it. She could hear the horses at the far end of the barn nervously stamping and kicking in their stalls, too. They sensed danger—maybe smelled Eleanor’s fear. She thanked God the cow and her new calf were safely back in the pasture.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Sweet Daddy snarled.

In her haste to get to Marcus’s pen, she tripped over one of the jerry cans and fell on her hands and knees on the concrete. She heard the can tip and the
glug-glug
of the gasoline as it ran out.

She couldn’t let Sweet Daddy flick another match now. Even if she could get out, the horses and Marcus couldn’t. She needed a weapon, something that would keep that knife from slicing into her.

A towel, a horse blanket, anything that she could wrap around her forearm would help. She looked around and saw nothing that would do. There wasn’t even anything to throw at him.

Sweet Daddy grinned at her and kicked over the other can of gasoline. It, too, began to flow out onto the concrete, down the aisle and under the hay.

She was close to Marcus’s stall now. If she touched that electric wire, she’d get a jolt, but not nearly so bad as a knife in her throat. She reached behind her, and Sweet Daddy realized what she planned to do.

“No!” He lunged at her.

And slipped in the stream of gasoline.

She felt the pain as the blade sliced through her jacket
and across her forearm. Another lunge and he’d have her. She grabbed the fence, took the jolt, realized she couldn’t possibly open the gate in time and didn’t have the strength to vault a five-foot fence. She was trapped.

“You gone plumb crazy?” Big loomed up out of the darkness behind Sweet Daddy.

Sweet Daddy whirled, making circles in front of him with his knife. “Ain’t your business, fool.”

“Who spilled gas? That’s right dangerous.”

“Big, watch out!” Eleanor shouted as Sweet Daddy lunged at him.

Big swept him aside with one broad arm and ignored the knife that had come dangerously close to his chest. “Doc? You all right? Hey, you got blood on you!”

“Big, behind you. Don’t let him light a match!”

“Riiight,” Sweet Daddy whispered.

The match flickered, then arced through the air to land in a pool of gasoline between him and Big.

Big turned at the
whomp.
“Oh, Lordy!” He reached across the flames, grabbed Sweet Daddy by the collar, dragged him out of the way of the fire, and held him two feet off the floor while Sweet Daddy struggled to reach Big’s body with the knife. “You shouldna done that.”

His voice was quiet, almost apologetic.

“Big, put him down. We’ve got to put out that fire.” Eleanor held her bleeding arm against her side and reached for the fire extinguisher beside Marcus’s stall.

“Elroy, now I am
mad.
”

Big wrenched the knife from Sweet Daddy and tossed it aside, then he lifted him two-handed over his head.

Sweet Daddy began to scream. He screamed as he flew through the air into the bull’s paddock. Then he stopped screaming and lay very still.

Eleanor saw the angle of his head and his open mouth just before Marcus realized that his foe was at his mercy at long last.

“I got to get him outta there,” Big said. “Oh, Lordy.”

“The fire, Big, put out the fire!” Eleanor threw the extinguisher to him and turned on the water hose. She aimed it at Marcus full force to keep him away from Sweet Daddy. She didn’t think it mattered now, but she had to try.

Marcus snorted, then reached under Sweet Daddy’s limp form with one of his horns and tossed the little man over his shoulder. Sweet Daddy landed like a broken puppet.

Over the hiss and spurt of the extinguisher and the crackle of the flames, came Big’s litany of “Oh, Lordy, Oh, Lordy…”

From the distance she heard sirens.

The gasoline blazed on the concrete, crawled over the bales of hay, and ate at Marcus’s enclosure. She heard the snap as the flames hit the electric wire.

Her eyes were burning and tearing. The smoke from the hay billowed thick and acrid. She felt light-headed, but started down the aisle toward the three horses who were screaming and kicking their stalls, desperate to get away from the flames.

From behind she heard the sound of running feet, then someone grabbed her.

“Get her out of here,” Gil shouted. He pushed her to Robert, who threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and raced out of the barn.

“Robert, put me down!” She began to cough, and the bouncing made her arm throb. “Get the horses out.”

He set her on her feet, gave her one look and sprinted back into the barn just as Gil drove the three horses out.

“Where’s Big?” Eleanor shouted.

“He’s gone to lock Marcus out into the back paddock.”

“Sweet Daddy’s in there. In Marcus’s stall.”

“Oh God.” Gil started back, but Eleanor stopped him.

“Let the firemen bring him out.”

“What you mean, woman?” Robert shouted. He looked from her face to Gil’s. “He dead?”

Eleanor nodded.

“Marcus got him?”

Eleanor took a deep breath. “Marcus got him.”

Gil saw her bloody arm. “You’re hurt.”

“Superficial.”

“Superficial, my ass.”

A car screamed up the long driveway from the highway, skidded to a stop, the door opened and Steve jumped out.

“Steve!” Eleanor cried. She forgot her arm, she forgot the fire and Sweet Daddy and everything else.