All Shook Up Read online

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know, Carver.”

  “Sorry, bud, but I don’t know. What, did you find out about the lodge and it pissed you off for some reason?”

  “This place?” Butch looked sincerely baffled. “What’s this place got to do with anything?”

  “I inherited part of it. Remember Edwina Lawrence? She owned part of this resort, and she left it to me.”

  “Well, hell, if that isn’t just perfect.” Butch shook his head in disgust. “I mean, is that goddamn typical, or what? How is it that you can always wade in the same shit as the rest of us, but somehow come out smelling like a fucking petunia?”

  “Just good, clean living, I guess.”

  “You think this is funny, you pious jerk-off? You closed down Lankovich’s entire operation and put two dozen men out of work. But do you have to scramble for a job like the rest of us? Hell, no. You end up owning a swank lodge.”

  “You can go to hell before I’ll apologize for that again,” J.D. snapped. “I didn’t put you out of work, Lankovich did! If I hadn’t blown the whistle on him, that building would have collapsed like a fucking house of cards. Innocent people would’ve died.”

  “So? It wouldn’t have been our fault. We did what we were supposed to.”

  “Christ, Butch, you never change, do you? It’s not my fault—what is that, your freaking anthem? Who the hell’s fault is it that you’re standing here pointing a gun at me, if not yours?”

  “Yours. If you hadn’t taken my job away, none of this would have happened.”

  “And I suppose if I’d drowned or gone off a cliff, that would have been my own damn fault, too.” Gripping his knees to keep from lunging for his friend’s throat and giving him the excuse to fire his gun, J.D. marveled, “I’d actually forgotten your convoluted way of reasoning. This must be the Dickson version of that old if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods thing, huh? If someone dies because of what you set in motion, but you aren’t actually looking, does it really count as murder?” Disgust welling up, he gave Butch a contemptuous once-over. “Frankly, I gotta wonder how you can sneer at the size of Junior’s balls. I sure as hell never would’ve expected you to show up to confront me face-to-face like this. Face it: the leaks in the boat and the siphoned gas tank are more your speed. Head-on like this, you can’t pretend it isn’t really happening.”

  “Shut up, J.D.!”

  “Or what?” he demanded, nodding at the gun. “You’re gonna shoot me with that thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t plan to shoot me if I stay nice and quiet?”

  Butch shifted restively and his gaze cut to the side for a second.

  J.D. laughed bitterly. “That’s pretty much what I thought. Since it looks like you plan to shoot me either way, what possible reason do I have to keep my mouth shut?”

  “I’ll give you a goddamn reason,” Butch snarled and leaned forward intently, his eyes narrowed to cold slits. “I can make it quick and painless, or I can blow your goddamn kneecaps off before I take you out.”

  “You’re right; that is incentive.” The proposed violence surprised him: Butch had always been a hothead, but he’d never been vicious. J.D. kept his face impassive, however, for Rat City rules decreed that the guy with the best poker face usually won. “You want to tell me why, first?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Butch rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand as he stared down at J.D. “Great—don’t that just freakin’ beat all? I coulda stayed home and saved us both a shitload of trouble.”

  J.D. shrugged, although his curiosity was roused. “Nobody’s pointing a gun at your head to make you stay. Go home now.”

  “Too late for that. I know you: now that you’ve got a whiff of the scent, you’ll start sniffing around, and you won’t quit until you dig up the truth. That’s what brought me here in the first place—your threat on the phone to hunt down my secret. You’re a fucking pit bull, J.D. You always have been.” He gestured with the gun. “Stand up.”

  J.D. stood. Threat on the phone?

  “Now turn around.”

  A bark of laughter escaped him. “Are you crazy? You want to shoot me, you can damn well do it face-to-face.”

  Butch shook his head in quick, agitated movements. “You think I won’t?”

  “I think doing someone when you don’t have to look him in the eye is a lot more your style.”

  “Yeah, well, guess what, pal? I’ve changed my style.”

  J.D. really didn’t want to believe that Butch truly could kill in cold blood, and not just because his butt was on the line. “I’m sorry to hear that. Since when?”

  Butch looked him straight in the eye. “Since the clerk at the One Stop forced me to shoot him.”

  25

  Dru had one foot on the front porch step and was all set to barge into J.D.’s cabin and give him a piece of her mind when she heard the voices within. Caught up in her own furious inner dialogue, she didn’t pay strict attention at first to what was being said. But when a voice she didn’t recognize said something about shooting someone, she froze. Oh, God, what was this?

  She eased off the step, knowing she should go for help. But curiosity drew her to the window at the far end of the living room instead. The cabin was set up off the ground with a crawl space underneath, so even standing on her toes, she could only see a tiny portion of the room. It afforded her a partial view of J.D. and the backside of another man.

  The screened window was open, and when J.D.’s voice suddenly broke the charged silence, it was with a clarity that made her jump skittishly.

  “Ah, Christ, Butch,” he said. “You actually did hold up that convenience store, then?”

  “Gina was giving me a rash,” the other man said sulkily. “You know how she is—I couldn’t keep asking her for beer money.”

  “So you walked into a store that you frequent all the time and robbed it at gunpoint instead?” J.D. demanded incredulously. “Do you ever stop and listen to yourself, for chrissake? You shot a man.”

  “It didn’t have to be that way! He forced my hand. All the idiot had to do was fork over the money, but no, he just had to play the hero. You would have thought it was his own money, he was so damned determined to hang onto it. You ask me, he was begging to be killed.”

  Dru’s jaw dropped and she felt her skin literally crawl, as if she’d just brushed up against something scaly that rustled in the dark.

  Disgust laced J.D.’s tone when he muttered, “Holy shit.”

  “Fuck you, Carver!” Butch snapped. He took a threatening step forward and Dru’s muscles tightened, but then he paused, and she saw some of the tension leave his posture.

  “You know, I always liked you,” he said. “But I’m sure as hell sick of your holier-than-thou attitude. Like your shit don’t stink, J.D.”

  Abruptly, he laughed, and it was not a jolly sound. “Come to think of it, you’re in this right up to your self-righteous neck. You were my alibi, bud—that makes you an accessory. How do you like that for irony?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Butch—I’ve actually been thinking quite a bit about what passes for friendship or loyalty in our neck of the city. And I’ve come to the conclusion that holding or calling in markers isn’t it.”

  “Close enough, bud.”

  “You think so? Just look where it’s gotten us now. When you told the cops that you were with me, I agreed because I felt I owed you a debt.”

  “Damn straight you owed me. I saved your neck when we were kids.”

  “Yeah, you did. And don’t think I don’t appreciate it. But ever since I left Seattle I’ve been around people who truly love and watch out for each other, and you know what? They don’t seem to keep score. I think that maybe the mark of real friendship is doing the hard thing and refusing to lie for your friend when he’s screwed up. Maybe if I’d done that when you first told the cops you were with me, you wouldn’t find it so damn easy to stand here now, fully prepared to kill again.” />
  Oh, God, oh, God. She should have run for help the minute she’d figured out the man in J.D.’s cabin was most likely the one who’d damaged his canoe and car. She was scared to death that if she went for help now, something dreadful would happen to J.D. while she was gone. Looking around, she spotted a large rock half buried in the dry, hard soil beneath the window. She squatted to pick up a smaller stone and started digging the large one free.

  She heard a definite sneer in Butch’s voice when he said, “So what you’re saying here is that if you’da turned me in then, your butt wouldn’t be in a sling now.”

  “No, dammit! I’m saying I think it’s downright sad that you’re finding it easier each time to pull the trigger. Hell, I don’t know, Butch. Maybe you wouldn’t have felt a drop of remorse one way or the other. But at least I wouldn’t have contributed to how easily you seem to be turning into a stone killer.”

  When Butch laughed, Dru paused to stare up at the window, her temper commencing a slow burn.

  “Good ole J.D.,” Butch sneered. “Christ, you are some throwback, you know it? You’ve got way more conscience than’s good for a person. Doesn’t it ever get inconvenient?”

  “All the time.”

  “But you always do the right thing anyway, don’tcha, bud? Maybe this little Pissville burg is the right place for you, after all.” A rumble of amusement sounded in his throat. “Well, hey, I can arrange it so you’ll never have to leave. Turn around.”

  J.D. made a rude noise. “Forget it. Like I told you already, you can damn well look me in the eye when you shoot me.”

  “And like I told you, asshole, that’s doable.”

  No! Dru rocked the stone beneath her hands back and forth with frenzied strength to loosen the last bit of earth that held it firm.

  “Of course, leaving a bullet-riddled corpse in the middle of my living room might mess up your chances of escaping some,” J.D. said. Dru, who was fast descending into a hot, sweaty panic, marveled at his coolness. “You want to actually get away with this, Butch? Then your best bet is to take me out into the woods somewhere far away from here.”

  What the hell are you doing? Dru surged to her feet, the rock now clenched between her hands. Was he crazy?

  “What are you, crazy?” Butch echoed her thought, but he didn’t sound horrified like her—he sounded suspicious as hell. “Why would you help me?”

  “Because the people around here have come to matter to me, and I don’t want them involved in this. There’s a ten-year-old kid who visits me all the time, and I don’t want him to find my moldering remains. Hell, Butch, they think I’m leaving today, anyway. Let’s just pack up and get the hell out of here, and no one will ever be the wiser.”

  “Fine,” Butch said flatly. “But you mess with me, and I’m telling you right now that I’ll come back to take it out on the brunette with the sweet tits that I saw you with the other night.”

  “What the hell has she got to do with this?”

  “I’m not sure. But she’s got something to do with it. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “As usual, Dickson, your bones are full of shit. But, whatever—I’m not going to mess with you.”

  “Fine, then. Get your stuff.”

  Dru raced on tiptoe to the front of the cabin and crept up onto the porch. Flattening herself against the wall to the side of the door, she tried to slow down her breathing. She felt perilously close to hyperventilating.

  She could hear the men’s voices but caught only a few words over the thundering pulse in her ears. It felt like a decade before she heard them approach the front door.

  She saw the screen door open. Gripping the rock in both hands, she pressed back hard against the wall in an attempt to become invisible.

  J.D. walked out first, duffel bag in hand, and the sight of his wide shoulders and long back, clad in one of his ubiquitous white T-shirts, steadied her slightly. The sight of the ominous black gun in the other man’s hand when he followed J.D. through the door made her realize she could actually go through with this. If she failed, he’d sounded far too willing to shoot J.D.

  And she was damned if she’d let that happen.

  Drawing in a deep, silent breath, she eased her arms up over her head, then took a giant step forward and swung the rock as hard as she could at the back of the man’s head. She tried to visualize the porch post beyond him to fool herself into believing she wasn’t really hitting a living, breathing human being. Even so, she pulled her punch slightly just before the rock connected with his skull.

  And still it made the most horrid sound she’d ever heard in her life.

  The rock tumbled out of her nerveless fingers at the same time that the gun in the man’s hand clattered to the porch floor. Then, between one heartbeat and the next, he dropped like a sack of cement.

  J.D. whirled around, and he felt his jaw drop at the sight that greeted him. Butch lay sprawled at his feet, out cold, and Dru stood behind him with the whitest face he’d ever seen, swaying slightly and looking as if it wouldn’t take more than a puff of air to blow her away.

  The big rock at her feet was self-explanatory.

  “Damn, sweetheart.” He bent down and picked up the gun, gingerly sliding the very tip of his index finger through its trigger guard. She moaned low in her throat, and he looked up at her. “Shhh. It’s okay. Don’t faint on me now.”

  “Did I kill him?”

  Pulling his T-shirt out of his waistband, he used it to keep his fingerprints off the gun and hopefully still preserve Butch’s as he gingerly tucked the weapon into his waistband. Praying that he wouldn’t end up shooting his own dick off, he double-checked the safety.

  Then he pressed his fingers to Butch’s carotid artery and felt the steady thump thump of a pulse. “No. He’ll live.”

  “Oh, God, John David, did you hear the sound his head made when I hit him?”

  “Can’t say that I did. I was kinda expecting to be shot in the back at any—”

  “Have you ever dropped a watermelon?” She shuddered. “It sounded like that. Exactly like a ripe melon breaking open.”

  “Try to think of something else.” He rose to his feet and stepped forward to pull her into his arms, his eyes closing. He hadn’t expected to ever hold her again. He could feel her shaking, and realized she needed more than a hug. He stroked a soothing hand down her braid. “It’s okay now, sweetheart. Shhh. You saved my life.” He’d had his own plan to get his dick out of the wringer, but she’d taken care of matters much more expeditiously. “Easy, now. It’s going to be all right.”

  “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

  “Whoa.” He whipped her away from his chest and hustled her over to the porch railing. She braced her hands against the balustrade and bent forward, her head hanging limply between her shoulders. J.D. rubbed small circles between her shoulder blades.

  She gagged numerous times, but finally raised her head. “False alarm, I guess.” Breathing deeply, she looked over her shoulder at J.D. “I think I’m okay now.”

  He tugged her back into his arms. “Poor darlin’.” He tilted his chin to look down at her, relieved to see a faint wash of color back in her cheeks. “I’d better go call the sheriff’s office before Butch comes around.”

  Dru pulled back far enough to stare up at him, her eyes a blazing blue. “Who the hell is he?”

  “He used to be my closest friend. He killed a man in Seattle.” J.D. wasn’t in any big-time hurry to tell her that he’d provided the alibi that allowed Butch to nearly drown her son, kill her aunt, and terrorize her. “I’ll go call the sheriff,” he repeated. “You want to come inside with me?”

  “Yes.” Then she hesitated. “No. My stomach’s still kind of rocky. I think I’d better stay outside where I can breathe real air.”

  He hated the idea of leaving her alone with Butch, even if he was unconscious. Yet he understood her need to be out here, where the scent and sight of the surrounding evergreens could settle her nerves, so he held her at arm
’s length for a moment to stare down into her face, then reluctantly let her go.

  He stopped on the way into the cabin to squat down next to Butch and double-check his condition. Oddly, J.D.’s primary emotion was a deep regret. They’d shared a lot of good times and had a long history that was impossible to discount.

  He’d have to work on doing exactly that, though—because Butch had been perfectly serious about killing him. J.D. rose to his feet. Jesus Jake. What a mess.

  In the cabin, he walked straight to the telephone, dialed the sheriff’s office, and related the situation succinctly. Then he dialed the Lawrences’ number to let Ben and Sophie know what was going on.

  The phone on the other end had only rung once when Dru’s scream split the air.

  J.D.’s blood turned to ice and, dropping the receiver, he raced out onto the porch, yanking the gun from his waistband as he ran. He’d never moved so fast in his life.

  Butch had come to and had Dru by the ankle. He’d clearly caught her by surprise, for she stared down at him in absolute horror and was screaming her head off. J.D. skidded to a halt and kicked Butch in the forearm, breaking his grip on her.

  He wanted to break more than that. Filled with a vicious anger, he squatted down and shoved the gun into the angle where Butch’s neck met his jaw. “Breathe wrong, you son of a bitch, and I’ll blow your head off.”

  Butch just moaned and cradled the arm J.D. had kicked, and J.D. looked up at Dru, who was gulping in air. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

  Her teeth chattered and, hugging herself, she simply stared at the two of them as if they were a couple of wild animals who might rise up at any moment to rip her throat out. She was hollow-eyed and as white-faced as she’d been right after she’d cold-cocked Butch with the rock.

  Despite the rage that he wasn’t certain should be directed at Butch or himself, he said gently, “Okay, I can see that you’re not. Listen, I was just calling your aunt and uncle and I don’t think I hung up the phone. Why don’t you go see if anyone’s on the line.”