Читать книгу Flood Zone - Dana Mentink - Страница 13

FOUR

Dallas listened to the rain pounding down on the metal roof of the twenty-nine-foot trailer he rented. It was a gem of a unit as far as he was concerned, far enough away from the other trailer park residents that he enjoyed the illusion of solitude. That and the fact that the river just at the edge of the property had already persuaded many folks to temporarily relocate to another trailer park on higher ground. He wasn’t completely familiar with Colorado weather patterns, but he’d give it a good couple of days before he needed to grab his pack and head for another spot.

Dallas sprawled on his back on the narrow bunk, Juno snoring on his mat on the floor. His thoughts wandered back to Mia and the fire. His police contact hadn’t been able to tell him much, but he knew that circumstantial evidence could convict a person in the eyes of the law and the community.

Motive and means. Mia had both.

He got to his feet and took up his guitar from the closet. Juno burrowed deeper into his mat as Dallas strummed out a few chords on the instrument that was a gift from his brother, Trey. So, indirectly, was Dallas’s damaged spleen and knee, but he did not hold that against his brother anymore. Dallas got into gang life to emulate Trey, but no one had forced him.

He’d gone in willingly and come out so damaged he would never realize his dream of being a Marine like their father.

He tried to remember his sixteen-year-old self, armed and patrolling the ten-block territory as a sentinel of sorts, a lookout for Uncle, the older leader of the gang who pedaled dope, which kept the wheels rolling. He’d admired Uncle, feared him even, yet watched him hand out new shoes and Fourth of July fireworks to the kids who couldn’t afford either. They were the same kids who would be members one day, looking for that combination of belonging and protection that Uncle provided. Sixteen years old, carrying a gun, drinking and protecting a hoodlum’s drug business. He cringed at the memory. What an idiot. What a coward.

How many trailers had he stayed in over the years? How many apartments or cabins had he called home until people got to know him a little too well and he felt that restless urge to move on? Was he still looking for that place to belong?

Or was it more cowardice? Probably, God forgive him. It was safer not to get to know people and to prevent them from knowing him. Safe...with a helping of sin mixed in. His grandfather’s favorite baseball player, Mickey Mantle, said gangs were where cowards went to hide. Maybe they sometimes went to trailer parks, too. He fought the rising tide of self-recrimination with a muttered prayer.

The clock reminded him he hadn’t eaten dinner. The fridge didn’t offer much so he grabbed a rainbow of hot peppers and an onion. Armed with a perfectly balanced knife, he allowed himself to be soothed by the precision of the slices as they fell away onto the cutting board.

Juno surged to his feet, ears cocked.

Company.

So late? And in the throes of a pounding rain? He put down the knife and sidled to the window, peering through the blinds. Nothing. No cars visible, but then his windows faced the tree-lined creek so he wouldn’t see one anyway. Juno was standing in front of the door, staring with laser-like precision, ears swiveling, as if he could see beyond the metal if he just worked hard enough at it. With hearing four times greater than a human’s, Juno was not often wrong about what he heard.

Dallas tried to peer through the blinds again, but the angle was wrong. Still no one knocked. Juno maintained his ferocious intensity, which told Dallas someone was out there. The slightest sound or scent telegraphed to a dog just as strongly as a stiff-knuckled rap on the door.

Okay. Let’s play. Dallas gripped the door handle. Juno’s whiskers quivered, body trembling, sensing a game in the offing. Juno, like every great SAR dog, had an intense play drive that never wound down.

Dallas did a slow count to three and yanked the handle.

Wind barreled in along with a gust of rain, and Juno charged down the metal stairs onto the wooden porch. He turned in circles looking for something that wasn’t there.

Dallas kept his fists ready and gave the dog the moment he needed to get his bearings. Moisture-laden air confused Juno’s senses, but not for long.

The dog shoved his head in the gap under the trailer and began to bark for all he was worth, tail whirling.

A woman’s scream cut through the storm.

“Sit,” Dallas yelled to Juno, who complied with a reluctant whine.

“Whoever you are under the trailer, come out.”

No answer.

“If you don’t come out, the dog is coming in.”

Now there was movement, a raspy breathing, a set of slender fingers wrapping around the edge of the trailer, the impression of a face.

“He’ll bite me.”

Dallas called Juno to him and held the dog by the collar, more to assure the woman than out of fear that Juno would disobey. Juno didn’t bite people. He was more interested in getting them to throw a ball for him to fetch. “Come out.”

She emerged, soggy and mud streaked, her hair plastered in coils against her face. Red hair.

“You were there at the fire.”

She didn’t answer, trembling in the falling rain.

“Come inside. We’ll talk.”

She didn’t move. “Are you a friend of Cora’s?”

“Are you?” He could see the thoughts racing through her mind as she chewed her lip without answering. “All I can tell you is I won’t hurt you.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” she said through chattering teeth.

“Guess you can’t. You came here to find me and here I am. If you want to talk, we do it inside. Don’t want the dog to catch cold.”

After another long look at Juno, the woman ran up the steps.

He tossed her a towel, which she wrapped around her shoulders before she sank onto the kitchen chair. Juno did his thing, sniffing her muddy shoes and the hem of her sodden linen pants.

Dallas studied her while he heated water in the microwave and flung in a tea bag which had come with the trailer. Some sort of fruity herbal stuff. Her clothes had been nice at one point, ruined now. A light jacket was not up to the task of keeping her dry from the pummeling rain. No purse.

“Who are you?” he asked as he handed her the tea.

She clutched it between her shaking hands, her knuckles white.

“Susan.” She swallowed. “I was going to meet Cora, and I saw the house burning. I tried to get inside to help her.”

Nice story. “Why were you meeting her?”

“She was...looking into something for me.” She locked eyes on his, hers a pale gray. “Is she all right?”

Dallas considered. Time to find out if Susan really was a friend to Cora. “Dead.” He gauged her reaction.

The woman did not move, as if the words were lost in the steam from the mug she held to her lips. “Dead.”

“So why were you going to see her?”

She gazed into the tea. “How did the fire start?”

“Maybe I should be asking you that.”

She jerked. “You think I set it?”

“So far I’ve seen you running away from a fire and sneaking outside my trailer. Puts your character in question.”

A glimmer of a smile lifted her lips, but there was something under the trailing wet hair, behind the gaunt lines of her mouth that revealed a hardness he hadn’t seen at first. “So you’re wondering if you can trust me?” she said.

“Not wondering. I’m not going to trust you, not until you give me the truth.”

“You’re a hard man.”

He sat opposite her. “I’ve got peppers to sauté. What are you here for?”

She held his eyes with hers, a slight lift to her chin. “Justice.”

“Not easy to find.”

“I know. But I’m going to have it. I’m going to get back what belongs to me.” The last words came out as a hiss.

“What were you doing at Cora’s?”

“Meeting her there. She was trying to help me unmask a villain, so to speak.”

“Who?”

“It’s private.”

He rapped a hand on the table. “We’re wasting time. Cora was likely murdered and you were there at the scene.”

“If I was going to kill someone, or burn a house in this town,” she said, after drinking deeply of the tea, “that’s not the one I would have picked. And by the way, you were there, too, at the scene. Did you have something to do with Cora’s death?”

Dallas resisted the urge to raise his voice. “If you thought I did, a quick phone call to the police would take care of it. You came here for another reason.”

“I wanted to know about Cora, and I’m not asking the police for personal reasons.”

Very personal, judging from the flicker of emotion that pinched the corners of her mouth. Impasse. They’d gotten there, he could tell. Whatever her motives, he wasn’t going to pry them out of her. Women didn’t work that way, he’d learned. Instead he sat back in the chair and waited.

* * *

Mia’s mouth went dry as the garage door stopped with a groan, halfway up. The man hopped off the step and ran to the car. He was coming to drag her out. The old car had no automatic locks so she slammed the button down and realized in a hot wave of panic that he was not headed to her side, but Gracie’s.

“Lock the door, Gracie,” Mia shouted.

Gracie sat frozen, staring at her mother.

Mia dove across her and hammered the lock, the back door, as well. The man banged his palms against the glass.

Gracie screamed. “Stop, stop!”

Mia nearly screamed too until the man stepped away suddenly. He picked up a metal bucket and swung it hard at the passenger window with a deafening crash until the glass was etched through with cracks.

“Get down onto the floor,” Mia yelled to Gracie, “and cover your head with your hands.”

She yanked the car into Reverse. After one quick breath, she stomped on the gas. The car shot backwards into the garage door. There was a terrible moment when the roof met the unyielding mass and she thought she had made a fatal error. Groaning metal, the sound of breaking glass and then quite without warning the car punched through, shearing the garage door into a crumpled mess, exploding onto the rain-slicked driveway.

Mia was oblivious to the damage. Only two facts remained, her car was still functioning and they were free from the garage. She reversed down the slope, cranked the car into Drive and sped off down the road, putting as much distance between the man and Gracie as she possibly could. One mile, two, her stomach remained in a tight knot, fingers clenched around the steering wheel.

She forced several breaths in and out before she could coax her voice into action. “Gracie Louise, are you hurt?”

Gracie’s tiny voice floated up from the floor. “Scary.”

“You’re right,” she said, relief making her voice thick. “But it’s okay now. You can climb back on the seat. Be careful of the glass.”

Gracie emerged like a hare having narrowly escaped the fox. Her lips were parted, eyes wide and wet. “Mommy, that was a bad man.”

Mia gave a shaky laugh and took her daughter’s hand. “Yes, he was.”

“Why was he in our house?”

She swallowed. “I don’t know, but we’ll go someplace safe until we find out, okay?”

“Where?”

The million dollar question. The nearest hotel was an hour away, and they didn’t have the money to stay in one for long anyway. Rain splattered through the side window that had broken when it impacted the garage door. She felt the bitter tide of anger rise as she contemplated her own helplessness. Mia risked a quick stop, engine running, to move Gracie to the backseat and buckle her into her booster. She kissed her and caressed her daughter’s plump cheeks. “I’m going to figure out something, okay?”

Gracie nodded, shaking the box of macaroni she still clung to. “But I’m hungry.”

Mia smiled as she climbed back into the driver’s seat, but worry soon overwhelmed her. She didn’t even have a cell phone to call the police. The storm intensified as she drove along, rattling the sides of the car. If she could call her sister for advice...

Your sister who is busy with her new husband and her new life. They were tight now, together again after all the anguish Mia had caused, but still there remained in the shadows between them, a heavy weight of guilt. It stemmed from the fact that her sister had been right about Hector when Mia refused to hear a bad word about him, a feeling that burgeoned during her time in jail with all its horrors. Because of Hector, Antonia was almost killed and there was nobody to blame for bringing him into their lives but Mia. No, she would not call Antonia.

“Why not call Hector?” her derisive thoughts chided her. He was sitting around in prison with nothing much to do and a reach that seemed to exceed the metal walls that caged him. She could grovel even more and throw herself on Dr. Elias’s mercy. Was there any pride left to salvage? Self-pity gave way to a hot flood of determination.

Stand on your own two feet, for once in your life.

Mile after mile gave her no clarity, no better sense of what to do. Only the instinct to keep going, to get away from whoever had violated their home, kept her pressing the car forward. She’d made up her mind to stop at the next town she came to and call the police when she realized where she was, at the entrance to the trailer park where Dallas lived. She’d given him a lift there once when his truck had engine trouble.

She saw the silhouette of his vehicle, and she pulled her car next to it, motor still running.

“Where are we?” Gracie said, unbuckling her strap.

“Nowhere, I was just stopping to rest my eyes for a minute.” What was she doing? She would not go to Dallas for help, the man who already seemed to have a strange influence over her pulse. An image of long-stemmed yellow roses floated into her mind. It was followed by a vision of Hector, the man whom she’d loved desperately, blindly, the husband who lied to her from the first kiss and right on until his arrest for drug dealing and later for the attempted abduction of her sister. Fool, fool, fool. Tears brimmed, captive in her eyes.

She swallowed hard. “Put your seat belt back on, we’re not stopping here.”

“But there’s Juno,” Gracie gabbled, shoving open the door and hopping out.

“Get back in the car right now, Gracie Louise,” Mia said, noting the spill of light from Dallas’s door as he emerged onto the trailer steps, peering into the darkness.

“Hi, Dallas,” Gracie called. “Can you make me some mac and cheese?”

Mia sighed. God could not lead her to another dark-haired man who would prove her a fool again. If that was His plan, Mia was going to make one of her own. Jaw tense, she stepped out of the car and went to retrieve her daughter.