Page 80 of Never Stay Gone
“I’m comin’, I’m on the way. Just tell me, are you okay? Shane, please, goddamnit, are you okay?”
“Dakota—” Finally, Shane’s voice shifted, cracking with emotion. “I—”
The line went dead.
* * *
Dakota could seethe farmhouse dipping in and out of the rolling hills for ten miles along the highway. It seemed to hover there, faded paint against the marble-blue sky and milk-white clouds, never getting nearer. Sparks rose from the naked rim of his truck’s right front wheel, the rubber from the popped tire long since shredded into pieces and left littered behind him, blown free as he hurtled forward at one hundred miles an hour.
The roads were empty, not a single Big Bend sheriff’s vehicle in sight. No one running radar through Rustler, lying in wait to catch speeders coming in off the desert. Of course, when you needed a deputy, there were none around.
He called the Big Bend Sheriff’s Department dispatch number, bellowing at whoever picked up the phone and demanding immediate assistance out at Danielle’s ranch. He was driving so fast he couldn’t hear a damn thing the other person said, and he repeated himself twice, then hung up.
He skidded on three, then two tires as he made a hard left turn from the highway to Danielle’s drive. Gravel slid beneath his truck, pebbles peppering the undercarriage like a blast from a shotgun. He fought the wheel, guiding the truck back to rights. Slammed the gas and listened to the hellish sounds of the bare rim on the raw ground. Like bombs were going off or fireworks were bursting in a mason jar next to his head.
Dakota hit the front yard hard, skidded across the parking area, and jerked his truck sideways into the grass. He came out with his gun drawn, moving until he was behind the cover of the engine block, the muzzle of his weapon pointed at the porch and the screen door flapping open and shut in the hot wind. “Shane?”
For a moment, there was nothing.
Fear ran rancid through him, prickling in his veins and cramping his muscles, and he replayed every moment of Shane’s call: the flat cadence of his voice as he spoke—until the end, when it seemed like he broke as he said Dakota’s name.
He heard the slow bootheels over the whistling wind, coming from inside the house like drumbeats. A shape, a man, coming toward the screen. Hands held up, open and spread, in front of his chest. Limping.
Shane.
Dakota almost wept when he saw Shane push through the screen door and step onto the porch, alive, no blood coming out of him. His eyes were tight and his lips were drawn, his face pale as pampas grass, blue eyes shimmering as they caught the sunlight. He didn’t have his gun on his hip.
“Drop it, Dakota,” a voice called from behind Shane. Dakota saw the outline of another man, tall, leanly muscled, holding a gun to the back of Shane’s head. “I can put a bullet in his brain faster than either one of you can move against me,” the man said. “So drop your weapon. Throw it in the horse corral.”
Dakota cursed. His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together, his heart hammering so hard he saw spots appear like film bleeding on the edges of his vision. “All right,” he said. “All right. Just don’t hurt ’im.” He flung his weapon sideways into the pen. It landed in a loose scatter of hay and dirt, dust puffing up as it slid.C’mon, Heath. Don’t let me down.
“Now get out here. Right in front of me.”
Dakota spread his hands and walked out from behind his truck, up to the base of the porch stairs. He kept his eyes locked on Shane, and Shane stared right back, trying to say something with the way he didn’t blink.
“You sent me out to that airstrip to, what, keep me occupied? Keep me from gettin’ in your way? Danielle’s dead in there, I take it?” Dakota called.
Wayne took a short step sideways, keeping the muzzle of his—no, Shane’s—weapon pointed at Shane. “You never were the smartest son of a bitch in the room, Dakota.”
“You’re cleanin’ up for him,” Dakota spat. “Gettin’ rid of his mess.”
He could see it so clearly now. All the facts fell into place, all the pieces of evidence tracing their way backward. Connections Dakota had tried to draw that had stayed frustratingly elusive. “The only girl in that grave who mattered to you was Jessica.”
“You know, I was going to just grab her and be done, dump her out in some field for a farmer to stumble on. But one dead girl is an investigation. A lot of dead girls is a mess. In the end, who those girls were doesn’t matter as much as how many of them died. Five, six, seven? That becomes white noise, static in the public’s mind.”
“They had names: Amber. Libby. Sophie—”
“Look at you,” Wayne said, grinning as he shook his head. “Chasing ghosts across Big Bend, trying to pull a few dumb fucking drug users into a profile. Like some avenging angel sent down for the losers of the world.”
Dakota kept going, stubbornly putting the puzzle together. “Drew must have told you about Carly textin’ him, that she’d seen him and Jessica. That’s why the pattern broke with her and Sophie. You had to kill her after you’d already killed Sophie. You were tryin’ to scare people, too, weren’t you? Make them believe the murders were connected to the drug trade. What, so you could get more money funneled to your border war?”
“Black budgets are a hell of a thing. No accounting. No oversight. No one to see you scrape whatever you want off the top.”
Sex. Money. Power. All the classic motivations. “Did Drew get tired of Jessica? Did he not wanna have a baby with her after all?”
“I’m getting too old for this shit.” Wayne’s cold glare turned venomous. “I thought you could be my replacement, Dakota.”
“Replacement?”
