Her 24-Hour Protector(67)

Her world went black.

When she came round, she felt nauseous. It took a few sickening, dizzying moments to realize she was bound tightly with rope and lying in the back of Rita’s SUV. Rita’s body lay limp and bloody beside her.

And the car was moving, somewhere dark. In the desert, no lights anywhere around them.



Headlights cut through blackness along a faraway ridge. The beams were then swallowed as the vehicle emitting them dipped into a canyon. There was only one road up ahead as far as Lex knew, and it led to the ghost town.

A sense of foreboding rustled through him.

Could be teens, out for a party, he thought. Or something more sinister.

He pulled abruptly over to the side of the road and examined his map with his flashlight. There was a much older disused track that led around the back of the abandoned town. It was several miles longer, but if he used that track, he could approach the town from the rear unanticipated. He could park his SUV below a ridge to the west, cut his lights, climb up and over the ridge, advancing in silence. If there was anyone in that old ghost town, he’d have the advantage of being able to see who they were, where they were and what they were up to.

He quickly removed his white shirt, reached back into the passenger seat and extracted a dark long-sleeved T-shirt from his gym bag. He pulled it over his head, checked his weapon and restarted the ignition.



Lex crept up the back of the ridge. The night was cloaked thick with heat, dead silent. The uncanny quietness set him on edge, heightened his senses. He could smell sand, stone, feel residual heat radiating up from sand that had blistered under the desert sun. He crested the ridge.

Below him silver moonlight glowed eerily over ruined buildings that squatted in a valley of dry scrub. A knotted ball of tumbleweed lodged at the facade of a crumbling structure, shades of gray and black playing tricks with his eyes. Lex could make out the shape of an old oil drum, a rusted old truck—remains of a life, an industry. Long gone. A mine headframe loomed above the abandoned structures, throwing long distorted shadows over the landscape.

There’s a main headframe, easy to spot. Next to it is an old metal-sided building. If you go about two hundred yards east of that, you’ll find another shaft opening covered with metal grate. He’s down there…

Lex shifted his gaze eastward, and suddenly he saw it—an SUV parked at the far end of the buildings, moonlight glinting off chrome.

Sliding his pistol from its holster, he scrambled sideways down the steep drop, dislodging a shower of small pebbles that went skittering down the bank ahead of him, sound disproportionately loud. Lex stilled at the bottom, pulse quickening. He waited. Silence descended back on the ghost town, and he crept stealthily toward the hulking buildings.

The sudden creak and groan of metal grating cut through the stillness, and again Lex froze. He edged further along the front of the metal-sided building, gun held down and in front of his body, making his way two hundred yards east of the rusting headframe as per Mercedes’s directions. He stopped. He could hear voices now. Males. Two.

He crept closer, ducked down behind a rusted drum, listened.

And he heard the sound that had haunted his boyhood dreams—the distinct sandpapery voice of Roman Markowitz. Lex peered cautiously around the wall. And he saw Frank Epstein in the pale moonlight.

They’d come ahead of him.

But how had they known? This was supposed to be Mercedes’s dark secret from her husband. The thought struck him suddenly…could Epstein have had a camera in his own penthouse, been watching her whole confession? Was Mercedes in trouble now—or worse? Lex’s heart began to slam as an even more chilling thought scrambled goose bumps over his skin—what if Epstein had a camera planted in his and Jenna’s hotel room? If so, Epstein would know that Jenna knew everything.

Had Lex put her life in danger?

His head began to swim. Focus. Jenna was with Perez. If he made a rash move now, he could end up dead. And dead wasn’t going to help Jenna. He couldn’t phone her now, either. The men would hear. Nor could he call for back-up.

Lex inched farther forward, lowering himself behind the cover of a rusting boxcar. From there he watched Markowitz descend into the mine shaft using rungs grafted against the wall.

Markowitz’s granular voice carried eerily up the mine shaft, which seemed to function as a large bullhorn. “He’s down here, all right, boss, I see bones.” Markowitz swore. “He’s like a freaking mummy. D’you want to throw that bag, and I’ll package him, bring him up?”

Lex peered farther around the boxcar, saw the dark shape of Frank Epstein directing a powerful flashlight down the shaft. The heavy grate that had covered it lay to one side. Pulling back that grate must have been what caused the sound Lex had heard earlier.