Acres, Natalie - Bang the Blower [Country Roads 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (14 page)

“Yes,” he breathed. “Can’t feel my heartbeat though.”

“You still have one, buddy,” the cop said, patting his arm. “Paramedics are on the way.” He lifted his shirt and checked out the wound.

“I want my little girl outta here. She ain’t safe!”

“Frank, no!” she screamed as Hank forcibly brought her to her feet. “You’re hurt. You’re bleeding, Frank!”

A second later, Hank picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder, his arm securing her hips. “Hank Hinman! Damn you! I want to be with Frank. Put me down!”

“Get her out of here, I said. It ain’t safe!” Frank’s tortured words tore at her soul. He was apparently still concerned about her safety when he should’ve been worried about his own.

Hank stormed toward the house with Julie in his arms. She fought him every step of the way. She needed to be with Frank. She didn’t want to be under Hank’s protection when Frank had been shot trying to save her!

“Damn it, Julie. Be still. You heard him. You aren’t safe. Frank knows something, and we need to find out what’s going on. See if someone can talk to him. Please give us a chance to do that!”

“I can’t lose him!” she wailed. “Please, Hank. Let me go to him. I can’t let him die alone.”

“Honey, listen,” Hank said, releasing her body but securing her arms. “Frank isn’t dying. The paramedics will be here soon, and Frank knows everyone. Those guys will work like crazy to save him.”

The detectives scurried around, trying to secure the area as they searched the property, ducking behind bushes and trees as if they thought someone else lurked nearby. In the distance, Julie heard Duke. “Frank, stay with me, buddy. You’re too much of a fighter to give up on us now. I’ll never forgive you if you crash on me now.”

In the distance, someone called for an ambulance again. A detective approached. “Hank, I need to question her if you don’t mind.”

“Actually, I do, Agent Dickerson. This isn’t a good time.”

“Then maybe I should ask you, and she can respond, if she knows why a woman by the name of Annie Taylor wants to see her dead?”

“What?” Hank screeched, tightening the grip he’d fastened around Julie’s arm.

“The reason Frank told you to get her out of here,” he began, tilting his chin toward Julie, “is because he must’ve known that there’s still a threat to Julie. It’s an ever-present danger, too. The buzz is out among the drivers. She’s been hiring assassins to do her dirty work.

“We just found a Mustang convertible on the back side of your property, down the road a bit, and it’s registered to Annie. Would you happen to know why she’d want to harm Julie?”

“Hank?” Julie searched his eyes and when she saw he was as surprised as she was, she didn’t press for his opinion. At this point, the only thing that mattered was that Carl Carlton, a man she’d once considered her boss, shot the only man she’d ever recognized as a father figure.

“I couldn’t tell you. My brother and I had a relationship with Annie, but we all parted on exceptional terms. She moved on and accepted that we didn’t want her in our lives. When we severed ties, we didn’t tell her we left her because of Julie. Maybe she assumed, but even so, she had no reason to blame our decision on someone else.”

“Apparently, she didn’t move on,” Agent Dickerson said. “From what we’ve gathered from intercepted calls and other research, she hired Carl Carlton to kill Julie. Carl is who we suspected of putting a hit on you, and we were right on the money.”

“I barely knew Carl,” Hank said.

“Seems he felt you were responsible for taking his driver away from him, and according to Carl’s son—and we questioned him yesterday—you became his enemy overnight. Apparently, Carl built his entire team around Julie.” Agent Dickerson took a deep breath and said, “Julie, based on several phone calls we’ve overheard, it appears Carl is responsible for your father’s death, too.”

“Oh no, he wouldn’t have known my father. Carl is approaching fifty, and my father would’ve been in his seventies if he’d lived.”

“You might want to look him up on the internet. They were close friends. And Carl wasn’t approaching fifty. He’s seventy-one.”

“What?” Hank asked, obviously surprised, too.

“Plastic surgery,” Agent Dickerson said, continuing right away, “Julie, have you ever met Annie Taylor?”

“In passing, a few times. Why?”

“Can you think of any reason why she’d want you dead?”

“Like I told you,” Hank replied for her. “My brother and I had a relationship with her at one time.”

“So you think this is some kind of jealous rage?”

“It would have to be,” Hank answered him. “Julie isn’t the type of person to scout for enemies.”

“Actually that’s not true, is it, Miss Jenkins?” Agent Dickerson asked.

She shook her head.

“Julie, don’t let him talk you into saying something you’ll regret.”

“I don’t mind,” she began, looking over his shoulder and watching as Frank seemed to come around. He was laughing and talking to the paramedics as they loaded him in the ambulance. “But you’ll have to question me at the hospital. I’m riding with Frank.”

“Actually, you can’t go, Miss Jenkins,” another detective said, entering the room. “Annie Taylor was just found in the garage. Her neck was sliced. We have some questions for you.”

About that time, a blinding light caught Hank’s eye. “This may have to wait, Detective. Can you get a few of your men together and follow me?”

* * * *

Sam McMann watched the police come and go. He noticed the detectives snooping around the house, and hid from them as they walked through the stables. If they thought he was going down without a fight, they had him mixed up with Julie Jenkins. The dumb bitch gave up as soon as she had a wreck worthy of reporting.

Afterwards, she decided to take up stock car racing. What a stupid cunt!

He rubbed his jaw. Then again, she was a slight improvement over the other dumb bimbo the Hinman duo brought home. That Annie Taylor was a nut job, a real quack. She owned a few cars, earned some quick cash, and started hiring men to kill Julie. Like he’d do that
for her
.

Just because he fucked Annie, didn’t mean he’d kill for her. If that was a stipulation she wanted satisfied prior to screwing him, she should’ve asked first. Instead, she bent over, showed her pretty pierced clit, and thought she had him by the balls because he shot off like a rocket inside her tight pussy.

Hell. He’d seen and fucked better. Things were about to get a lot sweeter for him, too. Julie Jenkins was a prize, and before he killed her, he planned to fuck her silly.

Satisfied everyone finally left the scene, Sam eased away from the loft. Jumping away from the ladder, he dusted off his jeans and took a deep breath.

He was home free.

“Put your hands where I can see them,” Duke Hinman called out. “Don’t try anything stupid. I will drop you where you stand.”

Slowly, Sam raised his arms high in the air. “I’m the only one here, but I know you can’t be talking to me. I’ve been covering your asses all day.”

“Is that a fact?” Hank asked, standing over him and looking down from the loft.

“Well Hank, I didn’t see you up there. There must be another way in and out of that loft. I must not be as sharp as I thought. Never saw you while I was up there watching the house for ya.”

“Guess I failed to mention that I spent several years in the Marines. I can scale any wall in front of me.”

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Hinman?”

“I reckon so,” he said. “Annie always thought so.”

“Annie?” Sam asked, pretending he’d never heard the name. “You mean Julie?”

“No,” Hank said, descending. “I mean Annie. You know, the gal you killed?”

“Me?” he asked, arching a brow. “I ain’t killed anyone today, Hank, or in the last week.”

“Is that right?” he asked, jumping down and landing in front of him. “Cops think several of the shots fired this morning came from this barn. And beat it all, they think they’ve heard of a Sam McMann. Any ideas about that?”

Sam shook his head. “None I could think of. Why?”

Duke crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re a hired gun, aren’t you Sam?”

“What are we living in here, Duke? An action-adventure movie?” He laughed aloud, thinking he’d better start thinking fast on his feet.

“One would wonder,” Duke replied. “Why did you kill Annie?”

“I didn’t.”

“I think you did,” Duke said.

“That makes two of us,” Hank told him.

“If you’re looking for a guilty party, you’d better have an appropriate place to aim the blame. Might want to start with that old man you seem to trust with your lives.”

“I trust Frank with more than my life,” Hank assured him. “I’d trust him to the end of the earth with Julie’s as well.”

Realizing he was fighting a losing battle, Sam gnawed on the inside of his jaw and decided to play devil’s advocate. “Annie wasn’t anything but a common slut. You guys know that.”

When the brothers stared at him like they were willing to listen, he continued. “Okay, I’ll come clean with you. I killed her. I didn’t want to do it, but fact was, I had to do it to save your Julie. She put the word out. There was two hundred thousand on the table to anyone who pulled the trigger. When she found out Carl Carlton took out a ten million dollar life insurance policy on Julie, why, she couldn’t see Julie dead fast enough.”

Hank scrubbed the side of his face, raking his fingers over the two-day growth of beard. “Truth is, you already collected a hundred grand from her. She paid you the second you secured a job here with us.”

“That’s a fact,” he admitted. “But you gotta believe me, boys. I never planned to hurt Julie. I pursued and then accepted a position here because I wanted to protect her. Why would I harm an innocent woman?”

“For the very reason you killed Annie,” Hank said, stepping forward and looking mad enough to kill someone—probably him.

“I didn’t want to hurt Annie. If you can believe this, Annie was actually a friend of mine.”

“With friends like you, who needs to go to hell and meet the devil, right?” Duke asked.

Sam took a deep breath. “All right. I admit it. She provoked me, and I lost my cool.”

“It was someone else’s fault, was that it?” Duke asked, shooting his brother a skeptical glance.

Sam couldn’t read them. It was hard to gauge whether or not he was getting anywhere.

“Well?”

“Pretty much,” Sam agreed. “Yeah.”

“Do you mind to tell me how you figure?” Duke asked. “I mean, did Annie ask you to kill her? Did she tell you she wanted to die?”

“No, of course not,” Sam replied. “Are you kidding me? Annie was so self-centered that she would’ve pushed her own child in front of a train in order to save herself.”

“Odd you mentioned that,” Hank said.

“What?”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant with your unborn child? I’m willing to bet she did, and you killed her so your wife and other children wouldn’t know,” Duke said.

Sam gulped. “Pregnant? Annie was pregnant?”

“Reckon he didn’t know that part,” Hank drawled.

“She wasn’t pregnant with my child,” Sam said, stunned.

“The hell she wasn’t,” Duke said. “Cops found her car. They discovered a letter she left behind as well. Annie was pregnant with your baby. She claims the two of you met at a race—she didn’t specify when or where, dragsters or stock cars—just mentioned the two of you knew one another, fooled around, and she got pregnant. For some reason, she wanted the world to know that you fathered her child in the event something happened to her.”

Sam felt like he was smothering. The rage he’d often felt when he was a child surfaced quicker than he could control the fury spinning. Regrouping, he pulled his thoughts together and decided on the best way to play this out.

Hank and Duke stepped closer. They looked intimidating and acted angrier than recently castrated bulls.

“Annie was going to tell my wife!”

“He’s grasping now,” Hank said.

“No, I’d say that’s about the gist of it. She had it in her to use blackmail to get what she wanted,” Duke pointed out.

“Annie wanted me, and she was willing to do anything to get me.”

“And why would she want a broken-down cowboy posing as a mechanic for a race team owned by the men she used to have in her bed?”

He knew the excuse provided was going nowhere fast. He pursed his lips and tried to think like a Hinman. What could he say to dig himself out of this hole?

“Tell you what, Sam. I’m gonna cut you some slack. We know you killed Annie. You admitted as much. Tell me why, and we’ll call it a day. This is just between men. No one is here but you and us. You tell us the truth and convince us it’s like you say, and you can walk out here without a hassle,” Hank said. “But I never want to see you back here. If I do, I’ll kill you and bury your body on this land in a way no one will find you.”

“In other words, he’ll kill ya, bury your corpse, and pour a slab of concrete over you so no one will ever think about where you’re buried. It’s a burial he once watched on television,” Duke explained, making a mockery out of him and the situation. “The show didn’t warn viewers to avoid trying this at home, so he’s always wanted to attempt something similar.”