Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(52)

Chapter 11



T here she was. He’d circled the lake, and snagged her signal on the handheld. He coasted, hoping to gain an element of stealth. This was no deranged stalker. This had been carefully planned, by someone with time and leisure to rig an ambush, with electronic backup, skilled in demolitions, who had studied the area meticulously.

A professional. Which wrenched open doors in his mind. Doors best left shut, if he meant to maintain a passing resemblance to sanity.



Midnight Project is trying to kill me. They saw Liv. Will kill her if they find her. Make her leave town today or she’s meat. The only time Liv could have attracted the attention of a person like T-Rex was when she was hanging out with a McCloud. This was just the kind of f*cked up shit that routinely happened to the men in his family. Dad had trained them for this stuff since they were born.

Orem Lake gleamed in the pink glow of dawn, its surface ruffled by the wind. It was a small, pristine lake, the ice-cold water a clear blue-green. There was only a handful of seasonal hunting and fishing cabins.

The monitor told him to bear left. He jerked up the emergency brake, and leaped out of the truck, following shallow depressions in the grass that led up into the towering forest. He passed a Jeep, its plate number obscured by spattered mud. The track dead-ended into a rock face. The cabin was almost hidden in the undergrowth. It was a ruin, siding rotten, roof almost bare of shingles. It perched on a low cliff of black granite, smeared with green, yellow and orange lichen, shrouded by vast, moss-draped trees.

No one had used this place in years, possibly decades. If not for the beacon, he would never have found her. No one would have.

If she was still alive.

He pushed the bowel-loosening wave of fear away. If T-Rex had wanted her dead quickly, he could have offed her at Chaeffer Canyon.

Doubts chewed at him. Con and Davy, bitching about how he never considered consequences. Fine and good, if it was only himself getting f*cked up, but this was Liv. He wondered how far behind the cops were. If Liv’s chances were better if he waited for backup.

He could doom her by racing in like a lone-ranger *, or he could doom her by waiting. He didn’t want to spend the rest of what passed for his life seeing Liv’s last moments, knowing he might have saved her if he’d been quicker, smarter. Like Kev’s pickup, endlessly falling in the back of his mind. He couldn’t go through it again.

He’d rather die.

Christ, how he wished he had Davy, Seth, and Con at his back. That he was packing his H&K, or the SIG. The Ruger packed a punch, but it was an emergency backup weapon, with only five shots.

But no. It was family policy not to store firearms at the Bluffs house, since it stood empty so much of the time.

Use your brain to think with, not your glands. The stern voices lecturing in his head slowed his headlong dash to a stagger.

But his goddamn brain wasn’t offering up any brilliant ideas.

A wrenching scream from the direction of the cabin propelled him like a bullet from a gun. To hell with his useless brain.

His glands were the best thing he had going for him, so f*ck it.

The cabin was propped on scaffolding to level it out on the slope, so the windows that weren’t boarded up were too high to see through.

He scrambled up the slope towards the door. Shoved and tore his way through a jungle of thorny vines and hanging moss.

The door had a warped latch, and a rusty padlock dangling from it. Sean pushed the door. It shrieked on its hinges. So much for stealth.

Two bodies struggled on a shiny black plastic tarp in the dark, moldy room. The guy whipped around at the sound, white-rimmed, bulging blue eyes, in a thick bulldog face. He was straddling Liv. He could see her jeans-clad legs, flopping beneath the guy’s bulk.

Shit. He couldn’t shoot the guy with Liv right behind him. T-Rex spun around. A gun. Bullets blasted, punching into the walls, the door. Duck, tuck, and roll. Bullets whipped through his hair, his sleeve. One scored a white-hot line across his back. Filthy window glass shattered.

When he rolled up onto his feet, the guy had the gun to Liv’s head. His arm held her chin back. Her wrists were bound in front of her. She was naked to the waist. Blood trickled down her torso from the side of her neck, shockingly bright against her pale skin.

“Drop the gun, or I’ll blow her head off,” the guy said.

Sean assessed his options in that endless nanosecond, and sent a telepathic apology to Davy and Con as his fingers loosened and let go.

He hated to make them go through it again, but they had wives, families. They would get through it. And Sean had just been marking time since Kev died, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The gun, thudding to the floor, was the sound of the shoe dropping.

“Kick it over to me,” the guy instructed.

The gun made a whispering scrape as it slid across the dirty, ragged linoleum floor. He began slowly rising to his feet.

“Stay down on your knees, *. Hands behind your head.”

“The police will be along real soon,” Sean said, sinking back down. “She’s transmitting a radio signal from her shoe. Want to see it?”

“Yeah, of course,” the guy said. “Of course she is. Of course they are.” He let out a high-pitched giggle. “Just look at this. Should I gut-shoot you, and let you bleed to death? Or sever your spinal column and leave you paralyzed? I oughta leave you alive, with the door open, for the animals. You can witness yourself becoming part of the food chain.” He slid the barrel of the gun down over Liv’s throat, between her breasts. “I don’t even know where to begin. I want to eat her up.”