Justice Burning (Hellfire #2)(2)

She couldn’t steal another. Without a dollar on her, she couldn’t buy a bus ticket or a rent a car. Damn. She should have thought this escape through a little more thoroughly. One thing was certain, she couldn’t stay on the side of the road. A sign a few miles back indicated a town was coming up. What was the name? Hellfire? A peculiar name for a town.

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since the night before. Maybe she could stop there, find a job and work for food. With a little bit of a plan in mind, she drove toward the town. She hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile when a sharp pop sounded, and the car pulled to the right.

Phoebe steered off the road and got out. Wadding up her skirt, she folded it over her arm and padded around the front of the car, gravel and grass digging into her tender bare feet. As she’d suspected, the right front tire was flat. Great. Her shoulders slumped. She’d never changed a flat tire in her life and her father had never demonstrated the process. He’d whip out his cell phone, call for roadside assistance and wait until help arrived. Phoebe didn’t have that luxury, with neither a cell phone, nor a roadside assistance service that didn’t belong to her daddy. Not to mention, that wasn’t what independent women did. How the hell did one change a flat tire?

She walked back around to the driver’s side and pulled the keys from the ignition. When she’d seen movies where the characters had to change a tire, they always went to the trunk. The spare tire should be in the trunk. It stood to reason, the tools to change the flat would be in the trunk as well. Keys in hand, she walked to the back of the vehicle, and hit the button to pop open the trunk.

With her dress in hand, barefooted, broke and determined, she leaned over and studied the space. A blanket lay across a rather large lump in the back. Hopefully the spare tire. Phoebe grabbed the blanket and yanked it off.

She gasped and staggered backward, all the blood draining from her head. This couldn’t be happening. No. No. No. Phoebe pressed her hand to her lips and edged closer to look again, praying she’d imagined what she’d seen.

Nope.

The lump beneath the blanket was none other than her missing groom, Ryan. Based on his waxy gray face and open eyes staring at nothing, the man was well and truly dead.

Sweet Jesus. Oh, sweet Jesus. Phoebe bit down on her bottom lip. Had she checked the trunk before she’d gone one hundred miles, would he have been alive enough to resuscitate? She gulped. Had she killed him by not checking? Though she hadn’t really loved him, she never wished him dead.

The next thought hit her square in the gut. She’d stolen Ryan’s car, run out on the wedding, and now had his dead body in the back of the vehicle. To make it worse, she had a witness who could state he heard her say, I’ll kill him. The best man had been there when she’d gone to find Ryan.

When the cops caught up with her and Ryan’s car, they’d find his body, receive testimony from his best man and presume Phoebe had killed him. Her independence would come to a screeching halt when she was arrested, booked and thrown in jail for the rest of her life.

Her head spinning, Phoebe stood back, looking around at the rolling grasslands. Not a car was in sight. She couldn’t just walk away. Barefoot, no telling how far to the nearest town, she wouldn’t make it. Phoebe hadn’t planned to start a new life on the lam for a murder she didn’t commit.

Scrambling for something, anything, she could do to get out of the mess she’d landed in, she slammed the trunk, hurried around the car and jumped into the driver’s seat. The wind chose that moment to pick up and her dress billowed around her as she pulled forward on the flat tire, bumping along the shoulder of the road. Her skirt flew up in her face. Trying to flatten it so that she could see, she shifted her foot to hit the brake, but she hit the accelerator instead. The convertible leaped forward, ran off the road and slammed into a fence post, throwing Phoebe forward, banging her forehead against the steering wheel. She saw stars that quickly changed to bright blue strobes. As her vision cleared, she realized the lights were attached to a police vehicle.

Could her day get any worse?



“Unit 470, we have a report of some teenagers drag racing on farm to market road 476 at the old Dunwitty grain silo.”

“10-4.” Deputy Nash Grayson slowed the sheriff’s deputy SUV, checked the road ahead leading into Hellfire, and glanced in his rearview mirror. No one coming. No one going. Quiet, placid, small-town Texas, where nothing much happened. He made a U-turn and headed back out into the countryside.

Thirteen months ago, he’d been in full combat gear, slipping through the streets of a small village in Afghanistan, searching for Taliban rebels. His fourth tour to the Middle East, he knew the drill. Kill the bad guys, not the civilians.

The nation he was sworn to defend didn’t understand how difficult it was to tell the difference. A smiling Afghan approaching a checkpoint might have explosives strapped to his waist beneath the robe he wore. Or a mother might send her child armed with a grenade into a group of soldiers visiting an orphanage. Over there, he had to remain vigilant. Hell, he’d needed eyes in the back of his head. Always alert, always listening and looking for sudden movement.

After a year back in his hometown of Hellfire, he still jumped at loud noises and dropped into a fighting stance when someone sneaked up behind him. But the bucolic life of the small town had helped him learn to breathe deeply again. Well, not too deeply when the wind blew from the direction of the local stockyard. The stench of cattle crap and urine filled the air on those days.

Other than the usual teenaged hijinks and an occasional domestic quarrel, things were pretty laid back. Almost too much so. Thankfully, when he wasn’t on the job, Nash had the family ranch to retreat to. There, he could work with the animals and burn off some of his restless energy.

Although he was nearing the end of his shift, Nash didn’t mind checking out the drag racing report. A typical Saturday in the country. Hellfire didn’t have a bowling alley or movie theater. The only organized activities available to the kids were football and rodeo. High school football games drew everyone out on Friday evenings in the fall. Which left Saturday and Sunday to do chores before the kids returned to school and parents to work on Monday. But after chores, the teens liked to gather at the town’s only fast food drive-in or find a place to raise hell out in the countryside. Everything from cow-tipping to mud-riding in the bottoms.

Today’s hell-raising just happened to be drag racing.

Nash pulled into the rutted gravel road leading to the abandoned Dunwitty silos. Apparently the race was in full swing, because all eyes were on the vehicles at the center of the mob. Two tricked-out trucks, with knobby tires and fat chrome exhaust pipes, shot out of the crowd of young people and barreled along the wide gravel road running half a mile in length. Their engines rumbled, the sound reverberating through the warm, late-afternoon air.

Guys in jeans, cowboy boots and hats punched the air, whooping and hollering. Girls in frayed cutoffs and shirts tied at their midriffs, laughed and screamed for the drivers to go faster.

Nothing Nash could do at that point would slow the racing trucks. If he didn’t know they were trespassing, he’d enjoy the race and then slip away before anyone was the wiser about his presence there.

But this was Dunwitty’s place and the clearly posted NO TRESPASSING signs out front were all the rules Nash needed. He followed the rules, the structure of his job and his life giving him comfort.

When the trucks reached the end of the road, the crowd of young people shouted, yelled, hooted and whistled for the winner. The trucks turned around and drove back to the silos, stopping as the kids converged on them.

Nash got out of his vehicle. Time to spoil the fun.

One young man, Johnny Austin, spotted Nash before he reached the edge of the crowd. “Time to leave,” he shouted, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the celebration.

All faces turned toward him.

With a wave, Nash jerked his head toward the silos. “Sorry, folks. I gotta break it up. You’re trespassing.”

“Aw,” the group said as a collective.

The guys and girls piled into the cars and trucks and filed out of the silo area, one by one.

Once they’d all gone, Nash climbed into his SUV and headed back to town to hang up his hat and go home. Another day, another dollar. The excitement was killing him. He chuckled. He’d thought about going to work in Houston, where a shooting occurred every day. Maybe more. But he liked being near the ranch, the horses and cattle. He’d missed it when he’d been on active duty.

Perhaps he needed a woman in his life. Like his brother Becket, who’d never been happier. Up until Kinsey had come back into his brother’s life, Nash had been content to be a bachelor. Seeing them together, always touching and kissing…Never mind the headboard banging and springs squeaking into the wee hours of the morning. Nash had gone so far as to sleep in the barn a few times, or asked for the night shift to avoid the happy copulating going on in the ranch house master bedroom.

Yeah, Houston was looking more and more like a possibility.

Ahead, he spied a strange sight. A shiny black convertible, with cans strung out behind and a banner proclaiming JUST MARRIED, sped toward town, weaving side to side, white fabric ballooning up from the driver’s seat like a parachute.