He’d taken a lot of chances lately, but look how they’d paid off.
The girl huddled near the window, dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing when Billy Wayne abducted her, handcuffed to the old radiator. It was difficult to say whether her hollow, half-there look was due to the GHB or the situation. He’d seen it before in the girls they’d taken, but usually not until after they made the video with Billy Wayne.
This one didn’t know how lucky she was to have avoided that particular fate.
Of course, there was no guarantee that she was headed to anything better. In fact, it could very well be worse.
Not that it really mattered.
He was just the broker. What happened to the commodity after he’d provided it wasn’t up to him.
As he looked at the girl, and at the unconscious boy lying next to her, he saw the flash of tan outside of the window.
Cautiously approaching from the side, he moved one slat of the blinds.
“What the hell?” Outside the house, about to go snooping in the barn, was that stupid, pretty-boy deputy. The one who’d used his fancy art skills to draw the composite of Billy Wayne. As if he hadn’t already been a big enough pain in the ass, he was about to discover the vehicles.
JR leaned close to the girl. “If you so much as breathe the wrong way, I’ll blow your pretty little head off.” He tipped her chin with the barrel of the pistol. “Understand?”
Her brown eyes, still hazy with the drug, widened into pools of terror. No doubt she recalled, vividly, what had happened to Billy Wayne.
JR eased up and unlocked the window. It was a little farther shot than he would have liked, but he really had no choice. He had to take the deputy out before he could radio in to the station. And since it was almost certain that others knew he was here, they’d come looking for him after a bit.
Which meant he would have to move quickly.
Releasing the safety on his nine mil, he aimed for the deputy’s chest. One shot to take the man down and another to finish him off.
He’d have to hide the body. And get rid of the car.
Then he remembered the old fishing hole down the road, and thought two birds with one stone. Just lock the deputy’s body in his trunk, and let him and his cruiser commune with the fishes.
JR smiled as he squeezed the trigger.
Laughed as the deputy went down.
And just because he was having so much fun, fired off two more rounds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CLAY couldn’t simply stand around with his head up his ass, waiting for something to happen. Despite the fact that Kathleen’s computer guy couldn’t yet offer anything conclusive, he had a hunch that he’d seen that truck before.
And that yet again, he’d been only a matter of feet from Max’s abductor.
Just let him near the guy once more. The third time would definitely be a charm.
“Call Josh Harding,” he told Kim after he’d gotten off the phone with Kathleen. “Tell him to drop what he’s doing, and go over to the UPS store on Main Street. We need to know the identity of that man I almost hit yesterday morning, ASAP. The vehicle used to abduct Max was a classic Ford pickup, circa 1940’s, with rust deterioration and two-tone paint.”
“Well crap,” Kim said, even as she flipped her phone open and dialed. “You think this has something to do with that man? What are the chances? I mean, that is either one hell of a weird coincidence, or this guy’s carried road rage to a whole new level.”
“No,” Clay said as she waited for Harding to answer. “There’s a bigger picture here that we’re missing. This is just one pine out of the forest, and I think we need to step back and try to bring the whole thing into view.” But the hell of it was that he was too damn close to the case to do anything other than stare blankly at the tree in front of him.
“Harding’s not answering,” she told Clay after a moment, looking up from her position behind Tate’s desk. “He was going out to canvass one of the quadrants near the Collier crime scene, and he might be tangled up in that. I’ll try Sheriff Callahan and see if he can send someone else.”
From across the room, Maureen held up her cell phone and waggled it back and forth. “Do you want me to see if I have any luck getting hold of Aunt Maggie? She’s bound to remember the woman’s name.”
“Sure. That’d be great.” Although he wasn’t sure how much it would help. Obviously, the woman’s name was a pseudonym. But at least it gave Tate’s cousin something positive to do, so that she didn’t just stand around feeling useless.
Like he was doing right now.
He walked over and looked out the window, finding it entirely too sunny and blue-sky gorgeous to suit how he felt inside. The cheerful array of rainbow colors decorating the buildings across the street made him want to scream.
“Callahan’s down in Beaufort,” Kim informed him after she concluded her brief conversation. “Wrapping up some of the loose ends from the William Wayne murder. Deputy Jones is busy tracking down some of the records for the offenders that came up as possible matches for that partial print, and the other deputies are otherwise engaged. Apparently, even the dispatcher called in sick. We want to talk to the lady at the UPS Store, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Did she strike you as the kind of woman who’d be willing to dole out that information over the phone?”
“As long as she can call ten friends and tell them all about it, she’ll tell us anything we want to know.”
“All hail the small town gossip.”
Clay got the store’s number from information, and tried to remember the woman’s name as it connected. Something with
