The Big Dark Sky (17)
On this occasion, however, when the butler showed Wyatt to the study, Liam O’Hara’s smile and handshake were perfunctory. He didn’t offer his guest coffee, didn’t engage in small talk, but escorted him directly to one of four leather armchairs encircling a steel-and-glass coffee table. The billionaire settled in the chair to the left of Wyatt’s and sat forward on the edge, his hands clutching the padded arms much as he might have held fast to the security bar in a roller-coaster car.
He lacked even the shadow of a beard, as though he must have American Indian genes in his lineage, but his face was freckled, his hair rust red, and his eyes as green as shamrocks.
He spoke rapidly, as he often did, but not with his customary ebullience, instead with quiet anxiety. “For a couple years, I’ve been buying land in Montana—ranches, contiguous properties. Not in or around the town where I was raised, but in the adjacent county. My parents have passed away, as you know, and I don’t really have friends back there. Anyway, I’m trying to put together maybe ten or twelve thousand acres, not just for sentimental reasons and not just as a place to get away to now and then, but also to preserve the land. It’s so beautiful there. Have you ever been? No, that’s right, I asked you that before, and you’ve never been. Well, I’d like you to go now, today, or as soon as you can, and look into a certain situation for me. Lyndsey and the kids and I went there last Friday, meant to stay a week at this ranch called Rustling Willows, roughing it, just the four of us, no entourage, but we got the hell out of there on Monday. The last few days, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened, but I can’t. Damn if I can. What happened—it was kind of magical at first, but it got weird pretty quickly, and then it scared the shit out of me.”
When Liam took a breath, Wyatt said, “Tell me what happened.”
The billionaire met Wyatt’s eyes, but then looked quickly away and hesitated, though his habit had always been to make direct eye contact and speak forthrightly. His attention seemed to be caught by a helicopter moving parallel to the superbly insulated windows, as silent as if it were a hallucination. But Wyatt sensed that Liam was less distracted by the aircraft than he was seeking a distraction to delay making what revelation he intended to impart.
Finally, he said, “I don’t believe in the supernatural—ghosts, spirits, possession, any of that. Do you?”
“Not actively,” Wyatt said. “But I keep an open mind.”
As he followed the receding helicopter, Liam said, “Anyway, whatever it was, it wasn’t any of that.”
After perhaps half a minute, Wyatt said, “I’m growing old here, Liam. Soon you’ll need to hire a younger gumshoe.”
Liam met his eyes and didn’t look away this time. “None of what I tell you can ever be repeated in any public forum. They’d think I’ve lost it, slid into drugs or something, and the company’s stock price would plummet.”
“If I’d wanted to sell the story of that threat against Laura and Tavis, as sensational as it was, I could’ve gotten seven hundred thousand—maybe eight, hell, maybe a million—from one tabloid or another. I wasn’t tempted for even a minute.”
Liam grimaced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply . . . Damn, Wyatt, this experience has fucked with my head. You and I go back a long way. I know you’re solid.”
“We go back to before you were who you are.” He reached out and put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Do I have to get you drunk before you’ll tell me what you need to tell me?”
Liam sighed and settled back in his chair and told it all.
Now, six hours later, Wyatt was in the Treasure State. Liam’s Learjet had flown him from Seattle to Spokane. From there, a chartered propjet carried him, the only passenger, to Helena, Montana, where the runway was too short for the Lear. A new Range Rover, purchased from a local dealer by Liam while Wyatt was in transit, waited for him at the airport. When money was no object, getting from anywhere to anywhere else could be as easy as going nowhere at all.
He would be at Rustling Willows well before nightfall.
12
Six days a week, Wendy Sharp worked the lunch shift at an Italian family restaurant and the dinner shift at an upscale place with good Mediterranean food, but all she had on Thursdays was a lunch shift. By three o’clock, she was hurrying through traffic in her VW, eager to free Cricket from Jolly Bertha and go to the park and watch people, especially people with dogs, because it was her and Cricket’s fondest dream to one day have a house with a yard and a dog, and they were still unsure what breed they most wanted.
Wendy Sharp had no one in the world except Cricket Moon; and she would die for her if ever it came to that. Cricket Moon Sharp was seven years old, with her father’s auburn hair and her mother’s blue eyes. She resembled her mother in every regard except for the hair, which was fortunate because Wendy might not have loved the child so intensely if every time she looked at her she was reminded of him. His name wasn’t Snake, but that’s what Wendy called him when she walked out of the hell that he built and ruled. Snake was the name he earned. Snake was not a part of their life anymore, and he never would be, not if Wendy had anything to say about it. In fact, she had everything to say about it, because Snake knew she would kill him hard if he ever came around, and he was scared of her.