Chapter 15 #2
It shouldn’t have surprised her how fast a thing like that traveled the back roads of Cane County.
She knew better than most how little stayed buried in this part of the world.
Still, it didn’t sit easily with her. That amount of money put a fresh target square on her brother’s back, and the whole county knowing about it only widened the circle of people who might come around with their hands out, or worse.
“Warren called me yesterday afternoon.” Nick had the grace to look reluctant about disclosing his source. “He wanted to set a meeting before the end of the month about the Harvest Festival. The settlement came up in the middle of it.”
“Of course it did.” Hadley thinned her lips in irritation. It hadn’t crossed her mind that Warren would be first in line for that bit of gossip. “God, he’s infuriating.”
Nick reached past her and drew the door open, his mistake in bringing up Whistlerun’s mayor plain on his face.
She murmured a thank-you and stepped into the lobby, the building’s stale air sliding over her and doing nothing for the burn already working its way up.
The squeak of her boots was loud on the polished floor.
Nick’s hand came to rest on her arm, light, and brought her up short just inside the doors.
“You didn’t hear the news from Mason, did you?”
It was in that moment that Hadley understood with ugly clarity just how far she’d walled herself off from the rest of the living world. She’d spent eleven months stacking every last brick of it herself, too. No wonder Julian had driven all that way out to Whistlerun to check on her in person.
She’d given up the life she’d built, traded the badge and the troop and the city glow for the town she’d spent twelve years outrunning.
And at the end of it, she didn’t have one friend within reach.
The single night she’d finally done the normal thing people did, sit at Gus’s bar and let folks talk to her, she’d turned even that into one more way to chase Reed’s killer.
Hadley pressed her lips together.
They’d gone drier than they had yesterday, cracked at the seam, and she remembered too late that she’d stood at the café counter not twenty minutes ago with a whole basket of ChapStick beside the register and walked out without buying a single tube.
“It doesn’t matter how I came to hear about the money.
” Hadley held his gaze. This was neither the time nor the place to test their personal boundaries, but she’d bend a little.
“Mason stopped in at the station this morning, though. First time he’s set foot through that door since I pinned this badge on. ”
Nick waited patiently for the rest of her story.
“I told him to take the money and run.” Hadley looked away and peeled a dry curl of skin from her bottom lip. “I told him to take every cent the state owes him and put as many miles between himself and Cane County as the money will buy.”
She hadn’t wanted Nick’s opinion so much as she’d needed to get the admission off her chest. Maybe she shouldn’t have been that honest with Mason. Maybe she’d overstepped in this new version of their sibling relationship. But wasn’t it about time the two of them were honest with one another?
She started across the lobby, grateful she’d parked on the right side of the building this morning.
The staircase up to Roland’s floor was straight ahead and a little to her left.
Movement near the tall side windows caught her attention, and she recognized Knox Hudson, deep in conversation with a student.
She had no intention of calling out a greeting, and she’d just as soon the man not register her presence at all.
She wanted this next interview kept low and quiet, before Roland Mercer caught wind of a second badge in the building and started arranging himself for an audience.
She reached for the railing.
A terrified scream tore down from somewhere above, guttural and short, more animal than human.
Her mind couldn’t fix on where it had come from, only that it bounced off the stairwell’s hard surfaces and broke apart in the open lobby.
For half a breath, time seemed to hang, and then Nick’s hand shot out and yanked her back out of harm’s way.
A body came down out of nowhere.
It came down in a graceless pitch, arms wheeling for a hold that wasn’t there.
A sheet of clear plastic came along with the momentum, but it billowed halfway down, delaying its own fall.
It was impossible not to track the descent of both.
Hands and fingers clawed at nothing, desperate to catch anything of substance.
A shoe came free and pinwheeled off on its own, leaving its owner to land first.
The sound of the impact was the worst part.
It wasn’t a thud. It was something flatter, wetter, and more final, a heavy slap of weight against tile with a smaller crack underneath it. The sickening sound carried clearly across the lobby and lodged itself somewhere in the building’s far recesses.
The tarp settled last, drifting down over the tile a beat behind him.
No one moved at first, too stunned at what they’d witnessed, though Nick’s grip gradually eased on her arm now that the danger had passed.
The student beside Knox began to make a thin, rising noise.
Knox himself stumbled back a full step, one hand thrown up to his mouth, the binder he’d been carrying dropped at his feet.
The burn behind her sternum flared hard and high, up into her throat, and she swallowed against it. Nick muttered expletives under his breath and reached for the radio on his belt. With every second that ticked past, the aftermath spread a little further across the polished tile.
Roland Mercer lay crumpled at the foot of the staircase.
One arm had somehow folded beneath his weight at an angle a shoulder didn’t allow, and one leg had come to rest bent up over the bottom step.
Dark blood pooled into the grout lines and followed them outward in thin, straight veins.
His glasses had skidded six feet across the floor, one lens spider-cracked, one earpiece snapped clean away.
His mouth hung open, and his eyes were fixed on the lobby ceiling.
Hadley forced herself to take the first step toward him, and then the second, her own pulse loud in her ears. This man had been her one thread back to whoever had killed Reed, the single loose end she’d been pulling on these past two days. Now it was gone, yanked clean out of her grasp.