Raising the Stakes

The lawyer wasn’t dumb. He dug a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and Harman handed over the photo.

“I can use the money to buy somethin’ nice for the boy,” he said somberly. “You take care now, Mr. Baron. These roads can be slippery in the rain.”

He waited until the door closed after the attorney. Then he sank down on the banquette.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Did the man really think he’d fallen for that lie about a music box, or that he’d bought him off with a hundred bucks? There was lots more to this story. Nobody, especially not a lawyer from—Harman glared at the card—from New York City, came all this distance to tell a woman her grandpa had left her a wind-up toy.

Dawn had come into money, and probably one hell of a lot of it.

Harman got to his feet, walked to the counter and slid onto a stool. “Gimme two eggs,” he said to the waitress, “over easy. Bacon. Flapjacks.” He leaned toward her. “And more coffee, only it better not be this crap from the bottom of the pot, you understand?”

The girl damn near clicked her heels, which was just as it should be. The bible said it best. A woman was meant to obey. Wives, especially. And what a wife possessed belonged to her husband. Her body. Her spawn. All her earthly possessions.

Harman scowled as the waitress put a cup in front of him.

Dawn was coming into an inheritance, and it was only right and proper he was there to take care of it for her, and to take care of the boy, too, see he was raised up proper. It was time to find the bitch and put her four years of loose living at an end.

* * *

Outside, in the parking lot, Gray got behind the wheel of the rental car and drove a couple of miles north before he pulled onto the shoulder of the road, took out his cell phone and dialed Jack Ballard.

“Jack? Gray Baron here. I just met with Harman Kitteridge. Oh, yeah. He’s just what his rap sheet suggests. Mean. And stupid as the day is long, except when he thinks he smells money. Nope. He hasn’t a clue as to where Dawn is. Trust me, Jack. I had him salivating. If he knew, he’d have—You did?” Gray smiled and gave the steering wheel a light tap with his fist. “Las Vegas, huh? Terrific. Too bad you didn’t call me. I’d have been able to skip my scintillating meeting with Kitter—Oh. Did you? Well, I was in a diner at the ass end of nowhere, which is probably why your call wouldn’t go through. In fact, I’m losing you now. Jack? Jack…”

The line went dead. Gray put the phone into his pocket, felt something papery and took out the photo of Dawn Lincoln Kitteridge. She didn’t look much like a woman who would walk out on a man and a child, but that only went to show you how misleading a picture could be. He had a photo of his own mother tucked away at the bottom of a drawer. He’d found it years ago, when he was ten or eleven, and she hadn’t looked like a woman who would have done those things, either…but she had.

Gray checked his mirror, did a U-turn, sped straight through Queen City and headed south, to Flagstaff and the airport. Forget staying on for a few days. Ballard had found the woman. He’d fly home, put things on hold for a week, then fly to Vegas and check out Dawn Kitteridge, though it wouldn’t take much checking before he’d know what to tell Jonas. How much doubt could there be as to the morals of a woman who slept around and then deserted her son, and never mind the way she looked in that photo.

He knew all about women like that. His own mother had slept her way through Brazos Springs before she’d walked away, left him behind and never once looked back.

Gray stepped down hard on the gas. Soon, very soon, he’d be able to put this entire incident behind him and get on with his own life.

CHAPTER FOUR

Las Vegas, Nevada

DAWN’S alarm was set for six but when she opened her eyes, the bright green numbers on the clock’s face read 5:03.

Her heart pounded as she sat up and looked around her tiny bedroom. What had awakened her? Footsteps? A voice? The sound of someone outside the window? She held her breath and listened but she couldn’t hear anything. Nothing but silence.

She exhaled and fell back against the pillows with relief. That was what had awakened her. Not a noise. The silence. The AC had shut off. The unit was old and noisy. It died with startling regularity and when it did, the lack of sound was like an assault on her eardrums.

Even after four years, she still couldn’t decide what was better, noises that startled you or silence that shook you. No, that wasn’t true. You could get accustomed to noise. Silence was different. If it was too quiet, you started to hear things. A creak that might be a footstep. A tap that might mean someone was at the window. A whisper that could be a voice you prayed you’d never hear again…

“Stop it,” she said, and she sat up and tossed the covers aside.

The creaks were from the floorboards. Her apartment had been carved out of the first floor parlor and maid’s room of an old house, old by Vegas standards, anyway. The only thing tapping at the window was the branch of the indigo bush. She probably should have lopped the branch off when it first started growing toward the house, just as Cassie had suggested, but she was happy letting the Indigo go its own way.

She’d had to plead with the landlord to let her plant it. The woman had looked at her as if she was crazy but she’d finally said yeah, okay, you want an indigo bush? You buy it, plant it, take care of it, you can have it. Dawn had done all that and provided the tough little shrub with the nurturing it needed to gain a foothold, and it had thrived.

The Indigo had the right to grow in any direction it wanted. So did every living thing on the planet.

As for hearing that voice, Harman’s voice, well, it was better to be alert than complacent. Every now and then, she’d see some half-buried item in the paper about a woman who had run from a husband or a boyfriend, been found by him and beaten senseless. Or killed. And even as she’d feel pain for that poor, faceless woman, Dawn would know that what she’d just read was a reminder. She’d have to spend the rest of her life being careful, never letting down her guard, never forgetting that Harman was still out there, hating her because she’d done the unthinkable.

She’d defied him. Worse, she’d left him. That was the worst sin of all.

Her husband had owned a dog when she’d married him, a scared, skinny hound that made the mistake of creeping to her for comfort one day after Harman kicked it. Enraged, he’d beaten the poor thing half-senseless and when it ran away, he’d gone after it, dragged it back to the mountain and shot it.

“Bad enough it weren’t loyal to me,” he’d said, while she’d sobbed and begged him to spare the dog’s life. “What’s mine stays mine till I say otherwise. You got that, bitch?”