Page 20 of Never Stay Gone
“The last time I was out there, after Frank had blown through Libby’s home again and left her with a split lip and a black eye, I told her to get the hell out of here. Go far away and start over. I gave her five hundred dollars, made sure her car wouldn’t quit on her, and told her to drive. She didn’t want to get too far from her son, Jackson, but El Paso or Abilene would be better than here. She told me she’d do it, she’d go. So when she didn’t show up for her shifts at the truck stop…” Shane heaved a long, broken sigh.
“That was kind of you.”
“Six months before, I drove Frank ten hours north and dropped him across the state line in Oklahoma. Told him never to come back or I’d kick his ass. But clearly that didn’t work.”
“Any idea where he is now? What he’s up to?”
Shane shook his head.
“Well, then he’s a suspect until he proves otherwise. Put out an APB on him, and we’ll run him down. A man like that might be the kind who kills six women and leaves them in a hole in the ground.”
Shane nodded. His lips were pressed in a hard line. “You think he did it?”
“I’m not rulin’ anyone out until the evidence says so. I don’t like gut feelings in casework. I seen innocent men get shafted by someone’s gut feelings. They might be a piece of shit, like Frank, but maybe they’re not the piece of shit we’re lookin’ for today. So we work this by the book. Find Frank, check his alibi. Work the victims too. When was they last seen? By who? Where? What secrets did they have? What kind of lives did they lead? Who were they, really? We’ve gotta talk to their closest, build up a picture of their lives. Now, you said Libby has a son? Jackson? Out at the Montgomery spread?”
“Been there three years now.”
Dakota pushed to his feet and grabbed his hat. “Then that’s where we’re going. We’ve gotta let him know about his mother.”
* * *
The driveto the Montgomery spread took a little over an hour. Shane drove, and Dakota filled him in on Amber Serrano’s arrest records and history with the law. She’d never been taken in by the Big Bend Sheriff’s Department, which was something of a miracle, but Dakota’s recon team had scooped her out of the desert more than a handful of times. The border patrol, too, had picked her up and brought her in, questioned her for hours, and then been forced to turn her loose. Amber was a US citizen, and with no hard proof of her breaking the law, there wasn’t much they could do but give her stern warnings to stay away from her brother and the Jalisco cartel or she’d wind up in deep trouble one day.
Deep trouble like a hole in the ground.
Dakota had felt it, looking at her, maybe a year ago. She had death all over her, like she was living in a vulture’s shadow. Most drug runners and operatives for the cartels had short and violent lives. Amber was seventeen when he first hauled her in from the desert, supposedly on a walk—in the middle of nowhere—but most likely scouting terrain for tunnels or landing strips. She’d been hungry, he could tell, for more out of life. It was the kind of hunger that usually drove kids to claw their way toward scholarships. Shane had had that hunger.
Amber’s hunger, it seemed, had been to climb the Jalisco cartel ladder. She wanted to be a bigger operative. She wore the Jalisco talisman around her neck and had a tattoo of Santa Muerte over her heart, above her breast. Her eyes, even as a teen, had been hard and cold, like obsidian.
So how had she ended up rotting in a grave in the middle of the desert?
And Jessica. What did she have in common with either Libby or Amber? How had she ended up sharing their hole in the ground?
What did Libby and Amber have in common with each other that brought them so intimately together in death?Bad timing? A killer’s appetite?
Amber had no living family on this side of the border, but the Rangers had compiled a list of her associates. He texted a Ranger he knew in Company E, Bennet Riley, and asked him to pull her record and email it to him. He’d have to run down her associates, try to find her friends or fellow drug runners. See if he could figure out the last time someone saw Amber Serrano.
Shane eventually pulled into the Montgomery spread and drove up the long gravel drive to the foreman’s house. The foreman’s wife came onto the porch, wiping her hands on a faded apron as she squinted at Shane’s truck. “Help you gentlemen?” she asked warily as Shane and Dakota climbed out. “You lookin’ for someone?”
“We’re looking for Jackson Lynn, ma’am,” Shane said, tipping his hat to her. “Would you mind radioing out to the crew and asking him to ride on in to talk with us?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Jackson is one of the good ones. If you fellas are chasin’ trouble, I’d be surprised to find Jackson involved with any of it. My husband wants to take him on and train him personal-like. Give him the reins of this place one day.”
“It’s about his momma, ma’am,” Shane said softly.
The woman’s expression softened. She nodded, invited them both onto the porch to take a seat on the old porch swing, and then disappeared through a creaking screen door into the house. Dakota heard her calling over the radio for her husband. Asking him to send Jackson in to speak to Deputy Carson about his mother. A few minutes later, she came back out with mason jars of sun tea for the three of them, and they waited in silence as a dust cloud billowed on the horizon, eventually spitting out the image of a man astride a horse, hauling ass their way as fast as he could.
Jackson Lynn came off his horse in a breathless tumble in front of the porch, dirty and rumpled in the way cowboys often were. He brought his horse to the paddock and the water trough, peeled off his gloves, and then jogged to the steps. “Sir? You got some news about my momma? Is she in some kind of trouble?”
Dakota watched Shane meet Jackson at the bottom of the warped porch stairs. He put his hands on Jackson’s biceps, holding him in a tight, two-handed grip, and looked Jackson dead in the eyes. The world chose that moment to kill the wind, turning the rolling whistle that filled the air into a hollow silence that waited for Shane’s words.
“I’m sorry, Jackson,” Shane said softly. “She’s gone. We found your mother’s body yesterday.”
Jackson wailed and crumpled into Shane’s hold, leaning all of his considerable weight on Shane.
Dakota was on his feet before he realized it, rushing to them, but he wasn’t fast enough to catch the two men before Shane’s bad knee buckled. They ended up on the ground, Jackson sobbing into Shane’s chest as Shane held the young man—no more than a boy, really—whose lonely world had just become even lonelier.
* * *
