“What are we living in here, Duke? An action-adventure movie?” He laughed aloud, thinking he’d better start thinking fast on his feet.
“One would wonder,” Duke replied. “Why did you kill Annie?”
“I didn’t.”
“I think you did,” Duke said.
“That makes two of us,” Hank told him.
“If you’re looking for a guilty party, you’d better have an appropriate place to aim the blame. Might want to start with that old man you seem to trust with your lives.”
“I trust Frank with more than my life,” Hank assured him. “I’d trust him to the end of the earth with Julie’s as well.”
Realizing he was fighting a losing battle, Sam gnawed on the inside of his jaw and decided to play devil’s advocate. “Annie wasn’t anything but a common slut. You guys know that.”
When the brothers stared at him like they were willing to listen, he continued. “Okay, I’ll come clean with you. I killed her. I didn’t want to do it, but fact was, I had to do it to save your Julie. She put the word out. There was two hundred thousand on the table to anyone who pulled the trigger. When she found out Carl Carlton took out a ten million dollar life insurance policy on Julie, why, she couldn’t see Julie dead fast enough.”
Hank scrubbed the side of his face, raking his fingers over the two-day growth of beard. “Truth is, you already collected a hundred grand from her. She paid you the second you secured a job here with us.”
“That’s a fact,” he admitted. “But you gotta believe me, boys. I never planned to hurt Julie. I pursued and then accepted a position here because I wanted to protect her. Why would I harm an innocent woman?”
“For the very reason you killed Annie,” Hank said, stepping forward and looking mad enough to kill someone—probably him.
“I didn’t want to hurt Annie. If you can believe this, Annie was actually a friend of mine.”
“With friends like you, who needs to go to hell and meet the devil, right?” Duke asked.
Sam took a deep breath. “All right. I admit it. She provoked me, and I lost my cool.”
“It was someone else’s fault, was that it?” Duke asked, shooting his brother a skeptical glance.
Sam couldn’t read them. It was hard to gauge whether or not he was getting anywhere.
“Well?”
“Pretty much,” Sam agreed. “Yeah.”
“Do you mind to tell me how you figure?” Duke asked. “I mean, did Annie ask you to kill her? Did she tell you she wanted to die?”
“No, of course not,” Sam replied. “Are you kidding me? Annie was so self-centered that she would’ve pushed her own child in front of a train in order to save herself.”
“Odd you mentioned that,” Hank said.
“What?”
“Did she tell you she was pregnant with your unborn child? I’m willing to bet she did, and you killed her so your wife and other children wouldn’t know,” Duke said.
Sam gulped. “Pregnant? Annie was pregnant?”
“Reckon he didn’t know that part,” Hank drawled.
“She wasn’t pregnant with my child,” Sam said, stunned.
“The hell she wasn’t,” Duke said. “Cops found her car. They discovered a letter she left behind as well. Annie was pregnant with your baby. She claims the two of you met at a race—she didn’t specify when or where, dragsters or stock cars—just mentioned the two of you knew one another, fooled around, and she got pregnant. For some reason, she wanted the world to know that you fathered her child in the event something happened to her.”
Sam felt like he was smothering. The rage he’d often felt when he was a child surfaced quicker than he could control the fury spinning. Regrouping, he pulled his thoughts together and decided on the best way to play this out.
Hank and Duke stepped closer. They looked intimidating and acted angrier than recently castrated bulls.