Kathleen Creighton - Lady Killer

“You were going to tell me something,” she whispered. “Last night…before I…ruined the moment.” And her ear, pressed against his chest, felt his heartbeat quicken.

“Hmm…can’t remember now. Must not’ve been that important.” His voice was a lazy growl, and his hand never faltered in its silken slide up and down her naked back.

But just the same, she knew he lied.

“I have to tell her.” Tony stared bleakly into his coffee cup, having refused Holt’s offer to buy him lunch at the diner. It had been hours since the French toast he’d had for breakfast, but it-or guilt-still lay heavy in his stomach. “This changes everything.”

“Yeah, it does.” Holt stabbed at a chunk of the meat loaf special. “You couldn’t have waited until all this was over to sleep with her?”

Anger lanced through Tony, driven, no doubt, by more guilt. “Look,” he snapped, “it’s not like I planned it, okay? Hell, do I look like the kind of guy who’d move in on his best friend’s sister, particularly at a time when she’s in dire straits?”

“I don’t know what kind of guy you are, frankly,” Holt said. “I just met you myself, remember?”

“Yeah, well…I’m not. Trust me.” He shifted and added darkly, “Okay, maybe you shouldn’t. She trusts me, and I’m not exactly being straight with her, am I?” He let out a breath. “That’s why I have to tell her. Now.”

Holt picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth with it, then reached for his wallet. “Hold off on that, if you can. Just a little bit longer. At least until Cory and Sam get here.”

“No kidding-they’re on their way?” Tony picked up the check. Even the coffee had turned sour in his stomach. “Where’d you find Cory? Sam track him down?”

Holt nodded. “He’s been somewhere in Africa-the Sudan, I think. Covering the latest uprising, I guess. Anyway, he just got airlifted out a couple days ago by the ‘independent security contractors’ along with the entire U.S. embassy staff and their families. I talked to him this morning. They should be here tomorrow sometime.” He raised his eyebrows at Tony as he slid out of the booth. “What? I figured that was good news.”

“Brooke told me some things. About…herself. Uh…jeez…” The last word was mostly breath. Holt looked another question at him, and he shook his head. “Personal stuff. About what happened to her when she was a kid, growing up. Her sister, too. The reason she got married so young. The reason her sister ran away from home.” He paused, and even thinking of talking about it left a bitter taste in his mouth. “Hell, Kincaid, do I need to spell it out?”

“Her father?” Holt’s voice was soft and dangerous.

“Brother. He was a good ten years older than the twins. An adult, anyway. And they were just kids when…it happened.”

They left the diner, with Holt muttering under his breath what sounded like swearing and blasphemy.

Tony nodded his agreement with the sentiments. “Anyway, Cory probably needs to know, and I guess I’m gonna have to be the one to tell him.” He paused, then added bleakly, “He already blames himself for what happened to his family-the kids getting split up. This is going to just about kill him.”

Brooke had never been so late with her morning chores. It was nearly noon when she turned the chickens out of their house, and they clucked petulantly at her as they stalked past her and through the door. Several of the hens were already on their nests-sulking, she was sure. She cooed apologies to them while she replenished their feeder with scratch and made a point to clean and fill their water bowls with fresh water. She gave the goats, alpacas and horses a little extra measure of grain, and gave the horses a good brushing before she turned them out to pasture.

She went to say good morning to Lady, but the cougar stayed on her rocky battlement and refused to come close to the fence. “Are you mad at me, too, my Lady girl?”

The cougar’s head was low and her shoulders tensed-her stalking stance-as she stared intently past Brooke, toward the lane and the barn and beyond. A chill went down Brooke’s spine. Clearly, something had upset her.

She thought of the SUV that Rocky and Isabel’s “cousin” had seen driving out of the back road, and the look on Lonnie’s face when he’d said, “This ain’t over.” And she walked back to the house, feeling small and exposed and vulnerable, like a rabbit in an open field, sensing the hawk circling high overhead.

She found Rocky and Isabel just coming down the back porch steps.

“We were looking for you,” Isabel said, and she looked anxiously at her husband.

They exchanged a brief glance, and Rocky said, “We were worried. Ever since my cousin told us he saw the SUV again. This morning he sees this SUV drive past your driveway, going very slowly. It drives down to the back road and turns in, then backs up and turns around and drives past your house again. He says it did this three times, that he saw. He says he thinks it was the same one he saw the day Duncan was killed.”

Brooke felt her body go still, while inside, her heart pounded hard and fast, and in her mind, a little girl’s voice whimpered, Tony, where are you? Come back! I need you…

Then the voice was gone, and the stillness was inside her, too. She said quietly, “Where is your cousin now?”

Again, Rocky and his wife exchanged glances. He cleared his throat and shifted nervously. “He is gone. He left this morning-after he sees-saw-the SUV. He is afraid because-” Another anxious glance at Isabel.

Isabel stepped forward and said angrily, “He’s afraid because he knows the sheriffs are crooked. They are bad men, Brooke. I’m sorry, but Duncan was, too. They take money, from the…from people like our cousin, and then they tell them they must get more money or they will kill them and send them back to their families in Mexico in little pieces.”

“How does your cousin know this?” The voice came from the vast stillness inside Brooke.

“He had a friend-Ernesto. They came over the border together. The sheriffs stopped them, but they didn’t make them go back or put them in jail. Instead, they took their money and told them they must get more from their families or friends here in the United States. Ernesto told them he had nobody here, and they took him away that night. My cousin never saw him again. My cousin managed to get away, and he came here, to us. So you see why he is afraid.”

Brooke nodded. She folded her arms across her body and rubbed at her upper arms to try to warm herself, but she felt cold clear through, anyway, in spite of the September sunshine. She said, with a calm that amazed her, “Whoever was in the SUV your cousin saw…I don’t think he was after your cousin-or me. It’s Lady he wants.”

“The lion? But why?” said Isabel.

“He wants to kill her,” said Brooke. And in her mind was the image of Lady crouched on her rock pile, a clear and easy target. “I don’t know why. Maybe because he believes she killed Duncan, in spite of what the medical examiner says. Maybe he’s just crazy. But if I don’t do something, he’s going to kill her.” She looked pleadingly into her neighbors’ eyes. “Will you help me? Please?”

Tony drove back to Brooke’s place on autopilot. His mind was lost in a swamp of confusion, where dark shadows and deep waters held unknown perils, and anxiety lurked like the indefinable fears and bad dreams of children.

He hadn’t known such anxiety since he was a child, and he realized he was feeling it now for the same reason he’d felt it then: because he was vulnerable. Overnight, it seemed, he’d come to care for someone in a way that up to now had been reserved for blood kin: mother, father, sisters and brothers. This woman and her son-Brooke and Daniel-had somehow become his responsibility and concern, and their well-being and happiness vital to his own. The realization made him feel warm and excited and happy in a way he couldn’t recall ever feeling before, but at the same time it made his heart tremble and his stomach fill with a cold, hard knot of fear.

The first thing he saw when he drove into the yard was that Brooke’s pickup truck wasn’t parked where it usually was. The second was that Hilda hadn’t come bounding out to meet him. The formless fear inside him coalesced and grew and threatened to become panic.

He got out of his car and slammed the door, leaving the groceries he’d bought sitting on the backseat. He called her name. And that was when he heard it-the sound that sent a chill shooting down his spine: the squall of an angry cougar.

He ran, and each footfall on the hard Texas soil jarred his head and his chest like hammer blows. She’s okay. She’s okay, he told himself, without rhyme or reason for either the fear or the futile attempt at reassurance. A hundred what-ifs tried to crowd into his mind all at once and only created a nightmarish chaos in his imagination.

From inside the barn, from the point where he had a clear view down the lane to the cougar’s compound, Tony could see Brooke’s pickup, and that it was backed up close to the gate in the chain-link fence. And what looked like the lion’s holding cage was sitting in the back of the pickup. And Brooke’s neighbors, Rocky and Isabel, were standing beside the pickup, their attention focused completely on what was happening inside the compound. He saw no one else, no big fawn-and-white dog, no sign of a sheriff’s SUV or deputy in or out of uniform.

With his worst fear unrealized-that Lonnie had come back for Lady and that Brooke was involved in a deadly face-off with an armed and dangerous deputy-and his heart more or less free to resume its normal function, he now felt it swan dive into his shoes. Oh, Brooke…what in the world are you thinking?

Having already halted his headlong dash, faced with the improbable scene before him, Tony forced himself to proceed now at a less panic-stricken pace. He strolled down the lane, with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, showing no sign, he hoped, of the fact that his whole body was vibrating with adrenaline.

“Hello,” he called when he was within a few yards of the pickup, and two heads jerked toward him in tandem, eyes widening with alarm. He nodded in a friendly way meant to calm the couple and said, “What’s going on?”

Isabel looked at her husband, and Rocky gave a shrug. “She is trying to catch the puma. She says she is going to set it free.”

“Jeez…” Tony whispered.

Isabel gave him a crooked smile and said, “Yes, I have been praying, too.”

Beyond her shoulder, Tony could see Brooke out in the cougar’s compound. She was standing with her back to him in the middle of the open area between the fence and the rocky knoll, facing the cougar, who was crouched on top of the rock pile. And even from where he stood, he could see that the lion’s ears lay flattened against her head and her tail was twitching furiously.

Having been acquainted with quite a few domestic felines in his lifetime, Tony knew a very scared or angry-and in this case, dangerous-cat when he saw one.

He opened the gate and slipped inside the compound, closing the gate carefully behind him. “Brooke, honey,” he said, marveling at how calm his voice sounded, “what are you doing?”

She turned her head to look at him, and for a moment his heart stopped. Don’t turn your back on her, sweetheart-please don’t turn around.

Her face was streaked with dirt-dust mixed with moisture that was either sweat or tears-and her voice shook. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. I’ve never seen her act like this before.”

“She’s scared,” Tony said, and the lion screamed and cringed back against the rocks as he started across the compound to where Brooke was. And that makes two of us. I’m six years old again, and that cat is looming over me, just the way I remember. And my sister’s hand is trembling in mine…

Then he was beside Brooke, and it was her hand he held tightly. “Don’t move and don’t make a sound,” he whispered, without moving his mouth-or was that a memory, too?

She looked at him with tear-filled eyes and whispered, “Lady’s not a killer. She would never attack me.”

“She’s a cougar, sweetheart. And right now she’s operating on instinct. If you turn your back on her and retreat, she just might.”

Letting go of her hand, he slipped his arm around her waist and began to walk her slowly backward. Out on the rock pile, the cat let out one more squall, then did that doubling-back-on herself maneuver, flowed like liquid amber over the rocks and, in a blink, was gone.

When they were safe on the other side of the fence, Brooke turned silently into his arms, buried her face against his chest and gathered his shirt in fisted handfuls. Rocky and Isabel were nowhere to be seen. Tony wrapped his arms around her and let his cheek rest on her sweat-damp hair, but he was in no way ready to let her off the hook for scaring him to death.