Kane- Tooth & Nail Page 13

  Through the nauseating waves of pain, it all came back to her. Killing Nick. Taking cover behind the fireplace. The grenade. The explosion. Flying through the air.

  Blackness.

  Clearly, the fall had not killed her, although, given the agony racking her battered body, death might have been the more preferable outcome. But that didn’t explain how she had ended up back here.

  As if on cue, Sheriff Dunkirk stepped out of the cabin, followed Paul, and proceeded to supply an explanation.

  “Gotta tell ya, Luna,” the lawman said. “It was a real bitch hauling your busted ass back up here.”

  “Busted ass,” Paul muttered. He had removed his vest, revealing a shirt soaked with sweat. Twigs and brambles clung to his pants. The sheriff might be claiming credit for dragging her back up the hillock, but it looked like Paul had done the actual work.

  “Whuh…why?” Luna struggled to form the word. It hurt like hell to talk. The movement of her jaw caused the flap of skin from her torn to cheek to move as well, sending fiery pain blazing through her face. She truly didn’t understand why they had carried her back up here. They could have just killed her at the bottom of the hillock.

  “Two reasons,” Sheriff Dunkirk replied. “One, I want your boyfriend to see what we did to you when he gets back. Two, since you didn’t do yourself a favor and die when you jumped off that fucking cliff, I figured we might as well have a little more fun with you.”

  “Fun with you,” Paul repeated.

  The sheriff walked over and stood directly behind her. Tilting her head back, she saw him pull a large folding knife from his pocket and flick open the blade. The shiny steel glinted in the afternoon sunlight.

  Suffering from pain behind anything she had ever experienced, Luna inwardly raged against the injustice of it all. If only she had just died in the explosion. Or if only the fall had killed her. Then she wouldn’t have to endure whatever torments the Dunkirks had in store for her. Oblivion would be a mercy at this point because life had become a living nightmare.

  “Just…kill…me,” she moaned. “Please…”

  “It’s coming, girl. Right after Paul does.”

  Through her haze of pain, she didn’t grasp what the sheriff’s words meant, but when she felt Paul tear away the shredded remnants of her jeans, she became sickeningly aware that her hell on earth was about to become a whole lot worse.

  She tried to fight, but half-blind, with broken arms and a punctured lung, it was impossible to fend him off. She managed a few feeble kicks that he easily swatted aside. Then Paul began to brutally punish her stricken body, grunting like an angry gorilla as he took out his rage on her.

  She just laid there, unmoving, waiting for the inevitable end. She didn’t even feel the sheriff take his turn. She stared up at the sky as a hawk rode the thermals far above her, perhaps waiting for her soul to join it in the heavens.

  She watched the hawk circle for an unknown number of heartbeats, then slowly closed her eyes. She heard the sheriff say something but couldn’t make out the words. Whatever it was, it no longer mattered.

  The last thing she felt was the razor-sharp blade cutting her throat.

  Chapter Nine

  Dribble Creek Camp

  Kane approached the cabin from the west, using the trail that snaked through the giant boulders just beyond the outhouse. Patches of sweat stained his clothes, and he was breathing a little hard from the exertion of double-timing it over two miles of rough terrain, but the Desert Eagle XIX L6 was rock-steady in his hand.

  He pulled up behind one of the boulders to recon the scene. Parked next to his Jeep Wrangler was a kitted-out Ford Bronco with the sheriff’s department emblem painted on the door. Clearly, the law—or the abomination that passed for law in this town—had paid the cabin a visit. Given the thrashing he had dished out to the sheriff’s sons last night, Kane highly doubted the man had come up here to protect and serve.

  The outdoor fireplace was a pile of rubble, scorch marks on the rocks indicating it had been blown apart by some kind of bomb or grenade. Kane couldn’t figure out why someone would do that, but he didn’t have all the puzzle pieces yet. Hard to put together the big picture with limited scraps of information.

  His eyes moved to the picnic table. Dark stains covered the surface. He recognized coagulated blood when he saw it. Had this been a few months earlier in the hot summer months, the puddle of sticky gore would have been buzzing with black, bloated blowflies.

  Something dark and cold crawled through his veins. It was impossible for whoever had spilled that much blood to still be alive. That much blood meant no survivor. Somebody had died here today.

  Kane gritted his teeth. If that somebody turned out to be Luna, he vowed there would be more bodies on this mountain before the sun set.

  But he was jumping the gun. No point in swearing revenge until he knew for sure whether or not she was dead. Maybe the blood belonged to someone else.

  A man could hope.

  He moved out from behind the boulder with the Desert Eagle leading the way. Coming in from the west, no windows faced his direction, so nobody could snipe him from inside the cabin.

  He darted across the top of the hillock and took up position to the right of the door. He pressed his ear against the wall and listened.

  Nothing.

  He couldn’t hear any movement or voices in the cabin. Not the creak of a floorboard, not the scrape of a chair, not a murmured conversation. Nothing.

  Then, abruptly breaking the silence, came a growled voice from inside.

  “Time to gut this bitch.”

  Kane knew he couldn’t wait any longer.

  He kicked in the door and charged through, muzzle-first.

  It took him two seconds to realize he’d been fooled.

  In the first second, his eyes took in Luna’s dead, naked body, swinging from a hangman’s noose in the doorway between the mudroom and the main room. He didn’t have time to catalog her various wounds, but the image of her deep-slashed throat seared into his retinas like a tattoo needle.

  In the next second, he realized someone lurked behind him. He started to turn and caught a glimpse of Paul Dunkirk as the sheriff’s son hit him with what felt like a million volts from the stun gun in his hand.

  The Desert Eagle fell to the floor as the electricity in Kane’s body began to misfire. Another heartbeat and his muscles started to seize and spasm. Dizziness swarmed his brain. Another crackling second, and his sense of balance went bye-bye. He dropped to his knees, incapacitated.

  Through all the shaking and shuddering, Kane saw a man wearing a sheriff’s badge—Sheriff Duncan Dunkirk, he presumed—step into the room, pushing aside Luna’s body to come through the doorway. Behind him, her corpse swung grotesquely.

  “Nice to meet you, Kane,” the sheriff said. “Can’t believe you fell for that trick.” He reached behind him and patted Luna’s naked thigh. “Then again, love makes fools of us all.”

  “Fucker,” Kane spat as his teeth chattered and his jaw muscles twitched.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sticks and stones and all that shit.” The sheriff stepped forward and lifted his foot. “Lights out, tough guy.”

  “Lights out,” Paul echoed.

  The heavy sole of the lawman’s boot crashed into Kane’s face hard enough to leave a tread-print on his forehead. He flipped backward, powerless to do anything as his electrical circuits continued to misfire. He crashed down on his side, reeling but not quite knocked out.

  The sheriff’s follow-up kick banged into his temple, and Kane plunged into unconsciousness.

  When he regained consciousness, the first thing he saw was Luna’s smile above him. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was and realize it wasn’t her smile, it was the red slash carved in the pale, white flesh of her throat. He silently cursed himself for getting involved with her, for driving into this rotten town and getting her killed. He knew she wouldn’t have wanted him to blame himself for her death, but he couldn’
t shake the feeling of guilt. He had come here looking for some kind of redemption, and she had paid the price.

  “Well, well, look who’s returned to the land of the living?”

  Sheriff Dunkirk sat at the table in the main room, while Kane was stretched out on the floor, turned on his side due to his hands being cuffed behind his back. His head throbbed from the vicious kicks. He hoped he didn’t have a concussion. His ankles were bound together with duct tape. Must be the small-town sheriff didn’t carry leg shackles with him.

  Kane didn’t know how long he’d been knocked out, but it was long enough for his muscles to stop seizing. They still ached like hell, but he was used to pushing past pain and would do so again if the Dunkirks gave him a chance to settle the score.

  Of course, with his hands cuffed behind him and his legs wrapped in enough duct tape to immobilize a pissed-off honey badger, getting that chance seemed like a real long shot at this point.

  Paul stood over him. No sign of the stun gun. “Land of the living,” he repeated.

  Kane looked up at him. “You’re a goddamned idiot. You know that, right?”

  Paul kicked him in the stomach so hard that Kane thought he might have ruptured his spleen.

  The sheriff chuckled. “Some folks might say an idiot is someone who spouts insults while they’re trussed up like a hog on Fourth of July.”

  “Fourth of July,” Paul echoed.

  Kane turned his head and spat. No blood. That was a good sign. Didn’t change the fact that when it came his turn to do the kicking, he intended to rupture Paul’s internal organs until he puked red by the gallon. They had killed Luna. There would be no forgiveness.

  Sheriff Dunkirk caught his mood. “You got killing in your eyes, boy.”

  “Take these cuffs off, and you’ll find out there’s plenty of killing in my bare hands.”

  “Not gonna happen,” the lawman replied. “You’ve got skills, that much is obvious. You took on a whole stinking bar last night and walked away with barely a scratch.”

  “Barely a scratch,” Paul repeated.

  “Only a pussy kicks a man when he’s on the ground.”

  “Nice try, boy, but I know what you’re trying to do, and I ain’t falling for it. Only a fool gives up the upper hand once he’s got it. Now, care to tell me your name?”

  “Why? You planning to put it on my gravestone?”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Any reason why I should believe that?”

  The sheriff smirked. “Because what I’ve got in mind for you is a fate worse than death.”

  “Worse than death,” Paul agreed.

  “So let’s hear it,” Kane said.

  “Tell me your name—hell, make one up for all I care—and I’ll give you all the gory details about what’s going to happen to your miserable ass.”

  “Call me Kane.”

  “Real name or bullshit?”

  “It’s real enough.” Kane flexed his wrists, testing to see if there was any give, any way to slide out of the handcuffs. No such luck.

  “Well, Kane,” Sheriff Dunkirk said, “you’re not going to die. At least, not by my hand. But you are going to hell.”

  “Going to hell,” Paul confirmed.

  “Never cared much for riddles,” Kane said. “Do me a favor and tell it plain.”

  “Let’s see if this is plain enough for you,” the sheriff replied. “You’re going to prison.”

  “Prison!” Paul sounded like an excited eight-year-old screeching about Disney World.

  Kane immediately understood his fate and felt cold despair slither through his guts like an unholy snake.

  Sheriff Dunkirk confirmed it a second later. “I’m throwing your ass into Black Bog Federal Prison. There’s more to you than meets the eye, Kane, and Nazareno will dig it out of you, or just dig out your eyes.” He leaned forward in his chair as if wanting to whisper a conspiratorial secret. “And even if Nazareno decides to let you live, when word gets out that you raped and killed a pretty young girl like Luna? Well, let’s just say the Black Bog inmates ain’t no choirboys, and jailhouse justice is a real thing.”

  “Real thing,” Paul said.

  Up until that moment, Kane had not wanted to consider that Luna had been sexually assaulted, despite her body being naked. But the sheriff’s words confirmed that particular horror, and now he had to live with it. The desire—no, the need—to avenge the atrocities committed against her burned through his veins like molten lava and set his brain on fire.

  His cold, angry eyes locked onto the lawman’s weather-worn face. “I’ve just got one question.”

  “So, ask.”

  “Which one of you raped her?”

  Without hesitation, the sheriff replied, “We both took a turn.”

  Paul beamed proudly. “I went first,” he said. “She liked it.”

  “And then I took a turn,” Sheriff Dunkirk said. “Then I cut her throat.”

  Through gritted teeth, Kane stared at Paul and rasped, “You get to die first, you son of a bitch.” His eyes shifted to the sheriff, dark, icy holes of hate and rage. “But you’ll die harder.”

  The lawman appeared unfazed. “Tough words from a man who’ll be dead by dawn.” He stood up and gestured to Paul. “Get him in the truck.”

  The sheriff cut down Luna’s body as Paul hauled Kane to his feet. Kane made the snap decision that if they cut the duct tape off his ankles so he could walk, he was going to try to take them out using just his feet. Kick their knees, bring them down, and then stomp them into unconsciousness or break their goddamned necks.

  That notion went out the window a moment later when Paul slung him over his shoulder like a bag of concrete mix, grunting from the effort—at six-foot-four and packed with hard muscle, Kane was not a featherweight—and carried him outside. Whether deliberately or by accident, he banged Kane’s head off doorjambs and walls a bunch of times on the way out. Kane cursed every blow because right now, that was all he could do.

  His last image of Luna was Sheriff Dunkirk dragging her naked, bloody body into the corner. The evil smile on the lawman’s face made Kane want to blow his teeth out the back of his head. He again vowed that Luna’s murder would not go unavenged. He would either make the sick bastards pay for what they had done or die trying.

  Right now, the latter seemed more likely.

  Paul shoved him into the back of the Bronco, which had been retrofitted with a prisoner cage, bouncing his head off the side of the truck in the process.

  “Oops,” Paul said with mouth-breather sarcasm. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Kane replied with a wolfish smile. “Someday, I’ll return the favor and crack your skull.”

  Circling around the front of the Ford, Sheriff Dunkirk said, “I admire your fighting spirit, Kane, I really do. But your grasp on reality is a little lacking.”

  Turning his head, Kane saw Nick Dunkirk’s body stuffed into the cargo box behind him, the back of his head blown open. He hoped like hell Luna had done it, that she had managed to kill the bastard before she died. It would be just like her to go down fighting.

  As he opened the driver’s side door, Sheriff Dunkirk caught Kane looking at the corpse and confirmed what Kane had suspected. “That bitch killed my son,” he growled. “Everything we did to her, she had it coming.”

  Kane stared straight ahead and stoked the fires of hate burning deep down inside. He would need all that hate, all the fury and sorrow and thirst for vengeance, to survive what came next. His will to live would be fueled by those dark emotions. He was about to be thrown into a wicked, violent hellhole. If he wanted to have any chance of coming out the other side alive, he would need to tap into his primal instincts.

  As the sheriff settled into the driver’s seat, Paul riding shotgun, Kane asked, “What are you going to do with Luna’s body?”

  “She’ll be cremated,” the lawman replied, turning to give him one of his trademark I’m-an-evil-shmuck grins.

&nb
sp; “Cremated,” Paul said, laughing like it was the best joke ever told.

  A moment later, Kane saw what they were grinning and laughing about.

  Smoke started rolling out the cabin’s open windows and he saw flames flickering inside, like catching glimpses of hell through a thick, black fog.

  “You’re a real bastard, Kane.” The sheriff smirked. “Brought poor Luna all the way up here, raped her, cut her throat, and then burned the place to the ground.” He shook his head in mock disbelief. “Yup, you’re a bad, bad man.”

  Yeah, I’m a bad man, all right, Kane thought. And you two assholes are on my shit list.

  Some people just didn’t know when they’d fucked with the wrong person.

  The Ford Bronco easily handled the rough trail as they drove away from Dribble Creek. Two miles later, as they crossed the grassy field by Ernie Foxx’s house, Kane saw Foxx standing outside, Doofus beside him. As they got closer, Kane saw that Foxx was staring off into the distance, back the way they had come. No doubt, smoke from the burning cabin had billowed high enough to be spotted.

  The Ford pulled up next to Foxx, and Sheriff Dunkirk cranked down the window. “Afternoon, Ernie. Sorry to tell you that I’ve got some bad news.”

  “Bad news,” Paul said.

  Foxx looked at Kane for a second—was that sympathy in his eyes?—then at the sheriff. “Bad news, huh? Worse than the fact that my camp seems to be on fire?”

  The lawman nodded. “Dunkirk nodded. “Afraid so, Ernie. You see, this son of a bitch—” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Kane, “raped and murdered Luna up at your cabin, then set it on fire.” He shook his head. “Hope you got insurance. You really ought to be more careful about who you rent your place to.”

  Foxx seemed taken aback by the news. “My God. Luna’s dead?”

  “Yep. This goddamned drifter cut her throat from ear to ear.”

  “Ear to ear,” Paul echoed.

  Foxx looked at Kane again. He clearly didn’t believe a word of the bullshit the sheriff was feeding him, which was nice, but didn’t help him much. Foxx was one of the sheep he and Luna had talked about last night. A good man, but unwilling to fight the evil strangling the town. As a gun enthusiast, Foxx no doubt had an arsenal in his house, but they would remain weapons of leisure, not weapons of war. Especially a war against law enforcement, no matter how corrupt.