Page 64 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“You’re a smart woman, Chief Dawkins.” Knox tried a different tack, his voice sliding toward reasonable, coaxing, a man with something to sell. “A person doesn’t walk a cornfield after dark for her health. You came out here hunting the same thing we are, because you know about the original story, don’t you?”

He paused, leaving room for an answer.

“So, let’s be smart together. What do you say?” Knox asked when she didn’t immediately respond. “From what I read in Roland’s research, there’s more than enough in this ground to go around. We split it, even shares, and every one of us drives home tonight. That’s fair. That’s more than fair, and you know it. If that fool Mercer had just seen reason, we’d all be lying on a beach somewhere right now instead of standing in a field pointing guns at each other.”

Hadley still didn’t answer.

She lowered herself instead, slow, an inch at a time, until she was crouched below the level of the tassels with one knee in the soft dirt. She began to feel across the ground with her free hand. The sun had gone all the way down while Whitney had talked, and the remaining cloud cover smothered whatever light might have lingered, so that even Hadley, vision long since adjusted, could make out little more than the pale vertical bars of the nearest stalks and the hard glare of the headlights beyond them.

That dark cut both ways.

It hid her.

It also meant she was searching the ground blind.

Her fingers dragged over dirt and the dry litter of fallen leaves, patient and silent, while Knox burned through the last of whatever patience he had.

“I’m losing my goodwill out here, Chief.”

The two of them had made an amateur’s mistake, and they were too deep in the moment to catch it. They stood square in their own headlights, lit bright and flat for anyone in the dark to pick out, while Hadley knelt invisible a good thirty yards off.

Sitting ducks, the both of them, if she could only even the playing field first.

Her fingers closed on a rock.

Small, river-smooth, the size of a walnut, the kind of stone a plow turned up by hundreds every spring and nobody ever cleared. She worked it loose from the wet dirt and gradually rose with it, coming up to her full height just as Knox’s voice cracked at the edges.

“Last chance. I mean it. She dies, and that’s on you⁠—”

“Knox.” Whitney’s voice had gone thin and high, like a woman who understood what was about to happen and had no way to stop it. “Knox, please don’t⁠—”

Hadley was out of time. No more waiting on backup, no more waiting on Whitney to talk her fiancé down. This was the moment it went one way or the other. She drew her arm back and threw the rock up and over, out past the corn and away from herself, deep into the black field.

It came down forty, fifty feet to the east, crashing through the dry stalks with a racket a body would make.

Knox turned toward it, keeping Nora hard against him, a shield he wasn’t about to give up. But the sound had come from far enough off her that it gave Hadley the half second she needed. He cranked his upper body after the noise, exactly as she’d gambled he would, and the turn swung his aim wide of her and pulled him a quarter-turn off Nora. His gaze and firearm were chasing the dark where the racket had been while his near side came open to the road. He fired twice in panic into the stalks thirty feet from where he thought she stood.

Hadley didn’t hesitate.

She raised her weapon, the near side of him laid bare and the line clean past Nora…and squeezed the trigger.

28

Hadley Dawkins

September 2026

Thursday – 7:52 pm

The access road had turned into a red-and-blue haze, and every twirl of the bright hues fed the throbbing in Hadley’s temples. She smothered a groan and leaned against the passenger side of Nick’s cruiser, observing one of the two ambulances pull away from the scene, bound for the hospital in Emberwood.

She’d kept Knox alive until the EMTs arrived, her hands pressed to the wound while Whitney came apart beside her, certain he was dying. Blood loss might have made good on that fear, but the wound itself hadn’t been the kind to kill a man. The angle of the shot had put the round in through his side and out his back, clipping past his shoulder blade, a through-and-through that had cost him a great deal of blood and missed his lung by the grace of probably an inch.

He would live to sit at a defense table, and she would be there to witness him sentenced.

“Kill those damn lights.” Nick’s voice carried across the scene to one of his deputies.

The red and blue died all at once. It hardly mattered, though. The headlights of the vehicles lining the access road cut all the way back to the county road, throwing more than enough light across the churned ground, and it wouldn’t be long before the state police rolled in with their floodlights and their questions.