Confessing to the Cowboy

chapter 16



The traffic accident was a nightmare of whirling cherry lights, stinging sleet and rescue workers and accident victims slipping and sliding on the icy road.

This particular sharp curve just outside of town was treacherous under the best of conditions. It had been here on a rainy night that Courtney Chambers had missed the curve and flown off the ridge and into the trees below. Of course, she’d been drugged at the time by somebody who had wanted to kidnap her baby.

He shoved aside thoughts of that particular crime, glad that at least it had been solved with a happy ending and the sick woman responsible for the accident was behind bars.

He needed to focus now on the two screaming men who had been the drivers of the two cars and were now each pointing fingers at the other with blame. Wilma Simpson sat sobbing in the front passenger seat of one of the cars. She refused to leave the vehicle even to allow the emergency workers to check her for injuries. “I just want to go home,” she sobbed over and over again.

Two people had already been taken from the scene, both injured but not anything life-threatening. The cars had hit almost head-on and surprisingly it had been the people in the backseat that had been injured.

Neither of them had been wearing seat belts and one’s head bounced off the front headrest while the other had banged knees against the front seat. Thankfully the people in the front seat had been wearing their seat belts. It was a damned miracle that nobody had been killed.

Each driver was accusing the other of being in the wrong lane, and unfortunately both had moved their cars from the point of impact and off to the side of the road before Cameron had arrived.

The sleet and freezing temperature were only adding to the issues as he silently cursed the weatherman for missing the forecast on this band of icy mix that had moved into the area. The forecast had said a brief icy shower, but there had been nothing brief about the sleet that had been ongoing and appeared to have parked overhead.

He stalked over to one of the raging drivers and pulled him away from the other before they began to take swings at each other. Ed Ganger and Blair Simpson were both hotheads, and Cameron knew it wouldn’t take much more before this escalated from a traffic accident into a brawling fistfight.

When he had Ed at a safe distance away from Blair he began a quick interview of his view of the event. Larry Brooks moved to Blair and began his own discussion with the irate man.

Cameron knew how this worked. They would both have different stories and someplace in the middle of those stories would be a semblance of the truth.

What he’d like to do was get out of the nasty weather and head to the café to pick up Mary. He’d like to be curled up on the sofa in front of a roaring blaze in the fire place at his house with her in his arms.

But it was just another one of his foolish fantasies. He couldn’t leave the scene of an accident and he had a feeling the last place in the world Mary wanted to be was in his arms again.

As Adam Benson took photos of what appeared to be the point of impact between the two cars, which initially indicated that both drivers were hugging the center line, Cameron took the two driver statements with him to his car and sank into the warmth of the blowing heater.

He gave each of the statements a cursory read to make sure they had all the information needed. The reports, along with the photos they had of both cars and the road, might allow them to be able to reenact the accident to see if blame needed to be placed. At this point he considered it a weather-related accident with no specific driver to blame. They could each contact their own insurance companies and figure it all out.

He got back out of the car, grateful that both vehicles remained drivable, thus negating the need for a tow truck.

With the sleet getting more intense, he sent both drivers on their way, one heading to the hospital to check on their passengers and the other, with the sobbing Wilma, home.

All the other men who were on traffic duty left to patrol the streets while Cameron headed back to the office. He’d write up a quick report and then head to the café to pick up Mary and get her back to his place.

A half an hour later he was seated at his desk, his report written, but his thoughts drifting into painful territory. He couldn’t be the son that his parents wanted. He couldn’t be the man for Mary and he couldn’t be the sheriff who caught the bad guy. Talk about feeling like a failure.

He tried to turn his thoughts around. He could twist and turn himself inside out and he would never be Bobby. It wasn’t his fault that his father was trapped in an abyss of grief even after two years. He could only hope that with more time his father would eventually come around and realize Cameron’s worth as a son...as a man.

Mary was a heartbreak that would take some time to heal. He’d entertained dreams of her for so long, and when his fantasy of making love to her had finally come true, it had been far beyond his best fantasy. But that didn’t mean he was the right man for her.

He should have never gotten intimately involved with her in the first place. It would have been much easier if she’d remained just a fantasy, a vision to fill his dreams at night.

He had to figure out a way to get her out of his heart. She’d become his addictive habit...thinking about her, dreaming about her and ending almost every night of the day sitting with her across the counter at the café.

She was definitely a habit he had to break and ultimately she was a citizen of his town who he had to protect from an unknown perpetrator.

Where in the hell was Jason McKnight? And if he wasn’t committing the murders himself, then who had he hired to do his dirty work? Although he’d managed to pull Denver Walton’s and Thomas Manning’s finances and background records based on probable cause, the judge had known that it was more of a fishing expedition and wouldn’t be so lenient the next time Cameron came to him.

As far as he was concerned Denver and Thomas were his best suspects and yet there was nothing concrete to tie either of them to the crimes.

He couldn’t help but feel as if he was missing something...overlooking something vital, but he’d gone over the reports a hundred times and nothing had popped out. He and his men had checked each person in town they thought the right height and weight to be the perpetrator and they’d all come up empty-handed.

He stood and grabbed his coat. Time to get Mary and get home before the roads became completely impassable. He was just about to leave his office when his cell phone rang.

“Cameron, it’s me,” his mother said.

“Mom, what’s up?”

“Your damn fool father decided he needed to go out to the barn in the middle of this weather and he was walking back from there when he slipped and fell. I can’t get him up and he’s just lying out in the yard. Please, can you get out here?” There was a wild panic in his mother’s voice.

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can,” he replied. A glance out the window let him know that the sleet still fell down from the sky.

He then dialed Mary’s cell phone number and frowned when it went directly to voice mail. Maybe she had a few customers show up despite the weather and was busy serving them.

“Mary, there’s an emergency out at my parents’ place. It shouldn’t take me too long, but I’ve got to get out there before I come to get you. Just sit tight, I’ll be there as soon as possible,” he said to her voice mail.

He’d head out to his parents’, see that his father was okay and then get to the café as quickly as possible. Hopefully by then whoever had decided to stop in and eat would be finished with their meals and he and Mary could get to his house and end this long, irritating night.

* * *

“You don’t look very happy to see me,” Brandon said as he advanced closer to where Mary stood, still stunned and half-breathless.

No, not Brandon. Jason. In a nanosecond her brain worked to process all the physical changes that had made her not recognize the man from her nightmares.

He’d gained at least thirty pounds since the last time she’d seen him and his brown eyes had obviously been turned blue with colored contacts. His bald head and missing eyebrows made it impossible to tell what his hair color might have been and the scars...the makeup she’d thought he’d used in an attempt to cover his scars had obviously been used to make them. He looked nothing like the man she’d run from so many years ago.

She backed up from him, aware of the knife’s sharp edge gleaming in the security lights overhead. “How... How did you find me?” She finally found her voice.

“You mean after you left me half-dead on the floor in our living room?” His eyes narrowed and despite the facade of Brandon Williams, war veteran, she saw Jason McKnight’s soul shining from the hatred in his miscolored eyes.

“It took me months in the hospital to recuperate from what you did to me.” He took another step closer and she retreated a step back, icy terror making her entire body feel wooden and difficult to move.

“You busted my spleen, left me with a compound fracture of my leg, busted four ribs and smashed my nose.” His voice was calm, the eerie calm before a storm erupted. “It was a year before I could even start to think about finding you, but in that year you never left my mind. In the past nine years you’ve been all I’ve thought about.” He cocked his head and smiled, Jason’s smile, not Brandon’s. “I guess you didn’t believe me when I told you that I’d make you pay, that I’d kill you if you ever left me.”

“Jason...please,” Mary started as her back hit the wall. Her gaze shot left and right, seeking something she could use as a weapon, something she could use for defense. But there was nothing.

“Jason please what? Please don’t hurt you? Please don’t kill you? You brought this all on yourself, Samantha. I haven’t spent all the money and time of the last nine years hunting you down not to make you pay.”

“Haven’t you done enough?” she cried. “You’ve already killed three innocent women.”

“And with each throat I slit I thought about you.”

Trapped.

She was trapped between the wall and the man who wanted her dead, and escape appeared impossible. Her terror gripped her by the throat not just now, but also in memory, a regurgitation of the sensations of fear she’d suffered while married to the man.

She was lost in those moments of his torment, the anxiety of never knowing when an attack might come or if the next one was the one that would kill her.

At that moment the back door opened and Junior rushed in, his coat covered with a fine layer of ice. “Mary, I forgot my phone,” he said and she raised a trembling finger to the phone on the counter next to the register.

“Thanks,” Junior said as he grabbed the phone. It was only then he focused on Jason. “Mr. Williams...you can walk. It’s like a miracle!” Junior’s childish smile quickly doused as he spied the knife in the man’s hand. “Mr. Williams...what are you doing with that knife?”

Before he could utter another word, Jason slammed his fist into Junior’s jaw. Junior whirled around with the force of the blow, bounced off the counter and fell to the floor, not moving again.

Mary screamed her outrage. “You didn’t have to hurt him. He liked you, he wouldn’t have said anything if you’d just played it cool.”

“I’m tired of playing it cool, besides, he’s not dead, he’s just unconscious. Once he’s conscious and I’m finished here he can tell anyone he wants that Brandon Williams killed Mary, because Brandon Williams doesn’t exist.” He smiled at her with pride. “The honorable injured vet will disappear forever after tonight.”

“You won’t get away. They know it’s you, Jason.”

His smile widened, the gesture not even beginning to warm the cold of his eyes. “Knowing and proving are two different things. I have dozens of people who will swear that I never left Switzerland, that I’ve been there every day in my offices for the last year.”

He seemed to be in no hurry to finish what he’d come here for, what he most wanted to do. “I spent a lot of money over the years trying to find you. It took seven private investigators and years before we finally hunted you down.”

“Just let me go,” she replied, hating the begging tone in her voice. “Like you said, nobody knows you were here. You could just walk away now and nobody would know what you’d done. Even if I told, it would be your word against mine and all of your alibi witnesses.”

Just like before, she thought. She’d been afraid to tell anyone about his abuse because it would have been his word against her own, and he’d held all the power, just like he did now.

He laughed, the deep sound clenching Mary’s stomach with dread. “And deny myself what I’ve dreamed about for all these years?” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve forgotten, Mary. I own you and I don’t let go of what’s mine.”

“You beat me.” She clenched her fists at her sides, remembering all the pain she’d experienced at his hands. “You choked and kicked me, you beat me black and blue.”

“It wasn’t my fault you couldn’t figure out how to be a good wife. You had to be taught. You needed to be taught to be exactly what I want you to be and I have to say, you were a very slow learner.”

She thanked the stars that Matt wasn’t here now, that she’d agreed to let him spend the night with his friend. She wanted Jason to forget he had a son, to kill her and then steal away in the night and never bother anyone else here in Grady Gulch again, including Matt.

“I can kill you, go back to Switzerland and take off the makeup, grow back my hair and lose a few pounds and then I figure I have two choices. I can either play the grieving ex-husband and come back here to claim my son. Or I can tell whoever makes contact with me that you and I were divorced a long time ago and I’d rather my son stay in the town where he’d grown up, that it would be too traumatic at his age to displace him from the people he knows and loves.”

As he spoke he turned the knife back and forth in his hand, the light catching the razor edge each time he turned it, but she knew he wasn’t ready to use it yet. Mary had always known the second that Jason was about to attack because his left eye twitched.

“I have a feeling your boyfriend, the sheriff, would take him on, raise the kid as his own. And every time he looked at Matt he’d think of you and what a failure he was as a sheriff. You’ll haunt him until the day he dies.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I haven’t decided how to play that out yet.”

Tears blurred Mary’s vision as once again she looked around frantically, seeking escape and praying that the blow to Junior hadn’t killed him.

The only thing she saw that might provide her any help at all was the switch to the security lights. If she could reach it before he attacked, then at least for a few seconds the place would be plunged into complete darkness and those precious seconds might allow her the time to get something to use as a weapon.

She fought back the need to vomit as her stomach clenched tighter and tighter. Where was Cameron? Shouldn’t he be finished with the traffic accident and be here to pick her up?

Hearing the sleet still pelting the windows, she realized she couldn’t depend on Cameron. The weather could keep him busy for some time.

And she was out of time.

With a twitch of his eye and a roar of rage, Jason lunged toward her. She had a split-second sight of the knife raised above his head when she threw herself at the switch and the café was plunged into darkness.