Dakota Marshal Read online

  The human noise receded. Insects and animal sounds took over. The odd shout still intruded, but he blocked them, homed in on what was closer, what might try to return to the motel.

  Sticking to the shadows, he did that himself and doubled back. He saw Morley standing at the rear entrance and another man at the side. Larry would cover the front. There were three ways in and three people on guard.

  McBride went down on one knee. He had two of the three entrances in sight when he spied the pinpoint flame and the lightning-quick movement that sent it flying in an arc toward the back wall of the motel.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Together, the doctor and Alessandra lifted Ruth onto a makeshift stretcher and into a minivan for transport to the hospital in Lancer. Larry and a slightly calmer Norm flanked her as she returned to Ruth’s office.

  She had no idea what McBride was doing, only that it had to be dangerous, and if he didn’t wind up dead, he’d be shot at least once before the night was done. By her. She was that angry.

  Larry tapped a man she didn’t know on the shoulder, and sent him to the front door.

  “All’s well, so far, Alessandra.”

  “No comment.” Her mind whirled in an endless spiral. Unable to shut it down, she prowled the small room, BlackBerry in hand, and ordered herself to think past the confusion. When that failed, she opened her email and reread every message she’d received since leaving Rapid City.

  “Something,” she said aloud. “I know there’s something.” But she simply couldn’t find it.

  Larry started the coffee machine and made small talk to Norm about a vehicle-related issue. Alessandra regarded the wall clock, bit her lip, then decided to call Joan at home.

  Her assistant answered on the first ring.

  “Alessandra? Oh, thank God. I kept hoping you’d phone so I could hear your voice.” Her own dropped. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you? Big trouble.”

  “You could say.” She scanned Joan’s latest email as she spoke. “We’re back in South Dakota, but—”

  “I knew it. I love McBride, don’t get me wrong, but the one time I tried to contact you at my cabin, he read the call display, texted me and said messages only. Anything verbal would be distracting and dangerous.”

  Alessandra’s eyes suddenly froze on the screen. “Uh, Joan?” A tremulous ball began to form. “I’m looking at your last email. You said a check for some after-hours work we did bounced.”

  “Oh, hon, that was just me being mad as a hornet and blathering on.”

  “It might be relevant.” She thought back to that night in the clinic and remembered the rain, the gusty wind, the vehicle. “I have this picture in my head of an old truck, a rusty old truck.”

  “With a man and a dog inside.” The concern in Joan’s tone turned to indignation. “You want to know about the check he wrote? Well, I’ll tell you. It was a bum all right, and so was he. Amos Smith, he called himself. Only had counter checks, he said, because he moved around so much. Taught me a lesson, that’s for sure. There’s more, too. Worse. I took some food to the local animal shelter yesterday after work, and what do you think I saw in one of the cages? A beautiful German shepherd with a white streak on his back in the shape of an arrow. Now, you and I both know that’s not a common mark.”

  Alessandra’s blood, already chilled, ran cold. “You found the dog—what was his name, Phoenix?—in a shelter?”

  “Yes, I did. Now you tell me, what kind of person brings an animal in for a late-night examination, writes a bad check, dumps the poor thing, then takes off for who knows where? A crazy person, that’s who. That dog is…”

  She continued to vent. Alessandra heard the buzz of words in her head, but since none of them registered, she lowered the phone.

  A rusty old truck, rolling away from the clinic. As if a dense fog had suddenly lifted, the image of that truck came clear. Truck, dog—and man.

  Except… She couldn’t see the man’s features clearly. He was an outline more than an actual image. He’d been tall and thin, she recalled, verging on gaunt. He’d had a prominent Adam’s apple and hands that tended to fidget.

  And he’d taken the dog he’d insisted she examine after-hours to an animal shelter.

  The fear spiking inside her morphed into terror.

  Smith, he’d call himself Smith. He’d come to the clinic when it was closed. Had he planned to kill her that night?

  She swung around, saw Larry and Norm chatting and remembered she was on the phone. Raising it, she caught Joan’s outraged tirade. “Going south, my foot. Weird galoot. I tell you, Alessandra—”

  “Joan, stop,” she interrupted. Blood roared like thunder in her ears. “Did Smith say anything that sounded odd?”

  A protracted “Well…” was the last thing she heard before a second explosion rent the air, rocking the building from foundation to rafters. The floor beneath her gave a mighty heave and sent her flying into Larry, who staggered into Norm, who collapsed on the sagging sofa.

  Dust and debris rained down, clouding the room and temporarily blinding them.

  Somehow, Alessandra wound up on her hands and knees. Dazed and disoriented, she watched the office swim around her. Had she hit her head?

  She thought she heard Larry groan and, coughing, pushed herself upright.

  A thousand thoughts buzzed in her head, but only one came clear. Smith had trapped her. And that being the case, what might he also have done with or to McBride?

  The door. She needed to find the door. Find McBride.

  “Alessandra?” Larry made a hazy attempt to locate her. “Are you hurt?”

  She spied his hand through the swirl of dust and reached for it. “I’m fine. Are you and Norm all ri—?”

  The arm that snaked around her neck snatched her away from Larry’s outstretched fingers. A gun with a very big barrel jabbed her under the chin.

  “You back off, old man,” a man’s voice, trembling with fury, snapped. “You, too,” he warned Norm. “Either of you move, you’re dead.”

  Larry’s alarmed eyes came clear. “You can’t—” But Alessandra shook him off when the man holding her tightened his grip.

  “Don’t you tell me what I can’t do. I’ll kill her here in front of you if I want to. That’s not what I want, but one way or another, she’s gonna die. Question is, do you wanna die with her?”

  “No,” she managed to gasp as Larry’s fingers curled into angry fists. “I’ll go with him. Don’t move, okay? Please don’t move.”

  An obliging Norm didn’t twitch a muscle or even blink. Larry seethed, but slowly lowered his hand.

  Smith’s rough voice came into Alessandra’s ear. “Now you and me are gonna leave. We see anyone, you say the same thing you did here.” He gave her throat a nasty squeeze. “Unless you want more people to die because of you.”

  More people to die?

  McBride’s name shot through her head. Her insides turned to ice.

  She backpedaled swiftly, had to if she wanted to hold back the panic. McBride was fine. Smith wasn’t referring to him. He couldn’t be.

  “Move,” he ordered when she dragged her feet. “You and me got a date with your destiny.” He kicked the door open all the way, shouted into the lobby. “I see one person twitch, hear one sound I don’t like, this little lady’s gonna have a great big bullet hole where her head used to be. I know someone’s here. Come out where I can see you.”

  There was a quiet shuffle before a man covered in plaster emerged from the far side of the reception desk. He looked dazed, as if he wasn’t sure what had happened.

  “In there with the others,” Smith instructed.

  The man faltered but complied.

  Smith’s mouth moved in close again. “Now it’s just you and me and your cop husband, Dr. Norris.”

  McBride wasn’t dead. The relief that streamed into Alessandra’s limbs made her go limp. But he hefted her up with the arm still locked around her throat and shook her to keep her moving.


  His voice, a rasp of pure loathing, growled, “You killed her, as surely as if you’d held this gun to her head and squeezed the trigger.” He rammed the barrel up hard under her chin. “You murdered my wife, Alessandra Norris. She died, and you lived, and that was all kinds of wrong. Even when it seemed you might still pay the price and die, along came a cop to rescue you.”

  “Who—?”

  “Shut up.” When his arm jerked, she saw black. “You just keep moving your feet. You’ll see how it’s gonna be soon enough.”

  He gave the damaged lobby door a vicious kick and yelled, “If you’re out here, McBride, you best not try and stop me.”

  He twirled Alessandra in an abrupt one-eighty as he spoke, then braced his spine against the trunk of a tree. He waited for several silent seconds before winding himself around the base. A wall of bushes rose up, black and dense. He shoved her through to the other side and forced her to walk for several minutes, with his arm still choking her and the gun still digging into the underside of her chin.

  Bushes turned to woods and back to dense bush. Finally, he thrust her through a tangle of vines and leaves into a clearing that might have been an access road once upon a time.

  And there it was, the yellow school bus she’d been glimpsing off and on since the night they’d first come to Ben’s Creek.

  Wrenching the door open, he tossed her inside and flung her to the floor.

  “It’s serendipity.” The gun shook in his hand as he slammed the door lock in place. “Now you pick yourself up, and sit right there, in that very first seat on the aisle. That’s where she was when she died, so that’s where you’ll be when you die.”

  “Who are you?” Alessandra managed to ask.

  Teeth tightly clenched, he leaned in so close that his mouth almost touched hers.

  “My name’s Penner, George Penner. My wife was going to visit her sister in Chicago, but you changed seats with her, and she died.”

  She swallowed a shocked breath when he whipped out a butcher knife with an eighteen-inch blade.

  Shoving the tip under her left breast, he let his lips curve into an evil smile. “You’re getting it, aren’t you, lady? You’re starting to understand. It took you long enough. I sent you messages at your clinic, then more specific ones on the road. I kept hoping you’d figure some part of it out. Now you’re here, and we’re gonna finish it the right and only way. As you killed, so shall you be killed.” His eyes glinted in the wisp of light from Ruth’s flickering highway sign. “YAMAN,” he said, and gave the blade a twist. “You’re A Murderer, Alessandra Norris!”

  IT WASN’T THE FORCE of the blast that knocked McBride off his feet. It was a section of metal fence that shot off its footings and came at him like a giant garrote. He avoided one post, but the more jagged of the two struck the side of his head.

  He pictured Alessandra’s eyes for a split second, then nothing.

  Until…

  “McBride!”

  A hand slapped him with force. It shattered the blackness in his mind and sucked him from the residue with a blistering punch of pain.

  He intercepted the next slap before it made contact. Everything spun except the thought that had been fueling him even as he’d gone under. Alessandra…

  Larry’s features swam in. “You awake?”

  “Enough. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.” The old man’s face crumpled. “Some guy took her after the second explosion. I tried to follow, but Norm kept fighting me, said not to move or he’d kill us all. By the time I got loose, they were gone. And Cory in the lobby was only half-conscious. He didn’t see anything, either. What’re we gonna do?”

  “Not panic,” McBride replied. Although it damn near killed him, he shut down as many emotions as he could and made it into a painful crouch.

  Settle, he ordered his mind. Think. The guy couldn’t drag Alessandra all over the countryside on foot.

  “Did anyone hear a vehicle?”

  “No, and I’ve been listening.” Larry’s head went up. “People are coming back…”

  “Keep them away,” McBride told him. “Keep them quiet. What door did he use?”

  “Front. He shouted at you not to try and stop him, then…I just don’t know. He disappeared.”

  McBride stood, swayed, found his balance. But it was like running in a nightmare. Every stride forward took forever and seemed to get him nowhere.

  At long, long last, however, he reached the motel.

  He found his backup on the floor of Ruth’s office. Shoving it into the top of his jeans, he checked his Glock, pulled out his cell and speed dialed Larry’s number.

  “Keep those people back,” he said into the phone. Then he ran through the lobby and out into the parking lot.

  Two dozen vehicles sat empty under a three-quarter moon. Ruth’s faulty sign hummed in the distance. He heard insects and the odd truck far down the road, but in the immediate area, everything remained silent.

  He was here, still here, McBride could feel it. Feel Alessandra.

  Sensations crawled over him, slithered through him. He recognized the threads of fear and blocked them.

  She’d find a way to stall, and he’d want to drag it out in any case. Or at least that was McBride’s hope.

  The sign made a staticky noise as portions of it winked on and off. Unmoving trees stood to his left and to his right. No one could hide there. Overgrown bushes that stretched half the length of the motel and eventually led to the woods made the most sense. The only sense, really. Assuming once again that insanity ever made sense.

  He had to choose, had to do something before he lost Alessandra to a madman.

  Fear knotted in his belly. He shoved it down, slammed a lid on it. He loved her. He wouldn’t lose her. He wouldn’t let her die.

  The bushes loomed, dark and misshapen. The sign sizzled and snapped. Frogs and crickets sang. Everything sounded rural and normal.

  Everything except the furious, spitting screech that erupted from an obscure spot deep in the distant woods.

  “DON’T HURT HIM!”

  Alessandra caught the cat Smith hurled into the air with the toe of his boot.

  “You stepped on his tail, that’s why he screamed.”

  Smith’s breath heaved in and out. “I hate animals.”

  Alessandra kept a firm hold on Ruth’s squirming cat and her eyes on her captor’s face. “You brought a dog to the clinic for an examination last Friday.”

  “I know what I did, and you know why I did it.”

  He glared at the long scratch Puddles had inflicted on the back of his hand. The hand not holding the knife, Alessandra noted.

  “I wanted to kill you that night, leastways that was the plan. Your floozy assistant would leave the clinic, and so would you. No one else around that late. You won’t know it, but your car was gonna run out of gas between the clinic and your house. I work with cars and trucks, take ’em apart and put ’em together. You only had a thimbleful of gas in your tank. Enough to start it up for sure, but not much more than that. You getting the picture here, Doc?”

  “You tampered with my car, saw to it I’d work late and had a plan for when I ran out of gas.”

  Did she sound calm, she wondered, or could he hear the panic scrambling inside her?

  She released the cat, carefully, and without averting her eyes said, “I understand you want me dead. What I don’t understand is why. Who was your wife, and what makes you think I killed her?”

  He bared his teeth. “I told you. You changed seats with her. I learned about it after the crash. I talked to people who didn’t die. I made sure what was what and who was who. You made her move, and she died because of it. Because of you.”

  The expression on his face—what Alessandra could see of it in the weak points of light that glowed on the wall behind her—had terror clamoring for release.

  He brought the knife back to center between them. “There’s four who’re responsible. You, who made her move. That lech dr
iver, who kept his brain and his eyesight in his pants. McBride, who got you out before the bus blew, and the bastard brownnoser with the big mouth and excellent driving record, who should have been steering the damn bus in the first place and instead got a promotion for ratting out his slimeball coworker.”

  “But—”

  Penner used the knife to slash the side of the seat. His eyes gleamed. “No buts, lady. My wife’s dead, and in a minute, you’re gonna be, too.”

  Memories scattered like ashes in Alessandra’s head. The rude woman had started the process. People had moved. Alessandra had moved—from row five to row one. Mother and daughter, seated across from her at that point, were accommodated. Everything was set. Until…

  A fragile blonde woman from Arizona who’d been traveling alone had approached her. Why? Because she’d been alone, as well? While the last of the hand luggage was transferred, and with people still milling in the aisle, she’d touched Alessandra’s shoulder.

  “Excuse me, do you suffer from motion sickness?”

  “I said no,” Alessandra recalled. Her eyes came up. “Your wife was sitting at the back of the bus. She came to me after most of the seat shuffling was done. She wanted to trade. I didn’t ask her to move. She asked me.”

  “You’re lying,” Penner growled. “Trying to save your skin. You wanted to be with that man in the back where she’d been sitting. People I talked to said you and him were getting on like nobody’s business. Flirting and cooing and having a good old time.”

  “We were talking, not flirting. He was gay, Penner. He wasn’t interested in me.”

  Penner moved fast, like an angry snake. Except the snake’s head stopped an inch from hers.

  “Don’t matter what he was. You wanted to sit with him, and my Amy made it possible for you to do that.”

  He was never going to believe her, Alessandra realized with a renewed spurt of fear. It didn’t matter what she said, he had his own truth, and he’d kill to avenge it.

  For a moment, she thought she spotted a shadow beyond the front windshield.

  McBride, or an animal in the bushes?