Chapter Thirteen
“You killed my mother!” Keely choked, overwhelmed with rage at just the sound of his voice. “How could you!”
“It wasn’t me, I swear it wasn’t!” he replied, and he sounded frightened. “Keely, I’ve never killed a person in my life. You have to believe me.”
“You threatened her for money—”
“I had to! Listen, if I don’t pay them, they’ll…
well, they’d already threatened to kill your mother, now they say they’ll get you, too,” he said nervously.
“It’s the Fuentes gang! I got mixed up with them because of Jock,” he said bitterly.
“He’s been working for Fuentes for years.
He even went to prison for him, just after you came to live with me.
He said they paid better than any of the other distributors, and that he’d get me in because he had a cousin in the organization.
But there was trouble right up-front because Jock double-crossed one of the bosses and pocketed some drug money.
Then he hid out and left me holding the bag.
They’re after me, now.” There was a sigh.
“Your mother was right about Jock. She said he’d destroy me if I stuck with him, and he has.
He keeps calling me, making threats toward you if you don’t come up with enough money to help him to get out of town before the drug lords kill him. I don’t know what to do!”
She had to clamp down hard on her feelings. He was rationalizing his behavior, but she remembered that he’d stood by while the mountain lion dragged her away to what would have been her death.
“You go to Sheriff Carson,” she told him. “Tell him what you’ve told me, and help him find Jock. That’s what you have to do.”
“Hell, Carson will lock me up and throw away the key!” he muttered. “I gave his brother the coke that killed him. No, I’m not going to the law.”
“What else can you do?” she asked.
“Get enough money to pay Jock, so he’ll get off my back.
The Fuentes organization want Jock. They want to kill him, but they don’t know where he is.
They thought Ella did and they…” He was going to say they tortured her, but he couldn’t make himself say that to his daughter, whom he’d failed in so many ways already.
“Well, they killed her. Now, the only hope I have is to raise enough money to help Jock get out of the country before they catch up with him. He swore if I didn’t, he’d tell them I was the one who double-crossed them.
He’d give them back what he took and blame it on me! ”
“If you give him money,” she said in a weary tone, “he’ll only want more.”
“There’s a chance he won’t. He just wants to get out of the country before they do to him what they did to those drug agents they killed.
He won’t say so, but I think he’s afraid of Fuentes’s new partner.
The partner is called Machado and he hates Jock.
He’ll kill him before Fuentes does if he gets the chance, and Jock knows it. ”
“Let him,” Keely said coldly.
“Jock was the only friend I had, Keely,” he said heavily. “He stood by me when everybody else jumped ship.”
Just as Carly had stood by Ella. But that had been because Carly genuinely loved Keely’s mother. Jock had stood by Brent Welsh because he knew Ella had money, Keely thought, and he could use Brent to get some of it. But she didn’t say that. He wouldn’t have listened anyway.
“I don’t have any money,” Keely told him.
“I work as a veterinarian technician and I make minimum wage. Mama—” Her voice broke.
She composed herself. “Mama had some money in a savings account, but it’s in her name and it’s tied up in probate.
I won’t be able to get it for weeks.” She didn’t know if that was true, but it sounded convincing.
He cursed sharply. “There must be something you can sell!”
“She already sold it all,” she said bitterly.
He muttered again, incoherent. “Then those friends of yours, the Sinclairs—they’ve got money. Ask them for it!”
“I won’t.”
“Your life is on the line, Keely!” he raged. “It’s not a game! Jock’s already said that he’s got nothing to lose. He’ll kill you if you don’t help us.”
She felt very old. Her mother was dead, she’d almost died herself. Boone knew her darkest secret and would surely not want her anymore, even if he was compassionate and understanding about her injury. He was scarred himself. But Keely saw no future for herself.
“I don’t care,” she said passively. “Let Jock do his worst. He might be doing me a favor,” she said with black humor. “God knows, I’m never going to have a husband or a family, the way I look.”
“I’m…sorry,” he said slowly. “I’m very sorry, for what happened. I was so shocked that I couldn’t even do anything. I feel bad about that. And I didn’t think about how the scars might affect your life.”
“Pity,” she said, and felt hatred seethe through her. “Until that moment, I thought you cared about me.”
“I do care, in my way,” he said. “My parents were ice-cold with each other and with me. They never went out of their way to do one charitable thing for anyone else. I learned that you take care of number one.”
“So did Mama,” she replied. “Neither of you was fit to raise a child.”
“Tell me about it,” he laughed hollowly. “Once you came, our lives changed forever. She was too unstable emotionally to cope with a baby.” He sounded bitter. “You spent a lot of time with Carly.”
A light flashed in her mind as she recalled Carly’s face. It was far more familiar to her than Ella’s. No wonder the other woman had been so protective of her.
“But that’s all in the past, and I’ve got bigger problems now. You have to try to get me some money. Jock says he won’t wait much longer.”
“Tell him to come see me. I can borrow a shotgun,” she mused.
“It’s not funny!”
“If you were in my position, it might be.”
“Ask your friends if they’ll help out. Even two thousand might be enough,” her father persisted. “Take this number down, Keely. You can reach me here.”
She grabbed a pencil and pad from inside the drawer by her bed. “Okay.”
He gave her the number. “Do your best, honey,” he pleaded. “You lived against all the odds. I don’t want you to die over a handful of money.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said heavily, and hung up. It wasn’t until then she realized that she was shaking.
* * *
When Boone came back, he found Keely quiet and preoccupied, staring into space.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, because he knew at once that something was. He could feel it.
She frowned. “How do you know something is?”
He moved to the bed and dropped down lazily into the armchair by her bed. “I read minds. Come on. Tell me.”
She sank back into the pillows wearily. “My father called. Jock’s running from the drug lords and he wants money to get out of the country. He told my father that if I don’t get it for him somehow, he’ll kill me. The drug dealers will probably send him back to wherever he came from in a shoebox.”
He took off his hat and dropped it on the floor by his chair. He ran a big, lean hand through his black hair. “I’ll turn Bailey loose on him, and when he gets through, Jock will fit in the shoebox. Or parts of him will.”
“Is Bailey all right?” she asked.
He smiled. “Doing great, thanks to you.” His smile faded. “I still can’t believe I listened to that self-centered little cheater when you told me what was wrong with Bailey. I wish I could go back and live those few minutes over.”
“It turned out all right.”
He nodded. “Only because you had the guts to do what you knew was right. You’ve got grit, Keely.”
“I’m just stubborn,” she replied. “What am I going to do? I don’t have anything I could sell that would bring enough money to buy Jock a plane ticket.”
“We’ll talk to Hayes,” he told her. “He’ll know what to do.”
* * *
And Hayes did. They arranged for a sum of money that Boone would give her father to lure him into a trap. Keely had already given Hayes the number where her father could be reached when she got the money.
“You’re not going,” she told Boone when he and Hayes were discussing who was going to take the money to Jock.
“Excuse me?” Boone asked haughtily.
She flushed, but she wouldn’t backtrack. “You’re not going. Everybody around me is either dead or in danger, and you’re not going to join my mother at the local funeral home. Let him do it.” She pointed at Hayes. “He knows how to deal with criminals. He’s good at it.”
“Thanks,” Hayes mused.
“I was with a Special Forces unit in the Middle East,” Boone reminded Keely. “I came home.”
She looked to Hayes for assistance.
He grimaced. “Okay, I’ll work out the details once you get the money together. With any luck, we can nab both men.”
“I’ll call you,” Boone promised.
When Hayes left, Boone watched Keely with faint amusement. “You’re afraid I’ll get hurt.”
She shifted on her pillows. “My mother is dead because my father wanted money. I don’t want to lose you… I mean, I don’t want Clark and Winnie to have to lose you.”
He pursed his lips. “I could have wrung your neck when I saw those photos,” he said conversationally. “I could have wrung Clark’s, too.”
“I know you don’t want him around me because I’m in another social class…”
“Stop that,” he muttered. “I didn’t want him around you because you’re mine, Keely,” he said curtly.
Warmth shot through her body like fire. Surely she was hearing things. Her expression said so.
“We’ll have to do something about that self-image.” He chuckled. “I don’t know why you ever thought I didn’t want you. Even Clark realized I was jealous as hell.”
“You hated me,” she exclaimed. “You ignored me when you came to bring Bailey to Dr. Rydel!”
“Camouflage,” he replied. “I didn’t know about your shoulder, then,” he added, in a subdued tone. “All I could think about was my own defects. I’d already had evidence of how a woman would react to them. You’re so young, Keely. I thought you were too young to cope.”
“I’m older than I look,” she replied.