“ In the loft. Up here.” She flicked on one of those lanterns that runs off a nine-volt battery but is made to look like an old kerosene lamp.
I scrambled up the ladder to the loft, Kip right behind me. Jo Jo was huddled in a corner, wrapped in a blanket. Her face was smudged with tear-streaked dirt. Her eyes were puffy. The beginning of a bruise was apparent on one cheek, and an angry red scratch was visible on her neck.
I crouched down next to her and reached out, but she dug herself deeper into the corner like a frightened animal. When I gently touched her cheek, she trembled.
“ Jo Jo. I’m here for you.”
“ Oh, Jake, you shouldn’t have come. And the boy, what’s-”
Kip was already shooting, using the hand focus ring, rather than the automatic. “Light’s a little low,” he said, “but this lens has tremendous sensitivity. Plus, the mike is incredible. This baby can pick up a rat farting at fifty yards.”
“ No, Jake, please. I’m so ashamed. The boy shouldn’t be here.”
“ Uncle Jake, please, you’re cutting off the angle.” The temperamental director was pouting. “I want to zoom from medium close up to extreme close up.”
“ Jake, no! Haven’t you done enough to me already?”
Now what did that mean? I was trying to help her. She seemed on the edge of hysteria. I turned to my nephew. “Okay, Kip. Cut! I’ve got enough.”
He shrugged and clicked off the camera.
“ Now, head back down the ladder and wait until I come get you.”
He frowned but took off.
Jo Jo huddled under the blanket, and when I reached for her hand, she let go. The blanket fell away, revealing bare shoulders and breasts.
“ He threw my clothes in one of the filthy stalls and told me that sluts sleep with the horses. He was so hateful, so ugly. Oh, Jake, I’ve made such a terrible mistake coming back here. I knew from before what he was like. It’s almost like he has a split personality. He can be so good, so kind and caring, and then, if something goes wrong with a claim or the leases, he becomes…I don’t know…irrational, unhinged, violent.”
“ I’ll take care of him, but first I want to make sure you’re all right.”
I moved close to Jo Jo, and she wrapped her arms around me, the blanket slipping farther away, her breasts pressing against me.
“ Oh, Jake. I must smell like a horse.”
“ Hush. You’re as beautiful and sweet and precious as the day we met.”
“ Mi angel. So long ago. I’ve changed so much.”
“ No you haven’t. Maybe you’re not as sure about everything as you were then, but that’s natural. The young know it all.”
She was crying again. “I was always too hard on you. I shouldn’t have tried to change you, but I could never accept things the way they were. It was the same with Luis.”
I pressed my face against hers, and her arms tightened around my neck. I kissed her, softly, and her lips yielded, and for a moment it seemed her breathing had stopped, but then she sighed, a long vast release of tension, and her body molded itself to mine.
I reached out and clicked off the lamp. Shafts of moonlight filtered into the loft through cracks in the plank walls of the loft, dust motes rising in the creamy glow. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, and the chilly nighttime breeze made the old barn groan and shudder.
And crack.
The sound startled me. Like the rung of a wooden ladder splintering under a heavy foot.
I sat up, and Jo Jo gasped, clutching at the blanket. Another sound, maybe the shuffling of feet. In the darkness, I couldn’t pin down the direction. I rolled to one side, grabbing the lamp, and came up in a crouch, keeping my back to the wall. I flicked on the lamp, blinked and looked around.
Nothing but shadows.
And a voice. “That’s better. Natural light just wasn’t doing it.”
I looked up. In the rafters above the loft, Kip was aiming his video camera at the two of us.
“ Out of here, Kip! Now!”
“ Okay, okay, I don’t want to lose my PG-13 rating, anyway.
He scrambled down from the rafter and climbed back down the ladder. I turned out the light again.
“ Just hold me, Jake,” Jo Jo said.
I did, and a thousand memories flooded my mind. I thought again of the day so long ago in her mother’s backyard. I thought of the good times, and the bad, and no times at all. I thought of Blinky and what he had gotten me into, and what was it Jo Jo was keeping from me, and was this the time to ask?
We lay there on our sides, her bare body warm even in the chill of the unheated barn. She coiled her legs around mine and buried her head against my chest. I could hear her heart beating.
“ Jo Jo, tell me all about it. What’s going on? Whatever it is, we can work together.”
“ All right. I owe you that. I owe you the truth. I’ve been so unfair to you. The night Hornback was killed, you went to meet my brother…”
“ Go on,” I said.
Then, the unmistakable creak of a foot on the ladder to the loft.
“ Kip, c'mon now!”
Another creak.
“ Cut your uncle a break.”
No sound at all.
“ Kip! You’re starting to bug me. I’ve got some business to finish here.”
Then a sound like a muffled voice.
I untangled myself from Jo Jo, and in the darkness, found the lamp once again, clicking it on.
Kip was there all right, but a large hand was clamped over his mouth, and he was tucked like a bedroll under a heavily veined arm that could have been sculpted from stone.
“ Fool me twice,” said Kit Carson Cimarron, “and you’re dead.”
CHAPTER 19
“ Let the boy go,” I said, getting to my feet.
Cimarron dropped Kip to the floor.
“ I tried to yell.” Kip was on the verge of tears.
“ It’s okay,” I said.
“ I tried to warn you, Uncle Jake, but the big bastard just sneaked up on me. If I’d have seen him, I’d have kicked him in the nuts.” When scared, some people clam up. Others just babble. Kip was a babbler. “I mean, he’s uglier than Mike Mazurki in Some Like It Hot, and-”
“ It’s okay, Kip. Now, get out of here.”
“…bigger than Richard Kiel with those steel teeth in The Spy Who Loved Me, and meaner than Alan Rickman in Die Hard.”
“ Now, Kip!”
Kip scrambled down the ladder. Cimarron hadn’t moved. He wore jeans and boots and no shirt, his chest and shoulders throwing a huge shadow against the far wall. Next to me, Jo Jo was clutching the blanket to her throat.
“ Josefina,” Cimarron said, “what the hell’s going on here?”
“ Simmy, he forced me,” she said, her eyes moist, her voice choking.
What!
