For all those reasons, he was distracted.
He parked the truck in the garage, whistled for Festus, who usually greeted him in the backyard, barking for joy.
Eli frowned, listening. The dog was barking—frantically—but the sound was muffled. Then he heard the thumping, realized that Festus was hurling his agile little body against the back door, or maybe even the wall.
What was up with that?
He hurried through the gate, saw no one in the glare of the motion-sensor lights.
Scanning the back porch, he noticed that the small wooden door that covered Festus’s private exit when it wasn’t in use had been closed and bolted.
That was his last conscious thought before something hard struck him in the back of the head.
The pain followed him into oblivion, throbbed there, his only link to the world outside his brain and the rest of his body.
Presently, he surfaced, only to find himself lying facedown in hard-crusted Montana snow. Crimson blood poured down the sides of his face and his neck and pooled around his head like a gruesome halo.
Festus was still barking, still slamming himself against the barriers keeping him inside.
“Easy boy,” he whispered. It was a reflex.
Someone was crouching beside him now; he saw small booted feet, worn jeans, a man’s heavy coat.
“You love your dog,” said Gretchen Lansing, in a strange singsong voice. “Freddie loved his dogs, too. It’s a good thing he died before you had them taken away, Sheriff Know-it-all, because losing them would have killed him as sure as that noose when it tightened around his neck.” She paused. “Once I’m sure you’re done for, I’ll dispose of the dog.”
Eli scoured the depths of his brain and brought up a question. “Did you kill your son, Gretchen?”
She gave an ugly laugh. “Freddie hasn’t done nothin’ I told him to do since he was a babe in arms. He hung himself because...well, things just got too hard for him, after that internet slut called him a lying creep and turned her back on him.”
Eli remembered his Dick Tracy watch and moved his hands, which were alongside his broken head, to press the SOS button.
He managed that, but not before Gretchen stood up and kicked him hard in the side.
The blow cracked a few ribs, and he suppressed a groan. “You won’t get away with this, Gretchen,” he said reasonably. Thickly. “The place is wired. There are cameras, and even if you find them, you’ll be arrested, because everything is being logged, back at my office.”
For God’s sake, Connie, notice the blip and tune in.
“I don’t care if I go to jail,” Gretchen informed him. “I’ve got nothing left, now that Freddie’s gone. Nothing.”
“What about Fred, Sr.?”
“He’s a bastard. I hope he rots in hell.”
“Did you kill Tiffany Ulbridge?” Eli spoke very slowly, very deliberately, hoping he’d asked the question aloud, instead of just thinking it. He was fading again, being sucked down into some yawning abyss.
“Yes,” Gretchen replied, a note of pride mixed in with all that crazy. “She was a stuck-up little bitch. Thought she was too good for my Freddie. I wasn’t going to let her get away with what she did to my boy, any more than I’ll give you a pass, after all you did to mess up my son’s life!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Eli saw, through the pain and the blood and the gathering darkness, that Gretchen was holding the snow shovel he kept on the back porch.
It dripped red.
He heard the dog, whimpering now. Defeated.
He heard a siren, distant, then closer, and closer still.
The squeal of brakes followed, lights blared.
“Police!” yelled a familiar female voice. “Drop your weapon or I will shoot!”
Melba. Eli would have smiled, if he hadn’t been losing consciousness.
He sensed, rather than saw, Gretchen raising the shovel for a hard swing.
There was a single shot.
And then Eli fell end over end into the darkest of darkness.
As he tumbled, one persistent glimmer shone in all that gloom; oddly, it was not an image, but a name.
Brynne.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HE WAS ALIVE.
At first, Eli thought he was still in his backyard, face down in frost-hardened snow, bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, but then he flash-focused on the ceiling tiles and realized two things: he was lying on his back and he was inside.
Make that three things: he had a headache and it was epic.
His vision blurred again, and he groaned.
The beep-beep-beep sound of medical equipment finally brought it all together in his beleaguered brain: he was in the county’s one and only hospital.
He felt a smaller, smoother hand curl around his, pressing something cylinder shaped into his palm.
“Push this button when the pain gets bad.” The voice was Sara’s.
He thumbed the button and, sure enough, after a few seconds, his head hurt marginally less than it had before.
“What—?” That single word was all he could manage, and it came out as a ragged croak.
“Gretchen Lansing clocked you with a snow shovel,” Sara replied, guessing the rest of the question he hadn’t managed to complete. Her voice quivered with tears she was probably too proud to shed. “She would have killed you, if it hadn’t been for Melba.”
Flashes of the attack flickered colorfully on the inside of his forehead. “Festus,” he said, trusting his sister to fill in the blanks.
She laughed softly, sniffled. “He’s fine. Melba brought him to us as soon as you’d been loaded into the ambulance.”
He was silent for a long time, trying to scrape up the energy to ask for more information. The effort exhausted him.
“Brynne is here. So are Cord and J.P. Marisol issued an edict—one visitor at a time. Right now, I’m it.”
“Melba?”
“She’s here, too.”
“Am I—?”
“No, you’re not going to die. One of Marisol’s colleagues flew in from Missoula to drill a hole in that hard skull of yours, though. Landed on the hospital roof in a helicopter. Your brain was swelling, so they had to relieve the pressure.”
“Ouch,” Eli whispered.
Sara chuckled and kissed his forehead. “My turn to sit with you is just about over. Are you up to a visit from Brynne?”