J. Black - The Survivors Club

He had to be careful. That’s why he used the landline, not his cell. Heaven only knew what they could do with cell phones. He lowered his voice. “You didn’t jump the gun?”

“What are you talking about?”

He was ninety-nine percent sure nobody was monitoring this call—he’d done a sweep this morning, but still, you never knew. He said carefully, “Was it you?”

“Was it me what ?”

“Try to keep up, okay? You took the dog. We all know how impulsive you are—”

She exploded. “ I’m impulsive? Look what you did in Houston! You know, Michael? Before you lecture me, you’d better take a look at yourself first. You’d better take your own damn advice!”

“What about Steve Barkman?”

“What about Steve Barkman?”

He kept his voice steady, even though he was angry. “I want to know how far you’ve gone off the reservation.”

“ Me? What about you ?”

“I’m asking you to tell me what else you’ve done. Did he approach you?” He almost said, “Did he blackmail you?” but stopped himself just in time.

There was a pause. Then Jaimie said, “Fuck you, Michael! Just…fuck you !”

And she hung up.

Michael sat there, hearing only the dial tone.

His heart thudded in his ears. His mouth went dry. What did Jaimie do?

Whatever it was, however deep she was into this, she wasn’t about to tell him. He hit End, planning to call her back, but the phone rang before he could punch in her number.

“Look, Jaimie—”

It wasn’t Jaimie. It was Brayden, his little sister. And she was crying.

He asked her what was wrong, but she was sobbing too hard for him to understand what she was saying.

At first.

CHAPTER 22

Tess turned onto Spanish Trail headed for the freeway. Her mind wasn’t on Michael DeKoven. It was on Alec Sheppard.

There was a spark there. She didn’t like to think about that.

She loved Max.

But the simple fact was, Max lived in California. She could relocate to California, but she couldn’t relocate to the world Max lived in. She couldn’t fit inside the bubble of his celebrity.

Her life was here. She worked homicide and it was part of the fabric that made her. Her identity as a homicide cop went far back. It went way back to her childhood, when her closest friend was kidnapped and a big, strong, gentle man had helped her through. His name was Detective Joe Clayborn, and he’d promised her he would find her best friend, and after he did—after he found Emily’s body—Joe Clayborn promised her he would find her killer and put him away.

He found him.

He found the neighbor kid before he could kill again.

Tess couldn’t live inside Max’s bubble. He would argue that she could do what she wanted, could pursue her own career. But she knew she’d be caught up in it—all of it, the tabloids and the fanzines and the paparazzi—and she didn’t want that kind of life. She wouldn’t be able to ply her trade there. Cops were insular and they kept to their own circles, and she wouldn’t fit in. She wouldn’t be effective. She would be an outsider.

It was hard enough here, with Danny teasing her all the time.

So she didn’t know what to do.

She was attracted to Alec Sheppard, but it was only because she wasn’t spending every day with Max, day after day, week after week, month after month. Absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. It made you forget.

If she and Max had any shot at all, they needed to be together.

And that was a bridge too far—for both of them.

Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night and a voice screamed inside her head: What are you doing ?

But she couldn’t cut the tie. Couldn’t. Not yet—

That was when Tess felt it—a piece falling into place.

Up ahead was the little general store in Rincon Valley. She pulled off the road and parked.

There were two reasons to stop at the store. One, she needed chocolate—dark chocolate, preferably—which she knew helped her think. And two, she might have to make more phone calls, and she didn’t want to do that while she was driving.

Inside the store, Tess bought a Dove Bar, her hands fumbling as she pulled the debit card from her purse.

When something happened in a case, she always felt she was on the edge of something big. Tremendous. Sometimes, too big for her to assimilate.

She felt like that now.

The woman at the cash register had long blonde hair and looked like she was a couple of years out of Rodeo Queen range. She said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m good.”

She walked out of the store and into the parking lot and out toward the back. There were corrals behind the store, and horses. This was a nice little spot, the Rincon Mountains rising up to the east, their golden flanks shadowed navy blue by clouds that seemed to wander over the mountain like a herd of buffalo.

The air smelled rural, like her place on Harshaw Road. The horses were at their feed tub at the far end of a pasture, their tails swishing. She could hear them stomping and banging their noses against the feed tub—sound traveled out here. It reminded her of Jaimie Wolfe and her equestrian center, and she wondered if Jaimie was part of the narrative she was building, too.

She punched in Alec Sheppard’s number and he answered on the first ring.

“You said something I didn’t quite get,” Tess said without preamble. “What did you mean when you said you were ‘getting in shape after the accident?’”

“Oh, that. I got busted up pretty bad in Florida.”

He sounded embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“I had what they call a partial malfunction. My reserve canopy tangled with the main canopy, and neither of them inflated. Do you know what terminal velocity means?”

“No.” Tess’s eye followed an old ranch truck—seventies vintage—pulling into the lot. Sunlight arrowed off the bumper and she shaded her eyes. When the engine shut off she smelled gas.

Sheppard said, “It’s an equation. People fall at different rates. If you weigh more, you fall faster. There are a lot of conditions that can change your velocity. In my case, the canopy was a mess but it did slow me down. Because the two of them were wadded up together, they created even more drag—that got me down to sixty or seventy miles per hour. I got lucky. Really lucky. I thought I was dead.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing much I could do. I tried to make like a flying squirrel and hope for the best. That was probably what saved me—pure luck I landed the way I wanted to. When I hit, my entire body absorbed the impact. If I’d gone in headfirst or hit with my feet, I would have accordioned, and that could have killed me. At the very least I’d have serious internal injuries.

“That’s a dangerous sport.”

He actually laughed. “I made one hell of an impression—literally—went in six, seven inches down in the bog. Just smushed into it—the mud got into my eyes, my nose, my mouth, I was this close to drowning. Thank God someone got to me in time to pull me out. Even so, the wind was knocked out of me and my heart stopped. I broke my ribs, collarbone, fractured my pelvis—”

“You survived all that?”

“I was lucky someone was there to give me CPR.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I was dead, for a very short period of time.”

Tess felt the tingle low in her abdomen. She had always—literally—felt with her gut. When she was getting close, when everything came together or was about to…

“You should go with me sometime,” Alec Sheppard said. Tess barely heard him. There was a buzzing in her ears. She saw the burned and crushed frame of the Spokane Indians’ bus—a photograph that had accompanied the article.