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“Make them. This is a warning. We won’t run this time. They come for us, any of us, we’ll kill them in their beds. All of them. The mothers, the kids, the babies.”
She had glared at him with those slanted amber eyes, fierce as a wolf’s, cold as death.
“You do that, you’ll sign a death warrant for every other colony in the country. Play nice.”
She reached forward and picked up his drink. Smiling, she raised it to her lips.
Then she bit down hard, crunching on the glass. She spat the bloody shards out on to the deck.
“I’m not playing, Tucker.”
And then she was gone, like a gust of something foul.
Tucker stared into the fire’s dead embers. Make them.
Yeah, right. To most of the townsfolk, he was an embarrassment. A pathetic recluse. A shameful failure who had failed to bring the killer of a young boy to justice. No one cared about Jensen Tucker. And those that did only cared that he wasn’t dead yet. They’d be packing the church at his funeral. Just so they could spit on his grave.
He picked up the bottle of bourbon and then realized it was empty. He walked into the kitchen. Another bottle sat beside the cooker. The good stuff. He pulled the stopper out of the bottle and poured a small glass. He felt the heat in his stomach. An addict about to get their fix. He glanced out of the window.
Something gray hung on a tree at the edge of his clearing, next to the carcass of the slaughtered pig.
Tucker frowned. It looked like a jacket.
He debated with himself and then, reluctantly, pushed the glass away and strode back into the living room. He shoved the front door open, jogged down the porch steps and crossed to the tree.
He looked around. Who had left this here? Athelinda? Someone else?
He unhooked the jacket from the branch. New from the look of it. Except for a few rust-colored stains around the collar. He felt his throat constrict.
A new, gray jacket with blood on it.
Instinctively, he found himself checking the pockets. His hand closed over something. Small, metallic and circular.
He pulled it out…and felt all the breath leave his body.
“Goddammit.”
12
“The cabin’s about ten minutes out of town and a short hike through the woods.”
Barbara wondered what Nicholls’s definition of a “short hike” was and decided she didn’t want to know. She gazed out of the truck’s window as they cruised along Main Street. Past Harty Snacks Café, past the general store with its self-loving Santa, past Dead Cool Clothing, Hart’s Hardware and Deadhart Surgery. That reminded her…
“I still need to talk to Dr. Dalton,” she said.
“Doc only works out of the surgery a couple of days a week,” Nicholls told her. “Other than that, he sees patients at his house, up near Deep Hollow Lake.”
“Right. The lake formed in a deep hollow by any chance?”
He managed a small smile. “Folks here do like to call a spade a spade.”
A larger, more modern, single-story building drew into view on their right.
“Deadhart School,” Nicholls said. “Elementary on one side. The other part is the high school.”
“That work out?”
“Has so far.”
