Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
With JR not willing to plead not guilty, I either need to find evidence that proves it was self-defense or risk losing him for a lot longer than another ten years.
I lower down Alex’s FBI cap to cover my eyes before waving a greeting to a young officer monitoring traffic coming and going from the cabin. With the plates on Alex’s SUV federal and my daggy clothes concealed by the steering wheel, the rookie agent waves back before he unlocks the gate so I can exit.
I’m tempted to do a little jig when I am on the open road. The only reason I don’t is because my heart is in my throat. One wrong movement might see me bringing up last night’s dinner into a toilet bowl like Regan. Cedric was remanded until trial, but when Alex searched Cecil’s cabin, he found it empty.
The man with the scarred face was nowhere to be seen.
After checking the address placed on JR’s arrest documentation against the one I punched into the GPS, I stray my eyes across a gate covered with vines.
“I guess this is it,” I mutter to myself while pulling on a parka thick enough to combat the freezing temperatures. The blizzard has blown over, but it is still cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I smile about my dad’s favorite saying while climbing over the gate. There are too many vines strangling it for me to push it open.
Partway down the overgrown driveway, I breathe a little easier. Even with the ground sloshy and the snow melted, there’s no mistaking this cabin. It was the first one I woke up in, and the one we fled when a madman took over its ownership.
The inside of the cabin, although still ransacked, is empty, so I turn to face the landscape JR described so well, I know the exact direction to walk to hunt for clues.
Tears prick my eyes when I reach a tree with a rope noose hanging off a thick branch. I don’t know if they left it up as a cruel reminder for JR or if they were too busy rushing Roderick to the hospital to take it down. Whatever the reason, it’s a horrible reminder of how cruel some people can be.
After sending a prayer to Cecil to thank him for taking care of JR, I shift on my feet to face the cabin, then crank my neck in the direction JR said Roderick came from. There’s nothing out that way but more woods, so Roderick must have been hiding in wake for JR to show up, or he knows this land as well as JR.
Once I’ve breathed out the nerves bubbling in my stomach, I crouch down onto my knees in the area Roderick lied lifeless, then push away the sludgy snow and leaves coating the ground.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m praying like hell something is here. I’m just really hoping it isn’t a body. I’ve seen plenty of corpses in my time, but I steer clear of decayed ones.
I’m on the verge of giving up when my hand scrapes across something hard in the soil. With my teeth, I remove the gloves stopping my hands from getting frostbite, then drag them over the object protruding from the ground.
“What is that?” I ask no one since I’m the only one stupid enough to be this deep into the woods so soon after a blizzard.
I snap my eyes to the left when a faint voice answers my rhetorical question. “A gun.” A woman who I’d guess to be approximately late thirties, early forties glances past my shoulder before she slowly walks out from behind a large tree trunk. Just like JR when he approached me, my first thought is that she looks disheveled and unhinged. But the more I watch her, the more I realize she too is using the woods as armor.
“Is it your gun?” I ask, thrusting the muddy side pistol her way.
She shakes her head so vigorously, she makes me dizzy before she points behind me. “It’s his.” Her words are as shaky as her hands.
When a man with a scarred face steps out from a tree even larger than the one the woman was hiding behind, instincts have me leaping to my feet to protect her. Some could say she is who I need protection from, but my intuition hasn’t reached the same conclusion.
She disclosed the stranger’s hidey-hole, and her eyes are as humble and honest as JR’s. Not to mention the fact that I misjudged JR the first time I laid eyes on him in almost a decade, I refuse to make the same mistake again.
“Stay where you are, or I’ll shoot.”
The man laughs a mocking chuckle. “That gun hasn’t been fired in years.” The eyes of a snake stare me down as he mutters, “Not since it was believed to have taken down a rabies-infested vermin who should have kept walking when he stumbled onto this place.” After snarling at the lady I’m protecting as if my skin is made out of armor, the man steps closer to us. “Death was knocking on Cecil’s door. I was this close…” he holds his thumb and index finger an inch apart, “… from righting the wrong my grandmother made.” He spits on the ground, missing the shock that fills my face when it finally dawns on me who he is. JR isn’t a killer because his victim isn’t dead. He’s standing right in front of me. “Then he went and ruined everything.” The way he sneers ‘he’ leaves no doubt whom he’s referencing—JR.