more to this than some reporter’s overactive imagination.”
“Or an attempt to add a little ‘sex appeal’ to a routine missing person story.” He sketched air quotes around the phrase, alluding to the Ranger mystique viewing audiences lapped up so eagerly.
She felt her face harden. “You really think I’m angling here? We’re talking about my family.”
Raising his palms in surrender, Henry quickly backpedaled. “I didn’t mean you, personally. Only that’s what these law-enforcement types are gonna think you’re up to.”
She sighed before admitting, “A lot of times, I would be.”
“Not you, Jessie, not that I’ve ever noticed. You’re not like that at all.”
She skewered him with a look, reminded of a recent conversation. “I’m not too soft for real news. Look how long I’ve covered the overnight crime beat.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I have plenty of ambition. Look at that story I just did on the mayor,” she insisted.
“You mean the one that Vivian wouldn’t let run before we left?”
“She’ll run it,” Jessie insisted. “When the time is right, she’ll—”
“It’s locked,” he interrupted, trying to hide his enthusiasm as he pointed out the padlock on the bunkhouse door. “Guess we’ll have to leave, after all. Wait. What’re you doing? You aren’t seriously thinking of breaking and—”
Using a small folding knife she’d pulled from her pocket, Jessie pried at the latch that held the lock in place.
“Entering,” Henry finished. “You surprise me, Jessie.”
“Which part?” she asked, easily dragging one screw from the dry-rotted wood. “The knife or the ambition?”
“You’re not letting me forget that, are you?”
“Not likely.” Her pulse jumped as the latch fell away. Rusty hinges squealed in protest as the bunkhouse door swung open.
She grabbed the porch rail, which she’d leaned against the wall, and gestured toward the black maw. “After you, sir.”
“Ladies first,” Henry said. “Though for the record, I still think this is the worst idea you’ve had all day. And considering some of the other ones, that’s really saying something.”
Jessie ducked beneath a cobweb that draped the upper portion of the doorway and stepped inside. But the chance that the stains on the old T-shirt might be blood had her heart pounding. Was it possible her sister had never left this glorified shack alive?
No way, she told herself, even as the fine hairs on the back of her neck rose. Surely, whoever had come to put on the padlock would have noticed something as obvious as a dead body—or its odor.
Shaking off her jitters, Jessie aimed her flashlight down the long and narrow space. Startled by her entrance, something scuttled across the floor, and she swallowed back revulsion.
There wasn’t much to see: a grimy tunnel-like room with a stained mattress pushed off to one side, a threadbare, plaid sofa with a distinct sag in the middle. Feet crunching over grit, she took another two steps inside. Enough to spotlight the kitchenette, with its rusty sink and a plug-in electric burner on a plywood countertop. At the far end was a single doorway, which must lead to the bathroom.
Jessie tried a light switch, found it dead as she’d expected, and walked the length of the bunkhouse, her eyes straining for forgotten oddments: a bent fork, a piece of junk mail—anything that might convey the slightest clue.
But there was nothing, no trash or personal possessions in the kitchen drawers or the tiny pantry. Even the dented refrigerator had been left unplugged with its doors propped open. Since Jessie couldn’t imagine her sister or her boyfriend taking the trouble to clean before running out on the rent, she supposed that Mrs. Rayford had had whomever she’d sent to secure the door deal with the mess.
Sighing, Jessie lowered her light. “Guess you’re right. There’s nothing left to see.”
Henry sidled toward the door. “Let’s get out, then. Before somebody catches us here.”
“Might as well check the bathroom first,” she said. “Then I’ll be right behind you.”
The beam of light preceded her, sweeping dated fixtures. A strand of hair lay in the sink, reddish-gold and longer than her own. Unease crawled on spider’s legs up her neck. Haley’s hair, she thought, raising her eyes to the mottled glass of a partially de-silvered mirror.
There, her attention zoomed in on the brownish speckles along the lower edge—speckles that made her think of dried blood.
“Henry!” she called.
But he was shouting her name even louder, screaming, “Jessie, don’t come out!”
Heart contracting, Jessie reached for the bathroom door to slam it shut. But in that fractured second, she looked out through the narrowing gap to see Henry’s splayed hands rising, his feet scrambling backward as he struggled to escape.
Reacting on pure reflex, she flung open the door rather than retreating. Unable to bear the thought of anyone hurting her reluctant partner, she launched herself forward, intent on dragging him out of harm’s way before—
She had barely made it a step when an impossibly loud boom exploded.
With that single blast, Henry was falling, crumpling as an arc of scarlet sprouted from his back. In the span of that same panicked heartbeat, an invisible blow caught her right hand, a shock that brought with it a wave of dizziness that dropped her to her knees. And pain, pain like she had never known, turned her vision red and dragged a cry from her lungs, sending streamers of shock cascading through her.
Abruptly biting back her scream, she looked at Henry: her coworker, her friend. A man she’d known for every day of the four years she had worked for Metro Update, a family man with a devoted wife and three grown children, with his first grandchild on the way.
He lay twitching in an expanding puddle, as his choking rattle gave way to a sigh, then utter stillness. Gone. He’s gone, she understood, the dark certainty slamming her like a mallet. And the bullet that had killed him must have passed through and caught her hand, too.
Get inside that bathroom, his voice seemed to shout inside her brain, before the shooter comes to finish you, too.
Adrenaline pounding through her, she fought to get up, to get away, but panic tangled her legs. So she moved as best she could, crawling toward the bathroom using knees and elbows while struggling to keep her throbbing right hand off the filthy floor...and to keep herself from looking back again at Henry—or checking for the gunman in the empty bunkhouse doorway.
Instead, she swore to herself she was going to get through this. Going to survive to make the animal who had gunned down Henry pay.
At least, she would if the shooter got in his vehicle and drove away now.
But
