Dorothy Garlock (30 page)

“You will not touch her!” Eli bellowed.

Blow after blow crashed into Seth’s face, blasting past his raised hands as if they weren’t there. Never in his life had Eli been so angry, so full of the desire to do harm. Soon, all sound faded away; he couldn’t hear his own ragged breathing, his fists as they wetly slammed into Seth’s blood-soaked face, or Hallie’s screams for him to stop. But then, as the beaten man’s hands fell to his side and his face lolled limply, all of the fight drained from Eli’s body in an instant.

I’ve done what I set out to do . . .

“Stop hitting him, Eli! Please, stop!”

Hallie watched in horror as Eli’s fists continued to slam into the man’s face. No matter what she said, no matter how hard she yelled, he was beyond her, completely intent upon destroying the man who had threatened her only seconds earlier. The man was clearly beaten, his body falling limp, no longer a threat to anyone, yet still Eli pressed on, the dull thud of flesh upon flesh echoing inside the barn.

But then, as swiftly as Eli’s rage had begun, it was over. Seth’s broken body lay beneath the rugged cowboy, but the fight had clearly left him. When he finally rose to his feet and staggered away, his shoulders and arms slumped, there was pain on his face.

“Oh, Eli!” she cried as she ran to him, passing Seth without a glance, and throwing her arms around her cowboy’s waist.

“Be careful, honey.” He winced. “I’m not in very good shape right now.”

Now that she was up close to him, she could see just how badly Eli had been beaten; the corner of his mouth was already swollen and an angry red, his lip was bloodied and cracked, and a knot of a bruise marked his cheek.
He looks as if he has been dragged behind a train!
Even though he was the victor, his body showed the violence of his struggle, with wounds that would take a long time to heal. Tears flooded her eyes seeing him in such a state.

“You’re hurt!” she cried.

“I suppose it
is
as bad as it looks,” he admitted.

With her face pressed tightly to his chest, she sobbed as Eli tried to comfort her, rubbing his bruised and bleeding hand through her hair, and whispering soothing words into her ear, but it did little good. Even though the danger had passed, she still felt that neither of them was truly safe, even in the security of each other’s arms.

“We have to get you to a doctor,” she insisted.

“He hurt me, but I’ve had worse,” he tried to reassure her. “Hell, if you had ever been on the receiving end of a mule’s kick, you’d know that what I just got doesn’t amount to much.”

As Hallie tried to accept his levity about what had happened, she found that she could not; too many questions continued to whirl around in her thoughts. She picked one and gave it voice. “Why did—did he try to kill you?”

“He’s the son of a bitch who killed my brother and he came here to kill me because of Fawn,” he told her, his voice still tinged with anger over all the havoc that Seth McCarty had wreaked upon his family.

Hallie gasped at the revelation. Pushing away from Eli’s chest, she stared into his face through tear-filled eyes, unable to believe what she had heard. “He’s the one? But why—why would he do such a thing?”

“He’s always hated me, Hallie.”

“But enough to come here and kill you?” she pressed. “Enough to kill your brother?”

As if lightning had struck the roof of the barn, an explosive crack hammered Hallie’s ears, making her cringe and burrow back into Eli’s chest. The rugged cowboy also jumped, pulling her closer to him, the muscles in his arms taut. Her first assumption was that it was Seth, rising from his feet to take aim upon them, to finish what he had set out to do, but he still lay where Eli had left him, although something about him was . . . different.

Two more cracks rang out and Hallie watched with disbelief as Seth’s prone body jumped in a bizarre dance, his limbs twitching as if controlled by a puppeteer, followed by rivers of dark blood pouring from three open wounds on his chest. Repulsed and horrified, she quickly looked away, turning back toward the open barn doors, her eyes settling upon a sight that made her own blood run cold and her breath catch.

There, in the deepening gloom of night, stood Fawn, a gun in her hand!

Chapter Twenty-eight

H
ANK STROLLED TO
the back door of the ranch house with a spring in his step and joy in his heart. The deepening colors of the night, the low call of coyotes far out in the distant hills, and the summer heat that still hung in the air did nothing to dampen his mood.
I am on my way to see Pearl!

He’d been a bachelor his entire life, satisfied to spend his days married to the ranch, working the land and the cattle without the encumbrance of a wife, all his nephews the children of his heart.
Until I met Pearl Parsons, I never knew what I was missing!
But now, having spent a week enjoying her fiery words and quick smile, he felt a longing that was as foreign to him as it was desirable.

“Time to go a courtin’,” he muttered.

Bounding up the steps, in the door, and across the kitchen, he heard a distant crack, what must have been the beginnings of a storm on the horizon, but paid it little mind. He expected to find Pearl at Mary’s side, her vigil over her friend seemingly never ending, and he headed down the hallway to the injured woman’s room.

He stepped through the doorway with a smile on his face as broad as the Big Dipper was in the starry sky, and said, “And how are you folk holdin’ up this evenin—” but the last word caught in his throat.

Inside the room was chaos, each sight vying to gain his attention. Pearl lay in a heap, her eyes turned to him in horror, dark blood coloring one corner of her mouth. Her mouth opened and shut as if on a hinge, but no sound came out, though none was needed for Hank to understand that she was in pain. Mary still slept fitfully in her bed, a sight that he had become used to, but it was the man that stood over her that he ultimately fixed upon.

The stranger looked as rough as a ragged nail, his filthy clothes hanging limply from his thin frame, his eyes small and feral underneath a mop of straggly hair knotted with grime. The man’s arms were tense as if he were a wild predator preparing to strike. In one fist he brandished a knife, its long blade glinting brightly in the lamplight.

“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Hank asked incredulously.

Without even a hint of hesitation, the strange man shot across the small space that divided them, the knife’s tip pointed at the cowboy’s belly. In the scant second that Hank had to protect himself, he would have sworn that he saw the beginnings of a smile cross the man’s lips.

“Uhnn,”
Hank grunted as his hands grabbed at the man’s wrists.

Quick as a wildcat, the man attacked Hank, assaulting all his senses. Close up, the smell of his unwashed body was as repulsive as a dead, bloated cow. Air hissed through his yellow teeth. But it was the man’s fury that caused the older man to step backward, an overwhelming relentlessness that knew no bounds, that wouldn’t end until one of them was dead.

Darting quickly to one side, Hank spun the knife blade away from his flesh and drove his elbow into the stranger’s jaw in the hope that he could gain a measure of distance from him, a chance to even the field. But even as the crack of bone against bone filled his ears, the man was back at him, grinning through a smile that began to fill with blood.

“That ain’t gonna be enough, old man,” he snarled.

He slashed out with the knife, his wrist cutting a tight arc through the stale air of the room, and a burning sensation instantly spread across Hank’s chest. His hand reflexively found the spot, his shirt cleanly torn asunder, the flesh beneath it parted, a trickle of blood running down his chest. Hank grimaced as the younger man’s smile grew.

With a grim certainty that soured his stomach, Hank
knew
that there was no hope that he could best the stranger. To face him here and now was to risk losing his own life, but he would not allow himself even to entertain the possibility of running away. To leave now would be to consign both Pearl and Mary to a fate worse than he could imagine. He must try to hold the man off long enough for Eli or some other help to arrive.

When the stranger came back for more, the knife cutting this way and that, Hank defended himself as best as he could, but soon he began to wear out, and it was then that the knife found him. Its point became buried deep into the meat of his shoulder, like a red-hot poker branding his flesh. Still, he would not give the man the satisfaction of hearing him scream; he fell to the ground in silence.

“Pe-Pearl,” he muttered.

The last thing he heard before he surrendered to the blackness that hovered over him was Pearl’s scream.

Sound exploded from Pearl’s lungs when the man she’d begun to love fell to the floor. While Hank had struggled with Chester, the knife cutting and slashing across the divide between them, she had been unable to make a sound, unable to breathe, unable even to think clearly! But when the blade pierced Hank’s shoulder and he collapsed to the floor, with blood pouring from the cut, all that she had held in was released in a rush.

“Oh, Hank,” she sobbed, her throat raw and strained.

For a moment, Chester stood, leering above the fallen man, his victim’s blood dripping from the knife. Pearl feared that he was about to bend down and finish his work, but his intentions were elsewhere. His head slowly turned to the bed and his true reason for coming to the ranch and ruining her life . . .
he turned to Mary!

“Don’t—don’t you touch her—,” Pearl warned.

“Shut up, bitch!” he snarled.

Stars and darkness still swam behind Pearl’s eyes from the blow that Chester had struck her. Struggling with all her might, she tried to rise from the floor, to stand up and stop him from what she was certain he was about to do, but she was far too weak and her rubbery legs once again collapsed beneath her. There was nothing she could do but watch.

With effort, she pulled her eyes from Chester to where Mary lay on the bed. It was then that her breath once again caught in her throat; she could not know whether it had been because of all of the fighting or her own shrill scream, but Mary had begun to stir, her hands lazily drifting from the bed, her eyes rapidly blinking as she tried to focus.

Chester had also noticed that she had begun to awaken. His emaciated body hunched, he slunk closer to the bed.

“That’s it, darlin’,” he encouraged her. “Come on back to your Chester.”

“Don’t wake up,” Pearl warned, her voice only a whisper.

Slowly Mary’s eyes fluttered open, a moment more of disorientation quickly followed by a focus upon what stood before her. Pearl could only watch as the nightmare that had plagued her friend for many long months prior to that fateful morning when they had left Whiskey Bend came back in an instant. Just as she had when she had wakened the first time and seen Abe, Mary once again was gripped by a terror that threatened to consume her.

“No . . . no!” she moaned, her dry voice cracking like kindling in a fire.

“I done found you, just like I said I would,” Chester announced triumphantly.

At the sound of Chester’s voice, Mary jumped as if her skin had been hit by lightning, twitching and flinching as if in pain. Her mouth swung limply, open and shut with only a low moan issuing forth. She tried to push herself away on her palms, but the weakness that had inhabited her body during her illness proved too great to overcome and she stayed in place as the man who had constantly abused her drew ever closer.

“Don’t you lay a hand on her,” Pearl protested weakly.

Chester sneered but didn’t reply.

“I’ll kill you if you do!”

As if that one exchange—Chester’s finding humor in the horror that filled both the women—were simply one indignity too much, Mary finally broke, drawing breath and letting forth a bloodcurdling scream. Never in her life had Pearl heard such a sound; it was, she supposed, not unlike that of a small animal dying in the jaws of a large predator, full of a fear that sent shivers racing across her skin and up her spine.

“Hush up that racket!” Chester barked in annoyance.

“Don’t—don’t touch me!” Mary screeched further.

“I’ll slap your goddamn mouth if ya don’t quit that yellin’!”

In his tone and words, Pearl could see that Chester had already had enough of Mary’s protests and screams. He grabbed her roughly by the wrist, her thin bones looking like sticks clasped in his grubby mitts, and yanked her toward him, trying to pull her to her feet.

“She’s not well enough for that!” Pearl cried.

“I ain’t come all this shittin’ way to hear any complaints,” he snapped, more at Mary than the woman who had spirited his beloved from him in the first place. “She’s a comin’ home to Whiskey Bend if’n I got to lash her to the horse and drag her the whole way!”

“I won’t—won’t go with you!” Mary protested. “I won’t!”

“Shut up!”

“I don’t want to go back with you! I don’t—”

As if it were the forked tongue of a coiled rattlesnake, ready to strike as it lay in the desert sand, Chester’s hand lashed out and snapped hard across Mary’s pale face, sending her crashing down onto the mattress. The sound of the blow echoed around the room like a gunshot. To Pearl, witnessing her defenseless friend being struck, it was as if she
herself
had taken the blow. Hopelessness filled her. In the face of Chester’s fury, she knew that there was nothing that she could do, no defense that she could muster that would keep him from doing exactly what he wanted. If he wished to kill them, there was nothing that she could do to stop him. If he wished to spirit Mary away, to take her back to the life she had endured with him, there was also nothing that could be done.

“What’s going on in there?” Mrs. Morgan’s voice floated from her room.

No flame of hope lit in Pearl’s heart at the sound of the older woman’s voice. Even if Adele had been as fit as a fiddle, instead of being injured and bedridden, it would have been folly to expect her to do anything to stop Chester’s impending rampage. With Hank having been bested, and Hallie and Eli out of sight, she and Mary were alone, alone to face the monster who had haunted their days and nights.