Selena Kitt
BEAUTY
Jolee could never stay out of trouble for long and being locked in the trunk of Carlos’s black BMW was no exception to that particular rule of her life. She’d given up trying to kick the side of the car to make noise-luxury car makers practically sound-proofed their trunks. Who knew? She wondered if engineers considered scenarios like this one-after all, any rich husband might have to enlist his hit men tie up and toss his troublesome wife into the trunk for easy disposal, right?
Besides, her feet were secured with zip ties, as were her hands, which stretched painfully behind her back. They didn’t use duct tape-too easy to wiggle out of-except for the pieces over her mouth. And even those weren’t just slapped on-they’d used the roll to wrap the silver stuff around and around her mouth and jaw in layers. Carlos’s guys knew exactly what they were doing. Of course they did. It was their job.
There was just no way out of this bit of trouble. That realization finally hit her in the darkness, the car’s wheels crunching gravel a long time now, off the highway, she surmised, the suspension bouncing her violently up and down. This was going to be the last batch of trouble she ever got herself into in the whole expanse of a life that seemed suddenly very short.
She’d been so focused on escaping or finding a way out since Carlos’s goons had grabbed her out back—zip-tied and duct taped before she could even raise the snow shovel she’d been using—that this final realization hit with such terrifying force Jolee actually wet herself, urine staining the crotch of her jeans with spreading navy blue darkness.
She was going to die.
“No,” she whispered, feeling herself giving in at the same time as she denied the notion.
“Please, no.”
She had no one left to mourn her. Her mother had been gone since she was a baby, her father dead for years, killed in a logging accident. And her husband-Carlos was the reason she was facing this end, a betrayal she still couldn’t wrap her head around. But for the first time in her life she was glad for the miscarriages, that she had no baby or child to leave behind. Her only real regret was that she had never really loved a man who truly loved her back.
Jolee wailed, a muffled cry that wouldn’t have been heard over the pounding bass of Ted Nugent through the car’s speakers even if they’d been stopped in traffic somewhere, but they were far from civilization. She knew where they were. Not exactly, but they’d driven a long way on this back, bumpy, winding road and there was no doubt in her mind they were in the middle of nowhere, deep into the wild, far from the logging camps, but still on the thousands of acres of land Carlos’s father had left him.
That was where Carlos buried the bodies.
Jolee thought of her husband, the way he sucked on a Wintergreen Lifesaver and tied his tie in their dresser mirror every morning as if he was going off like any other man to a regular job living a regular life, the way he ruffled her hair and called her “chickie” and kissed her cheek before he left. How could that man be the same man who had ordered her kidnapped and killed?
As much as she wanted to deny it, she knew it was the truth. Her husband killed people.
No, he had people killed. If they got in his way, if they threatened him or his little empire, Carlos had the money, the power and the influence to simply make them disappear. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, for years she had suppressed her intuition. But when proof had arrived in her mailbox, when she had confronted Carlos with the information and he had petted and placated and pacified her, she had still denied it, hadn’t she? She’d believed his lies. Because she wanted to? Because she had to? What woman wanted to believe her husband would have her father killed?
It had been over a week since the blow-up, since the unstamped white envelope with proof of Carlos’s crime had shown up in their mailbox with just her name—Jolee Mercier—scrawled onto the front. She’d thought things had gone back to normal, that Carlos had forgotten, that they could live out their lives as they always had, separately together. How could she have let herself sink so low? How could she have believed for one moment that the man she married wasn’t the monster he’d been revealed to be?
But she had found that living with something, day in and day out, numbed you to its power. Now she was going to pay for that denial, with her life.
“No!” She didn’t know where she found the strength. Maybe it was the thought of Carlos telling his next conquest that, sadly, his last wife had run off on him. Maybe it was the injustice of being interred beside her father somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a mass grave for Carlos’s enemies-men who had defended the union, women who had turned him down, people who had made Carlos’s life uncomfortable. How many bodies were buried out there, she wondered? If he would order his own wife killed-who hadn’t he gotten rid of?
Jolee wiggled around in the trunk. There was nothing back there-made more room for bodies, she assumed dismally-just a tire iron and a jack and a set of jumper cables. All great weapons if she could have gotten her hands free, but the zip ties were drawn so tight behind her back the circulation had long ago disappeared from her fingers. She could still feel her feet though, and that was what she used, slamming both of them against the latch of the trunk.
There was no way to disguise what she was doing. She knew the guys would hear her.
The music stopped blaring almost immediately. She was probably denting the hell out of Carlos’s car. The thought, he’s going to kill me, crossed her mind and she gave a strangled, crazed half-laugh, kicking again, again, again.
“What the fuck? Bitch! Knock it the hell off!” She recognized the voice. One of the guys who’d grabbed her, an older man, her father’s age, someone she remembered seeing around the logging camps and later, at her husband’s office.
She heard him yelling but didn’t stop. If they pulled over now and shot her in the head it wouldn’t matter. This was her one chance, her last chance, a last gasp for a final breath.
When the trunk popped open, Jolee screamed in triumph behind her duct tape mask. She had time to see a gun metal expanse of winter sky and fat flakes of snow still falling outside, her nostrils flaring as she filled them with a sharp, cold intake of air, before the car stopped.
But it didn’t just stop. The impact was so sudden Jolee was tossed toward the front of the BMW, hitting her head against the car jack. She felt something floppy on her forehead, wetness flooding her eye, stinging, but then she was flying and couldn’t think about that anymore, thrown out of the open trunk into a foot of heavy snow.
The landing was hard, so hard she couldn’t breathe, but her head hurt the most and the last thing she remembered was hearing a scream, a wild animal cry of pain and death and horror, and she wondered briefly if she was making that awful noise before the world went black.
Silas had been following the animal for over a mile. His father taught him long ago that hunting should be something a man did honorably, so tracking in the snow seemed a bit unfair, but he was carrying a bow, not a gun, and the elk had a good quarter mile head-start. Besides, the animal was a thousand pounds and bulls were known to charge any hunter forced to get too close. Silas was careful to stay downwind. He had two arrows ready-elk often ran, even after a kill shot, and he was ready to track it for the second if he needed to-but it turned out he only needed one.
The first shot was good, clean, a chest hit, surely puncturing the animal’s lung, possibly piercing the heart. And still, the big bull ran, bellowing as it bounded through the trees, heading for the old logging road. It wasn’t much of a road at all, just a two-track, and very few people knew about it-most of them dead. His brother, Carlos, only had it plowed or graded for “special occasions.”