No Perfect Hero(104)

But I still manage a glare for him as he rattles on. “Now how'd you figure out I was blackmailing Bress? Did War tell you?”

“I’d like to think I’m a pretty good judge of character, and yours is lacking.” I offer my sweetest, most venomous smile, even if moving my mouth at all stings like a desert wasp. “You’ve always seemed fake to me. Bress was kind.” I shrug a little, and he tenses – does he think I’m testing the cuffs?

Good. Maybe that’ll keep him nervous, paying attention to me, so I shift my wrists a little and keep talking. “So I thought, if Bress is this weird nice guy but he’s running drugs like Warren thinks, why would he do that? Easy...” I can’t keep the contempt I feel from showing as I glower at him. “You made him get involved. You used him as your cover. He's got connections all over Heart's Edge and beyond that you don't. It's your shitty drug network that's poisoning this town.”

“Clever girl, piecing all that together from scraps. You’d make a better bounty hunter than Warren. He’s so oblivious. So trusting. Brotherhood and all that shit.” He tilts his head. It’s an eerie, puppet-like movement, his eyes a little too wide and sharp. “His sister was smarter.”

I gasp. Seeing how dark his eyes get when he mentions Jenna Ford sends a freezing current through my blood.

“What'd you do to her?” I whisper. “Why?”

“Because she had the guts to figure me out. Or maybe I got sloppy...me and Bress had ourselves a little dustup over her one fine Afghan evening. That boy was a big man, whipped my skinny ass good for talking shit, me saying he'd never know what to do with a woman like her.”

Fricking creep. I wrinkle my nose. If only storytime was over...

“Jenna knew when he dragged himself back to her, probably saw the bruises I left. She came by my tent that night. Probably wanted to apologize, try to smooth things over, knowing one day we'd all be neighbors again in Heart's Edge. That's how she walked right in on the middle of me and my man from Army Intelligence talking about dividing up our cut of Afghan heroin, how we'd get it back to the States. That idiot got flustered, denied too much, tried to fold up our maps of the heartland a little too fast.”

My heart stops beating. Stewart leans closer, a curl in his smile.

“Never knew how much she saw. Wasn't gonna find out the hard way. I'd heard there were assholes in those hills when we went out covering the sweeper crew. The ambush gave us cover. I did the rest. And then, years later, when it was all just a memory, I told Bress I'd frame his ass for killing her if he didn't let me borrow his sweet little empire for distribution.”

“Bastard!” I hiss, kicking one leg. I'm too stunned to hit him, and he easily sidesteps.

“Quit your fussin'. You should be happy, Ms. Mustang. I’m finally leaving Heart’s Edge and taking my poison with me. Gotta set up shop somewhere farther west and start over. So you’d better hope your man plays his cards right.” He rolls forward onto his knees, leaning down, bringing his face in close to mine. His shadow envelops me. “Because you've got that shock in your eyes. You look a little too much like Jenna before she died.”

I want to snap back in defiance, but my blood is too sick, too heavy, my tongue too frozen with fear.

I don’t want to die. Don’t want to leave Tara. I don’t want to leave Warren, or this feeling like we could be something close to the family I’ve craved.

I’m scared for all of us, so scared, but I’ve got to push it down and remember to be brave for the little girl hugging her knees to her chest and silently crying.

But I won’t get the chance.

Because Stewart reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a plastic-wrapped rag, then shakes it out. The moment the plastic falls away from the damply clinging cloth, the smell assaults me.

It's powerful, chemical, stinging my nose and my eyes. It hits me what it is a second too late, just as Stewart closes in, presses it against my mouth, giving me no choice but to breathe in.

Chloroform.

I try to struggle, to turn my face away, to hold my breath, but it’s too late. I’ve already breathed it.

And his face is the last thing I see as I fade away in a cloud of heavy, bitterly drugging scent, my head swimming.

“Now,” he says, a hollow voice resonating in the dark, chasing me into the blackness. “Let’s make sure you don’t give me more trouble like your dead fucking car.”





22





Foxholes (Warren)





This has to work. There's too much at stake.

It’s not a bad plan. I don’t do bad plans.

Right now, I’m stashed in the back of my own truck with Doc. There’s a false bottom in the truck bed that I’ve often used for concealing my perfectly legal weapons caches without dealing with questions from the cops.

Today it’s the perfect size for two full-grown men lying in wait for a fucking snake of an asshole who kidnaps women and little girls.

Blake, disguised as me, dropped us off hours ago.

We threw a hat on his head and put him in some of my clothes, and he parked my Dodge behind the billboard as I was told, then ran back to town to change, grab his own car, and circle around the long way to take up a position on point a mile ahead, concealed behind some scrub brush at a turnoff, watching for Stewart through a pair of night vision binoculars.