Czytaj książkę: «Six-Gun Showdown»

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

I’m not dead.

The voice mail message caused Deputy Jax Crockett to freeze. He stabbed the replay button on his phone and listened to it again. Three words. That was it.

But it felt as if a stick of dynamite had just gone off in his chest.

Paige.

Oh, mercy. It was his ex-wife, Paige.

That was her voice, all right. He was sure of it. But it couldn’t be her because he’d buried her a year ago.

Jax listened to the message again. And again. Then, he checked the name and number of the caller.

Unknown.

Which meant the person might have blocked him from seeing it. But it’d come in a half hour earlier when he’d been on the back part of his ranch looking for a calf that’d strayed from the herd. No phone reception was back there, so the call had gone straight to voice mail.

Was that fear he’d heard in her voice?

Or maybe fear that someone else was pretending to feel?

This had to be some kind of sick prank. That was it. Maybe someone who sounded like Paige.

But his gut didn’t go along with that notion.

He knew his ex-wife’s voice, and that’d been her on the other end of the line. Of course, that didn’t mean someone hadn’t used an old recording of her voice, perhaps piecing together words from other conversations to come up with that one sentence.

I’m not dead.

“You okay, boss?” he heard someone ask.

Jax dragged his thoughts back to reality and noticed that one of his ranch hands, Buddy Martindale, was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

Heck, maybe he had.

After all, he was standing in the barn while he repeatedly punched the voice mail button on his phone.

“Did anybody call the ranch in the past hour or so?” Jax asked him.

Buddy lifted his cowboy hat enough to scratch his head, giving that some thought. “Not that I know of. Maybe you oughta check with Belinda, though.”

Yes, Belinda Darby would know. His son’s nanny was inside the house, and since it was coming up on dinnertime, Belinda would be close to not only Jax’s son, Matthew, but also near the house phone. She would have been able to hear the line ringing in Jax’s home office, too, if someone had tried to reach him there.

Someone like a dead woman.

Get a grip.

Paige had been murdered by the serial killer known as the Moonlight Strangler. And there had to be some reasonable explanation for the call.

Jax handed off his horse’s reins to Buddy, something he wouldn’t normally do. Tending the horses was a task he enjoyed. Not today, though. Not after that message.

There were a good thirty yards between the barn and the back porch, so while he made his way to the house, Jax listened to the recording again. Hearing it for the fifth time didn’t lessen the impact.

The memories came, slamming into him.

Nightmares of the violence Paige had suffered. Folks often reminded him that she’d only died once. That she wasn’t suffering now, that she was at peace. And while that was true, Jax couldn’t stop himself from reliving every last horrifying moment of Paige’s life.

Their marriage had fallen apart several months before she was killed, but it didn’t matter that their divorce had been finalized only days before that fateful night. Paige sure hadn’t deserved to die, and their son hadn’t deserved to lose his mother.

Before Jax reached the back porch, the door opened, and Belinda stuck out her head. Even though the sunset wasn’t far off, it was still hot, the August air more humid than cooling, and the breeze took a swipe at her long blond hair.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” she said, smiling, but that smile quickly vanished. “Is everything all right?”

Heck, he must have been wearing his emotions on his face and every other part of him. A rarity for him since, to the best of his knowledge, no one had ever called him the emotional type.

“Have there been any calls since I’ve been out?” he asked.

“No.” Unlike Buddy, Belinda didn’t even hesitate. “Why? What’s wrong?”

Jax waved her off. No need to worry her. And she would be worried if he told her about the voice mail. Belinda took care of Matthew as if he were her own and would have done the same for Jax if he’d let her. Anything that bothered the two of them would bother her.

“Can you stay late tonight? I need to go back to the sheriff’s office and look over some reports,” he lied.

Well, it was sort of a lie, anyway. He was a deputy after all, and there were always reports to read, write or look over. He’d maybe work on a few while he was there.

But what he really wanted was to have the voice mail analyzed.

He’d saved the old answering machine with Paige’s recorded message on it. Jax had figured when Matthew got older, he might want to hear his mommy’s voice.

Or at least that’s what Jax had told himself.

But now, the recording could be compared to the one on his voice mail, and he’d have the proof he needed that this was some kind of a sick hoax. Maybe then the knot in his stomach would ease up.

“No problem. I can stay as late as you need,” Belinda assured him.

He hadn’t expected her to say anything different. “Thanks. And don’t hold dinner for me. I’ll be back before Matthew’s bedtime, though.”

Belinda nodded and went back inside. But not before giving him another concerned look. She would believe his lie because she wanted to believe it, but she knew something was wrong.

Jax was within a few steps of the back porch when he caught some movement from the corner of his eye. Just a blur of motion in the open doorway of the detached garage. Since Buddy was still in the main barn, Jax knew it wasn’t him, and none of the hands from his family’s ranch had come to help him work today. Still, that didn’t mean his sister or brothers hadn’t sent someone over to get a vehicle or something.

Except it didn’t feel like anything that ordinary.

Probably because of that voice mail.

He was armed, his Glock in his waist holster, and Jax slid his hand over it and started toward the garage.

There.

He saw the movement again.

Someone was definitely inside.

He’d made some enemies over the years. That came with the territory of being a lawman. But if someone had decided to bring a fight to his ranch, then the person could have already ambushed him.

Not exactly a thought to steady his nerves.

“Who’s there?” he asked. Not a shout.

Jax kept his voice low enough so that Belinda or anyone in the house wouldn’t necessarily hear him. But a person in the garage should.

He got no answer, and he glanced back at his house to make sure Belinda was still inside. She was. Jax considered firing off a text to warn her to get Matthew and herself away from the windows, but it might be overkill.

Or not.

He got another glimpse of the shadowy figure and decided to confront this head-on. Literally. Jax drew his gun and hurried to the entry. It was dark inside, but not so dark that he didn’t see the person lurking behind the back end of one of the trucks.

“Paige?” Jax whispered.

He could have sworn everything stopped. His heartbeat. His breath. Maybe even time. But that standstill didn’t last.

Because the person stepped out, not enough for him to fully see her, but Jax knew it was a woman.

“You got my message,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Paige. It was her. In the flesh.

Jax had a thousand emotions hit him at once. Relief. Mercy, there was a ton of relief, but it didn’t last but a second or two before the other emotions took over: shock, disbelief and, yeah, anger.

Lots and lots of anger.

“Why?” he managed to say, though he wasn’t sure how he could even speak with his throat clamped shut.

Paige cleared her throat, too. “Because it was necessary.”

As answers went, it sucked, and he let her know that with the scowl he aimed at her. “Why?” he repeated.

She stepped from the shadows but didn’t come closer to him. Still, it was close enough for him to confirm what he already knew.

This was Paige.

She was back from the grave. Or else, back from a lie that she’d apparently let him believe.

For a dead woman, she didn’t look bad, but she had changed. No more blond hair. It was dark brown now and cut short and choppy. She’d also lost some of those curves that’d always caught his eye and every other man’s in town.

“I know you have a thousand questions,” she said, rubbing her hands along the outside legs of her jeans. She also glanced around. Behind him.

Behind her.

“Just one question. Why the hell did you let me believe you were dead?” But Jax couldn’t even wait for the answer. He cursed. “I saw pictures of you after the Moonlight Strangler had gotten his hands on you. There’s no reason you should have let me believe that’d happened to you.”

“It did happen.” She stepped even closer, and thanks to the sunlight spearing through the door, he saw the scar on her cheek.

The crescent-shaped knife cut that the Moonlight Strangler had given all his victims.

There were marks on her throat, too. Scars from the piano wire that had sliced into her skin when the killer strangled her.

“Yes.” Paige touched her fingers to her neck. “It’s healed now. For the most part.”

She was wrong. It would never heal. Never go away. Not in his mind, anyway.

“But clearly you’re not dead,” he snapped. And he didn’t want her to be, but he damn sure wanted some answers. “I’ve been through hell for the past year. Hell,” Jax emphasized. “You didn’t just put me through this, either. Matthew went through it, too.”

Even though his son had been only a year old when Paige died, it’d broken Jax’s heart to hear his son call out for his ma-ma.

“Matthew.” Her breath hitched, and tears sprang to her eyes. “I did this for him. For you.”

“You didn’t do anything for me.” There was no way for him to rein in the anger in his voice or any other part of him. “You let me believe you’d been murdered.”

She nodded, came even closer. So close that he caught her familiar scent. But she also glanced around again. “Because if I hadn’t let you believe that, the Moonlight Strangler would have come after me again. And I was afraid he’d use Matthew and you to get to me.”

He cursed again, dismissing that. “I’m a deputy sheriff.”

“And that didn’t stop him from getting to me,” Paige reminded him just as quickly.

Good grief, she might as well have slugged him with a two-by-four. Because it was the truth. And it was a truth that Jax had struggled with for the past year.

He hadn’t managed to save her.

But someone obviously had.

“What happened?” he demanded.

She paused, gathered her breath. Maybe her thoughts, too. “By the time the San Antonio cops got to the crime scene, I was barely alive. In fact, the first cop on the scene did report me as dead. That’s the report that went out to you and everybody else. But the paramedics managed to revive me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I knew if word got out that I was alive, the killer would just come after me again.”

He mentally went through all the details and saw one big question at the end of that explanation. “Who helped you come up with this stupid plan?”

“I came up with it.” She glanced around again. “And I convinced a cop at SAPD who knew about me to go along with it.”

Jax didn’t miss the glancing around, nor the hesitation in her voice.

“Who helped you?” he pressed.

She dodged his gaze. “Other than the cop, Cord Granger helped.”

Jax would have cursed again if he could have gotten his jaw unclenched. Cord Granger, a DEA agent. Also the biological brother to his adopted sister, Addie.

Cord and Addie’s father was none other than the Moonlight Strangler himself. Though the law didn’t have the actual identity of the vicious serial killer, they knew from DNA comparisons that both Cord and Addie were his biological children. Children the killer had abandoned when they were a little more than toddlers, and neither had any recollections of the man.

Too bad.

If they had a name, then they could find and arrest the piece of slime.

Something that Cord had made his top priority.

Jax had never cared much for Cord. And this wouldn’t help. Because Cord was much more concerned about catching his birth father than he was with the safety of the people around him. Jax wouldn’t have put it past the man to actually use Paige to draw the killer out. And now he’d apparently put Paige up to lying to him.

Not just any old lie, either.

But one that’d crushed Jax and the rest of his family.

“You were a fool to trust Cord,” he finally managed to say. Jax shoved his thumb against his chest. “You should have trusted me instead.”

She huffed. Not an angry sound, but more like stating the obvious. “We weren’t exactly in a good place, Jax.”

That was the wrong thing to say. A new wave of anger came. “You’re sure you didn’t die because you didn’t want to face the divorce?” Or maybe because she hadn’t wanted to face him?

Her eyes narrowed when their gazes connected again. “No. It was to save Matthew and you.”

Jax didn’t have time to figure out if he believed that or not. Because he heard something he didn’t want to hear.

Belinda’s voice.

“Jax, are you all right?” the nanny called out.

Belinda was on the back porch, peering into the garage. She could almost certainly see him, but probably not Paige. Paige kept it that way by stepping into the shadows.

“Tell her to go back inside,” Paige insisted.

Jax opened his mouth to ask why, but because he was watching Paige so closely, he saw the urgency slide across her face.

And the fear.

“I’m fine,” he told Belinda. “Just checking a few things before I head to the office.”

He waited to see if that’d be enough or if he truly would have to tell her to go inside. But thankfully, it worked. Belinda went back in and closed the door.

“What happened?” Jax asked Paige. And he didn’t need his lawman’s instincts to tell him that not only had something happened...

Something had gone wrong.

“What made you come back now?” he pressed.

The fear in her face went up a significant notch. “I think the Moonlight Strangler is on his way here to draw me out.”

All right. That upped his concern, too. A lot. “And how exactly would he do that?”

Paige’s mouth trembled. “The Moonlight Strangler is coming after Matthew and you...tonight.”

Chapter Two

Paige stood there and waited for Jax to react to the news she’d just delivered.

And he reacted all right.

He turned, ready to bolt inside the house. To protect Matthew, no doubt. But Paige took hold of his arm to stop him.

“Just listen to what I have to say,” she insisted. “I don’t want to give the Moonlight Strangler a reason to fire shots into the house.”

He slung off her grip. “Neither do I, but I’m not going to stand here while he goes after my son.”

Our son, she nearly corrected, but Paige figured that was a different battle for a different time. They had to survive this one first.

“The killer likely knows I’m here,” she explained, hoping it would get Jax to stay put. “I figure he’s watching me. Somehow. Maybe with cameras. Maybe he’s out there somewhere in the woods with infrared equipment. He’s been watching me for the past three days, though I haven’t spotted him yet.”

Jax’s eyes narrowed. “And even though you knew he was watching, you brought him here, to my doorstep?”

She had no trouble hearing the anger in his voice. Or seeing it on his face. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” he snapped.

They weren’t just talking about her being here now, but all the other things that’d happened between them. Again, another battle, another time.

Paige stopped him again when he tried to bolt. “The killer would have come here no matter what I did because he knew he’d be able to use Matthew and you to get to me.”

He went still. Not in a good way. But in that calm, almost lethal way of a lawman who’d just heard something he didn’t want to hear. “And how the heck do you know that?”

“Because he’s sent me several texts. And, yes, I’m certain they’re from the Moonlight Strangler because he knew details about my attack that hadn’t been released to the press. In the last one he sent, he said if I didn’t meet him tonight at 9:00 p.m., then he’d go after Matthew and you.”

That was still nearly two hours away.

Not much time to pull off a miracle. But it might be enough time to bring all of this to an end. An end that would keep Matthew and Jax out of danger.

Jax stood there, obviously processing that, and cursed again. Glared at her, too.

She deserved the profanity and the glare. Deserved every drop of rage that he wanted to sling at her. Because he was right. She had turned his life upside down. Her precious little boy’s, too.

“If you knew the killer was watching you, following you, then why hide here?” Jax asked.

She’d known that question was coming. Others would, too. “Because I didn’t want to pull Belinda or your ranch hands into this. I’m not hiding from the killer. I’m hiding from them. That’s why I parked by the creek and walked here.”

Paige was thankful no one on the ranch had spotted her. Even though she’d altered her appearance, someone could have recognized her. Especially Belinda. They’d known each other since childhood, and a change of hairstyle wasn’t going to fool anyone for long.

“At the time I faked my death,” she continued, “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was trusting the right people.”

“You mean Cord,” he snarled.

Paige hated that Jax was aiming his venom at Cord. Because Cord was the one person she was certain had kept his promise to make sure Jax and Matthew stayed out of harm’s way.

But someone else had betrayed her.

Paige hoped she got a chance to discover who’d done that and deliver some payback. First, though, she had to protect Matthew—and Jax if he’d let her.

“After the attack, I went to a safe house in the Panhandle,” she said. “Not an official safe house,” Paige corrected, “but it was a place for me to recover and get back on my feet. Then, I moved to an apartment in Houston. That’s where I’ve been, where I probably would have stayed, if I hadn’t started getting those texts from the Moonlight Strangler three days ago.”

“And those texts just appeared without any kind of warning or sign that the killer knew you were alive?” His voice stayed a snarl.

“Yes. I’m still trying to figure out how he learned that.” She gave a heavy sigh. “Look, I know you have a lot of questions, but they have to wait. We have to put Matthew’s safety first.”

He couldn’t argue with that, but mercy, she was dreading those questions. Dreading even more that she didn’t have the answers that Jax wanted to hear.

Jax cursed again before he glanced around the garage, the yard and the back of the house. “I don’t want you inside. I don’t want Matthew seeing you yet.”

“Agreed.” Though it broke her heart to say that.

Jax’s eyebrow lifted, and he got that look, the one that condemned her as a mother.

“I want to see him and hold him more than I want my next breath,” Paige clarified. “But if I go inside, it might give the killer a reason to try to get in there, too. He warned me not to try to hide behind my son.”

As if she’d do that.

But she would have to draw Jax into the middle of this. Paige couldn’t see a way around it.

“If I’d thought I could make Matthew safer by going inside with him, I would have already been in there,” Paige added.

That stirred Jax’s jaw muscles, but thankfully he didn’t try to bolt toward the house again. However, he did take out his phone, and he moved into the shadows of the garage, his attention nailed to the house.

“I’m texting Belinda to tell her to lock the doors and set the security system,” Jax relayed to her. “I’ll tell her it’s just a precaution, that a prisoner has escaped. And then I’m calling for backup.”

Paige didn’t stop him from sending the first text. She wanted the house locked down. But she did stop him from texting his brother Jericho. Jericho was the sheriff, and while he would ultimately get involved in this, now wasn’t the time. Ditto for Jax’s other two brothers, Chase and Levi. They were both lawmen, too, and having them here could make a bad situation worse.

“Hear me out before you involve your brothers in this,” she said. “After I got those messages from the Moonlight Strangler, I knew he wasn’t going to back down until he had me. I’m the one who got away, and he wants me dead.”

“I’m listening,” Jax said when she hesitated.

Paige hadn’t hesitated because she thought he wasn’t listening, but rather because she wasn’t sure how to say this. Best just to get it out there. “If I’d thought it would keep Matthew out of danger, I would have just surrendered to him. Would have let him finish what he started.”

Jax cursed again. “Do you hear yourself? You’re talking about suicide. What you should have done is gone to the cops. Or to me.”

“I did come to you, tonight,” she whispered. “You won’t be thanking me for that, though, but it was the only way. I want this monster dead, and I want you to kill him for me.”

He gave a crisp nod. “Tell me where he is, and I will,” Jax said as if it were a done deal.

It was far from being a done deal, though.

“He wants me to meet him tonight at nine on the bridge at Appaloosa Creek. I’m sure he already had the area under some kind of surveillance before he told me it was the meeting place. He said if I show up with anyone but you, then he’ll start a killing spree. One that will involve our son.”

She gave him a moment to let that sink in. It didn’t sink in well. The fire went through his already fiery blue eyes. Actually, plenty of things about Jax fell into the fiery category. All cowboy, even with that badge clipped to his belt. Hot cowboy, she mentally corrected.

Even now, after all this time and water under the bridge, Paige was still attracted to him. Something she shouldn’t be remembering. Not when she had more important things to deal with.

“That’s why you can’t involve your brothers,” she added. “If they go rushing to the area, he’ll know.”

“How?” he snapped.

“I’m not sure. Like I said, I suspect long-range cameras. Of course, that means he has the resources to set up something like that without being detected.”

His stare drilled into her. “Who is he?”

A heavy sigh left her mouth. “I honestly don’t know.”

No one did. The Moonlight Strangler had murdered more than a dozen women before he’d finally made a mistake and left his DNA at a crime scene. There’d been no match for the DNA in the system, but there had been a match of a different kind.

To Jax’s adopted sister, Addie.

“As you know, Addie doesn’t remember her father,” Paige said.

Of course, Addie had been just three when she’d been found wandering around the woods near the Crocketts’ Appaloosa Pass Ranch. When no one had come forward to claim her, Jax’s parents had adopted her and raised her as their own along with their four sons: Jax, Jericho, Chase and Levi.

“As fraternal twins, Cord was the same age as Addie when he was abandoned, and he doesn’t remember anything, either,” she went on.

Something Paige had in common with Addie and Cord since she, too, had been left at the hospital when she was a baby. Of course, she hadn’t been abandoned by a serial killer.

He got quiet again, but not for long. “Did you see the Moonlight Strangler’s face when he tried to kill you?” Jax asked.

This was one of the other questions she’d expected, but Paige had to shake her head and hope she could say the words without having flashbacks or a panic attack.

“He hit me with a stun gun when I was getting into my car in the parking lot of the CSI office in San Antonio,” she said. Her words rushed together, spilling out with her breath. “He was wearing a mask so I never saw his face. He said some things to me...cut me and strangled me until I lost consciousness.”

Jax pressed his lips together for a moment. “What things did he say?”

That required her to take a moment. Things that were hard to repeat aloud, though they repeated in her head all the time.

And in her nightmares.

“He said if he hadn’t managed to get to me, then he would have kidnapped Matthew to draw me out.” There. That was the worst of it. The absolute worst. “The next thing I remember after that was waking up with a San Antonio cop leaning over me.”

“The cop who helped you fake your death,” he mumbled. “Along with Cord.” Jax took the venom in his voice up a notch.

Probably because Cord was obsessed with finding and stopping the Moonlight Strangler. But Paige thought maybe she heard something else in Jax’s voice. Perhaps a little jealousy. She recognized it because she felt that same ugly emotion when Jax said Belinda’s name.

“It’s not like that between Cord and me,” she volunteered.

His glare didn’t soften any. “Then how is it exactly? Why don’t you tell me?”

Well, this was a can of worms that she’d hoped to delay opening. The emotions of it were still too raw, and Paige wasn’t sure she could tell him without choking on the words. But Jax had to know. Because it was hearing this that would hopefully get him to cooperate with her dangerous plan.

“When the killer was strangling me,” she said, but then had to stop to fight back the images of that nightmare. Always the images. “He told me my birth mother was one of his first victims and that he was killing me to make sure her spawn didn’t live another second.”

Judging from the way his eyes widened, Jax hadn’t expected that. “And you believed him?”

“No. But the DNA test I took later proved otherwise.” That required another deep breath. “According to the test, my birth mother was Mary Madison. Her body was found just a few days after I was abandoned in the hospital. I didn’t learn any of this until after I’d faked my death.”

“His victim’s daughter,” Jax said. He did some deep breathing, too, and she could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “That’s why he came after you?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer. “Then why hasn’t he gone after the children of his other victims?”

She had to shake her head. “Maybe my birth mother’s murder was more personal to him? Or he could believe I know something about him that the others don’t.”

“Do you?” he asked, and it sounded like some kind of accusation.

With good reason.

Cord wasn’t the only one who’d become obsessed with finding the Moonlight Strangler. She had as well, and even though Paige had dismissed it as part of her job as a crime scene investigator, it’d been more than that. She’d felt it bone deep.

And she’d been right.

She wasn’t just searching for a killer who had eluded the cops for nearly thirty years. Now she knew that she’d been looking for the man who’d murdered her mother so she could stop him from killing again. Of course, the obsession had come back to haunt her and just might cost her everything.

“I don’t know anything about his identity,” she continued, “but I do know how to stop him.”

However, it would cost her big-time. The trick was not to have that cost spread to Matthew and Jax.