Fatal Burn (West Coast 2)

But it was a lost cause.

The demons would return.

They always did.

The phone blasted beside her bed and Shannon reluctantly reached to answer it. She gave up on any hope of sleep. It was only nine-thirty in the morning and she’d already endured a call from her mother, saying she and Oliver would be over later in the day with Shannon’s truck, another call from Lily, shocked at Mary Beth’s death, and a third from Carl Washington wanting an interview. She’d no sooner hung up on the reporter when the phone rang again.

“Hello?” she answered tensely, ready and armed to tell Washington to quit harassing her.

“How are you?”

Travis Settler. She recognized the strong voice immediately. Stupidly, her pulse jumped a bit and she remembered how she’d seen him last, in the pickup, in the dark, so close she could have touched him.

She scooted back on the bed and rested against the headboard. “I’m okay.”

“You get your truck back?”

“One of my brothers is bringing it over.”

“Good. I thought we should get started with the dogs.”

He sounded anxious. She didn’t blame him. “Give me an hour. I’ve got a few chores to do.”

“You got it.” He hung up and she pushed herself off the bed.

“No rest for the wicked,” she muttered and Khan lifted his bad ear but didn’t move from his spot on the quilt. “Yeah, I’m talkin’ about you.” She ruffled his coat, then headed for the shower. Her headache was still drumming in the back of her skull and her eyes felt gritty. The few hours of sleep she’d caught between nightmares of Mary Beth had been few and her shoulder ached a little.

The hot water of the shower felt good and she managed to wash her hair without getting too much shampoo in her eyes or disturbing the stitches on the back of her head. She left her hair alone, deciding to let the damp curls air dry, then brushed her teeth and swiped on lipstick and mascara.

The image in the mirror staring back at her wasn’t exactly Hollywood-glamorous but was fresh-scrubbed, which would just have to do.

She dragged on a pair of clean, worn jeans, and pulled a V-neck T-shirt over her head. Her ribs and shoulder felt better than they had since the attack.

“Clean living,” she told Khan as he stretched on the bed. She ducked into the bathroom and shook out a Vicodin from the bottle. She thought about the day ahead. Travis Settler was first on the docket, then she’d have to deal with her dogs, her mother, her brothers and who knew who else. Closing her fist around the tablet, she decided to hold off on taking anything stronger than over-the-counter stuff. She didn’t want to spend the rest of the day dull-witted. She wasn’t much of a pill popper, and she wanted to wean herself as quickly as possible off the medication. If the pain got to be more than she could handle, then, okay, she’d take a dose, if not, she’d “soldier on,” as her father had so often said.

Her father.

She thought fleetingly of him and wondered what he would say or do in a situation where fires were being set, people dying…Patrick Flannery had been a man of action, oftentimes bending or nearly breaking the rules to serve his purpose. More dedicated to his career than to his wife and six children, he was a no-bullshit individual whose hard drinking and rule breaking had eventually cost him his job.

“Oh, Pop,” she whispered, conjuring up his face and almost hearing him say, Buck up, Shannon. Life’s not always easy, but it’s always interesting.

Unfortunately, sometimes “interesting” meant painful. She had only to remember the horrid image of Mary Beth’s burned body being hauled out of her home.

Shannon put the tablet back in the bottle, shoving it into the medicine cabinet and shutting the mirrored door.

She settled for a couple of ibuprofen. “Breakfast,” she explained to Khan, swallowing the pills dry, then leaning over and chasing them down with a drink from the tap.

With the dog leading the way, she headed downstairs and started making coffee. As the machine gurgled and dripped she fed Khan and glanced out the window. The sun had long risen and through an open window she felt a warm, dry breeze, the promise of yet another day where the temperature pushed a hundred degrees in this year of drought and fear of forest fires.

Like the year that Ryan was killed.

She tried not to remember that breathless, hot Indian summer where there was talk of electrical brownouts, low reservoirs of water. The fires had been relentless, crackling and feeding in the surrounding hills.

And with the heat and fear came quick tempers and anger. She’d seen it in Ryan’s face, known that telling him she intended to divorce him would only add to his rage, that the restraining order she’d managed to get was in his eyes little more than a piece of paper.

There had been no getting away from him, nor from his fury. Even her brothers hadn’t been able to protect her. Nor had they been able to keep her baby safe. No one had. Her throat tightened as she remembered a time she’d sworn to forget. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of her second pregnancy, and the old sadness and anger invaded her soul. Her fingers clenched around the edge of the counter. How she’d wanted that child, even though he had been fathered by her estranged husband, had been created in a loveless marriage that had been rapidly and surely crumbling apart. That child, her son, Ryan Carlyle’s son, had been the one good thing to come from the unhappy, violent union. She bit her lip. Like a whipsaw, guilt cut through her because if she looked deep into her own soul, and faced the naked truth that stalked her relentlessly, she knew that she wasn’t sorry that Ryan was gone. Maybe not even sorry that he was dead.

After fishing in the refrigerator for some creamer to no avail, she poured herself a cup of coffee. Sipping, she searched for her cell phone but couldn’t find that either. Then, with Khan barreling ahead of her, she walked outside and noticed that Nate’s truck, again, was missing, not parked in its usual spot. She started to worry about him. That worry changed to perplexity when she went to check on the horses and saw that they’d already been fed, watered, then let outside where they were currently grazing on dry bits of grass or standing next to each other, swatting flies with their tails.