Chapter 27
Hadley Dawkins
Hadley stayed hidden in the shadows of the cornfield, while out in the wash of the headlights, Knox crossed the open ground to Whitney.
He took the weapon from her, gently prying her fingers loose one at a time from a grip she’d held too long.
She sagged into his side the second her hand was empty, her face crumpling, and she pressed her forehead to his shoulder.
Whitney and Knox were engaged to be married.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Knox.
” Whitney’s words came out wet and broken.
“Reed wasn’t supposed to die. And the professor…
I never touched him, Knox. I swear to God I never laid a hand on him.
He backed into that construction area on his own.
The whole thing gave way, and he went over, and there was nothing…
there was nothing I could have done. It was an accident.
All of it, one long accident that just keeps getting worse. ”
Nora’s shuddering breath carried across the distance between them. Whitney pulled back and wrapped her fingers around the lapels of Knox’s jacket.
“Whatever happens tonight, you have to promise me. Promise me Nora doesn’t get hurt. Promise me, Knox.”
“Shh.” Knox curled an arm around her, the weapon hanging easy in his own hand now, and pressed his lips to her hair.
“Everything’s going to be fine. We find that gold, we dig it up, and this whole year turns into nothing but a bad memory.
I keep telling you that money can bury a bad memory under a million good ones.
You and me, babe. It’ll all be worth it. Trust me.”
Then he lifted his head, and whatever tenderness he’d shown Whitney drained out of him, gone between one breath and the next.
“Enough stalling.” Knox brought the firearm up and leveled the barrel at Nora. “Make the call.”
Hadley’s pulse kicked hard against her ribs. She tilted her head a fraction, straining past the dry hiss of the corn for the one sound she wanted more than anything…gravel turning under tires.
There was nothing.
No sign of backup at all.
Nora wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and bent to her phone.
Her fingers shook so badly it took her a moment to find the number, which meant she was calling her cousin, or someone else in the Mercer family.
Someone who wasn’t listed in her favorites.
That bought Hadley a few more minutes to work out a plan.
If backup was still miles out, she would have no choice but to move on her own.
What she didn’t expect was for her own phone to ring.
It went off in her back pocket, the ringtone she’d never once thought to silence, the shrill chime tearing across the dark field and turning every head in the cut.
Everything happened at once. Whitney screamed.
Nora’s phone dropped from her hands. And Knox wheeled toward the sound and fired, the muzzle flash bleaching the corn white for half a second while the report slammed flat across the field.
The round punched through the stalks a foot from Hadley’s head, clipping the leaves with a hard, wet snap of shredded corn, and she was already dropping and bringing her own weapon up before her thoughts caught up with her body.
By the time she had him in her sights, Knox had crossed to Nora and hauled her up off her knees by a fistful of hair. He dragged her in front of him and jammed the barrel against the side of her head. Nora’s hands came up, empty and shaking. Her phone lay in the dirt where it had fallen.
“Stop, stop, stop.” Whitney hung back, unwilling to get any closer, her whole body poised against making it worse. “Knox, don’t. Please. You said nobody else would get—”
“Come out. Now.” Panic had climbed into Knox’s voice, and he ground the barrel harder into Nora’s temple. “You come out of that field right now, or I put one through her head and take my chances. You’ve got three seconds. One.”
Hadley’s phone stopped at last, the call rolling over to voicemail, and the silence it left behind landed heavier than the ringing had. In that quiet, she understood why Nora had been made to call her in the first place.
This morning, on the sidewalk in front of the station, Hadley had inadvertently allowed Nora and Whitney to believe the USB was in her hands.
She’d merely meant the sheriff’s office had made a discovery.
Whitney had taken it as gospel. She believed the chief of police had the USB drive, and every desperate move out here tonight had been built on getting Nora to summon the one person who could hand it over.
“Two.”
Hadley stayed exactly where she was.
Knox wouldn’t fire. Not yet. He was smart enough not to throw away his leverage.
The second he put a bullet in Nora, he had a body and no bargaining left.
Any armed officer with the dark for cover and a clean reason to drop him where he stood would take that opportunity.
He needed Nora alive to draw Hadley out, and he needed her alive to get that drive.
Julian’s voice came back to her from when he’d sat behind Reed’s desk. People got killed for one of four things, he’d said. Lust, love, loathing, or loot. The rest was just paperwork. This was loot, plain and simple, and loot was the only thing keeping Nora breathing.
“You’re a smart woman, Chief Dawkins.” Knox tried a different tack, his voice sliding toward reasonable, coaxing, a man with something to sell.
“A person doesn’t walk a cornfield after dark for her health.
You came out here hunting the same thing we are, because you know about the original story, don’t you? ”
He paused, leaving room for an answer.
“So, let’s be smart together. What do you say?
” Knox asked when she didn’t immediately respond.
“From what I read in Roland’s research, there’s more than enough in this ground to go around.
We split it, even shares, and every one of us drives home tonight.
That’s fair. That’s more than fair, and you know it.
If that fool Mercer had just seen reason, we’d all be lying on a beach somewhere right now instead of standing in a field pointing guns at each other. ”
Hadley still didn’t answer.
She lowered herself instead, slow, an inch at a time, until she was crouched below the level of the tassels with one knee in the soft dirt.
She began to feel across the ground with her free hand.
The sun had gone all the way down while Whitney had talked, and the remaining cloud cover smothered whatever light might have lingered, so that even Hadley, vision long since adjusted, could make out little more than the pale vertical bars of the nearest stalks and the hard glare of the headlights beyond them.
That dark cut both ways.
It hid her.
It also meant she was searching the ground blind.
Her fingers dragged over dirt and the dry litter of fallen leaves, patient and silent, while Knox burned through the last of whatever patience he had.
“I’m losing my goodwill out here, Chief.”
The two of them had made an amateur’s mistake, and they were too deep in the moment to catch it. They stood square in their own headlights, lit bright and flat for anyone in the dark to pick out, while Hadley knelt invisible a good thirty yards off.
Sitting ducks, the both of them, if she could only even the playing field first.
Her fingers closed on a rock.
Small, river-smooth, the size of a walnut, the kind of stone a plow turned up by hundreds every spring and nobody ever cleared. She worked it loose from the wet dirt and gradually rose with it, coming up to her full height just as Knox’s voice cracked at the edges.
“Last chance. I mean it. She dies, and that’s on you—”
“Knox.” Whitney’s voice had gone thin and high, like a woman who understood what was about to happen and had no way to stop it. “Knox, please don’t—”
Hadley was out of time. No more waiting on backup, no more waiting on Whitney to talk her fiancé down. This was the moment it went one way or the other. She drew her arm back and threw the rock up and over, out past the corn and away from herself, deep into the black field.
It came down forty, fifty feet to the east, crashing through the dry stalks with a racket a body would make.
Knox turned toward it, keeping Nora hard against him, a shield he wasn’t about to give up.
But the sound had come from far enough off her that it gave Hadley the half second she needed.
He cranked his upper body after the noise, exactly as she’d gambled he would, and the turn swung his aim wide of her and pulled him a quarter-turn off Nora.
His gaze and firearm were chasing the dark where the racket had been while his near side came open to the road.
He fired twice in panic into the stalks thirty feet from where he thought she stood.
Hadley didn’t hesitate.
She raised her weapon, the near side of him laid bare and the line clean past Nora…and squeezed the trigger.