Then it was gone.
“Oh nooooo,” he said, his voice choked with emotion.
When the light vanished, Liv opened her eyes a crack and found Brenda still glaring at her from a few feet away. Liv had never experienced so much raw, focused hate in her life. But this time, instead of shuddering, she grinned.
She whispered, “What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”
Then: “You can watch what happens next.”
—
AFTER THIRTY SECONDS of Eldon’s panicked shouts to Bull for help, which went unanswered, and then to Dallas, who wasn’t there, he slid the ladder into the root cellar. The feet of it settled between Brenda and Liv and broke up their staring contest.
As Eldon backed down the ladder, he grunted with each step. Liv closed her eyes again in case he shined the flashlight at her.
Eldon reached the floor and immediately turned to Brenda. He bent down over her, stroked her hair and back, and said with grateful astonishment, “You’re still breathing.”
Liv cracked her eyelids to see that Brenda’s eyes were on Eldon in a sidewise glance. They looked desperate. She was trying to warn him.
“What happened? Did you fall in? Don’t tell me I hit you with the back of the truck and knocked you in here.”
As quietly and gracefully as she could, Liv rolled to her feet and grasped the rock in the wall. It pulled free, but it was heavy.
Brenda’s eyes clicked back and forth between Eldon hovering over her and Liv approaching him from behind with the rock raised unsteadily over her head.
Eldon said, “Did that nigger bitch get you down here somehow?”
Before he could turn around, Liv smashed the stone down on the crown of Eldon’s head and he rolled forward onto Brenda, whimpering like a wounded dog.
Blood streamed down the sides of his face onto Brenda’s coat and back.
—
BEFORE SHE MOUNTED the ladder, Liv looked over her shoulder. Eldon’s arms and legs were twitching slightly and the back folds of his C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service uniform shirt tightened and relaxed. He was still breathing as well. He was a tough old man with a really hard head, she thought. That rock would have instantly killed anyone else.
She climbed the ladder recklessly, once losing her footing on a rung and nearly falling back into the cellar. The near-accident focused her attention and she climbed out very deliberately the rest of the way. But when she reached open air and felt the sting of the cold fresh wind on her face, she whooped.
Then she grasped the ladder and started to pull upward. It would not come free.
Liv yanked hard on it and there was some give, but not enough.
Was it stuck on something?
She peered down into the hole and cursed. Eldon’s huge hand grasped the bottom rung. He was still on the ground, still on top of his wife, but he held the ladder in a death grip. Even with one hand, he had more strength than she did.
Liv looked around. The compound was silent. The only light was the porch light at the main house. Bull and Dallas were still away.
Maybe Eldon had some kind of tool in his truck, she thought. Something she could slide down the ladder or drop on Eldon to make him give up his grip.
She found a flathead shovel sticking up on the side of the pump unit and she pried it loose. Liv ran back to the root cellar and threw the shovel down blade-first like a spear. It bounced harmlessly off Eldon’s back and clattered in the corner of the cellar. He still had that one-handed grip.
Then she thought about leverage. She couldn’t outmuscle him, but . . .
—
SHE TWISTED THE LADDER hard to the right. It gave, but not enough. Then she violently reversed the twist to the left in a full rotation and it came free. She’d managed to wrench it out of his fingers.
When the ladder was up and out of the cellar and lying in the snow, she whooped again.
Hot tears stung her eyes and her cheeks. She didn’t want to look back down in that hole, didn’t want to see Eldon and Brenda Cates twitching down there like bloody salamanders.
She just wanted to be out of there.
That’s when she looked up and saw headlights coming fast from the west.
30
The engine of Bull’s pickup coughed, then raced, then coughed again. Joe glanced down and saw that the needle of the gas gauge was past the E, and he hoped he had enough fuel in the tank to get into the Cates compound.
He was surprised how dark it was now that the sun had finally dropped behind the mountains. There was still enough cloud cover to blot out most of the stars, and the only sign of life he could see ahead of him was a single porch light at the main house.
Where was everybody?
The motor shuddered and quit and the power steering went down and made the steering wheel taut. Joe pushed the transmission lever into neutral and coasted the last forty feet into the compound.
“That’s it, Daisy,” he said aloud.
As he reached down to kill the headlamps, he glimpsed movement on the far side of the compound in the vicinity of the outbuildings. Joe squinted to see better, but whoever it was had moved beyond the reach of the lights.
He started to get out with his shotgun but thought: Bull was a poacher. Poachers have spotlights. The grip for Bull’s roof-mounted spotlight was overhead and Joe grasped it and thumbed it on.
There, shielding her eyes against the powerful beam, was Olivia Brannan. She was dirty and bloody and standing to the side of the C&C Sewer and Septic Tank Service pump truck he’d seen moving across the yard from the sagebrush bench.
Joe closed his eyes for a second and breathed a sigh of relief. She was alive after all.
But she looked terrified.
—
“LIV BRANNAN,” he called out while standing on the running board with the driver’s-side door open, “it’s Joe Pickett.”
At the mention of his name, she froze for a second, then covered her face with her hands and dropped to her knees.
He could hear her sobbing as he ran though the snow toward her with his shotgun ready and Daisy on his heels. When she looked up, he was grateful they were tears of joy.
“What happened here?”
She hugged herself and said, “They kept me in that hole back there after they shot Nate. I just now got out. Just now.”
He kneeled down in front of her and put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel her tremble. When she spoke, she was half crying and half smiling.
“It was the Cates family,” she said. “They kept me down there since it happened. They’d lower food down to me in a bucket, but they didn’t know what to do with me so they decided to murder me.”
Joe rotated on his heels and looked around. “Where are they now?” he asked, suddenly aware of how vulnerable the both of them were since they were bathed in light from the spotlight.
“Luckily, I made Brenda fall into the hole and I’m pretty sure she broke her neck. I hit Eldon on the head with a thirty-pound rock. They’re both still down there,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder. “Eldon’s probably dead by now. I hope Brenda is alive a while longer. She needs to know what it feels like to be kept prisoner in a damned hole in the ground.”
“Liv, you have to be kidding me, right?” Joe asked. “They’re both in that root cellar?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re okay?”
“I think I can say I am,” she said, closing her eyes and squeezing two more tears out. “I’m probably going to be half crazy, though.”
Joe stood and walked around her to the open cellar doors. The pump truck was backed up to it so that the discharge valve was poised over the opening.