Lone Calder Star (34 page)

"I don't. You're scaring me so much I can't think." There was too much truth in that statement.

"You should be scared-scared of what I'll do to you if you mess this up," Boone warned and gave another twisting jerk of her hair.

"Please." Her voice was thready and tight. "I can't remember."

"All you have to so is tell Max that you made up all that shit about the anthrax-make him understand that everything Echohawk told him was a pack of lies. You got that?"

But only one part of it registered. "Quint saw Max?" The ring of confusion and uncertainty was in her voice and her searching look.

"Hell yes! That's why you've got to set things straight and tell him the truth-that I never admitted anything!"

Dallas could almost see violent forces building up in him, a hair-trigger from exploding. She rushed to defuse them.

"I will. I'll tell him exactly what you said."

Her ready agreement took him aback. "That's better." He let go of her hair, but kept his grip on her arm. "Come on. Let's go."

When he swung toward the front door, Dallas took a chance and stepped into the kitchen doorway, pulling at his grip. "My purse-"

The words were barely out of her mouth before she was forcibly slammed against the framework and a big hand grabbed her by the throat.

"I told you to forget about that damned purse!" Boone thundered, his fingers tightening, choking off her air and silencing her vocal cords.

He hurled more abuse and obscenities at her, but Dallas was beyond hearing them. She opened
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her mouth for air, but none came in and no sound came out. She pushed frantically at his hand, trying to weaken its stranglehold on her throat with no success.

With her lungs screaming for air, panic set in. Kicking and clawing, she tried to fight him off even as a redness pressed against the edges of her vision. But she could feel her strength ebbing away, fading even as the pain grew to an intense level-her ears, her head, her whole body roaring with it.

Blackness swirled, a relief offered somewhere in its dark void. Even as it closed around her consciousness, the pressure abruptly lifted. But there was no strength in her legs to hold her upright, DaIlas slumped to the floor, sucking in air in great, liferenewing gulps, a hand lifting to her painfully throbbing throat.

A loud crash finally penetrated her dazed senses. With an alnmst drunken swing of her head, Dallas looked around for Boone, fear surfacing anew.

Then she saw him-there in the kitchen. But he wasn't alone. He was grappling with Quint. She had no idea where Quint had come from or when or how.

A kind of joyous relief quivered through her, but it didn't last ,as Quint blocked one blow from Boone, but missed the second. It clipped him on the chin, sending him reeling backward into the kitchen counter. Boone plunged after him, fists swinging.

Her own eyes warned her that Boone was bigger, stronger, and a good forty pounds heavier than Quint. This time Quint managed to duck under an arcing swing and dance out of Boone's trap. But Dallas didn't know how long he could hold him off without help.

Forcing her limbs to work, she struggled to her feet and half staggered to the telephone on the corner desk. Behind her she could hear the gruntings of breath, the shuffle of feet, and the smash of fist against flesh, all of it coming above the radio's tender ballad.

With clumsy fingers, she clutched the receiver to her ear and dialed the emergency number. An operator was quick to answer, the voice coming clearly across the line.

"What's your emergency please?"

But Dallas had trouble making her bruised vocal cords work. "Send the police." It was raspy and weak. She swallowed and tried again. "It's Boone Rutledge. He's gone crazy."

As if in emphasis of her words, a kitchen chair went flying across the floor and crashed into the wall, the racket of it loud enough for the operator to hear.

"Where are you?"

"The Cee Bar Ranch." Dallas threw a worried glance over her shoulder and saw Quint on the floor, looking; dazed and giving his head a shake as if to clear it. But it was the sight of Boone diving for him that made her call a loud and raspy warning. "Look our!"

Quint rolled clear, but Boone grabbed him before he could scramble to his feet. The two men rolled around on the floor, each struggling to gain an advantage.

The voice in Dallas's ear kept demanding answers, but she couldn't seem to focus on anything but the fight.

"Tell them to hurry," she pleaded, fear striking deep when Boone pinned Quint to the floor and closed both hands around his throat, teeth bared, a killing look in his eyes. "My God, Boone's going to kill him."

She dropped the phone and automatically moved to help Quint. Then it all changed in the blink of an eye. One moment Boone's hands were around Quint's throat; in the next his arms were flying outward and Quint bucked him aside.

Gathering himself, Quint lurched to his feet and swayed a little, fists up in readiness, his chest heaving, one side of his face bloodied from a cut above his eye and more blood trickling from a corner of his mouth. Then Boone was up as well, his gaze fastening itself on Quint with a kind of crazed fury and frustration.

The two men circled warily, fists rotating, each searching for an opening in the other's defenses.

Boone banged a hip into the corner of the kitchen table. With a sweep of his paw, he hurled the table aside, overturning it.

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Quint stepped in and landed two hard blows that temporarily staggered Boone. But he came roaring back with a growl of rage, swinging wildly, more blows missing than landing, but the ones that did inflicted damage.

Unable to stand and watch a second longer, Dallas ran into the living room and fumbled frantically to undo the lock on the gun cabinet's door. At last, she flung it open and grabbed the shotgun from the rack.

She snatched up a box of shells and fed two into the chambers. Heart pounding, she raced back to the kitchen.

Boone was on the flour, a hand pressed to his jaw. Quint stood in front of him, directly between Dallas and Boone. Cursing under his breath, Boone grabbed for the counter edge to haul himself up and missed, catching hold of a drawer handle instead. The drawer came flying out off its track, the utensils tumbling from it and littering to the floor.

When Boone rolled to his feet, he scooped up something, but not until she saw the glint of a steel blade did Dallas recognize the carving knife.

"Look out, Quint!" Dallas shouted, and this time her voice had some force to it. "He has a knife!"

She lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, but she had no clear shot at the crouching Boone, knife held low. His arm snaked out and Quint jumped back to avoid the arcing slice of the blade point, drawing an ugly laugh from Boone. Again and again the knife slashed through the air in front of Quint.

Dallas wanted to tell him to get out of the way, but she was more afraid of distracting him at the wrong moment. Boone made a sudden stabbing thrust with the knife. Quint sidestepped, but the blade's back-slice caught his arm, cutting through sleeve and flesh, causing an instant spurt of blood onto the material.

Before Dallas could move or cry out, Boone lunged at Quint again. This time Quint grabbed the arm with the knife and tried to wrest it away from him. The two struggled over it, locked together in an ever-changing shift of bodies to counter weight or leverage.

Dallas was never sure what happened next-if it was a deliberate or an accidental tangle of legs that took both men to the floor. She only knew she lost sight of the knife when they fell.

Suddenly both men went still.

With her heart in her throat, Dallas waited, the fear of what this could mean stopping her from lowering the shotgun. Then Boone moved, rolling off Quint. She gasped back a little sob and slipped her finger across the trigger. Then she saw the knife buried in Boone's chest and the blood that smeared the front of his shirt.

And there was Quint,grabbing onto the counter and pulling himself upright, the arm with the blond-soaked sleeve hanging limp at his side, his chest heaving in exhaustion as he looked down at Boone.

Relief turned her legs to jelly. Hurriedly Dallas lowered the shotgun, but she was too well schooled in firearm safety to simply lay the weapon aside without first breaking it open and removing the shells.

Only when it was safely unloaded did Dallas thrust it aside and hurry to Quint. He was propped against the counter, a gray dullness to his eyes.

"I'm fine." He made a wan attempt at a reassuring smile.

"No, you're not. You're bleeding to death." Dallas grabbed a dish towel out of the drawer and tied it around his upper arm, pulling it tight across the deep gash.

"Did you call the police?" His voice had the flatness of sapped strength.

"Yes." Until that moment, Dallas had all but forgotten that.

"That must be them coming now," he mumbled.

Belatedly Dallas identified the wail of the sirens in the background, separating their sound from the Hank Jr. classic being played on the radio.

As their scream grew louder, she darted a glance at Boone's motionless form, not really sure if
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he was alive or dead. Truthfully she didn't care.

"I thought he was going to kill you," Dallas murmured, her voice thick with the freshness of that memory.

"It was close." Quint's glance lifted, touching the red marks on her face and neck. "Are you-"

But he never had a chance to finish the sentence as the door burst open and two uniformed officers charged into the room, one after the other, hands on their holstered weapons. Their lightning scan of the kitchen noted the overturned table and scattered chairs.

"Sweet Jesus, it's Boone Rutledge," the older officer said when he saw the man on the floor. "Get the paramedics in here. Quick!"

While the second officer turned back to the door, the first hurried across the room to Boone's side, sparing only a glance at Quint while obviously deciding he presented no threat. When the paramedics rushed into the house, he straightened up from the body.

"1 think I felt a faint pulse," he told them.

Leaving the paramedics to their task, the officer shifted his attention to Quint and Dallas, immediately separating them. And the questions began.

Within minutes the paramedics had Boone loaded onto a stretcher for transport. Dallas watched as they wheeled him out of the house. By then more officers had arrived on the scene. She saw one of them escorting Quint outside.

"Where are they taking him?" she demanded of the two officers interrogating her.

"To the hospital to get that cut stitched."

"You're aren't going to arrest him, are you? I told you it was self-defense. Boone came at him with the knife," Dallas insisted forcefully.

"That's what you said." The older man nodded, but with a touch of skepticism. "Now, can you tell us why Boone was here?"

And the questioning started all over again.

Empty arrived back at the ranch in the middle of it all, his return necessitating another retelling of the events. To Dallas's relief, he didn't demand to know every single detail.

Quint sat atop the bed in the hospital's examination room, a large gauze bandage covering the wound to his arm and a smaller one on the cut above his eye. The nurse went over the doctor's instructions with him, then gave him a copy of them along with a prescription for an antibiotic.

"Remember," she said. "Take it a little easy for a few days. No heavy lifting with that arm. You don't want to tear any of the doc's fine stitching."

"I'll remember." Quint stood up and winced a little as he slipped on his jacket.

The nurse opened the door. Quint wasn't surprised to see an officer standing outside the treatment room. He stepped into the hallway and paused next to the man.

"Do you stilll need me?" he asked.

"I just got word you're free to go. At least, for now," the officer replied, somewhat grudgingly.

"What about Boone?"

There was a single negative movement of the man's head. "He never made it to the operating room." He paused, his eyes narrowing on Quint with sharpened interest. "A curious thing, though, he had a pattern of small puncture wounds along the back of one shoulder that looked to be recent. You wouldn't happen to know anything about them, would you?"

"Was it the kind of pattern a shotgun might leave?" Quint asked with a thoughtful look.

The officer stared, his eyes widening at the possibility. "It might."

"The night my hay caught fire, I saw someone running away. I fired off a shot. At the time I thought he was too far away. Maybe he wasn't," Quint suggested.

"You don't really think Boone Rutledge set fire to it, do you?" The officer looked at him askance.

"I don't imagine we'll ever know for sure," Quint admitted, although privately he had his own
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opinion. "Will you be giving me a ride back to the ranch?"

"No. The Garners are out in the lobby waiting for you." He gestured toward the exit sign. "Like I said, you're free to go. Just don't leave the area in case anything comes up that we need to talk to you about again."

"I won't be going anywhere," Quint told him.

"Good," the officer said and moved off, heading in the opposite direction of the emergency room exit.

Quint watched him a moment, then turned to leave just as a door in a side hall opend and Max Rutledge rolled out in his

wheelchair. It stopped abruptly when Max caught sight of Quint.

After an instant's hesitation, Quint approached him. He couldn't help noticing that Max looked older and colder, but the fire hadn't left his dark eyes.

" I'm sorry about your son, Max," Quint told him. "He gave me no choice."

"He was worthless and a liar," Max stated in a hard, flat voice. "But he was my son."

"I know," Quint said calmly. "You paid a high price for your atempt to grab the Cee Bar. Too high."

"I imagine you're wondering now if I intend to avenge his death," Max stated.

" I think you're smarter than that, Max." With a respectful nod Quint turned and walked back to the main hall and the exit floor to the ER's waiting room.