Carla Neggers - Abandon

“I wasn’t trying to kill your father. I just wanted him to suffer for not trusting me.”

She spotted Rook moving into position in the trees behind Jesse and decided to play him for more time. Push him. Let him make his move.

“Yeah, well, Jesse,” she said, “just give me an excuse to kill you, and I will. What about that poor woman you carved up last week in the mountains? That was to throw us off, wasn’t it? Make us think you were a deranged hiker picking his victims at random.”

He shrugged, obviously pleased with himself. “It worked.”

Bastard. “And Harris – you left him to rot like a dead rat in that rooming house.” Her arms were tired from holding up her Browning and keeping Jesse in her sight, but she didn’t waver. “Since you aren’t putting your hands up, as I’ve instructed you several times -”

“I want to go to Mexico and live out my life.” His voice took on a pleading note that she assumed was entirely phony, intended to manipulate her. “Why don’t you come with me? I have money, more than you’ll ever make as a marshal. I haven’t done anything someone similarly provoked wouldn’t have done. It was self-defense with Harris. Whatever happens to Cal is his own doing.”

“Shut up already. This conversation is over. I’ve had enough.”

That was her cue to Rook.

He leaped, tackling Jesse, both of them crashing to the ground. Mackenzie jumped forward, keeping her gun on Jesse.

A knife appeared in his hand. She reacted instantly, stepping on his wrist. He yelped in pain and released the knife. She quickly kicked it away from his reach and helped Rook cuff him and search him.

“Butcher,” she said, standing back from the man who’d maimed her father twenty years ago, who’d slashed her and another woman a week ago and had murdered Harris Mayer. “How many people have you carved up?”

Jesse leered at her. “More than you’ll ever know.”

Rook glanced at her. “Mac – you okay?”

She noticed the blood on her left side. “Just watching you two fight opened up my knife wound.” Actually, more likely jumping over the stream had, but she figured he knew that. “You were stealthy for a city guy, Rook. I’m impressed. I expected an elephant tramping through the woods.”

Jesse spat into the grass. “Cal’s dead because of you.”

“If he dies,” Rook said, “it’ll be because of you.”

Mackenzie stared into Jesse’s eyes, remembering herself crouched in the woods and her father – so handsome, so strong – arguing with this intransigent, arrogant man. She’d sensed his violence. But she was only eleven, and if her father hadn’t known what Jesse would do, how could she?

She looked at Rook. “I know where Cal is.”

“The clearing?”

She nodded. “I’ll go. It’s just up the hill -”

“We’ll go together.” He grabbed Jesse by the shoulder. “On your feet, pal.”

Mackenzie scooped up Jesse’s knife and led the way to the clearing. It had been one of her favorite escapes when she’d first started wandering off on her own as a child, never imagining that anything out here could hurt her – or her family. Jesse had camped there, without permission, all those years ago. And her father had discovered him and worried that the young trespasser posed a danger to his daughter.

When they arrived at the clearing, no one was there. Sunlight shone on the field grass and ferns, and the shade shifted with the wind.

“You had your chance,” Jesse said. “You lose.”

Mackenzie didn’t even glance back at him. “You wouldn’t leave Cal out in the open,” she said, inspecting the trees along the edge of the clearing.

Behind her, Jesse kept talking. “The crooked bastard double-crossed me. Harris helped him.” Anger and entitlement crept into his voice. “I only want what’s mine.”

“There he is.”

Mackenzie crouched under the low, dead branches of a hemlock. Cal was shoved up against the trunk, bound and gagged and in clear physical distress. “Don’t try to move,” she said gently, strands of her hair catching in branches, the acidic smell of pitch and brown needles filling her nostrils. “Hang on, Cal, okay? Help is here.” His gag was yanked so tight, it cut into the sides of his mouth, and she had to use Jesse’s knife to cut it from him. Gingerly, she pulled the bandana from his mouth. “More help’s on the way. We’ll get you to a hospital.”

He blinked at her, tried to speak, then tried again. “Beanie?”

“She’s fine.” Mackenzie couldn’t remember him ever referring to the woman he’d married by her nickname. “Gus is with her.”

“Gus…those two…” Cal’s shoulders sagged, his head lolling to one side, but his eyes focused on Mackenzie. “Jesse – I wanted to get him out of my life. All our lives.”

“Save your strength, okay? We can talk later.”

She cut his hands free. He was dehydrated, his arms and face bruised and beaten. He licked his parched lips, his tongue swollen. “He killed Lynn. She wasn’t…I helped Jesse extort money from her boss. But Lynn and I…” He caught Mackenzie’s fingers in his. “I loved her.”

Mackenzie thought of the photograph in Bernadette’s bloody hand. Lynn must have been the name of the blond woman with Cal.

“Jesse was right about the shed,” Cal whispered.

“What about the shed?”

But he drifted into unconsciousness. She felt for a pulse, but it was thready. She broke off dried branches above them, trying to give him more room, more air, and get a better look at him.

And she saw the blood on his lower left side.

She and Rook had gotten to Cal in time to save him from dehydration, exposure and a beating, but not from a stab wound – not, she realized now, from Jesse Lambert. Jesse had lied. There was no hope for Cal, no chance to save him regardless of what she or Bernadette or anyone did.

Cal was another of Jesse’s victims.

The loons circled in the water in front of the dock, closer to Bernadette’s house than usual, and Mackenzie wondered if they knew, on some instinctive level, that their presence was a comfort. As a child, she’d hide among the rocks and trees along the shore and watch them, always careful not to disturb them.

She stood on the threshold of the shed, smelling the lawn mower grease and the dust and the half-opened bag of composted cow manure. Bernadette was at the hospital, getting stitched up. Gus had accompanied her.

Cal had died before paramedics could get to him under the hemlock.

As she stepped into the shed, Mackenzie was aware of Rook behind her. “Before my father was hurt, it never occurred to me I could be in any danger out here at the lake. In town, maybe. But not here.”

“Sounds like a normal kid to me.”

“I suppose.”

She glanced back at Rook, any effects of his encounter with Jesse Lambert impossible to detect. She and Rook had turned Jesse over to the state police. Jurisdictional issues would get sorted out. In the meantime, the locals had their slasher in custody.

“You FBI types won’t object if I take a look around in here, will you?” she asked.

Rook shrugged. “Would it matter?”

Mackenzie didn’t answer. She was focused on what Cal had told her before he’d died. She found a sawhorse on the back wall and dragged it to the middle of the floor, near her father’s old bloodstains. He hadn’t been distracted or careless that day – and his maiming wasn’t an accident. Jesse had sabotaged the saw, setting off a chain reaction her father had been helpless to stop.

It had been one of Jesse Lambert’s early acts of deliberate, malicious violence.

Mackenzie was convinced there had been others over the years. They hadn’t started up again just with the attacks on her and the hiker last week, on Harris – on Bernadette and Cal. They’d been ongoing.