Сандра Браун - Thick as Thieves

Dwayne Hawkins lay sprawled on his back in the dirt. The shotgun had landed yards away from his outstretched arm.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” Arden didn’t stop to think about Ledge’s dire warnings and emphatic instructions. The door unlocked when she opened it and all but fell out. As she ran across the yard, she held her hands over her ears to mute the din coming from the cages.

Ledge seemed impervious to the dogs, to her, to everything. He walked over to Hawkins’s prone form and pressed the muzzle of the rifle against the center of his forehead. In horror, she stumbled toward him, calling his name. He didn’t react.

It wasn’t until she got to within feet of him that she realized Hawkins wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even bleeding. He hadn’t been touched. He lay between the arms of a V, neatly stitched into the dirt by bullets. His eyes were open and blinking rapidly. His rib cage was sawing up and down. Otherwise he was frozen with fright.

Ledge said, “You sicced your dogs on us?”

“I got nothing against you. Honest. Swear. Don’t kill me,” he pled, then began to blubber.

“Who put you up to it?”

“That asshole DA. Dyle.”

“What did he pay you?”

“Nuthin’. We made a deal.”

“What did you get in return, Dwayne?”

“He let me off for…I got this hobby.”

“Dogfighting. Some hobby, Dwayne.”

“You got no call to—”

“Did the DA tell you why he wanted to harm Ms. Maxwell?”

Dwayne didn’t move, but his eyes cut to her. “That her?”

“Did he tell you why he wanted—”

“No, no,” he sputtered. “He said turn the dogs on y’all. That’s all I know.”

“ Y’all ? Both of us?”

“He said you two’d be together.”

“How did he know that?”

“No clue. He said that sooner or later y’all’d show up at the house behind the beauty parlor and for me to be waitin’. I didn’t mean to—”

“Sure you did, Dwayne. You meant for us to be chewed to pieces.”

“I got nuthin’ against you,” he repeated. “Her, either.”

“Well, I’ve got something against you now.” Ledge’s voice had the quality of an icicle. “Do you know what I did in the army?”

“Heard you was in the war, but—”

“Sniper.”

Dwayne whimpered. His Adam’s apple slid up and down.

“That’s right, Dwayne. I could target your eye socket from a mile away. Any. Time. I. Want. And I swear to God I will if you don’t disappear.”

“Disappear? Run off, you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I cain’t. Dyle said if I double-crossed him, he’d kill me.”

“Then you’re up shit creek, Dwayne.”

“Dyle’s got Mex’cans with cartel experience.”

“And I’ve got a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight. If it’s any comfort to you, you’ll be dead before you hear the report. When you look at it that way, you’re probably better off sticking around and sucking up to Dyle until—well, until I take a notion.”

Hawkins hiccupped a sob, and snot trickled from his nostril.

Ledge hitched his head back toward the cages. “I ought to shoot you right now for animal abuse. But if you stay in the neighborhood, in the state, you’re on borrowed time.”

Ledge lifted the muzzle off Hawkins’s forehead, walked over to the shotgun, and removed the shells. He put them in the breast pocket of his shirt. Giving Arden a fearsome look, he nodded her toward the truck.

She walked to it quickly. Ledge walked backward, keeping a bead on Hawkins as he picked up the empty shell casings. When he reached the truck, he got in, replaced the rifle on the floorboard, and put the pickup in reverse.

He said, “Rusty put him up to it. You heard that, right?”

“I heard.”

“Do you believe me now? He killed Brian Foster.” He thumped the steering wheel with his fist. “I goddamn know it.”

Chapter 32

That night in 2000—Rusty

It never would have occurred to Rusty that the pipsqueak bookkeeper would turn brave in the amount of time between when the band of burglars had split up in the parking lot of Burnet’s bar and now, when Foster arrived at their designated meeting place to hide the booty.

Even when Rusty had talked to Foster on the phone half an hour ago to tell him about Ledge’s arrest and the jeopardy it placed them in, Foster had seemed his ordinary self. That was, uncertain and indecisive, anxiety and fear bringing him close to his breaking point.

Which was exactly where Rusty wanted him to be.

But as he watched from his hiding place on the other side of a narrow channel, he saw Foster plowing through the dark woods with less trepidation than one would expect. The beam of his flashlight danced among the trees and bounced over the marshy ground as he walked with a purposeful stride that was out of character with his scared-rabbit personality.

He didn’t slow down or stop until he reached a barricade of cypress knees in the shallows, where he stopped and shone the flashlight around. He aimed it at the grouping of picnic tables a short distance away, apparently believing that he would find Rusty there waiting for him, as he’d been doing the first day Foster had followed Rusty’s instructions and had arrived with a six-pack of cold brew.

“Rusty?”

The dark, sultry stillness of their surroundings absorbed Foster’s voice like a velvet muffler. He cleared his throat. “Rusty?”

On that second try, Rusty detected a trace of misgiving in his tone. He smiled, thinking, That’s more like it . He stepped out from behind his cover of low tree branches, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called in a stage whisper, “Here.”

Foster swept the flashlight beam across the channel, swinging it from side to side until it lit on Rusty, who raised a hand and made a staying motion intended to communicate that Foster was to sit tight.

“Where’s the money?”

“Shh!” Didn’t the idiot realize that sound carried over water?

Rusty unwound the line from around a sapling that he’d used to tie down the canoe, although there was little danger of it drifting. The current here was sluggish at best.

The canoe rocked when he stepped into it, but he maintained his balance. On his knees, he began paddling toward where Foster stood, still aiming the flashlight directly at him.

Speaking only loud enough to make himself heard, Rusty told him to turn it off. “You’ll signal to somebody that we’re here.”

“Nobody’s around.”

“Kill the light, will ya?”

Foster switched it off. Rusty paddled as soundlessly as possible, making shallow dips into the water. As he drew closer, Foster said in a whisper, “Can you see where you’re going?”

“My eyes have adjusted. Catch this line.”

He was about to pitch it when Foster said, “Hold on. Where’s the money?”

“Right here.”

Rusty pointed down to the bag in the hull. He grinned up at Foster. “Look familiar?”

“Open it.”

“Waste of time, but if you insist.”

Rusty heaved a sigh as though he were being unnecessarily inconvenienced, but he was playacting. He had counted on Foster being bright enough to ask to see it before committing himself wholeheartedly to this linkup. Leaning far enough forward to reach the bag, he unzipped it and held it open.

Foster flipped the flashlight back on and aimed it into the bag.

“Satisfied?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Then turn off that goddamn light.”

Foster fumbled in his effort to click it off, almost dropping it.

Rusty couldn’t resist taunting him. “How come you’re so nervous? Are you afraid of the dark?”

“This place looks different in daylight. I’ve never been out here at night.”