Cold Springs(95)

Pérez was laboring mightily to hold his tongue. And, with a small twinge of surprise, Chadwick realized that Pérez did not hate the girl. His eyes were full of disappointment, bitterness, resentment—but not hate. Not the contempt you might show for someone you planned to kill. Pérez reminded Chadwick more of himself, in the days when he argued constantly with Katherine.

“Your dad was good to me,” Pérez said tightly. “I wouldn't hurt him. You think I'm the problem, then I pity you. I couldn't hurt him as much as you did.”

Mallory took a step back, retreating. She ran into the hay bales and sank onto Joey Allbritton's sleeping bag.

“Mallory,” Chadwick said. “Tell us what you were going to say this morning—about the person who blackmailed your father.”

“I wasn't . . .” She looked toward the barn door, as if contemplating escape, but Jones was there, silently guarding the exit. “It's just . . . the Montrose house. Katherine had taken me there before.”

“You mean before the night she died?”

“Twice before that. But the last time, the night she died—that was different.”

“She was depressed,” Chadwick said. “She was about to take her own life.”

“It was more than that.” She was shivering, her breath turning to mist as if all the cold air in the barn were condensing around her. “The first two times, she went there to see her boyfriend, Samuel. I was too young to understand it then, but I remember her smelling good—she would borrow perfume from her mother. She would smell like roses.”

Chadwick had a sudden, painful memory of Katherine, the night he picked her up from the Oakland police station—the smell in the car a profane mix of Norma's perfume and he**in smoke.

“The last time she took me,” Mallory said, “that night, she didn't wear perfume. She wasn't excited.”

“Of course,” Chadwick said. “She was clinically depressed.”

“No. That night, Katherine went for a different reason. She said she needed to talk to somebody. She never said Samuel. I think she went to see someone else, somebody who gave her the drugs that killed her.”

The silence was long enough for the tremor to reach every part of Chadwick's nervous system. “Who?”

Mallory took a quick glance at Pérez, making sure he was still bound. “Please—I don't know.”

“Your father's life may be on the line, Mallory. He might still be alive.”

“I know that. Christ, I know that.”

“Tell me what you're leaving out.”

Her eyes glittered with tears—sea-colored, like her mother's, but permanently seared with afterimages no fifteen-year-old should have.

“I don't know,” she pleaded. “Just let me go back to Cold Springs, all right? I never wanted to run. I swear to God, I want to finish Black Level. I need to go back.”

Chadwick looked at Jones. She mimed a push, a silent suggestion that he needed to back off the girl.

“So what now?” Pérez asked. “You kill me?”

Chadwick imagined giving Pérez over to the local deputies—the same deputies who had stopped Hunter on the road years ago looking for a convenient rape suspect. The same deputies who had been known to let illegal immigrants have accidents with doors, stairwells and nightsticks before turning them over to the INS.

Chadwick thought about his other options.

“You bring me in, man,” Pérez said, “you know what's going to happen. I'm gonna have to sell you to the cops. You're gonna have to sell me. You think either one of us is going to get a fair shake?”

“Put the blindfold back on him,” Chadwick told Jones. “The gag, too.”

Jones hesitated only for a moment, then she did what she was asked.

Chadwick went outside, talked to Joey Allbritton, got directions to the kind of spot he needed.

“You get what you wanted from that guy?” Allbritton asked.

“As much as I could get.”

“And you'll turn him in now, right?”

“Thank you, Joey. It was good to see you. I wouldn't mention this to anyone.”

“Good to see you, too, sir. Tell Dr. Hunter I'll come out to help with horse training anytime.”

“I will.”

“Seriously. Anytime.”

When Mallory came out, Joey clamped his hand on her forearm.

“Chadwick will take care of you. Chadwick saved my life, okay? Trust him.”

Mallory murmured something, tried to pull away, but Joey held her.

“I mean it, black level,” he said. “Trust him.”

He let her pull away then, and she walked toward the car, stepping gingerly around rocks as if each might be a land mine.

As they drove back down the muddy road, Joey's figure got smaller and smaller, but the rising sun spread his shadow into something enormous on the barn wall.

By eight-thirty, Chadwick and Pérez were several miles away, standing in the middle of a fallow wheat field far from any major roadways. Chadwick stripped Pérez of his shoes. Then he tucked something in Pérez's T-shirt pocket. Only then did he ungag him and cut his arms free.

Pérez ripped off his blindfold. The gun in Chadwick's hand dissuaded him from taking any other liberties.