Page 84 of Never Stay Gone
Dakota thought back to the night Amanda had summoned him. Wayne’s steel-edged anger, what Dakota had thought had been the product of political nerves. Amanda’s tears. Drew’s silence. “Wayne said the powerful always need handlers. That they need someone to save them from themselves.”
“Then we need to proveeverything,” Bennet said. “If he’s involved, he’s got to pay for what he’s done. We need to tie Wayne’s crimes to Drew Riggs. We’ve got to turn him inside out.”
There was nothing on Wayne’s phone. No incriminating texts, no messages about a done deal or a finished job. His emails were the kind of boring that came with the job of chief of staff to a politician: a lot of press contacts, a lot of policy legalese. Dakota felt his eyes drooping as he scrolled through. “This is getting us nowhere. He’s too smart to leave evidence out in the open.”
They searched Wayne’s Jeep hard, tearing out the seats and ripping up the carpets. Heath drove his truck across the fields as the sun went down, and they worked by the glow of his headlights as they unscrewed door panels and disassembled the engine.
Finally, they found the burner phone, hidden behind the center console. Bennet found the scratches on the plastic, and Heath took his knife to the edge, until he popped out the console and found the open space behind the radio.
It was an old flip phone, early to mid-2000s model, nothing smart about it. The memory only went back a few days, as if the phone had been wiped clean. It had only texted two numbers in that time.
One of the incoming texts said,Is it done?and Wayne had replied,Soon. The texts were sent only two hours before.
“If we can prove that phone belongs to Drew Riggs, we’ve got the son of a bitch,” Bennet said.
“So we prove it,” Heath said. “And when we tie the phone to him, we lay it all out in front of his eyes and watch him crumble.”
“Do you have the evidence for that?” Bennet asked. “Hard evidence that proves Wayne killed those girls? If Drew Riggs is the kind of sick son of a bitch who could order Wayne to kill his own girlfriend and baby, will he really crumble over two text messages? We need something strong enough to break him. Strong enough to convict.”
Jessica made a call.
“Yeah,” Dakota said. “Yeah. We do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
One week later,Dakota sat across from Governor Riggs in her office in Austin, watching a strong woman struggle not to break down. Her lips were clamped tightly together, and her face was pale beneath the makeup she’d caked on, trying to cover the dark circles from a week of sleepless nights. She had her hands clasped in front of her on her desk, fingers interlaced so tightly her fingertips were a deep, dark maroon where they dug into her thin flesh.
Chief Ranger Skidmore had delivered the news to the governor at four in the morning the day after the shootings: that her chief of staff had been shot dead by Ranger Jennings out in Rustler, that Wayne had implicated himself in the murders of all the women pulled out of the desert grave. She’d taken the news hard—screaming, then crying—and she wasn’t seen in public for two days after. A lifetime in politics.
Heath sat on Dakota’s right, Bennet on Dakota’s left. They’d all come to Austin for the sit-down with Amanda, walking her through each step of their case, of their evidence.
“I appreciate all of your diligence in keeping the… details quiet,” Amanda said. Her voice was steel, but it trembled on the edge. Like metal that had been struck. “I appreciate the time you’ve given me to wrap my head around this.”
They’d released minimal details to the media. Wayne Cross was dead, and that was pretty much it, as far as press releases went. There were rumors that the Rangers had developed a few persons of interest in the desert graves case, and there was that odd report about a Big Bend sheriff’s deputy being medevaced to the hospital, but that was West Texas. Wild shit happened in West Texas.
“How is Deputy Carson?” Amanda asked.
“He’s doin’ all right,” Dakota said. His fingernails clawed into his jeans over his thighs. One of his heels bounced in a staccato rhythm, his boot springing up out of the governor’s overly plush carpet. He’d been tempted so many, many times that week to light up a cigarette. But no: the promise of kissing Shane kept him from buying a pack or bumming a smoke.
Shane had spent the past seven days in the hospital, and Dakota made the hundred-plus-mile drive from Rustler to Midland every day to sit at his bedside and fall asleep with his forehead pillowed on the edge of Shane’s bed.
Shane had arrived with a collapsed lung, pressure building in his chest, a shattered collarbone, cracked ribs, a fractured sternum, and one hell of a bruised chest. A ricochet hit like a boxer’s punch, and Shane had a bruise that ran from his neck to his waist, ugly and dark and so painful he sometimes cried, even though he was lying as still as he could get. His insides were just as bruised as his outsides, the doctor said.
“How could you do that?” Dakota had asked Shane the second day, when Shane was finally awake enough to do more than blink at Dakota a few times before slipping back into unconsciousness. “How could you pull his gun to your chest?”
“I had to save you,” Shane had said. His voice was weak, almost a whisper. “He was going to kill you.”
“You could have died. By rights, you should have died.” There was no way his ring should have saved Shane’s life. Shane couldn’t have known—didn’t know—the bullet would ricochet off Dakota’s ring. The odds weren’t just improbable. They were impossible.
I want you to have the good luck.His ring, his good luck charm, a piece of himself and his own heart, given to Shane to keep. All these years later, after everything between them, that token of Dakota’s love had saved Shane’s life.
Shane had looked Dakota dead in the eyes. Tears welled, fractals shimmering like glittering diamonds before they spilled past his eyelashes. “I was ready,” Shane whispered. “I’d told you the truth. I told you I loved you. Everything else—everythingelse—I fucked up, or I lost, or I ruined. I’ve hated my life for so long I barely remember what it was like to be happy. I was happy with you, back then, but I was soscaredtoo…” He’d closed his eyes. Shuddered. “You knew I loved you. I was ready, if it meant saving your life.”
Dakota had bowed his head over their clasped hands. He’d grabbed on to Shane, holding tight as Shane’s fingers weakly curled around his. The machines hummed and beeped in the background, and every breath he took felt like it had been stolen back from death itself. Every moment seemed unreal, like they shouldn’t be there, like Dakota was hovering in that dream space between waking and sleeping.
“I don’t wanna justhearthat you love me,” he’d finally growled. “Shane, you have so many people who care about you. You’re a goddamn hero to Brian. You’re like a big brother to him. Heath cares about you, deeply. And me… Iloveyou, and I wanna have a life with you. That’s what I’ve always wanted: you and me, together forever. And isn’t that what you promised? That we’d be good together for the rest of our lives? That you weren’t ever lettin’ me go? What you’re sayin’, that sounds like you was lettin’ go.”
“Dakota—”
