Page 30 of Killer on the Homestead (Bent County Protectors #2)

Duncan sped his way toward Bent. His mind was racing in a million different directions. But he knew how to handle that, he reminded himself. He knew a million ways to focus. Back then, every game had felt like life or death.

Now that his situation really felt like life or death, he realized how ridiculous it had been to put so much pressure on himself for a game .

He gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could, especially with his bad arm, and focused on the throbbing pain in his shoulder. Sometimes pain could be a great focal point and motivator. He used it.

He drove with the idea he’d retrace Rosalie’s steps. Drive to the hospital, then from there head to the sheriff’s department. And if there was no sign of her, then to Wilde and Fool’s Gold. And if she wasn’t there, and hadn’t gotten back to him, then what?

No. He couldn’t deal in then whats . One step at a time. He made it to the hospital parking lot and finally had to force himself to loosen his grip on the wheel. He was sweating, a mix of worry and pain, and he needed to be more in control.

He did a quick circuit of the hospital parking lot. He saw his mother’s car. Wondered how Owen was doing. He should stop in, make sure Mom was taking care of herself.

He would. He’d come back. Once he figured out what the hell was going on with Rosalie. It was probably something so ridiculous, and yet he couldn’t get past this driving need to make sure .

Because maybe she was just ignoring him, but it didn’t feel right. She’d said she would call him, and she’d said so reluctantly. Rosalie might want to push him away sometimes, but she wasn’t a liar .

But she could have gotten caught up in something, and then wouldn’t he feel stupid if he’d gone around tracing her steps?

“I’d rather feel stupid than guilty,” he muttered to himself, driving back out of the parking lot of the hospital. He got back on the highway that would lead him to Bent and the sheriff’s department.

He was so intent on getting there, he almost missed it.

A glint of something on the side of the road.

He didn’t even fully mean to look into his rearview mirror to see what it was.

But when he did, he slammed on the brakes.

With his breath caught in his throat, he pulled an immediate and very illegal U-turn, going down the highway on the wrong side so he could pull up on the shoulder that allowed him the perfect view of a truck crashed into the ditch.

With a buzzing in his ears and his entire body feeling completely numb, he shoved the truck into Park, jumped out, and ran over to the crashed truck.

Rosalie’s crashed truck.

The driver’s-side door and back-seat door were open and when Duncan ran around the full length of it, he realized it was empty. Empty was good.

Right?

He let out a pained breath, then started a closer inspection of the car on the driver’s side.

He noted her phone was in the console, which wasn’t…

right. It couldn’t be right. He didn’t see anything else out of place or strange, except when he stepped away and realized the little smudge on the driver’s-side door’s window looked a lot like… blood.

He didn’t let himself think about that, because there was no one here . Which meant if she’d had an accident, she’d gotten out. No one was dead here, and that was what mattered.

But why wouldn’t she be here? Why wouldn’t she have used her phone to call for help? It didn’t add up and Duncan didn’t know what to do . Where to even begin. She had to be around here somewhere. Bleeding. Maybe she’d tried to walk along the side of the road?

But why would she leave her phone?

Since he didn’t have the first clue, and his gaze kept getting pulled back to the blood on the window, Duncan knew he needed help. He thought about what Rosalie had done when his place had been trashed—she’d called Detective Beckett directly on his cell.

A number Beckett had handed out to his parents that first night, and Duncan had the good sense to have added to his contacts. He dialed it now.

“Beckett,” the man greeted tersely.

“It’s Duncan—” Before he could even get his last name out, Beckett was cursing.

“If you call me again, I’m—”

There was no time for that. “I found Rosalie’s truck crashed in a ditch on Route Two. She’s nowhere to be found, but there’s some blood.”

For a moment, the detective said nothing. “Where on Route Two?”

Duncan looked around, tried to discern what mile marker he’d be at. Gave the detective an approximation.

“All right. You’re going to stay put. Right by the truck. I’m going to send an ambulance, then I’ll be out. Once I get there, you’re going to get the hell out of our way.”

Duncan knew Detective Beckett was right. The police knew what they were doing. Detectives knew what they were doing. But he couldn’t bring himself to verbally agree.

“Listen. This is dangerous. Terry Boothe’s truck was found parked in an abandoned garage not far from the hospital. There’s a threat here. I’m on my way. You need to step back and let the police handle it.”

Duncan considered it. For maybe two seconds. Terry had left his truck near the hospital? Where Rosalie had last been?

No.

“Sorry. Can’t do that.” He hung up. Surveyed the quiet world around him. What had happened here? An accident? A fight? She hadn’t just crashed, or she’d still be here. She would have used that phone to call it in or at least taken it with her.

Something bad had happened. Maybe it wasn’t Terry, but too much was adding up.

Duncan took a few steps away from the truck in the tall grass. He could kind of see where some of the blades had been depressed by someone stepping on them. He’d follow the trail as best he could.

But before he could take even two steps, his toe hit something hard. He looked down and saw the glint of metal. He crouched to examine it. He couldn’t be sure it was Rosalie’s, but it was definitely a gun. So he picked it up.

He had a bad feeling they were going to need it.

Rosalie stumbled, her stomach roiling so much she thought for sure there was no way she’d breathe through the need to wretch.

But she managed. On her hands and knees, the muddy ground seeping into both, she managed to swallow down the need to be sick. She blinked at the gunk in her eyes, but she couldn’t see. She wanted to believe it was just blood, but she knew better.

She was losing consciousness. The grip of black was edging around her brain, and she kept fighting it off, but only barely.

“Come on,” she muttered to herself. “Get it together.” She sucked in a deep, painful breath, then pushed off her arms so that she was upright on her knees.

But the sight that greeted her wasn’t a good one. Terry was approaching. He’d caught up with her. Found her.

Now what?

She tried to get to her feet, but her legs wouldn’t seem to move, so she tried to scoot back, away from him. She groped around on the ground for something, anything she could use as a weapon.

“You’ve made this much harder than it needed to be, Rosalie,” Terry said, walking in slow, menacing steps toward her. “I could have buried you out here. It could have been easy, but you had to wreck that truck. Now, we’ve got to complicate things.”

He moved toward her, and she tried to scramble away, but she couldn’t seem to get to her feet.

She just stumbled, and then she felt his hand on her arm and she was being dragged back.

She thought she was kicking. She was trying to kick, but it didn’t seem to change the steady slide of her body across the ground.

“You left a pretty nice blood trail. Now, do we think it’ll be the cops or Duncan who comes to rescue you? My money’s on our boy. If not, that’ll be okay. It can still look like him. It’ll look like him.”

She tried to speak, tried to get her mouth to move, but it wouldn’t.

“You shouldn’t have crashed the truck, Rosalie. You shouldn’t have done it. But you did, so we’ll deal with it.”

She tried to push him away, but she had such little strength left. He had one arm behind her, then the other, and shoved her back against the tree as something wrapped around her. A rope?

She tried to focus on breathing over panic. Understanding what Terry was saying over wanting to start sobbing.

“You can’t really think you’re going to get away with this,” she rasped.

“Of course I am. I have a plan. You’ve been ten steps behind it this whole time. So I’ve got time. To perfect it. To make it right. You shouldn’t have brought Duncan into it.”

Duncan thought she was with the police, but how much time had passed? Would he be worried? Would he tell them to look for Terry? Would anyone find her wrecked truck?

They had to. If someone started looking for her, they’d have to find it. If she could just stay alive…

“Why?” she asked Terry, though she wasn’t even sure what she was questioning. Just this whole damn horror.

“Why.” He snorted. “Ten years of planning thwarted by some uppity kid who’d never seen a day of hard work in his whole sorry life?

No. It wasn’t happening. It’s not happening.

I never meant to kill him. If he hadn’t gotten messed up in the cows, hadn’t tried to blackmail me, they’d be mine and I’d be gone.

But now? Now I’ll kill whoever the hell gets in my way.

Him. Owen. You. Duncan. It’ll end there.

I’ll be out of here once you two are taken care of. ”

The cows. Somehow this had all been about the cows? She couldn’t think it through clearly, but that was secondary right now. Because right now she had to save herself. Save Duncan.

There had to be some way out of this mess, but she was having a hard time keeping her eyes open.

A hard time making sense of her scrambled thoughts and the gray mist over everything.

Her head bobbed forward, the world black again.

Then she felt a sharp, teeth-rattling sting against her cheek.

Her eyes popped open, and she realized he’d slapped her.

“None of that,” he growled.

Her cheek throbbed where he’d made impact.

“We need you awake. This isn’t going to fall on me.”

She used what little strength she had left to spit—a mix of blood and saliva—right at his face.

He reared back his arm, so she squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself for impact, for pain, for the awful, awful consequences.

But nothing happened. She opened her eyes to the foggy gray and saw him, still standing above her, but he’d dropped his arm and taken a step back.

“Not yet,” he muttered to himself, whirling around and stalking away as he wiped his face on his sleeve. “Gotta make it right, so not yet.”

Every “not yet” gave her a chance. That’s what she told herself.

No matter how dire it all looked.