Blind Tiger by Sandra Brown

Since that night in the yard, Thatcher hadn’t sought her out.

She considered the matter closed.

Out of politeness, she tapped on the door to the shack and softly called Corrine’s name. Getting no response, she pushed open the door and went inside. As expected, Corrine wasn’t there. Laurel set the parcels she’d brought on the table, leaving it to Corrine to put away the items where she wanted them.

On her way out, Laurel noticed two things about Irv’s old bureau. To support the legless corner, Corrine had replaced the stacked catalogues with blocks of wood. And on top, along with her hairbrush and other personal articles, was the primer Laurel had given her.

She thumbed open the cover and was pleased to see that Corrine had been practicing. She’d copied several lines of the alphabet on the first page. The letters were imperfect, but by page three she was showing improvement. On page four she’d doodled a drawing. Beneath it, she’d printed ERNIE.

Laurel laughed softly. Maybe Corrine’s drawing was an indecipherable death threat. Their relationship was still prickly.

She returned the primer to its place on the bureau, then stepped out and pulled the door closed. As she was retracing her way to the back, she heard the sound of an approaching automobile on the road. A set of headlights topped a hill. Another set of lights followed close behind the first. Then a third vehicle. All were traveling fast, maintaining their distance from each other, looking very much like a convoy with a mission.

Laurel’s heart lurched and didn’t stop pounding until they had passed the turnoff to the shack. She could easily have talked her way around being here. It was still Irv’s property. She could say she had come to retrieve something he had left behind when they’d moved.

But then, a worse thought occurred to her: If the shack hadn’t been their destination, where were they going in such an obvious hurry? Beyond here was no-man’s-land, nothing out there except—

Not thinking twice about it, she began running toward the hill behind the shack. She forgot all the safety precautions she had hammered into Corrine. Her pistol was in her pocket, but she didn’t have a lantern, and she wouldn’t have lit it if she did. She didn’t tread carefully. She didn’t think about turning her ankle or slipping on loose rocks and plunging down a steep incline into a crevice where she could die of thirst before being found.

She heard the yap of a coyote, but it was far away, and the only predator that concerned her was Man. Lawmen. Or angry competitors. She didn’t know which posed the greatest threat, and was loath to speculate on the consequences of the stills being discovered by either element. If indeed that’s where the convoy was headed, she had to get there first. The stills might have to be abandoned, but Corrine and Ernie could escape.

Over the months that she’d been making this trek, she’d found routes that weren’t so steep, that curved up the incline gradually. But they meandered and took more time, and she was aware of time running out. She went straight up.

She stumbled once and fell to her knee. Her skirt and petticoat helped to pad her kneecap, but she’d struck it hard enough to jar her teeth. She would bear a bruise.

Losing her footing a second time, she reached for a bush to break her fall. The brittle foliage scraped her arm. A night bird swooped low directly in front of her, its screech causing her to cry out in fright despite the need for stealth.

Her lungs began to burn, her heart felt near to bursting, but she pushed on, upward. If she was wrong, they would all have a good laugh over her frantic climb later. Much later.

But for now she must assume that her friends were in danger of being caught, captured, punished to the extreme. If she arrived too late, they might even pay with their lives.

Even in the darkness, she knew she was approaching the crest that overlooked Ernie’s camp. She was panting hard as she scrambled up the last several yards. Sweat dripped into her eyes, causing them to sting. As she topped the hill, she closed her eyes to blink away the sweat, but also to postpone, even for a millisecond, what she would see below.

Praying for the best, expecting the worst, she opened her eyes.

What she saw caused her to stagger backward. She gasped for breath through her mouth, which hung open in disbelief.

Because there was nothing to see below. The clearing was empty.





Forty-Two



The sheriff stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands on his hips in a pose of disgust. He watched while deputies used flashlights to search the area, which obviously had been recently vacated.

“Goddamn it.”

Thatcher came alongside him in time to overhear his muttered blasphemy. “They just left with Tup. His given name is Thomas.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Hanging on. Doc Perkins gave him a shot of morphine. But up to that point he was vocal. Very. Cursed the sons of bitches who had laid the trap, cussed his sorry-assed cousin who’d abandoned him.” Thatcher paused, then added, “Honestly, when we arrived, and there was nothing here, I thought Elray had been lying about all of it, even the stills.”

Elray’s memory of the stills’ location had been miraculously restored when Bill again threatened to turn him over to his great-uncle Hiram. Shortly thereafter, three sheriff’s department vehicles, one with Dr. Perkins as a ride-along, had set out from town with Elray giving directions. Because the night was so dark, he’d mistaken landmarks several times, and they’d had to double back in order to find turnoffs previously missed.