Джеймс Паттерсон - Three Women Disappear

CHAPTER 30

BUT THAT WAS an illusion. The others fired, Aaron’s defenders and now mine. A total of fifteen rounds from four different guns. I don’t think anyone missed. Every single shot pierced Clay Hobson in the chest before he ever squeezed his own trigger.

The bullet-riddled man teetered backward, took two clumsy steps, paused, coughed up blood, then fell into the trench behind him, into the roaring inferno of the rig, where instantly the dynamite sticks in his vest combusted.

Boom .

Luckily, our crowd was on the opposite edge of the blast radius. Clay Hobson wasn’t spared. His body was obliterated, while the rest of us remained dazed but still on our feet. Aaron had instinctively clutched downward, curling himself over Sierra. She was shell-shocked, but she would see her fifth birthday.

The one person now trembling in our midst was Jedediah.

The crowd had fully aligned itself with Aaron, defending him, and thereby me. Jed’s goons were nowhere to be seen, successfully evaded by my determined husband.

“Set your gun down, Jed,” said the tattooed woman.

Jed didn’t seem popular here. Maybe everyone saw through him.

The man in the cowboy hat cocked his revolver. “Jedediah Branch, I don’t care how high up you are on the food chain. If you move one molecule of that index finger, I will shoot you in the throat.”

Jed was pale. He lowered his weapon slowly.

I gingerly made my way over to Aaron. I wanted so badly to hug him but he looked frail enough to crush. I didn’t even want to exhale in his direction. Instead, I took my place at his side.

Jed was covered in oil, head to toe, doused by the spray of snuffing out the first derrick. One of the men looked directly at Jed, pulled out a pocket lighter and flicked it without ever breaking eye contact, holding the flame aloft like a torch.

Jed trembled in horror. The implication was terrifying. These people might actually burn him alive. He dropped to his knees, to face, of all people, Aaron.

“No. Please,” Jed began to grovel. “Please don’t.”

He must’ve been convinced Aaron would condemn him. I had to be honest: seeing my husband hold our child, thrashed, bruised, teetering on the edge of death, mere yards away from the man responsible for the agony of it all, I almost wondered if he might actually give the word.

Almost.

But I knew better. I knew what Jed didn’t know.

“You asked me to speak at the rally on behalf of Drake, but you found out I was going to blow the whistle on the whole operation. So you ordered me killed. You ordered my family killed. All so you could keep getting kickbacks from Drake Oil while these laborers got sicker and sicker, poisoned by the drinking water in their own homes.”

Aaron stared at Jed.

“You want me to call them off?” said Aaron to the judge.

Aaron isn’t a murderer.

“I’ll make you glad you did,” said Jed. He kept his movements slow and cautious, well aware of the muzzles pointing at his vital organs. His desperate gaze turned to me. “Please, Miranda. Anything you want.”

“There’s nothing you can say,” I told him.

His ghostly face then peered around the group, frantically calculating.

“I’ll say it,” said Jed. He took a deep breath. “I did what you saw other judges do. I obstructed justice. I was paid to rule in favor of Drake Oil.” He clasped his hands as if in prayer. Imploring. “But I can make it right. Help me make it right.”

It had no value, this sad speech. Under duress, stating something he’d later dispute, it had no legal weight. This was just another stunt. But the moral victory definitely tasted sweet.

What was bizarre was that everyone was staring at me just as much as they were staring at the judge, wondering what kind of verdict I would render.

“Help me, Miranda,” pleaded Jed.

I said, “My family will be giving you back your $145,000.”

I let that sit for a second, watching his confusion.

“The bonus your people paid us?” I continued. “You’ll be getting all that back. Starting with…” I began to fish in the pockets of my jeans. Here came all the cash I had on me, some bills and two coins, a grand total of six dollars and eleven cents. I tossed the wad toward Jedediah, then added, “The rest is coming soon.”

In the distance were sirens.

I looked over at Aaron. He emitted a frail half chuckle, his best version of a laugh. Which meant, given the state he was in, that he found me hysterical.

“There’s an ambulance for you, Mr. Cooper,” said the tattooed lady, kindly. She was pointing to the front gate at the far end of the ranch, ready to assist him down the road.

I still didn’t want to hug my husband for fear of toppling him over, but before I could tell him no, he put Sierra on the ground and embraced me. Sierra glommed on to us to make it a three-way group effort. We held. We held tight.

We held our family as if we’d just learned what the word meant.

EPILOGUE

THAT DAY FELT like a year. And that’s how long it would ultimately take to ram this monstrosity of a case through the Arizona court system, where Aaron had been summoned to testify, where I was now waiting out in the hallway for him.

Sierra was orbiting around the corridor like an urban tumbleweed. She’d abandoned her career in kangaroo development and moved on to portrait photography, snapping pictures of random faces wherever we went.

“There,” she said, pointing into the courtroom. The door had opened briefly, giving her a glimpse of the distant witness stand and her daddy taking a seat. “Daddy! He’s handsome.”

She could hardly comprehend how important this was. He was about to provide landmark testimony that would essentially bury the oil titan for good. I could hardly comprehend it myself. All nine active members of the board would sink. The CEO, the previous CEO, the army of vice presidents, Jedediah and all the other judges who were bought off, the late Clay Hobson, everyone whose hands were dirty.

It got too much for me to watch, to be honest. The trial recognized case after case of ravaged families, and last week, while sitting in on testimony from a balding mother of three, two of whom were in caskets, I wound up getting escorted out of the room. For yelling at the defense.

I’m the reason gavels were invented.

As for Aaron’s culpability, our infamous Tuesday in the canyon helped sway any public doubt as to whether we’d duly suffered. I mean, let’s not forget, Aaron was the one person who tried to drown this demon the moment he learned it existed.

“Mommy, that lady is staring,” said Sierra, having just snapped a photo down the hall. She leaned over to show me a woman on her screen, a woman who was now approaching in a high-heeled cadence that echoed across the marble. She was indeed staring. At me.

Soon her stilettos came to a crisp halt right in front of my chair. She was tall, tall like a statue-of-democracy tall, her business suit failing to hide a well-chiseled figure.

“Miranda Cooper,” she said to me. A question with no question mark.

“Uh,” I replied.

“My apologies for being abrupt. My name is Kelly Miles. I have a job offer.”

“Oh.”

“My team fights the kind of battles I think you’d appreciate. And we happen to need a geologist. Someone to cover the Caspian Sea. Someone like you. Someone hard to stop.”

Hard to stop. Is that my new slogan?

“Ah.” The only reply I could think of besides uh and oh .

She looked like she could dent a concrete wall just by glaring at it. I got the feeling she wasn’t offering me a job so much as telling me she already hired me. The Caspian? Isn’t that Russia? And missiles?