Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(89)

DeMarco leaned over her body, pulled the seat belt harness across her chest, and buckled her in.

? ? ?

Twenty minutes, he told himself. Twenty minutes to the clearing near Schofield Run. Huston had a twenty-minute jump on him. But Huston would be driving cautiously. He wouldn’t want to get pulled over in a stolen car with a man in the trunk. DeMarco, on the other hand, had no such concern. He drove through the graying morning as fast as the turns allowed. He knew there would be no troopers hiding along the highway for another two hours. So maybe he could make up a few minutes on Huston by speeding.

“Then the hike to the campsite,” he told Bonnie. “He’ll have to cut Inman’s legs free. Then he’ll either make a second trip back to the car for the cement blocks or he’ll make your boyfriend carry them. That’s what I would do.”

The seat belt straps across Bonnie’s chest and lap kept her upper body tight against the seat, but her head jounced forward and back, side to side. Her feet slid over the floor mat, sometimes kicking out violently in reaction to a hard turn. She was wearing a pair of straw-colored mules but soon both feet were bare. DeMarco wished he could stop long enough to put her shoes back on, but he could not.

“Why did he kill you?” he asked. “Did you balk when you realized he was coming for me? Did you try to talk him out of it?”

He wondered if she had even known about the Huston murders before the fact. Probably not. Hard-timers like Inman learn to trust no one. They impart information on a need-to-know basis only, and even then it’s usually a lie.

“Why did he come after me?” he asked. “Why not just get away as far and as fast as you could?”

Her head rolled side to side with the movements of the car. Her bare feet scraped the floor.





Sixty-Two


In gray light, DeMarco pushed his way through the stand of red pines, his left arm raised to bat the branches away from his face, his forearm already scratched and bleeding. He moved toward the burbling of water over rocks. The needle-matted ground was soft and fragrant, and if he ran stooped low, he could pass under most of the branches. Behind him in the clearing, his car and Bonnie’s Mustang sat side by side, both hoods lightly steaming from the engine heat. He thought maybe he could get to the campsite in time. Maybe he could prevent what he knew was going to happen there.

The first shot echoed through the tops of the trees and over the misted lake like the crack of a bullwhip. It threw DeMarco off stride for a moment, then he was running again, harder now, listening to the silence, the pause, and praying that it continued. Huston would have been surprised by the effects of that first shot, the spray of tiny pellets, the sudden bloody pockmarks all over Inman’s face and chest. It would be a killing shot only if delivered point-blank, and he doubted Huston’s ability to do that. So now maybe Huston was checking the cylinder, seeing the two remaining rounds of birdshot, the three .22 longs. Maybe he would take some delight in the birdshot, see it as a way of prolonging Inman’s pain. But certainly he planned to save the last round for himself.

A less attractive scenario was that the little shell full of birdshot had been emptied inside Huston’s own mouth or against his temple. In which case, Huston would have already used the knife to dispatch Inman. Both images made DeMarco cringe.

Only ten more yards and he would be into the white beyond the trees, the mist along the shore and over the lake. He ran full speed now, chest aching. Praying for more silence.

He broke out of the trees and onto the pebbly shore and swung left. Then he was splashing with long strides across Schofield Run, the water icy against his shins. He slipped and went down and banged his elbow hard against the rocks but was quickly on his feet again, splashing onto dry ground. He put a hand to his jacket pocket, made sure his service weapon was still there, though he felt no need to take it in hand. He had already decided that he was not going to pull a gun on Huston, no matter what.

DeMarco could make out two dark figures through the mist now, two faceless silhouettes, one standing in the water, one lower, possibly sitting on shore. Then the second shot cracked. The sound slapped DeMarco full in the face. “Thomas, don’t!” he yelled. But with the words came the splintering crack of four more shots in rapid succession, and the figure on the shore fell onto his back, and DeMarco slowed, blinked, and as his focus on the figure in the water sharpened, the ache in his chest swelled and pulsed, and he reached into his pocket and withdrew his weapon and walked toward Inman. The man was standing beside a small boulder that protruded from the water, his hands taped at the wrist and clasped hard around DeMarco’s father’s revolver.

? ? ?

Huston’s face and neck and chest were riddled with bloody splotches from the first three shots. The last three, all to his chest, had made slightly larger wounds, and around them, the blood was bright and flowing, emerging with the slow, shallow pulses of his heart.

DeMarco knelt beside him. He kept his right hand extended toward the lake, held Inman ankle-deep in the water. He placed his left hand atop Huston’s head. Huston lay with his eyes wide open, staring into the high, deep whiteness. His hands were clenched against the pain but a small smile creased his mouth. “You’re a very clever man,” DeMarco told him.

Huston gave no indication that he had heard. He’s somewhere else, DeMarco told himself. Maybe he was with Claire and the children already. Maybe he was watching as they approached him hand in hand.