Boneyard Ridge (21 page)

He didn’t answer, but the tense set of his profile suggested she’d found a sore spot.

“You could let me go. Just end this madness here, once and for all. You know I didn’t do anything that wasn’t my God-given right. I had a right to protect myself from Clinton. I had a right to choose what to do with my own body.”

“I can’t stop them,” he said quietly. “I can barely control them as it is, and if I were to show any sign of softness—”

“They’d destroy you,” she finished for him, overwhelmed with hopelessness.

“I
am
sorry.” Asa looked at her then, his brown eyes surprisingly sympathetic. “I always liked you, Susie McKenzie. You had fire.”

She looked away, her gaze settling on the back of Kenny Bradbury’s shaggy head where he sat in the driver’s seat of the panel van carrying her inexorably toward her fate.

Please,
she thought,
please let Hunter have been conscious. Please let him figure out what I was trying to tell him.

* * *

“
T
HESE NEED TO
be tested for toxins,” Hunter said without preamble, handing Alexander Quinn the four bottles of herbs Susannah had taken from the hotel kitchen before she’d been ambushed by the Bradburys. Quinn had met him on the road at the place where Hunter and Susannah had stashed their extra supplies. “And if there’s anything in them, the cops need to get a warrant for Marcus Lemonde’s desk in the Event Planning office.”

Hunter bent to pick up both packs and slung them over one shoulder, already headed back to the borrowed SUV.

Quinn followed at a brisk pace. “Where are you going?”

“Boneyard Ridge. There’s a place there called Laurel Bald. That’s where they’re taking her.”

“The Bradburys?” Quinn asked.

Hunter stopped midstep, turning to look at his boss. “You knew about the Bradburys?” All he’d told Quinn on the phone was that their plans had gone sideways and now Susannah had been kidnapped. He hadn’t mentioned the Bradburys. Of that, he was certain.

“I know her real name is Susan McKenzie and that she killed a man named Clinton Bradbury when she was sixteen years old.”

Hunter stared at Quinn in silence before he breathed out a stream of profanities. “Of course you knew. You know every damn thing there is to know about everybody, don’t you? You probably even knew that if you assigned me to watch her, I’d end up willing to take a bullet for her. Because I’m that sort of guy, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are. I just didn’t have any idea you’d be willing to do it because you’d fallen in love with her.”

Hunter started to protest, but the words never got past the back of his throat. What was the point of arguing? If he wasn’t already in love with her, he was awfully close, wasn’t he? Even now, the thought that he might not reach her in time to stop the Bradburys from doing whatever they planned to do to her was enough to make him feel weak-kneed and sick.

But it was also enough to make him ignore the pain still throbbing in his head, because he didn’t have time to worry about whether or not he had a concussion. He couldn’t afford to wait for a CAT scan or to get checked out by the paramedics.

Susannah needed him. And she’d given him a way to find her.

“You’re going after her.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am,” Hunter said, already moving toward the SUV again.

“You’ll need backup.”

“I probably will,” he conceded, opening the driver’s-side door.

“I’ll get these samples to a lab. And I’ll put some agents on call. Will six be enough? They can be in Boneyard Ridge in half an hour. Siege protocol?”

Hunter thought about it. He wasn’t sure how many Bradburys there were in Boneyard Ridge, but unless they were all commando-trained warriors, they wouldn’t be any match for seven well-trained agents from The Gates.

“Six should do it. Siege protocol,” he agreed as he slid behind the steering wheel and put the keys in the ignition. “If there aren’t toxins in those herbs, then get back to that hotel and figure out what Billy Dawson’s up to, even if you have to call in a fake bomb threat to get the cops involved. Because I’ve got something else to do.”

Hunter put the SUV in Drive and pulled away from Quinn, heading north toward Boneyard Ridge.

* * *

D
AWN WAS STILL
several hours away when the panel van carrying Susannah and her captors chugged its way up the winding mountain road to Laurel Bald near the top of Boneyard Ridge. Next to her, Asa Bradbury released an audible sigh, as if reaching his home territory came as a physical relief.

She herself felt nothing but sheer, gut-twisting panic. No matter how much she’d once loved this place, Boneyard Ridge had long since become a place of fear and loathing. Her grandmother was gone from this place, leaving only a mixed bag of memories and the ever-present threat of violence and retribution.

Retribution she was about to face, after so many years trying to run from the inevitable.

“Where do you plan to keep me?” she asked, trying not to let her fear show.

She could tell from the look in Asa’s eyes that she hadn’t been successful. “Jennalyn’s cabin. She’s made you up a place to rest in the cellar. It’ll be a mite cold, so I asked her to make sure you had extra blankets.”

“You’re keeping me prisoner in a root cellar. In October.”

“Did you expect a comfortable guest suite?” he asked in a flat tone, slanting another look her way. “You killed my brother.”

“In self-defense.”

“So you say.”

“You know it was self-defense. You as much as admitted it.”

“You’ll have your say at the tribunal.”

“Will I be provided with legal counsel?” she countered, deciding to play the game by Asa’s rules. If he wanted to pretend he was seeking justice, then she would humor him. But on her own terms.

“You can serve as your own counsel, just as we’ll serve as Clinton’s.”

“And the judge?”

“Three of our elders.”

“Names?”

He was silent for a long moment. “Colton Bradbury, Mary Partlain and Brantley Bradbury.”

She tried to place their positions in the Bradbury family. Asa’s parents were both dead, but Asa’s father had had two brothers, if she remembered correctly. “Colton’s your uncle, right? And Mary Partlain?”

“My father’s cousin. And Brantley is my uncle Bevill’s eldest son.”

“And in what possible way is this a fair tribunal?”

“You’ll have your say. It’s more than you gave Clinton.”

“Oh, he had his say.” Anger eclipsed fear as the images from that terrible night flooded her brain, driving out everything but rage at what Clinton Bradbury had forced her to do to defend herself. “He said a lot of profane and wicked things to me before he tried to pin me to my bed, strip off my clothes and violate my body against my will.”

“You’re wasting your breath on me, Susan. I am not the one you’ll need to convince.” Even as he spoke, the van pulled to a stop.

Kenny Bradbury cut the engine and turned around to look at Asa. “We’re here.”

Asa rose to his feet and reached across to open the panel van’s side door. Attached to him by the handcuff, Susannah had no choice but to rise as well, following him out of the van into the cold night air. Her ragged breath condensed as it hit the cold air, mingling with the misty swirls of Asa’s slower, calmer exhalations.

In silence, he led her to an angled door, well-hidden by high-growing grass, about ten yards from the small, silent cabin that slumbered in the clearing. Surrounded by towering evergreens and autumn-hued hardwoods already starting to shed their leaves for the winter, the clearing was overgrown and littered with fallen leaves that crunched beneath Susannah’s boots as she stumbled after him, tugged along by the handcuff and the sheer strength of Asa Bradbury’s determination.

He waited for Kenny to unlock the padlock holding the cellar door closed, then nudged Susannah down a set of cinder-block stairs descending into the dark belly of the root cellar. With a tug of a chain, he turned on the only light in the room, a bald bulb screwed into a fixture attached to an exposed wooden beam in the cellar’s unfinished ceiling.

He gave her a prod toward an old, battered sofa someone had pushed up against one of the cellar’s dirt walls. “Sit.”

She did as he ordered, gauging her chances at making a run for her life. Not good, she decided as he deftly removed the cuff around his wrist and slid it through one link of a chain hanging from a hook in the ceiling. “You should have enough chain to reach the toilet if you need it,” he said, waving his hand toward a portable toilet chair standing nearby. “And you should be comfortable enough sleeping. I suggest you try to rest. There’s not a lot of night left.”

Without saying anything more to her, he headed back up the steps and disappeared through the door, closing it behind him. She heard the rattle of the padlock being reengaged.

Then there was nothing but silence, broken only by the thunderous cadence of her own pulse in her ears.

She checked her watch. Only four hours had passed since she and Hunter had left Quinn’s cabin for their mission at the hotel.

Hunter, she thought, her heart sinking. What if she’d been wrong? What if he’d really been unconscious, or worse? She’d seen him breathing—she’d been able to reassure herself of that much, at least. But he might have sustained a closed head injury. His brain might be swelling right now, deadly pressure building in his skull.

Why hadn’t she made them let her check on him?

How could she have left him behind that way?

She had to get out of here. Yes, the cellar door was padlocked, and yes, she was handcuffed to a chain, but there were ways of getting out of handcuffs, right? All she had to do was find the right tool.

The cellar was mostly bare—probably cleaned out specifically to make sure she wouldn’t find anything to aid in her escape. But after a few minutes of searching, and stretching the chain to its limit, she found an old mesh bag of what looked to be desiccated, rotted potatoes. The blackened lumps only vaguely resembled their original state, and the smell rising from the bag was less than pleasant. But the bag itself was tied at one end by a metal twist tie. Susannah unwound the tie from the bag and stripped away the paper coating to reveal a thin, flexible wire.

“That’ll do,” she murmured with satisfaction, returning to the sofa and bending the wire in an L-shape. Before her grandmother had pulled her out of her father’s home, she’d learned a few lessons in, well, less-than-legal arts. One of those things had been how to pick a handcuff lock.

The wire her father had used to teach her had been a twisted paper clip, which was considerably stiffer and less flexible than the twist tie she was currently applying to the handcuff lock. But with some finesse and, she had to admit, a whole lot of luck, she managed to get the wire in just the right position to spring the lock. The cuff fell open and she pulled her hand free, elated.

But her elation seeped away almost immediately. She’d won only the first battle, she knew, her gaze sliding toward the closed cellar doors at the top of the cinder-block stairs. The next part of the war would be the hardest. She had to figure out a way to get rid of the padlock trapping her in place.

From the inside, without a single tool at her disposal.

Chapter Sixteen

Hunter parked near the top of the ridge and consulted the map application on the burner phone Quinn had provided. Based on a few calculations and some extrapolation of information he’d found online, he figured that Laurel Bald should be dead ahead as the crow flew.

He lifted the binoculars he’d packed and peered through the predawn gloom. The night was mostly clear, but cold and damp enough for mists to settle into the coves and valleys between the rounded mountain peaks, partially obscuring his view.

After a few moments, however, his eyes adjusted to the darkness and a faint paleness began to separate itself from the gloom. A mostly treeless summit, dun-colored due to autumn die-off—a bald, as it was known in this part of the Appalachians.

That had to be Laurel Bald, didn’t it?

He scanned the mountain beneath the bald, looking for signs of habitation. Most of the homes in Boneyard Ridge were scattered along the main road that wound its way around the mountain, denser in the lower elevations but growing more scattered where the road began to climb more steeply as it reached the summit.

There were a couple of houses located near the bald. He couldn’t make out any lights from within the cabin walls, but slender fingers of smoke rose from stone chimneys to mingle with the mountain mists.

He punched in the number of Quinn’s latest burner phone.

His boss answered on the first ring. “Still alive?”

“So far. Don’t suppose you’ve had any luck analyzing those herbs?”

“This soon? No. I’m going to make some calls come daylight, though. See if we can’t get the cop conference put on hold. I know some people high up in that law enforcement society—they’ll listen to me.”

“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”

“I wanted to see what you could come up with first. It’s a hell of a lot easier to go to them with all the information you and Ms. Marsh managed to put together than to go in there with nothing concrete to offer.”

There was a lot Quinn wasn’t saying, but Hunter didn’t have time to sort through his boss’s half-truths and lies of omission. “Any chance you could give me some insight on the Bradburys before I go running in there half-cocked?”

“I was hoping you’d put the brakes on long enough to ask a pertinent question or two,” Quinn said, grim amusement tinting his voice. “There are three main branches of the family, but only one you really need to worry about—Asa Bradbury, the younger of Aaron Bradbury’s two sons and the head of the family now that the old man and Clinton are gone. Old Aaron had two brothers, Colton and Bevill, but Bevill had a stroke several years ago and he’s disabled. His son Brantley has taken over for his father in the family business but he’s not that interested in getting his hands dirty. And Colton’s getting old now, so his son Kenny’s doing a lot of the work of transporting drugs and keeping their dealers from getting any ideas about branching out on their own. He’s more brawn than brains.”