Eve smiled back at her. “Then we’ll skip them.” Lord, she was glad that Catherine had come with Joe. She needed her to lighten the tension gripping her as she waited for the confrontation with Joe. “John didn’t kill her, Catherine. I know it.”
“You couldn’t know it unless he’d prove it. Did he?”
A wild story about a little girl who sang songs to him in prison. “All the Pretty Little Horses.” A wild story she believed with all her heart. “No, he didn’t prove anything.”
“You were very emotionally attached to him as a teenager. Could that have influenced you?”
“I keep telling you, it was no love affair.” But it had turned into a love story for both of them. Though not for each other. A love story about Bonnie. “He didn’t do it.” She finished her coffee. “He’s trying to find out who did kill her.”
Catherine stared at her. “He told you that? Queen said he was very clever. Eve, he’d realize that was the most persuasive thing he could say that would make you believe he wasn’t her killer. You’d identify with him immediately.”
And Eve knew that was true. It didn’t make any difference. “I believe him.”
Catherine shook her head. “Look at it objectively from my point of view, Joe’s point of view. Gallo finds out that we’re on his trail. He has a choice of going deeper undercover, killing you and everyone connected with you, or convincing you that he’s not really the bad guy as you’ve been told. The first two choices are messy and would interfere with this nice life he’s built for himself. So he looks for a way to get you away to himself and go for option three.”
“He didn’t kill her.” Eve saw the impatience on Catherine’s face, and added, “I know you think I’m being unreasonable. You’re right. Reason has nothing to do with this. But he loved Bonnie, and he would never murder her.”
“He couldn’t have loved her. He didn’t know her.”
Eve couldn’t explain without seeming even more irrational than Catherine thought her to be. She could only repeat. “He didn’t kill her. If it will make you feel better, I’m not going to let him off with just accepting that as fact. There are so many things about this I don’t understand, but I think he’s way ahead of me in the search for Bonnie’s murderer. I believe he knows who did kill her, and I’m going after him and make him tell me who it is.”
“Or make him confess that he did it himself.” She was frowning down at the coffee in her cup. “I don’t like the setup, Eve. He swoops down and takes you away and hypnotizes you into thinking you have some kind of joint mission. The odds of his being able to do that are damn slim. He has to be a spellbinder. I knew when I was talking to Queen that Gallo was bigger than life. Yeah, I was feeling sorry that he was a victim, but I don’t feel sorry for him now.”
“I’m not going to try to convince you.” She stood up. “I’m going after Joe. I’m getting worried. He should have been back by now.”
“Wait. I’ll go with you.”
“Finish your coffee.” Eve was already at the door. “Judy said there was no way he could catch up with Gallo.”
“She doesn’t know Joe.” She joined Eve as she reached the hall. “I wouldn’t want him after me. He’s a driven—” She broke off as Judy opened the basement door.
Joe was not with her.
Eve stiffened. “You didn’t find him down there, Judy?”
She shook her head. “He found a hatchet among the tools down there and broke the lock on the exit door. There’s a passage that leads underneath the courtyard and down the mountain. John always left a vehicle in the trees about a quarter mile down the path. Your Joe Quinn is somewhere in the passage or already on the mountain path.” She paused. “I had to call Bill Hanks to go after him.”
Eve’s heart skipped a beat. “Why? You said John told you to make sure there was no conflict between them. You’re putting them in a hunt-and-chase position. That’s asking for trouble.”
Judy shrugged. “He was going after John. I couldn’t run the risk of him catching him. I told Hanks to try to be careful. But nothing is going to happen to John.” She looked Eve straight in the eye. “You have your priorities, I have mine. Too bad if your Joe Quinn gets hurt. If he’d stayed here, he would have been fine.”
It was all very simple for Judy, Eve realized. If John Gallo was threatened, then Judy would cause the sky to fall to get him out of trouble. She wouldn’t care who else was hurt. Eve started for the basement door. “You get on the phone and get Hanks off Joe’s trail.”
“Where you going?” Judy asked warily.
“I’m going to find Joe. If you want to obey John’s orders to keep me safe, you’d better make sure Hanks backs off because I’m going to be with Joe.”
“No.” Judy took an impulsive step toward her. “You can’t get in—”
“But she can,” Catherine said softly. She gave Judy a look that stopped her in her tracks. “And you’d better back off, too, and do what she says.” She was following Eve down the basement stairs. “Then you can go to your cozy little kitchen, have one of your dandy ‘store-bought’ doughnuts, and wait for the flak to settle.”
* * *
TIRE TRACKS.
Joe dropped to his knees and examined the marks to the side of the trail. Fresh tracks. The driver was in a hurry. He had peeled onto the road. Heavy truck or van, probably an off-road vehicle.
How fresh? He listened, tuning out the night sounds. The sound of an engine, faint but …
Yes.
And that driver had to be John Gallo.
He felt a rush of fierce satisfaction.
He jumped to his feet and scrambled up on the shoulder of the slope, drawing his gun. Damn I wish I had my rifle. But his Beretta had a fairly long range for a handgun. It might be enough if he could get close enough to shoot out one of the back tires.
He ran to the top of the incline.
A Jeep Cherokee, descending the twisting mountain road, was coming into view around the curve a short distance below him. Not short enough for Joe. Gallo would have to come around the next curve at an angle closer to where Joe stood for him to use the Beretta.
That meant Joe had to get at least fifty feet down the mountain to reach that next twisting level of the road.
He threw himself off road. He skidded down the loosely packed rocks of the slope, falling, picking himself up, and skidding again.
Twenty feet.
He slipped and rolled down the incline until he was stopped by some low shrubs.
He caught his breath and jumped up.
Ten more feet.
Not as slippery as the incline above. No falls.
He was there.
And Gallo was coming around the curve only twenty feet below him!
He had him.
Go slow. He had maybe a minute until Gallo was out of sight again. The shot had to be right. He aimed carefully at the right-rear tire.
He started to squeeze the trigger.
Pain.
His arm jerked as a bullet tore through his forearm!
Shit.
Not from Gallo.
The shot had come from above.
Rage tore through him as he saw Gallo disappear around the curve.
Another shot. Grazing his ear. He had to get out from the middle of the road and into the pine trees on the slope.
He glanced up the mountain as he dove into the trees.
Two men. One short, thin, the other taller and burly. They were separating, fading into the trees on the slope, and coming down the mountain after him.
Good.
He was bleeding. He took off his shirt, tore it in two, and wrapped one piece tightly around his forearm. Now forget it and go on the hunt.
* * *
WHERE WAS THE BASTARD? Hanks wondered. He knew he’d hit him with that first bullet.
Hanks’s phone vibrated.
“He’s disappeared,” Brock whispered. “Dammit, Hanks, I’ve searched this slope, and he’s not here. Did you see him? Maybe he’s unconscious or something and fell off the slope.”
“No, keep looking.” He was uneasy. Quinn was more than they’d bargained for. He’d been seconds away from putting a bullet into Gallo’s Jeep, and now they couldn’t locate him. “I saw him go into those trees, and he’s wounded. He can’t be moving fast.”