warmth of his leather jacket, lulled by the pulse of the motorcycle, the feel of the wind in her hair. She couldn’t believe that he’d found her.
What had she been thinking giving him that damned key? She’d taken a terrible risk, but then she’d never dreamed he would come looking for her. What if he had gotten into the Grizzly Club this morning before she’d gotten out of there?
She shook off the thought and watched the countryside blur past, first forest-covered mountains, then wide-open spaces as they raced along the two-lane highway that cut east across the state.
She’d gotten away. No one knew where she was. But still she had to look back. The past had been chasing her for so long, she didn’t kid herself that it wasn’t close behind.
There were no cars close behind them, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be looking for her.
For a moment, she considered what she’d done. She didn’t know this cowboy, didn’t know where he was taking her or what would happen when they got there.
This is so like you. Leaping before you look. Not thinking about the consequences of your actions. As if you weren’t in enough trouble already.
Her mother’s words rang in her ears. The only difference this time was that she wasn’t that fourteen-year-old girl with eleven dollars in the pocket of her worn jean jacket and her only possession a beat-up guitar one of her mother’s boyfriend’s had left behind.
She’d escaped both times. That time from one of her mother’s amorous boyfriends and with her virginity. This time with her life. At least so far.
That reckless spirit is going to get you into trouble one day. You mark my words, girl.
Wouldn’t her mama love to hear that she’d been right. But mama was long dead and Jennifer Blythe James was still alive. If anything, that girl and the woman she’d become was a survivor. She’d gotten out of that dirty desert trailer park where she’d started life. She would get out of this.
“WHO’S THE VICTIM?” Sheriff Buford Olson asked, sensing the Grizzly Club general manager hovering somewhere at a discreet distance behind him.
“Martin Sanderson,” Kevin said. “It’s his house.”
Buford studied the larger bloody footprint next to the body. At a glance, he could see that it didn’t match the soles of the two security guards or the general manager’s, and unlike the other smaller print, this one headed not for the door, but in the opposite direction.
As he let his gaze follow the path the bloody prints had taken, Buford noted that the man had tried to wipe his shoe clean of the blood on an expensive-looking rug between the deceased and the bar where he was now lounging.
Buford was startled to see the man making himself at home at the bar with a drink in his hand. How many people had those dumb security guards let in?
“What the hell?” the sheriff demanded as he pushed himself up from where he’d been squatting beside the body. The “club” gave him a royal pain. He moved toward the bar, being careful not to step on the bloody footprints the man had left behind.
Buford didn’t need to ask the man’s name. He recognized Jett Akins only because his fourteen-year-old granddaughter Amy had a poster of the man on her bedroom wall. On the poster, Jett had been wearing all black—just as he was this morning—and clutching a fancy electric guitar. Now he clutched a tumbler, the dark contents only half full.
The one time his granddaughter had played a Jett Atkin’s song for him, Buford had done his best not to show his true feelings. The so-called song had made him dearly miss the 1960s. Seemed to him there hadn’t been any good music since then, other than country-western, of course.
“Mr. Atkins found the body,” Kevin said from the entryway.
Jett Atkins looked pale and shaken. He downed the rest of his drink as the sheriff came toward him. Buford would guess it wasn’t his first.
“You found the body?” he asked Jett, who looked older than he had on his poster. He had dark hair and eyes and a large spider tattoo on his neck and more tattoos on the back of his hands—all that was showing since the black shirt he wore was long-sleeved.
“I flew in this morning and took a taxi here. When I saw Martin, I called the club’s emergency number.” His voice died off as he looked again at the dead man by the fireplace and poured himself another drink.
Buford wanted to ask why the hell he hadn’t called 911 instead of calling the club’s emergency number. Isn’t that what a normal person would do when he found a dead body?
He turned to Kevin again. “How many people were in this house?”
“Mr. Sanderson had left the names of six approved guests at the gate with the guard, along with special keys for admittance to all the amenities on the grounds,” Kevin said in his annoyingly official tone. “All of those keys have been picked up.”
“Six people? So where are they?” the sheriff demanded. “And I am going to need a list of their names.” Before he could finish, Kevin withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and stepped around the sunken living room to hand it to him.
“These are the names of the guests Mr. Sanderson approved.”
Buford read off the names. “JJ, Caro, Luca, Bets, T-Top and Jett. Those aren’t names.” He had almost forgotten about Jett until he spoke.
“They’re stage names,” he said. “Caro, Luca, T-Top, and Bets. It’s from when they were in a band together.”
Stage names? “Are they actors?” Buford asked, thinking things couldn’t get any worse.
“Musicians,” Jett said.
He was wrong about things not getting worse. He couldn’t tell the difference between women’s or men’s names and said as much.
“They were an all-girl band back in the nineties called Tough as Nails,” Jett said, making it sound as if the nineties were the Stone Age.
“You don’t know their real names?” Buford asked.
“They are the only names required for our guards to admit them,” Kevin said. “Here at the Grizzly Club we respect the privacy of our residents.”
Swearing, Buford wrote down: Caro, Luca, T-Top and Bets in his notebook.
“What about this JJ?” he asked. “You said he picked up his key yesterday?”
“She.”
Buford turned to look at Jett. “She?” he asked thinking one of these women account for the woman’s cowboy-boot print in the dead man’s blood.
“JJ. She was also in the band, the lead singer,” Jett said.
The sheriff turned to the club manager again. “I need full legal names for these guests and I need to know where they are.”
“Only Mr. Sanderson would have that information and he … All I can tell you is that the five approved guests picked
