Mortal Fear

the house armed. I make the call, and the dispatcher agrees to do it while I wait. A moment later, she tells me we should come out unarmed. I tell her to forget it. Brahma could still be in the house, waiting for just such an opportunity.

When Drewe is packed, I give her the shotgun, shoulder her bag, and grip the Magnum in my right hand. “Ready?” I ask.

She nods.

We burst out of the bedroom door at a near run, careening up the hall and crashing through the front door into a supernova of white light.

“THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPONS!” roars a bullhorn voice. “RIGHT NOW!”

I toss the Magnum onto the porch. Drewe does the same with the shotgun. Just to be safe, I put up both hands, and Drewe follows my example. It’s raining again. As my pupils contract, I make out a ring of cars and men behind the spotlights.

“COME DOWN FROM THE PORCH AND LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND!”

“It’s too goddamned muddy!” I shout back.

After a tense silence, the cookie-cutter silhouette of a cowboy blots out some of the light in front of us.

“What in the name of creation happened out here?” bellows Sheriff Buckner, beckoning us toward the shelter of the cars. “Anybody else in that house?”

“I don’t know.” I lead Drewe down the steps into the rain and start explaining the situation. Buckner’s face remains impassive. He already knows about Billy Jackson. “You realize what you did by not telling us about that basement?” he yells. “I’ve got a critically injured man!”

“I told Billy to wait for you. He wouldn’t listen.”

He shakes his head. “That’s about the first thing you ever told me I believe.”

“Sheriff, I need to get my wife to her parents’ house. It’s pouring rain out here.”

“You ain’t going nowhere, Cole. Not till we figure out what’s what around here.”

“She hasn’t seen her mother or father yet. I know Dr. Anderson must be worried sick by now.”

Buckner looks at Drewe’s washed-out face, then signals to a deputy. “Daniels, you take this lady to Bob Anderson’s house outside of Yazoo City. She’ll tell you the way.”

“I know the way, Sheriff.”

“Hallelujah. Go on, then.”

“Does it have to be me?”

“Go on, damn it!”

The deputy turns and mopes toward his car, but Drewe doesn’t follow. “I’m not going without my husband,” she says flatly.

“Now, Mrs. Cole,” says Buckner, “you don’t-”

“I mean it.”

“I’ll come straight back with your deputy,” I promise. “Just let me ride with her. You know what she’s been through. You can interrogate me all night long after I get back.”

“I’m gonna do just that,” growls Buckner. “All right, get out of here. Daniels? Make sure you bring Cole back here with you!”

As Drewe and I catch up to the chosen deputy, he mutters, “God, I hate to miss this.”

Climbing into the cruiser, I hear Sheriff Buckner shouting at the house through his bullhorn. He’s not much of a negotiator. Just three sentences.

“HEY IN THERE! IF YOU MAKE ME COME IN AFTER YOU, YOU WILL NOT COME OUT ALIVE! YOU HAVE EXACTLY SIXTY SECONDS TO SURRENDER!”

Then he begins counting.

CHAPTER 41

“ Damn, I hate to miss that,” Deputy Daniels whines for the third time, watching his rearview mirror as the cruiser rumbles up the slick highway. “You get something like that once in maybe ten years around here.”

“There’s nobody in the house,” I tell him, holding Drewe tight against me.

“How do you know that?”

“Too many ways he could have gotten out. He had a good chance to kill both of us, and he didn’t. Same with Billy and Jimmy. If he was ever there at all.”

“He shot Billy, didn’t he?”

“Billy’s partner shot Billy.”

“What?”

“That’s what Billy said, and I think he’s right.”

Daniels looks around in his seat, bug-eyed with excitement. “I’ll be goddamned. That sounds just like Jimmy. I don’t know how many illegal does he’s shot. Too damn quick on the trigger.”

Drewe is tugging at my sleeve. I look down into her face, startled by the intensity in her eyes. “What was Erin doing at our house?” she asks quietly. “Did you bring her there?”

I motion for her to wait, but she knows we’ll be separated in twenty minutes, and she means to have answers. I lean forward in the seat. “Deputy, you think you could hit the siren and the gas? My wife’s feeling sick. She really needs to get home.”

“Hey, the sooner we get there, the sooner I get back.” He reaches up and switches on his red flashers, then gooses the gas pedal.

“No siren?”

“Hell, we don’t need it out here in the wide open, do we?”

“We get a lot of loose cows out this way. Deer too.”

He snorts at my cautiousness, but all the same he hits the siren and accelerates still faster.

The car has already outrun the rain. I slide down in the seat with Drewe, as if to rest more comfortably, and begin speaking below the howl of the siren. “I don’t know why she was there. She told your mother she was coming to talk to you.”

“I know. But why? You drove to Jackson and saw her like I asked you to?”

“I told you I did.”

“I hardly remember you coming in. I don’t remember what you said. What happened when you saw Erin?”

I hesitate. “She told me she was fine.”

“And you believed her?”

“What could I do?”

“You just left? After I’d told you what I was afraid of?”

“She wasn’t going to hurt herself, Drewe. I could see that much. I was going to call you about it, but when I got home two detectives were waiting to arrest me. Erin obviously drove over sometime after that.”

She looks away with her lips drawn tight. “It doesn’t make sense. What are you keeping from me, Harper?”

You never want to know.

“First Erin didn’t want to see me, then she drives eighty miles to talk to me? I can’t make that work.”

“Drewe….”

She looks back at me with glittering eyes. “My sister is dead, Harper. Any promise you made to her about keeping secrets is meaningless now. You’ve got to help me understand this.”

“I didn’t want to tell you this.”

She pulls away far enough to give me a level gaze. She’s obviously been expecting some dark revelation for a while, and she braces against it like a defendant awaiting sentence.

“Patrick isn’t Holly’s father.”

She blinks three times fast, processing the information as she would some rare medical symptom, trying to fit