She had to clamp down hard on her feelings. He was rationalizing his behavior, but she remembered that he’d stood by while the mountain lion dragged her away to what would have been her death.
“You go to Sheriff Carson,” she told him. “Tell him what you’ve told me, and help him find Jock. That’s what you have to do.”
“Hell, Carson will lock me up and throw away the key!” he muttered. “I gave his brother the coke that killed him. No, I’m not going to the law.”
“What else can you do?” she asked.
“Get enough money to pay Jock, so he’ll get off my back. The Fuentes organization want Jock. They want to kill him, but they don’t know where he is. They thought Ella did and they…” He was going to say they tortured her, but he couldn’t make himself say that to his daughter, whom he’d failed in so many ways already. “Well, they killed her. Now, the only hope I have is to raise enough money to help Jock get out of the country before they catch up with him. He swore if I didn’t, he’d tell them I was the one who double-crossed them. He’d give them back what he took and blame it on me!”
“If you give him money,” she said in a weary tone, “he’ll only want more.”
“There’s a chance he won’t. He just wants to get out of the country before they do to him what they did to those drug agents they killed. He won’t say so, but I think he’s afraid of Fuentes’s new partner. The partner is called Machado and he hates Jock. He’ll kill him before Fuentes does if he gets the chance, and Jock knows it.”
“Let him,” Keely said coldly.
“Jock was the only friend I had, Keely,” he said heavily. “He stood by me when everybody else jumped ship.”
Just as Carly had stood by Ella. But that had been because Carly genuinely loved Keely’s mother. Jock had stood by Brent Welsh because he knew Ella had money, Keely thought, and he could use Brent to get some of it. But she didn’t say that. He wouldn’t have listened anyway.
“I don’t have any money,” Keely told him. “I work as a veterinarian technician and I make minimum wage. Mama—” Her voice broke. She composed herself. “Mama had some money in a savings account, but it’s in her name and it’s tied up in probate. I won’t be able to get it for weeks.” She didn’t know if that was true, but it sounded convincing.
He cursed sharply. “There must be something you can sell!”
“She already sold it all,” she said bitterly.
He muttered again, incoherent. “Then those friends of yours, the Sinclairs—they’ve got money. Ask them for it!”
“I won’t.”
“Your life is on the line, Keely!” he raged. “It’s not a game! Jock’s already said that he’s got nothing to lose. He’ll kill you if you don’t help us.”
She felt very old. Her mother was dead, she’d almost died herself. Boone knew her darkest secret and would surely not want her anymore, even if he was compassionate and understanding about her injury. He was scarred himself. But Keely saw no future for herself.
“I don’t care,” she said passively. “Let Jock do his worst. He might be doing me a favor,” she said with black humor. “God knows, I’m never going to have a husband or a family, the way I look.”
“I’m…sorry,” he said slowly. “I’m very sorry, for what happened. I was so shocked that I couldn’t even do anything. I feel bad about that. And I didn’t think about how the scars might affect your life.”
“Pity,” she said, and felt hatred seethe through her. “Until that moment, I thought you cared about me.”
“I do care, in my way,” he said. “My parents were ice-cold with each other and with me. They never went out of their way to do one charitable thing for anyone else. I learned that you take care of number one.”
“So did Mama,” she replied. “Neither of you was fit to raise a child.”
“Tell me about it.” He laughed hollowly. “Once you came, our lives changed forever. She was too unstable emotionally to cope with a baby.” He sounded bitter. “You spent a lot of time with Carly.”
A light flashed in her mind as she recalled Carly’s face. It was far more familiar to her than Ella’s. No wonder the other woman had been so protective of her.
“But that’s all in the past, and I’ve got bigger problems now. You have to try to get me some money. Jock says he won’t wait much longer.”
“Tell him to come see me. I can borrow a shotgun,” she mused.
“It’s not funny!”
“If you were in my position, it might be.”
“Ask your friends if they’ll help out. Even two thousand might be enough,” her father persisted. “Take this number down, Keely. You can reach me here.”
She grabbed a pencil and pad from inside the drawer by her bed. “Okay.”
He gave her the number. “Do your best, honey,” he pleaded. “You lived against all the odds. I don’t want you to die over a handful of money.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said heavily, and hung up. It wasn’t until then she realized that she was shaking.
* * *
WHEN BOONE CAME back, he found Keely quiet and preoccupied, staring into space.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, because he knew at once that something was. He could feel it.
She frowned. “How do you know something is?”
He moved to the bed and dropped down lazily into the armchair by her bed. “I read minds. Come on. Tell me.”
She sank back into the pillows wearily. “My father called. Jock’s running from the drug lords and he wants money to get out of the country. He told my father that if I don’t get it up for him somehow, he’ll kill me. The drug dealers will probably send him back to wherever he came from in a shoe box.”
He took off his hat and
