Page 66 of Killer on the Homestead
“Of course I am. I have a plan. You’ve been ten steps behind it this whole time. So I’ve got time. To perfect it. To make it right. You shouldn’t have brought Duncan into it.”
Duncan thought she was with the police, but how much time had passed? Would he be worried? Would he tell them to look for Terry? Would anyone find her wrecked truck?
They had to. If someone started looking for her, they’d have to find it. If she could just stay alive…
“Why?” she asked Terry, though she wasn’t even sure what she was questioning. Just this whole damn horror.
“Why.” He snorted. “Ten years of planning thwarted by some uppity kid who’d never seen a day of hard work in his whole sorry life? No. It wasn’t happening. It’snothappening. I never meant to kill him. If he hadn’t gotten messed up in the cows, hadn’t tried to blackmail me, they’d be mine and I’d be gone. But now? Now I’ll kill whoever the hell gets in my way. Him. Owen. You. Duncan. It’ll end there. I’ll be out of here once you two are taken care of.”
The cows. Somehow this had all been about the cows? She couldn’t think it through clearly, but that was secondary right now. Because right now she had to save herself. Save Duncan.
There had to be some way out of this mess, but she was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. A hard time making sense of her scrambled thoughts and the gray mist overeverything. Her head bobbed forward, the world black again. Then she felt a sharp, teeth-rattling sting against her cheek. Her eyes popped open, and she realized he’d slapped her.
“None of that,” he growled.
Her cheek throbbed where he’d made impact.
“We need you awake. This isn’t going to fall on me.”
She used what little strength she had left to spit—a mix of blood and saliva—right at his face.
He reared back his arm, so she squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself for impact, for pain, for the awful, awful consequences.
But nothing happened. She opened her eyes to the foggy gray and saw him, still standing above her, but he’d dropped his arm and taken a step back.
“Not yet,” he muttered to himself, whirling around and stalking away as he wiped his face on his sleeve. “Gotta make it right, so not yet.”
Every “not yet” gave her a chance. That’s what she told herself.
No matter how dire it all looked.
Chapter Twenty
Duncan was no expert tracker, but he managed to follow boot prints and drops of blood when there was no grass and only dirt. Away from the road, toward the trees.
Why would she do that? He made it into the grouping of trees. Pine needles littered the muddy ground below. Boot prints squelched into the mud. Was he ruining them? He tried to walk around them in case more help came.
He made it to one side, noted a tree that looked like it had been walked around quite a bit. He crouched, wondering if he studied the markings in the muddy ground, he’d be able to have an idea of what happened. But next to a tree, on an upturned curved leaf, was a tiny puddle of something dark, and a few more leaves around the area had the same.
Blood. It had to be blood. Way too much of it. His heart twisted into a pained pretzel. What was she doing? Heading away from help like this?
He shook his head. Answers didn’t matter. He had to find her. So he searched the area for where the footprints came out on the other side. The terrain was pretty open here, and it was hard to note where any footprints were back in the tall grasses.
But in the distance, he saw another cluster of trees. If she had run away from the road and toward the cover of the first group of trees, then left this area, wouldn’t she likely run for more cover?
He heard sirens in the distance. Maybe he should go back. The cops would know how to track. They’d have a better way of dealing with this, probably.
But he was alreadyouthere. She might be close, and if that washerblood, how could he possibly turn away? He surveyed the world around him again. The trees were the only place to go. Since there was no way of determining tracks, he decided to follow his intuition.
He began to walk straight for it, cutting through tall grass and focusing on not tripping over a random boulder, hole, or God forbid, a snake. He gripped the gun in his hand, ready to use it if he had to. He knew how to shoot it, probably, though it had been years since he’d even attempted to use a gun and his shooting hand was somewhat compromised.
He wouldn’t need it. It was just a precaution. Everything would be fine once he found her. Everything his dad had taught him as a kid would come back to him, like muscle memory.
If he even needed it. Which he wouldn’t, he told himself, over and over again.
Every once in a while, he paused. Looked around. Listened. It wouldn’t be smart to get lost, but…
He heard it in one of those moments. A kind ofsnicksound, far away, but followed by something like a grunt. It all sounded very…human.
