Green Lake (22 page)

“Ugh. The things you bachelors eat.”

Eris closed the door firmly behind her as she stepped into the hall. He liked the cheese and egg sandwich Madeleine had made for him. It was quick and filling and didn't make much of a mess.

The sandwich his mother made for him wasn't nearly as good, but Eris ate it anyway and swallowed a glass of juice before heading outside to see about his hawk. His mother was still eating at the table.

The hawk was dead in its cage, speared through the middle with a long pointed stick. Eris drew a sharp breath and looked around himself, his eyes narrowed and his mouth tight.

His first thought was of Dale Russell, but anyone could have killed the hawk. The slimy kitten-killing Earthworm could have done it, he told himself as he eyed Sherman Tanner's house.

He put on some gloves and removed the hawk from the cage so his mother wouldn't see it. He placed it in the garage in a paper sack to take care of later.

Goddammit. He hated to see that. Someone being cruel to an animal just to be cruel to a human.

His mood was sour the first few hours that morning and it stayed sour in spite of his mother's attempts to change it. Finally she sighed and said, “Did you and Madeleine have an argument?”

“No.”

“Then what's wrong? Are you always this moody?”

He only looked at her.

“You and Clint, the original silent brooders. I don't know where you come by it, unless it was from my father. He was a brooder to beat all brooders. Made my mother crazy. He'd spend hours sulking and expect everyone else's mood to be just as dark as his. He wasn't happy until he'd made everyone else unhappy. Then he would suddenly, miraculously cheer up again.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Eris's mouth. He turned the truck down the county road where he had caught Bruce Beckworth shooting birds and listened to his mother go on about family peccadilloes until she had him chuckling.

Then a tire blew out.

Eris muttered under his breath and stopped the truck to get out and have a look. It was the left rear tire, and it was already flat. He hunkered down to examine it, and a hundredth of a second after he lowered himself, the rear glass of the pickup shattered and he saw his mother's head slump forward. Before he could turn around and look, a bullet slammed into his shoulder and then another struck him just above his shoulder blade, sending him into the tailgate of the truck and causing his vision to darken. Eris flattened and rolled under the truck. From far away he heard the sound of a door slamming and tires spinning in the dust. He twisted around to look, but the pain of the movement caused his vision to darken again and he could see nothing but the blackness of unconsciousness awaiting him. He took deep breaths, and when he was ready, he moved out from under the truck and pulled himself up with his uninjured side to ease himself to the open driver's door.

He checked over his shoulder as he moved, but there was no sign of the gunman. The pain streaked like fire down his body every time he moved his head and he gritted his teeth as he bent down to slide inside the cab. He reached with his good right arm to lift his mother's head, and his hand came away covered with blood. He saw a red horizontal line that started almost at the back of her skull and plowed through her left temple. Rivulets of blood streamed down her cheek. Eris checked for a pulse and found a faint one. Then he picked up his radio.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Madeleine's lip curled when she saw Sherman Tanner come hurrying up the drive to the cabin. She took her notebook inside and made a point of slamming the door. He came and hammered on the wood anyway.

‘‘You'll want to hear this,” he called from outside. “I just heard something on my radio about our neighbor that might interest you. He's been shot.”

Madeleine's breath stopped. She rushed to jerk open the door. “Eris? Eris has been shot?”

“That's right,” said Tanner, pleased to be imparting such information. “The woman in the truck with him was shot, too. They're both being flown to
Wichita by helicopter, because it sounds like the woman's injuries are critical and Renard didn't want to leave her.”

Madeleine asked if he knew which hospital and then nodded when he told her. It was the hospital in which Jacqueline and Manuel worked.

“Who did it?” she asked, thinking of Dale Russell. “Do they know who shot them?”

“An unknown assailant was all I heard,” said Tanner with a sniff.

“Thank you for telling me,” Madeleine said, and she shut the door in his face to rush to the telephone and call Jacqueline. Her sister was in surgery, and Manuel was out of the office, so Madeleine quickly threw some things in a bag, scooped up the kitten, and locked the door to the cabin behind her. Her heart was pounding in her chest as she got in the truck and started the engine. She was fuming at Dale Russell, whom she knew had to be responsible. The man pulled a gun on Eris last night. She had seen him.

Worry made her teeth grind as she drove, and she began to pray as she had never prayed, asking for Eris to please be all right. For the first time in her life she was truly in love and the man she was in love with didn't need his mother to die right after he found her
. She was important to him, and she could make him laugh and she could tell him things about himself he needed to know.

Her mental state made her reckless
. She made it to the city in under an hour and sped through traffic to Manuel and Jacqueline's house to quickly drop off the kitten before hurrying on. She couldn't leave it in the hot pickup any more than she could have left it at the cabin to go hungry. She wrenched open the door with a key her sister had given her, and saw Manuel naked on the sofa in the living room with a woman who was not Jacqueline.

Madeleine's face went slack with shock and Manuel leapt from the sofa and reached for his pants. Madeleine put the kitten down and left the house, hurrying to the pickup to get to the hospital, a few blocks away. She shook her head in amazement and disgust as she drove away and didn't know whether she wanted to laugh or cry over all the time she had wasted envying her sister's marriage.

Her heart felt sick for Jacqueline, and she knew she would avoid her sister rather than seek her out once in the hospital. She wouldn't be able to look her in the face without blurting out what she had just seen, and Madeleine had other things to worry about at the moment.

She was given the runaround in the intensive care unit until she told them she was Eris Renard's fiancée and begged to be allowed to see him. A kindly doctor took pity and showed her to Eris's room, where he lay swathed in bandages, his eyes open and staring at the ceiling. His gaze lowered as she stepped in the doorway, and at the sight of her face he extended his good arm to her. The doctor nodded and told her to go on, closing the door behind her. Madeleine went to Eris and dropped her purse to put her arms around him. His arm came around her waist and she pressed grateful kisses against his face and mouth before looking him over to assure herself he was all right.

“I tried to call you,” he said.

“Tanner told me. Is there any word on your mother?”

“She's still in surgery.”

“Where was she hit?”

“In the head.”

Madeleine sucked in her breath. It was too bad Manuel was fooling around at home. He was purported to be one of the best neurologists in the state.

“What about you?”

“Once in the shoulder, once beneath the shoulder blade.”

She swallowed and he took her hand and squeezed her fingers.

“Shouldn't you be sleeping?” she said. “Are you in any pain?”

“They gave me a shot.”

“What happened?” she asked. “Do you think it was Russell?”

“No.” Eris's eyes shifted away from her. “Russell is no marksman. First a tire was shot out, and then the shooter went for a heart shot on me, but I was already bending down to look at the tire. I don't think he meant to hit Sara.”

“Was she conscious? Did she speak to you?”

Eris looked at her. “She came around just as we were landing. She asked me to take her home.”

“She did.”

“She was frightened, and going into shock.”

Madeleine held her breath. She would not ask. He would have to tell her.

“I told her I would,” he said.

“Take her home.”

“Yes.”

“How much time will you have off?”

”A few weeks disability, and possible additional suspension for having her with me in the first place. I'll stay in New Mexico a week or two.”

Madeleine nodded. “When will you leave?”

“As soon as she's able. It'll be up to the doctors to say.”

She squeezed his hand
then she cleared her throat and said,

“I should go now and let you sleep. I'll come by later, if they let me in. I had to tell them we were engaged.”

Eris quirked a brow and Madeleine dropped a final fleeting kiss on his lips before departing. She left the room and found the nearest elevator to take her down to the hospital cafeteria. She ordered a Diet Coke and sat huddled in a booth in the corner, unable to fight the feeling that once he left he would never return.

When she saw Jacqueline enter the cafeteria she thought
of hiding, but it was too late, her sister had already seen her.

Jacqueline looked tired, but she smiled as she walked over to Madeleine's table. “What are you doing here?”

“Eris and his mother were shot today. I came as soon as I heard.”

Jacqueline's eyes rounded. “Eris Renard? Who shot him? Why?”

“Nobody knows. He's all right, but his mother was wounded in the head. Last I heard she was still in surgery.”

“Who's doing it? I'm not sure where Manny is today.”

“He's at home,” Madeleine said haltingly. “I saw him when I dropped off the kitten.”

Jacqueline peered at her sister. “What's wrong? Why did your cheeks just turn red? Did you walk in on him in the bathroom or something?”

Madeleine covered her mouth and stared at her sister over the top of her hand. The mental debate of whether to tell her or not tell her lasted approximately ten seconds.

She had to. If the circumstances were reversed, Madeleine knew she would want to know.

“I walked in on him with another woman, Jacqueline. They were both naked on the sofa.”

Jacqueline gaped soundlessly at her for nearly thirty seconds while her face went white. “You're lying,” she said finally. “You're paying me back for everything I said to you. It's been eating you up thinking of a way to get back at me and you—”

Madeleine put her hands over her eyes and shook her head. She got up to leave the table, but Jacqueline snatched her by the arm and pulled her around.

“Tell me you're lying, dammit. Tell me.”

Madeleine could only look at her and apologize with her eyes.

Jacqueline swerved away from her and bent over to grip the table and make a choking sound. Madeleine put a hand on her back, but Jacqueline knocked it away and collapsed into the booth, her eyes red and her shoulders already heaving in silent sobs.

“I never wanted to hurt you/’ Madeleine whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

“Go away,” said Jacqueline. “Just go away.”

Madeleine stared dejectedly at her sister's bent head and wondered why doing what felt like the right thing never felt right once it was done.

Before she realized what she was doing she was in the truck and heading back to Jacqueline's house. She didn't go inside, she simply put the keys to the truck under the visor and hopped into her Audi, parked beside the drive.

She felt better driving the Audi. Once on the highway she opened up and flew down the road.

While driving she asked herself the real reason she told her sister what she witnessed. If she had kept her mouth shut things might have gone on the same for them, with Manuel only occasionally sampling other women and Jacqueline remaining blissfully unaware and still happily married.

Perhaps it truly had been something vindictive on Madeleine's part. Some desire to take retribution for all Jacqueline had said and to prove to her sister that even people who did good and never hurt anyone else got hurt themselves sometimes, just because people were people.

She closed her eyes briefly as her thoughts shifted to Eris. She wished she hadn't told him how she felt about him. She had warned herself not to say it aloud, not to give in to her emotions when she was still unsure of his. Now she found herself feeling like Sam Craven must have felt the last two years of their marriage. The way her sister Jacqueline was doubtlessly feeling right now.

It was a terrible, desolate feeling.

The miles crawled by as she shifted gears and mashed the accelerator with her foot.

She had told Eris she would come by later, but she could not go back and face him that night. She had to get away from everyone.

Ronnie Lyman spent the day following a man in a baseball cap driving a SUV. He had seen the man shoot Eris Renard earlier, and he giggled himself into a fit when he realized the guy was staggering drunk.

It was too good. It was just too good. Ronnie had been following Renard and hanging way back, wondering who the woman in the cab with him was and what he could do to her, when he saw the whole thing happen. Renard's truck had gone down the road, kicking up dust, and the SUV pulled out two hundred yards behind it. There was a moment of hesitation, and then the SUV fell in behind Renard's truck. In a flash the man had leapt out of the SUV and thrown open the door to begin firing, as if the decision had been made and acted upon in an instant. It took him two shots to blow out a tire, and Ronnie was impressed at the man's marksmanship. Renard would be dead right now, splattered all over the road, if the man hadn't been so drunk. Ronnie was sure of it.

The guy had balls, he gave him that. But now Ronnie was wondering what else he had. He followed him all the way back to Fayville and saw the SUV turn off in a drive a half-mile long that led up to a house the size of a damned shopping center.

Ronnie hung in there, watching to see if the place was maybe the house of a girlfriend or someone else, but the SUV stayed there for hours. Long enough for the guy in the ball cap to sleep off his morning drunk, Ronnie guessed. An hour after dark, just as Ronnie was preparing to leave, he saw the lights of the SUV suddenly come on again. He started his own car and made ready to follow.

The SUV headed northwest again, and Ronnie trailed him as he picked up a couple buddies along the way. Then the man in the baseball cap and his two friends headed for a public hunting area, where they began to drink beer, spotlight deer, and take turns shooting.

The guy obviously figured he didn't have to worry about Eris Renard that night.

Ronnie stayed back and watched until the trio decided to leave. They drove to the reservoir and trolled the bays before stopping to join a party in progress at a private dock. When the three men left the SUV, Ronnie took a tiny penlight from his glove compartment and hurried over to have a look inside. He wanted to see what kind of rifle had been used on Eris Renard and the luckless deer that night. The rifle was in the back, and Ronnie picked up a cartridge rolling around on the floorboard. .270 cartridge.

The gun was a Remington 7400. Semiautomatic. A play toy for a rich boy.

Ronnie slunk back to the car and made himself comfortable. The party went on until nearly three in the morning, and Ronnie was fighting sleep by the time they stumbled to the SUV. Someone from the party came out and told the man in the baseball cap to leave the beer he was taking with him. The man in the ball cap put down the beer and kicked the other man in the balls, then hit him over the head with his fists locked when he doubled over. Somebody shouted, somebody else screamed, and the guy's friends dragged him away and shoved him in the SUV, leaving the beer in the grass.

Several guys from the party came running, but the SUV took off after a shuddering start and weaved down the road away from the pursuers.

Ronnie frowned as he started his car and fell in behind. He wondered if he should even mess around with this guy. The asshole was clearly unstable.

But a second look at that big house changed his mind, and he thought he even glimpsed a Jaguar in the garage when the driver put the SUV inside for the night.

Everything that had been driving him the last two weeks, the need to find Sheila and his daughters, the urge to harm Eris Renard and scare his pretty blonde girlfriend, were swept away like leaves in a gutter as Ronnie considered that Jaguar.