Knight in a White Stetson (24 page)

“Get him on the phone.”

“You’re whacked, you know that. I don’t take orders from you.”

“Get him, Frank. I want to talk to him in the next two minutes or everything I’ve got on you goes
to
the press.” He gave him the number of the ranch house and slammed down the phone.

Henry whirled on the terrified trio watching him.

“Dupree’s got Calla. Don’t ask me how I know, I don’t have time
to
tell you.” And couldn’t anyway. Not for certain. His ordered, careful brain was working on instinct now. And he knew it was as right about this as it had ever been about anything.

“Well, so damn what?” Lester exploded. “You got us scared to death because Calla’s gone somewhere with Dick Dupree? You’re crazy, you pissant, and if my wife wasn’t here, I’d whup you
to
within…”

“Shut up, Lester!” Jackson snapped, never taking his eyes from the young man in front of him. If he knew anything, he knew this man’s fear. It had crawled into his gut the minute he’d walked through that kitchen door. His baby girl was in trouble. Horrible trouble. He also knew Henry would do anything to keep her from harm. “What’s Dupree want with her, son?”

Henry raked a hand down his face. “I don’t know, exactly. He and Shaw were trying to scam her out of the ranch.” And if she had even one little bruise on her lovely body, or she shed even one tear over this, he was going to hunt Dartmouth down and pound him into sand. “Dupree’s desperate. He even had Calla followed. I don’t know why he’s got her now, but I want her back.”

Lester grunted, but looked plenty nervous. “Hell, boy, Dupree wouldn’t kidnap Calla. She’d kill him.”

“Elk Camp,” Jackson spoke calmly. “He’d take her to Elk Camp. It’s the only place he knows around here.”

The phone shrilled. Henry was across the room clutching it in his hands before the first ring faded.

“Pete.”

“Lost your cowgirl, Mitch? She’s gonna have your hide.”

“I know. I know where she is, though, and I’m going out
to
get her. I need your help.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not exactly in the neighborhood. I can get a chopper out and be there in two hours.”

“Do it.”

“Where?”

Henry turned to Jackson. “Where?”

Jackson took the phone out of his hand. There were tears in his eyes, and he made no attempt to wipe them away. “Go find my girl, Henry. I’ll tell this man what he needs to know.”

He headed for the door. Lester was already there. “Move, old man,” Henry snarled.

“Don’t you ‘old man’ me, pissant. You don’t know where Elk Camp is, and I do.” He opened the door for Henry and gave him a little shove for good measure as he went though it. “You’d be wandering around for weeks before you found it, Californian.”

Chapter 19

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S
even o’clock and she was still alive. That was certainly something. By now, Henry would have returned to the ranch and discovered her missing.

And, pretty soon, he’d come and get her. She knew it with the same, unshakable confidence that allowed her to believe that, by whatever force of dumb luck or fate, Henry had fallen in love with her. He loved her, and he wouldn’t let this puny little banker toss her off a cliff. Henry was her knight in shining armor. She’d just have to be patient until he got here.

“I wish you’d stop smiling like that,” Dupree grumbled heavily. “Are you going crazy on me or something?”

“Uh, listen,
Dick,”
Calla said, “if I was walking around in the hot sun, holding a gun on one of my best and oldest clients, threatening
to
dump her off a cliff and then try
to
convince a town of six hundred of her closest, indeed her only friends, that she signed over to you a piece of million-dollar property that had been in her family for more than one hundred years, I wouldn’t be calling anybody
else
crazy.”

“They’ll believe it.” Dupree waved the gun
at
her. “Get up. We’re almost there.”

“Don’t be such an idiot. You and I both know you’re not going to be throwing me off any damn cliff.”

“Well, me and this big gun say different. Now, move it or lose it.”

“Nope.”

Dupree sat down on his rock again. He was incredulous. “What?”

“I said no. I’m tired. If you want to kill me, you’re going to have to shoot me through right here where I’m sitting.”

“I will, dammit,” Dupree threatened, the gun swinging wildly in her direction.

Calla tried not to look
at
the gun.

“Go ahead then. But it’ll be even harder to convince anybody I died by accident if I have a big bullet hole in my head. Even the folks in Paradise aren’t stupid enough to believe that.”

Dupree considered that.

Calla pushed her advantage. “And come on, Dick,” she scoffed. “If I haven’t committed suicide by now, I never will. You forget, they watched me for six months after Benny died.”

“It could be that delayed-grief-syndrome thing,” he offered finally.

“You mean the suicide? Dick, it’s hard to believe, but you could actually be dumber than you look.”

“Come on, smart-ass,” he shouted. “We’re walking again.”

“I’m not walking, Dupree. Forget it.”

Dupree crossed the space between them with alarming alacrity. Calla wondered suddenly if she had underestimated him.

“Get up,” he commanded grimly.

“Don’t try to intimidate me, Dick Dupree. You can’t.” Calla saw the blow coming to her head, but wasn’t able to dodge quickly enough to avoid it altogether. The butt of Dupree’s gun cracked against her shoulder.

She swallowed her scream, but tears rushed to her eyes. She grabbed the shoulder and massaged it gently, feeling for a broken bone. The gun had hit the muscle, luckily, and she’d have a whale of a bruise, but nothing was broken.

Calla looked steadily
at
Dupree. “That hurt.”

“Good. I hope it got your attention.” Dupree leaned down to breathe his minted, businessman’s breath into Calla’s face. “I think you believe this is a game
to
me, Calla. It isn’t. This is my life. This is fifty-four years of sweating it out in this little town, waiting for a break. Waiting for someone
to
notice how good I am at my job.” He tipped her chin with the barrel of the gun. Calla stopped rubbing her shoulder and stared into Dupree’s clear blue eyes. “A little smack on your arm is the least of your worries. I’m going to kill you, Calla.” His small mustache twitched at the threat. “Now, you have a choice whether to live until we get to Tellum Canyon, or not. It doesn’t matter to me either way. I can beat you to death right now and throw you over the cliff later, or you can start walking.” He straightened. “Choose.”

Calla rose from the rock, the pain in her shoulder shooting down to her fingertips and up through her neck
to
her skull. A headache was already settling in.

She’d pushed him too far. It was a lifelong problem with her. When she got out of this, if she got out of this, she’d have to think long and hard about why she always felt compelled to push people too far.

She started walking toward Tellum Canyon.

* * *

Henry saw the abandoned truck, situated as it was on the rise of a small, rock-jacketed knoll, from more than a mile away. He raced toward it, a cloud of dust smoking up from the dirt road behind him. Lester clung
to
the door handle to keep from toppling over onto, the bench seat of the cab.

“You’re going to kill us before we even get there,” Lester shouted over the roar of engine noise and the clatter of the truck body as it bounced over the rough wads.

Henry didn’t answer. He tried to think of some reason Dupree and Calla would abandon their vehicle.

“Are we close?” Henry asked Lester. The din of rocks and dirt flinging out from under the wheels of the truck almost obliterated the sound of his voice.

“Five miles,” Lester yelled.

“Why would he leave the truck? Does the road go through?”

“Yeah. It’s bad, but it goes through.”

Lester pulled the rifle from the gun rack behind Henry’s head and checked the chamber. It was loaded. Lester laid the gun across his lap and gave Henry an approving glance.

“You’re pretty handy for a city boy,” Lester said. Henry slowed the truck to a crawl when he came upon Calla’s abandoned vehicle.

The truck was empty.

And the front left tire was dead flat.

“Flat tire,” Lester stated.

“I can see that, Lester.”

“The spare’s right there. Wonder why he didn’t get Calla to change it? She can change a tire in no time. Ever seen her do it? It’s a sight.”

“I’ve seen it.”

The unchanged flat tire and abandoned truck could mean one of two things. Either Calla refused to change the tire and they were now on foot, or Calla couldn’t change the tire because something was wrong with her.

No. Nothing was wrong. Henry couldn’t allow himself to think that. If he did, the knot in his throat would come back and choke him down so thoroughly he would be of no use to her.

Calla was still safe. She probably pretended she didn’t know how to fix a flat. Or simply refused to do it. And it was a sure bet Dupree couldn’t fix it and keep an eye on Calla at the same time. So they went on foot.

Henry looked at his watch. Seven o’clock. He had no more than two hours of daylight left to find Calla. After that, he’d have to depend on Dupree’s lighting a fire, or perhaps using a flashlight to find his way back to the abandoned pickup.

“Which way?” Henry asked Lester.

“Northeast. That way,” he said. In the waning light, Henry could make out only a ridge and a valley beyond. He gunned the truck back onto the road.

“That’s Elk Camp?”

“And Tellum Canyon. Steepest son of a bitch you’ll ever see. You can’t see it from here. Dupree shot a cow elk up there last year. Never did get her out.”

“Great.”

“Yep,” Lester nodded slowly. “That’s about the size of it.”

“Can you tell how long ago they started walking?”

“Who am I? Daniel Boone?”

Henry stared out at the landscape, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of her. “How far is it?”

“To Tellum? It’s past Elk Camp a mile or so. The road gets worse on up ahead. The BLM don’t even bother with it no more. Fish and Game, neither. I’d say forty-five minutes by truck. Only a little longer if we hike it cross-country.”

“We’ll take the truck.”

Lester shrugged noncommittally. “Dupree’ll hear it.”

“If we walk, we might never catch up to them.”

“That’s true, too. Six of one.”

“Calla says that.”

“Does she? I’ll have to give her hell about it when we find her.”

Lester and Henry exchanged looks.

“Give me the rundown on Dupree.” Henry knew from Pete’s extensive instruction that it was best to know the man you were tracking.

Besides, listening to Lester gave him something to think about besides Calla out there somewhere, facing down a small-time lunatic all by herself.

* * *

Tellum Canyon had two-hundred foot walls, black and deep and impossibly sheer, formed by the unstoppable forces of water and lava some uncounted millions of years earlier, and accessible only to the golden eagles and red-tailed hawks that made their nests there.

As they approached the rocky lip of the canyon, Calla heard rather than felt the rush of warm air that seemed forever trapped inside the canyon walls, wailing up one side and down the other, making hot pockets on which the wild raptors hung, inspecting the ground far below for the movements of field mice and jackrabbits. Calla shivered in spite of herself. Little chance she could hang in one of those pockets of air. She’d drop like a stone. The eagles would close in before her body was even cold.

She turned to Dupree. “Now what?”

“Now you sign this deed and take a dive off that canyon wall.”

“Get serious, Dupree. You sound like that old song, ‘Give up the deed to your ranch or I’ll blow you all to bits!’”

Dupree shoved the papers
at
her chest. A ballpoint pen, stamped with the logo of the Paradise Savings and Loan, bent them
at
one corner.

She shoved them back. “I’m not signing it.”

“You’ll sign it. And if you don’t, I’ll bring your father out here until he signs it. And if he won’t sign it, I’ll bring your Aunt Helen out here until she signs it. See how that works? I have it all figured out.”

Calla rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’ll be believable.”

“I don’t really care what people believe,” Dupree insisted. “I only care about what they can prove. Besides, your family has always been a little on the odd side. The fact that one by one everybody came up to the spot where their beloved Calla died and flung themselves off the cliff in her memory may not even surprise anybody. You never know.” He rattled the papers
at
her again. “Now sign.”

Calla looked
at
the deed that represented four generations of McFadden ranching families and took it, almost reverently, in her fingers.

She looked
at it
for a long minute. Her name was on the deed, right under her mother’s name, and her grandfather Lemuel’s and her great-grandfather Benjamin’s names. Calla began to methodically rip the deed into tiny pieces.

Dupree watched her, stunned.

She opened her hands and let the pieces of paper swirl and dance in the breeze. Together, Calla and Dupree watched the shredded document as it lifted from her hands and hovered above Tellum Canyon, held there as a feather is held above the soft breath of a curious child.

“You didn’t really think I’d sign that, did you, Dick?”

Dupree slowly focused on her, his expression twisting from shock into a kind of hideous anger Calla had never seen before. He was suddenly, utterly out of control. It was what Calla had been waiting for.

She kicked the heavy toe of her boot hard up into Dupree’s groin. The little man grunted pitifully and folded. His gun skittered harmlessly down the canyon wall.

“Calla.”
The shout of Henry’s voice was sweet and strong in her ears.

“Henry! I’m here.”

He appeared at the crest of the little rise, a rifle in his hand, looking for all the world just exactly like a knight in shining armor should look.

She tried to run toward him, but something had happened to her legs. She couldn’t imagine what it was. She looked up at Henry. He was coming toward her
at
a dead run, an expression of horror and fury distorting his strong features.

I’m safe now,
Calla thought.
Why does he still look so scared?
She attempted again to go to him, but she stumbled instead.

Calla looked down
at
Dupree. He seemed to be wrapping himself around her ankles.

Too late, she realized what was happening. As she fell to the ground, she kicked
at
the dead weight around her ankles, but
to
no avail. Dupree had her clutched too tightly.

Calla curled forward and raked
at
Dupree’s face with her fingernails, pulling great threads of skin from his cheeks. Blood poured into his eyes, mixing with the dirt she had kicked up onto his face with her boots and making a grisly paste, but Dupree appeared not to notice. He was fixed on the canyon, only a few feet away. He wriggled forward on his belly toward the lip of the canyon wall, like a great vulture with a too heavy carcass, dragging his prey along with him.