J. Jance - Devil’s Claw

At the time of Sandra Ridder’s arrest, no one had been particularly interested in what her daughter had to say. Within days the child had been shunted out of town and sent off to live with her grandmother and great-grandmother. Instinctively, Lucy had known that the diskette and whatever else her mother had hidden that night had to have something to do with her father’s death, but she didn’t know what. And she didn’t know what to do about it. Her father had come to school earlier that day, at lunch. He had taken her across the street for a doughnut and had warned her that Sandra might be in some kind of trouble at work. He had said something about Sandra being a spy, but that had seemed too silly, too far-fetched to be real. That was something that only happened in the movies or on TV.

Grieving for her father, lost, angry, and isolated, Lucy had kept quiet. She had told no one about that nighttime trek to the entrance of Cochise Stronghold, not even her Grandma Bagwell. Instead, Lucy had waited. It was almost two years later when, leaving the house without permission, she had taken a solitary hike back to Cochise Stronghold.

Working quickly, she had wrestled the heavy rocks out of the way. Underneath, she had discovered one of the plastic containers her father had used to pack canned peaches or pears into their sack lunches. Inside the container, Lucy had found two things-the blue computer disk and a tiny gun. Touching the metal handle, Lucy recognized that this wasn’t a toy. It was a real gun, and Lucy knew at once that this was most likely the weapon-the long-missing weapon-that had killed her father. Her fingers shrank away from the cold steel, but she grabbed the diskette. This was something her father had given her, something Tom Ridder had obviously meant for Lucy to have. Her mother had taken it from her, and now Lucy was taking it back.

Now, once again within yards and spying distance of the entrance to Cochise Stronghold, Lucy walked her bike off the roadway and hid it in the brush. She walked up to the sign. She was relieved to see that none of the rocks seemed to have been disturbed. That meant that if her mother was coming here, she had not yet arrived.

Returning to her hiding place just beyond the crest of the creek bank, Lucy snuggled herself deep into the protective warmth of her bedroll. With Big Red keeping watch from the branches of a nearby oak, girl and hawk settled in to wait. Despite her intention of staying wide awake, physical exertion worked its magic, and Lucy fell sound asleep. She might have missed the whole thing if a warning squawk from Big Red hadn’t brought her wide awake.

The last time Lucy had looked at the entrance sign it had been bathed in the faded glow of moonlight. Now it was fully illuminated in the glow of headlights from a nearby parked car. And on the ground, under the sign, was a woman on her hands and knees, struggling to shift the rocks from place to place.

With a catch in her throat, Lucy watched as her mother-a woman she hadn’t seen in almost eight years, a woman she had hoped never to see again-carefully moved the rocks to one side. Lucy found herself paralyzed by a storm of emotion. She wanted to speak to Sandra, and yet, at the same time, she didn’t want to. In the end, not knowing what to say, Lucy stayed where she was. She was still sitting there as unmoving as a carved wooden statue when a car pulled up and stopped beside the sign.

“Do you need help?” a man asked from inside the idling vehicle.

Quickly, Sandra Ridder stood up and walked over to the car. Lucy couldn’t hear all that was being said, but evidently it was enough to satisfy the guy’s curiosity. “Okay, then,” he concluded at last. “Since you’re all right, I’ll just go on and go.”

Sandra and Lucy both watched as the vehicle’s taillights disappeared behind a tangle of underbrush and scrub oak. Momentarily distracted, neither of them saw the figure of another man suddenly emerge from the gloom into the bright glow of headlights.

“Well, well, well,” he said with an audible sneer. “Imagine meeting you here!”

Lucy heard Sandra’s sharp intake of breath. She stepped back one full step. “What are you doing here?” she gasped.

“What do you think?” he growled, closing the gap between them with one long stride. “I came to collect what’s mine.” He paused then and looked around. “What a clever girl,” he added. “To think you’d hide it out in the open like this, hidden and yet almost in plain sight.”

“Hide what?” Sandra asked.

He lunged at her then and grabbed her by one arm. “Don’t go all coy and innocent on me, Sandy, honey. I know the score here. I know all about it.”

“Stop,” she said, squirming and trying to free her captured arm. “You’re hurting me.”

“And I’m going to hurt you a whole hell of a lot more if you don’t give it to me right now! Now, for the last time, where is it?”

Sandra seemed to go limp in his grasp. “There,” she said, pointing.

“Where?”

“Under the sign. I buried it.”

“Well, suppose you unbury it?” With that, he flung her away from him and sent her stumbling forward. Only by catching and steadying herself against the body of the sign did she keep from falling.

Barely daring to breathe, Lucy watched the ugly drama unfold. For the next several moments the man loomed over a kneeling Sandra Ridder while she removed several more rocks. And the whole time it was happening, Lucy was all too aware of what her mother had yet to discover. If what the man wanted was the diskette, it was no longer where Sandra Ridder had left it all those years earlier.

“You little bitch,” he said as she worked. “Whatever made you think you could hold out on me? Whatever made you think you could get away with it?”

“I didn’t. I just wanted-”

“Shut up and get it. Now!”

Part of Lucy wanted to call out to her mother and warn her. “Look over here,” she wanted to say. “The diskette is right here in my pack.” But another part of her-that primitive but still powerful instinct for self-preservation-kept her as still and silent as a frightened fawn.

At last Sandra wrested one final rock out of the way and plunged, elbow-deep, into the hole. She seemed to struggle for a moment, searching with her fingers. Then a look of utter disbelief crossed her face, but she said nothing.

“All right,” the man said impatiently, holding out his hand. “Don’t be so slow about it. Hand it over.”

Obligingly Sandra Ridder removed her hand from the hole. When she did so, Lucy caught the smallest glint of metal and knew that Sandra was holding the one thing that remained in the container-the tiny gun that had been entombed right along with the diskette.

“Stop right there,” Sandra ordered, aiming the weapon at the man who, even then, was bearing down on her.

But he didn’t stop, and, unfortunately for Sandra Ridder, she didn’t pull the trigger. From Lucy’s hidden vantage point, what happened next seemed to do so in slow motion. The two separate figures of man and woman merged into one writhing mass of flesh. The two-headed creature fell to the ground, rolling this way and that. When the gunshot came, it was so muffled between the two clenched and struggling bodies that, bare yards away, Lucy hardly heard it. There was a single high-pitched shriek of pain, then slowly the two co-joined figures drew apart. When they had separated completely, the man was standing upright with the gun in his hand while an injured Sandra writhed and sobbed on the ground.

For several long seconds, nothing happened. Then there was an ominous click as the man tried to fire the gun while holding it at point-blank range inches from Sandra’s head. “Shit!” he muttered after attempting to fire the weapon one more time. “The damn thing must be empty.”