The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,93

scenario I’d constructed, the one I was sure Jake Whitaker had constructed too.

The one where Charley and Eliza were having an affair.

And then suddenly I got it—South Carolina and Tennessee, so close, and Eliza’s fascination with Charley, with Charley’s history, and though it all, Janie’s refrain. Flesh and blood, flesh and blood.

“You’re her mother,” I said.

Charley breathed in rapid shallow shudders. I thought for a second she was going to shoot me. But she didn’t move to pull the trigger. She just stared.

“You’re the girl from out of town,” I said. “You abandoned Eliza with Janie’s brother, and he abandoned her with Janie’s family. Jake knew Eliza was obsessed with you. He snooped in her apartment, probably in her e-mail, and thought you were having an affair with her. That’s what he told you at the reception, isn’t it? But he had it all wrong.”

She was shaking harder now. “Eliza found me in Miami. She was barely sixteen, looking for money.”

“How did she know where to look?”

“Her idiot father. She tracked him down first in some halfway house and he spilled the beans, the bastard, right before he died. She just typed my name into some directory, she said, and there I was—my address, my phone number, everything. But once she saw I was as broke as she was, she didn’t want anything to do with me. Which was fine by me—I didn’t need a kid, especially not some teenage brat. But then I became somebody, and suddenly she wanted plenty.”

The mystery of the cash-stuffed shoebox and the bank account. “She got greedy.”

“She started coming to my parties, bringing her stupid friends. Then she came crying to me, said this photographer had pictures he was threatening to sell to the tabloids along with the whole story. I told her if that happened, she’d go to jail for blackmail.”

Which explained all those questions Eliza had asked my brother about confidentiality. Eliza wasn’t as dumb as everyone assumed.

“But I didn’t care if she told or not—I’d had it with her—but he said it couldn’t get out, that it would ruin us.”

There was the word “he” again. Not Bulldog, and not Trey, no matter what she said. She’d wanted the secret to come out, and “he” had said no. And I had a pretty good guess who “he” was.

Mark Beaumont. I wondered where he was, if he had any idea that Charley was fleeing and leaving the whole mess in his lap. I hoped he didn’t, because I was in double trouble then.

“Why didn’t you talk to the cops?”

“Because they wouldn’t understand.”

“But you have no money, no way to—”

She let loose a high acidic laugh, and I realized my mistake. Of course she had money. She’d probably been socking it away for years. Unfortunately, there was one problem, or two rather. And she had them both at gunpoint.

She waved the gun at Trey. “Where’s Landon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.” She swung the gun up. “You tell me where he is and how many men he’s got and where they are, or I swear to God, I’ll blow your head off!”

Something snapped inside me. “You will not. You don’t even know what you’re doing with that thing.”

She aimed dead center at my chest. “We’ll see.”

We were only fifteen feet apart—even she could hit me at that distance. But I saw her hands shaking, her tiny weak hands, and I knew she couldn’t do it. Hell, it had taken me almost an hour to get the hang of the H& squeeze cocker, and it took strength and know-how to pull it off.

She couldn’t do it.

Probably not anyway.

I edged my hands a few inches downward. Then I heard a rasp of breath, and Trey moved his head. Charley heard it too, and swung the gun in his direction. I saw her elbows tense, saw her close her eyes and brace herself for the blast, and I screamed just as Trey looked up.

The shots came from behind and caught her in the chest—one and then two—and she snapped like she’d caught on a tripwire. And then she went down, eyes wide. And then she fell forward. All I’d heard was the pneumatic pop pop of a silencer.

I whipped around to see Landon stepping out of the shadows. He had the gun still trained on Charley. It didn’t wobble at all.

“Are you okay?”

I tried to nod, but the nausea swelled and crested. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

And then I was on all fours, retching, but nothing was coming