Page 78 of Never Stay Gone
Shane slid in beside Danielle’s car. Grabbed his hat, his cell phone.
Wind whipped over the earth as he crossed to the house. He heard the nickering of horses, snorts and chuffs coming from the corral. The barn doors were open, the inside dark and shadowed.
His boots echoed on the wood steps. “Danielle? It’s Shane.”
Silence.
He waited on the porch outside the screen door, his thumbs in his belt loops. Danielle had said to come to the house. She’d meant right away, hadn’t she? “Danielle?”
Shane rapped three times on the frame before he rubbed his lips together and pulled the screen door open. The spring squealed, announcing his arrival louder than either his knocks or his greeting. He expected to hear boots thumping or sandals flapping on the floor, for Danielle to shout down the stairs or call out, “Just a minute!”
The house remained quiet.
Something wasn’t right. Was Danielle in trouble? Hurt, or worse? She’d been Shelly’s best friend. She wouldn’t hurt herself, though—
Shane stepped inside, looking left and right. All the shades had been drawn, plunging the old, cramped rooms into stifling darkness. He peered into the corners, trying to tease out whether the shadows he saw were simply furniture or people sitting there, staring at him. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. “Danielle? Hello?”
Nothing. Not a sound, save for the wind whistling through the old farmhouse.
He moved into the gloom. To the left, the living room, with flecks of dust spinning where a few slanted sunbeams evaded the shutters. Ahead, a narrow hallway led to the kitchen at the back of the house, a staircase to the upstairs bedrooms hugging the right wall.
Shane peered up the stairs. Listened for the creak of a floorboard or the whisper of an exhale. The rustle of fabric as someone shifted position. Nothing.
There was a puddle of light spilling from the kitchen. Not sunlight. It was more butter yellow, like someone had left a refrigerator door open. He frowned and strode quickly down the hall, steeling himself in case he saw Danielle sprawled on the floor, lying in front of the—
“Don’t. Move.”
Shane felt a circle of cold steel dig into the skin at the base of his skull. He froze, hands caught in front of him, useless and empty.
Someone grabbed his pistol out of his holster. He heard deep, steady breathing behind him. What he hadn’t heard a few moments ago.
Whoever it was had been careful, breathed only when Shane was moving. Someone disciplined.
A hand shoved him in the center of his back, and he spilled forward into the kitchen. He spotted both Shelly’s and Danielle’s cell phones on the kitchen table. Not left behind. Taken. By her killer.
Shane turned as soon as he steadied himself, facing the man who’d disarmed him and had a gun trained on the center of his chest. The man who had killed Shelly.
He was older than Shane, but in the shadows, it was hard to tell by how much. He had a lean face with a square jaw, a city haircut, and eyes colder than Shane had ever seen. Colder even than his father’s.
The man kept his pistol on Shane in a one-handed hold, the barrel steady, finger curled around the trigger and half-squeezed. In his other hand, he held Shane’s weapon in a loose but ready grip.
On the ground, sprawled between the open refrigerator and the sink, were Danielle and her husband. They had the stillness of the dead: their lungs didn’t inflate, their chests didn’t rise, their pulse points didn’t move beneath their skin. Shane couldn’t see right away how they’d been killed, but they were definitely dead.
The man hefted Shane’s weapon and pointed it at Danielle, firing two bullets into her body. One struck her throat, and the other hit her right where her heart was. A blink, and then the man fired on Danielle’s husband, another two shots slamming into his chest. Blood slowly oozed out of both bodies, pooling beneath them, drawn by gravity rather than the pumping of their already-stopped hearts.
The man lowered Shane’s weapon. He never took his eyes off Shane. His own weapon never wavered. “Hello, Shane.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Call Dakota.”
A thousand slivers of dread slid down Shane’s spine. He didn’t move. Barely even breathed.
The man shifted his weapon, moving the barrel from Shane’s chest to the center of his forehead. “Bring him here. Now.”
Chapter Twenty
The west sideof the Long Canyon Ranch was rugged, barren country. Scrub mesquite barely calf high, full of ragged thorns, and wandering creosote spread across the windswept land like a blight. There was no grass bunched in clumps for grazing, no prickly pear to hint that there was water just under the surface. Only the sun-scorched brush that clung to life.
