Chapter 32
DAISY
Bare feet on sunbaked dirt, a paring knife in my back pocket, and in the equipment barn ahead of me is a half-deaf man with a radio and the only chance I have left.
My soles slap the ground and pain shoots straight up my shins, but slow is dead, so I don’t slow.
It’s two hundred yards to the equipment barn. In the midday sun, barefoot, it might as well be two miles.
I throw one look over my shoulder, around fifty yards out from the house. The back door is still banging on its spring, and no one’s on the porch.
Yet.
My heart lodges in my throat as I turn forward and push harder, because if I can see the porch, then they can see me.
I hear the music before he comes into view.
It’s Johnny Cash, ‘The Man Comes Around,’ threading out of the open barn doors.
That radio has lived on a nail by the barn wall since I was small enough to sit on the bench beside it, and I have never in my entire life been so grateful to hear Johnny Cash sing about the end of the world.
Halfway across the yard, I can see him through the barn doors, hunched under the hood of the F-250, cap pushed back on his head the way he wears it when he’s listening for something. His good ear is dropped toward the engine block, every ounce of his attention inside that motor.
I scream his name.
Nothing.
With seventy yards to close, I try again.
“Dave.”
Fifty.
I holler at the top of my lungs.
“DAVE—”
His head comes up out of the engine bay like a man surfacing from deep water. For one breath, he stares at me like he can’t make sense of what he’s seeing, but that changes when his eyes meet mine.
He drops the rag he’s holding into the engine bay and comes around the front of the truck at a speed a man his age should not be able to manage.
When I clear the barn doors, my feet hit the concrete pad, and the cooling relief nearly brings me to my knees. He’s there before I can fall.
“Daisy.” His hands come up to my shoulders, steadying me. “Breathe, girl.”
I can’t.
“Marcus.” It comes out broken, between rasping breaths that burn my chest. “Marcus is in the house. He killed my dad, Dave. He killed Bill.”
His fingers tighten on my shoulders as he blinks in disbelief before his jaw clenches, decision made.
“He alone?” he questions through gritted teeth.
I shake my head. “Stan Cutter’s with him. He’s got a gun.”
“Stanley.” There’s a flash of recognition across his face. “Goddammit, Stanley.”
He’s moving before I finish. One hand closes around my upper arm and he’s walking me backward, deeper into the barn, toward the cab of the F-250.
He jerks his chin. “Keys are in it. Always are. You get in, you lock the doors, and you drive.”
“Dave—”
“You drive out the south gate, girl.” His eyes look more serious than I’ve ever seen them. “Stay drivin’ and you do not stop until you see a badge, you hear me?”
“No.” I shake my head firmly. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Yes, you are.”
His grip on my arm tightens, and he starts walking me the last few feet toward the driver’s side door. My bare heels scrape backward across the concrete, but I plant them firmly.
“Dave, listen to me—”
“Daisy.” He tilts his head, frustration evident in every muscle of his body.
“Colt and the boys are at the east ridge. Maggie’s in Sage Harbor. Wyatt and June are at Hadley’s. Marcus set all of it up to clear the ranch, Dave, he knew where everyone would be, he planned this—”
“Then that’s why you get in the truck.” He says it like it’s simple mathematics.
“But he’ll kill you.”
“Well, he can certainly try.”
“Dave.”
His jaw works, but his grip doesn’t loosen.
Then over his shoulder, past the open barn doors, and across two hundred yards of packed dirt, the back door of the house bangs once more against its spring.
Suddenly, it stops because someone is holding it open, and Stan clears the porch step.
The side of his face where the mug broke is split deep along the cheekbone, blood running freely down his jaw and into the collar of his shirt. His left eye is half-closed where the swelling has started, and in his right hand, loose at his side, is the gun.
Marcus is on the porch behind him with his hat still in his hands, and I suddenly and involuntarily go very still under Dave’s grip.
He feels it, his head turning a quarter inch to track my eyeline, and then he sees them too.
Whatever he was about to say next, he doesn’t.
His fingers leave my arm, slow and deliberate, in the way he’d take his hand off a horse he doesn’t want to spook. He steps sideways, one measured pace, until his shoulder is in front of mine and he’s placed his body between me and the porch.
“Get in the truck, girl.”
“Dave—”
“Now.”
His voice says don’t argue, and we’re running out of time, and even though everything inside of me is screaming not to, I do as he says.
The driver’s door opens under my hand and I swing up into the cab, keeping low. The keys are hanging in the ignition, the way Dave said they would be, a dented brass tag on the ring that reads D.H. in Jessamine Hartley’s faded handwriting.
I pull the door closed as quietly as I can, then lock it.
Through the windshield, I watch Dave turn his back on me and walk several slow steps out of the barn doors and into the yard.
He stops in the dirt, maybe ten feet clear of the doors, squared off toward the porch. His empty hands are at his sides, his cap still pushed back on his head, and from the cab, he looks like a man waiting on an old friend to arrive.
Stan has come down off the porch, though Marcus remains behind, hat in his hands. The man who broke down in the kitchen is gone. Out here, he’s just a coward letting his nephew do his dirty work.
Stan’s boots have crossed half the yard already, unhurried, the gun still loose in his right hand.
I slide down the bench seat until my shoulder is against the driver’s door and my right hand is on the keys dangling from the ignition.
My left hand finds the gear lever on the column.
The F-250 is a three-on-the-tree, the same arrangement Wyatt’s old truck had. First gear is up and to the left. Reverse is up and to the right. I learned to drive on a transmission shaped like this one, in the same yard on a dead August afternoon, Wyatt’s hand over mine on the shift.
Through the windshield, Stan stops about fifteen feet away from Dave.
I can’t hear what Dave says to him, the cab seals it off, but I see Dave’s jaw move, and Stan’s head cock to the side as though he’s just heard something he wasn’t expecting.
The gun in Stan’s hand doesn’t come up.
Not yet.
I roll the driver’s side window down half an inch, even when I know I shouldn’t. The sound carries both ways, but I need to know whether Dave is reaching him.
Dave’s voice comes through in fragments, low and steady, and I catch “your mama,” “Fourth of July,” “pony,” “rain barrel,” and “laughed until she cried.”
Whatever Dave is doing, Stan is listening, and he answers him, low and fragmented. I catch “can’t” and “too late.”
“It’s not, son. Let me help—” Dave pleads.
“Don’t.” Stan’s face is screwed up, the emotions he lacked when he arrived in the kitchen not even ten minutes ago taking over.
Dave takes one tentative step forward.
“I knew your daddy, Stanley.”
Dave’s voice cuts clear across the yard for the first time, carrying more solidly than the angle he tried first.
“I knew the man he was ’fore the drink. And I’m tellin’ you, son, he would not want this for you.”
Stan’s gun hand has started to tremble.
I have sat across from enough people deciding whether to tell the truth to know what it looks like when someone is about to cross a line.
His shoulders drop ever so slightly, and the set of his jawline softens. And for one heart-stopping moment, I think Dave is getting through to him.
But then from the porch, Marcus’s voice carries firmly across the yard.
“Stanley.”
Just the name.
He doesn’t shout, and there’s no anger in his tone. It’s like a schoolteacher’s voice, reminding a child of where his focus is supposed to be.
“Just this one more, son. Then we’re square.”
And just like that, Stan’s back stiffens like he’s been whipped. His gun hand stops trembling, he raises it upward, and I don’t even think before I turn the key, the engine catching first try.
Alma told me debts like his don’t end, but Stan doesn’t know that. His face says he’s sorry— but right now, he’s not as sorry as he is desperate.
I shove the column into first and the engine roars under my hands. Stan’s head snaps toward the sound, and the gun that was aimed at Dave a heartbeat ago swings around to me right as I drop the clutch.
The F-250 leaps out of the barn, tires biting dirt the second they clear the concrete, and I’m out in the yard before I’ve finished deciding to do it.
Dave is already on the ground on my left, rolling clear of the tires, and the breath I didn’t know I was holding comes back into my chest at the sight of him moving.
Stan does not move.
He plants his feet in the middle of the yard with the gun up and both hands on it, and for one long heartbeat his eyes find mine through the windshield with all the calm of a man who knows exactly what he’s about to do.
He fires, hitting the front left tire, and the steering wheel tears out of my grip as the truck lurches hard to one side. Then the yard begins to spin.
My shoulder hits the door, then the ceiling, then the door again, and somewhere in the chaos, I’m aware of the grille passing Stan on the wrong side, six feet wide of him.
The F-250 fishtails off to the side, plowing a long-gouged arc through the dirt, as the truck comes to rest broadside against the old pasture fence.
There’s dust everywhere, and I can’t hear a thing over the sound of the ringing in my ears. My left shoulder is screaming blue murder, and through the cracked windshield, I can see Stan, standing exactly where he was when I accelerated out of the equipment barn.
He hasn’t moved a step, the gun is still held up in both hands, and now, as though in slow motion, he turns back toward Dave on the ground.
From the porch, Marcus’s voice is muffled as my ears start to clear, but I can make out what he says.
“Both of them, son. No loose ends.”
Stan does not answer. Instead, he takes two steps toward Dave.
And through the cracked glass of the windshield, across twenty feet of dirt and the cab of a truck I have just destroyed, Dave raises his head to look at me.
Just me.
And his mouth shapes a single soundless word.
Run.
Then Stan pulls the trigger.
The sound of it travels through the broken windshield, into the cab and cuts into my chest like a knife.
Dave drops to the dirt as the scream that tears out of my throat is raw and wordless and too late.
He’s not moving. Fear and grief tighten like a vise around my heart, but I don’t have a moment to process any of it, because Stan has turned his attention in my direction.
My fingers find the door handle on the passenger side, and my ribs and shoulder are in agony when I shove it open. Ignoring them, I drop into the dirt with the F-250 between me and Stan, and my bare feet hit the ground running.
The closest cover is the hay barn, forty feet of open dirt off the far side of the truck, with Stan coming around the tailgate of the F-250 behind me.
I run harder than I ever have before. My body has gone beyond feeling, and my feet only know to do the next thing they’re told.
And behind me, boots pound the ground hard, but I don’t dare look back.
I clear the threshold but don’t slow.
The barn hits me all at once. It’s dim after the high noon sun, and smells of cut hay and old wood. There are stalls running down the left wall, and a stack of bales against the right, with the loft ladder bolted to the post at the back.
I go for the ladder.
Up.
Up is the one direction he is slower than I am. Up is where I am small and he is not.
My hand hits the first rung, and my feet find the rest of them without my eyes having to check. I’ve been up this ladder hundreds of times in my life, and my body remembers.
I’m high up in the dimly lit loft before Stan is through the barn doors.
Bales are stacked six deep along the back wall, loose hay scattered underfoot, and there are more than enough shadows to disappear in. I throw myself flat behind the nearest stack of bales and hold my breath right as Stan’s voice comes up from the barn floor.
“Daisy.”
The sing-song tone he uses is almost cajoling, and it sends a shiver down the length of my spine.
I fit myself into the gap between two bales and the outer wall, and I make myself as small as possible. I slide the paring knife out of my jeans and into my right hand, the wooden handle warm from my body. Three inches of blade is a joke against what he has.
But a joke at point-blank range in the dark is still a joke that cuts, and I may be down, but I’m not out.
My phone vibrates against my hip, low and muffled against the denim, and for one horrible second, I’m sure he’s heard it. But Stan is already speaking again, his boots shifting on the plank floor below me, and the sound of his own voice covers the sound I’ve made.
I reach my left hand around to the front of my jeans and ease the phone out of the pocket. The screen lights the hay next to my cheek a pale ghostly blue, and tears of relief prick the back of my eyelids when I see the name on it is the only name in the world I wanted to see.
Wyatt.
Hope floods my chest so hard it almost cracks me open, and I cup the phone against my sternum to smother the light before it gives me away.
I answer and thumb the volume all the way down in the same motion.
“Come on down outta that loft, darlin’.” Stan’s voice has gone coaxing. “No sense drawin’ this out.”
Say anything, Stan. Keep talking. Wyatt needs to hear you.
“I’m not lookin’ to hurt you, darlin’. Just come on down.”
A rung creaks.
I slam my eyes closed as I desperately try to get a handle on my breathing, because he’s on the ladder now.
He’s on his way up, and there’s nowhere for me to turn.
All I can do is press myself smaller between the bales and the outer wall, phone hugged against my chest, paring knife in my right hand.
“Just gotta get this done. Then it’ll all be over. For both of us.”
He’s coming up slowly, using one hand, meaning the gun is still in the other. My mouth is bone dry, my head is fuzzy, and it suddenly feels like there’s not enough air in my lungs.
“Come now, Daisy.”
He’s even closer.
Wyatt, please.
“I know you’re up here, darlin’. It’s just us now.”